Fossil Capital (2016)
Andreas Malm (1977)
488 pages
The term
Anthropocene first appeared in the late twentieth-century, coined to express the idea that the world has entered a new geological epoch, one characterized by significant human impact on the Earth. Although formally rejected by the scientific standards committee responsible for the official Geologic Time Scale, it remains a powerful descriptor of the widespread effects of human activity on the environment – in particular, the impacts associated with greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
As felicitous as the word may be for environmentalists, however, author Andreas Malm opens his book
Fossil Capital challenging its appropriateness. His disagreement centers on the implication of the prefix
Anthro-: that the fundamental nature of human development shoulders the blame for the rising use of fossil fuels over the past two centuries to the point of a potentially existential crisis for civilization as we know it – the implied indictment of humankind as a whole. Instead, he argues that while
unlikely to gather anything like a consensus behind it, a more scientifically accurate designation … would be ‘the Capitalocene.’ This is the geology not of mankind, but of capital accumulation. (391)
In support of his contention, Malm, a professor of Human Ecology, explores
The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, as stated in his book’s subtitle. Focusing on the cotton industry in early 19th century England – the booming manufacturing sector at the birth of the Industrial Revolution – he details how and why factories employing skilled labor and clean waterpower in the early 1800’s had, by the middle of that century, transitioned to automation and carbon-intensive steam power. Through an extensive analysis of that history, he builds the case for
capital accumulation as the main driver behind these transitions.
Malm opens by noting that the widespread belief that humankind inexorably expands its consumption of resources rests largely on theories first put forth by economists David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus in the late 1700’s. The pair argued that human societies naturally grow to the point that resources become scarce, and that the subsequent threat of poverty then motivates the development and adoption of technical solutions out of the impasse. In this line of thinking, then:
Coal resolved a crisis of overpopulation. Like all innovations that composed the Industrial Revolution, the exploitation of fossil fuels was the outcome of a ‘valiant struggle of a society with its back to the ecological wall’, and ‘response to a particular resource shortage’, a decision ‘made ‘under duress’ (23)
It turns out, however, that the facts simply don’t support this characterization. By carefully and thoroughly examining data and original writings regarding the growth and evolution of the cotton industry over the first half of the 1800’s, Malm demonstrates the lack of evidence for the traditional narrative, and then lays out the extensive evidence for the actual motivations behind the transition to automation and the use of steam power.
In the late 1700’s, he notes, the key steps in fabric production – spinning, turning cotton into yarn, and weaving, turning yarn into fabric – were done by machines requiring highly skilled workers, spinners and weavers, and that the energy for these factories came from water mills. With the English selling fabric globally, “profits of 50%” (59) were realized, and capital rushed in, leading to a dramatic expansion in the number and size of factories and so of production, with little change to the manufacturing process.
Then, in 1825, came the “the greatest financial meltdown of the nineteenth century.” So deep was the subsequent “panic,” that “when five years had passed without improvement, [a business paper] concluded that the glorious era of manufacture and commerce was approaching a complete end.” Overproduction led to falling prices, and profits fell “to an average of 5% or lower in the decade after the panic.” (58-59)
Business owners attempted to improve their profit position by, not surprisingly, lowering wages. As workers saw their pay drop below subsistence levels, strikes followed. These work stoppages were often led by the spinners, Malm notes: since spinning machines required complex, manual manipulation, the spinner “remained indispensable, [and so able to] bring mills to a full stop.” (64) Owners, seeking a way out from under the threat of such strikes, approached “the genius of a workshop for machine manufacturing [and asked him] to invent a self-acting mule” (65) – a spinning machine that could do the complex manipulations required on its own. By 1830, the first such machines were in use, and owners rushed to integrate them into their businesses. The craftsmen previously employed were replaced by minders, low-skilled workers who only needed to monitor and occasionally adjust these automated machines.
Close on the heels of this transition, the other major step in fabric production, weaving, succumbed to automation, as the power loom was invented and quickly propagated throughout the industry. The specifics driving the transition were different, as Malm describes, but the motivation was the same: owners desired to establish a more powerful position over weavers. The result, again, was a shift to automated equipment that required less-skilled, lower paid workers.
Through these examples from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Malm demonstrates the foundation of his thesis: that the evidence simply does not support the conclusion that transitions to using new technologies necessarily occur as a result of a crisis of population growth or of resource scarcity. The focus of business owners on labor costs was, in fact, never a secret; Malm quotes a cotton mill manager of the time as saying:
Many of the recent improvements in machinery have been accelerated in their introduction nearly as much by the vexatious conduct of the work people … as by the wish to bring goods to market at a cheaper price. (75)
Another manager in the 1830’s wrote that
the machines never get drunk; their hands never shook from excess [work]; they were never absent from work; they did not strike for wages; they were unfailing in their accuracy and regularity. (198)
Thus, then as now, “the logic of capitalist commodity production – the hunt for profit, the burden of fixed capital, the struggle for survival in ultra-competitive markets” (188) drove the shift to automation.
