Not in our nature: the male deal and corporate solutions to the debt-nature crisis
Terisa E. Turner and Craig S. Benjamin
Departments of Sociology & Anthropology
and Political Studies
University of Guelph
July 1993
Published in REVIEW, Volume XVII, 1994.
Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center
for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations
State University of New York, Binghamton, New York
This paper draws on research and text in Terisa E. Turner with Mark
Weston, "Debt for nature swaps: corporate solutions and gendered
resistance," a paper presented at the March 24-26, 1993 Conference
on the Latin American and Caribbean Debt Crisis and its Aftermath,
"Is there life after debt?" organized by the Cooperative Program
for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Inter-American
Organization for Higher Education, University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario, Canada. The authors are also indebted to Harry
Cleaver, the members of the Midnight Notes Collective and to the
cited works of the Instituto Brasileiro de Analises Socials e
Economicas (IBASE).
Not in our nature: the male deal and corporate solutions to the
debt-nature crisis
Abstract
In this article we delineate three dynamics of class composition,
economic restructuring and gendered-class struggle which we argue
are reflected in the promotion of debt for nature swaps as a
component of the corporate solution to the debt-nature crisis.
The first of these dynamics is the recomposition of capital itself.
We argue that the promotion of debt for nature swaps reflects the
convergence of three groups of gendered-class actors within or
aligned to international capital: owners of the largest, most
globalized transnational corporations; secondly, those members of
the third world capitalist class who became major investors in
transnational capital during the period of high oil prices and
loose lending in the 1970s; and thirdly, the expanding,
predominantly male managerial class which both runs the
transnationals and dominates the largest international
environmental organizations.
On the one hand, the owners, investors and managers of global
capital have the potential to form a strategic alliance or power
bloc within capital on the basis of their mutual interests in
restoring the rate of profit and the hegemony of a global system of
capitalist accumulation badly battered by the popular uprisings of
the 1960s. On the other hand, the third world investors and the
managerial class find themselves increasingly on the front line of
social struggle as this economic restructuring threatens to exhaust
the ecological and social basis of capitalist production and human
life. Corporate environmentalism, we argue, is part of the 'new
male deal' holding this strategic alliance together.
The second dynamic which we trace is capital's efforts to
restructure the relations and conditions in which work is
performed. We demonstrate that through a sequence of economic
restructuring measures initiated with the oil crisis of the early
1970s capital has reduced workers' access to relatively high paying
and secure waged work as a means of increasing the exploitation of
various forms of low-paid or unwaged, casual or invisible labour
typically performed by women in general, as well as by women and
men in the urban informal sector and among peasant and indigenous
societies.
The third dynamic is the growth in popular insurgency led by
precisely those workers whom capital has targeted to pay the price
of economic restructuring. We argue that these subject groups not
only have the power to resist capitalist restructuring, but more
significantly the power to transform the social relations of
capitalist production through their struggles. This potential has
repeatedly forced capital to redouble its efforts to carry out the
restructuring of labour relations and to do so by directly
attacking the very basis of insurgent social power, namely access
to arable land, non-commodified social environments, and public
services.
Thus on the one hand capitalist restructuring of labour relations,
the enclosure of natural resources and the debt-imposed assault on
state spending, have brought on a 'reproduction crisis' for the
urban and rural poor. On the other hand, it is in the face of such
enclosures, that broad based movements of women and men are
struggling to retain or reappropriate popular control over the
means of subsistence, and to exert locally defined values, meanings
and forms of social relations in defense of the commons. To accept
debt for nature swaps and other new enclosures as any sort of
solution to the debt-nature crisis is to accept defeat for the
popular struggle to restore the commons even as this struggle is
finding its strength.
Not in our nature: the male deal and corporate solutions to the
debt-nature crisis
Introduction
In 1984, Paul Lovejoy of the World Wildlife Fund proposed a new
approach to third world debt management called debt for nature
swaps (DFNs). Such swaps involve government agencies and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) purchasing part of a
country's foreign debt. Because debt is sold on a secondary market
at a discount based on the debtor nation's ability to make
payments, this debt can be purchased at discounts typically ranging
from 30 to 85 percent of the face value (Mahoney 1992: 98). The
debt purchased by NGOs and government agencies is then converted
through a deal with the debtor government by which the
debt-purchasing agency or NGO receives in local currency, bonds, or
equity the equivalent of the full dollar value of the debt
purchased. DFNs are distinguished from other forms of debt equity
swaps only because the NGO or agency uses the cash, credit or
equity for conservation related projects.
DFNs have been endorsed by the participation of southern
governments and prominent northern agencies, NGOs and environmental
organizations, including USAID, the Smithsonian Institute, the
World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy and the Rainforest
Alliance. Grassroots organizations and activists, however, have
criticized DFNs as contributing to the alienation of natural
resources from local communities, infringing on indigenous
territorial rights, and undermining calls to repudiate the debt
(COICA 1989; Tokar 1990: 26; IBASE 1992: 15, 19, 27-8).
In 1989, Santos Adam Afsua, of the Inter Ethnic Association for the
Development of the Peruvian Jungle (AIDESEP), expressed this
indigenous peopless view of debt for nature swaps:
the debt
crisis and the ecological crisis the technical and political
character of production and reproduction, e.g., division of labor,
hierarchy of skills and wages, division between the employed and
the reserve army of the unemployed, between the legal and the
criminal (Midnight Notes 1992: xiii-xiv)." To reflect this
theoretical standpoint that class formation under capitalism is
inextricably linked with gender constructions, we use the terms
gendered-class struggle and gendered-class throughout the text. The
more common phrase "gender and class interests" is rejected as
implying that class is in some way distinct from gender.
