Producing Capitalist Landscapes: Ethnographies of the Green Transition and its Contradictions

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue “Producing capitalist landscapes: Ethnographies of the green transition and its contradictions” lays out the foundations of our shared approach to the study of capitalist processes of socioenvironmental transformation and spells out some of the main findings and common themes that traverse the articles in the collection. Thus, in the first part we present the basic tenets of Marxist historical ethnography, and discuss how it can be applied to the study of capitalism as an environment-making historical system. A brief summary of the articles in the special issue shows that each one of them represents a particular take on the study of the production of capitalist landscapes within the context of the green or low-carbon transition. In the second part we engage with three common threads that emerge from the collection: the dialectic between capitalist value, social worth and processes of cultural and economic devaluation; the role of the state in coordinating the production of environments appropriated to the goals of capitalist accumulation; and the symbolic and environmental dimensions of technological fixes.

KEYWORDS:

• Green transition
• Historical materialist anthropology
• Value
• State
• Technology

In February 2019 the authors of the papers included in this special issue gathered at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Our aim was to look at our ongoing research projects through the lens of the production of nature under conditions of financialized accumulation.¹ Joined by colleagues from the Institute and beyond, and inspired by recent conversations about capitalism working its way through contemporary socioecological relations, we aimed to reconnect marginalized anthropological and ethnographic tools for the study of nature-society relations with the analysis of contemporary environmental transformations. Our goal was to contribute to a materialist and dialectical agenda for the analysis of capitalism as an environment-making process; in it we were united by the belief that the anthropological focus on the lived experience of processes of extraction and exploitation was indispensable to an understanding of ecological crises and of the promises and realities of the low-carbon transition.

This special issue is traversed by the same concerns that animated our initial meeting and builds on the conversation sparked by it. Thus, it seeks to understand how capitalist processes imbricate with the production of landscapes and to offer a multifaceted account of the attempts to contain solutions to the global environmental crisis within the dominant capitalist model of accumulation. The five research articles contained in this special issue share a broadly defined research agenda, characterized by the following ideas. First, they all share a concern with understanding capitalist relations of production and reproduction as socioecological processes. Second, they all focus on specific cases of energy transition and decarbonization, showing them to be processes of capitalist restructuring that involve the reorganization of space and nature in which the state plays a crucial, mediating role. Third, they all adopt a Marxist-inspired, historical ethnographic perspective; this approach posits that much insight can be gained about the large political economic and environmental transformations under consideration by analyzing their political and cultural effects upon local actors, and that the lived experience and situated praxis of these actors offer possibilities for imagining alternative political projects and attendant socioenvironmental futures.

The aim of this introduction is to lay out the foundations of our shared approach to the study of capitalist processes of socioenvironmental transformation and to spell out some of the main findings and common themes that traverse the articles in this collection. Thus, in the first part we present the basic tenets of Marxist historical ethnography, and discuss how it can be applied to the study of capitalism as an environment-making historical system. A brief summary of the articles in the special issue shows that each one of them represents a particular take on the study of the production of capitalist landscapes within the context of the green or low-carbon transition. In the second part we engage with three common threads that emerge from the collection: the dialectic between capitalist value, social worth and processes of cultural and economic devaluation; the role of the state in coordinating the production of environments appropriated to the goals of capitalist accumulation; and the symbolic and environmental dimensions of technological fixes.

Historical Materialist Anthropology

Anthropologists are well placed to challenge the view according to which the contemporary threat to the destruction of life on a global scale is a property of the species. Indeed, a programmatic concern with cultural diversity has long converted ethnographers into observers and recorders of the diversity of socioenvironmental relations. Yet beyond this shared programmatic approach, anthropology is a rich and varied discipline populated with multiple perspectives and traditions. To simplify a complex intellectual landscape, we could divide these perspectives into two main camps. On the one hand, a large part of the discipline focuses on understanding how different social groups – understood as culturally coherent, irreducible units – embody different ways of being human. On the other hand, a second tradition, to which the texts in this special issue all subscribe, is primarily interested in understanding how global capitalism shapes the lives of ordinary people, and, reciprocally, how their struggle – to make a living and create livable lives, to forge relationships and alliances, to build horizons of meaning – grounds the abstractions of capitalist development. Thus, the former tradition focuses on multiplicity, singularity and contingent creativity, for it tends to see societies and cultures as internally homogeneous, bounded objects, whereas the latter approaches the world as an articulated totality, and is thus more interested in analyzing connections, contradictions and structured relations. If the former understands cultural difference as immanent, the latter approaches it as emergent from unequal power relations (Gill and Kasmir 2016; Narotzky 2016; Smith 2016a).