Of course, this fundamental dynamic of capitalism – owners reducing wages to increase profits, workers pushing back in frustration, and owners finally finding it more profitable to replace workers with automation – remains a familiar story two centuries later. Increasing automation, in fact, puts the lie to politicians who argue that they can create jobs in the US by getting businesses to bring factories back from overseas; as economist Martin Wolf points out in his trenchant and thought-provoking book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (my review linked to at right):
Even if some industrial production were to be brought home [to Western, high income countries], at great cost, via protection against imports [such as by tariffs], there would then be ongoing – and probably accelerating – use of robots. (121, Wolf)
With the true reasons behind the introduction of automation detailed, Malm takes up the principal focus of his book: identifying the drivers for the shift to steam from existing sources of power such as water. He again provides extensive evidence and references that the traditional reasons given by historians for this shift – pressures to expand production to meet growing populations or overcome resource constraints – don’t stand up to historical scrutiny: the problem in the bust years of the 1820’s was over-production, not a demand explosion or limited sources of waterpower.
He notes that the steam engine had been in use since its invention in the late 1700’s, but only to a limited extent because of the higher costs of coal relative to freely available sources of water. Nonetheless, in the wake of the crisis of the 1820’s and despite plenty of streams and rivers remaining in England to be exploited, business owners shifted to steam, as they did to automation. Through an in-depth exploration of this transition to steam – a precursor to its adoption elsewhere as the industrial revolution spread across the globe – Malm demonstrates the driving force as being, again, factory owners’ desire for greater control over their workforce in order to increase profits – not an inevitable shift to a newer technology. (He points out that it is a false argument to look forward to a century later, when water resources may have eventually been exhausted; businesses did not make the transition anticipating a need generations in their future.)
Steam power allowed owners to move their factories from the typically sparsely populated areas near streams, to city centers. This, along with automation requiring less skilled labor, provided them a larger pool of workers, making it easy to replace those causing unrest or striking. He quotes owners of one factory in 1834 as stating that “the threat of discharge we conceive as one of the most effectual means of securing proper obedience and due subordination amongst all the hands employed by us.” (153) Malm also hints at perhaps the origin of the now commonplace two weeks’ notice contracts for non-union employees:
Inside Lancastrian cotton towns, the masters made it a habit to display the rule of two weeks’ notice for all the hands to see – an impossible luxury in [rural, water mill driven factory locations] where the masters strove for long-term contracts. (153)
In general, business owners recognized that:
only a shadow of potential substitutes will keep a worker aware that she is fortunate to have her job. The threat of dismissal is ‘perhaps the most effective means yet discovered to impose labour discipline in class-divided societies.’ … a large, dense, concentrated supply [of workers] allows for ‘flexible labour turnover policies’, whereas a small, thin, spatially dispersed labour market forces firms to treat their employees as precious minerals. (299)
Over several chapters, Malm also examines the environmental and social impacts of coal powered factories on cities, including describing the failed attempts by groups of workers to push back on the transition to steam power. In so doing, he corrects the popular image of Luddites as anti-technology: they indeed sought to stop the shift to the new, automated equipment – but with the intent of saving their jobs, and so livelihood, not out of an inherent hatred of new technology. Yet another self-serving myth in the long history of business owners’ campaigns to create public beliefs that rationalize accepting and ignoring the capitalist system’s damaging externalities, as opposed to acknowledging, confronting and addressing them.
Malm then shifts his discussion to the present, in a chapter titled China as Chimney of the World: Capital Fossil Today, in which he highlights China as a significant example of how fossil fuel capitalism continues to operate today as it began to some two centuries ago, except now globally. Companies use the mobility that fossil fuels provide to enable global exploitation of the cheapest, most compliant labor, with the consequence of continued growth in Green House Gas emissions.
He begins by highlighting the common narrative of the growth in Chinese coal consumption as a destructive choice they have made and are imposing on the world – Chinese CO2 emissions. Examining the data, he reveals a much more complicit role for the West, and in particular the capitalist economic system, for these emissions.
A figure in the book shows China’s coal consumption as flat from 1995 to 2000, but then undergoing a roughly 100% increase from 2000 to 2007, after China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade organization “dismantled … barriers to investment.” (331) And yet, despite nearly 20% population increase over that period, residential energy use stayed flat, while industry accounted for 90% of coal use in 2002. Thus, industrial growth led to the dramatic increase in coal consumption, and so CO2 emissions.
But, he notes, 50% of the Chinese CO2 emissions in the period 2002 to 2008 were due to exported products, and 63% of exports came from foreign affiliates who relocated to China, with the US the leading country of origin for such exported factories. Thus, Western companies, in search of increasing profits, have sought out lower wages and a stable (non-union) workforce in China for goods produced for the West and, in so doing, have played an outsized role in motivating China to quickly expand its energy infrastructure. This has meant China building relatively easily installed and locally supplied coal power plants; not surprisingly, he notes, on a per unit production basis China emits more CO2 than Western countries. Thus, for a significant portion of China’s growth in CO2 emissions, the blame falls on Western business owners pursuing larger profits for goods sold to Western buyers.
