The Horsemen
and the Killing Fields:
The Final
Contradiction of Capitalism
Dr.
Peter E. Grimes
Peter E.
Grimes 1999 “The Horsemen and the Killing Fields: The Final Contradiction of Capitalism” Pp. 13-42 in Walter L. Goldfrank, David Goodman and Andrew Szasz (eds.) Ecology
and the World-System, Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press
THE
HORSEMEN AND THE KILLING FIELDS
https://irows.ucr.edu/grimes/horsemen.htm
INTRODUCTION
We live today in
a time of unprecedented crisis on a global scale. This is a point of agreement shared by most
scientists examining planetary trends. It is also a point many nonscientists sense intuitively. They show their fear in
subtle but revealing ways: rising
support for religious fundamentalism, ethnic separatism, millenarianism, and a generalized "hunkering
down" into enclaves within which they feel "safe" against a dark
and uncertain future. This popular sentiment is a murky reaction to real threats only occasionally
referenced by the sanctioned media—erratic
and violent weather; generation-long and global rises in the rates of cancer, inequality, and poverty; urban
unemployment; shrinking government services.
These are global and long-term trends from which no one is immune. Yet they are subject to local variations and reversals
(such as the current drop in U.S. crime and unemployment rates),
allowing for the transient illusion that one or another nation, region, class, or ethnicity may be safe. But these
illusions only fuel motivation for
the very separatism that can block effective global solutions.
The reality felt only dimly on a popular level is well known to the
scientific community.
Rates of economic growth fell worldwide between the 1970s and the early 1990s,
while the biosphere continues to be shredded ever more efficiently by such
growth as remains (Stevens 1997, June 17, C-8). Global warming, deforestation, collapsing fisheries, and ozone depletion
are collectively combining to touch everyday
life, while new versions of old diseases are reviving ancient plagues. At the same time, the contraction of high-wage jobs
has cut into the tax base of governments
across the core, encouraging them to cut social spending at the very time that it is needed the most.
The crisis is real, urgent, and global. Popular fear is warranted But without correct information, that fear lends itself to
manipulation by demagogues preaching isolation and separation for political gain, thereby erecting
barriers of fear to the very cooperation
that is so necessary for common survival. Presented here is an effort to
provide needed scientific information about our crisis in a clear, systematic, and accessible
way, reaching for a unified analysis that links the elimination of nature with the
economic deprivation of everyday life, while showing at the same time why the
urge toward political separatism is both so tempting yet so collectively fatal.
Since
the crises of the biosphere, economy, and political legitimacy are mutually
interactive, the unraveling of their causal links is similar to teasing apart a
knot in thread—all of the
parts are connected, so the place to begin is almost arbitrary.
Here we start at the ground and move up, both conceptually and
ecologically.
EVOLUTION AND HABITAT
All life processes are driven by energy, and for the vast majority of
organisms the source of
that energy is solar, captured first by the plants and then sequentially consumed by herbivores and carnivores.
Under typical conditions plants capture about 2 percent of the incoming
sunlight, while herbivores and carnivores can
at best access 10 percent of the energy stored in the bodies of plants and grazing animals, respectively (Bonner 1988; Colinvaux
1978). In these terms of energy
flow, the various means by which human societies have been organized (e.g., hunter-gatherer bands, horticultural chiefdoms,
agricultural empires, and the current
structures of global capitalism) can be understood as ever more aggressive
efforts to channel solar energy away from competing species and toward exclusively human consumption. The nested problems of
our times can also be stated in these
thermodynamic terms as arising from the collision of our expanding energy consumption with the limits set by primary plant
production.[1]
The dependence of humans upon plant production has ultimately forced our
species to relinquish
its original freedom as roaming gatherers, scavengers, and occasional hunters in favor of securing a
predictable future food supply as farmers,
thereby cutting out the "middlemen" of herbivore insects and animals.
The passage of the millennia since
those initial settlements has allowed plenty of time for the development of agricultural techniques
that maximized yield per acre, technologies
specifically adapted to local conditions of soil and climate. One of our current problems lies with the misapplication of
techniques developed for the temperate
regions to the tropics. But to understand why this is, we must first digress into the question of soil types.
Climates,
Plants, and Soils
The climactic stability of the period since the end of the last ice age
has allowed for the
stable reproduction of locally adapted plants, which give the appearance of being, in the words of one ecologist,
"Nation-States of Trees" (Colinvaux
1978, chap. 5). Huge areas of continents
worldwide are dominated by a narrow range of similar tree, bush, and grass
varieties. Below the arctic tundra are
hundreds of miles of conifers and other evergreens, merging as one moves south almost imperceptibly into deciduous
hardwoods, themselves gradually giving
way to either desert cacti or tropical broad-leafed softwoods, depending on the
abundance of rain. Finally, of course, there is the broad band of tropical rain
forest around the equator, the
object of so much recent world attention.
Ecological investigation has demonstrated that these broad areas of
plant similarity are the
products of evolutionary selection responding to the climactic stability experienced within each of these
different biomes: a stability of temperature,
wind, and precipitation acting over the nine millennia since the end of the
last glaciation (Colinvaux 1978, chap. 5). The key insight that explains these various plant forms is their efforts to maintain
the conditions of temperature, sunlight,
and nutrient flow that will optimize photosynthesis within the limits imposed by their local climates. Below the arctic
tree line the dominant vegetation is evergreens.
The needle shape of their "leaves" minimizes the heat loss of evaporative cooling while still allowing for a high
density of chloroplasts (the site of photosynthesis), which gives them their
dark green color. Further, this shape's thermal efficiency allows the needles to be productive of sugar energy even
during very cold and/or cloudy
periods.
South of the broad belt of conifers lies a contiguous belt of mixed
conifers and deciduous
trees. During the summers of this northern temperate zone, the broad-leafed deciduous trees are at a distinct
advantage, gathering solar energy much faster
than their conifer cousins. But during the winter, the conditions are exactly as in the arctic. Here the needle strategy excels
over the broad-leafed, allowing the conifers
to prosper while the broad-leafed plants have given up altogether, shedding their leaf factories and escaping into
hibernation. When the line of arctic weather
retreats northward in the spring, the deciduous broad-leafed strategy once again triumphs, and the broad leaves are generated
anew. Further south, below the southernmost
reach of the arctic winter, the high rate of evaporative cooling characteristic of the broad-leafed deciduous trees
becomes an adaptive advantage because the summers are warm and humid. Under
these conditions the conifer strategy
no longer pays off, because needles become too hot in the summer and do not compensate adequately during the short and mild
winters.
In the deserts, plant life takes on shapes that minimize the surface
area exposed to the sun
while maximizing the surface area exposed to wind—the exact opposite of the
conifers of the North. Also, they have evolved means of carefully guarding their water against unnecessary loss. Yet
they share with the tundra plants of the far North the quality of extremely
slow growth, reflecting the severity of the struggle against their harsh climates, a struggle that allows only the
most meager rate of biomass
accumulation.
At last we
come to the tropics, where weather is stable year-round except when punctuated by storms. As in the desert, the
sheer abundance of sunlight requires some mechanism of cooling. Yet
here the copious supply of rain supplies that cooling, allowing for very broad-leafed plants to prosper, shedding
excess heat by evaporation, despite
the humidity. The absence of winter
means both that the broad leaves can be retained permanently and that thick hard bark is unnecessary. All of the
retained solar energy can thereby be
released for growth, a condition that generates the profusion of biomass
stereotypical of our images of tropical jungles.
Most of these plant designs had evolved long before the last ice age.
But it has only been
since the last ice age that they assumed their current geographic positions.[2]
During the nine millennia since, they have changed the composition of the soils beneath them in fundamental ways, ways
that continue to channel where and
how we can grow food.
AGRICULTURE
Soil, Plants, and Social Structure
In the broad
belt of conifers ringing the arctic below the tundra, centuries of needle
accumulation have led to acidic soils of limited agricultural value even in
areas having a growing season. But further
south, in the mixed boreal/deciduous forests and even more in the purely
deciduous biomes, the fallen leaves have lower acidity. More importantly, the annual winters retard the decomposition
process, allowing for the slow accretion of organic humus (incompletely
“digested” plant matter) at the rate of about one inch per century (Colinvaux
1978, chap. 7). This organic residue is
unique to the temperate zones and has gradually altered the soil chemistry so as both to infuse it with nutrients and
also to make it chemically more
receptive to bonding with them. It is this same combination of soil ingredients unique to the temperate zone
that allows for the irresponsible farmer to reuse the same plot of land almost indefinitely.
Further south still (skipping over the deserts) in the tropics, the
majority of the soil is
sterile. This appears bizarre when one considers the plush and abundant growth of a rain forest. The answer lies in the
vigorous and competitive growth of life
enabled by the constant moist warmth there. The surface life on top of the soil
(fungi, bacteria, insects, and their
predators) so quickly and efficiently devours fallen dead wood and animals that their nutrients never get the chance
to get fully absorbed by the ground. Any molecular morsel remaining after this
thorough treatment by decomposers is
eagerly snatched by the network of near-surface roots supplying the forest trees. The evolutionary
efficiency of this matrix of life in the rain forest (ultimately powered by the constant stream of intense solar
energy) prevents the percolation of
nutrients down into the soil, thereby disabling the chemical processes that sustain the gray-brown soils
of the temperate zones. Instead, tropic
and near-tropic soils are red, having long ago been washed clean by millennia
of rain of the clay silicates that capture and reproduce the gray-brown humus of the temperate biomes.[3]
When our
ancient ancestors eventually became compelled by population growth to abandon
the hunter-gatherer life for the more predictable and controlled foraging and eventual planting of what would slowly unfold
into horticultural production, they
became tethered to particular locations, their ranges constricted by the
requirements of crop maintenance. This "Neolithic revolution" can be
reconstructed by the artifacts
recovered by archeologists and allows us to locate and date the earliest settlements. The earliest evidence dates from
around 9-7,000 years B.P. (7-5,000 B.C. or, almost immediately after the
end of the "ice age"), and the majority of locations lie between 20' and 40* north of the equator
(Sanderson 1995, 112-120),
Abundant
evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer bands were well aware of the technology of horticulture long before they
chose to use it, presumably because they knew also that it would
require much more time and energy than they were
willing to invest. But, eventually, growing population density in the temperate regions required the shift to plant
cultivation in order to reduce between-group
competition and warfare.[4] The same
process also operated in both the tropics
and the polar regions, but the much poorer land productivity there precluded
the solution adopted in the temperate realms of increasing land productivity:
instead competing groups were compelled to separate from each other across much greater spaces in order to survive or else
be condemned to constant warfare (Chase-Dunn
and Hall 1997).
