Robert Biel's The Entropy of Capitalism is a wonderfully accessible, path-breaking work of political economy, indispensable for understanding our times. It brilliantly combines Marxist with dynamical systems theory to argue that capitalism/imperialism is literally in the throes of its demise. It may linger on in a “cold” imperialist mode for a generation or two but, ever parasitical both on human society and on the physical environment, it has now moved into an “autophagous” phase in which it parasitizes the chaos that it itself creates, “notably in the link between the two sides of imperialism: militarism (the 'war on terror') and speculative finance capital”.
Historically capitalism has shown itself to be an adaptive system, but adaptation has always been high-cost in terms of environmental depletion. This cost could be hidden or exported to the underdeveloped South for a time, but it always blows back later. Thus “fossil fuels enabled capitalism to pretend it could abolish entropy by miraculously expanding value out of nothing, but eventually the payback is global warming, the drying-up of energy stocks, and the knock-on effects of both these factors on food”. On Biel's analysis, which draws on experience in low-input agriculture, capitalist agriculture is unsustainable, and an unprecedented food crisis is looming.
The burning question that confronts us today therefore is: Can capitalism adapt once more by conjuring up a new regime of accumulation? What comes after the neoliberalism that announced that neoliberalism is “the end of history”? Biel does not think that a new regime of accumulation is possible, and elaborates a complex supporting argument, which he summarizes as follows:
“The problem with capitalism is not per se that it is lumpy and unpredictable [chaotic and complex - for chaos and complexity can promote creativity], but that its developmental basis is extremely narrow, it is uniquely concerned with preserving exploitation, and that it has painted humanity (and itself) into a corner where we are imprisoned by feedback loops of repression and environmental degradation.”
“Preserving exploitation” gives rise to conflict and struggle, which is at the heart of Biel's analysis. The struggle of classes and other oppressed groups “would tear society apart” were it not “kept at bay. Through massively unsustainable environmental demands”, and it is struggle, not ecological limits as such, that is “the force which really bounces back the news of impending entropy, signalling a refusal to tolerate the existing trajectory”. Currently capitalism is in endgame exterminist mode: “What we are witnessing . is more or less the threat of a global Easter Island”.
Exhaustion is both quantitative (depletion of physical resources and ofun-monetarized spheres for commodification) and qualitative (the undermining of social and economic repair systems, overdetermined by ecological crisis), and the ruling order is sitting on a time-bomb of vastly increased social inequality both within the capitalist heartlands and in the South.
Capitalism's inability to respond creatively and effectively to the multicrisis humanity is facing should not surprise us, as it has been premised from the outset on a contradictory relationship with nature, leading it to wage war both against the cultural systems that people evolved historically to manage that relationship sustainably and against the only viable current solution, “common-pool resources and the regimes which naturally evolve to manage them”. When it hit upon a new neoliberal regime of accumulation in the late seventies, the ruling order played all its remaining “cards” in one go:
“the creative destruction of modernism, delocation of industrial production to Asia, the dissolution of state property, the furious commodification of all areas of life. This leaves the system with no fresh 'get-out-of-gaol' card when a new crisis comes along, with the result that today, when the mode of production unwillingly finds itself 'in charge' of humanity's response to the ecological crisis, it is at the same time submerged in an intractable problem of salvaging *itself*, through the search for a new regime of capital accumulation which obstinately refuses to materialise”.
The “creative destruction of modernism” had two main aspects: more efficient exploitation of individual human capacity in a decentralized way, and exploitation of the creativity that emerges in complex systems such as social networks. Capitalism has learnt to cultivate these “in a tame and exploitative form”, but precisely in virtue of that cribs and contains them rather than allowing them scope to develop their full, enormous potential. Because spontaneously evolving complex systems are far more creative than hierarchically controlled ones, “disorganized capitalism” easily defeated central planned actually existing socialism, but in so doing it released forces that may assist in its own demise. Today “capitalism needs to be overthrown not because it is a restriction on central planning but because it is a restriction on networking and grassroots capacity” which, if given free rein, are entirely capable of producing a postcapitalist future where “small local cells of society and economy . create higher-level order, knowledge and innovation through networking and emergence”.
Biel argues that the current drive to a non-Eurocentric re-orientation of the capitalist world system, in which the capitalist epicentre moves to Asia, does not present a viable alternative. Any move to a non-Eurocentric world would involve the displacement of capitalism itself, ultimately because of the ecological constraints on capitalism's inexorable drive to growth. Meanwhile, globalization has been accompanied by new and pervasive approaches to organized collective military domination abroad, and repression and social control at home, on the part of the Eurocentric (Antlantocentric) ruling order. This “blocks” the drive to a non-Eurocentric capitalism, while also contributing mightily to the autophagous “hollowing out” of the core. With the growing struggles in the South against its status as a “sink” for the entropy of the North, the real possibility comes into view of a “great reversal” as the banner of emancipatory social change continues to migrate, involving a switch to ecologically sustainable democratically self-organizing local economies and communities, for which there is no real alternative over the longer run, first in the South and then generalizing.
The overriding moral of the book is that we need to learn to regard the multicrisis as an opportunity for effecting sustainable emancipatory solutions rather than as a source of great danger. Messiness and “disordered phase transitions will be a part of *any* social development, and are nothing to be afraid of, quite the contrary”. It is the master-classes who fear change, which in reality is an essential aspect of human social being and sooner or later spells an end to any exploitative social system.
ENDS
Ismail Lagardien
Nihil humani a me alienum puto