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Time contradictions of capitalismAndri W. Stahel aa Teaches Economic History , Autonomous University of Barcelona , Barcelona, SpainPublished online: 25 Feb 2009.

To cite this article: Andri W. Stahel (1999) Time contradictions of capitalism , Capitalism Nature Socialism, 10:1, 101-132,DOI: 10.1080/10455759909358851

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THE SECOND CONTRADICTION

Time Contradictions of Capitalism

By Andri W. Stahel

1. Introduction

The logic of capital is essentially temporal; therefore, tounderstand the inherent contradictions of capitalism, we have tounderstand its temporal dimension.

As Marx noted, capitalism has to be seen as a process in which"the circulation of money as capital...is an end in itself, since theexpansion of value only exists in this continuously renewedmovement."1 The circulation of capital is essentially temporal in that itis an ongoing process, marked by a continuous and progressivetemporality, the time of expanding capital. We are aware that the spatialand temporal aspects are intimately interwoven, constituting adialectical whole where one dimension only exists in relation to, and bymeans of, the other. However, for purpose of analysis, we will separatethem in order to argue that while capital has an inherent tendency toexpand in spatial terms (geographically, increasingly extendingthroughout the globe, as well as socially and ecologically, encom-passing more and more social, cultural, political and biosphericaldomains under its rules), this expansion is subordinated to the temporallogic of its ends: the accumulation of capital itself. As Altvatar put it,"At first space is conquered extensively; subsequently, it is capitalizedintensively."2

* Special thanks are due to Martin O'Connor for his valuable comments on thefirst draft of this article and to Ivan Edwards for his persistency and sense ofhumor revising the final one.1 Marx, O Capital (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilização Brasileira, 1975), p. 171.2 Elmar Altvatar, "Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space,"CNS, 3, November, 1989.

CNS 10(1), March, 1999 101

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To sum-up, the essential means of expansion of capitalism as aspatio-temporal process lies in its spatial dimension, while the essenceof its ends and logic (the expansion and accumulation of capital itself)is given by its temporal dimension.

What Martin O'Connor has referred to as the process of thecapitalization of nature* represents a subordination of biosphericaltemporality to the temporal logic of capital, whenever capital expandsspatially to new natural domains. The fundamental contradictions thatarise in this process are the contradictions between these differenttemporalities, the issue that will constitute the core of the presentanalysis. Further, the aim of this article is to analyze these contra-dictions, which have been termed by James O'Connor the secondcontradiction of capitalism,4 by trying to understand and explain itsunderlying temporal logic.

In the first part, I will briefly discuss the dependency of thecapitalist system on an instrumental, purely quantitative external andabstract time concept (the time of mechanical clocks) at the expense ofthe qualitative, internal and process-related time of systems. In doingso, I will discuss what Polanyi termed the "Utopian character of the self-regulating markets" from the perspective of the different temporalitiesinvolved, particularly the more general and internal time of self-organizing systems (which I will call "systemic time") and themechanical time of the clock (refered to simply as "mechanical time" orin some passages as "chronological time"), which became the centerpiece of the hegemony of the capitalist system and of the organizationof the industrial market economy.

Our definition of systemic time is based on the studies of the ther-modynamics worked out by Prigogine and his followers. As he stated:

Today's physics no longer negates time. Itrecognizes the irreversible time of evolution; therhythmical time of structures whose drive isnourished by the world which passes through them;the bifurcating time of evolution due to instabilityand amplification of fluctuations and evenmicroscopic time...which manifests the indeterminacy

3 Martin O'Connor, "Codependency and Indeterminacy: A Critique of theTheory of Production," CNS, 3, November, 1989; "The System of CapitalizedNature," CNS, 3, 3, September, 1992 and "On the Misadventures of CapitalistNature," CNS, 4, 3, September, 1993.4 See his "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction," CNS,Issue 1, Fall, 1988.

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of the microphysical evolutions. Every complexbeing is constituted by a plurality of times, inter-woven and interrelated according to subtle andmultiple articulations. History, be it of a living beingor of society, can never again be reduced to themonotonous simplicity of a unique time, whether thistime monitors an invariance or whether it follows thepath of a progress or a degradation.5

This "larger time of the thermodynamic becoming"6 implies aradically different conceptual and methodological framework, thatconstitutes the basis for my analysis of the "second contradiction ofcapitalism."

