Reading 5 - Fraser: For a trans-environmental eco-socialism

How does Fraser define capitalism? (3)

• Capitalism represents socio-historical driver of climate change + core institutionalized dynamic that must be dismantled in order to stop it

  • Implicated in non-ecological forms of social injustice (sexual dom, racial-imperial oppression, class exploitation)

  • Also central in non-ecological societal impassess (crises of care + social reproduction; finance, supply chains, wages + work; gov + de-democratization)

Fraser argues that there’s a basic ecological contradiction at the heart of capitalism. What is this contradiction? Why, according to her, is it problematic? (2)

• Due to social injustice + societal impassess capitalism creates -> Disclosing links among multiple strands of injustice + irrationality, represents the key to dev a powerful counter hegemonic project of eco-societal transformation

• Capitalism harbours ecological contradiction which inclines it non-accidentally create environmental crisis 

Capitalism harbours ecological contradiction which inclines it non-accidentally create environmental crisis (4)

• Due to class of profit-driven entrepreneurs who engineered fossil-fuelled system of production + transportation → released a flood of greenhouse gases into atmosphere 

• Capitalism is a way of org relation of production + exchange to their non-econ conditions of possibility

• Contradiction encapsulated in four D-words

• Historical career of capitalism’s ecological contradiction spans four regimes of accumulation:

Capitalism is a way of org relation of production + exchange to their non-econ conditions of possibility (2)

• Institutionalized social order that encompasses not only econ but also activities, relations + processes, defined as ‘non-econ’, that make econ possible

• System’s econ is dependent on nature (for production + for disposing waste)

Contradiction encapsulated in four D-words (4)

• Dependence, division, disavowal + destabilization

  • Capitalist society makes ‘econ’ depend on ‘nature’, while dividing them ontologically

  • This arrangement programmes econ to disavow ecological reproduction costs it generates

  • The effect, as those costs mount exponentially, is to destabilize ecosystems

Historical career of capitalism’s ecological contradiction spans four regimes of accumulation (4)

• Mercantile-capitalist phase of sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

• Liberal-colonial regime of nineteenth + early twentieth

• State-managed phase of second third of twentieth century

• Current regime of financialized capitalism

Mercantile capitalism and energy (2)

• Agri + manufacturing ran almost entirely on animal muscle, both human + otherwise + some wind/water

• Only way to augment available energy was through conquest SO brutal systems of socio-ecological extractivism were created 

Liberal-colonial regime (3)

• Exosomatic regime: first to take carbonized solar energy from beneath crust of Earth + convert it to mechanical energy outside of living bodies

• Liberal-colonial regime appeared to liberate forces of production from constraints of land + labour.

• Liberal-colonial regime exhausted farmlands + polluted cities in a single stroke -> This massive disruption of soil-nutrient cycle epitomized capitalism’s ecological contradiction in its liberal-colonial phase

State-managed capitalism (5)

• US built novel exosomatic-industrial complex around internal-combustion engine + refined oil

• The result was age of automobile: icon of consumerist freedom, catalyst of highway construction, enabler of suburbanization, spewer of carbon dioxide + reshaper of geopolitics 

• Coal-fired ‘carbon demo’ gave way to an oil-fuelled variant, courtesy of US

  • Oil-fuelled social demo at Global North rested on militarily imposed oligarchy on Global south 

• Regime unloaded eco-‘externalities’ disproportionately onto poor communities, esp communities of colour, in core, while ramping up extractivism + env-load displacement in periphery

Financialized capitalism (5)

• Relocation of manufacturing to Global South has scrambled previous energic geo + consumption

• Global north very carbon intensive 

• Capital continues to generate new historical natures at a rapid pace (minerals)

• Money flows instead into speculative trade in emissions permits, ecosystem services, carbon offsets + env derivatives.

  • What enables such ‘regulation’ + also fostered by it, is new green-capitalist imaginary, which subjects whole of nature to an abstract econ logic, even when not directly commodify it

How, for Fraser, is capitalism’s ecological contradiction related to other contradictions? How else is capitalism self-undermining? (4)

• Capitalism relies on social-reproductive + pol prerequisites -> these arrangements too, are contradictory 

  • Social-reproductive conditions for a capitalist society structure relations between production + multiple forms of carework performed by communities + families (esp women)

  • Political: capitalist econ necessarily relies on a host of pol supports: repressive security forces that contain dissent + enforce order; legal systems that guarantee pv property + authorize accumulation; multiple public goods that enable pv firms to operate profitably

  • Economic: capitalism’s way of relating econ to polity is also destabilizing