The ecological accumulation regime

[Lecture notes]

Introduction

• The talk of green capitalism is omnipresent.

• Green capitalism refers to capitalism based on environmental protection (based on the idea of ecological modernization from the 1980s), which continues to enable economic growth and therefore does not come up against the „The Limits to growth“ imposed by the limits of natural resources. (It is a symbiosis of ecology and economy, if you like).

• The left-wing critique of this claims, on the one hand, to expose the fact that this is not possible and, on the other, that it is actually still fossil capitalism, which is, however, „painted green“, i.e. only supposedly ecological. For example, it is pointed out that the majority of energy worldwide is still generated from fossil fuels or that renewable energies are also dependent on the exploitation of raw materials and therefore environmental destruction.

• The last two points of criticism are correct, but I would say that these capitalist developments are therefore not „painted green“, but actually green in the sense of actually ecological. And I would also say that the aim is to transgress/extend the limits to growth that we are confronted with today, even if they appear to be entirely material limits to nature.

• We therefore speak of the ecological accumulation regime in contrast to green capitalism.

Stability in instability through a new accumulation regime

• With the help of the concept of the accumulation regime (which comes from regulation theory), we attempt to explain a new phase of stability in the midst of capitalism’s immanently crisis-ridden mode of production. The accumulation regime describes the growth periods of the development of a capitalist economy (with the interplay of transformation, norms of production and consumption as well as the organization of the economy and society. It is intended to ensure the satisfaction of people’s needs through a certain mode of production of goods. An example of this is the accumulation regime of Fordism (standardized products, full employment, high wage levels)). It always reacts to crises of valorization.

• The current signs of this can be seen in the drastic financialization of capital, with corresponding crises and a more aggressive search for sales markets, not least by warlike means (the fact that these phenomena have existed since the 1970s indicates that neoliberalism was unable to regulate the crisis of the 1970s in the long term)

• Material production, state rule and ideological forms of thought form a mode of regulation that stabilizes the accumulation regime. (This consists of state institutions, apparatuses, social networks, forms of mass consumption and lifestyle as well as other norms. The design of the regulatory mode is fundamentally open and subject to social power relations and cultural hegemony).

• We claim to be confronted with the ecological accumulation regime as a new one, just as the neoliberal regime replaced the Fordist one. Its logic is ecologization, just as it was intensification in Fordism and flexibilization in neoliberalism, and we are trying to describe its mode of regulation.

• We know that an accumulation regime can only ever be defined with certainty ex post, i.e. in its final phase. In a sense, therefore, our analysis is speculative when we try to analyze the changes we are currently experiencing. However, we believe that this is necessary, not least in order to take our experience of a momentary upheaval seriously and to know what form of domination we are increasingly dealing with. And therefore also what we need to fight against.

What do we mean when we talk about ecology?

• Today, we generally understand ecology to mean sustainability, i.e. protecting the environment or nature to preserve it and thus our livelihoods instead of destroying it. This is a shift in meaning that only came about with the environmental movements of the 1970s and the subsequent anchoring of environmental protection in national and international politics. Underneath this lies the meaning that underlies ecology as a science: Ecology as the study (science) of the reciprocal relationships of living beings (or living things) and their inanimate environment. This is always based on the idea of the dynamic balance of this interrelationship, which began to be systematized at the beginning of the 20th century with the help of the concept of the ecosystem. This dynamic equilibrium is established through self-regulation of the ecosystem (homeostasis).

• Ecology as a science emerged at the end of the 19th century and became a political paradigm at the latest with the institutionalization of environmental protection in politics (late 1970s/80s). This means that even if we equate it with sustainability in everyday usage, the original meaning always resonates.

• It seems essential to us to name this because it means that the idea of the dynamic balance of the interrelationship between living things and the environment as a form of organization of life, i.e. our life, has found its way into the prevailing politics.

• In the name of this idea of the ecological – so our thesis – we are confronted with the emergence of a new political and economic regime.

• Speeking of „green capitalism“ therefore falls short because it only focuses on economic changes, and talking of „green-painted fossil capitalism“ does so, too because it fails to see what is actually new, what profound changes we are facing.