Thirdly, we recognize that the NGOs which have acted as brokers of
institutional solutions to the debt-nature crisis are not an
undifferentiated category of disinterested problem solvers (IBASE
1992: 16-7; Rahnema 1985:68). Instead, we attempt to analyze the
ways in which the actions of NGOs and popular movements are rooted
in the technical and political divisions of the working class and
capital. Proceeding from this basis, and from an analysis of the
articulation of the debt and ecological crises to global capitalist
restructuring and gendered resistance, we move beyond Mahoneys organizing in Ecuador.
In the fifth and sixth sections, we examine the rise of corporate
environmentalism as a key element in global capital's strategies to
resolve the present cycle of crisis and struggle in its favour.
Drawing on case histories of debt for nature swaps enacted in
Ecuador, we argue that DFNs, like other corporate solutions to the
debt crisis, support the recomposition of global capital, open new
opportunities for commodification and exploitation, and undermine
working class struggles to organize alternatives to the destructive
model of capitalist accumulation. On this basis, we advocate a firm
stand against DFNs as part of the project of building a popular
movement of reappropriating popular control over the means of
subsistence, and of exerting locally defined values, meanings and
forms of social relations, in opposition to the "new enclosures"
organized by global capital and its allies (Midnight Notes 1992:
318.)
II. Theorizing crisis and struggle
In this paper we seek to understand debt for nature swaps in the
context of a global struggle in which women in general, as well as
women and men among groups of peasants, indigenous peoples,
squatters, migrant labourers and other diverse subject groups have
emerged as the central protagonists. To date, scholarly analysis of
this contemporary cycle of working class struggles has been
dominated by a sterile debate between mainstream marxists and
various post-structuralist and 'post-marxist' social movement
theorists (e.g., Laclau and Mouffe 1987; Wood 1986). As with most
elite debates, the vigour with which the social movement debate has
been waged only serves to reinforce "the tacit unspoken
assumptions" shared by the contending intellectuals (Chomsky 1978:
31). In this case, we would argue, the tacit assumption is that
capitalist relations of production are confined to the waged
workplace. Within the parameters of debate set by this assumption,
popular struggles over access to social services, the preservation
of natural environments, or how power is shared in the household,
in Laclau and Mouffe's words, "necessarily depend, therefore, to a
large extent on the way in which the social agent is constituted
outside the relations of production (Laclau and Mouffe 1987: 103,
emphasis in original)."
Having started with an assumption that capitalist relations of
production begin and end at the factory gates, the social movement
debate precludes from consideration the possibility that unwaged
labour performed in the home and in the community, for example, is
organized by a gendered division of labour that is part of
capitalist relations of production. Writing on recent struggles by
Mexican women "to procure land for housing, demand social services,
and protect and gain access to natural resources," Lynn Stephen
notes that the failure of social movement theorists and mainstream
marxists to consider the link between popular struggles and the
gendered division of labour under capital "certainly renders rather
invisible the participation of hundreds of thousands of (Mexican)
women motivated by class- and gender-specific social roles (Stephen
1992:82)."
Developing a systematic analysis of the articulation between, on
the on hand, contemporary social struggles and the formation of
gendered-class interests and, on the other hand, social power
within the capitalist division of labour requires a
reconceptualization of labour exploitation and relations of
production. In this section we trace three points of an alternative
theoretical framework which argues that popular struggles are
constituted in and against the hierarchical exploitation of labour,
land and society. The three points of this framework pertain to: 1)
the importance of those forms of labour sometimes called
"reproductive labour" to capitalist relations of production; 2) the
construction of "reproductive labour" and related social struggles
within the technical and political division of labour under
capital; and 3) the articulation between these struggles and
capitalist restructuring.
Shadow work
Claudia von Werlhof has observed that "[e]ighty to ninety percent
of the world population consists essentially of women, peasants,
craftsmen, petty traders and such wage labourers whom one can call
neither 'free' nor proletarian (von Werlhof 1988c: 171)." Unless
the capitalist organization of production is confined to a very
small "internal moment (Laclau and Mouffe 1987)" in the life of
society, any reconceptualization of the operation of the capitalist
model of accumulation and struggles against it must begin with the
labour of this eighty to ninety percent of the world population.
Despite the evident differences among these subject groups, tribal
peoples and small peasants, migrant labourers, petty traders, and
"housewives" share the general characteristic that, in addition to
any waged labour they might perform, they also perform without
compensation a substantial part of the labour necessary to sustain
their own life and the lives of others (von Werlhof 1988a: 16). The
labour involved in sustaining human life takes many forms,
including cultivating and preparing food, providing for the
physical needs of children and the aged, teaching skills, attitudes
and forms of behaviour to young people and providing psychological
and sexual services to adults. Depending on the worker's location
within the world system and the gendered, ethnicized divisions of
labour within the working class, this work involves to a greater or
less degree cultivation of non-commodified natural environments,
building networks of cooperation and social support among family
and community members, negotiating the use of public services and
public space, and transforming capitalist commodities into sources
of physical and psychological nourishment.
Before we consider more closely why most of this labour is unwaged,
and why certain subject groups perform such a disproportionately
large share of this unwaged labour, we should first be clear that
the fact that this labour is unwaged does not mean that it is
'unproductive' for capital. On the contrary, it is critically
important to capital that the work of producing and sustaining life
gets done because, in fact, capital cannot function without workers
available to sell the central commodity of capitalist production,
disciplined labour power (Cox and Federici 1975; Federici 1975; S.