This thermodynamic time is essentially systemic and internal, incontrast to the external and abstract time of the clock. As Prigogine andStengers stated:

Far from equilibrium, the homogeneity of time istwofold destroyed: by the active spatio-temporalstructure which gives to the system the behavior of anorganized totality, characterized by an intrinsicrhythm and dimension, as well as by the historybehind the emergence of those structures.

Thermodynamic time relates, therefore, to a qualitative and non-homogeneous time and the autonomous self-organizing capacity ofsystems, while mechanical time refers to an external, abstract andquantitative time, seen as a line along which events can be placed.More fundamentally, thermodynamic time refers to irreversibility andthe way in which history — irreversible evolution — is introduced inphysics itself. This is contrasted to the concept of mechanical time,which (exported to the social sciences, particularly economics) leadeconomists and other social scientists to seek an ahistorical anduniversal knowledge, thereby extirpating history from social sciences.

We use the term "mechanical" not only because this abstract timewas originally measured by a mechanical device (the mechanical clock,although it makes no difference whether it is measured by electronic or

5 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance (Paris: Gallimard,1996), p. 366. About Prigogine's theories, see also his From Being to Becoming(San Francisco: Freeman, 1980) and his latest La Fin des Certitudes (Paris: Éd.Odile Jacob, 1996). All quotes in this paper refer to La Nouvelle Alliance.6 Ibid., p. 2917 Ibid., p. 228.

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atomic means, as it is presently), but more fundamentally because itrefers to the time concept that lies at the heart of Newtonian mechanics,which shaped modern science paradigmatically. It did so not only inphysics and the other so-called natural sciences, but also in economics.As Georgescu-Roegen put it, "the way this discipline (economics) isnow generally professed, is mechanistic in the same strong sense inwhich we generally believe only Classical mechanics to be."8 In thisarticle, I reinforce Georgescu-Roegen's argument by stressing that thisattachment to the Newtonian paradigm is most importantly theincorporation of a given mechanical time concept, which is an a prioriimplicit assumption that shapes economics as a science, particularly theidea and explanation of economic value.

This Newtonian world-view portrayed the universe as perfectlyordered, made up of passive, separate objects, which are subjected tooutside forces and perform perfectly reversible trajectories. This world-view and its underlying mechanical time concept was intimatelycoupled to the emergence of a mechanical industrial organization ofproduction and the associated appropriation and transformation ofhuman and non-human nature.9

8 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 1. Although Georgescu-Roegen sees this attachment to the Newtonian paradigm as an historical puzzle,it should not surprise us once we consider the fundamental role moderneconomics played in legitimizing the emerging industrial order and how themechanical time concept at the heart of the Newtonian physics was (and still is)coupled to modern social and economic time practice.9 By referring to human nature we are thinking in terms of Marx's classicformulation that humankind with its productive powers, while acting over andtransforming nature, transforms its own nature. We can see this mechanistictransformation of human nature in our present-day clock time centered socialand individual life, to the point that Gault could state that, "Our ubiquitouspossession of clocks not only blinds us to our dependence upon them, it alsodisguises our exit from time. We have robbed ourselves of our sixth sense androbbed ourselves of the sense of the robbery; we have banished ourselves fromtime and never sensed our exile" (Richard Gault, "In and Out of Time,"Environmental Values, 4, 1995, p. 154). This transformation of human naturealso becomes evident in modern labor relations, in the real subordination of thelaborer to the rhythm and time of the mechanical machine, which found itshighest expression in Taylor's "scientific management" and Ford's assemblyline. A magnificent expression of this process can be found in Chaplin's classicModern Times, highlighting the conflictive temporal dimensions of modernlabor organization. See also Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital:The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly

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While talking about systemic time we have to retain Luhman'spoint that "the concept of systems denotes something that is really asystem and thus assumes the responsibility to verify its ownproposition."10 Therefore we are referring not to a way to conceive timefrom a systemic perspective, but more fundamentally to the systemicfeatures of reality itself and thus to a grounded time, the reality ofwhich has to be assessed and verified in terms of this physical andsocio-cultural reality.11

