introduction
One of the key elements in the analysis of imperialism is the issue of ecological degradation, linked to each of the divisions that emerge in a world capitalist system where a large number of States are constantly competing with each other both directly and through of its financial and industrial corporations for the control —or, better said, looting— of resources (almost always foreign), within the framework of a hierarchy that subordinates the center (or metropolis) to the periphery . In this article, we will try to address how the relationships of domination of the human being over himself and nature are expressed after abandoning the feudal mode of production, the devastating consequences of global warming on the most vulnerable sectors of the population, the negligence of international organizations when proposing a legal model
that recognizes the status and ensures the survival of people displaced by environmental risks or dangers in the host countries, the approach of alternatives absolutely disconnected from reality by some well-meaning freethinkers, and the main reproaches that can be formulated from an anti-imperialist perspective to the political-economic agenda of neoliberal regimes in climate matters.
II. Imperialist drift of metabolic cleavage
In line with what we have been suggesting in the introduction, it would be advisable to open this section by referring to the transfers of economic value that characterize interregional dependency ties in order to trace a brief genealogy of the first point that we have undertaken to develop. Well, these links are associated with ecological-material flows that contribute, simultaneously, to the transformation of the city-countryside relationship (in a similar way to that exposed by Marx in The German Ideology ), on the one hand, and of entire ecosystems through of the massive movements of labor (human capital) for the labor efforts required by the tasks of extraction and transmission of resources. All this, moreover, necessarily implies taking advantage of the weaknesses¹ of certain societies to guarantee the viability of imperialist domination (Foster & Clark, 2004: 232) in a self-propelling process of capital accumulation where the surplus of a phase becomes a fund investment for the next, according to our authors.
For example, if we examine the situation in Great Britain, we can see that there was, firstly, a dispossession of land (often by violent means) that previously belonged to the peasantry (setting up enclosures), and, subsequently, the revocation of the collective rights and uses that had traditionally been conferred on them, resulting in the transfer of ownership of the material means of production to a feudal group that would systematically delegate all the work of the land to those same individuals without ever participating in it. in them and concentrating all the available wealth thanks to this new monopoly. The poverty that became widespread among the rural population dedicated to this work activity forced an exodus to urban areas where the opportunity to obtain a position as a salaried worker would give rise to the rise of the industrial proletariat that the development of the bourgeois mode of production required. As we know, the reserve army that constituted those who were left out of the abuses of the factory context was useful to make production even more profitable thanks to the maintenance of wages at negligible levels. In this sense, the link that underlies this process between the alienation of nature and inter exploitation (think of the current state of the livestock industry, with the macro-farms and other brutalities) and intraspecies (that is, between human beings) becomes evident. humans).
Well, having clarified all of the above, it would now be convenient to turn to the issue of metabolic cleavage as a fundamental concept to shed light on a rather unknown side of Karl Marx's thought, developed as a result of concern about the pernicious impact that export and conversion of essential nutrients for the soil (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium), first into food, and then into polluting waste from city dwellers, at a distance from the original land where it was to be returned unheard of to date (Foster & Clark, 2004: 233), understanding, in line with Justus von Liebig, that even the most advanced form of capitalist agricultural production at that time [...] was nothing more than a system of theft whose effects would tend to intensify ad infinitum if a new regulatory law was not implemented with which it would be possible to restore the previous natural order.
On the other hand, we must note the following: «The discovery of the gold and silver deposits of America, the crusade of extermination, enslavement and burial in the mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and the looting of the Indies Orientals, the conversion of the African continent into a hunting ground for Negro slaves," declares Marx, "are all events that mark the dawn of the age of capitalist production." Certainly, the historical materialist method of analysis offers us the necessary tools to understand that, once all available data is taken into account, European development could not have been based exclusively on "large-scale trade" or the sophistication of certain phases of development. agricultural production, but, quite to the contrary, one of the determining variables of it was, in the first place, the genocide and indigenous subjugation, essential to preventively suppress or inhibit any act of indigenous resistance to the course of generalized pillage that the invaders had designed with the objective of transforming into capital all that wealth of the American continent that could fit in our ships; Next, the importance of forcing the creation of marketable monocultures (such as salt, opium, or betel in India, or coffee and sugar in Central America²) for export to the Old World was emphasized, with precisely these new slaves being responsible for to make them sprout with their blood, sweat, and tears: the more they want a product in the world market, the greater the misery it brings to the Latin American peoples whose sacrifice creates it , as Eduardo Galeano would say (Foster & Clark, 2004: 234) .