Based, then, on an analysis of data and behavior from the earliest days of the industrial revolution to the present-day, Malm argues that “fossil capital … constitutes the main propulsive force of the fossil economy.” (355) Fossil fuels have provided capitalists with power, both in the sense of motive force for their machines and economic authority over their workers. From this, then, Malm’s contention that Capitalocene stands as a better descriptor of our time than Anthropocene:
Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation of the fossil economy; at no moment did the species vote for it either with feet or ballots, or march in mechanical unison, or exercise any sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the earth system. … Steam won because it augmented the power of some over others. … The succession of fossil-fuelled technologies following steam – electricity, the internal combustion engine, the petroleum complex: cars, tankers, refineries, petrochemicals, aviation… – have all been introduced through investment decisions, sometimes with crucial input from certain governments but rarely through democratic deliberation. The privilege of instigating new cycles of burning appears prima facie to have stayed with the class in charge of commodity production. (267-8)
Turning, toward the end of the book, to the challenges of attempting to turn away from fossil fuels to reduce Green House Gas emissions, Malm points out a fundamental complexity:
It would be foolhardy … to trust in demand and supply as the mechanisms of the transition. If solar and wind were to become radically cheaper than fossil fuels, demand for the latter might fall – only to induce a corresponding fall in their prices, reviving demand and reestablishing an equilibrium of profligacy. (382)
Given the inherent nature of market forces, then, only taking fossil fuels off the table as an energy option, will move the needle in terms of emissions reductions.
Malm’s book provides a deeply engaging and highly readable account of the history of the rise of fossil fuel use. His text does, admittedly, retain a bit of the feel of its origins as his Ph.D. thesis, in particular in its approach to referencing other works. As one example: Malm will provide an author and their background, and then some hundred or more pages later reference the author only by last name; a curious reader must perform a multi-step search through the index to track down the full name. A second, if related issue, is the unfortunate lack of a bibliography; if a footnote references, for example, “Hunter, Waterpower, 506-507,” and a reader wishes to know the full author’s name and the title of their book, it becomes a painful search through the footnotes to find the initial, complete reference, often several chapters earlier.
More fundamentally, one could push back on Malm’s analysis and conclusions regarding the role of capitalists – versus human society as a whole – in the expansion of fossil fuel use over the past two centuries by observing that capitalists are humans too, so is it a distinction without a difference? The point he makes, however, is that we (present-day) society have become so profoundly taken-in by arguments of the inevitable nature of human technological development that we’ve come to believe that increasing fossil fuel use has been unavoidable. Through extensive referencing of historical data and documentation Malm lays out a convincing argument for revising this assumption, and so view the transition to fossil fuels as a decision, not an inevitability.
And, if we acknowledge that the choice to use fossil fuels was made by a relatively small number of capitalist business owners seeking increased profits by switching to a source of power that they could exploit to achieve a controlling power over their labor force, we can recognize it as a (now potentially catastrophic) decision that could deserve revisiting and changing. More broadly, and what I’m particularly drawn to with his book, is that it can encourage us to reconsider other assumptions we hold to be inescapable aspects of our economic system. And if we do, and we understand that they can be changed, even now, then perhaps we must not be consigned to the devastating experience of
[philosopher Walter] Benjamin’s angel of history [who] ‘sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet’ … [leaving] some swept away by the storm we call progress, others sailing to their fortunes. (393)
Other notes and information:
Ultimately, Malm’s arguments can encompass many other impacts associated with the Anthropocene as well, such as, say, pollution impacts or destruction of our natural environment.
Although not central to the thesis of his book, Malm also makes the striking observation that shifting through automation and steam power to a labor force concentrated in cities led to a gradual normalization of the shift from craftsmen to
minders:
when a multitude of workers live together in the same neighbourhoods, submission to factory discipline may appear as a calling, a normal way of life and expected future: the town is the place where the ethos of wage labour – so repulsive to the first recruits – takes root. (299)
Until I read the Walter Benjamin quote that I conclude at the end of the essay, I hadn’t realized the source of singer Laurie Anderson’s lyrics in her amazing song
The Dream Before.
Lyrics here.
Malm’s argument against what he sees as Malthus and Ricardo’s myth of humans having an inevitable tendency to shift to new technologies and exploit resources to exhaustion, and the pass this gives business owners within the capitalist system in driving such behavior, reminded me of historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. (My review linked to at right.) Oreskes and Conway conclude that:
By promoting a false dichotomy between laissez-faire capitalism and communist regimentation, market fundamentalists [have made] it difficult for Americans to have conversations about crucial issues, such as appropriate levels of taxation or the balance between federal and state authority, or even how to appraise the size of the federal government objectively. (118)