Building on Poincaré's studies, Prigogine noted (as Capra put it)that "resonances occur in all systems involving continual interaction.The phenomena described by Newtonian mechanics, by contrast, aresimple examples involving transitory interactions such as collisions ofbilliard balls without friction, which are always idealizations."12

Prigogine could show that the notion of unique and pre-determinabletrajectories has to be abandoned, since the "general case is the one ofsystems where the notion of a unique trajectory cannot be evoked. Theonly possible description is thus the statistical one in terms of adistribution function."13 Thus, what Prigogine termed the "becoming ofdissipative structures" was shown to be essentially and irreducibly opento novelty. It is in this framework that a picture of a living nature withan irreducible element of unpredictability emerges: "The bifurcatingnature is the one where small differences, insignificant fluctuations,may, if they occur in the right circumstances, take over the wholesystem and promote a new functioning level." This unpredictable,living indeterminacy is not only a feature of the micro-physical level ofquantum physics; it is also a reality in our world of larger systems andeven of the planetary orbits, the symbol of the ordered and predictable

Review Press, 1974) and Simone Weil, A Condição Operária e Outros Estudossobre a Opressäo (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979).10 Niklas Luhmann, Sociedad y Sistema: la ambición de la teoría (Barcelona:Ediciones Paidós, 1990), p. 41.11 For a critical discussion of systems, which is in tune with our perspective inthis paper, see Edgar Morin, La Méthode 1. La Nature de la Nature (Paris: Ed.du Seuil, 1977) and La Méthode II. La Vie de la Vie (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1980).12 Fritjof Capra, "The Time Paradox," Resurgence, 185, November/December,1997, p. 12.

13 Prigogine, op. cit., p. 344.14 Ibid., p. 361.

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Newtonian universe, whose long-term stability can no longer beasserted with certitude.15

It has to be stressed that this "far from equilibrium"thermodynamics is not only the source of destruction (high entropy),but also "that irreversible processes play a constructive role. Theprocesses of this complex and active nature, and our own lives, are onlypossible because they are maintained far from equilibrium by acontinual flux which nourishes them."16 Therefore what I termed"systemic time" is the time by which everything that exists, does so notas isolated and passive objects, but as self-organizing systems incontinuous interaction with other systems. These, in turn, exist withinlarger systems in a continuous dialectical and creative process ofdestruction, as well as of the maintenance of structural identities(Bergson's durée) and of becoming.

A last introductory remark has to be made about this dichotomizeduse of the terms "mechanical" and "systemic" time. As Adams alreadynoted, most social science studies of other times "are characterised by acommon feature: they dichotomise societies into traditional and modernones in which the former ones are constructed through its opposition tothe dominant images of 'our western time.'"17 This way of constructingthe time of "others" ignores the implicit cultural time assumptions ofthe researcher. By doing so, it often serves to establish an unequalpower relation, through which the specific socio-cultural timeconstructs of other human societies are encapsulated in a simplecategory, which often says more about the temporal (implicit)assumptions of the researcher than of the varied, multi-faceted timepractices and conceptions of these societies. Reduced to a simplecategory (which ignores both cultural and historical variability in spaceamong different societies, and also in time due to changes inconceptions and practices of each individual society), their ownhistoricity is denied once they are represented as living in a single,traditional, cyclical and ever-repeating time, in opposition to the linear,historical time of the West. It reduces other societies to empty objects,represented as ahistorical and thus with no intrinsic autonomy anddynamism. Lost in their ahistorical slumber, these societies arevulnerable to being shaken up by spatially expanding capital, bringing(and imposing) its own historical and temporal logic, in the same way

15 Ibid., p. 332.16 Ibid., p. 265.

17 Barbara Adams, Timewatch — The Social Analysis of Time (Oxford:Blackwell Publishers, 1995), p. 28.

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as "nature," portrayed by the mechanistic world-view as being made upof inert objects, is prone to being appropriated and transformed by thesesame forces.