James 1976). The fact that the world's labour force is organized in
such a way that this labour-power is available to capital, while
capital pays little of the cost of its production is central to the
profitability of the capitalist system of production. segments concentrated
in, but not exclusive to the industrialized north s work,
third world fightback against colonial and neo-colonial
exploitation, and indigenous people's resistance to the alienation
of territory and territorial rights by the capitalist state, as
well as struggles for the recognition of civil rights for people of
colour and gay men and lesbians. Significantly, many of these
struggles succeeded in bridging the gap between shadow and waged
labour, despite the efforts of the state, the comprador unions,
household patriarchs and other male dealers to maintain this
separation (Cleaver 1989: 21, Linebaugh and Ramirez 1975; W.
Cleaver 1975).
In this section, we briefly examine the cycle of global crises and
popular struggles that proceeded from the shattering of the
wage-productivity deal. Beginning with the imposition of the energy
crisis in 1973, we trace key elements of capital's efforts to
restructure production relations through crisis and of popular
resistance to this restructuring. We delineate capital's general
strategies of attacking workers' real wages, globalizing circuits
of production and consumption and expanding the range of human
activities, natural resources, and social infrastructure circulated
through market exchange. We also show how the failure to contain
working class insurgency through energy crisis-induced
restructuring has led to the deepening spiral of economic
restructuring and popular uprisings characteristic of the debt
crisis.
The energy shock and the recomposition of global capital
In August 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OAPEC) imposed an embargo on oil shipments to the West.
The oil embargo had two general consequences for the world economy:
first, in the short term, it led to a massive hike in the price of
oil, which along with labour is a centrally strategic commodity in
capitalist production (Nore and Turner 1980); second, in the long
term, the higher price of this strategic commodity contributed to
rising interest rates and inflation, a consequence made possible by
the US government's decision in 1972 to abrogate the Bretton Woods
currency agreement. OAPEC's imposition of the oil embargo was
intended to achieve a new consensus between the Middle Eastern and
North African oil exporting states and their national working
classes, firstly through a display of defiance intended to appeal
to pan Arab nationalism, and secondly through the creation of new
possibilities for public spending (Cleaver 1989:24; Turner 1993b).
Western capitalists and capitalist states may have been
inconvenienced by the embargo, but on the issue of higher oil
prices there was a significant convergence of interests between
international capital and the supposedly renegade Arab heads of
state.
The primary importance of the energy shock is that it provided
advanced segments of international capital an opportunity to forge
new circuits of accumulation and to restructure relations of
production. Immediately following the embargo, the governments of
the Arab as well as non-Arab states in the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) took control of oil
production, sales and pricing by nationalizing the majority of
concessions up to then held by transnationals. This move allowed
the OPEC states to command a significant share of the profits
generated by the rise in oil prices. This sudden sharp rise in
petrodollars flowing to OPEC countries was multiplied by a period
of easy credit as northern banks moved to take advantage of an
increase in demand for loans created by interest rates which, prior
to 1982, were lower than the rate of inflation. Together this flood
of oil wealth and bank loans into the oil producing countries and,
indeed, to much of the oil importing third world led to a boom in
public and elite spending. This wealth, we should note, came from
those private and public corporations not yet integrated with
energy or banking capital, as well as from the international
working class which was suddenly faced with rising oil prices and
an inflated cost of living. We should also note that by and large,
petrodollars and third world loans were recycled to US and European
transnationals by way of trade, construction contracts, interest
payments and direct investment. As an immediate consequence of oil
crisis financed industrialization, the US government and
transnationals alone were able to increase transactions with OPEC
countries five-fold, generating a $38 billion capital account
surplus over the period 1974 to 1977 (Sassen-Koob 1987: 65). In
short, the oil crisis-induced internationalization of the circuits
of production and finance channelled money from pockets of workers
and small capital, through the hands of a new third world
transnational class and back to US and European capital. We
consider the implications of these developments for the changing
composition of the working class and of capital in turn.
Restructuring the working class
The extended circuits of finance and production forged in response
to the oil crisis strengthened capital's capacity to take advantage
of low-cost labour wherever it could be found or developed.
Combined with innovations in technology and the recomposition of
global capital described below, these changes have enabled capital
to drive down the wages paid to the full-time waged proletariat
while at the same time transferring a greater portion of production
to non-proletarian workers employed on a part-time or casual basis
(Broad 1991; Sassen-Koob 1984; Midnight Notes 1992).
In the first stage of restructuring, capital took advantage of the
large, low wage labour pools of the global periphery by exporting
parts of the manufacturing and assembly process to overseas export
processing zones. This, in turn, had an impact on production
relations in the core cities, in part because the ability of
capital to pursue low wages abroad reduced the bargaining power of
organized labour in the industrialized north. Labour in established
industries was reorganized through increased automation, a shift to
batch as opposed to mass production, and the introduction of
Japanese-style team management (Sassen-Koob 1983; Hall and Jacques
1989; Harvey and Scott 1989). As a consequence, between 1973 and
1988, average weekly wages for full-time workers in the US dropped
by 20 percent, while in the same period the ratio of capital
investment to workers tripled. Also beginning in 1973 work
stoppages in the US began falling. By 1981 work stoppages were 35
percent of their 1974 level. Between 1982 and 1992, work stoppages
fell by more than half. In other words, "workers virtually ceased
striking altogether (Midnight Notes 1992: 60)."
At the same time, an increasing number of women and men were
entering the waged workforce in the industrialized north. From 1980
to 1990, the work force increased by 20 percent, and the percentage
of people over 16 in the waged work force reached an historic high
of 66 percent (Midnight Notes 1992: 60). Much of this expansion can
be accounted for by the growth in part-time and casual jobs.
