The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics

The more climate change scenarios gain traction throughout the popular imaginary and concerns over environmental degradation mount, the more human population growth is becoming the subject of agitated discussion and debate, as much in the popular media as in scholarly circles.² The debate centers around how many people the earth can support and the ways in which population numbers drive changes in climate. The argument is that the more people there are on the planet, the more GHG emissions will be emitted and the more the earth’s limited resources will be consumed. Surviving the potential health and environmental effects of climate change in large part depends on our ability to adapt and offset the severity of climate change. Because human activities are responsible for the large amounts of GHG emissions that have led to changes in climate, mitigating population growth has become entwined with the political discourse of climate change adaptation and measures to slow it.

In 2011, global human population hit the 7 billion mark. UN demographers estimate that between 2009 and 2050 the world’s population will increase by 2.3 billion people and will peak at a little more than 9 billion. Most growth is projected to occur in the developing world, which will reach 7.9 billion people in 2050.³ The reasons for the growing number of human beings are many: better health, improved average life expectancy, lower mortality and fertility rates, and increasing urbanization and economic growth throughout poorer regions of the world. Food, water, land, and energy resources are being placed under enormous stress, and many predict that these problems will become acute if the situation of population growth goes unchecked.⁴ The IPCC “Special Report on Emission Scenarios” lists population growth alongside economic growth, technological change, and changes in patterns of land and energy use as a key factor driving GHG emissions.⁵

Noted climate scientist James Lovelock explains with his theory of Gaia that the earth is a dynamic yet stable living entity. Put differently, the earth is a single self-regulating physiological system of animate and inanimate matter. Human activities such as deforestation, emission of GHGs, over-fishing of oceans, and so on are disrupting the dynamic equilibrium of the earth, thereby destabilizing the environmental conditions that have been favorable for life on earth as we know it to flourish. The two main culprits Lovelock identifies are fossil fuels and human population growth.⁶ For this reason, Lovelock rallies on the side of efficiently lowering the population growth rate through the introduction of voluntary population controls. He maintains that the solution to overpopulation lies with women. He explains that “when women are given a fair chance to develop their potential they choose voluntarily to be less fecund.”⁷ Yet as a climate scientist Lovelock does not take into account the thornier politics surrounding reproductive policies and programs.

The social and health implications that arose as a consequence of China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1979, are now widely known. One of the primary goals of the one-child policy was to slow dramatically China’s population growth so that by the year 2000 the national population would be 1.2 billion people. If assessed purely on the basis of population numbers, the policy was reasonably successful. In 2000, China’s population was 1.25 billion people, the government estimating that the policy prevented between 250 and 300 million births. Yet at what cost was this goal achieved? Chinese culture and custom favor boys more than girls because boys carry on the family name and are responsible for looking after their parents in old age (they act as a safety net). For this reason, rural couples whose first child is a girl have been allowed to have another child.⁸

The Chinese preference for boy babies unsurprisingly led to a skewed sex ratio. With couples selecting to abort female babies, the number of male births compared to female births increased. Female infant and child mortality rates grew as girls were neglected. Girls were less aggressively treated when they fell ill than their brothers were. In conjunction with this issue, the one-child policy has had broader negative social implications. The scarcity of women has fueled the commercial sex industry along with the illegal trade in abduction and trafficking of women for marriage. Medical scholars have flagged the potential impacts these activities have for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.⁹

Interestingly, India, which does not have national population controls, also has a distorted ratio of boys to girls, which is second to that of China. Female infanticide is common in India because a female child is a financial liability for the family, which has to save for her dowry, whereas a boy can be the source of future income because he is paid a dowry. Despite the fact that dowries were made illegal in 1961, the cultural tradition remains intact. As of 2010, the ratio of boys to girls in India was 1,000 to 914.¹⁰ As in China, the reason for India’s skewed sex population ratio is that the connection among reproduction, culture, society, and economics is complex, and oversimplifying this connection leads to socially unjust solutions.

State family-planning initiatives that aim to lower the birth rate efficiently by regulating the number, timing, and spacing of births are notoriously unjust.¹¹ Betsy Hartmann declares in her groundbreaking analysis of the politics of population control, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, that the population–environment discourse informing family-planning policy in the global South and developing East leads to nothing less than “neofascist” population environmentalism. She demonstrates how efficiency-based programs are intimidating and restrict women’s choices. These programs aspire to achieve numerical targets (often calculated on the basis of number of births or the number of women using contraception), adopt a cafeteria approach in poor communities by presenting women with several contraceptive options and often “encouraging” certain choices (IUDs, sterilization, the contraceptive pill, or implants such as Norplant), or offer programs that use incentives such as rewarding those women who accept contraceptives or who agree to being sterilized.¹² In the context of poverty, family-planning “incentives” that offer food and cash do not enhance a woman’s reproductive choices; they are purely and simply coercive, for there is no “free” choice when you and your family are starving.