These dichotomizations tend to ignore that "there is no single time,only a multitude of times which interpenetrate and permeate our dailylives." This is true for non-capitalist societies as well as for ourmodern capitalist world. Different qualitative, quantitative, internal,external, linear, cyclical, changing, stable (and so on) patterns can befound in every activity, be it labor in a factory or hunting in a hunter-gatherer community. What changes is the intensity and the relationsestablished between these different patterns. Therefore, our two terms"mechanical" and "systemic" time have to be understood, first of all, asanalytical constructs (in the sense of Weber's "ideal types," which cannever be found as such in reality, but which serve to throw analyticallight on actual concrete reality).1

The 'nature' which our science studies nowadaysis no longer the 'nature' which an unchanging andrepetitive time manages to describe....From now onwe must explore a 'nature' comprised of multiple anddiverging paths of evolution, which invites us not tohold a perception which excludes all other ones, butinstead the coexistence of times irreducibly differentand articulated.20

Both times are in fact intimately related and dialecticallyinterwoven. Both are the basis of two opposite paradigms, the one ofthe new science of complexity, the other the science of simpleelemental behavior. As Prigogine noted,

The first synthesis, the Newtonian synthesis,could not be complete: the universal interaction lawwhose action was described by dynamics cannotaccount for the complex and irreversible behavior ofmatter. As in Newton's time, two sciences areconfronted: the science of gravitation, whichdescribes an atemporal and lawful nature, and thescience of fire, chemistry. Ignis mutat res: we alreadyquoted this ancient device, chemical bodies are the

18 Ibid., p. 12.19 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York:

Free Press, 1969), pp. 87-157.20 Prigogine, op. cit., p. 52.

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creatures of fire, the creatures of the irreversiblebecoming. How is it possible to cross the abyss whichseparates the time of complex processes and the timeequated with the identity of laws, the science ofbecoming and the science of being, two scienceswhich are separated by everything and notwith-standing describe the same world?21

Seen in isolation, both times appear to deny each other. But as adialectical pair, both times only exist by means of and in relation to theother. It is in this interdependency and mutual exclusion that we have tounderstand both times, knowing that every concrete situation ispermeated and constituted by a multiplicity of times. What is importantto retain is the pre-eminence, from the physical point of view, ofsystemic time in contrast to the hegemony of mechanical time-basedpractice and concept in the industrial capitalist system.

In a world made up by systems (living systems, ecosystems,climate systems, socio-cultural systems, etc.), the time of Newtonianmechanics appears as a special case. Nevertheless, it is this timeconcept and logic which is at the heart of the organization of theindustrial market economy and, in more general terms, capital'sappropriation, transformation and organization of reality. It is this "roleinversion," by which the mechanical time concept and practice becamehegemonic (in Gramsci's sense of this term), negating the intrinsicautonomy, interdependency and dynamism of reality, which is at theheart of the contradictions that can be found in the capitalistaccumulation process (here we are thinking not only of the secondcontradiction, derived from the contradiction between the capitalist andbiospherical, natural time, but also of the "first contradiction," theclassical Marxist socio-historical one, which can be read as acontradiction between the different social and individual dimensions ofhuman temporalities (in its multiple biological, socio-cultural, sentient,and self-reflexive dimensions), on the one hand, and the time of theorganization of industrial labor and the market-based order, on theother.

At this point, I will argue that the idea of a second contradictioncan be identified more easily in the works of Polanyi than those ofMarx. We can see this in Polanyi's major book where he discusses theUtopian character of the idea of a self-adjusting market: "Such aninstitution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating

21 Ibid., p. 266

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the human and natural substance of society."22 Marx, on the other hand,by following the path of classical political economy in his economicwritings, distanced himself from a deeper understanding of the human/nature contradiction inherent to the capitalistic system.23

James O'Connor explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness toPolanyi's work, "who remains a shining light in a heaven filled withdying stars and black holes..."24 I believe that Polanyi's analysis ofthree fictitious commodities is particularly revealing in relation to thecontradictions I am discussing, especially when he shows that:

labor, land and money are essential elements ofindustry; they also must be organized in markets; infact these markets form an absolutely vital part of theeconomic system. But labor, land and money areobviously not commodities....Labor is only anothername for a human activity which goes with life itself,which in its turn is not produced for sale but forentirely different reasons, nor can that activity bedetached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized;land is only another name for nature, which is notproduced by man; actual money, finally, is merely atoken of purchasing power which, as a rule, is notproduced at all, but comes into being through themechanism of banking or state finance."25

Here Polanyi implicitly throws an important light on ourdiscussion. Discussing three fictitious commodities that are not

