SECOND NATURE OF CAPITALISM

Recent decades have witnessed plenty of natural disasters all over the earth. They are neither purely natural nor completely socially produced. They are a new, second nature that has been produced under capitalism.

Nature is no more the nature of Adam and Eve or physical, biological, chemical existence in it.

In pre-capitalist era, nature was still an external, outer part of humans and just used for social purposes. It had a utility for production, consumption, living and geopolitical meaning. In the main, it was a use-value.

Hence, it was still the nature, first nature in which humans were born.

Once it has been fully dominated and controlled through capitalism, a second nature was erected upon it.

Now the nature we have is the second nature whose even the most physical characteristics seeming external to humans are social, capitalist and internal to us.

Nature cannot be considered any more a different category than what is social. It has turned into our second nature, our shell, instrument, raw material, leisure and lost its independent existence.

If it seems to react  against us in the form of disasters, this due to that it has become only our second nature that contradicts our "social nature". 

Floods, hurricanes, nuclear accidents, ozone hole, and even earth wakes, just like hunger, are socially caused or socially received. Environment does not mean the environs of our life, but a component of its production and reproduction. However, it has been reduced to “environs” consisting of natural physical subjects, animate or inanimate.

Despite this, capitalism makes nature an instrument for it as what it does to our bodies. From both of them, it just wants to extract a value. Our bodies are only a source of labour power as for it, nature is only a second nature which is put under its command and rovelved around its own interests and conception.

Thus, we have not only capitalist social relations, but also, capitalist nature, environment, ecosystem, flora and fauna. Even lions, chimpanzees are capitalist as long as they are a part of capitalist relations. What is a lion in a zoo, nothing but an animal slave who works for only food and shelter.

Floods have always existed, as hurricanes, earth wakes have been. But, floods are capitalist as they are related with capitalist urbanization, destruction of water paths and green textures that absorb them naturally. Earth wakes are also capitalist since cities have been constructed through fault lines. As for hunger, it is mainly a capitalist phenomena and a result of the colonial past in Africa whose rural, agricultural communes were changed, rearranged or destroyed by imperialists. As scarcity, poverty are produced by capitalist market on its structural base, hunger, floods or other natural disasters too, are produced by its "second nature". 

Can we blame capitalism for everything? Surely not, but if we have any social or natural area that is purely natural and trans-historical. Is there any such areas? Movement of a geological stratum is not driven by capitalism. However, it is that which determines who lives where and which spaces are produced where and how. 

Adaptation of social life to nature is possible only through a long experience of humans or planning process, which requires the rejection of capitalist market. Planning is the accumulation of old and long rational experiences of humans. 

Today, not only for local and regional scales, but also for global level, humanity needs socialist planning to define what we need, and decide what we can produce and which places and conditions are required to survive humanly. 

Oil is scarce only as it is extracted and circulated as a commodity and nuclear energy becomes another scarce commodity. Next step under capitalism is even sunshine and wind to become scarce commodities. 

From a place where wage levels are low, people has to migrate to another places of higher wages. Wage inequality is against nature but fits the second nature of capitalism, which produces unnecessarily concentrated and unnecessarily empty and poor places. 

Cities are formed according to profit maximization, rent appropriation and minimization of labour costs. Agricultural lands are changed into reserve areas of rent and investment or completely left by producers who do not survive. But urban classes need nutrition. Therefore, seeds have to be genetically changed for productivity. Animal husbandry is not the job of peasants but the profitable investments of global capitalist farmers. However, they do not produce meat, chicken or fish, but a sort of protein. Animals become capitalist commodities that should produce more meat with less input within shorter periods and move far less in small production areas. 

Global trade forces all localities to act on the base of David Ricardo's principle of comparative advantages. A country with a good agricultural tradition should leave agriculture to another part of the world and from which it has to import the goods which it can already produce. Therefore, banana is exported to even the Mediterranean region from Bahamas and meat from Argentina to everywhere as oil and gas from the  Middle East to everywhere in the world. 

Not only Adam Smith's free international market, but pro-socialist Ricardo's principle of "comparative advantages" is the causes of global, natural disasters. Specialized cities, regions and their global division of labour upon the ground of comparative advantages do not recognise nature but only "second nature" of capitalism. Costs of production, transportation and productivity of labour, i.e, ratio of surplus, do not know any human need, problem and solution. 

Oxygen, protein, fauna, flora, seas, forests, living areas of humans cannot be sacrificed to profits, rents and interests of the capitalists.  

Each natural disaster, just like war, is a new subject of capitalist investment. Wars or natural disasters are the same and caused by capitalism and its second nature. 


Next stage of change will be the production of the third nature we cannot define in advance.