We call this latter perspective historical materialist anthropology,² and its central lineage harkens back to the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of authors,³ mostly in the US and France, sought inspiration in the Marxist tradition in order to develop an anthropology that combined the attention to ethnographic detail with the analysis of broader political economic processes (Godelier [1973] 1977; Roseberry 1988). Although socioenvironmental relations have rarely been a primary object of analysis for historical materialist anthropology, this special issue largely emerges out of the belief that this tradition provides key conceptual and methodological tools for the grounded analysis of capitalism as an environment-making process. To summarize these generative possibilities, we focus on four key ideas: a broad understanding of production; a focus on reproduction; a dialectical approach to the relationship between the symbolic and the material; and an emphasis on history.

Historical materialist anthropology follows Marx in adopting a broad concept of production, which Wolf defines thus: “Production embrace[s] at once the changing relations of humankind to nature, the social relations into which humans enter in the course of transforming nature, and the consequent transformations of human symbolic capability” (1982, 21; see also Roseberry 1997). This broad concept of production warns against adopting an economistic approach to the analysis of capitalism, and suggests the need to address accumulation through economic and extra-economic means as well as to reveal how the idea of the “purely economic” is instrumental to securing the operation of the law of value (Kalb 2020). The concept therefore is not strictly economic but also ecological, social and political, for production refers both to the “active engagement with nature and the concomitant ‘reproduction’ of social ties” ( Wolf 1982, 75). Production for us means the continuous production of a certain social, political, cultural and ecological order that establishes access to and control of resources and power, both material and symbolic.

This broad understanding of production – qua reproduction of relations of production writ large – takes us to our second idea, the focus on reproduction. With this term we refer, on the one hand, to the reproduction of processes of accumulation and domination and, on the other hand, to the everyday ways in which ordinary people strive to reproduce their livelihoods. The integral concept of social reproduction central to historical materialist anthropology draws on and advances debates in feminist theory,⁴ as well as two key insights from Karl Polanyi. First, his argument (Polanyi [1944] 2001) that capitalism’s key factors of production – namely, labor and nature – are fictitious commodities; treating them as commodities leads to their degradation/depletion, thus positing a key contradiction for the reproduction of accumulation and opening a space for social contestation (what Polanyi called “countermovements”).⁵ The second insight, which takes us to the most anthropological Polanyi (Polanyi 1977), is his insistence not to reduce economic practices to the workings of the market, and to instead pay attention to the myriad mechanisms through which ordinary households carve out a living . These mechanisms play a key role in creating a livable life in front of capital’s destructive drive, corresponding to what Stefania Barca calls the “forces of reproduction” (2020) that carry out the work of sustaining life, a work that cannot be accounted for by a narrow focus on production.

The third idea follows suit and points to the importance of symbolic constructs (for instance: property rules, or the culturally specific definition of what constitutes a life worth living, or the process of abstraction that makes possible imagining nature as a commodity), and to the need to attend to the dialectical interplay between material phenomena and ideological constructs. Far from subscribing to a mechanistic understanding of base and superstructure, historical materialist anthropology understands mental activity as quintessentially material, and examines the active presence of thought and meaning-making within production writ large. As Godelier puts it: “There is a mental component at the core of our material relations with nature. Three functions of thought mingle there: the representation, organization and legitimation of our relations with each other and with nature. (…) There exists in every social relation a mental part that is both one of the actual conditions for the birth and reproduction of this relation, and at the same time its internal organizational schema” ([1984] 1986, 11; see also Williams [1972] 2020). Yet, analyzing the interplay between mental and material also means observing that in actual social practice capitalism operates a separation between the two, “between the subjective being and the objective conditions for the production of life, as well as an alienation of consciousness from the process of production of life” (Narotzky 1997, 171). The separation between ideal and material (for instance, between intellectual and manual labor) is thus the product of a historical process, and can only be reapprehended through it.

Finally, then, our anthropology is deeply historical, for it understands reality as processual, relational and contested. Rejecting a transhistorical understanding of culture and capital, it approaches history as the medium through which novel combinations of capitalist development and historical consciousness are formed. This radically historical approach is central to the political impetus of historical materialist anthropology. Indeed, it is through this approach that we access the lived experience of ordinary people that forms the intimate texture of our ethnographies. Yet, more importantly, it is this historically grounded experience that which allows us to move our lens from the study of reified social relations (the “concrete abstractions” of capitalism) to the study of actual social relations, the ultimate goal of our analyses being to dialectically integrate both ends. This does not amount to denying the force of capitalist abstraction, but to a project of rejecting it by grounding it in historically concrete practice and lived experience.