22 Remarking that Polanyi considers the word "utopian" in the sense of the non-realizable, which is essentially contradictory. See Karl Polanyi, The GreatTransformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), p. 3.23 Although in his philosophy of history, the human/nature axis was clearlypresent and he (for example, in his The Critique of the Gotha Programme)explicitly stated that "Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just asmuch the source of use value (and it is surely of such that material wealthconsists!)." As we will discuss later, it is the impossibility of translating thiswealth creation by nature into a quantitative exchange value plus the focus ofthe value theory on the "chronological" aspects of wealth, that are behind (inour interpretation) the progressive ignorance of this "material basis of wealth."For a deeper analysis of the contradiction between Marx's philosophy ofhistory and his economic writings, see Ted Benton, "Marxism and NaturalLimits: an Ecological Critique and Reconstruction," New Left Review, 178,1989.

24 James O'Connor, op. cit., p. 12.25 Polanyi, op. cit., p. 72.

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produced capitalistically, he says that they belong to another temporaldomain than that of capital; and that they are not (nor can they be)produced and controlled according to capital's own temporal logic andneeds. We can hear his words echoed by O'Connor when he statesthat:

the point of departure of 'ecological Marxism' is thecontradiction between capitalist production relationsand productive forces and conditions of production.Neither human laborpower nor external nature norinfrastructure including their space/time dimensionsare produced capitalistically, although capital treatsthese conditions of production as if they arecommodities or commodity capital.26

2. From Becoming to Being: the Emergence of Instrumental Time

The emergence of the capitalistic system was only possiblebecause of a radical shift in social conceptions of time and social timepractices. Many authors have shown that our modern society is basedon the emergence of a mechanical, abstract and purely quantitativetime, to the point that Lewis Mumford, the great historian oftechnology, argued that the key invention for the industrial revolutionwas the mechanical clock, not the steam engine.27

The capitalization of society, which can be seen in the constitutionof the modern labor market, was essentially a conflict concerning timeand control over this time. As Edward Thompson showed, the firstchallenge for the constitution of the labor market was to bring laborunder the new time discipline of capital. The reason is that thealienation of labor in the capitalist system meant (essentially) alienatedtime, which belonged to and had to be controlled from the outsideaccording to the synchronization requirements of emerging mechanicalindustrial production and of the capital accumulation process. It is in

26 James O'Connor, op. cit., p. 23.27 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace andWorld, 1934). See also Jacques Attali, Histoire du Temps (Paris: Fayard, 1982);David Landes, Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1983); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey— The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1986); Edward Thompson, "Tiempo, Disciplinade Trabajo y Capitalismo Industrial," in Tradición, Revuelta y Consciência deClase (Barcelona: Editorial Critica, 1984); Robert Nisbet, Social Change andHistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

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this sense that we can see how the mechanical clock allowed for whatHabermas called instrumental reason to be effective in the factory.28

Richard Gault defined this shift as a shift from kairological tochronological time. Kairological time is defined by him as "a time ofopportunities and events. It is the time of right times, the right time forthings to happen."29 The same idea can be found in Heidegger's readingof the Sentence of Anaximandre, who stated that "everything thatpresents itself lasts its own time...."30 Here we can find, at the culturallevel, a time concept in keeping with the insights gained by Prigogineat the physical level and which we discussed briefly in our definition ofwhat we termed systemic time. This qualitative, internal, relative andprocess-related time is found to be the central time representation ofmost non-capitalist societies, where there is a time for everything andeverything has its own time. There is the time of the Gods, the sacredtime of rituals and myths, the time of society, the time of other naturalbeings and the time of the different social and yearly seasons.31

However, by considering time as an external line of measurement,along which things happen, modern man has placed himself outsidetime and thus has made himself potentially manageable from anexternally given capitalist time discipline — the time of the machinesand of capital's accumulation process.

By emphasizing the intimate relation between the scientific worldand the more general cultural milieu, Prigogine and Stengers threwlight on how it could come at the moment when the irreversible marchof history became self-evident (with the industrial revolution and thefiery spectacle of the new steam engine), the scientist could stick to theNewtonian universe, in which ordered and reversible trajectories existoutside time. Classical science, although non-reducible to this uniqueaspect was, in fact, one facet of the instrumental reason which was one

28 Thompson, op. cit. And Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of CommunicativeAction (London: Heinemann, 1984). See also Schivelbusch (op. cit.) about theimportance of the railway system's requirement for the emergence of a singleand homogeneous national time concept. In all these studies, it is clear how thischange has never been a linear, homogeneous transition, but essentially aconflictive process in which contradictory ways to conceive humankind, societyand its relation to the environment clashed.