Just as serious and worrisome is the fact that this dependency, initially unilateral, would gradually take place in the other direction, although, as our authors relate, in a completely artificial way; This, at least, if we critically assess the Western race for guano and nitrate, which inflicted so much damage on relations between Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, when England did everything possible ( war, war, and more war ) for avoiding the state monopoly of resources that it considered necessary for its arms and agricultural industries. So much so, that we can see an evident antecedent of the current tendencies to brand as a dictator any president who intends to lead the liberation of his people from the imperialist yoke in the figure of President José Manuel Balmaceda, who ended up committing suicide in 1891 after the conflict financed by English and foreign investors with the connivance of their respective embassies (without going any further, the British ambassador wrote a letter in which he expressed that his community could not hide "its satisfaction at the fall of Balmaceda, whose eventual victory would have implied serious damage to our commercial interests»; to delve into both this section of the story and that relating to ecological debt , see Foster & Clark, 2004: 236-246).
Regarding the case of oil, a resource coveted with particular vehemence in the West, Michael Perelman suggests the following:
The origin of the curse of oil lies not in its physical properties, but rather in the social structure of the world… Such a rich natural resource base makes poor countries, especially the relatively more powerless, an attractive target—political and militarily—for the dominant nations. Powerful nations are not going to risk having such a valuable resource under the control of an independent government, especially one that might pursue policies that do not coincide with the economic interests of large transnational corporations. Therefore, governments that exhibit excessive independence are soon overthrown, even when their successors sustain an environment of corruption and political instability³.
Although we could approach this problem from multiple additional fronts, we have to waive such a possibility for reasons of space, and instead cite some last sagacious criticisms made against this current state of affairs by the Indian author Vandana Shiva (2004) in her magisterial work on ecofeminism —to which we hope to dedicate several pages of reflection in the near future by virtue of its inexhaustible intellectual value—:
The paradox and the crisis of development come from the erroneous identification of culturally perceived poverty with true material poverty, and the erroneous identification of the growth of commodity production with the better satisfaction of basic needs. In fact, there is less water, less fertile land, and less genetic wealth as a result of the development process. As these natural resources are the basis of women's subsistence economy, their scarcity impoverishes women and marginalized peoples in unusual ways. This new impoverishment stems from the fact that the resources on which their subsistence was based were absorbed by the market economy while they themselves were excluded and displaced by it.
Global corporations don't just want to own non-renewable resources like diamonds, oil and minerals. They want to own our biodiversity and water. They want to transform the very essence and basis of life into private property. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) on seeds and plants, animals and human genes are intended to make life the property of corporations. At the same time that they lie that they have "invented" life forms and living organisms, corporations also claim patents on pirated knowledge from the Third World.
III. Lack of protection of climate refugees in the international legal system.
In 1948, the UN promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, establishing for the first time in a text of international importance that we all have the right to request and obtain asylum in third countries if we can demonstrate that our lives are in danger due to political persecution. Three years later, as a result of the massive flows of forced migration that had derived from the global war conflict, a Convention on the Status of Refugees came into force, which continues to constitute an essential component of the refugee regime today, if although its conceptual formulation leaves much to be desired, according to Berchin et al. (2017: 147).
For this reason, certain countries have resolved to develop an indigenous definition in each case in order to provide subsidiary protection to their citizens by including the risk of being subjected to torture and capital punishment and the dangers associated with war, environmental disasters, and the lack of natural resources, among others, to then make a distinction between various categories of migrants, from those who move for economic reasons, to those who do so in response to a serious humanitarian situation, and, finally, , climate refugees.
Although this last term was popularized by Lester Brown in 1970, it was not until 1985 that the debate around it began, especially an article by E. El-Hinnawi for UNEP , in whose pages it is argued that This category would include people forced to temporarily or permanently abandon their traditional habitat due to a climatic disturbance (whether of natural or human origin) that endangers their existence or seriously affects their quality of life , for example: droughts, earthquakes, avalanches, desertification, deforestation, and disputes over land or water resources, which can in turn affect unemployment rates and food insecurity.