The new accumulation regime is characterized by the fact that it reorganizes the production and consumption of material goods and stabilizes them in a cybernetic sense by reorganizing the reciprocal relationships between living beings and their inanimate environment. This is what is essentially new about it. The stabilization that it undertakes is thus one that fundamentally relates to the possibility of life by establishing a certain form of survival, which constitutes its totality. At the same time, it remains bound to the instability of the living. This is why the ecological regime of accumulation is characterized by stability in instability. The ecological totalitarianism inherent in it also leads to a dehumanization of human beings. We observe these three inherently contradictory principles at three different points:

First, we can see massive investments and subsidies in green technologies and energies leading to new forms of extractivism and land grabbing. This changes people’s relationships with each other, but also with territories and raw materials.

• In the USA, China, the EU and Germany, there are plans to invest hundreds of billions in the next ten years or so: Research and production of green technologies such as battery storage, solar modules, sustainable fuels and hydrogen. In addition, the conversion of heating systems or combustion engines to electric cars, for example, will be subsidized.

• European Green Deal [2019]: amounts to approx. 1 trillion euros of investment over ten years (with an annual budget of 160 billion; measures in energy, buildings, industry, mobility)

• Massive subsidies can also be observed in relation to digitalization and algorithmization:

• – The interesting thing about the German government’s Climate and Transformation Fund, for example, is that the subsidies for semiconductor factories in Germany are listed as a climate measure. In doing so, the German government itself identifies the link between digitalization and ecology. These efforts materialized in subsidies are also evident in the EU Chip Act (2023), which provides 43 billion euros of investment in European semiconductor production. (USA comparable package of measures in legislative form: CHIPS and Science Act of 2022)

• In Germany, the first chip plant is being built near Dresden from this year, which will produce chips in Germany from 2027

• The Europe-wide funding strategy (IPCEI project), which aims to secure strategic resources and technologies, has been in place since 2018. These are microelectronics, digital infrastructure for industry, hydrogen, the pharmaceutical industry and „European Battery Innovation“. The latter has led, for example, to a battery cell factory being built in Schleswig-Holstein. The largest industrial settlement there for decades. More are to follow in Germany. The aim is to create 800,000 jobs by 2025. (You can also see a new security strategy here which aims on less dependence of other states: „strategic autonomy“ in reference to resource access, technologies and production.)

• This is leading to a change in interest in raw materials:

• Rare earths are becoming much more important, as are metals such as lithium for batteries, etc.

• This is resulting in massive geopolitical changes, such as the war in Ukraine (both high gas and lithium deposits in eastern Ukraine, for example) or changing global dependency chains even without a state of war (for oil, Arab states, for renewables where lithium and rare earths are found or semiconductors are produced: China/Taiwan etc.).

• Ideologically, renewable energies and technologies promise a harmonious, infinite cycle; in fact, they open up new global territories for resource exploitation, sales markets and economic cycles to stabilize and expand value-added production. As a result, we are confronted with new forms of extractivism and land grabbing!

Secondly, digitalization and algorithms serve to organize, regulate and simply network these new energies and technologies and, by extension, people in a new form.

• AI programs, social media and platforms, or more generally and more precisely algorithms, are central to this as a second axis alongside the green technologies and energies of the new accumulation of capital. They also promise a qualitative leap in the automation of work processes, which is already reshaping the global labor regime and could lead to renewed increases in productivity and a corresponding distribution of wealth. However, extractivism and land grabbing in this area also affect the non-material aspects of human beings. Relationships, emotions and affects are measured, fragmented into information and transformed into value-shaped data and sold back to us as such.

• This is aptly described in the Conspirationist Manifesto as the colonization of the soul.

• In terms of biotechnologies, this can also occur via a fusion of body and machine, in that

• extractivism and the land-grabbing of the ecological accumulation regime are accessing the area of reproduction. Although what we call the care economy can only be automated, rationalized and even valorized to a limited extent, the new regime focuses precisely on those areas of our lives that have not yet been commodified, or have only been commodified to a limited extent, in order to overcome the limitations. Through robotization, biotechnologies, algorithmization and cybernetization of processes, profit increases are certainly conceivable. Especially if we think beyond the care economy and consider the reproduction of (survival) life as a whole, bio- and reproductive technologies, genetic research and brain-computer interface research offer unimagined opportunities to colonize the body and corpus; business and research reports and products already on the market from big pharma and start-ups speak volumes about this (Komlosy: Zeitenwende). This heralds the dehumanization of humans.