For the peoples of the northern Polar Regions living atop or just south
of the vast ice sheets
capping the arctic, exploitation of plant energy was never a serious option. Instead, they were compelled by the
constraints of their climate to live as carnivores, searching out prey (marine and terrestrial) whose migrations
north served as imports of solar energy from the south. Hence the
development of complex societies based upon dense human settlements was
vitiated from the start.
Similar constraints operated in the tropics. This may at first seem
strange. After all, it
is the tropics that have always had the strongest and most consistent input of
solar energy leading to the greatest biodiversity and may well have been the initial environment of the first humans. Yet
most of the areas of initial Neolithic settlement
are well north of the tropics.[5] Once
again, the answer lies in the soil.
Among indigenous peoples still living in the tropics, rotating
slash-and-burn (swidden) horticulture continues to be the technology of
choice. This is because the
ashes left from burning temporarily boosts the fertility of the soil, allowing
for the growth of edible plants until the
soil is again washed clean by the rains. Once harvested, the cultivated area is deliberately allowed to revert to
forest. Over eons this strategy has
worked, because the small size of the plots of land involved is well within the scale that can be eventually
repopulated by the limited colonization
strategies available to vegetation in the tropics. However, the ecological constraints
placed on the reproduction and spread of tropical plants places a strict upper limit on the density of human population
that can be supported by swidden technology.
This ecological barrier—as rigorous as that operating in the Polar regions—here again prevented the emergence of the
densities of human settlement required
for complex social systems, forever stalling the development of societies more
complex than chiefdoms in the tropics.
These preconditions of long-term soil fertility are found only in the
soils beneath the temperate
forests. Hence the Neolithic breakthrough to collectively managed horticulture on a large scale was both
compelled by the population density
accumulating in favorable climates, while yet also being enabled by the combination of solar energy and soil fertility
peculiar to those climates. This technical and organizational revolution
was also the first historical demonstration of an ability perhaps unique to
humanity—the capacity to collectively plan and execute a strategy to deliberately and systematically divert
solar energy away from competing
life-forms toward exclusively human use.[6]
The
soils laid down and evolving under the deciduous broad-leafed regions north of the tropics were
of the gray sort most fertile for cultivation, which had been gradually
stocking up precious topsoil at the rate of one inch per century. These were the soils
that became the ecological foundation for the complex "tributary”[7]
empires of our past—the Mesopotamian civilizations; the Harrapan, Mauryan, and Gupta civilizations
of India; the Han dynasty of China; the Greco-Roman empires. But although more tolerant
of human agricultural exploitation than other soil types, they can still be
exhausted by sufficient misuse. The current arid sterility of the Middle East and much
of the peninsulas of the Mediterranean bears quiet testimony to the
depredations of past abuse: massive deforestation (allowing erosion of
topsoil) along with grossly excessive irrigation (salting the soil to toxic levels). Recent
research suggests that the collapse of more than one empire may have been
rooted in soil depletion (Runnels 1995; Chew 1996). But despite these
excesses, the greater fertility of the bulk of the temperate regions eventually came to support the
highest population densities on the planet throughout the nine millennia since
the Neolithic revolution.
CAPITALIST TECHNOLOGY
AND GLOBAL AGRICULTURE
Machinery and Fossil Fuels
Capitalist
social production relations in the agricultural sector did not of itself alter
the centuries-old
techniques of the tributary mode.[8]
Europe had, by the eighteenth
century, long been familiar with the medieval use of the three-field rotation system that restored
soil fertility by the growth of nitrogen-fixing plants (often legumes or clover) as one
of the three
crops; Southeast Asia had likewise settled the technical aspects of optimum production for the
fertilization of rice paddies; while the Andean peoples of the Incan
civilization had devised ingenious methods of prolonging the growing season for potatoes
by planting
them in raised rows adjacent to troughs of water. Each of these approaches to maximizing land
productivity had evolved over centuries of experimentation in their respective regional
biomes, and the development (or imposition via conquest) of capitalism did not
change these approaches.
However, the adaptation of steam power to the development of the first
tractors
near the turn of the twentieth century was one of the very first applications
of the
current era of technological revolution to a rural environment. While designed originally as a
replacement for the horse, the early tractors were too expensive for purchase by the typical
family farmer. So instead entrepreneurs would invest in them cooperatively while also
hiring men to operate and maintain them and send these teams of men and
machines from farm to farm for hire (the same business model of locally pooled
capital investment used by farmers building Yankee Clipper ships in Maine.) The
beginning of this new technology was in the United States, both because that was where the
first manufacturers
of this equipment were located and because farmers in the U.S. were relatively wealthy as
compared to their counterparts elsewhere on the planet.[9] As
the
market for farm machinery expanded, economies of scale, Taylorism.[10]
and assembly-line
organization allowed the price of farm machinery to drop. Immediately affected was the use of animals as
motive power: between 1865 and 1915
the number
of horses and mules for every hectare of cropland fluctuated around 0.3, with a high of 0.35 in
the first year and a low of 0.25 in 1880. (These numbers and the ones following are
all derived from figures provided by Mitchell [1993) and the U.S. Bureau of the
Census.) But after 1915 (five years after the appearance of the tractor in the
records) the number began to drop consistently, passing below 0.2 in 1930, 0.1 in 1950,
and disappearing entirely from the books in 1965 (see Figure 2.1). To this
trend out for animals we see the inverse for tractors. Starting with their appearance in
the census records in 1910, the number of tractors per hectare planted in food
crops doubled every five years until 1935, after which it shot up dramatically from
0.01 in 1935 to 0.08 in 1970. These numbers provide a very clear demonstration
of the displacement of solar (organic) energy by fossil fuel (machine) power.[11]
In addition, when we remember to include fertilizers as themselves drawn from
fossil fuels, their application to cropland has closely followed the use of
tractors, again shooting up fastest after 1935 (Figure 2.1). The development of machines
also began to displace human labor as well. In 1830, agricultural workers
comprised 70 percent of the workforce and in 1870 50 percent, but as early as
1913 the percentage was cut almost in half (27.5 percent), while by 1950 it had
shrunk to 13 percent, and in 1991 was only 1.6 percent (Maddison 1995, table
2-5, 39; World Bank 1995b, table a-2. 148). Meanwhile, the share of U.S.
agricultural production as a
percentage of its GDP stayed largely the same between 1950 and 1990 (World Bank
1982, 1995b).
The substitution of
mechanical energy powered by fossil fuels for the traditional
organic labor of animals and people in all areas of production has been the most
important trend of our era. But in agriculture as in all other spheres, the transition
has entailed important costs. Here this cost is most obvious in the loss of topsoil
that came with the new machinery.
++ HORSES/Mules; **TRACTORS;
… FERTILZERS (pounds/acre)
Figure 2.1: Power Inputs per 1000
Crop Hectares in USA, 1865-1970
To understand why agricultural machinery has accelerated
topsoil depletion we must first spell out some of the side effects of
machinery itself. The most efficient application of machines is to single-crop
fields that are large. Otherwise the farmer sacrifices the economies of scale
enabled by machinery to time spent changing the types of equipment.
Animal-drawn ploughs can steer around large rocks and trees, so low-capital
family farms relying on solar energy could function profitably along the east
coast up into the Appalachian Mountains during the last century. But heavy
equipment works best when unobstructed by rocks, trees, or bushes, which has
favored both the previous westward migration of farming within the U.S. out of
the mountains and into the plains states and also to deforestation and major
loss of species diversity in those states. Meanwhile, ironically, this same
movement west has allowed for a reforestation of the U.S. east coast and
eastern Midwest as family farms have gone bankrupt (particularly Black-owned
farms during the Depression), along with the return of birds, deer, coyotes,
and bears to these regions (Stevens 1997, June 10, C-1; Rudel
and Chun 1996). Loss of trees and non-crop plants in active farming areas
eliminates windbreaks and greatly accelerates erosion and topsoil runoff, while
the machinery itself cuts deeper into the ground than animal-drawn ploughs used
to. (That's one reason why the Mississippi is also called the "Big
Muddy," as flooding and erosion flush out the best soil and the chemicals
applied to it from the Midwest plains.) Another spin-off problem is that the
water runoff takes not just topsoil but also the other chemicals applied to
fields. Just as DDT killed birds, so a growth regulator found in vitamin A and used
as a pesticide is currently thought to be a leading suspect behind a massive
problem of gross frog mutation recently identified in Wisconsin (All Things Considered, National Public
Radio, May 9, 1997))[12] Nicanoid pesticides contribute to bee
colony collapse, yet bees are essential for crop pollination. But the most important toxic run-off is
nitrogen. When rivers carrying nitrogen
fertilizers empty into lakes and seas, the nitrogen acts as it was designed to:
accelerate plant growth. In lakes and seas
the plant beneficiaries are algae, producing temporarily huge “blooms” which
die of “old age” after a few weeks, falling to the bottom. Their corpses are digested by organisms that
consume oxygen, suffocating fish and generating environments that only anaerobic
organisms can thrive in, organisms toxic to most life forms. The net result has been the growth of “dead
zones” in the Caribbean and great lakes.
The mechanization of monocrop
agriculture, when combined with the application of some kinds of petrochemicals
to enhance soil fertility, other kinds to dampen competition from weeds, and
still others to decrease predation by insects or disease, succeeded
spectacularly in its original goals. Yield per acre and per worker both went up
steadily throughout the twentieth century, and especially after World War II.