29 Gault, op. cit., p. 155.30 Martin Heidegger, A Sentença de Anaximandro; Os Pensadores/ Os Pré-

Socráticos (São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1978), p. 3431 See Almir Andrade, As Duas Faces do Tempo-Ensaio Crítico sobre os

Fundamentos da Filosofia Dialética (São Paulo: Edusp, 1971), Chapter 15.

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foundation of the emerging market society, based on mechanical timeconception and practices.

Central to capital's forward drive (which is the time of the capital'srealization process), is the need to act over reality, to transform thisreality. This was made possible within a world view which portrayednature as essentially passive, mere objects, separate and existing outsideof time, whose deterministic trajectories were given by the externalforces applied on them. It was in this sense that the equation betweenknowledge and domination could be made, since the knowledge of thelaws governing the trajectories of these passive objects would allowhumans and their productive forces to control and determine theirevolution.

It is only within the mechanical time concept that the idea ofplanning and of a technocratic control of reality may be conceived. InGault's words:

Today forecasting and planning are so commonthat it is difficult to appreciate their relative novelty.In kairological time planning is inconceivable. Thosedwelling in kairological time cannot determine inadvance the right time to do this or that. They awaitthe unknown future and prepare to respond to it.Response is vital, since the kairological futuredelivers, not a pre-determined, fully-formed present,but opportunities and challenges. It is the humanresponse to the possibilities which emerge from thefuture which actually yield the present.32

Only in a time concept devoid of intrinsic quality can the future appearas deprived of any substance, fully open to the determination of thosewho control and manipulate the forces or energies that will lead todeterministic and predictable trajectories of passive objects.

Nevertheless, it is within the emerging picture of a living natureand its internal, autonomous and irreducible creative time that we canlook for answers to the present crisis and also why "The problem ofaccident...emerges directly as a dialectical by-product of the Enlighten-ment ideology of mastery of nature by technology. It is a sign of notjust the non-realization, but of the non-realizability of perfect functionalcontrol."33

32 Gault, op. cit., p. 156.33 Martin O'Connor, 1989, op. cit., p. 23.

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This picture explains why, in a what Gault termed a kairologicalculture, human beings have to be prepared to answer the challengewhich the future presents, once things present themselves. In thispicture, the relation of people to other beings can no longer be one ofdomination, a monologue in which man imposes his will on reality, buta necessary dialogue between beings in co-evolution.

3. Mechanical Time and Economic Value

Behind every commodity there is a production time that includesnot only human social labor (which in our society gives its commodityform to different products) but also the working of the more generalsystemic time of different natural, social and cultural processes.Through these different evolutionary processes, complex new structuresand organizations of matter and energy are created in what Reevescalled the "constitution of the different complexity steps."34 InPrigogine's analysis, this process is discussed as the "becoming ofdissipative structures," where order emerges from fluctuation andsystems are kept in a state which is far from thermodynamic, lowenergy equilibrium. This evolution encompasses the differentcosmological processes that produced our solar system and the differentchemical elements of our primitive earth, up to the geo-bio-physio-logical processes of the creative evolution of this planet whichdetermine the present chemical composition and distribution, as well asthe complex structures, of the living matter of our present world. Thissystem is maintained in an "evolutionary balance," far fromthermodynamic equilibrium (in a tension at many levels of change andmaintenance, organization and disorganization, order and chaos, asMorin has noted).35

Therefore, compared to "dead" planets, which are more or lessclose to a thermodynamic equilibrium state, the Earth is characterizedby the high improbability of the constitution of its atmosphere, oceansand terrestrial ecosystems, where highly reactive chemical elements andliving forms (as prey and predators) co-exist in a dynamic "far fromequilibrium" balance.

