Sustaining Tourism, Sustaining Capitalism? The Tourism Industry's Role in Global Capitalist Expansion

Abstract

This article contends that international tourism may be one important means by which the capitalist world-economy seeks to sustain itself in the face of inherent contradictions that threaten its long-term survival. Marxist critics have long identified an inevitable tendency towards crises of overproduction (over-accumulation) within the capitalist system, provoked by what Marx termed the central contradiction between imperatives of production and consumption. Subsequent analysts have highlighted a variety of so-called ‘fixes’ by which overproduction crises can be forestalled through spatial and/or temporal displacement of excess accumulated capital. Building upon this analysis, I outline a number of such fixes intrinsic to the development of the international tourism industry. In addition, I suggest that ecotourism development in particular provides additional fixes for capitalism's so-called ‘second contradiction’ between the imperative of continual growth and finite natural resources. In sum, I propose that advocacy of global ‘sustainable tourism’ by a transnational capitalist class may play an important role in sustaining capitalism as well.

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• neo-liberalism
• conservation
• ecotourism
• sustainability
• Marxism