In this way, an increase of up to 150 million in 2050 in the number of environmental refugees is estimated, which will certainly represent one of the most serious crises to be faced in this century. All in all, it seems that none of this has sufficiently set off the international community's alarms, since today the legal guarantees specifically designed for individuals victimized by circumstances that, in most cases, have not contributed to generate (since 85% come from poor countries), continue to be rather scarce, showing that, often, the empirical data that make up the reports and analyzes prepared with the financing of certain organizations have had practically no effect in what a the configuration of new government policies is concerned (at least in the opinion of those of us who do not feel satisfied by the official theaters that are set up from time to time to calm the apparently fickle anxieties of the masses).
In practice, it is uncertain what will happen in the future to small Pacific island developing states (such as Kiribati and Tuvalu) and their citizens once the effects of coastal erosion, coral bleaching, monsoons (more frequent than ever due to greenhouse gases), and storm surges, in conjunction with their low topography, make them uninhabitable (Berchin et al. 2017: 148), at least considering the fact that the interested disinterest of the maximum Authorities have allowed the crossings of those displaced by these risks to continue to be classified as illegal migratory movements , for example, from Bangladesh to India, despite clearly constituting the only way of survival left to them (Berchin et al., 2017: 149).
Furthermore, since displacement currently tends to take place internally due to such restrictions, its active subjects will often find themselves without access to basic goods and services such as drinking water or the sewage system, crowding into unhealthy areas with few opportunities labor and being more susceptible to various types of victimization and hostilities, especially in the case of women. Another of the negative consequences, of course, has to do with the loss of traditions, artistic manifestations, and languages of the indigenous peoples that inhabit barely urbanized regions, although the capitalist superstructure has been in charge of institutionalizing as many hierarchical dichotomies as necessary ( North/South, Nature/Culture, Tradition/Modernity ) to desensitize humanity to its self-destruction (Brisman et al., 2018: 307-310).
According to Brisman et al. (2018: 301-302), this harsh reality is accompanied by another sinister phenomenon: the creation of privatized luxury green enclaves by the transnational bourgeoisie and the States with the greatest risk of environmental collapse, which entail de facto the enrichment of a few at the expense of the global ecological crisis to isolate themselves from its effects (specifically, the rise in sea level) establishing a true climate apartheid . An example of this would be the Eko Atlantic megacity on Victoria Island, next to Lagos, in Nigeria, which is expected to house the 250,000 richest people in Africa – the 1%, the privileged minority – thanks to the financial support of some banks. , corporations, and retired politicians, while two-thirds of the population suffers in their own flesh the most abject poverty, to the point that it prevents them from fleeing, condemning them to greater marginalization (Brisman et al., 2018: 311- 312).
IV. What solutions does the liberal sector propose in the face of eventual natural catastrophes?
Some authors, such as Justin P. Holt (2021: 2-4), have tried to propose solutions in terms that are reconcilable with the capitalist system, resorting to liberal theories such as Robert Nozick's distributive justice, according to which a person has the right to possess something if it was acquired or transferred to you fairly , that is, voluntarily and without fraud, coercion, or theft . Under normal circumstances, redistribution that does not result from a gift or rectification is considered unfair , but under catastrophic conditions, the right of possession of people over their property may be temporarily neutralized to honor the rights proclaimed on the role of the refugees. In principle, a transfer of assets should take place from those who have more to those who do not have sufficient means according to a reference base until the minimum is reached, which could imply the occupation of land or buildings and the use of resources. for a defined time without this implying the interruption of the fluctuation of its prices .
In return, they propose, it would be possible or desirable to provisionally grant the owners assets of another nature, at least until the catastrophe is over and the refugees can decide whether to vacate the property or pay for their stay as rent. Furthermore, they propose that former residents grant some type of loan to refugees with rates according to the particular characteristics of the latter, if anything limiting them depending on the severity of the circumstances. With these loans ( inheritable debts ), it would be feasible, according to the author, to auction the properties among the refugees, while the owners would be in a position to bequeath or sell their new assets (that is, the property titles and return plans for such loans) to speculators to profit from the crisis.