These technical changes also achieved the goal of lowering consumer prices.
But there have been other, less well-advertised, effects as well. The use of
these techniques has become increasingly expensive, raising the barriers to
entry even as they have reduced the price—and thus the profit per acre—of farming.
An important result has been the consolidation of an increasingly corporate
ownership along with the gradual washing out (accelerated during recessions) of
family farms. From a low point of an average of 140 acres per farm in 1880, the
mean size stayed roughly the same at below 150 until 1935. Then, mimicking the
other indicators, it starts a sharp slope upwards of 25 to 50 acres every five
years, reaching 461 in 1990 without showing any sign of stopping (Figure 2.2).
Hence yield per acre rose consistently starting in the depression years, but
did so at the cost of a total commitment to fossil fuels, artificial
fertilizers, and the corporatization, automation, and centralization of
ownership and production. The absolute number of people on farms peaked also in
1935 at around 31 million, after which it declined in an inverse echo of the
other trends to a mere 10 million in 1970 (Figure 2.2). The same is true at an
even higher level among the main beef suppliers: McMichael (1996. 102) reports that only three
corporations headquartered in the United States (Cargill, ConAgra, and Tyson's
Foods), in cooperation the Japanese firms C. Itoh and Nippon
Meat Packers, supply a controlling share of global feedlot supplies and meat
products.
Figure 2.2: Farm Acreage and Population, 1860-1990
Global
Model: The "Green Revolution"
The detailed focus on the agricultural
pattern inside the United States is not intended to be parochial. To the
contrary, l have lingered on this example precisely because it was to become an international
global model encouraged by U.S policymakers for emulation throughout the world (McMichael 1996). As early as the Marshall
Plan, the U.S. approach to agricultural production was being promoted by Washington to selected European
farmers (All Things Considered, National Public Radio, June 5, 1997). During
the following decades, the U.S. method of high fossil-fuel inputs was also extended to the
periphery as the most efficient solution to the demands of the global agricultural market
(McMichael 1996). The centerpiece of
this campaign was the "Green Revolution" (a presumed prophylactic for
the spread of the dreaded "Red" revolutions then breaking out across
the periphery). It was an effort to use a technical
"fix" (increased food production) to a social problem (class polarization and generalized malnutrition). The
Green Revolution sought to increase the yields of rice and other staple crops
for use in the periphery, along with building their resistance to predation by
insects, fungi, and bacteria. In many ways it succeeded (and continues to
evolve). However, optimal use of these altered varieties led to several
unanticipated consequences.
For many of the crops
"improved" by breeding (particularly during the initial periods of the 1960s and early 1970s), more
water and fertilizer were needed than that traditionally applied to
optimize performance (faster growth requires more inputs.) In the case of water, costly irrigation pumps were needed often enough that the
introduction of these new crops requiring these pumps had the effect of raising the economic barriers to
entry for peasant farmers, along with the minimum land area necessary to profit, thereby expelling
poorer peasants to the cities (just as U.S. "family" farms
have themselves been expelled) (Perlman 1977; Burbach
and Flynn 1980). Alternatively, peasants pushed
out of traditional land have colonized the
poorer soils along the mountainsides by cutting down rain forests. Increased irrigation also accelerated the rate of topsoil
loss and salinization, resulting in a long-term postwar global decline of
productive land area (Pimentel and Harvey 1995). The requisite
fertilizers themselves had to be bought from the U.S. or other core countries (increasing the need for foreign
exchange [U.S. dollars], and thereby also the pressure to grow cash crops for export for dollars instead of food
for local use), compounding rural class
polarization. For peasants without enough money to buy new equipment, the solution nearest to hand has been to have more
children to increase family labor power. This has been another unanticipated
consequence of the "Green Revolution":
delaying the completion of the demographic transition by prolonging the period of high fertility in the countryside. By
tying peasant income directly to the world market price for their cash crops,
lower and uncertain sales from the use of the new crop varieties sustained high
rates of fertility (to create new labor input), despite the drop in mortality brought about by new public health
measures (Folbre 1977; Grimes 1982; Mamdani 1972). Now, in 2017, twenty years after this initial
essay (1997), rural automation plus climate contraction of arable land have
forced a drop in human fertility, although cultural time-lags continue to
over-produce excess unemployed young men compelled to either migrate north
and/or join armed gangs attached to smuggling and/or anti-state
insurrection. The bloom of this armed
underground economy is most obvious in Mexico and Central America in the
Western Hemisphere; the countries in the Sahel in Africa; and the geographic
swath east of the Red Sea including the war zones of Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
and all of the “Stans” up to and including Tibet, Myanmar, and south China.
Further,
the replacement of traditional plant species and their genetic diversity
by an imported group dependent on further imports is a questionable long-term
strategy. As the land becomes less fertile with degradation it eventually is
abandoned. Its productive life thereafter can only be extended by growing
cocaine, opium, or other very high-priced crops, because
traditional crops do not even repay the cost of the fertilizer. The contraction of arable land combined with
the overproduction of children creates unemployment and migration from the
global “south” to the global “north.”
This migration contributes to the political destabilization of the north
discussed below.
The overall result of machinery,
irrigation, and petrochemicals applied on a global scale has been the
corresponding amplification of the same topsoil loss and
land degradation that characterizes the United States. The International Commission
of Scientific Unions issued a report (1997) which concludes that, worldwide,
75 billion metric tons of topsoil are washed away annually by the combination
of machinery and irrigation, which corresponds to .5 inches per year (recall that
.5 inch represents the work of 50 years of deposition, which means that, should
this rate continue, only 20 more years will eliminate all of the topsoil accumulated
in the temperate zones since the last ice age, 10,000 BP). In his encyclopedic summary of
global environmental issues, Caldwell (1996, 257- 58)
asserts that:
Possibly
the most serious natural resource problem now affecting all nations is land
degradation
. . . many activities in traditional as well as in modem industrial society
contribute to the
deterioration of soil quality and the loss of agricultural land; losses include
soil erosion, loss
of fertility, laterization. salinization and water-logging, desiccation, conversion to urban uses, and contamination by toxic
wastes , the effects of soil mismanagement are characteristically slow, incremental, and cumulative, so
that internationally significant injury may not be evident until irreversible
damage has been done.
Bundled into this
transition is also a dangerous dependence on fossil fuels for
most inputs to compensate. But, unlike the temperate soils that dominate the United
States and Europe, a large part of the soils in the periphery are tropical,
hence (once large sections are cleared) they quickly become completely
dependent upon external inputs (Colinvaux 1978, chap. 7).
Any prolonged disruption (or significant price increase)
of imported inputs would necessarily result in a dramatic contraction
of output and the transformation of the formerly tropical soil into a wasteland
(it cannot revert to tropical forest because of the soil sterility of tropical soils
discussed above [Colinvaux 1978]).
Crisis in Fresh Water
A closely related problem
emerging in recent years has been a growing shortage
of fresh water (Caldwell 1996, 258; la Riviere 1990,
37-48). The aspect of the global water cycle of concern here is
the rate of flow. Fresh water on land is renewed by ocean evaporation
(and desalinization) followed by rain over land, after which it eventually
returns to the sea. Over geological time, fresh water has accumulated in
glacial snow packs and underground aquifers. (A huge example of the latter
is the Oglala aquifer—named after the Sioux tribe—which stretches from the
Dakotas south as far as Kansas and Colorado.) The demand for fresh water for
both irrigation (currently 70 percent of global demand [World Bank 1997]) and urbanization
has come to exceed the flow provided by rain, most severely in drought prone
areas. To compensate, deeper wells have tapped aquifers. The Oglala aquifer
has been tapped to supply Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and farms in southern California
to augment the flow of the Colorado River (itself so drained that during some
summers it no longer makes it to the ocean).
In the former Soviet Union. the Aral Sea has contracted
50 percent, and the remainder has dangerous levels of salinity
and petro-toxins (BBC, Outlook May 14,
1997). Over the short term, the retreat of glacial snow packs adds to river
flow in more temperate climates, but that is at best a mixed
blessing. We are collectively consuming our water "capital,'
which will ultimately require restoration of the balance via a
massive contraction of use. This can only mean sharp contractions
of agricultural output and urban size or use (la Riviere
1990, 37-48).
In the first few
millennia of human agriculture, it was not understood that continuous
irrigation eventually deposited enough salt on the soil
surface that fertility disappeared. In an analogous
fashion, only now is it becoming also clear that continuous
irrigation from wells liberates arsenic from its bonds to the soil, creating
a gradual buildup of arsenic in the well water. Arsenic is a cumulative toxin for
which there is no known cure. Recently the BBC reported that the British Geological
Survey has discovered that the problem has become so widespread in
Bangladesh and parts of India that an estimated 30-60 million people are being
poisoned by their well water, a problem sufficiently grave that the World Bank
has dispatched a team to investigate (BBC, The
World Today, May 8, May 19. 1997).
Current
technologies used in global food production have achieved their
historic highs of yield per acre only by supplementing natural energy inputs
with ever-larger amounts of fossil fuel.
Insofar as there are limits to the supply of fossil
fuels, the enormous subsidy they provide must eventually grow smaller and finally
stop altogether. By itself, that will lower yield per acre and thereby raise prices.
Added to these challenges are the current uncertainties of global warming
(explored at greater length below). If the warming reaches the levels now
officially projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC 1990; IPCC 1992.; Karl, Nichols, and Gregory
1997), then the reversion of arid farmland to desert (as is now
already underway in the state of Nebraska) will tend to accelerate,
illustrating the removal of marginal land from production. This will
become another pressure acting to increase food prices.
The
post-war explosion in global food production has been predicated
on the extension to the tropics of a technology developed for application to the
temperate zones. In both regions the technology requires the massive subsidy of
a finite resource—fossil fuels—to boost production. While this subsidy is unsustainable
over the long term in either region, it is particularly unsuitable to the tropics,
where the baseline soil fertility is so very low that withdrawal of fossil fuels
would quickly lead to complete agricultural collapse. To the degree that global
food output is relying on a transient and artificial fertility of tropical
soils, then to that same degree it is hostage to the availability of
cheap fossil fuels.
INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION
AND THE BIOSPHERE
The
"industrialization" of agriculture was, as the term itself implies,
the transfer of technologies originally developed for application
to urban manufacturing facilities to the growing of plants. The motivation for the
development of machinery to production was to better control labor
and reduce the number of employees where possible (e.g., Braverman, 1974; Marglin in 1974; Stone 1974). As
was true of agriculture later, the result was a substitution
of fossil fuels for solar (human) energy. Again as with agriculture, the economic
results were spectacular. Maddison (1995, 36) has calculated that, in the United
States, the value in constant 1990 dollars of just machinery and equipment alone
per worker traces a path like that found in agriculture: while in 1820 the
value was 281, in 1870 it had quadrupled to 1,367; in 1992 it was 39.636
(Figure 2.3 below). The clever application of machinery to an
ever-expanding range of human activities has been geometric, and
today it has been given an added boost by the microprocessor.
Additional data Maddison provides demonstrates that this sequence of
jumps in worker productivity found in the U.S. is typical throughout the
world-economy, although the values are predictably smaller in the periphery
(Figure 2.4) (Maddison 1995, 249). Once again, machinery powered by
fossil fuels is both faster and more reliable than human
workers powered by the foods grown in the sun. Yet once again there
are unpleasant consequences not popularly understood.
Figure 2.3: U.S. Labor Productivity: Equipment value/worker 1820 to 1990, in 1990
dollars (Maddison, 1995).
From 1930 to 1990, the
global production of fossil fuels rose from 1.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent to 7.34 billion barrels; of which the
United States produced 46 percent in the first year and 20 percent in the
second (Figure 2.5; data from Etemad and Luciani 1991; the
United Nations Energy Statistics Yearbooks). Inside the U.S.in 1987, 36
percent of its consumption was for industrial production and another 37 percent for transportation
(mostly also connected with the requirements
of production) (Gibbons, Blair, and Gwin 1990, 94).
The upward burst of fossil fuel
production after 1935 both globally and inside the U.S. parallels the history of the application of fossil fuels to
agriculture and industry documented
here for the U.S. alone.
Among
the unwelcome by-products added to the biosphere by recent industrial
production technologies have been excessive heat, resource exhaustion, acid rain,
environmental estrogens, chlorofluorocarhons (CFCs),
which cause ozone depletion and greenhouse warming. We will
take these in turn.
Figure 2.4: Labor Productivity: GDP/Worker Hour, Selected Countries (1870-1990) in 1990 Dollars
n USA *Japan + Germany ¨ USSR X Taiwan t S. Korea
Entropy and
Heat
The
simplest and most elemental spin-off of any material transformation is heat.
The second law of thermodynamics requires that all material transformations involve
energy, and the greater either the speed of those transformations or their degree,
the greater the energy involved. Energy, in turn, ultimately degrades into its
lowest form—heat. It is this that, along with the heat absorption and low
reflectivity of many roads and building materials, accounts for why most large cities
average 100 (F) warmer than the surrounding countryside. This simple
fact is the ultimate brake on industrial production. If there were no economic
barriers to the conversion of earth's available materials into
machines, tools, and the energy to run them sufficient to supply
today's global population at the living standard that was typical
of the core in the early 1970s, the energy required for this massive
transformation of matter would by itself generate enough heat to turn the atmosphere
into an oven that would cook us all to death (Commoner 1977; Georgescu-Rogen 1971).
A second, less often articulated, implication of the
thermodynamics of production is the dispersion of mineral
resources. Iron ore, for example, is initially concentrated in a
mining site. After purification and further concentration in a steel mill,
it becomes a component in commodities that are distributed globally. When those
goods are discarded by their end users, they eventually rust, leaving behind a
small area of iron oxide that returns to the soil. The net effect of this
process is that resources initially found in abundant and
concentrated pockets become dispersed in a way that makes them impossible to
easily reclaim in the future. The overall volume remains the
same, but its geographical redistribution fundamentally changes
its accessibility to future generations.
Figure
2.5: Fossil
Fuel Production: U.S. and World, 1800-1995
Billions of Oil Equivalents
US as % World
1 800 1815 1830 1845 1860 1875 1890 1905 1920 1935 1950 1965 1980 1995
— US Production +Global Production *USA % GLOBE
Acid Rain
Acid rain results from the burning of coal with a high
sulfur content. That coal, being more abundant and cheaper than the
alternatives, is the fuel of choice for power plants throughout the world
(particularly China). When burned, the exhaust contains sulfur dioxide (SO2)
which quickly combines with water in the atmosphere to create sulfuric acid (H2SO4).
The rain downwind raises the acidity of soils and streams, killing trees,
bacteria, and insects. Damage from acid rain been well documented in the
northeast of the U.S. and Canada, the Smokey Mountains of the southeastern
U.S., and the Black Forest of Germany.
Environmental Estrogens
The production and use of plastics and electrical
components has entailed the use of certain chemicals (e.g., PCBs) that are
"loose cannons" in the ecosystem. They are collectively called
"environmental estrogens" because they mimic natural estrogens and
thereby may potentially interfere with the sexual evolution of a large number of
different species (e.g., mature male alligators in Florida with immature testes
unable to generate viable sperm, accelerated rates of sexual maturation of
human female children [Painter 1997, 1]), Some have speculated that these
chemicals may even be playing a role in the observed disappearance of frogs and
amphibians (Blaustein and Wake 1995).
Ozone Depletion
More
commonly known and now actually regulated are the effects of CFCs on
the ozone layer. Used until recently as coolants in refrigerators and air conditioners,
solvents for cleaning electrical components, and propellants for spray cans, CFCs
were quite abundant in the 1960s and 1970s. After use, they eventually float up
into the stratosphere, several miles up and well above the cloud layer. At that
high level, ultraviolet (UV) light (very high-energy
photons just beyond the blue-purple part of the visible range)
from the sun floods in directly. Photons with these energies
can easily strip electrons from atoms and break apart molecules, so they are
extremely dangerous to life. Any human exposed naked to such light would quickly
burn to death from the radiation. Under normal conditions, oxygen (02)
hit by UV light splits in two (0,) and then recombines
into 03—ozone. (The same thing happens when
lightning strikes, giving air its distinctive "fresh" smell after a
summer thunderstorm--a fact taken advantage of by car manufacturers who spray
their products with ozone to give them that "new car" smell). Ozone
has the capacity to absorb UV light and re-emit the absorbed
energy in a more benign lower frequency form as it creates
Ozone. CFCs interfere with this process by preferentially attracting the
oxygen atoms split by UV, thus preventing their recombination into ozone. Hence
the ozone hole first noticed above the Antarctic and now also perceptible as patches
of depletion in the Northern Hemisphere.
The
removal of the protection of ozone has allowed a dramatic increase of UV light proceeding unimpeded to the ground, especially
in the portions of the Southern Hemisphere
nearest the pole: South Australia, Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand. The effects have been observed in a myriad of
forms, as an upsurge in skin cancer, cataracts,
and blindness of sheep in New Zealand and kangaroos in South Australia. As with estrogens, some have speculated
that excessive UV may be playing an additional
role in the disappearance of the amphibians by sterilizing their eggs. Cases of melanoma have been proliferating in
the U.S. and Canada as well, and followers of
newspaper weather sections have doubtless noticed that most now feature a UV index as a routine part of their
forecast. During the summer of 1995, the staff
of the Baltimore Aquarium rescued a blind sea turtle from the coast of Delaware and were puzzled by the fact that he
had cataracts while yet a juvenile of only 15
years. A less well-known outcome of increased UV radiation at ground level is a probable increase in mutations,
especially among viruses, whose only
protection from the air is a thin jacket of protein. The long-term results of such mutations are unpredictable. The UN-sponsored
international agreement on regulation and eventual elimination of CFCs (The Montreal Protocols reached in 1987)
is one of the few true success
stories of cooperation on a global level to address a global problem. Even so,
it may take up to 50 years for the ozone layer to fully recover.
GLOBAL WARMING
Planetary
Thermodynamics
Global
warming from the introduction of greenhouse gases is another result of
current technology found within both production and consumption. CFCs and methane
(the latter largely from cattle and anaerobic bacteria) are each potent
greenhouse gases, CFCs all the more so because they are very
stable and very effective at blocking infrared (heat) radiation
heading back out into space. However, the most abundant greenhouse
gas is carbon dioxide (CO2), a direct product of fossil fuels. All
automobiles, planes, and ships burning hydrocarbons emit CO2
along with all coal or oil fired electric generators. Hence almost all of the machinery
used in production and transport contributes to CO2 emissions.
An
extreme outcome of heat entrapment from CO2 and other greenhouse gases
can be found on our nearest planetary neighbor Venus, whose proximity to the
sun and heavily carbonized (CO2 and Methane) atmosphere sustains a
surface temperature above the melting point of lead (over 700°
F). Here on Earth, if it were not for naturally occurring levels
of atmospheric C02, the surface temperature would be below freezing
(0°C), liquid water would not exist, and life would be impossible. But it is a delicate
balance. Too much warming and life (as we know it now) would die.
That temperature
varies with the abundance of CO2 is also clear from the fossil
record and Antarctic ice cores. Those same ice cores reveal that levels of atmospheric
CO2 have risen 27 percent during the period 1800-1990, from 280ppm to
355ppm (Figure 2.6 below). As early as 1994-1996, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (representing scientists from almost every country)
has confirmed that global warming is already underway. What remains unknown
is how far the process will go. Adding to the difficulties of prediction is the
question of the missing carbon: calculated emissions of CO2
have outpaced observed levels since reliable data on the
former have been available (1950). Where is the missing carbon
going? Several answers have been proposed, including root systems
and ocean absorption. Whatever the specific cause of these natural carbon "sinks,"
it is likely that they will eventually fill up, in which case levels would catch
up quickly with emissions, accelerating and intensifying the entire
process. (Since the original writing of
this essay in 1997, it has become clear that the major carbon sink has been the
oceans, which have now have indeed become “filled.”)
