Abstract
Ecologically unequal exchange denotes a seemingly inexorable process whose impetus is both global and planetary. The logic underlying ecologically unequal exchange suggests that rather than moving toward a reconciliation of society and nature, the history of modern capitalist society is pointing toward nature being turned into a “function” of society. Modern society thus appears as a type of socio-economic organization that is characterized by corresponding modes of politics and culture in whose context “nature” is being supplanted, to an ever greater extent, by artificial substitutes. Paradoxically, social, political, and cultural forms are being replaced by modes of “human” and “social” interaction (and corresponding, new institutional structures) that replicate and reinforce organizational, technological, and economic patterns at the heart of capitalism. It may be possible to avert this prospect; if so, equalizing ecological exchange around the globe will be a necessary step along the way. Such equalizing may well be the necessary first step in remedying the world-system’s impetus toward maintaining and amplifying existing forms of inequality that nation-states no longer can contain or alleviate.
We thank Paul Gellert for helpful comments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
“The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy economy,” the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the “spaceman” economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the ‘factors of production,’ a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. …By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production andconsumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts” (Boulding 1966:9–10). See also Boulding ([1973] 1980) and Spash (2013).
- 3.
“The emergence of the possibility of a future, in which surplus production no longer must be based on the labor of an oppressed class, is, at the same time, the emergence of the possibility of a disastrous development in which the growing superfluity of labor is expressed as the growing superfluity of people” (Postone 2015:21).
- 4.
- 5.
Regarding the concept of artifice as a social-theoretical concept, see Dahms (2017).
References
Boulding, Kenneth E. 1966. “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.” Pp. 3–14 in Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy: Essays from the Sixth RFF Forum, edited by Henry Jarrett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. [1973] 1980. “Spaceship Earth Revisited.” Pp. 264–266 in Economics, Ecology, Ethics: Essays toward a Steady-State Economy, edited by Herman E. Daly. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Dahms, Harry F. 2015a. “Which Capital, Which Marx? Basic Income between Mainstream Economics, Critical Theory, and the Logic of Capital.” Basic Income Studies 10(1):115–140.
———. 2015b. “Toward a Critical Theory of Capital in the 21st Century: Thomas Piketty between Adam Smith and the Prospect of Apocalypse.” Critical Sociology 41(2):359–374.
———. 2017. “Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century: The Logic of Capital between Classical Social Theory, the Early Frankfurt School Critique of Political Economy, and the Prospect of Artifice.” Pp. 47–74 in The Social Ontology of Capitalism, edited by Daniel Krier and Mark Worrell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2018. “Critical Theory, Radical Reform and Planetary Sociology: Between Impossibility and Inevitability.” Pp. 152–168 in Piketty, Inequality and 21st Century Capitalism, edited by David A. Smith and Lauren Langman. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Diamond, Larry and Marc F. Plattner, editors. 2015. Democracy in Decline? Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Diamond, Larry, Marc F. Plattner, and Christopher Walker, editors. 2016. Authoritarianism Goes Global. The Challenge to Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Durkheim, Emile. [1893] 1997. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press.
Kaplan, Robert. 1997. “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” The Atlantic Monthly, December. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/12/was-democracy-just-a-moment/306022/.
Kurlantzick, Joshua. 2013. Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Postone, Moishe. 2015. “The Task of Critical Theory Today: Rethinking the Critique of Capitalism and Its Futures.” Pp. 3–28 in Globalization, Critique and Social Theory: Diagnoses and Challenges, edited by Harry F. Dahms (Current Perspectives in Social Theory 33). Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Spash, Clive L. 2013. “The Ecological Economics of Boulding’s Spaceship Earth.” SRE-Discussion Papers 3919, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. Available at http://www-sre.wu.ac.at/sre-disc/sre-disc-2013_02.pdf.
The Data Team. 2018. “Democracy Continues Its Disturbing Retreat.” The Economist, January 31. Available at https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/01/daily-chart-21.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dahms, H.F., Frey, R.S. (2019). Epilogue: The Wider View. In: Frey, R.S., Gellert, P.K., Dahms, H.F. (eds) Ecologically Unequal Exchange. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89740-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89740-0_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89739-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89740-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)