Between 1973 and 1983 growth in part-time employment generally far
exceeded the growth of full-time employment in most Western
countries. In the US, part-time employment grew by 19.7 percent
while full-time employment grew by 14.8 percent. In Canada,
part-time employment grew by 52.3 percent while full-time
employment grew by 18.4 percent. In West Germany and the United
Kingdom, full-time employment actually declined by 4 percent and
6.7 percent respectively, while part-time employment increased by
65.4 percent and 19.7 percent (de Neubourg 1985: 561). In addition
to the growth of casual wage labour, the first phase of economic
restructuring also led to a substantial increase in the number of
women and men working in sweatshops, engaged in homeworking or
otherwise participating in the informal economy in both core cities
and in the periphery (Sassen-Koob 1983; Sen and Grown 1987: 62,
66).
There are three points to be noted about capitals wages
were consistently restructured downward toward the lowest income
classes (Sassen-Koob 1987: 72). The likelihood of being employed in
low-wage, casualized labour in the US also varied considerably by
ethnicity and country of birth. According to the 1980 census data
for the five US states with the highest rate of immigration, almost
half of immigrant women in these states held low-paying service
sector and manual labour jobs compared to 25 percent of
non-immigrant women (Bach and Tienda 1984: 18).
Finally, women and men worldwide engaged in low-waged, casual
labour as a survival strategy necessitated by the circumstances of
economic restructuring. In addition to the losses in household
incomes resulting from the restructuring of industrial labour, debt
and oil financed development projects uprooted millions from a
basis of subsistence predicated on access to natural resources.
(Sassen-Koob 1987). The reconstruction of waged labour as waged
shadow work helped channel women's survival initiatives to the
maximal benefit of capital (Safa and Antrobus 1992: 54).
In summary, we can see how in the aftermath of the 1973 energy ,
capital tried to restore its rate of accumulation and break
the social power of working class movements by reconstructing the
majority of waged work as low-paying, insecure and closely
supervised shadow work. To achieve this reconstruction, capital had
to undermine the established industrial trade unions by dismantling
and relocating much of the industrial base of the core countries.
In addition, capital had to drive an increasing number of first and
third world women, as well as third world men, into low-paying
waged jobs by cutting off their access to income previous obtained
through the wages of proletarian spouses and kin.
Despite the extent of restructuring catalyzed by the energy crisis,
the austerity measures were largely unsuccessful. Working class
uprisings persisted in securing a greater share of the flow of
petrodollars and unconditional loans characteristic of the 1973 to
1982 period. Growing unemployment in North American and Europe and
increasingly diffused circuits of production alone were not enough
to prevent workers pressing for and sometimes winning wage
concessions (Cleaver 1989). In the oil producing countries and in
the neighbouring societies which supplied them with migrant labour,
the bourgeoisies also failed in their efforts to contain working
class initiatives.
Initially, capital hoped that new wealth flowing into OPEC and the
associated states would help keep a lid on working class insurgency
(Turner 1990: 8). The vulnerability of the state to popular
uprisings, however, was demonstrated in Egypt in 1976 and 1977.
When President Anwar Sadat asked the World Bank for new loans, the
bank attempted to impose conditions typical of what are now known
as structural adjustment programs, including reduced government
subsidies for basic foods.
"When his creditors insisted on these changes despite Sadat's
warnings of possible consequences, the subsidies were cut. The
result was a dramatic, overnight explosion of popular anger...
Within 24 hours Sadat was forced to rescind the cuts and the
creditors supplied the loans without the previous conditions being
met (Cleaver 1989: 33)."
This message was reinforced in 1979 when 80,000 Iranian oil workers
went on strike. With the active involvement of some two million
women and children living in Iranian oil towns they succeeded in
closing down the world's second largest oil exporting operation,
cutting off all oil to the Shah's military; as well as to Israel,
Portugal, Britain and South Africa; and taking approximately five
million barrels of oil out of the world market for each day of the
strike. In this uprising against the Shah, the Iranian regime was
explicitly identified and repudiated as a broker for US and
European oil corporations (Turner 1991).
Restructured capital and the new male deal
We have argued that by the late 1960s international capital faced
a crisis of profits and power. Because of this crisis, sectors of
international capital responded to the sparked by
the OAPEC oil embargo by deepening the global circuits of
production and finance and then used these circuits to attempt to
restructure relations of both waged and unwaged labour. As we can
see from the Egyptian and Iranian examples of popular insurgency,
however, the initial phase of economic restructuring led not to a
resolution of capital's crisis, but a deepening of gendered-class
struggle.
Before considering how global capital has tried to manage this
deepening cycle of crisis and struggle through the mechanism of the
debt crisis, we first briefly outline three key changes in the
composition of global capital organized through the oil
crisis-induced internationalization of the circuits of production
and finance. These three changes correspond to the increased
competition and concentration among the largest, most globalized
sectors of international capital, the rise of a significant class
of third world investors, and the expansion of the managerial class
of international capital.
Firstly, the energy crisis, like any sudden change in pricing,
accelerated inter-capitalist competition. Naturally, those
corporations with large investment resources at hand and experience
in operating at the transnational level were in an advantageous
position to take command of these new opportunities. The response
of the major oil transnationals to the energy crisis is a good
illustration. In 1970, the transnational oil corporations
controlled 94 percent of world crude oil production. As a result of
post-embargo nationalizations, their total share had declined to 41
percent by 1981, with the share of the seven largest oil
transnationals falling from 64 to 22 percent (Tanzer and Zorn 1985:
32). This declining share in production was only partially offset
by the fact that the largest transnationals were able to maintain
rights to buy and sell crude oil supplied by the newly nationalized
production operations. The energy transnationals also responded to
the crisis by intensifying a process of new exploration and
diversification begun in the early 1960s partly in response to the
struggles of US energy workers (Cleaver 1975). But most
significantly, by the late 1970s the failure of the transnational
oil corporations to restore their rate of profit through other
means led to an intensive round of buyouts and mergers within the
industry. In the early 1980s oil companies found that it cost as
much as $15-$20 per barrel to discover new reserves, while buying
up other oil companies could effectively provide proven reserves at
$5-$6 per barrel (Tanzer and Zorn 1985: 38). These struggles among
the transnational corporations created new opportunities for
speculator capital and concentrated the wealth and power of the
industry into fewer hands, but ultimately failed to pull the
industry out of stagnation and crisis (Tanzer and Zorn 1985: 39).