Rising Sea Levels
It has already been
observed that glacial ice packs arc retreating while plants and
butterflies have been documented moving higher up mountains and further north
(Peters and Lovejoy 1990). Melting ice suggests rising sea levels, which satellite
data now confirm. The retreat of the last ice sheets, which at their maximum
25,000 years ago stretched out across most of Europe, Russia, and North America
in the North and equivalently in the South, raised sea levels over 300
feet. The remaining ice, if
fully melted, would add another 250 feet. While we are yet far
from that point, a rise of only one or two feet would permanently flood the current
arable land around the Nile and has been estimated to be able to cut agricultural
production globally by as much as 20 percent. Further, rising sea levels pose
the potential for flooding important ports and coastal cities, as well as
Pacific island states.
Disease
The zones supporting
different forms of plant life also support connected bacteria,
fungi, and viruses. As warming allows these to move north, diseases typically
associated with the tropics (e.g., malaria, dengue fever) will follow into the areas
now occupied by the countries in the temperate core.[13] Exacerbating this concern
is the evolutionary mechanism of virulence. Diseases require hosts, and the
tendency is for evolution to select for those diseases that can reside inside
their hosts without killing them for long periods of time,
long enough at least for them to survive until contact with a new host
is possible. 'This evolutionary mandate is strongest where the host population
is lowest. Conversely, an abundant supply of densely populated
hosts removes that mandate, allowing for the transient flourishing
of exceptionally virulent diseases that can kill quickly while still assured of
transmission to new hosts. Just as the swine flu pandemic of 1918 is now
suspected of having evolved under the unusually high
concentrations of people in the trenches of World War I, so
the extraordinary population densities in cities throughout
the globe today make ideal breeding grounds for novel forms of extremely virulent
diseases. When combined with the typically irresponsible use of antibiotics
(e.g.--cattle farming), such diseases may also be expected to be immune to
normal antibiotics (e.g.--the resurgence of immune tuberculosis
among the urban poor; the recent identification of a form of staph
bacterium in Tokyo that is likewise immune to treatment). Finally, the influx
of UV light from the depleted ozone layer can he expected
to accelerate rates of mutation among all microorganisms, particularly viruses.
(For more detail on all of the above, see McMichael
1993.)
Desertification
Warming
implies a general movement toward the poles of the temperate climate, a range
of temperatures appropriate for our major food crops (wheat, rice, and maize).
Unfortunately, at least in North America, the soils north of the (now global)
"breadbasket" of the Great Plains are less fertile,
implying a loss in yield with migration north. (Further, movement
toward the poles implies increasing exposure to UV radiation.) For plants not
under human cultivation, the polar shift in climate may outrun their ability to
migrate, leading to their extinction (along with whatever other life
forms depend upon them). The
areas left behind are predicted to become prone to desertification. Indeed,
portions of the U.S. state of Nebraska have rolling green hills that are actually
sand dunes covered with grass. During the dust bowl era of the 1930s, the grasses
died and the dunes moved with the wind as they reverted to desert. Current satellite
data indicate that the same process has begun again. Pressures toward desertification
are likely to grow, expanding deserts everywhere.
Severe Weather
The
fundamental force powering all wind is heat, specifically the difference in
heat between the equator and the poles. Hot, humid air rises high above the tropics
and is blown toward the nearest pole. Along the way it cools, releasing its heat
as rain. Storms are thus simply heat engines engaged in the impossible task of equalizing
the temperature difference between the equator and the poles. The rotation of
the Earth sets some of these storms to spinning like pinwheels, generating counter-clockwise
hurricanes (as they are called in the north Atlantic) and clockwise cyclones
(their Asian equivalents below the equator). Sophisticated climate
models run on supercomputers predict more frequent storms having
higher wind-speeds with increased warming, implying corresponding increases in
deaths and infrastructural damage. In reality, the two hurricane
seasons (1995-6) in the Atlantic have been the most active of any on record in the
past 20 years, and the 2017 season appears to be much more violent than then.
Because the global population is growing, and most of
that population lives near rivers and seacoasts, the
mortality figures could become truly staggering as well as the
cost of repair (already a demand on the budget of the United
States and well outside the means of governments in the periphery). Adding to the difficulties of
prediction here is that overall warming is still consistent with
local cooling in certain areas for brief periods, leading to wild oscillations
in annual temperatures and precipitation (Karl, Nichols, and
Gregory 1997). More recent models have even suggested that the
temperature difference between the poles and equator may ultimately decrease,
shutting down the “Gulf Stream”/”Atlantic Conveyor,” implying a reduction in
storm severity (Karl, Nichols, and Gregory 1997). Clearly atmospheric science
has a need for much greater refinement ahead before it can reliably guide our
expectations.
At
the worst extreme, more far-fetched but still plausible results of sufficient warming
could include a complete polar meltdown with sea levels rising the full 250
feet. The consequent redistribution of mass from the poles (as
ice on land) to the equator (as water) would potentially slow down the Earth's
rate of spin, like an ice skater extending her arms while
spinning. A change in the spin rate could alter plate tectonics even as the
ocean cooled dramatically from the polar infusion. The former
could stimulate major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions
even as the latter disrupted global wind patterns. (Since this initial writing, earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions have both been increasing in frequency and violence.)
But
setting aside these nightmare scenarios, even the changes observed so far
have serious implications for the viability of mechanized agriculture and automated
industry, each powered by the fossil fuels shown already to be so destructive
to the biosphere.
THE GLOBAL REORGANIZATION OF PRODUCTION AND THE FISCAL CRISIS OF THE CORE STATES
Automation
in the contemporary core is pervasive. Almost every act of consumption
involves a machine at some stage, from cash registers to automated tellers,
while small computers are included in an ever-broader array of end-use commodities
such as radios, ovens, and refrigerators. These examples are but echoes of the
real revolution experienced in production that began in the 1970s.
The
hallmark of the relations of production characterizing capitalism is the structured
antagonism between capital and labor. Precisely because capital needs labor
to create commodities, it must solicit labor's cooperation and even support. Yet,
of course, market competition continually encourages capital to reduce labor costs
even while raising worker output. Labor, in its turn, has typically fought
against these pressures from capital by slowdowns, strikes, and so
forth. Until recently, the weapons available to capital to maintain its control
were limited: the direct supervision of assembly, the importation of
strikebreakers, and the employment of state-sponsored violence.
Now, at last, during this century scientific investigation has
yielded technologies that have enormously enhanced the power of capital against
labor. These are, first, an infrastructure of telecommunication that
allows for the remote control of multiple production
sites and, second, the development of semi-intelligent machines that
can potentially fulfill capital's ultimate dream of removing
labor altogether. But an important cost of each of these developments has been an
increase in the consumption of fossil fuels.
The motivation for the very first
factories (in the eighteenth century) was not to increase the output per worker directly, but
to do so indirectly by gathering all of the laborers together
under the same supervised roof (Marglin, 1974).
Before then, raw wool was spun into yarn in the homes of young women
earning their dowries (Tilly and Scott, 1978).
Their aggregation into factories forced them to work harder, deprived
them of house-hold labor, and family social relations. That extension of the
control of capital over labor expanded considerably in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. In the steel industry, for example, one of the many
methods created to divide laborers under the guise of "efficiency"
was the imposition by management of artificial distinctions
between workers of equal skill in the form of differing job titles
and wages assigned to separate locations in the same assembly line
(Stone, 1974). The early decades of the twentieth century also saw Taylor's
time-motion studies, which complemented and informed the perfection of the
assembly line (Braverman, 1974). Each of these successive reorganizations
of production were justified in their day as technical improvements in efficiency,
although the actual changes in output per worker were probably less dramatic
than the extension of the political and social control of capital over labor.
In contrast with these
earlier reorganizations of the shop floor, the successive
and cumulative inventions of the vacuum tube (1920s) computer (1940s) and
semiconductor (1950s) truly revolutionized production in a technical way. By endowing
machines with the capacity to make "choices" (however crude), information
technology has at last allowed machines to become genuine robot-workers,
thereby enabling them to seize the bottom rung of the job ladder. In the United
States, this has been the rung traditionally held by the unskilled or
new immigrant (Aronowitz, 1973), whose
expulsion from the formal "monopoly sector" workforce of
the core by the proliferation of robot technology has trapped them for the
indefinite future in the “informal”/”competitive” sector. We
can only expect that future technical change will eventually
enable robots to climb ever-higher up the rungs of the job ladder, thereby expelling
ever more "skilled" workers into the informal sector as their
decision-making powers improve.
The necessary result will be a two-layered economy, one “formal,”
bureaucratic, and cooperative with (and governing) the state; the other
“informal,” gang-controlled, illegal, and based on barter, smuggling, and personal ties.
The revolutionary effects
of the microchip started emerging in the form of robots on the shop floor
in the 1970s and early 1980s, and were felt first by the working
class, whose discontent made headlines as shootings on the shop floor
(Georgakis and Surkin, 1975). But by the mid-1980s
the new technology had crept up to the levels of middle management,
even as it spilled out of the most monopolized parts of the private
sector into the offices of government (e.g.--“Going Postal”). Specifically, the personal computer quickly
transcended its initial role as a smart typewriter to encompass scheduling, accounting,
statistics, scientific computation, blueprints for product design, movie animation
and special effects, and so on. These multiple uses allowed for the combination
of many different jobs onto one desktop, which in turn allowed for the elimination
of an equivalent number of now redundant personnel and positions.
Insofar
as these high-wage blue-collar and mid-range white-collar workers had
been the core tax base of the welfare state, the dramatic contraction of their numbers
during the microchip revolution (as manifested both by automation and relocation
abroad of production facilities) eviscerated that base,
accelerating the growing fiscal crisis of the United States
government at all levels as predicted and elaborated by James
O'Connor as early as 1973 (O'Connor, 1973). At that time he argued
that the diminution of employment in the monopoly ("formal") sector
was already threatening the supply of tax revenue, and
history since has clearly vindicated his expectations: higher taxes
on the shrinking number of high--wage workers in the (private)
monopoly and state sectors, combined with a contraction of employment in
those same sectors, and diminishing services available from the state have all
coalesced to create an angry attitude toward the state,
particularly within the ranks of the white males previously
granted privileged entree into the monopoly and state sectors.