With regard to starvation in relationship to overpopulation, Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich have argued that the human race is procreating itself to death.¹³ They use energy as a standard with which to measure the environmental damage of human activities. The picture they create directly challenges the trend to hold poor women of low- and middle-income countries responsible for the depletion of the world’s natural resources and changes in climate. The Ehrlich equation has been used to calculate the environmental impact of population: I = PAT, where I is environmental impact, P is the number of people, A is per capita consumption, and T is environmental damage. The Ehrlichs later introduced a surrogate formula, I = P × Epc, where Epc refers to per capita energy consumption. The surrogate equation provides a more nuanced analysis of the conjunction of population growth and environmental damage because it takes into account the dramatic differences in consumption between the developed and developing world. As a result, the authors reverse the standard conclusion that the rate of reproduction by poor women in the developing world is responsible for global overpopulation. In fact, when the variable of per capita energy consumption is incorporated into the population equation, the result is that the developed world, not the developing world, is shown to be the most overpopulated.

Flattening the population–climate discourse to a question of numbers has had the unfortunate consequence of holding women in developing countries culpable for climate change and environmental degradation, a distortion that some statisticians have sought to rectify. For instance, Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax calculate the carbon legacy of individuals who have a child, factoring into their assessment where a person lives.¹⁴ Their findings show a vast difference between the legacy of a U.S. female who has a child and that of a Bangladeshi female, with the American woman’s legacy (18,500 tons) being two orders of magnitude greater than that of the Bangladeshi female (136 tons). As Murtaugh and Schlax assess the weighted emissions of descendents, they “explore the effects of individual reproductive behavior by tracing a single female’s genetic contribution to future generations and weighing her descendant’s impacts by their relatedness to her.”¹⁵ Although they recognize that a woman from the United States has a greater carbon legacy than a woman from China, they also add that by virtue of China’s large population size its total emissions surpass those of the United States. Hence, we come full circle: the finger of blame once again falls on the reproductive labor of poor women in low- and middle-income countries.

I do not mean to suggest that the intersection of population and climate change be ignored; I am, however, proposing that the intersection be more vigorously put to work. The discourse needs to welcome the critical input of those working on the ground along with those whose research amplifies, as opposed to simplifies, the social, economic, and political costs and risks associated with population-control policies. Criticisms destabilizing the work of family-planning interventions in low- and middle-income countries have led to frustrations such as those expressed by John Bongaarts, Brian O’Neill, and Stuart Gaffin. Although they acknowledge consumption accounts for a big chunk of the climate pie, they also castigate “human rights advocates and women’s groups” for their criticisms of coercive population controls, accusing them of playing a “part in limiting the discussion of the relationship between population and environmental change at the 1992 Earth Summit.”¹⁶ This kind of rejection of constructive and informed criticism reinforces the structural obstacles that disadvantage poor women the world over because it builds a firewall between the social impacts of population-control practices and the environmental politics informing population-control policies. Although Hartmann’s research does the important job of dismantling the firewall, I would suggest that it has the effect of a displacement activity, and, for this reason I believe that if we intend to disassemble the barrier, we need first to defuse the social energies and forces that built the firewall in the first place.

The anxieties over the growing populations in low- and middle-income countries and the projected burdens this growth will pose for mitigating and adapting to climate change does not neatly square with the geopolitical realities of the global economy. If we briefly return to a point I made in chapter 1 concerning China’s carbon emissions—wealthy countries outsource their dirty manufacturing to China—we might be able to recognize the paradox in operation with regard to population. Many people from low- and middle-income countries work in the service industry and in the manufacturing of commodities that meet the consumption needs of wealthy nations. In light of this situation, framing climate change as a problem exacerbated by the growing populations of low- and middle-income countries quite simply shifts responsibility and culpability for climate change away from affluent high-carbon societies.

