Preliminary remark:
Unfortunately, Achim Szepanski was unable to attend the Non-Congress in person. So, to the best of our knowledge and belief, we have used quotes from his writings to engage him in conversation with the text “Zeit der Ökologie” (Time of Ecology). This publication appears here after his death. We remember him fondly.
Conversation by quotation:
Achim Szepanski takes a critical stance towards the thesis of the new ecological accumulation regime. He does not ascribe the necessary potency to green technologies as modernisation innovations, as the crisis situation is too serious for there to be a reconfiguration immanent to capitalism.
He writes in this regard:
„The stimulus versus austerity debate haunting all media, from left to right, from neoclassicism to post-Keynesianism, undauntedly attests to the potency of states to still be able to solve crises, only this has long since been exhausted. Profit rates in industry are stagnating, while the ecstatic growth of speculative capital is constantly widening the gap between orbitally circulating money capital and the surplus value created through the exploitation of labour.“
„In contrast to medicine, in which the crisis is supposed to trigger the cure and thus disappear, the current polycrisis apparently does not pass, rather it seems to be delirious in permanence, without any way out, without any alternative like capitalism itself. For Marxists, this has the macroeconomic implication that crises in today’s capitalism have at least lost their purifying function; capital needs them to conceal its chronic impotence. What changes, therefore, is the epistemic function of the crisis,“ which he describes as a polycrisis with intertwining parts.
The rationality of the modellable, the knowable and the predictable would collapse in the polycrisis. For this reason, a deliberate leap with green technology is not feasible from this perspective: in view of the polycrisis, capitalism cannot be „cured“ by green growth, by an ecological accumulation regime.
The polycrisis is also characterised by the following: „In times of catastrophe, reality and fiction intermingle. The global information war is currently in full swing in view of the war in Ukraine and Gaza. Different versions of reality are clashing more and more openly. There is no longer just one reality, as there was in the old world. That is exactly what Baudrillard means by hyperreality.“ This produces the „homo catastrophicus“. There is certainly a commonality here of „Time of Ecology“ with Szepanski, that the „homo catastrophicus“ can be described as the bearer of an ecological accumulation regime, too.
Achim Szepanski’s basic observation is: „World capitalism seems to have entered a paradoxical, accelerating and at the same time exhausting panic mode, in which the ecstasy of the over as over-accumulation and over-speculation meets the destructive activities of capital, especially with regard to the capitalisation of nature and the creation of a global surplus population.“ The over would also be effective in the non-linear development of over-pollution, as demonstrated by the history of capitalism: each new ecological regime has not only produced more waste, but also qualitatively new and more toxic forms of waste.
Instead of being able to discern a green modernisation project of capitalism on the horizon, from Szepanski’s perspective it is above all (over)speculation that is the foundation of further development. He writes:
„With the ecstasy of speculative capital, Fordist factory production disappears in the global North to continue to exist in all sorts of proliferations in the global South. Meanwhile, financial capital is heralding the victory of a weightless digital economy, which on the one hand has largely freed itself from the „real economy“ and has left itself open to auto-referential speculation, and on the other must constantly control the real economy on the financial markets, so that it is impossible to speak of an absolute detachment of financial capital from industrial capital. However, it is not the real economy that drives the financial economy but, conversely, it is the financial economy that structures the real economy. It must always be borne in mind that the „value“ of a financial investment is not subordinate to the capitalist production process, but precedes it. It does not exist because surplus value has been produced, but because financial capital is confident that the realisation of returns will take place in the future. […]
Derivatives are at the centre of speculation today, and they are to some extent decoupled from the price of the underlying asset, such as oil, although not completely decoupled. Today, far more derivatives and futures contracts are bought and sold than barrels of oil are traded.“ …and even more than solar panels and e-cars are traded.
Achim Szepanski’s analysis raises the question for the position of the ecological accumulation regime: Can we even expect a new accumulation regime to develop within crisis-ridden capitalism – does declining neoliberalism still have the necessary strength to develop a new form of capitalist stabilisation under the paradigm of ecology? Or is everything heading towards an implosion in which there is no after?