Thirdly

• all these changes are carried out in the name of ecology. In ideological terms, it therefore serves to disinhibit the capitalist mode of production by reflecting its limits and at the same time transgressing or expanding these limits. (disinhibition according to Jean-Baptiste Fressoz). Ecology therefore serves to legitimize the transgression of the limits of the world in order to expand the limits of capitalism. It thus serves to legitimize the transgression of what is currently socially possible and accepted towards a new totality and thus the creation of a new subjectivity, i.e. a change in us.

• „This serves to combat climate change“ serves as a killer argument for any opposition to this project, ecology as a legitimization of the creation of a reality without alternatives.

• Specifically, this happens through the invocation of the ecological crisis in the form of catastrophism, which creates the ability to integrate and legitimize the implementation of the ecological accumulation regime.

• – This is expressed politically in programmes such as the „Green New Deal“ or the „socio-ecological transformation“, which in turn are materialized in the packages of measures/subsidies already mentioned.

• When we speak of ecological totalitarianism, it is important to say that we mean a post-ideological form of totalitarianism (Recalcati, Soiland). On the one hand, this means that the project of the ecological accumulation regime is not bound to a fixed milieu, such as the one that sees itself as green-progressive. Both on a social and political level, as well as in terms of capital fractions, the sponsorship runs across political camps. On the other hand, this means that ecology is to a certain extent a technocratic idea in line with the contemporary diagnosis of post-ideology (by Recalcati, Soiland), namely reduced to the description of a mode of operation, i.e. a form, without any content. This makes it the perfect vehicle for a project of capitalist renewal that has no specific idea of life and the world, but merely attempts to implement a new form of organizing them. In a way that, in keeping with cybernetics, relies on self-regulation, i.e. self-control.

• In the previous panel, we already talked about new forms of subjectivation that could be part of this new accumulation regime. I will therefore not go into this in more detail here.

• We have also already talked about the state of exception, digitalization, etc., these are part of ecocracy (Riesel and Semprun) as the name for the political form of rule of the ecological accumulation regime. Catastrophism (change in security discourse etc.) is also part of this.

For us this means:

• To describe this new totality of the rule of ecology as a political paradigm is our attempt to assert a third position between the diagnoses of the times that either claim that we are facing the final crisis of capitalism or that historical fascism is returning in new clothes.

• Instead, we claim that the ecological accumulation regime will continue the existing catastrophe in a new quality. In other words, that we are dealing with a renewal of capitalism for an uncertain period of time.

• Accordingly, the ecological accumulation regime does not break with previous forms of exploitation. It does not create sustainability and regeneration in the sense of comprehensive recovery, but in the sense of repeated destruction. The ecological accumulation regime combines an extractive logic that organizes the access to and valorization of natural resources as well as the body and soul, and a regenerative logic that enables the reproduction of this access. These logics do not contradict each other, nor are they successive phases of development. Rather, we can speak of an extraction in the name of regeneration. Both logics are mutually dependent and are each an expression of objectification in the human-nature relationship.

• Furthermore, the ecological accumulation regime serves us to formulate a critique of a climate movement that only demands or proposes a „better“ green policy: serves the renewal of capitalism without even realizing it. In its critique of both fossil and green capitalism, it takes up the prevailing understanding of ecology and thus of nature, as well as catastrophist notions of climate change, and testifies to a high belief in science that serves the political implementation of this project/the ecological accumulation regime and that drives the accompanying ecological subjectivization.

• Instead, what is needed is the realization of the necessary complete withdrawal of ecological thinking, because it has always already been corrupted by domination. It implies a cybernetic form of control and, in any case, the modern bourgeois idea of nature as reified, which thus reproduces the subjugation of nature, which in turn is the basis for the destruction of our livelihoods.

• Every proposal for a better use of nature in the sense of a more ecological policy falls into this trap, which is why I consider it essential to remain with the „non“, the negation.

• To stop the destruction of the world and liberate ourselves, we do not need „more“ or „more consistent“ ecology, but a rediscovery of the world beyond objectification. Rediscovering the world means withdrawing from objectification and at the same time attacking all existing social relations that organize the relationships between living beings. In other words, it means launching an attack on the existing ecology.

• and thus also to understand the progressive-ecological milieu as an opponent that, in the heroic gesture of saving the world, snatches it from us and finally throws it, used up and vomited out, at our feet!