- COVID-19 has accentuated ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities.
- These factors have been imposed by capitalism are further aggravated by COVID-19.
- Emergence of catastrophe capitalism as the structural crisis of the system takes on planetary dimensions.
- Capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains.
- These commodity chains are controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones in the Global South.
- The apex of world consumption, finance, and accumulation primarily in the Global North.
- These commodity chains make up the main material circuits of capital globally.
- They constitute the phenomenon of late imperialism identified with the rise of generalized monopoly-finance capital.
According to a report published in the Monthly Review and authored by John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi, COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism.
The emergence of catastrophe capitalism
As the world enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are seeing the emergence of catastrophe capitalism as the structural crisis of the system takes on planetary dimensions.
Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones, primarily in the Global South, with the apex of world consumption, finance, and accumulation primarily in the Global North.
Commodity chains phenomena
These commodity chains make up the main material circuits of capital globally that constitute the phenomenon of late imperialism identified with the rise of generalized monopoly-finance capital. In this system, exorbitant imperial rents from the control of global production are obtained not only from the global labor arbitrage, through which multinational corporations with their headquarters in the center of the system overexploit industrial labor in the periphery, but also increasingly through the global land arbitrage, in which agribusiness multinationals expropriate cheap land (and labor) in the Global South so as to produce export crops mainly for sale in the Global North.
In addressing these complex circuits of capital in today’s global economy, corporate managers refer both to supply chains and value chains, with supply chains representing the movement of the physical product, and value chains directed at the “value-added” at each node of production, from raw materials to the final product.
This dual emphasis on supply chains and value chains resembles in some ways the more dialectical approach developed in Karl Marx’s analysis of the commodity chains in production and exchange, encompassing both use values and exchange values. In the first volume of Capital, Marx highlighted the dual reality of natural-material use values (the “natural form”) and exchange values (the “value-form”) present in each link of “the general chain of metamorphoses taking place in the world of commodities.” Marx’s approach was carried forward by Rudolf Hilferding in his Finance Capital, where he wrote of the “links in the chain of commodity exchanges.”
The commodity-chain concept
In the 1980s, world-system theorists Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein reintroduced the commodity-chain concept based on these roots within Marxian theory. Nevertheless, what was generally lost in later Marxian (and world-system) analyses of commodity chains, which treated these as exclusively economic/value phenomena, was the material-ecological aspect of use-values.
Marx, who never lost sight of the natural-material limits in which the circuit of capital took place, had stressed “the negative, i.e. destructive side” of capitalist valorization with respect to the natural conditions of production and the metabolism of human beings and nature as a whole.
The “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” (the metabolic rift) that constituted capitalism’s destructive relation to the earth, whereby it “exhausted the soil” and “forced the manuring of English fields with guano,” was equally evident in “periodical epidemics,” resulting from the same organic contradictions of the system.
Focus on the dual, contradictory forms
Such a theoretical framework, focusing on the dual, contradictory forms of commodity chains, which incorporate both use values and exchange values, provides the basis for understanding the combined ecological, epidemiological, and economic crisis tendencies of late imperialism.
It allows us to perceive how the circuit of capital under late imperialism is tied to the etiology of disease via agribusiness, and how this has generated the COVID-19 pandemic. This same perspective focusing on commodity chains, moreover, allows us to understand how the disruption of the flow of use values in the form of material goods and the resulting interruption of the flow of value has generated a severe and lasting economic crisis. The result is to push an already stagnant economy to the very edge, threatening the toppling of the financial superstructure of the system.
Finally, beyond all of this lies the much greater planetary rift engendered by today’s catastrophe capitalism, exhibited in climate change and the crossing of various planetary boundaries, of which the present epidemiological crisis is simply another dramatic manifestation.
Circuits of Capital and Ecological-Epidemiological Crises
Remarkably, during the last decade, a new more holistic One Health-One World approach to the etiology of disease arose, mainly in response to the appearance of recent zoonotic diseases (or zoonoses) such as SARS, MERS, and H1N1 transmitted to humans from nonhuman animals, wild or domesticated.
One Health model
The One Health model integrates epidemiological analysis on an ecological basis, bringing together ecological scientists, physicians, veterinarians, and public health analysts within an approach that has a global scope. However, the original ecological framework that motivated One Health, representing a new, more comprehensive approach to zoonotic disease, has recently been appropriated and partially negated by such dominant organizations as the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States.
