REVISITED Capitalism, Higher Education and Ecological Crisis
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REPRODUCTION REVISITED Capitalism, Higher Education and Ecological Crisis TONI RUUSKA REPRODUCTION REVISITED Published by MayflyBooks. Available in paperback and free online at www.mayflybooks.org in 2019. © Toni Ruuska 2019 Cover photo and design by Risto Musta ISBN: 978-1-906948-42-9 (Print) 978-1-906948-43-6 (PDF) 978-1-906948-44-3 (ebook) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. REPRODUCTION REVISITED Capitalism, Higher Education and Ecological Crisis TONI RUUSKA may f l y www.mayflybooks.org iv CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………1 2. MARX AND MARXISM…………………………………14 Philosophy, ecology, education 3. CAPITALISM AND FINITE PLANET………………… 56 The Absolute Contradiction 4. REPRODUCTION OF CAPITALISM…………………115 5. CAPITALISM, HIGHER EDUCATION………………156 AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 6. HIGHER EDUCATION AS A FACTORY……………180 OF COMPETITIVENESS AND INNOVATIONS The Finnish Context 7. REPRODUCTION REVISITED…………………………240 Conclusions 8. REFERENCES……………………………………………256 v vi 1 INTRODUCTION t is warmer now. The climate is changing. Somewhere rains Iare heavier, somewhere they are non-existent. Storms are more intense. The weather is unstable. Recurring heat waves and floods torment the livelihoods of humans and other earthly beings. Ice melts, and ocean levels are on the rise, as are ocean temperatures. Worse still, climate change is only one part of the ongoing ecological crisis (see e.g. Steffen et al., 2015), although perhaps the most critical part of it together with biodiversity loss. This crisis, for one, is human-induced. With all its inventions, soaring population and societal arrangements, the human race has become a force of nature. However, the Anthropocene epoch (Crutzen, 2002; Crutzen and Steffen, 2003) is not driven forward by humanity as a whole, but rather a relatively small group of wealthy organisations and individuals, as more and more people, cultures and non-human organisms are pushed into the ever- expanding capitalist socio-economic structure as particles of modern industrial civilisation. When writing this book, the most important question for me has been: why is the destruction of the natural world happening? To state the obvious, there are many answers to this question, but the most apparent one is that some parts of the human species 1 REPRODUCTION REVISITED – mostly from the Northern and Western hemispheres – exploit natural resources and destroy non-human life at an unprecedented and unsustainable rate due to various ‘economic’ reasons. However, within the dominant Western culture, we do not perceive that we destroy life, but rather that our doings are ‘economic growth’, ‘progress’ and ‘development’. It is not odd that the general public in the affluent North generally frowns upon environmentalists. For instance, I remember my elders calling the Finnish environmentalists ‘hemmetin (damned) koijärveläiset!’ denoting a particular event, people and lake (Koijärvi) where different streams of Finnish environmental movement were united in 1979. One of the reasons why environmentalists are looked down upon, or even hated and held in disdain is, I feel, because the reproduction of capitalist socio-economic structure – or the ‘engine’ of industrial civilisation – demands expansive exploitation of natural habitats and resources. Where environmentalists are committed to conservation and protection of natural habitats, the reproduction of capitalism demands the opposite; that is, total exploitation. This claim is for obvious reasons vehemently denied by anyone from the establishment, which argues with more or less one voice that the despotic rule of capital benefits everyone and everything, including ecosystems and the non-human habitants of this planet. In fact, we are rather told that without economic growth, we would not be able to afford to protect the environment in the first place (but make no mistake, this reasoning is analogous to the idea that the only way to save one’s life is to commit suicide). The capitalist socio-economic structure is not only destructive ecologically and naturally, it is also a structure of privilege and social hierarchies – as with any other human civilisation thus far (see Wallerstein, 2003). Through the ages, the majority of ‘civilised’ human beings have worked hard and somewhat purposelessly for 2 INTRODUCTION the benefit of the ruling elites (Eagleton, 2012, 84). Our time is no different. ‘We are the 99%!’ is a contemporary slogan, but it could easily have been the slogan for any other time. Nonetheless, I do believe that our time on this planet is unusual. As a prominent Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright (1995) wrote some twenty years ago: an observer interested in understanding our time could not fail to notice that people increasingly feel they are living in ’the end of times’. This phenomenon, von Wright (ibid) remarks, refers to an instinctive feeling that a particular course of development – which we have been taking for granted – has come to its end and, at the same time, we are approaching a new era beyond our assessment. Concerning what von Wright might have referred to as the end of times, it has become clear that humanity’s exploitation of natural resources now exceeds earth’s sustainable resource-carrying capacity (Meadows et al., 2002; Jackson, 2009; WWF, 2014). On the one hand, many non-renewable natural resources are at risk of running out, while renewable resources are being consumed at a faster rate than they can be renewed (Lorek and Spangenberg, 2014). On the other hand, some non-renewable resources (such as oil and natural gas) are not running out fast enough, for example, from the perspective of catastrophic climate change (Glade and Ekins, 2015). Why then do humans, especially in the affluent North (see e.g. Ulvila and Wilén, 2017), over-exploit natural resources? When seeking an answer to this question, could one, for example, claim that the ecological crisis is due to an anthropocentric thinking, based on which humans perceive themselves as superior beings having the right to subordinate other living creatures to human will, or due to other dominant cultural beliefs? (see e.g. Næss, 1989; Bowers, 1993; Heikkurinen et al., 2016). One could also cast the blame of the ecological destruction on the ‘sense of progress’ that characterises Western thinking (see e.g. Bowers, 1993; Hamilton 3 REPRODUCTION REVISITED et al., 2015), based on which social and environmental problems, especially in the modern era, can be – or so it is thought – alleviated by means of technological solutions (see also Heikkurinen, 2016). Another way to answer this question, or rather point the finger, could also be the so-called neoliberal politics and ideology (see e.g. Harvey, 2005; Jones, 2013) that diverts the responsibility of actions, as well as the responsibility of poverty reduction and mitigation of climate change, to an ambiguous ‘market’ character.1 The approach to environmental degradation in this book is explicitly material, because that is what environmental degradation actually is – a material incidence. Just as Soper (1995, 249) has stated, it has not been the discourse of ‘global warming’ that has produced the conditions about which the discourse is concerned (see also Malm, 2018). Rather than discourses or social constructions, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels stressed that ecological problems originate from the interaction between humans, society and their natural environments. That is to say, human-caused ecological problems are the outcome of material production processes between humans and their natural environments (Commoner, 1992). 1 Although it seems evident to me that capitalism, with its compulsion for growth and expansion, constitutes the hard core of the current ecological crisis (see Foster, 2009), it also seems apparent that humanity’s problems concerning environmental degradation extend far beyond capitalism and even industrial civilisation (see e.g. Bowers, 1993; Jensen, 2006; Jensen and McBay, 2009). As Bowers (1993, 19) notes, ‘there is no single cause for any aspect of the ecological crisis, but there are complex and interconnected cultural patterns, beliefs, and values that collectively help to introduce perturbations into ecosystems, causing them to go into decline.’ Furthermore, environmental degradation is not only a modern problem, but has also been a problem of the past, as numerous past civilisations have disappeared because of environmental degradation and the exploitation of their habitats (see e.g. Diamond, 2005, Tainter, 2015). Thus, a more profound and philosophical question is whether humans are bound to destroy their habitats, or is this perhaps only a matter linked to human civilisations (Jensen, 2006) or, for example, anthropocentric thinking and misplaced cultural beliefs (Næss, 1989; Bowers, 1993). Nevertheless, these essential questions go beyond the scope of this book. 4 INTRODUCTION Despite capitalism’s relatively long roots (see e.g. Wood, 2002; Moore, 2007; 2015; Arrighi, 2010) most of its development towards its current industrial form has happened within the past two centuries. During the same period of time, in the era of the Anthropocene (see Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002), human-caused changes and the degradation of the ecosystem have increased exponentially. Somewhat surprisingly it has been recognised only very recently that industrial