From our point of view, the foregoing would be contrary to the principles that should inspire any fair economic and political system (that is, the distribution among all the inhabitants of state-owned housing with the power for their indefinite personal use —especially to finish once with the privileges of banks to seize and sell real estate—, and the duty to work for the common good, without discrimination and with the right to learn the official language as a second language in intensive courses), as has already been verified in some of its variants during different crises of a natural nature in the USA, where the restitution of the means of subsistence that those affected previously had is considered mainly a private matter - it has been verified that the promises of state aid programs some 5,100 undocumented immigrants have been unfulfilled, for example, in the case of Hurricane Ida, with only 32 beneficiary applicants s of aid and another 53 pending payment—conditional on the supportive will of individuals who lend themselves to carrying out specific acts of charity or continued efforts to help without public funding of any kind.
Furthermore, we cannot expect the status of these refugees to change, at least to the extent that the absence of the rights associated with citizenship for those who settle abroad, for whatever reason, is perfectly compatible with the mechanisms that govern a labor market characterized by the systematic theft of surplus value by the owners of the means of production, since the more devalued someone's work is based on personal traits, such as biological sex or ethnicity ( object of discrimination due to their belonging to a historically oppressed group), the easier it will be to monetize the wage exploitation to which they have been subjected, at least in comparison with those who have made their time available to the capitalist of the day without sharing said characteristics (in this case, men born in the State where the contract has been formalized).
In this way, even during the eventual implementation of the program suggested by Holt (2021), nothing invites us to think that the abuses or excesses by those potential owners of real estate softened by the tragedy could be avoided without first correcting all the deficiencies. of a system that is not enough to simply reform , since the latter would always have the last word regarding the conditions of the hypothetical agreement (this is the case, for example, on platforms such as WorkAway , which, in many cases, only opens the door to an infinity of of prerogatives on the part of the hosts who lend a piece of their home or establishment to temporarily reside and, in the best of cases, food, in exchange for a variety of services without a contract that is worth, even when both parties meet, at the least on paper, protected by the same legal texts, as can happen in the case of two or more European citizens).
V. Controversies and intellectual dishonesty in environmental policy in recent decades
Since the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 (in force since 1994 and ratified by the original 197 countries), to which the Kyoto Protocol would later be incorporated in 1997, the Conference of the Parties (COP, for its acronym in English) has constituted the body with the highest authority to make relevant decisions in pursuit of the maintenance of international efforts to "find a solution" (at least until the great fortunes -Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and company - can order the construction of a sumptuous temporary residence managed by artificial intelligence in the space where they will settle after the total collapse that hangs over humanity) to the inconveniences associated with corporate debauchery in environmental matters, being "devoted" to the examination of new scientific discoveries, global enforcement of standards, and emissions reports and inventories submitted by parties at annual meetings that have been held since 1995.
Well, according to Huan Qingzhi (2017: 77-80), one of the fundamental bases of said Convention is, in theory, the principle of common but differentiated responsibility , presumably useful for promoting fairer cooperation strategies and regulations. where the need for development of the countries of the Global South is taken into account. However, given that this instrument does not operate in a vacuum, but rather is determined directly by the prevailing political and economic order at the international level, the disagreements around the dual regime or two-lane system (you know, nothing is more unfair than treat everyone equally ) – which should serve to acknowledge the global disparities underlying the dilemma at hand – have led to the failure of several sessions. Among them, that of 2009, during which Canada, along with other Western nations, withdrew from the scope of application of said mechanism.
Certainly, it must be uncomfortable for the arrogant capitalist powers to recognize that the lifestyle of high consumption (with all that this means for the environment and public health, no matter how much greenwashing they try to promote to protect their beloved neoliberal market) that have been able to finance and maintain thanks to the genocidal incursions of their military industry —incredibly polluting, by the way— through the richest continents in resources, as we noted at the beginning of this article, it is responsible for 92% of CO2 emissions (reaching USA to 14 tons produced per person per year, while in India they are only close to 1.8). In the case of China, the increase in its greenhouse gas emissions derives from the need to guarantee minimally acceptable material living conditions for its entire population, if perhaps it can be blamed —although with what moral authority— for having become the factory of the world during its first decades of greater industrial development in a context of relocation —with what this implies for the working class as a whole— sponsored by absolutely predatory transnational companies thirsty for profits.