Taken in combination, these four ideas compose a project of engaging with capitalism in a non-capital-centric way. An approach that recognizes capitalism as a world historical force, yes, but one that is also attentive to all that which exists beyond the value form and that pays primary attention to the experience and point of view of those who live and struggle within and against it (Sider 2014). For although we must avoid romanticizing their struggles – both reactionary and emancipatory, both openly rebellious and quotidianly subdued – we must also recognize the way they help shape capitalist development. This has been the aim of the five ethnographic papers in this special issue, all of which provide grounded, vivid accounts of capitalism as an environment-making force.

Ethnographies of the Low-Carbon Transition

All five papers in this collection document social configurations into which geographically diverse projects of decarbonization are embedded. All authors address instances of green capitalist modernization implemented in the name of a low-carbon transition compatible with a growth-oriented economy. Collectively, they provide a record of how the forms of social appropriation of labor that underwrite place-bound projects of decarbonization strengthen processes of uneven development and historically structured inequalities. Each article offers a situated take on the contradictions pervading capital-led processes of green transition, be it through the promotion of renewable energies, carbon credit exchange systems and more efficient means of transportation, or through the downsizing of the fossil-fuel complex. In every case the aim of tackling the global environmental crisis is subordinated to, and hampered by, the ambition to create new profit opportunities, and the authors document the class character of these efforts, the inequities on which they rest and the iterative production of uneven development that results from it.

Through the case of wind energy development in Southern Catalonia, Jaume Franquesa shows how a centralized model of wind energy development is implicated in the production of an internal periphery. His analysis of the co-production of territories and livelihoods reveals that the extensive spatial claims accompanying wind energy development demand the erosion of economic value and the disvalorization of cultural worth. Placed in a broader field of forces, resistance to wind energy development is thus revealed as part of the struggle to assert worth and preserve value under conditions of diminishing autonomy.

Antonio Pusceddu’s analysis of the tensions between industrial workers and environmentalists in Brindisi, an industrial city in the Italian South, elucidates how locally manifested socioecological contradictions express themselves in the political ecologies of class. His historical ethnographic analysis traces the way in which industrial development projects, as part of successive waves of state-organized appropriation, produce different configurations of labor-environment relations. Workers and laborers differently situated in the field of production occupy diverging positions with respect to renewable energy development plans. Yet, as Pusceddu shows, focusing on the broader dilemmas faced by industrial workers and environmentalists in the field of reproduction allows us to point in the direction of a shared struggle for use value.

Natalia Buier’s contribution addresses the conditions of possibility of Europe’s most advanced high-speed rail (HSR) network, the Spanish AVE. The analysis locates HSR development into a multi-scalar project of capital flow into large-scale transport infrastructure and builds on research that has debunked optimistic narratives about HSR’s environmental benefits. Buier’s historical ethnographic approach focuses on the adoption of HSR as part of a broader transformation of the transport market as well as on the main instance of opposition to it, the struggle against HSR in the Basque Country. Engaging with the ideological and material conditions that allow for an exclusionary capitalist project to be legitimized as a green developmentalist one, the article evinces how coercion is essential to the structure of dominance upon which the expansion of HSR relies.

Theodora Vetta’s ethnographic analysis takes us to the north of Greece, where she traces the transformation of the Greek energy sector and its impact on the district of Kozani in the region of Western Macedonia. Focused on coal-based electricity production as well as on mega and petty solar ventures, Vetta’s article evidences the unequal distribution of energy-transition costs. The liberalization of the previously state-controlled monopoly and the reorganization of a sector in line with the imperatives of privatization and austerity are shown to heighten previously existing social and ethnic inequalities. Vetta’s research reveals how conflicts around ecological degradation mobilize competing claims to land and labor, and how state-backed capital relies on the production of cheapness in the confrontation between different orders of worth.

The final article in this special issue takes a geographical leap that reveals the asynchronous nature of structurally similar attempts to foster GDP growth while performing environmental redress. Charlotte Bruckermann’s analysis of individual carbon accounting schemes through digital apps provides insights into the contradictions traversing the Chinese attempt to create the world’s largest unified carbon market. Her analysis of innovative designs for carbon exchange discloses the ways that flows in carbon debts and credits cheapen and lay waste to landscapes, both spatially and temporally. The article reveals the way in which the digital transformation of everyday life is geared towards solidifying a capitalist futurity that silences the contradiction of green consumption feeding green consumption, while fueling fantasies of technological redemption.

