Capitalism was not paying its bills. Everything it needed to multiply its wealth, it bought ever more cheaply - from the natural world to human labor. Today's spate of crises is the result of this and marks the end of capitalism in its current form.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
Jakub Majmurek: When we ask the average person what object best symbolizes modern capitalism, the answer would most likely be a smartphone or a microprocessor. You in your book History of the World in Seven Cheap Things give a completely different answer: the best symbol of the current form of capitalism is chicken nuggets. Why?
Raj Patel: Because it better than anything else allows us to illustrate the two problems we write about in the book: first, capitalocene, and second, cheapness.
Capitalocene, that is?.
R.P.: The geological era in which we live, visible in the fossil record. We don't call it the Anthropocene, because the problem here is not man and his activities, but a certain socio-economic system - capitalism - and its relationship with nature.
Chicken nuggets illustrate it perfectly. The chicken used to make this dish is the most numerous bird in the world today. It originated in East Asia, but was domesticated and popularized as part of a specific approach to the web of life, assuming that people can treat nature as a resource to be exploited and manipulated. This shows the role that expensive nature plays in capitalism.
In order to turn a live chicken into nuggets, labor is needed, again as cheaply as possible. This, then, is the second cheap thing central to the history of capitalism: cheap labor. The nuggets themselves are consumed mainly by the working classes - which again is typical of the history of capitalism, which for its development has always needed cheap food for the working classes, because it allowed them to pay low wages and keep labor costs down. So we have another cheap thing - cheap food.
To make nuggets, you need energy - again, as cheap as possible. Cheap energy is another cheap thing capitalism needs. Every factory is accompanied by an energy-powered mine or oil well.
Work conditions in the meat industry are harsh, with workers complaining of burnout, injury and physical exhaustion. To participate in the production process, they need care work, which capitalism has also always tried to cheapen as much as possible. So we have another cheap thing, care. In the States, fast food chains like KFC have always been backed by low-interest loans - and that's another cheap thing central to capitalism: cheap money.
This is six of the seven cheap things in the title of your book - all in a piece of chicken. .
R.P.: There is also a seventh: cheap life. These are certain structures of domination, paths of individual and social futures that are inscribed in the process of producing chicken nuggets.
Jason W. Moore: At the same time, it must be emphasized that cheap nature is always a battlefield. She is not cheap for you, for us or for our readers, but for capital and capitalists. And it is cheap in the double sense of the word: not only does it cost little, but it is also devoid of value, respect, dignity. The capitalist exploitation of nature, of life, of labor, of all things, Raj said, is always a certain strategy of devaluation.
You pose the thesis that the history of capitalism can be presented as the history of the process of cheapening. However, how do you define "cheapening"? In your terms, can it be said to be underpaid human labor and non-human, underpaid labor of nature?".
J.W.M: In part, yes, but it is worth remembering that cash relations under capitalism always rise on a foundation of unpaid labor - mainly women and all that capitalism presents as nature. This is crucial not only for understanding the current crisis, but also the underlying dynamics of oppression, the inscribed processes of creating climate-class divisions, climate patriarchy and climate apartheid.
R.P.: The word "dynamics" is key here. In Seven Cheap Things we show the dynamics of capitalism as a system that doesn't want to pay its bills. And when crisis strikes - when workers demand higher wages, women start demanding to be paid for their care work, and so on - it looks for other sources of cheapness.
Cheap things are never just cheap on their own. They become cheap as part of a specific dynamic, marked by crises resulting from the struggle against the process of cheapening and capital's attempts to solve these crises. Indeed, throughout history, capitalism develops through expansion into more areas of the web of life, generating new areas and ways of producing cheapness.
Our book ends with the rather grim observation that all areas of cheapness, all seven cheap things necessary for the development of capitalism, are today simultaneously in a state of crisis.
J.W.M.: We are currently facing a real multi-crisis. At the same time, it is not, as Adam Tooze and the Financial Times would like, a collection of many individual crises, but a single, fundamental crisis finding expression in all areas of cheapness.
Your book is clearly inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein's theory, because like him you look for the origins of capitalism as far back as the long 16th century, during the period of the great geographical discoveries. How do you define capitalism in general? What characterizes it as a system different from others?.
J.S.W.: We are inspired by Wallersteien, who in turn was inspired by the great Polish historian Marian Malowist. I think it's important for Polish readers to be aware that not only the emergence of the Atlantic world with its colonies, but also the folk economy in Eastern Europe was necessary for the emergence of capitalism.
We define capitalism as a civilization that prioritizes the endless accumulation of capital. It is not about economic growth, but infinite expansion that appropriates and then devours people's lives, labor, landscapes - all in order to increase the rate of profit and create opportunities for new profitable investments. This process is combined with the endless conquest of land, practices of domination and proletarianization, and in our view is just reaching its limits.
