The Global Political Economy of the Environment

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The Global Political Economy of the Environment

• IPE II Lecture 11

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Lecture Outline

• Kaplans Coming Anarchy
• Against Kaplan Keynesianism, modernisation
  theory, agro-industry, the WTO, IMF, World bank
• Empire
• Historical production of capitalism against
  nature scientific revolution, Christian moral
  economy, 19th century watershed, Mill (wanton
  nature), Jevons (blinding value theory), Property
  (stewardship to risk?)

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Kaplans Coming Anarchy

• 1. From Cold war to New Threats
• 2. The Issues ( a la Kaplan)
• Socio-economic dislocation and the restless
  hordes
• Environmental scarcity and catastrophe
• Cultural antagonisms

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Kaplan Ignoramus?

• Problems all in poor societies
• West seen as potential victim!
• West needs to manage the problem
• BUT

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Pace Kaplan 1

• Does history show capitalist societies can manage
  these problems?
• Environmental costs are external costs
• Production problematic environmentally
• - Keynesian demand management
• - Modernisation theory (Biel reading)

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Pace Kaplan 2

• The Environment at the World Trade Organisation
• The Sources of socio-economic dislocation
• - Agro-industry
• - World Bank and International Monetary Fund

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Ellen Woods Empire

• Actually existing globalisationmeans the
  opening of subordinate economies and their
  vulnerability to imperial capital, while the
  imperial economy remains sheltered as much as
  possible from the obverse effects. Globalization
  has nothing to do with free trade. On the
  contrary, it is about the careful control of
  trading conditions, in the interests of imperial
  capital. Globalization has been as much about
  preventing as promoting integration. The global
  movements of capital require not only free
  transborder access to labour, resources and
  markets but also protection from opposite
  movements, as well as a kind of economic and
  social fragmentation that enhances profitability
  by differentiating the costs and conditions of
  production.

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Genesis of Environmental Catastrophe

• Christian Moral Economy and Scientific revolution
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• Adam Smith (1723-1790)
• It is not from the benevolence of the butcher,
  the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
  dinner, but from their regard to their own
  interest. We address ourselves, not to their
  humanity but to their self-love, and never talk
  to them of our own necessities but of their
  advantages. so it is this same trucking
  disposition which originally gives occasion to
  the division of labour.
• (Wealth of Nations Book I pp. 102)

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Capitalism Against Nature

• 19th century Why then?
• 1. Religious Crisis
• 2. Collapse of common episteme
• Foucault the total set of relations that unite,
  at a given period, the discursive practices that
  give rise to epistemological figures, sciences,
  and possibly formalized systems (Archaeology of
  Knowledge 1969 211)
• 3. Need for new foundation for knowledge

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John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

• Nature not only amoral but wantonly immoral
• the doctrine that man ought to follow nature, or
  in other words, ought to make the spontaneous
  course of things the model of his voluntary
  actions, is equally irrational and immoral.
  Irrational, because all human action whatever,
  consists in altering, and all useful action in
  improving, the spontaneous course of nature
  Immoral, because the course of natural phenomena
  being replete with everything which when
  committed by human beings is most worthy of
  abhorrence, any one who endeavoured in his
  actions to imitate the natural course of things
  would be universally seen and acknowledged to be
  the wickedest of men.

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William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882)

• Value Theory
• Previously bottom up from nature
• Marginal value theory top down from individual
  consumption choices
• Accompanying shift in conceptions of property
• John Lockes (1632-1704) Spoilation proviso
• Abandonment of stewardship (now risk?)

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Locke and Property

• For this labour being the unquestionable
  property of the labourer, no man but he can have
  a right to what that is once joined to, at least
  where there is enough, and as good left in common
  for othersif gathering acorns, or other fruits
  of the earth etc. makes a right to them, then
  anyone may ingross as much as he will. To which I
  answer, not so. The same law of nature that does
  by this means give us property, does also bound
  that property tooAs much as anyone can make use
  of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so
  much may he by his labour fix a property in.
  Whatever is beyond this is more that his share,
  and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God
  for Man to spoil or destroy.
• (Locke (1689), Two Treatises of Government,
  Section 32, pp. 308)