So how is it that the population–climate discourse came to be defined by the reproductive choices of individuals and more specifically the reproductive choices of poor women from low- and middle-income countries, despite research that points to the high emissions arising from the consumption rates and lifestyle choices of the affluent? The answer to this question lies in part in the influential 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin,¹⁷ whose work carries a strong Malthusian aftertaste. In it, Hardin argued that despite advances in science and technology (genetically modified crops, new agricultural technologies, and so on), the world can support only a finite population because it is biophysically constrained, a position that Lovelock also puts forward. In Hardin’s view, the problem of population growth arises out of human beings’ self-interested nature. Although the earth’s resources are held in common—they are collectively shared—individuals exploit those resources for their own benefit. Hardin maintained that individual rational behavior is characterized by self-interest, and the result is that the individual acts to maximize his or her own benefits even when the costs are collectively incurred.¹⁸ He assumes that the commons dilemma is one of open access—people openly use the earth’s resources without weighing up costs and benefits to others, instead of considering perhaps that they need to restrict the overexploitation of the commons. He was clearly in favor of a utilitarian approach to solving his interpretation of the ecological and social costs of population growth, arguing that the best way to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people is to limit individual freedom by placing constraints on the number of offspring women can produce.

Although Hartmann supports the position that people act out of self-interest when they decide to have several children, contrary to Hardin she looks to the conditions that constrain them to do otherwise. She criticizes Hardin’s lifeboat ethics, which likens the earth to a “lifeboat in which there is not enough food to go around” and which posits the solution as “not to let the poor and the starving on board.”¹⁹ In response, she places reproduction in a broader social, political, economic, and cultural context, clarifying that children are like an asset in poor families. They contribute to the household either by babysitting their younger siblings while their parents work or by working themselves (girls often help collect water or firewood and boys help in the field). Adult children can also take care of their parents when they fall ill. And given the higher infant and child mortality rates that characterize poorer communities (largely due to poor mother or child nutrition or both), parents often have several children to ensure that some survive through to adulthood, at which time they become a safety net for their parents in old age.

Hartmann supports a humanitarian approach to population control, one that starts by challenging inequity and confronting the poverty that arises from this. Her position echoes that of Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, founder and executive director of the Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples’ International Center for Policy Research and Education). Tauli-Corpuz has publicly criticized those who view population growth as the primary cause of climate change: “The main thing is really the lifestyles—the economic development model that’s being pushed…. [I]f you think population is the problem, and undertake centralized ways of controlling population growth, we will be in an even greater mess.”²⁰ In place of the reproductive rights model, she advocates a holistic approach to reproductive health, clarifying that the quality of women’s health is directly proportional to the opportunities and education available to them.

The direct correlation between the number of people, on the one hand, and climate change and environmental depletion, on the other, fails to account for the vast differences in patterns of consumption, which in turn correlate with the unequal distribution of power and resources around the world.²¹ Although some analyses reflect distortions in patterns of consumption across populations, and others recognize the cumulative energy use and emissions effects of individual reproductive choices, all these analyses suffer from one significant blind spot: the individual subject is used as the primary unit of analysis.²² By considering the complex ways in which environment, demography, time, and social resources interact, the notion of an undifferentiated subject is problematized.

Leiwen Jiang and Karen Hardee take an important step in this direction as they underscore the limitations of using the individual person’s consumption patterns as the primary unit of assessment in developing climate change scenarios. They stress that the demographic component used in integrated assessment models assumes that “each individual in a population shares the same productive and consumptive behavior.” They warn that this assumption leads to serious inaccuracies. In response, they recommend that the individual consumption unit be replaced with household size, arguing that the latter is a more reliable variable because the per capita energy consumption of a smaller household is much higher than that of a larger household. They also draw attention to the ways in which consumption patterns change across different kinds of households. For instance, aging and urbanization trends generally drive carbon emissions down.²³

Recent research such as Jiang and Hardee’s raises an intriguing problem for contemporary social and political theory. The liberal notion of the unencumbered individual who is free to express himself or herself and to make choices in the world not only distorts projections for how population impacts climate, but also turns the bodies of poor women in low- and middle-income countries into a political site. Using climate change predictions to push for caps on population growth transforms the meaning of both the environmental and the social issues at stake. As the impoverished reproductive body of the poor becomes the subject of “democratic” discourse (in UN reports, popular media, government policy, NGO programs, allocation of funding, and scientific scrutiny), it is inserted into the public domain.

