lundi 21 mars 2011
Sustainability (6)
¶ 17:14 
Based on : Erin Balser, Capital Accumulation, Sustainability and Hamilton, Ontario : How Technology and Capitalism can Misappropriate the Idea of Sustainability.
Known as « one response to the environmental crisis » (p.1), the term ‘sustainability’ is also defined as “inter- and intra- generational equity in the social, environmental, economic, moral and political spheres of society.”(p.1) Sustainability is an idea to describe the fact that we have to live in a way which provides our own needs but which can also provide the needs of future generations. The original concept aims to convey the idea that we have to organize this and to work on it together, in groups, but the statement shows that it has nowadays “largely fallen to the individual” (p.1).
Capitalism is the idea of producing goods in order to get money: not only an amount of money sufficient to pay back the costs of production, but big enough to add a surplus value and bring profit. Its main characteristic is that “capitalism is constantly expanding”, always “looking for new things to commodify.” (p.1) Erin Balser assumes that “Capitalism is not a simplistic linear system which subsumes singular items” (p.1) but it takes everything to commodify from the world around and consequently has a big impact on it. Capitalism is a “diverse web that is continuously expanding and trapping things.”(p.1) Its system does not work as a simple and logical development: it grows and evolves by crisis.
“In ‘Empire’, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri declare that ‘crisis indicate[s] a passage, which is the turning point in every systematic cycle of accumulation, from a first phase of material expansion (investment in production) to a second phase of financial expansion (including speculation)’ (238)” (p.1). The authors distinguish the ‘realization’ part and the ‘capitalization’ one. A good current example could be the Fairtrade market. Producing products in a ‘fair’ way is not a new concept: it has existed for ages in certain parts of the market. But when the second phase of capitalism’s crisis came, people decided to capitalize on it. Consumers were ready to spend more for fair causes, so Fairtrade products became a consumption tendency. This really happened in several stages because buying Fairtrade is a new idea for an old process of production, highlighted by current consumption.
To answer the sustainability question, Bio-Diesel is an example of an offered solution. Producing fuel by using vegetable and animal fat shows the possibility of providing today’s consumers’ needs in a clean way. The problem with Bio-Diesel is the actual cleanness of its process : deterioration of the social environment for the inhabitants of the Bio-Diesel’s production area, and its lack of use among consumers due to its expense. The two groups of people affected by these factors represent the poor communities, who are being further disadvantaged by those who capitalize on this ‘clean’ product.
Sustainability seems to have been created by capitalists, who saw in this concept a new thing to commodify. From their viewpoint, sustainability is perfectly compatible with capitalism because it represents a generator of profit. It is not the case anymore if we enlarge the concept to include social issues which seem to be the opposite to and incompatible with capitalism.
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