Themes and Directions: Value, State, Technology

To close this introductory piece, we will point at some of the common themes that traverse these articles, which also constitute directions for future research and action. We are structuring them through three keywords: value, state and technology.

When we speak of the production of capitalist landscapes, we refer to the reorganization of nature and labor oriented to create relatively stable spatial configurations allowing for the reproduction of accumulation, wherever possible on an expanded scale. In this process value plays a key role, understood not as an intrinsic quality of commodities but as a “relational aspect of a structure of interdependent productive activities” (Turner 2008, 46).⁶ Indeed, to speak of capitalism as an environment-making force is to speak of subjecting nature to the law of value, and the papers in this collection show that this law entails the definition of certain peoples, practices, environments and substances as valuable, and the concurrent devaluation of others. Thus, if the production of capitalist landscapes is a key means of organizing and making mutually consistent the social division of nature and the social division of labor, value indicates the operational logic of the process – that is to say, the forms of allocation of social labor and nature – as well as the matrix of domination on which it rests.

Yet, in addition to describing the workings of the law of value, our papers also unearth local value systems that assign worth and worthlessness to specific socioenvironmental relations and practices. These are cultural frameworks that largely speak through moral idioms and ultimately aim to assert what constitutes a life worth living. They guide the practices and establish the networks of relationships that constitute the daily struggle to make a living, while also helping to construct the horizons of meaning that underpin the longer-term strategies oriented to the reproduction of livelihoods. These worth-assigning frameworks may strive for autonomy from the capitalist law of value, but they are never independent from it, for they work within a terrain defined by it.

Capitalist valuation establishes a hierarchical ordering that is crucial for legitimizing the exclusionary and exploitative processes that fuel accumulation. Whether this ordering is embraced or contested (i.e. whether local frameworks line up with the law of value) is never predetermined, for it is the outcome of dynamic local sociohistorical configurations. In this special issue, Bruckermann (2022) and Vetta (2022) show how Chinese consumers and Greek miners tend to adopt notions of worth and deservingness that are in synch with capital’s logic, but also reveal the resources that are mobilized to secure such alignments. In contrast, the cases described by Buier, Franquesa and Pusceddu show a rather different picture, one in which local grassroots movements are able to assert, albeit with varying degrees of success, their own notions of natural wealth and moral worth, thus reproducing “resistant subjectivities” (Smith 2016b) or even foreshadowing the emergence of new historical subjects (Pusceddu, 2022). But these same cases reveal the importance of a historical view from below: what separates claims to social autonomy from a defense of property or a constrained environmental consciousness from a developmentalist one is how the notions of worth and wealth asserted are situated in broader histories of dispossession.

Through unveiling these broader histories of dispossession the contributors to this issue show the continued prominence of the state in securing the reproduction of capitalist production at large, and document the multiple ways in which state intervention was and remains indispensable to the production of green capitalist landscapes. In some cases, it signals the places of profitable investment and absorbs the costs of the private industry; in others, it takes a protagonist role in expanding the frontier of accumulation, either by developing new industrial or financial endeavors or by leading processes of green grabbing. More generally, in all our cases we observe how the state assumes a coordinating role, striving to create the appropriate environment for capital to deploy its law of value while defusing contestation.

While pointing at the involvement of the state in the production of capitalist landscapes is little more than a truism, we believe that it is important to examine this involvement carefully. In this respect, our articles suggest that one of the most important functions of the state in this process is that of acting as guarantor and coordinator of the law of value. This follows an insight from Henri Lefebvre (1977 ), who argues that the key role of the state in capitalist reproduction is harmonizing the different abstractions of capital by establishing "the equivalence of the various chains of equivalences” (1977, 58, authors' translation). Capitalism is premised on making equivalent that which is incommensurable. This is a central point in Marx, who argued that the main drama for workers is not that they are getting paid less than what they work, but that they exchange living, productive labor for dead labor. This exchange of non-equivalents contributes to the separation of the workers from the means of production, a process that is the constitutive premise of the workers’ poverty, subordination and alienation. It is also thus that abstract labor is made possible. In reorganizing nature, capital operates similarly. It strives to produce a natural environment that is both homogenized and fragmented, a process that Jason Moore (2015) calls the production of abstract nature. Fragmented to the extent that capital segregates nature into valuable (but cheap) resources and non-valuable leftovers; homogenized because realizing the value of that which was deemed valuable requires its exchangeability.