Something interesting subsequently happens: as the reproductive coding of the bodies of poor women is deterritorialized, those bodies are seamlessly shifted into a liminal space between reproductive and productive labor. By recognizing this shift, I am not intending to valorize as subversive the in-between spaces in which they hover. As Brian Massumi has aptly noted, when theory attempts to overcome the hierarchies implied within dualistic thinking, it too often averts to the in-between spaces of hybridity and bordering in an “effort to find a place for social change again,” the effect of which is to relegate social change to the site of marginality, which is in itself “defined less by location than [by] the evanescence of a momentary parodic rupture.” Massumi incisively remarks that from here the question of how subversion can “react back on the positionalities of departure in a way that might enduringly change them becomes an insoluble problem.”²⁴ In the absence of radically changing how the positionalities on either end of a divide work, the potentially antagonistic character of their relationship is neutralized.

The political problem is less one of how to release a body from occupying an in-between space than one of changing the oppressive positionalities that arise from either side of the divide in which the body is situated. Although the reproductive rights movement might aspire to emancipate women from reproductive labor, as Hartmann’s and Tauli-Corpuz’s work shows, a social and culturally sensitive approach has to address the different ways in which motherhood and reproductive and sexual health are connected to educational and work opportunities. Providing women with the technologies to decide when they will have children is not an inherently emancipatory move if all it means is that the laboring poor female body is then put to work in a context where she has no worker’s rights. Rosi Braidotti aptly states: “All technologies have a strong ‘bio-power’ effect, in that they affect bodies and immerse them in social relations of power, inclusion, and exclusion.”²⁵ This brings the analysis full circle because it means that framing the connection between climate change and population growth as a question of how to achieve reproductive rights is misplaced.

Another pertinent issue is how the reproductive rights movement connects the larger issue of achieving gender justice to the population debates of climate change politics. The reproductive rights approach to population control views its work as redistributing resources by providing women with the resources they need to make a choice over whether they will have a baby or not. It also recognizes that the definition of women in terms of their reproductive labor creates the marginalized social status women occupy, which in turn leads to gender discrimination. Last, it aspires to increase gender parity by providing women with greater access to the reproductive decision-making process.²⁶ However, cracks start appearing when capital infiltrates the reproductive rights movement. This problem is not a normative one; it is a machinic question of how the aims of reproductive rights activists are put to work.

For instance, one of the mechanisms through which reproductive and productive labor socially subordinates the bodies of poor women is the placement of the body’s labor power in the service of capital accumulation. The emancipatory potential of the lived body is regulated as it is inscribed through a socioeconomic discourse of capitalist value. For instance, in the context of women’s reproductive rights, reiteration reinstates the authority not of the “original” meaning (the reproductive body), but of sociopolitical processes that characterize capitalist production and exploitation. By the same token, the iterative process resignifies the reproductive meaning of the bodies of poor women from low- and middle-income countries as liberated (or potentially liberated) by the principles of the liberal democratic state (understood as a secular institution committed to the advancement of individual human rights), and in so doing it locks the affective potential of those bodies between reproductive and productive labor, neither of which changes how labor power is abstracted as part of the larger machinations of capital.

The issue is not just that the meaning of a body changes (passive to active subject) through reiteration, as Jacques Derrida claims in his use of the concept; it is that in the relations that situate and demarcate the potentia (creative power) of bodies in a “liberated” zone, the liveliness of labor power is abstracted and placed in the service of capital. It is therefore not the changed meaning of the body that matters as much as the machinic question of how the body’s affective potential is put to work as part of reproductive and productive labor power. This is why Derrida’s concept of iteration as transformative is depoliticized, not for the usual reasons Derrida is criticized—namely, that the deconstructive project of decentralizing truth values is nihilistic—for such a criticism oversimplifies the Derridean project, which takes care to emphasize that releasing the restraints of absolute Truth is in fact a liberating exercise. Rather, the central role Derrida accords the relational condition of meaning as constituted through the iteration of differences displaces the machinic question of how those relations work.²⁷ Despite the reproductive use of a body to produce the labor force (laboring in pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, and domestic work) that is being transformed by reproductive technologies (Norplant, IUDs, and so on), the change that ensues when reproductive labor and technology interact in this way puts that same body to use as productive labor power working on the sweatshop floor.