Secondly, the increase in wealth flowing to the south by way of
crude oil sales and bank loans provided an opportunity for a
segment of the third world capitalist class to divert a substantial
part of this wealth for the purpose of foreign investment. Not
surprisingly, the OPEC states made the most spectacular entry into
transnational investment: the OPEC statesConnor
(O'Connor 1990: 4). As we will see, however, the power of
international capital and the debtor state to impose debt-related
austerity measures has been jeopardized by deepening popular
insurgency.
Anti-austerity struggles and the delegitimization of the state
Popular rejection of austerity measures and the intensified
exploitation and commodification of labour has been expressed
through food riots, strikes, demonstrations and other uprisings;
through actions to block foreign or local investment; and through
resistance to the privatization which such investment entails.
Between 1976 and 1986, John Walton notes, "more than half the major
countries of Latin America and the Caribbean experienced social
upheavals in direct response to austerity measures. Thirteen of
twenty-four nations in the region (excluding the mini-states)
produced fifty separate protest events (Walton 1989: 309)." The
specific austerity measures that precipitated these uprisings
"are relatively uniform. Typically, they come in a set that cuts
deeply into the subsistence capacity of low-income groups:
rescinded government subsidies of food, basic necessities, and
gasoline, meaning price rises; cuts in subsidized services, leading
to fare increases in public transportation, for example; public
spending reductions that eliminate jobs in government and
government contract work (e.g., construction). In short, rapid
reductions in the standard of living by visible government action
is the most common precipitant of protest. Other circumstances that
mobilize collective actions are devaluations that soon show up in
domestic price increases, inflation, unemployment, and wage freezes
(Walton 1989: 316)."
In the paragraphs below, we briefly examine two indices of the
challenge to capitalist hegemony presented by popular resistance to
structural adjustment and related policies: first, the difficulty
faced by governments trying to impose SAPs; and second, the
fluctuations in price of debt sold on the secondary market in
response to these failures. Following this summary, we present a
brief case history of Ecuadorian women organizing against economic
restructuring. This case history is intended to delineate some of
the key dynamics of popular struggles, including the importance of
womens own interest in restructuring,
in the face of these popular mobilizations, "opposition to the IMF
in some form is often a political necessity (Walton 1989: 325)."
Second, the price of debt on the secondary market is itself a
measure of the effectiveness with which popular movements have
engaged in various forms of resistance to debt repayment and to the
terms of structural adjustment. Anti-austerity struggles coincide
with a devaluation of the subject countries' debt on the
international market. Over the 1980s the price of most country's
debt on the secondary market plunged from around 80 cents on the
dollar to from between 5 and 60 cents. However between 1990 and
1991 there appeared to be a slight increase in the discounted value
of the debt of states which have imposed IMF terms through violent
repression of popular movements, or which met IMF directives to
sell off large public utilities (Culpepper 1993). For instance, the
price of Chile's debt went up from 61 to 89 cents on the dollar
between 1987 and 1991. The recovery in secondary market values for
Chilean, Costa Rican and Jamaican debt between 1990 and June 1991
suggests "that markets may regain confidence in those countries
where the IMF really plays the tough cop (George 1992:68)."
We have argued that the imposition of austerity measures is
designed precisely to intensify and control womens organizing
through one case history. In this summary we
draw on the writing of Rocio Rosero (Rosero 1991:59-78) of
Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN) and
coordinator of the Women's Network of the Consejo de Educacion de
Adultos de America Latina (CEAAL). Roseros work and the
transformation of the power relations between
women and men. Because they are capable of mobilizing a broad-base
of popular support, anti-austerity struggles limit the ability of
transnational capital and its allied regimes to impose economic
restructuring through the mechanism of debt repayment. The fact
that the debt crisis has organized a massive transfer of wealth
from the debtor states to transnational capital has been frequently
noted. Less frequently noted is the fact that in organizing this
exploitation capital has laid bare the fundamental antagonism
between worker survival and capitalist accumulation. The
recomposition of the working class in opposition to SAPs has the
capacity to profoundly weaken capital's hegemony. As a consequence,
global capital has been propelled into a dangerous balancing act of
trying not only to profit from, but also to manage the debt crisis.
Managing the debt crisis
As we have noted, global capitals
action would expose the inability of other US and UK banks to
follow suit, by the end of the summer of 1987, twenty-two of the
thirty US banks with assets of more than $20 billion, together with
all the UK clearing banks, had made special provision against their
largest Third World debts. The total losses resulting from these
actions amounted to $10.7 billion (Hall 1988: 10)."
What the major creditor banks had done, in effect, was to absorb in
advance and under their own terms losses equivalent to those that
might occur should any single creditor state default. These actions
provided the banks, and the international financial system as a
whole, protection against the eventuality of just such a default
taking place. Even with these provisions, however, the banks
remained vulnerable to a moratorium declared by a debtor's cartel,
or to the avalanche effects of a single country repudiating its
debts. "Thus for example, in Britain, Lloyds' and Midlands' special
provisions cover only 50 percent and 42 percent respectively of
their aggregate lending to Brazil, Mexico and Argentina (Hall 1988:
10)."
