O’Connor and the ‘Second Contradiction'
The advocates of the ‘metabolic rift' approach tend to adhere closely to a debatable reading of Marx as unequivocally aligned with modern ecological thinking, but there are others who also draw on the legacy of Marxian historical materialism, but have a more nuanced and sometimes critical response to the writings of Marx and Engels themselves.
One such writer is the late Jim O'Connor (O'Connor 1998; Benton 1996). His notion of a ‘second contradiction' of capitalism shares key features with Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation (1944, 2001). That work was directed against the resurgent radical market-liberalism of von Mises and Hayek, and used both historical examples and theoretical argument to show why belief in a self-sustaining market economy was ‘utopian', in the sense of an impossible dream. Polanyi's core idea was that markets have limits which they cannot transcend, exemplified by ‘land', ‘labour' and ‘money'. Under capitalism these are treated as if they were commodities, but they do not behave like commodities. They are not produced and reproduced as commodities, do not conform to the laws of demand and supply and so on. In the case of land and labour, attempts at commodification lead to overexploitation and degradation which so affect people's lives that various sorts of resistance follow - these include revolts of farmers, workers and communities, as well as nature itself, in the form of environmental disruptions. This ‘countermovement' demands the restoration of social ascendancy over the market, and the re-embedding of the economy within social life and nature.This notion of a market economy, subjected to governmental regulation and subordinated to the needs of the wider society, constitutes one tradition of reformist socialism, and is even echoed in the 2021 BBC Reith Lectures delivered by former head of the UK's Bank of England, Mark Carney (2021).
More radical socialist traditions take this vision further to embrace the deeper integration of economic activity into society through one or another form of common or ‘stakeholder' property in land, resources and means of production (See, for example O'Neill 1993; Devine 2010). O'Connor develops the ecological dimension in Marx through his reading of Polanyi, making most use of the idea of nature and labour (power) as ‘fictitious commodities'. To greatly oversimplify, his account represents the antagonism between capital and labour as the ‘first contradiction' of capitalism, but the ecological disruptions of capitalism are the outcome of a ‘second contradiction': this is a contradiction, intrinsic to capitalism, between the forces and relations of the system, on the one hand, and the conditions of production, on the other. The conditions of production can be thought of as boundary conditions, delineating the physical and social space within which capitalist production is possible. These conditions are of three broad kinds. The first is the production and reproduction of the labour force, which takes place largely outside the sphere of the market in households of various kinds, and under conditions constantly under threat from the cheapening of wage labour, exploitation of domestic labour and degradation of the living environment. The second is the assemblage of socially provided conditions, such as modes of transport, communications, flood defences and other infrastructures. These may be provided by the private sector, but as necessary to the viability of markets, they cannot be left to the vagaries of the market. Third, are those conditions we now recognize as ecological - the land, in Polanyi's terms. Stability of the climate, the recycling of nutrients, water, the role of biodiversity in decomposition, photosynthesis, pollination and so on are all preconditions for industry and agriculture (and, indeed, for life itself).O'Connor shares with the theorists of metabolic rift the broad account of capitalism dominated by an abstract, expansionary logic that is indifferent to the complexity of concrete labour processes, and argues that this applies, also, to the conditions of production: they cannot figure substantively in the cost/benefit calculations of economic actors, and consequently are overridden and undermined by the operation of the market. There is, then, endemic to capitalism, a contradiction between the dynamic tendencies of the forces and relations of production, on the one hand, and the necessary conditions of production, on the other.
This is a second reason for thinking capitalism is a necessarily self-destroying system (the first being the industrial working class - the hoped-for ‘grave-diggers' of capitalism).It is arguable that O'Connor's framework is more fertile than that so far developed by the metabolic rift school of thought, as it includes an account of politics and the state in capitalist societies as the institutional framework through which policies to ameliorate the consequences of both socio-economic and ecological contradictions are implemented. Following Polanyi's emphasis on the ‘countermovement' to the extension of market forces, O'Connor also provides a framework for thinking about the role of social movements in hoped-for socio-ecological transformation. The long-term persistence and resilience of capitalist relations, despite the self-destructive tendencies of the system, are in this way accounted for, while at the same time there is an account of sources of social movement activism in civil society as having a potential, through coalitions, to achieve a more radical transformation.
The argument as presented here is, of course, abstract, and carries many unanswered questions. These questions have been and are being addressed through substantive research (the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism is a valuable resource for much of this work), and O'Connor's theoretical approach can provide a normatively grounded framework for a coherent research programme. The key norms are a commitment to human equality and to maintenance of liveable relations between humans and the rest of nature. Among the questions posed are, first, what grounds there might be for expecting social actors situated very differently in terms of their anxieties, satisfactions and experiences of loss to make sense of their situation in ways that converge sufficiently to make possible coordinated action. More concretely, why should we expect organized industrial workers to see ecological campaigners as potential allies? A further set of questions has to do with the transnational dimensions of the climate and ecological crisis.
The capacity of nation states to regulate a national economy to ameliorate social inequalities and ecological harms, to facilitate ‘sustainability, has inherent limits, but is also challenged in two ways. First, gross inequalities among nation states within a highly structured world system carry great differences both in the coordination capacities of states, as well as in their democratic openness to social movements and the ‘countermovement’. Second, these inequalities are intensified by the growth of the power of transnational capital under the neo-liberal regime of recent decades, and the growing dominance of financial capital, even further removed from the ‘concrete’ practices of need-meeting. In the absence of any global regulatory regime that could match the more traditional role of national states it seems very likely that socio-political conflicts will intensify, along with continuing failure to address the climate and ecological crises. Whether the necessary transnational social movement coalitions can be formed and acquire sufficient political leverage to bring about transition to a liveable and socially just world order is an open question.