Questioning Natural & Community Capital -- Justin Podur & J.J. McMurtry
Channel: Creorder
Date: 2013-01-08

3rd Annual Forum on Capital as Power: "Capitalizing Power: The Qualities and Quantities of Accumulation"

September 28-30, 2012, York University, Toronto

3. Nature, Capital, and Commodification: Ecology and the Capital as Power Framework

Justin Podur, York University (jpodur@yorku.ca)

Environmental and ecological economics offer the critique that mainstream economics fails to understand that economic activity takes place in a natural envelope and within ecological constraints -- human societies are based on the appropriation of biomass and energy from nature. Approaches to addressing this gap have included the valuation of natural capital or ecosystem services, the generation of carbon and other commodity markets, and programs like the World Bank's debt exchange. How do these approaches look when a political economy framework is applied? What happens to assessments of the value of natural capital when capital is understood as a mode of power? This paper explores some of these questions.

4. Community Capital: The Pitfalls and Promise of Local Power

J.J. McMurtry, York University (jmcmurtr@yorku.ca)

The question of economic, social and cultural power is an urgent one in search of an answer for community economic activists. According to its adherents, the framework of Capital as Power 'offers a radical alternative to both liberal and Marxist political economies. In this framework, capital is viewed not as a productive economic entity, but as the central power institution of capitalist society at large, while capitalism as a whole is seen not as a mode of  production and consumption, but as a mode of power'. A key question for such a proposal therefore becomes 'How is capitalized power resisted and opposed, and can it be reformed or overthrown?' It is this question that this paper engages, examining nascent alternatives of the local, co-operative, and community economic movements from the perspective of a rigorous political economy theory that the Capital as Power framework suggests.

The reality of local, co-operative, and social economy activities however makes this 'community capital' movement resistant to internalizing political economy analysis, partially because this movement has internalized the liberal capitalist power framework, but also because of the legacy of Marxist practice and theory over the twentieth century. As a result, the promise of the local power movement as an alternative locus of power has been mired in theoretical lacuna ranging from individualist anarchism through social democratic nationalism to libertarian capitalism. This paper examines how these lacunae have been created and the pitfalls they present, as well as the promising potential that these movements represent as sites of resistance as well as laboratories for a less oppressive future social reality.

Conference page: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/341/