The constitution of modern economics has as its focus humanmechanical production time, ignoring the more general systemic one.The very example of the beaver and the deer, by which Smithintroduced his labor value theory and constituted the British political

34 Hubert Reeves, L'heure de s'enivrer — L'univers a-t-il un sens? (Paris: Ed.du Seuil, 1986).

35 Morin, op. cit.

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economy tradition in opposition to the French Physiocrats, could,according to our discussion here, be read the other way around tocontradict what Smith wanted to prove. Whilst the Physiocrats saw inthe working of nature the only true source of a surplus value (produitnet), Smith argued that value had to be necessarily given by the laborrequired to hunt the animals and bring them to the market. We can seethat Smith considered only the market value (exchange value) of acommodity, and ignored the fact that the animals had to be "produced"by the systemic time dialectics of the ecosystem in which they evolvedand, ultimately, by an evolutionary history which goes back to theorigins of our universe, a process which, as Prigogine showed, isneither repeatable nor predetermined.36 Once extinct, there is no humanproduction process which can produce new value in terms of beavers.Thus, value had to be produced by nature initially, whether we considerit as God's gift, as the Physiocrats did, or whether we consider it interms of the unique and irreversible history of the evolution ofdissipative structures in terms of "far from equilibrium"thermodynamics.

Smith clearly reasoned in terms of a mechanical time and by doingso he changed the focus of economic theory from natural time to humanproduction time. It is this same reasoning that is behind the modernprejudice that sees pre-industrial societies as deprived and theireconomies as subsistence economies, in sharp contrast with, forexample, the first impressions gained by the Europeans who describedthe exuberance and natural richness of pre-colonial America andAfrica, as well as modern anthropological research which shows therelatively little time spent by those societies in order to assure theirsubsistence.37 With their social and cultural structure inserted in theoverall systemic time dialectics (although, as Ponting's analysis shows,not without contradictions), these societies based their economicstructure on "mining" the wealth created by the free (or directed)38

systemic time of the natural processes, as Smith's hunters did. As aresult of the colonization of these areas, the systemic dynamics were

36 Prigogine, op. cit. and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes ofthe Wealth of Nations (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 53.37 See for example Pierre Alphandéry, et al., O Equívoco Ecológico (São Paulo:Ed. Brasiliense, 1992); Edward Goldsmith, The Way —An Ecological World-View (London: Rider, 1992); Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World(London: Penguin Books, 1992).38 Since even in hunter-gatherer societies directed intervention in the ecosystemcan be found, as in the cases of proto-agricultural species selection and otherpractices to increase the basis of human subsistence.

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disrupted and replaced by the mechanical time logic of capital. It is thisprocess of capitalization of nature and capitalization of society broughtby the colonization process and later on by economic development, andnot the contrary (a lack of sufficient economic development) that reallydeprived these societies and regions, opening the door to modernmanifestations of famine and misery which can be found incontemporary Africa, Asia and the Americas.

As Vandana Shiva showed, the very idea of development placedthose societies within the hegemonic temporal framework of capitalistsocieties, by representing them as immature and incomplete, thereforerequiring a process of development, seen as a series of linear steps, inorder to attain maturity. This development, centered on the pursuit ofeconomic growth and an accelerated process of modernization, meantthe displacement of the previous spatio-temporal order in favor of amarket-oriented and mechanical time-based organization andappropriation of natural and socio-cultural space. We can see thisprocess happening with the introduction of modern agriculturaltechniques, the "green revolution," displacing local-based, subsistence-oriented multiple and diversified traditional farming; or in the rapidindustrialization process of these countries, with the constitution of agrowing labor market, rapid urbanization, professional and technicalschools (to provide skilled labor), and so on. The first thing immigrantswho have been displaced by the export-oriented "green revolution" inthe countryside learn in the growing urban centers, in technical schoolsor in their new job (if they get one), is to organize their life according tothe clock-time discipline, leaving behind the communal and naturalcycles-based time practice they were used to.39

On a national level, we can see this transformation carried out bythe "entrepreneur-state," creating the "pre-conditions" for developmentand aiming to attract foreign transnational capital: space is occupiedand transformed by the building of new roads and dams; electricity isdistributed throughout the whole territory; and with the introduction ofthe mass media, particularly nation-wide television, even the mostremote households are tuned, at a given hour, to the evening news or topopular television series which every day display the urban livingrhythm and the vast array of new consumer goods made available (evenif only on an imaginary level) by the national development effort.

39 Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston:South End Press, 1997) and for an analysis of how the "green revolution"brought famine and disrupted traditional societies, see Vandana Shiva, TheViolence of the Green Revolution (Penang: Third World Network, 1991).

