puntheist

To sustain a process of perpetual accumulation, capital must obtain an ever-rising quantity of inputs at the lowest possible price, meaning cheap labour and cheap nature. The problem for capital, however, is that obtaining these inputs sooner or later entails very severe contradictions. During the rise of capitalism in the West, capitalists discovered that if they intensified the exploitation of their domestic working classes too much, they would eventually face a revolution. By the same coin, as they intensified the exploitation of domestic natural resources, they successively undermined the ecological basis of production itself. Capital therefore required some kind of “outside” — an external frontier where it can exploit labour and nature with impunity, and where it can externalize social and ecological costs.  In other words, capitalism requires an imperial arrangement in order to stabilize accumulation. Imperialism is thus a structurally necessary feature of capitalism. Even today, some 60 years after the formal end of colonialism, our world-system continues to be structured by a fundamental imbalance between North and South and the economic domination of the latter by the former. Transforming this arrangement is the key political challenge of our time.