Hence, the multisector approach of One Health has been rapidly converted into a mode of bringing such varied interests as public health, private medicine, animal health, agribusiness, and big pharma together to strengthen the response to what is regarded as episodic epidemics, while signifying the rise of a broad corporatist strategy in which capital, specifically agribusiness, is the dominant element. The result is that the connections between epidemiological crises and the capitalist world economy are systematically downplayed in what purports to be a holistic model.
Structural One Health
There thus arose in response a new, revolutionary approach to the etiology of disease, known as Structural One Health, building critically on One Health, but rooted rather in the broad historical-materialist tradition. For proponents of Structural One Health, the key is to ascertain how pandemics in the contemporary global economy are connected to the circuits of capital that are rapidly changing environmental conditions.
A team of scientists, including Rodrick Wallace, Luis Fernando Chaves, Luke R. Bergmann, Constância Ayres, Lenny Hogerwerf, Richard Kock, and Robert G. Wallace, have together written a series of works such as Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection and, more recently, “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital” (by Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace) in the May 2020 issue of Monthly Review. Structural One Health is defined as “a new field, [which] examines the impacts global circuits of capital and other fundamental contexts, including deep cultural histories, have upon regional agro economics and associated disease dynamics across species.”
Approaches
The revolutionary historical-materialist approach represented by Structural One Health departs from the mainstream One Health approach in:
(1) focusing on commodity chains as drivers of pandemics;
(2) discounting the usual “absolute geographies” approach that concentrates on certain locales in which novel viruses emerge while failing to perceive the global economic conduits of transmission;
(3) seeing the pandemics, not as an episodic problem, or random “black swan” events, but rather as reflecting a general structural crisis of capital, in the sense explicated by István Mészáros in his Beyond Capital;
(4) adopting the approach of dialectical biology, associated with Harvard biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in The Dialectical Biologist; and
(5) insisting on the radical reconstruction of society at large in ways that would promote a sustainable “planetary metabolism.”
Marx’s notions of commodity chains and the metabolic rift
In his Big Farms Make Big Flu and other writings, Robert G. (Rob) Wallace draws on Marx’s notions of commodity chains and the metabolic rift, as well as the critique of austerity and privatization based in the notion of the Lauderdale Paradox (according to which private riches are enhanced by the destruction of public wealth). Thinkers in this critical tradition thus rely on a dialectical approach to ecological destruction and the etiology of the disease.
New historical-materialist epidemiology
Naturally, the new historical-materialist epidemiology did not appear out of thin air but was built on a long tradition of socialist struggles and critical analyses of epidemics, including such historic contributions as:
(1) Frederick Engels’s Conditions of the Working Class in England, which explored the class basis of infectious diseases;
(2) Marx’s own discussions of epidemics and general health conditions in Capital;
(3) the British zoologist (Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley’s protégé and Marx’s friend) E. Ray Lankester’s treatment of the anthropogenic sources of disease and their basis in capitalist agriculture, markets, and finance in his Kingdom of Man; and
(4) Levins’s “Is Capitalism a Disease?”
Especially important in the new historical-materialist epidemiology associated with Structural One Health is the explicit recognition of the role of global agribusiness and integration of this with detailed research into every aspect of the etiology of disease, focusing on the new zoonoses.
Such diseases, as Rob Wallace stated in Big Farms Make Big Flu, were the “inadvertent biotic fallout of efforts aimed at steering animal ontogeny and ecology to multinational profitability,” producing new deadly pathogens.
Offshore farming
Offshore farming consisting of monocultures of genetically similar domestic animals (eliminating immune firebreaks), including massive hog feedlots and vast poultry farms coupled with rapid deforestation and the chaotic mixing of wild birds and other wildlife with industrial animal production—not excluding wet markets—has created the conditions for the spread of new deadly pathogens such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1, H5N1, and now SARS-CoV-2. Over half a million people globally died of H1N1 while the deaths from SARS-CoV-2 will likely far exceed that.