The notion of the frontier plays a very important role in your argument, you begin it by analyzing the role that its Atlantic frontiers played in the development of capitalism. Is the frontier a place where the process of producing cheap things can take place particularly effectively?.
R.P.: We start with the Portuguese colonization of Madeira in the 15th century, because it's a perfect example. Portuguese colonial expansion not coincidentally begins at a specific moment: the collapse of the medieval climatic optimum and the epidemic of plague, the "black death," in the 14th century.
Madeira is one of the first colonies to grow sugar cane using slave labor. When the sugar crop ecologically depleted the island, it became a stop on the slave trade route between Africa and the Americas. Today, traces of this dark heritage have become a tourist attraction.
So, using Madeira as an example, we see not only how cheapness is created in borderlands, but also how capitalism can redefine borderlands in the face of crises.
Capitalism cannot exist without frontier areas, but also capital, in making its expansion, by no means changes only frontier areas. Boundaries always change the area that expands into them.
Why is the frontier so important to the creation of cheapness?
J.S.W.: The key is the processes of non-economic appropriation of labor - human and non-human, nature's labor - occurring in border areas. In each era of the development of capitalism, new imperial frontiers play a key role for accumulation: in the early days of capitalism it was sugarcane plantations and silver mines in the Americas, in the 18th century and early 19th century cotton plantations emerging as the frontiers of European colonization moved westward at the turn of the 20th century the frontier where oil was extracted.
Since capitalism wants to pay the smallest possible bills, and is a downright monstrously inefficient system at that, it constantly has to push its boundaries, reinventing itself in order to acquire cheap labor and cheap nature, because this is absolutely necessary for its functioning. Now we are nearing the end of this process, because for more than half a century there has been no successful attempt to reinvent capitalism.
R.P.: There was neoliberalism, but it really only brought another period of stagnation.
Musk and Trump promise to colonize Mars, this is not an attempt to establish a new frontier in space?.
R.P.: Musk is not doing anything new here. Capital has been interested in space for some time, for example, the possibility of extracting minerals from asteroids. Recently, the Financial Times published an interesting article on the competition to share radio frequencies around the Moon - because data transmitted from the Moon could become the new frontier, allowing capital accumulation.
Information is another key concept for the capitalist frontier. What is Musk realistically working on now? Not on colonizing Mars, but on taking control of the US government's payment system. Because the information it contains is something priceless - and I think we will soon see Musk monetize it.
The example of biotech companies turning our DNA into the next frontier shows that borders don't have to be spatial. Capitalism is constantly looking for new ways to turn information that was previously simply part of the web of life into a commodity; how to attach a price tag to something that never had a price.
J.W.M.: With the fact that capitalism is reaching for these very limits, it shows that we are at the end of cheapness. The frontiers that Musk is trying to establish do not offer hope for the dawn of a new golden age of capitalism. Their exploitation is primarily intended to trigger a redistribution of resources toward the 0.1 percent of the richest.
Therefore, today we are dealing not so much with the beginning of a new era of capitalism, but with the beginning of a transformation toward a new post-capitalist order. In my opinion, it may resemble the scientific dictatorship described by Aldous Huxley in The New Wonderful World, it will be characterized by extreme centralization of corporate power and information flows.
But let's return to history for a moment. The Industrial Revolution plays a very minor role in your book, which is a brief history of capitalism. Christopher Columbus and his conquests in the New World are much more important to you than what happened in the north of England in the 18th century, when the textile industry was established, or in Germany during the Second Industrial Revolution a century later. Why such a choice? .
R.P.: Because everything, that was really interesting about the Industrial Revolution, had already happened at the time of the conquest of Madeira. The standardization and mechanization of labor; the transformation of nature into fuel that can be burned for energy extraction; the processes to reduce people to a source of cheap labor; the mechanisms to keep them alive with cheap calories and unpaid caretaker labor; and finally, the credit to finance wars that push successive capitalist frontiers - all this is already occurring with the development of sugar cane plantations in Madeira, around 1450.
We do not think that the Industrial Revolution was not important. But for it to have happened at all, several interlocking processes dating back to the long 16th century had to have occurred beforehand.
This is especially important today, during the interregnum, or transition between systems, full of various pathological symptoms. For we have reached a systemic crisis of capitalism, while at the same time the working class still has not developed the tools to govern itself. We have not yet reached the point where the working class has enough power to force a transformation toward socialism. What we would call the "bourgeois left" is completely helpless. In these dark times, therefore, it is worth reaching back to the history of resistance, the history of struggles against the expansion of capitalism, stretching back half a century.
J.W.M.: Much of the contemporary climate movement is unfortunately characterized by a complete lack of historical awareness. This is best demonstrated by such slogans as "just stop oil!". After all, the problem is not oil, but capitalism.