The banks' actions reduced the leverage that any debtor state might
exert against its creditors through the threat of default. As a
consequence, capital was able to strengthen its hand against the
popular forces organizing to block restructuring and repudiate the
debt. This measure, however, did little to defend capital against
the threat of debtor cartels forming on a regional or global basis.
Nor did these measures protect the overextended loans of the
multilateral banks which were increasing the direct target of
popular insurgency.
In August 1990, the US administration under President George Bush
took another step toward consolidating the various sectors of
capital behind continued restructuring. This new initiative, called
the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI), linked a broad
range of economic restructuring programs, including SAPs and the
pursuit of a hemispheric free trade zone, to a set of incentives
and consensus building measures such as limited debt forgiveness
and special aid programs. The initiative also included the
provision that for the first time public funds could be used to
convert Latin American debts held by the US government and the
multilateral banks. In effect, the EAI proposed another level of
transfers from the public sector to the US and Latin American
transnational capitalists who would be the primary beneficiaries of
debt conversion. The EAI was intended not only to consolidate the
allied powers of international capital, the third world speculator
class and the third world state. The EAI also include specific
provisions pertaining to debt for nature swaps that appealed to the
crucially important managerial class.
Having successfully lobbied Congress to include DFNs in this debt
conversion package, a US environmental NGO, the Natural Resources
Defense Council (NRDC), took the lead in promoting the EAI to its
Latin American counterparts. After a meeting in Argentina on April
19, 1991, 51 Latin American NGOs issued a denunciation of the EAI
as the latest round of US recolonization of the south. On June 28,
1991 NRDC issued a response and an appeal to the southern NGOs
which said, in part, "We realize that problems have arisen with the
debt-for-nature swaps that have been carried out in several Latin
American countries. Our intent in this case was to avoid similar
problems with the EAI by urging that a broad range of NGOs in your
country determine environmental priorities which would be
incorporated into the environmental framework agreements. We
realize the EAI contains serious flaws and that many countries and
NGOs may reject this initiative outright. The concept of trying to
bring governments and NGOs from the North and South together to
address environmental and debt issues poses enormous challenges.
Nevertheless, we hope to maintain channels of communication and
work together (NRDC 1991)."
In promoting Bush's Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, NRDC
and its allies presented to the US taxpayer the debt for nature
swap mechanism as a practical measure for rectifying ecological
destruction. What went unsaid was the swaps' reliance on taxpayers
to pay for bad debts incurred by banks and the state. This vital
dimension was erased as part of the process of manufacturing
consent around continued economic restructuring. The double edged
mediation of consensus building frameworks such as DFNs, targets
citizens north and south, in an effort to arrange public acceptance
of corporate actions that are clearly at odds with the
gendered-class interests expressed through popular resistance to
austerity measures.
In the final section of this paper, we return to the subject of
DFNs as a tool in the reconstruction of corporate hegemony, as a
source of new accumulation, and as a mechanism of capitalist attack
on the working classes. As background, we examine the rise of the
corporate-environment alliance utilized in the EAI and necessary to
the promotion of DFNs as a capitalist solution to the debt-nature
crisis.
V. Incorporating nature
Debt for nature swaps are part of a broad range of new
environmental initiatives that emerged out of a corporate backlash
against environmental regulation in the US in the early 1980s (Di
Chiro 1992). These initiatives are characterized by 1) their claim
to resolve the contradiction between capitalist accumulation, on
the one hand, and the health of ecosystems and the people dependent
on them, on the other hand; and 2) the redefinition of conservation
objectives within the larger project of economic restructuring.
Thus we argue that corporate environmentalism is part of an effort
to construct a new consensus, inclusive of global capitals corporate-environmental
alliance is the work of Gilford Pichot who founded the US Forest
Service in 1905. Closely tied to the Progressive movement fostered
by President Theodore Roosevelt, Pichot and other conservationists
"argued for a professional, efficient, and technocratic approach"
that would reconcile industrial and leisure demands on forests,
rivers and other natural resources. When faced with a conflict
between leisure and industrial use, however, "Pichot and his allies
usually supported the developers (Darnovsky 1992: 17)."
Within the contemporary environmental movement, the
industry-dominated conservationist school is often contrasted to
the ostensibly more radical school of environmental preservation
associated particularly with the movement to establish national
parks. Preservationist John Muir made the struggle against
corporate development of 'wilderness' areas a "national cause
celebre" with his campaign to prevent the damming of the Hetch
Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park (Darnovsky 1992: 17). US
environmentalists, generally claim Muir, not Pichot as their
forefather.
Despite the distinctions usually made between the conservationist
and preservationist movements, however, we would suggest that both
of these early forms of elite environmentalism express
relationships of male dealing. In section II, we argued that the
secure wages paid to a narrow portion of the working class place
members of this proletarian elite in a position to command and
benefit from the labour of others. This male deal, we have argued,
has three important characteristics. Firstly, this relationship is
a central element of capitalist relations of production because it
organizes the greatest part of the labour necessary for capitalist
production at minimal or no cost to capital. Secondly, this
relationship implies a conflict between male dealers and the shadow
workers whose labour they command. Thirdly, the male dealers'
access to a secure wage and associated command over the labour of
others greatly narrows the scope of male dealers' relationship with
the natural world and other non-commodified sources of subsistence.
In the following paragraphs, we trace three aspects of male dealing
in the early environmental movement.
