> The rate of sustainable
> >consumption of fossil fuel is very low and can easily be exceeded by a
> european
> >feudal economy or any other pre-capitalist one.
>
> Then why wasn't it? Why didn't those feudal barons have tenant-tended deep
> drilling equipment factories on each of their feifdoms?
>
> All it takes is some technical
> >innovations and the availability of these fuels.
Indeed. There is no sustainable rate of fossil fuel consumption, because once
that genie is out of the bottle, there are no longer any Malthusian brakes on
population growth. Under capitalism, take off into 'sustained economic growth'
as Rostow amusingly called it, launched humankind into a classic exponential
growth followed by die-off trajectory. As has been pointed out by many
writers, including me, if the large scale exploitation of fossil fuels had
not begun, the 18th century would never have become the 19th and we still
would have serfdom, etc.
By the end of the 18th century, Western European societies had entered a
Malthusian impasse. Resource-depletion, energy-famines and raw materials
shortages constricted economic growth. Population increase led to social
tensions in Great Britain and in France to outright revolution, as
malnourished urban populations turned on the elites. Social disorder went hand
in hand with libertarian and subversive currents in literature and philosophy.
The elites themselves were riven with conflict and unable to sustain hegemony.
Such concatenations of events were commonplace in all historical societies and
cultures.
And everywhere without exception, the outcome had always been the same: the
Malthusian trap led to civilisational collapse and to the liquidation of
surplus population, as a result of war, disease, famine, revolution or a
combination of factors.
Nothing suggested what was to come. The French Enlightenment itself was no
harbinger of the breakout to sustained growth. Far from being the exceptional
event in human culture which its propagandists portrayed it as, the Age of
Reason was foreshadowed in other times and places and many of its achievements
were surpassed in civilisations which later foundered or fell into unyielding
stagnation. Thus the classical Kantian synthesis on which the Enlightenment's
schemes of moral and scientific order were based, had its roots in a Greek
antiquity whose own Enlightenment was derivative, for the Hellenic world
imported its key cultural qualia from India, Persia, Egypt and elsewhere. In
any case the moral order of rights and values which the Enlightenment
proclaimed as the fount of modernity and progress, turned out to have much
epistemic contradiction at its heart. The contents of mytho-cultural ensembles
were systematically worked over, to be discarded or assimilated by the new
synthesis, but this process itself was a familiar one in the reinvention of
Creation Myths in all cultures and times. Less was new in the Enlightenment
than it supposed and the tasks of mythogenesis remained as onerous and as
vital to the priesthood of the Enlightenment as to all others.
Even science did not after all depend on reason alone; it turned out that in
making sense of the results of observation, acts of faith were (and are) still
called for. As Immanuel Wallerstein points out, "the deliberate construction
of Newtonian-Cartesian science" was exactly that: a fabrication meant to serve
the goals of a reconstituted hegemony:
" Science was very sure of itself in this struggle. This is well illustrated
by two famous declarations of the Marquis de Laplace. One was his bon mot in
replying to Napoleon's query about the absence of God in his physics "Sire, I
have not found any need for that hypothesis" (cited in Koyri 1957, 276). The
other was his unyielding statement about how much science could know:
"The present state of the system of nature is evidently a resultant of what it
was in the preceding instant, and if we conceive of an Intelligence who, for a
given moment, embraces all the relations of beings in the Universe, It will be
able to determine for any instant of the past or future their respective
positions, motions, and generally their affections (cited in Hahn 1967, 15).
"Triumphant science was not prepared to admit any doubts or to share the stage
with anyone else. " [Wallerstein, "Social Science and the Quest for a Just
Society", American Journal of Sociology, CII, 5, March 1997]
But it was not the so-called Scientific Revolution which broke the European
system free of the Malthusian trap; science was the beneficiary of the
Industrial Revolution, not its maker. The common assumption that science
created industry is just another bit of retrospective myth-making.
In any case, there was in reality, little in the Newtonian system or in its
Kantian theoretical justification, which cannot be found in earlier
anticipations within mathematics and the physical sciences: even the calculus
had its well-known precursors. The great Paradigm Shift was little more than
an ex post facto justification and glorification of events which in themselves
were highly contingent, the results of the fortuitous and unprecedented series
of accidents which birthed the industrial era. The fact that a folklore grew
up about science-based production is neither here nor there; false appearances
aside there was no smooth continuous process which led from Greenwich
clockmaking or from Newton's alchemy, to the industrial science which first
emerged in the interstices of production before seizing hold of it in earnest
only after 1870, and not in England or in France, but in Bismarckian Germany.