We can really find out all we can about a person's climate policy by asking them when they think capitalism began, and thus where they think the current climate crisis began. And it began in the long 16th century, when the European ruling class created a new civilization, a new capitalist world ecology. And today, the Pentagon-Wall Street-Davos axis is threatening to create a new, even worse post-capitalist system for us in the face of the climate crisis.
Why are the opportunities for capitalism running out? The possibility of creating cheap things has collapsed?.
R.P.: We started with chicken, and this might be a good time to return to it. We are in the midst of a bird flu epidemic that is hitting the non-human elements of the web of life, but only for now. When we read about tens of thousands of marine mammals dying on Arctic beaches, or birds falling from the sky like in Revelation, it's hard to shake the feeling that we're at a similarly pivotal moment as the period when the medieval climatic optimum was ending and Europe was beginning to recover from the damage inflicted on it by the Black Death epidemic.
What does the global ruling class do in this situation? Although it talks about colonizing Mars, it often simply bunkers down to survive the apocalypse.
J.W.M.: The richest are literally building bunkers for themselves in case of a climate catastrophe. I would like to emphasize one thing: we are not repeating the "limits to growth" arguments. They were developed by the transatlantic ruling class within the Club of Rome in the 1970s as a response to the demands of the popular classes, mainly in the countries of the global South.
We repeat after Marx: the limit of capitalism is capital itself, understood in a broad sense as a certain ecology, a constellation of life, power and profit.
Today we are observing the exhaustion of the agricultural model that originated with the Second Agrarian Revolution in the Netherlands and Great Britain, and which spread around the world with the sugar cane plantations. This model was based on a simple principle: we produce more and more food with less and less labor. And what hopes we didn't pin on precision agriculture, due to climate change, this model ended. And it was on this model that the supply of cheap food, and consequently cheap labor, depended.
Whatever does not emerge to replace the current system will have to somehow resemble a steady-state economy, where population size and wealth are more or less constant, not growing over time.
What specifically might emerge?
J.W.M.: There are two major projects today. One has a center in Washington and the transatlantic world, the other in Beijing. Of course, there is an ongoing dispute in the States and throughout the Western world over what a responsive post-capitalist transformation to the climate crisis should look like exactly, but the U.S. project remains deeply unequal and militarized in each version. The Chinese project, on the other hand, is attempting to resurrect the millennia-old dynamics of China's tributarian system, which is also deeply unequal and domination-based, but different from that based on the West's imperialist domination.
So we have a choice between the future of Trump-Musk or the future of Chairman Xi?.
R.P.: These are the two biggest projects today. But the interregnum, a period of transition, provides an opportunity for the working classes to develop the capabilities that will one day allow them to take control of the means of production, to press the levers that will unlock other scenarios.
Of course, the vision of workers autonomously managing the steady-state economy seems much more sensible than the intentions of Washington or Beijing. At the same time, it is very interesting to hear what China is saying about ecological civilization. It is not yet a perspective to reintegrate humans into the web of life, but a certain reconfiguration of the relationships linking them to it.
Surely we should aspire to something more than these two dominant visions. And this is happening all over the world. We see, for example, that strikes are on the rise in China. In the West, too, the working classes are beginning to look for alternatives. Although I don't want to over-idealize the working classes here, because on the other hand, in the States, many trade unionists have bought the lion's share of Trump's agenda.
Much of the theory about what a different future might look like is being formed directly on the front lines, in action. I'm writing a new book about this now, and I don't want to reveal too much prematurely, but we have, for example, the landless movement in Brazil, which is very interested in how to rethink the whole relationship of people to the web of life, how urban-centered power should build relationships with rural spaces, how actions to solve the water crisis, for example, can be rooted in democratic practices.
J.W.M.: As we show in the book, climate crises are always a nightmare for the ruling classes. A series of popular revolts provoked by the end of the medieval climatic optimum nearly brought the late medieval elites to their knees. We saw the same thing in the 17th century, and even at the end of the 18th, at the end of the Little Ice Age. This is the time of the U.S. War of Independence, the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, the Tupac Amaru uprising in Peru, the biggest hunger riots in Europe.
So we should not be afraid of climate crises. And we certainly shouldn't succumb to the climate emergency, the Huxleyan scientific dictatorship established in the name of protecting us from climate catastrophe. As Naomi Klein perfectly identified a decade ago: the basic problem is a crisis of democracy. And the alternative is grassroots, authentic democracy in opposition to various authoritarian forces.
So far, the experience with devolution, known from African or Latin American countries forced to implement structural adjustment programs, has been decidedly negative. But one can also imagine a different devzrost, associated with policies that are much more egalitarian and democratic.
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Raj Patel - author of numerous books, filmmaker and researcher associated with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He was one of the organizers of the alter-globalist group protests in Seattle in 1999. As a social activist, he is concerned with food sovereignty.
Jason W. Moore - professor of sociology at Binghampton Universit. His research work focuses on environmental history, historical geography and the history of capitalism.