For this reason, the simplest way to throw balls out has been to exercise tight control over the hegemonic narrative around the climate issue, distorting institutional discourses to adjust them to the supremacist agenda of those who have proclaimed themselves eternal winners, always alternating between expropriation and coercion in a game where only the law of the strongest is admitted and the category of human rights is no longer contemplated except in empty proclamations. One of the consequences of this approach is, neither more nor less, the aggravation and deepening of all the hierarchies that make up the world order as we have been experiencing it in recent centuries. While the post-industrial countries are heading towards a generalization of low-carbon technology in the market with a view, as usual, to unlimited capital accumulation, the countries that have not yet gone through the most advanced phases of the mode of bourgeois production will be described as unsustainable without a transformation of the power relations that govern the international sphere.
This, among other reasons, because it has been established that the transfer of said technology will depend on the adequacy of the policies of the countries of the South to the standards designed by the North, despite being perfectly aware that the former will never be able to follow in the footsteps of the latter due to the very nature of the economic order that subjugates us, needing to sacrifice well-being of 85% of the world's population to guarantee the comfort of the remaining 15%. In fact, in line with what we commented several lines above, a similar idea refers to Ulrich Brand with his concept imperial way of life , according to which in Europe and North America, thanks to their privileged position in terms of the acquisition of natural resources , commercial exchange, the abuse of atmospheric space to pollute with impunity, and the international division of labor, it is possible to enjoy a high-quality natural environment and, at the same time, maintain higher standards of living than those of the emerging economies of in a totally exclusive way, at the same time that the ambition of one day emulating material conditions of a similar entity is installed in the minds of the latter's elites, despite the fact that it is impossible to get rid of the dependency relationships that they set in motion and continue winding up a system, which, moreover, is based on the binomial racism-sexism and can no longer do without it (because, otherwise, how could it justify Can such a disparity of rights and opportunities be created depending on the sex and place of origin of each individual?)
Truly, the ideological construct of universalism (of development and modernization programs exported by the West) requires and is based precisely on the denial of the scale of those same hierarchical relationships since the beginning of the colonial era to perpetuate itself as the founding myth of our civilization , even if it is just one more among all those that appear in the field of social scientific production (Brisman et al., 2018: 303). Thus, third world states will never be able to enjoy the same powers to assume leadership and propose truly substantial changes or make suggestions that challenge the current infrastructure and superstructure and are taken seriously by their first world counterparts.
SAW. Conclusions
The harsh reality, at least for the apologists of neoliberalism and its inherent contradictions - who get excited thinking about the dead-paper commitments that the media that manufacture each and every one of their opinions have assured them that their leaders will strictly fulfill if the sector private monopolist allows it—is that capitalism is incapable of entailing any ecological or social sustainability, since it inevitably depends on exploitation among human beings and on nature, as we have already warned, and it seems to be very far from even taking a step towards the restriction of global capital and the incrementalist desire that inspires the guidelines of the troika composed of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. After all, as Qingzhi (2017:82-89) rightly points out, it would make little sense that contemporary States, characterized by high levels of domestic injustice and inequality, would agree to avoid imbalances of power in the international arena through adherence to a guide in accordance with universal socialism that the Earth really needs to resist the evils that plague it because of the short-term gaze of the psychopaths, elected or not, who govern us.
Footnotes
¹ With free rein, for example, to unleash the discharge of polluting waste in strategic territories.
² Marx, K. (1992), “Perhaps you believe, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which did not care about commercial matters, had not planted sugar cane or coffee trees there. El Capital, Volume I, Vol. 3. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores , pp. 941-942.
³ Perelman, M. (2003). Myths of the Market: Economics and the Environment. Organization & Environment, 16(2), p. 199-202.
Bibliographic references
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Two months after Storm Ida, only 32 undocumented New Yorkers have received relief funds (citylimits.org)
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Holt, J.P. (2021). A Use of Nozick's Notion of Catastrophe: The Distributive Justice Problem of Environmental Refugees. Academy Letters , 1061(1061).
Not Cold War | After COP26: The world needs climate cooperation, not a new Cold War
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