Had industrialism not taken hold, the false tale of continuity within science
from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, would never have
become the dominant narrative of European development, and the Kant-Newton
golden age would have seemed to posterity an epoch without real precursors or
direct successors; the Enlightenment, in a word, would have been seen as
leading nowhere, as having no forces of internal renewal and growth, any more
than the ferment of Periclean Athens led anywhere directly. The connection
between Newtonian triumphalism and capitalist industry is itself almost
entirely fortuitous. This strikes at the heart of key Euro-American myths
about both the origins and the destiny of the "Western model".
To explain the hugely-significant break-out from the Malthusian trap we are
thus left with a mere concatenation of possibly fortunate accidents, once the
theoretical apparatus of the capitalist enlightenment has been dismantled, and
it is the job of historians above all (more than philosophers or social
theorists) to investigate and account for this contingent process of
origination; for beyond the empirical facts of the case, in reality there are
no larger truths lurking, no a priori factors or axioms available to explain
the fortuitous, unexpected and completely unpredictable rise of this
backwater, Europe, to be world hegemon. There can be no appeal to the
superiority European markets, financial systems, to the history of innovation,
or to the alleged benefits arising from the existence of a plurality of small
competing states. All of these supposed causes also existed elsewhere and
usually in better supply. Nor can the accumulation logic of capitalism itself
be argued as a cause of take-off.
This logic is inscribed in capitalism's historical origins as effect, not
cause, and these origins arose in a different way, without benefit of the
immanent certitude of capital's 'iron laws'. The hard materiality of
capitalist civilisation, as it unfolded in its quirky particularity and
empirical specificity, is what Marx recognised as the rational kernel hidden
within the shell of Hegel's mystifications. This recognition struck at the
heart of bourgeois rationalisation. The very arbitrariness of its facticity
echoed in the arbitrary misuse of its power, in the shadow it threw over all
pre-existing civilisations, in the crisis-ridden chaos of capitalist
accumulation in which the seething reality of plunder, exploitation and the
merciless pumping out of surplus labour was concealed behind tatty veils of
decency and moral order, so thin and squalid as to barely count even as the
hypocritical observance of polite form. The doomed Other was obliged not
merely to sit out the black comedy of their own extirpation in mute silence,
but even to participate in the bacchanalia by assuming the guide of deceitful,
sly Native which was no more than a mocking parody of their swaggering
European masters.
For those with eyes to see, it was always clear that there was nothing special
about Europe, and the rise of industrial capitalism only confirms this once
its real history is known. The vile truth about the Enlightenment is that the
universal republic of laws and liberties it proclaimed was nothing but a
screen for a dehumanising racism which in the name of Democracy and Reason
permitted Euro-American capitalism to wade in the blood of hundreds of
millions of 'others' for more than two centuries, and still it is not called
to account.
As Marx was first to point out, the manner of capitalism's emergence effaced
its own origins, wiping them from existence just as the slow induration of its
forms, hardening like a carapace around the precapitalist world, throttling
it, wiped them from memory too, depriving its denizens of the possibility of
even thinking that world except though the lens of nostalgia or the sublime
posturing of David-like heroic portraiture (this sense of a shared lacuna, of
the world we have lost, is the collective Western mind's guilty conscience,
the nightmare of the dead generations that weighs on the brains of the living,
and the insistent instinct for the sacred which lies behind every liberatory
project).
What was effaced were precisely those precapitalist cultures and peoples which
presumed to continue without the 'aid' of Progress and Enlightenment: starting
in its own backyard, then continuing as it took breath and gathered confidence
with blood-soaked imperialisms which engulfed the world, it has ended with the
sanguinary recapitulation of the colonial theme under the guise of
globalisation and behind the banners of supranational institutes of power:
Nato, the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, Nafta, Mercosur, Seato, Cento, which
are of course nothing but the character-masks of world capitalism in its most
toxic incarnation: Night-watchman, chamber of commerce, charity, moneylender,
etc.: each year, millions are immolated before its shibboleths.
The escape from the Malthusian trap launched the world system on a trajectory
which could only reproduce the trap at ever-higher levels of intensity, until
the stake is no longer a temporary setback, or the collapse of a specific
culture, or a blip in a secular demographic uptick: the stake has become the
survival of the human species, and more even than that. Here is where a deeper
ontic structure may be discerned behind the surface scatter, in which
capitalism itself becomes only an aspect or an attribute of the evolutionary
process, doomed to reproduce its own preconditions while attempting to escape
from their fatal consequences. That is the singular lesson of the break-out
which began in England after 1750. It depended on a model of energetics and of
industrial production which is still basic to capitalism. This model is
unsustainable.
Mark
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