By the late 1970s in the United States the implicit social contract (of a balance
between wages, profits, and state services) among capital, labor unions, and
the state that had reigned since World War II began to unravel. Starting in California
with the tax revolt organized by Howard Jarvis in a popular referendum in
1978 and ratified nationally by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the hostility
of the downsized working classes and small business owners toward government
and taxes has been skillfully manipulated by the right (by discrediting
taxation) to cultivate antigovernment feelings strong enough to enthusiastically
support the dismantling of the postwar welfare state.
Just
as the United States led the technical transformation of agriculture among the
countries of the core, so too it has also led in the contraction of the welfare
state among those same countries. Within the limits imposed by their respective
histories of class struggle, Britain, Germany, the
Netherlands, and even France have been compelled to follow
the U.S. example during the 1980s and 1990s by also constricting welfare outlays
and tightening tax codes. In every case,
these policies were aimed at coping with the same global problem: the evacuation
of employment arising from automation and outsourcing
within each of the local monopoly sectors. The
global reorganization of production enabled by telecommunications and the microprocessor
offered possibilities of higher profits from automation and factory relocation
to the semiperiphery that were eagerly sought by monopoly firms in all of
the nations of the core.
From an historically more
detached perspective, the popularity of the revolt against
the postwar welfare state can be understood as having been the political
manifestation throughout the core of long-term changes in technology and labor
market structure apparent since at least the oil crisis of
1973 (Mandel 1978; Kotz, McDonough, and Reich 1994;
McMichael 1996). Put another way, the social structure of accumulation
(prevailing since Bretton Woods); the social contract between capital and labor
within the core and the financial institutions regulating relations between the
core and periphery—fell apart during the 1970s. Real wages throughout the core have stayed at
roughly the same level since the middle of that decade, unemployment
has swelled until workers have been compelled to take jobs offering one-third
of their former wages, and the resultant loss of tax revenue created a fiscal
crisis which stalled out the welfare state during the late 1970s. On the
international level of global trade, in response to shrinking core
markets, the debt crisis of the semiperiphery (whose export earnings depend
entirely on core markets) became so bad that it compelled a serious reexamination
of the viability of the World Bank Group in the early 1980s (McMichael
1996; Suter 1986). There were transient exceptions: the "Asian Tigers"
of the semiperiphery were the beneficiaries of monopoly sector investment (the
destinations for the flight of manufacturing and investment leaving the core). However,
the rest of the semiperiphery and all of the periphery
were less fortunate. Most of the former were saddled by debt,
among whom some (e.g. Mexico and Brazil) precipitated the
debt crisis of the early 1980s. Among the latter, Latin America
and much of Asia struggled hard just to stay in place, while in Africa the economic
situation actually deteriorated by every measure (see Terlouw,
1992).
The collapse of the USSR
and its Eastern European satellites can also be understood within
this broader context of global disarray as a reflection of their gradual
digestion by the capitalist world-economy (Chase-Dunn 1982). Since World War
II, a growing dependence on sales to the capitalist world for state revenue had
eventually integrated the "socialist camp" into a role
equivalent to the capitalist semiperiphery. For example, since the
late 1970s Poland and Hungary had entered fully into the membership
of the World Bank (Payer 1982). The collapse of 1989 can be understood as yet
one more expression of the global depression and dis/reorganization afflicting
the semiperiphery of the world-economy from 1973 to 1996 (the year of the
official end of the "Uruguay Round" of the GATT and its conversion
into the WTO).
Class Polarization and
Ethnic Cleansing
What
the planet's peoples have experienced over the last 20 years is the largest
restructuring of the mechanisms of accumulation to have occurred since the
Great Depression of the 1930’s, or the European conquest of the globe. The
global mobility of capital combined with its command of
armies of robots, both enabled by the microchip revolution, has finally broken
the barriers to the equalization of wages between core and periphery
by pitting their workforces directly against each other. Because the previous regime
of unequal wages had sustained the high wages of the core and—via their taxes—the
welfare state, the elimination of that core-periphery wage inequality has
both threatened to eliminate that state and at the same time cast the lot of
the workers of the core into the same pit as that of their brethren in the
periphery. The long-term political results are as yet
unpredictable, but are likely to be volatile.
In
the periphery, global warming has undermined traditional farming, creating
armies of unemployed young men. At the
same time, the collapse of the patronage income to the peripheral state derived
from the alliance fears of the cold war (money spent on buying the
allegiance of states in the periphery), combined with the tightening of loan
restrictions from the World Bank, have reduced access to capital and blocked
the ability of local ruling elites to compensate supporters with state
contracts. In the semiperiphery (outside the briefly favored group
of "tigers" in Asia), the collapse of cold-war spending by the states
of the core, combined with limitations on the effective demand
from markets in that core (mainly due to the contracting income
of the working classes) have also reduced growth, which again has
limited the ability of the governments to reward internal supporters.
Finally, in the core the contraction of the welfare state has cut off benefits
to the powerless even as it is rooted in the dropping
lifestyle of the previously privileged. Throughout the
globe, the gap between rich and poor
has increased (World Bank 1992). One result has been the
reemergence of the far right among the displaced White exiles from
the monopoly sector in the core, along with the pervasive
spread of nihilism among the urban young (whose non-politics of hopelessness,
self-loathing, and narcissism could go right, left, or simply erode into
anarchy). (Now, from the hindsight of 20
years, today’s youth appear to have aroused from their slumber and plunged into
the realm of politics with an aggressive zeal.)
In
many parts of the world, classes overlap with ethnic categories—occupations (hence
incomes) have become historically and regionally associated with peoples
sharing similar cultures and backgrounds. The United States abounds with examples: Mexican immigrants provide the bulk of labor
for large corporate farms; Blacks and exiles from Central
America provide the lowest wage unskilled work in hotels and restaurants along
the east coast and in factories in the Midwest (Georgakas and Surkin 1975); motel
chains have become increasingly owned by people from the Indian
subcontinent; and many small shops in the ghettos of both coasts
are now owned by Koreans (Bonacich, 1994).
On
a global scale and in historical perspective, social scientists have documented
how certain ethnic groups who had already adapted to the role of small-scale
retailers were deliberately encouraged and sometimes even relocated by colonial
powers to be ethnic buffers between the general population and the rulers at
the top (Bonacich 1994; Portes
and Walton 1981; Wallerstein 1979). Specific examples of such
“middleman minorities” are the Jews in Europe, the Indians in Africa and the
Caribbean, the Chinese in Southeast Asia. and Korean shopkeepers in the U.S.
today. Individuals from these national/ethnic backgrounds had already evolved into
the niche of small-scale lenders and shopkeepers before European colonization.
But their respective aptitudes were encouraged and facilitated by the colonial powers
in the nineteenth century. With the help of these powers, Indians were settled
in Africa and the northern coast of Latin America, Chinese were accelerated
in their colonization of Malaysia and Indonesia, and the refugees from Jewish pogroms
in Europe fled to New York.
Other racial and
ethnic gradations have evolved quite independently of such outside
"help." Latin and Central Americans assign low status to anyone
defined as descended from the indigenous (pre-conquest)
population, Europeans discriminate against southern Europeans in
general and Roma in particular, Russians loathe equally Jews and
people from the south (e.g., Georgians, Kazaks); and Indians
assume that those with darker skin are from the caste of untouchables.
This global overlap
between class and race (always socially defined) exacerbates
the political dangers of our era. In a
time of generalized contraction of state expenditures, the
falling living standards of those dependent upon those expenditures
pits competing constituencies against each other. Insofar as these competing
groups are often associated with different ethnicities, the political temptation
among the elite to convert this competition into ethnic hatred is great—a
perfect distraction from the underlying causes of globalized automation. Within the countries of the
core, the flight of capital, the defeat of labor, and the resultant fiscal
crisis has fueled the rise of neo-fascism among the working class
youth of France, Germany, England, and the United States. Their
ideological response to the elimination of a safety net is to
attack "foreigners" with darker skins. Among the countries of Africa,
the withdrawal of patronage income from the cold war has sometimes led to the
collapse of the state altogether as ethnic peace could no longer be purchased
with outside income (e.g., Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Congo, Liberia,
and Sierra Leone).[14]
Such state collapses have driven peasants out of their homes into horrible
refugee camps patrolled by predatory UN forces.
Additionally, adding to these war refugees, global warming throughout
the marginal land of the periphery has driven traditional labor to migrate
north to Europe and the United States and Canada, accelerated in their
evacuation by Chinese investment in agricultural automation and infrastructure
using Chinese labor in both Latin America and Africa. The collective power of these environmental
and geo-political forces have coalesced into an
explosion of over-crowded sewage depots rife with human misery and
disease. These camps are the sources of
the desperate young men willing to die while crossing the Sahara to head north,
only to be once again imprisoned and beaten should they make it to Europe (or
the United states). The temporal
coincidence of their arrival with the destruction of white labor in the north
make ethnic warfare inevitable, and its exploitation by fascist politicians
just as unavoidable.
Other states face the same challenges,
but may yet avoid similar disasters.
Yugoslavia has demonstrated that even the semiperiphery is not immune as
is Brazil and Mexico in 2017. But even where total anarchic collapse has been
avoided, major restructuring has been required as states scramble to catch up with
the new mobility of capital (e.g., the bailout of Mexico following NAFTA and
a similar IMF-sponsored rescue package for Thailand).