First of all, both the preservationists and the conservationists
assumed the existence of areas of 'wilderness' remote from human
habitation and human labour, but available to serve the needs of a
growing urban population. The ability of these early
environmentalists to treat areas of the continent as wilderness
areas to be preserved for corporate-dominated 'multiple, wise use'
or as examples of 'pristine nature' are predicted on the recent
forcible removals of indigenous peoples from that very land
(Darnovsky 1992: 18; Wilson 1991: 25-7). Both the removals
themselves, and the ability of the preservationists and
conservationists to later benefit from these removals, are
indicative of the hierarchical organization of power and privilege
under capital.
Secondly, the conservationist and preservationist construction of
wilderness is constituted within a particular historic conjuncture
of capitalism marked by the transfer of industrial production from
the countryside to the city that began in the US in the 1830s, and
the attendant expansion of the urban working and petty capitalist
classes, including clerks, book keepers and merchants, as well as
urban factory workers. In opposing large-scale industrial
extraction, the preservations sought natural areas for their
personal use, primarily for recreation and aesthetic enjoyment.
Leisure uses of nature, no less than resource extraction, express
the specific gendered-class interests of the male dealers who 1)
depended on nature only for those few needs, primarily
psychological or spiritual, which they could not buy as commodities
or command through the labour of shadow workers and 2) had the
means to travel to remote areas to fulfil these needs. Critically,
both aspects of this relationship are dependent on capitalist
exploitation of nature and shadow workers. "The same middle-class
couples who benefited from the capitalist use of nature as resource
also needed the antidote of weekend excursions to New England's
lakes and mountains. The same men who were subjected to the
stresses of competition needed the balance of nature's psychic
comfort (Merchant 1989: 251)."
Thirdly, this argument that the preservationist and conservationist
movements expressed a form of male deal specific to the rise of
industrial capitalism is supported by parallel developments in the
urban centers. The wilderness preservation and conservation
movements were a small part of a wide range of movements around
health and leisure issues related to the production of labour power
under industrial capitalism. These movements included diverse urban
working class struggles to reduce industrial pollution in the waged
workplace and the community, to improve sewage and garbage
services, to gain access to clean water, and to build neighbourhood
social life (Darnovsky 1992: 26). In the 1980s, for example, in
many North American cities citizen groups organized to block
development of vacant lots so that the land could be used as play
areas for children. With the rise of the welfare state in this
century, provision and maintenance of play grounds would be
provided on a more formal and more rigorously supervised basis by
municipal governments. Initially, however, the playground movement
was a popular initiative organized by women and enacted through
womens organizations and the collective bargaining units men
were forming in the factories at the same time (Wilson 1991: 24).
As waged factory work reduced the hours men spent in the work of
raising their children, women the
old-boys networks and clubs typified by the military-industrial
complex, the World Bank's web of clients, consultants and
contractors, the Trilateral Commission, and so on. The answer is
non-governmental organizations (Lohmann 1990: 83-4)."
There are numerous reasons why sectors of the US environmental
movement would pursue such an alliance with capital. To begin with,
the mainstream environmental movement has a long history of
implicit as well as explicit corporate alliances. The 19th century
conservationist and preservationist movements helped define the
terms of much of the contemporary wilderness protection discourse
in the US. We have seen how the objectives of the conservationist
and preservationist movements were predicated on the specific
gendered-class interests of US industrial capital and its managers
and intellectual workers. A new revisionist historical interest in
this period (Darnovsky 1992), reflects a perception that the
contemporary mainstream environmental movement continues to be
rooted in similar gendered-class interests. During the post-WWII
productivity deal, public involvement in environmental organizing
expanded rapidly. The growth in membership, however, did not
reflect a fundamental transformation of the gendered-class
character of the mainstream movement. Firstly, the expansion was
rooted in the temporary extension of the male deal to a larger
segment of the working class population. As a consequence of this
expanded deal, more workers gained access to sufficiently high
levels of wage income and days off such that 1) experiencing nature
for leisure or aesthetic enjoyment became a high priority need in
the production of their labour power; and 2) they could afford to
travel outside their day to day work environment to find this
nature (Hays 1982; Wilson 1991). Secondly, the mainstream movement
for the most part failed to build links with non-elite interest
such as communities of colour. Partly as a consequence, the
mainstream movement continued to exclude from the environmental
agenda non-wilderness issues such as the urban environment and
subsistence land use rights (Bullard 1993; COICA 1989; Di Chiro
1992). Thirdly, despite the expanded membership base, in most
environmental organizations these members have very little decision
making power within the organization. As a consequence, much of the
real organizational power within the mainstream environmental
movement has remained in the hands of professional managers, most
of whom continue to be university educated, Euro-American men
(Darnovsky 1992; Sale 1986).
For all the reasons outline above, many environmental organizations
entered the 1980s pursuing gendered-class politics little different
from their predecessors a century earlier. At the same time, the
outward circumstances of environmental organizing had changed in a
number of important ways, many of them directly linked to the
contemporary cycle of crisis and struggle. Firstly, a range of
investigations carried out at the grassroots level had exposed the
extent of capitalist destruction of the environment and human
health. The pressure for action exerted within and by all sectors
of the environmental movement had led to the creation of numerous
governmental regulations intended mostly to screen the quantity and
toxicity of industrial emissions being released into the
environment. As such regulations were poorly defined and did not
address the actual toxicity of the production process itself, they
largely failed to meet public demands for substantial reductions in
industrial contamination of the environment (Commoner 1987).
Secondly, in response to the widely perceived failure of the
mainstream movements to reduce industrial pollution, a more
insurgent mode of environmental activism was coming to the fore, as
typified by the US organization Earth First! At the same time, the
US government under Ronald Reagan was carrying out a corporate
agenda of repealing or diluting any environmental regulation that
was seen to be hindering corporate profit-making (Darnovsky 1992:
42).
