On 10/29/2024 4:32 AM, Barry Brooks wrote:
... we only harvest the wealth of nature. We are planet parasites, dependent on the unearned harvest of nature. We are not creators of wealth.
For sure, there's no dispute that in addition to exploitation at the points of production and social reproduction, we must grapple with 'unequal ecological exchange': depletion of what Marx called 'free gifts of nature' (especially non-renewable mineral and fossil wealth). Both geographically and over time (i.e., reflecting a debt to future generations), capital mainly in the West/BRICS+ economies underdevelops the vast majority of humankind. Climate catastrophe is the most obvious way, but local pollution, local social and political degradation, and depletion of natural wealth are also major contributors to this underdevelopment.
There is the 'creation' of wealth, of course, usually divided by bourgeois economists into 'produced capital', 'financial capital' and 'human/social capital' - which if you calculate a 'Hartwick Rule' reinvestment of 'natural capital' depletion, in some cases turns out positive. In nearly all of Africa, though, the 'parasite' claim of natural-resource depletion outweighing reinvestment is true (i.e. the Hartwick Rule of reinvesting natural capital is violated).
Even the World Bank admits this, at least for Africa. Their methodology and conceptual apparatus are subject to profound critique, of course, but here's their new 'Changing Wealth of Nations' approach to these matters: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099100824155021548/pdf/P17844617dfe6e0241ad25120b1320904c2.pdf
A couple of attempts to convert that (and related) data into a Luxemburgist framing of capital 'eating up' non-capitalist relations: https://www.cadtm.org/Measuring-Capital-s-Super-Exploitation-of-People-and-Nature-in-South-Africa and https://www.cadtm.org/Unequal-ecological-exchange-worsens-across-time-and-space-creating-growing
Samir Amin: "Capitalist accumulation is founded on the destruction of the bases of all wealth: human beings and their natural environment. Historical Marxisms had largely passed an eraser over the analyses advanced by Marx on this subject and taken the point of view of the bourgeoisie – equated to an atemporal ‘rational’ point of view – in regard to the exploitation of natural resources.”
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