The state is the chief coordinator of this exchangeability. Indeed, it is the state that creates the space of flows that allows for these exchanges, creating equivalences between, say, a certain wind regime in a corner of the Mediterranean and the allocation of production subsidies for renewables, or between the “good deeds” of the model Chinese citizen and the planting of trees. Furthermore, through its legal force, the state links together these equivalences, for example by enforcing the expropriation of land for the construction of a wind farm (Franquesa 2022) or by classifying the destruction of property as an act of terrorism (Buier 2022). Through it, it sanctions the law of value, which dictates that that land and the practices associated with it are valueless while the wind above it is valuable; or that the wrecking of machinery is commensurate with the destruction of human lives. By harmonizing and enforcing this sort of equivalences, the state makes concrete the abstractions of the law of value, and turns a system of accumulation into a broader system of domination.

Finally, this broader system of domination through which green transitions are enforced rehearses a glaring promise: capital’s Promethean capacity to solve the environmental crisis while reproducing accumulation. Technology plays a key role in this process, and this is reflected in our articles, each one of which revolves around a prodigious technological innovation that is to make capitalism cleaner and better, be it a mobile phone app, solar panels, or high-speed rail.

The fallacy of this proposition has been amply denounced (Hornborg 2011 ; Dunlap and Jakobsen 2020). Its class character, on the other hand, is as old as capitalism, as the words of Andrew Ure, written in 1835, make evident: “When capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility” (quoted in Caffentzis 2013, 153). But to teach and to learn are not the same. Between the deployment of technology as a capital-led project for containing the environmental contradictions of the present and the successful establishment of hegemony stands labor as a living, potentially counter-hegemonic force. As the cases discussed here amply demonstrate, dreams of immaterial transitions are decidedly illusory: technological fixes are processes of intensive and extensive transformations of landscapes. But technological modernization, as an iteration of green developmentalism, is also a paradigmatic instantiation of the unity of material and ideological processes. The attempt to offset environmental contradictions without altering social relations of production and reproduction depends on securing forms of collective commitment to technological progress. The “overweighting of tools, weapons, physical apparatus and machines” (Mumford 1967, 5) is a historical (albeit resilient) process that requires the consolidation of certain registers of meaning and the exclusion of others. High-speed rail, windmills or mobile apps are not readily available as tools and symbols of a socially neutral green transition, they can only be made to appear as such through the outcome of political, culturally embedded struggles.

Analyzed in its material and ideological dimensions, the strength of the technological impetus of green capitalism is revealed as couched “in the context of a struggle over a whole way of being and living” (Harvey 1976, 277). The outcome of this struggle, the five contributors to this special issue remind us, is not predetermined. Whether the artifacts of the low-carbon transition “return to dominate day life” (Harvey 1976, 279) or they are confronted by forces seeking to liberate the production of use value from exchange value will definitely determine the outcome of future socioenvironmental struggles. Historical ethnography, we collectively argue, is an instrument for revealing the conditions of possibility for the latter.

Acknowledgments

The editors of this special issue would like to express their deep gratitude to Chris Hann for his support of the workshop that brought the contributors together. The initial event was made possible by practical and emotional encouragement from Don Kalb. Among the many invisible forces of reproduction that made our initial meeting possible at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology we are deeply indebted to Anke Meyer, Bettina Mann, Stefan Schwendtner and Carlo Diesterbeck.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition to the 5 papers in this Special Issue, the workshop included a sixth paper by Sergiu Novac, which dealt with nuclear decommissioning in Germany. For a summary of the workshop, see https://www.eth.mpg.de/5088166/news_2019_04_01_01

2 It is also often called anthropological political economy (Roseberry 1988).

3 A necessarily incomplete list of these classic works must include Nash (1979), Meillassoux ([1977] 1981), Wolf (1982), Mintz (1986), Godelier ([1984] 1986) and Roseberry (1989). Some of the key monographs written in the last two decades or so within this tradition include Kasmir (1996), Kalb (1997), Narotzky and Smith (2006), Binford (2013), Sider (2014), Gill (2016) and Campbell (2018), to name just a few.

4 For a brief, insightful overview of feminist debates on reproduction, see Mezzadri (2019); for a recent illustration of the affinities between historical materialist anthropology and feminist reproduction theory see Barca (2020).

5 This basically corresponds to James O’Connor’s second contradiction of capitalism (O’Connor 1998).

6 Our discussion on value and worth is informed by a strand of mostly anthropological literature that has appeared in the last two decades, including works such as De Angelis (2007), Turner (2008), Graeber (2011), Narotzky and Besnier (2014), Collins (2016), Franquesa (2019) and Hann and Kalb (2020).