In 1981, at the request of a private donor who supported
environmental conservation, the chief executive officers of the
National Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife
Federation, the Wilderness Society, the Environmental Policy
Institute, and four other large, US environmental organizations,
"many of them with a wilderness orientation, sat down for a power
lunch in Washington. The donor who had convened the meeting
recommended that they form a loose environmental coalition, one
which would include only organizations that were "active," which he
defined as "regularly going to members of Congress and
corporations." Groups such as Greenpeace and Environmental Action,
which had large memberships and were national in scope but which
defined "active" as "conducting, supporting or advocating direct
action against the offending industries," were to be excluded. The
coalition of environmentalists' chief executive officers, which
named itself the Group of Ten [with the later addition of two more
"active" corporatist organizations], polished its professionalism,
redoubled its lobbying efforts, and refined the art of compromise
and dealmaking (Darnovsky 1992: 42)."
The result of the Group of Ten's renewed dedication to working
within the framework of economic restructuring can be seen in a
broad range of new environmental initiatives, including debt for
nature swaps, which attempt to reconstruct environmental
conservation not as a limit to growth, but as a basis for new
strategies of accumulation. Such initiatives include the
commodification of endangered eco-systems as sites organized for
"eco-tourism" or the extraction of plant genetic material for
pharmaceutical and agro-chemical industries, and the endorsement of
so-called "green" or "environmentally-friendly" consumer goods
(Diamond 1991; Nelson 1993; Tokar 1991). This is environmentalism
as a modern enclosure movement: an intensification of capitalist
commodification and exploitation, "a regular return on the path of
accumulation and a structural component of class struggle (Midnight
Notes 1992: 318.)"
VI. Debt for nature swaps: hegemony, accumulation and
counter-insurgency
Between 1987 and mid-1991, NGOs and government agencies purchased
debt valued at more than US$61 million in 19 DFNs. Although ten
countries took part in these swaps, four were responsible for 95 percent of
the environmental funds generated (Mahoney 1992: 98). These funds
were used for a variety of purposes including environmental
training, research and education. But the primary use was to manage
or expand natural parks and conservation areas (Mahoney 1992: 97).
In this paper we have set debt for nature swaps in the context of
a struggle taking place between capitalist and popular forces, as
well as among capitalists and capitalist states, over the ways and
conditions in which work is performed. Capital's failure to resolve
its crisis of falling profits and declining hegemony through the
mechanisms of the energy and debt crises has, we have argued, led
to a deepening struggle between capital and popular forces for
control over natural, social, and built environments. The rise of
corporate environmentalism reconstructs nature conservation 1) as
a key element in the process of building and maintaining consensus
within the strategic power bloc composed of the owners of the
largest, most globalized transnationals, the managers who run these
corporations, and the third world capitalists who have invested in
them; 2) as an opportunity to employ the interlocking crises of
debt and nature to organize and build support for new strategies of
accumulation in the interest of these specific gendered-class
actors; and 3) as a strategy of counter-insurgency aimed directly
at those popular organizations most effective in opposing
capitalist restructuring.
In this section, we examine debt for nature swaps in the context of
the specific gendered-class interests of restructured global
capital. After summarizing some of the key criticisms of DFNs as
articulated by grassroots organizations and activists, we turn to
a detailed examination of the consensual environmental discourse
which links the owners, managers and investors in global capital to
programs such as DFNs. We conclude this section by tracing the
articulation of these interests to two DFNs carried out in Ecuador
in 1987 and 1989.
Debt for Nature Swaps: critical issues
In an article written before the first DFN was completed in 1987,
Barbara Bramble, then director of international programs for the
resources conservation department of the US National Wildlife
Federation, stated that financial and political questions aside,
all parties involved in DFNs could be assumed to gain from the
s
efforts to restructure the relations and conditions in which work
is performed. We demonstrated that through a sequence of economic
restructuring measures initiated with the oil crisis of the early
1970s capital has reduced workers' access to relatively high paying
and secure waged work as a means of increasing the exploitation of
various forms of low-paid or unwaged, casual or invisible labour
typically performed by women in general, as well as by women and
men in the urban informal sector and among peasant and indigenous
societies.
The third dynamic examined in this paper is the growth in popular
insurgency led by precisely those workers whom capital has targeted
to pay the price of economic restructuring. We argued that these
subject groups not only have the power to resist capitalist
restructuring, but more significantly the power to transform the
social relations of capitalist production through their struggles.
This potential has repeatedly forced capital to redouble its
efforts to carry out the restructuring of labour relations and to
do so by directly attacking the very basis of insurgent social
power, namely access to arable land, non-commodified social
environments, and public services.
Thus on the one hand capitalist restructuring of labour relations,
the enclosure of natural resources and the debt-imposed assault on
state spending, have brought on what Gita Sen and Caren Grown have
termed a "reproduction crisis (Sen and Grown 1987: 51)" for the
urban and rural poor. On the other hand, it is precisely in the
face of such enclosures, that broad based movements of women and
men are struggling to retain or reappropriate popular control over
the means of subsistence, and to exert locally defined values,
meanings and forms of social relations in defense of the commons.
(Midnight Notes 1992: 317-33; Rao 1989; Varese 1991).
Of popular organization against debt repayments and capitalist
restructuring, Harry Cleaver has said, "Either we believe in our
ability to craft a new world, or we do not. Those of use who are
convinced that we, collectively, have this ability cannot accept
being limited to some variation of accumulation (Cleaver 1989:
41)." To accept debt for nature swaps and other new enclosures as
any sort of solution to the debt-nature crisis is to accept defeat
for the popular struggle to restore the commons even as this
struggle is finding its strength.
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