The entire international
hierarchy of core, semiperiphery, and periphery prevailing since the earliest
days of colonialism is being restructured by the new mobility of capital
enabled by the microchip, leading to a conversion of the stratification between
nations into a stratification within them. Accordingly, we are
living in a time when the traditional hostility between separate nations is being replaced by a class/ethnic
hostility within them. Global war is being augmented/replaced by civil
wars that are ethnically based. All of this restructuring is made possible by
the microchip, which is in turn dependent upon an industrial base fueled by
fossil fuels, which in their turn power global warming, which in its turn must
ultimately contract global food supply and drive food prices up. Unless the
benefits of the monopoly profits from automation are redistributed from the
capitalist class into the rest of the working class as higher wages to support
higher food costs, the necessary result must be sharper conflicts and greater
killing. Ultimately, we may need to
devise a system of redistribution that segregates employment from income
altogether.
Inter-Core War
One last factor left
hitherto untouched is the prospect of global war. This topic is sufficiently
complex that it has generated a substantial literature (e.g..
Chase-Dunn and Bornschier 1998; Goldstein 1988;
Thompson 1990; Modelski and Thompson 1988; 1998). The
central question motivating many of these works is whether global war is
cyclical and, if so, what the mechanisms governing its frequency are. The
answer adopted by many of these authors is that it is indeed cyclical, that the
governing cycle has a period of between 40 and 60 years, and that the recurrent
issue is the need to update the interstate hierarchy implicit within the
existing international political structures to reflect the economic changes in
that hierarchy experienced since the preceding inter-core ("world")
war. Put simply, world wars are the means by which obsolete global political
institutions are smashed and reorganized to make them reflect the new economic
power hierarchy. Should the ordinary war cycle continue, the likelihood for the
next war should be greatest around 2010 to 2020. If, however, one factors in the current
apparent collapse of the states in the periphery, the growth of inequality in
the core leading to worsening ethnic tension and state de-legitimization as
disparities within the core reflect ever more faithfully the disparities outside
of it, and, finally, the uncertainties of harsher weather and rising food
prices addressed here, then the resultant threats to global security (however
defined and by whom) may greatly accelerate the timing of the war cycle.
Finally, should such a war break out it will almost certainly be nuclear (if
only in part), in which case every single bio-spherical problem cited above
will be grossly worsened and the probability of total social collapse made far
more likely.
CONCLUSION
The title of this essay is a deliberately mixed
metaphor. The "Killing Fields" refers to the genocide perpetrated on
the people of Cambodia by the administration of Pol Pot, while The
"Horsemen" refer to the legendary four forces of the
"Apocalypse” found in the book of Revelations in the Christian Bible:
starvation, disease, pestilence (insects), and War. The former was, in retrospect, an
early example of the genocidal collapse of a peripheral state, the
latter a plausible prediction about our collective future
based on biospheric and world-system processes. My choice of this title was
to suggest the linkage between the capitalist imperative to use fossil fuel
technology against labor and the destruction of the
biosphere; how that ecological destruction will necessarily entrain
starvation, disease, and war; and, finally, how the stresses
created by this social dissolution will enhance the likelihood of wars of
"ethnic cleansing." The
parallel between the biblical prophecy and our current challenges is striking.
Unchecked
global capitalism has put us in a double-bind: if the supply of fossil
fuels were unlimited, global warming would eventually eliminate arable land and
cook us to death. Alternatively, assuming the supply of fossil fuels is limited,
their exhaustion will drive up prices for food, housing, and transport
to levels beyond the reach of most people, fueling class and ethnic
conflict. Either scenario is fatal. But the second is more
likely. Although stocks of fossil fuels unknown today may yet be
discovered, the energy required to locate and retrieve them must eventually
grow exponentially." This fact will inevitably manifest itself as increasing
energy prices. Obviously alternative energy sources will become more frequent
and perhaps even dominant. However neither solar,
geothermal, nor nuclear energy can be convened into fertilizers,
herbicides, and pesticides. These attributes are unique to
fossil fuels. As they diminish, agricultural yield per acre must fall and
food prices rise proportionally. This is particularly true of the soils in the
tropics, which have by now become almost completely
dependent on imported chemicals based on fossil fuels (McMichael
1996; Colinvaux 1978).
When one includes
in this picture the probability that robots could displace all but the most
highly trained "knowledge workers," the scenario becomes bleak: a
huge mass of malnourished and desperate people struggling to live from a shrinking
black market trafficking in illegal goods, packed tightly together in
dilapidated ghettos rife with virulent diseases and gang violence,
and sporadically involved in ethnic/neighborhood/gang wars. Even
in the absence of another inter-core and nuclear war, the extremely
high death rates that would accompany this grim scenario would, over several
generations, reduce the global human population back down to levels supportable
by low-energy agriculture—perhaps the two to three billion we numbered globally
before World War II. Of course nuclear war would itself dramatically reduce
population levels as well as infrastructural support. But even
today, we must remember that the destruction of the tropics is creating a mass extinction
already worse than that accompanying the loss of the dinosaurs (Wilson 1990,
1992). For example, today there remain no more than 3,000 tigers alive on the
entire planet (National Public Radio, All
Things Considered, July 9, 1997). The numbers of black
rhinoceros are similar and lions not far behind. But for every charismatic
large animal endangered, there are millions of species of smaller insects,
plants, and amphibians disappearing with every acre of deforestation, not just
in the tropics but as well across the countries of the core. To the extent that
these issues have been publicly addressed at all, the problem hits been
laid at the doorstep of population growth particularly in the
periphery, But it should by now be clear that such a
belief is at best misinformed: both the growth in population and
the threats to life on the planet in general are caused by the use of
technology solely for the pursuit of capital accumulation on a world
scale.
The
human historical record reveals many examples of the rise of societies whose
complex organization allowed for the production and distribution of enough food
that all could live. But the same record also shows that every one of these societies
crumbled, often because of resource depletion accompanied by civil and/ or
border wars (Tainter 1988). The argument that I have
presented here merely shows that we continue to be constrained,
as were our ancestors, by the boundaries imposed by the physical
laws of energy flow (thermodynamics). Unlike them, we have
the intellectual tools to predict and even avoid our fate. But these tools and knowledge
are ignored and unheard when they imply social changes that are contrary
to the needs of those in power.
The
power for change lies with the general population worldwide. If they remain
uninformed, their spontaneous revolts will simply accelerate the descent into
anarchy. But if properly informed, the popular mobilization required to reorganize
the social order—already implicit within the de-legitimation of the current
states—can be focused into a coherent global objective. The occurrence of
several major natural disasters may yet be necessary to provide the correct unifying
vision. Tragic as this may be, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "There is
nothing like a hanging to concentrate the mind."
NOTES
1. At its most
simplistic level, this collision appears to be merely a restatement of Malthus:
the human population is growing faster than our ability to increase
food yield per acre. However there is an important modification to
this apparent acceptance of Malthus that must also be
included. Malthus and his followers have tended to blame poverty on
"over--population." thereby shifting the blame for income
inequality away from capitalist accumulation to the victims
of that accumulation. In stark contrast to this temptation to "blame the
victim," the analysis here will demonstrate that the
primary culprits of our collective predicament are to be found
in the mechanisms that sustain the rich, not in those that perpetuate the poor.
2. The lingering
presence of conifers in the Smokey Mountains of southern North America provides
silent testimony to the southern extent of the last glaciation. Once the dominant species,
they have eventually been pushed out by the warmth driving the glacial retreat, yielding
their territory to the better equipped deciduous. Those conifers that survived did so by
gradually climbing higher up the mountainsides, where they remain today stranded thousands
of miles south of their brethren in the arctic,
3. The red soils of
the southern United States seem at first an exception to this generalization, because
they are fertile when cared for. However, it may be that the lower incidence of solar energy
there as compared to the tropics has prevented the development of a biomass as
aggressively efficient in extracting food as that found in the tropics.
4. Exactly consistent
with the Gaussian ''exclusion" principle explained by Bonner (1988).
The two most obvious exceptions are the Mayan and Khmer
(Anghor Wat) civilizations, each relatively recent entries to
the historical stage. However each was located on floodplains,
whose local fertility is greatly enhanced by the importation of runoff from all
of the catchment areas upstream.
6. An attribute the
ecologist Colinvaux nicely captures by the label of "niche-shifting" (1978,
chap. 16),
7. The label
"tributary" was originally applied by Amin (1976) to characterize the
principal
form of surplus accumulation used by the pre-capitalist empires. It refers to
the institutional
forms that accumulation took: on an individual level, the peasant or slave that
worked
the land was expected to give up a portion of his crop to the representatives
of the state
as a "tribute" or tax; while surrounding client or colonial states
purchased their continued nominal "independence" also by the payment
of "tribute." On both levels, the revenue of the state was a
form of what would now be called a "protection racket." For further information see
Amin (1976) or Chase-Dunn and Grimes (1995).
8. Even though it did
greatly catalyze the conversion of large areas of land from traditional uses to
sheep production while simultaneously encouraging the foundation of plantations using
slave labor for cash-crop production.
9, An excellent account
of the development of these higher incomes in the colonies of European
settlement can be found in Amin (1976).
10. The regimentation
of worker movements in commodity assembly based upon the time-motion
studies of Frederick Taylor, extensive discussion of which can be found in Braverman (1974).
11. Fossil fuels are
solar in origin as well, but insofar as their initial solar "charge"
happened during and before the dinosaur eras, our use of them now is like
taking money out of a savings account without any restoration. We are living of our
solar "capital."
12. A longer and more specific list can be
found in Commoner (1971).
13. Dengue fever has
already been observed moving north from Central America into Mexico.
14. Ironically counter
to this trend, the withdrawal of cold war patronage has actually facilitated peace
agreements and democratization in El Salvador and Guatemala because the support
of
the United States was essential to the power of the military supporting the
oligarchies there.
15. This is another
manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics elaborately and persuasively
explained by Commoner (1977).
REFERENCES
Amin, Samir. 1976. Unequal Development. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Aronowitz.
Stanley. 1973. False Promises: The
Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill.
BBC. 1997. "Outlook." May 14.
BBC. 1997. "The World
Today." May 8 and May 19
Blaustein,
Andrew R., and David B. Wake. 1995. The Puzzle of Declining Amphibian Populations.
Scientific American 27(4): 52-57.