“Agribusinesses,” Rob Wallace writes, “are moving their companies into the Global South to take advantage of cheap labor and cheap land,” and “spreading their entire production line across the world.” Avians, hogs, and humans all interact to produce new diseases. “Influenzas,” Wallace tells us, “now emerge by way of a globalized network of corporate feedlot production and trade, wherever specific strains first evolve. With flocks and herds whisked from region to region—transforming spatial distance into just-in-time expediency—multiple strains of influenza are continually introduced into localities filled with populations of susceptible animals.”
Large-scale commercial poultry operations
Large-scale commercial poultry operations have been shown to have much higher odds of hosting these virulent zoonoses. Value-chain analysis has been used to trace the etiology of new influenzas such as H5N1 along the poultry production commodity chain.
Influenza in southern China has been shown to emerge in the context of “a ‘historical present’ within which multiple virulent recombinants arise out of a mélange of agro-ecologies originating at different times by both path dependence and contingency: in this case, ancient (rice), early modern (semi-domesticated ducks), and present-day (poultry intensification).”
This analysis has also been extended by radical geographers, such as Bergmann, working on “the convergence of biology and economy beyond a single commodity chain and up into the fabric of the global economy.”
Interconnected global commodity
The interconnected global commodity chains of agribusiness, which provide the bases for the appearance of novel zoonoses, ensure that these pathogens move rapidly from one place to another, exploiting the chains of human connection and globalization, with the human hosts moving in days, even hours, from one part of the globe to the other.
Wallace and his colleagues write in “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital”: “Some pathogens emerge right out of centers of production.… But many like COVID-19 originate on the frontiers of capital production. Indeed, at least 60 percent of novel human pathogens emerge by spilling over from wild animals to local human communities (before the more successful ones spread to the rest of the world).”
As they sum up the conditions of the transmission of these diseases, the underlying operative premise is that the cause of COVID-19 and other such pathogens is not found just in the object of anyone infectious agent or its clinical course, but also in the field of ecosystemic relations that capital and other structural causes have pinned back to their own advantage. The wide variety of pathogens, representing different taxa, source hosts, modes of transmission, clinical courses, and epidemiological outcomes, have all the earmarks that send us running wild-eyed to our search engines upon each outbreak, and mark different parts and pathways along with the same kinds of circuits of land use and value accumulation.
Imperial restructuring of production
The imperial restructuring of production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—which we know as globalization—was the result primarily of the global labor arbitrage and the overexploitation (and super-exploitation) of workers in the Global South (including the purposeful contamination of the local environments) for the benefit primarily of the centers of world capital and finance.
But it was also driven in part by a global land arbitrage that took place simultaneously through multinational agribusiness corporations. According to Eric Holt-Giménez in A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, “the price of land” in much of the Global South “is so low in relation to its land rent (what it is worth for what it can produce) that the capture of the difference (arbitrage) between low price and high land rent will provide investors with a handsome profit. Any benefits from actually growing crops are secondary to the deal.… Land arbitrage opportunities come about by bringing new land—with an attractive land rent—into the global land market where rents can actually be capitalized.”
Much of this was fed by what is called the Livestock Revolution, which made livestock into a globalized commodity based on giant feedlots and genetic monocultures.
Territorial restructuring
These conditions have been promoted by the various development banks in the context of what is euphemistically known as “territorial restructuring,” which involves removing subsistence farmers and small producers from the land at the behest of multinational corporations, primarily agribusinesses, as well as rapid deforestation and ecosystem destruction.
These are also known as twenty-first-century land grabs, accelerated by high prices for basic foods in 2008 and again in 2011, as well as private wealth funds seeking tangible assets in the face of uncertainty after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09. The result is the greatest mass migration in human history, with people being thrown off the land in a global process of depeasantization, altering the agroecology of whole regions, replacing traditional agriculture with monocultures, and pushing populations into urban slums.
Pathogens – no longer constrained
Rob Wallace and his colleagues observe that historian and critical-urban theorist Mike Davis and others “have identified how these newly urbanizing landscapes act as both local markets and regional hubs for global agricultural commodities passing through.… As a result, forest disease dynamics, the pathogens’ primeval sources, are no longer constrained to the hinterlands alone. Their associated epidemiologies have themselves turned relational, felt across time and space. A SARS can suddenly find itself spilling over into humans in the big city only a few days out of its bat cave.”
The impacts of this phenomenon in various segments will be discussed in subsequent parts.
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Source: MonthlyReview