In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri envision a liberating role for potentia and immaterial labor, which they understand as a self-creating, mobile, and deskilled labor force.²⁸ In the later Commonwealth, they modify this position, commenting on the complicity between potentia and the biopolitical character of capitalist production. They unpack the technical composition of labor and capitalist forms of exploitation, describing three trends characteristic of the biopolitics of capital: immaterialization, feminization, and migration. Their definition of immaterial labor includes “images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships.” They add: “Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation, and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value.”²⁹ The second trend they identify is the feminization of labor, which they take to mean both the quantitative increase in the number of women entering the wage labor market and the qualitative changes in labor. For example, the work-day unit is no longer so clearly defined by the eight-hour working day; it has been turned into a flexible period, including part-time, contract-based, and informal forms of employment. This temporal smudging of work time and life trails alongside the blurring of productive and reproductive labor. It is also characteristic of what Hardt and Negri describe as “feminized” labor, in which the labor force has become infused with the qualities traditionally associated with work done by women, such as caregiving. The third labor trend is new migratory patterns as more and more women from low- and middle-income countries enter low-skilled, labor-intensive work in addition to jobs traditionally taken by women, such as those in the service sector (as nannies, cleaners, sex workers, and nurses).

By maintaining the Marxist dialectic of struggle, Hardt and Negri revitalize what Massumi describes as the logical consistency of the in-between—not as a “middling being but rather [as] the being of the middle—the being of a relation.”³⁰ Unlike the liminal in-between discussed previously, the ontological conception of the “being of the middle” is conditioned by relationality. Indeed, as Marx identified, the antagonistic nature of this relation is where the potential for political change resides. Hardt and Negri state: “Capitalist production … is becoming biopolitical.”³¹

Hardt and Negri understand the biopolitical dimension of capital to refer to the coupling of commodity production with the production of social life, and the point they make here reminds me of the women I met who were living and working in Dharavi, Mumbai, one of the world’s largest slums. I was struck by just how much the emancipatory promise of immaterial labor had not been met.³² Thus, for these women the regime of appropriation and enclosure through which the biopolitical mode of production operates (under the guise of reproductive rights) is also another expression of the division of labor. It is not that different from the caste system, guilds, or modern industrialization.³³ So although the development of biotechnologies is an indispensable feature of the biopolitical mode of production, as Hardt and Negri outline, for the women of Dharavi the antagonism between labor and capital is still a constitutive political struggle. The struggle over how reproductive technologies are put to work is key here because just as quickly as these women’s bodies are liberated from reproductive labor, they are inserted into the system of productive labor. This situation cuts to the heart of reproductive technologies and the debate over population control as it is tied to climate change politics. The freed bodies of the women in Dharavi have in effect become the structural source of their exploitation. Having fewer babies, they now have more time to work sitting on a dirt floor sorting through the trash the wealthy left behind, without protection, breaks, sick leave, or workers’ compensation.

Reproductive technologies are basically the machinery through which the biopolitical mode of production appropriates the bodies of poor women so that more of the force and energy of material life can be appropriated and enclosed. The more we push population into the foreground, the more consumption rates and the extraction of resources and environmental exploitation needed to sustain commodity production get pushed into the background. Are the poor women from low- and middle-income countries having fewer babies so that the affluent can continue to consume a steady line of cheap commodities that are made by the cheap labor of those selfsame women—for instance, those who have migrated from rural India and now work in the slums of Mumbai because they have more time to do so now that they have fewer children to take care of?

The point is that both reproductive labor and productive labor carry out the same economic function: capital accumulation. From this perspective, hovering in the liminal space between productive and reproductive, labor is itself a relation of production. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain, capitalism works to “decode and deterritorialize the flows” of bodies.³⁴ Simply put, following close behind the deterritorialization of the reproductive determination of bodies is the reterritorialization process waged by capital. As climate justice is presented through the lens of reproductive rights, the bodies of poor women from low- and middle-income countries are reconfigured through the axiomatic of capital’s fulfilling all the three labor trends that Hardt and Negri so aptly identify.

Here we return to the women I visited and spent time listening to in both rural India and the slums of Mumbai at the beginning of 2011. They left me wondering how they experienced the liberation that came from access to family-planning programs. It seemed to me that what this “liberation” had facilitated was merely a shift in location: the same institutionalized power relations defined how their bodies were situated and organized within the social field. That is, the women of the slums may have moved out of the private patriarchal world of the family in rural India, but they were quickly inserted into the private sweatshops of the plastic-recycling center of Dharavi earning 100 rupees a day (approximately $2.25) and returning home each day to a list of domestic chores in a tiny ten-by-ten-foot room/home that had running water for three hours a day and no sewage system. I was left with no doubt as to these women’s creative potential to transform their lives as workingwomen. They proudly spoke of the respect they had gained in the eyes of their husbands because they, too, had become breadwinners, yet I also had no illusions over what this kind of potentia (creative power) could achieve.