Bonacich,
Edna. 1994. The New Asian Immigration in
Los Angeles and Global Restructuring. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Bonner, John Tyler. 1988. The Evolution of Complexity by Means of
Natural Selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation
of Work in the Twentieth
Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Burbach,
Roger. and Patricia Flynn. 1980. Agribusiness
in the Americas. New York: Monthly Review Press and the North
American Congress on Latin America.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher,
and Peter Grimes. 1995. World-System Analysis. Annual Review of Sociology 21: 387.417.
Caldwell, Lynton Keith.
1996. International Environmental Policy,
3rd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chase-Dunn,
Christopher, and Tom Hall. 1997. Rise and
Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder. CO: Westview Press.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Volker Bornschier, eds. 1998. The
Future of Global Conflict. London: Sage.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1982. Socialist States in the World- System. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage.
Chew, Sing. 1996. "Accumulation,
Environmental Degradation, and Core-Periphery Relations in the World-System,
2500 BC to 1990 AD." Paper presented at the 36th annual meetings of the
International Studies Association, Chicago, Illinois, February 21-25.
Colinvaux, Paul. 1978. Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Commoner, Barry. 1971. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and
Technology. New York: Bantam.
Commoner, Barry. 1977. The Poverty of Power: Energy and the
Economic Crisis, New York: Bantam.
Folbre, Nancy.
1977. Population Growth and Capitalist Development in Zongolica.
Veracruz Latin American Perspectives 4(4):
41-55.
Georgakas,
Dan, and Marvin Surkin. 1975. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. A Study in Urban Revolution. New York:
St. Martin's Press.
Georgescu-Rogen.
Nicholas. 1971. The Entropy Law and the
Economic Process. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Gibbons, John H., Peter D. Blair, and
Holly Gwin. 1990. Strategies for Energy Use. In Managing Planet Earth: Readings from
Scientific American Magazine, 85-96. San Francisco: Freeman.
Goldstein, Joshua. 1988. Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the
Modern Age. New Haven. CT: Yale University Press.
Grimes, Peter. 1982. Poverty,
Exploitation, and Population Growth: Marxist and Mullins sian
Views on the Political Economy of Childbearing in the Third World. Master's
Thesis, Michigan State University.
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change). 1990. Climate Change:
The IPCC' Scientific Assessment, ed. J, T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, and
J.1. Ephraums, New York Cambridge University Press.
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change). 1992. Climate Change
1Q02, The Supplementary Report to the IPCC Scientific Assessment, ed. J. T.
Houghton. B. A Callander, and S. K. Varney. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Karl. Thomas R., Neville Nichols, and
Jonathan Gregory, 1997. The Coming Climate. Scientific
American (May): 79-83.
Kota, David M., Terrence McDonough,
and Michael Reich. 1994. Social
Structures of Accumulation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
la Riviere. Maurits. 1990. Threats to the World's Water. In Managing Planet Earth: Readings from Scientific American Magazine, 37-49.
San Francisco: Freeman.
Maddison, Angus. 1995. Monitoring the World-Economy 1820-1992. Paris:
Organization for Cooperation and Development in Europe, Development Centre
Studies.
Mamdani,
Mahmood. 1972. The Myth of Population
Control: Family, Caste, and Class in an Indian tillage. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Mandel. Ernest. 1978. The Second Slump, London: New Left
Books.
Margiin,
Stephan A. 1974 “What do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in
Capitalist Production.” Review of Radical
Political Economics 6(2): .33-60,
McMichael White', A. J 199.1
Planetary Overload: Global Environmental
Change and the Health the Human Split.
New York Times, section C4 2
McMichael, Philip, 1996. Development and Social Change: A Global
Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Mitchell, Brian R. 1993. International Historical Statistics: The
Americas 1750-1988, 2nd ed. New York: Stockton Press.
Modelski,
George. and William R. Thompson. 1988. Seapower in Global
Politics, 1494- /993. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Modelski,
George, and William R. Thompson. 1998. Innovation,
Growth and War: The Co-Evolution of Global Politics and Economics. Columbia,
SC: University of South Carolina Press.
National Public Radio. 1997. All Things Considered. Broadcasts on May
9. June 5, July 9.
O'Connor, James. 1973. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New
York: St. Martin's Press.
Painter, Kim, 1997. Puberty Signs
Evident in 7- and 8-Year-Old Girls. USA
TODAY, April 8. 1.
Payer, Cheryl. 1982, The World Bank: A Critical Analysis. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Perlman, Michael, 1977. Farming for Profit in a Hungry World: Capital and the Crisis in Agriculture. New York: Universe Books.
Peters, Robert L., and Thomas E.
Lovejoy. 1990. Global Warming and
Biological Diversity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pimentel, David, and C. Harvey. 1995.
Environmental and Economic Casts of Soil Erosion and Conservation Benefits. Science 267(Feb. 24): 1117-23.
Portes,
Alejandro, and John Walton. 1981. Labor,
Class. and the International System. New York: Academic Press.
Rudd, Tom, and Chun Fu. 1996. A requiem
for the Southern Regionalists: Reforestation in the South and the Uses of
Regional Social Science. Social Science
Quarterly 77 (Dec.): 804-20.
Runnels, Curtis N. 1995. Environmental
Degradation in Ancient Greece. Scientific
American 272(3): 96-99.
Sanderson, Steven K. 1995. Social Transformations: A General Theory of
Historical Development. London: Basil Blackwell.
Stevens, William K. 1997. Five Years
After Environmental Summit in Rio, Little Progress. New York Times, June 17, C-8.
Stevens, William K. 1997. Something to
Sing About: Songbirds Aren't in Decline. New
York TOMS, June 10, C-
Stone, Katherine. 1974, The Origins of
Job Structures in the Steel Industry. The
Review of Radical Political Economics 6(2): 61-97.
Suter. Christian. 1986. Debt Cycles in the World-Economy. Boulder,
CO: Westview.
Tainter,
Joseph A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex
Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press,
Tilly, Louise A,;
and Joan W. Scott. 1978. Women, Work, and
Family. N.Y.: Holt, Reinhart, and
Winston
Terlouw,
Cornelius Peter. 1992. The Regional Geography
of the World-System: External Arena, Periphery, Semiperiphery,
Core. Utrecht: Faculteit Ruimtelijke
Wetenschappen, Rejksuniversiteit
Utrecht.
Thompson, William R. 1990. Long Waves,
Technological Innovation and Relative Decline. International Organization 44: 201-33.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Washington,
DC: United States Government Printing Office. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, Edward 0. 1990. Threats to
Biodiversity. In Managing Plana Earth:
Readings from Scientific American Magazine, 49-60, San Francisco: Freeman.
Wilson. Edward O. 1992. The Diversity of Life. New York: Norton,
World Bank. 1982. World Tables. Washington, DC: World Bank Group.
World Bank. 1995a. World Development Report, Washington.
DC: World Hank Gimp. World Bank 1995b. World
Tables. Washington, DC: World Bank Group,
[1] At its most simplistic level, this collision appears to be merely a restatement of Malthus: the human population is growing faster than our ability to increase food yield per acre. However there is an important modification to this apparent acceptance of Malthus that must also be included. Malthus and his followers have tended to blame poverty on "over--population." thereby shifting the blame for income inequality away from capitalist accumulation to the victims of that accumulation. In stark contrast to this temptation to "blame the victim," the analysis here will demonstrate that the primary culprits of our collective predicament are to be found in the mechanisms that sustain the rich, not in those that perpetuate the poor.
[2] The lingering presence of conifers in the Smokey Mountains of southern North America provides silent testimony to the southern extent of the last glaciation. Once the dominant species, they have eventually been pushed out by the warmth driving the glacial retreat, yielding their territory to the better equipped deciduous. Those conifers that survived did so by gradually climbing higher up the mountainsides, where they remain today stranded thousands of miles south of their brethren in the arctic,
[3] The red soils of the southern United States seem at first an exception to this generalization, because they are fertile when cared for. However, it may be that the lower incidence of solar energy there as compared to the tropics has prevented the development of a biomass as aggressively efficient in extracting food as that found in the tropics.
[4] Exactly consistent with the Gaussian ''exclusion" principle explained by Bonner (1988).
[5]
The two most obvious exceptions are the Mayan and Kmer
(Angry Wat) civilizations, each relatively recent entries to the historical
stage. However each was located on floodplains, whose local fertility is
greatly enhanced by the importation of runoff from all of the catchment areas
upstream.
[6]An attribute the ecologist Colinvaux nicely captures by the label of "niche-shifting" (1978, chap. 16),
[7] The label "tributary" was originally applied by Amin (1976) to characterize the principal form of surplus accumulation used by the pre-capitalist empires. It refers to the institutional forms that accumulation took: on an individual level, the peasant or slave that worked the land was expected to give up a portion of his crop to the representatives of the state as a "tribute" or tax; while surrounding client or colonial states purchased their continued nominal "independence" also by the payment of "tribute." On both levels, the revenue of the state was a form of what would now be called a "protection racket." For further information see Amin (1976) or Chase-Dunn and Grimes (1995).
[8]Even though it did greatly catalyze the conversion of large areas of land from traditional uses to sheep production while simultaneously encouraging the foundation of plantations using slave labor for cash-crop production.
[9] An excellent account of the development of these higher incomes in the colonies of European settlement can be found in Amin (1976).
[10] The regimentation of worker movements in commodity assembly based upon the time-motion studies of Frederick Taylor, extensive discussion of which can be found in Braverman (1974).
[11] Fossil fuels are solar in origin as well, but insofar as their initial solar "charge" happened during and before the dinosaur eras, our use of them now is like taking money out of a savings account without any restoration. We are living of our solar "capital."
[12] A longer and more specific list can be found in Commoner (1971).
[13]Dengue fever has already been observed moving north from Central America into Mexico.
[14]Ironically counter to this trend, the withdrawal of cold war patronage has actually facilitated peace agreements and democratization in El Salvador and Guatemala because the support of the United States was essential to the power of the military supporting the oligarchies there.