Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of capitalism’s forces of destruction as a complement to Marx’s forces/relations of production pair. It analyzes the rapid development of such forces of destruction as capitalism’s massive marketing and advertising apparatus, ecocidal fossil-fuel-based technologies, as well as its increasingly lethal military technologies and argues that because of their negative impact on human well-being and the ecological integrity of the planet, a new capitalist contradiction emerges. This contradiction does not consist in capitalist relations of production fettering the development of the forces of production. Instead, its crux is that the benefits from the continuing development of the forces of production diminish over time, while the threats to human beings and the planet from capitalism’s growing forces of destruction increase. This contradiction cannot, however, be counted on to produce a unified anti-capitalist subject across the planet. Indeed, the paper analyzes how this new contradiction is experienced differently depending on people’s position within the global system, notably depending on their class, gender, race but also depending on whether they live in the global North or the global South. Thus, this contradiction is as likely to divide populations with an interest in the abolition of capitalism and that contradiction as it is to unite them. In short, the article analyzes capitalism’s new contradiction along with this contradiction’s contradictory implications: the growing imperative to replace capitalism with a more democratic economic system but also the obstacles to the creation of a cross-planetary anti-capitalist coalition that this contradiction also raises.