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Modern state planning follows a clearly instrumental time logic, bywhich things are seen in an instrumental way, as means to perform agiven end, ignoring the multiple dimensions by which every new thingaffects and inserts itself in the web of systemic dialectics. For example,seen as a simple cause-effect link of a linear development flux, a damproduces energy and a new road allows trucks to carry soybeans to theexport port. Their multiple environmental and socio-cultural effects areignored, although the violent and accelerated disruption of theenvironmental and socio-cultural dynamics which accompany themshould be self-evident. At this point, centralized states have beenpowerful allies of development, as in Latin American militarydictatorships; in the rapid industrialization of Southeast Asia's"dragons" and "tigers;" and in the former Soviet bloc and present-dayChina. These centralized regimes were able to impose this mechanicaltime logic regardless of the other temporalities involved. The highecological and social cost of these development processes is, in fact, agood example of the temporal contradictions we are discussing.

But this imposition goes way beyond the political imposition bymeans of force. Ivan Illich, in his studies of the dynamics of theindustrial system, already showed how once a sub-system goes beyonda given limit it tends to impose its logic and rationality on the wholesociety through what he termed a "radical monopoly."4 The importantpoint for our analysis is that this radical monopoly is primarily themonopoly of the hegemonic capitalist temporality, in terms of itsimplicit mechanical time framework, that shapes our perception ofreality and leads voters, in modern democratic states, to vote for givenpolitical options.41

4. Chronos, Entropy and the Market

As noted, behind everything that exists lies the workings of acomplex systemic time dialectic linking the different geo-bio-physiological processes of life on earth, continuously creating (anddestroying) new forms and re-creating in turn the conditions for theirown existence. These processes have resulted in the earth being kept in

40 Ivan Illich, La Convivialité (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1973).41 At this point it may be useful to remember Habermas's critique thatdemocracy (including in the modern bourgeoise sense) implies not only theequal right to express one's opinions and share of the volonté générale in thepolitical vote market, but requires, first of all, equal access to the formation ofthis volonté générale, that is to say, equal access to the social communicationand information premises which shape the dominant world-view (JürgenHabermas, Legitimation Crisis [Boston: Beacon, 1975]).

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a "far from equilibrium," low entropy state for about 3.5 billion years.Here we can see that low entropy has to be seen as a system's property,rather than as a property that can be assigned to the object (which is thedefinition that emerges by studying thermodynamics within theclassical framework of mechanics — the way thermodynamics started,in fact — and which Prigogine studied as the first step of thermo-dynamics). It is in the system's dynamics that we can find low entropy,in contrast to the inert and stable death order of high entropy states. It isthis entropie distance that prevents our sun, with its violent nuclearreactions and radiation, in tension with gravitational forces keeping ittogether, from becoming a dead black star, our sun's most probablefuture. This entropie distance also separates our living earth systemfrom Mars, or, at an intermediate level, the distance between anexuberant tropical forest, with its myriad of living organisms, cyclesand internal and external relationships, and the pasture land that mayreplace the forest. This entropie distance, too, separates traditionalagriculture practices, with their huge variety of interrelated species,crops and techniques, from modern agricultural monocultures. Thelatter are much closer to thermodynamic equilibrium and morevulnerable to outside environmental fluctuations such as temperaturevariations and pests, and thus are closer to collapsing into a highentropy order.

In the latter example, we can see how the low entropy equilibriumof industrial systems can only be achieved by a huge external influx ofenergy and matter (in the case of industrial commercial agriculture,fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically transformed seeds), debilitatingother systems, while at the same time being less stable and complex.This, in turn, is the consequence of the replacement of the previousinternal systemic dialectics (whereby the ecosystem as a wholeperformed a wide range of functions such as soil erosion control byforests and vegetation, material recycling and fixation of atmosphericnutrients by the biota, pest control by species balance, and localhumidity and climate control) by a human labor-and-energy-intensiveproduction based on a mechanical, linear organization logic. 2

It is this definition of low entropy as a "far from thermodynamic"equilibrium state that we will use to define wealth, in sharp contrast toeconomic value which is the result of the human appropriation and

42 A good example of the basic differences between a systemic-based and amechanical time logic-based production can be found in the discussions ofpermaculture, for example, in Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture(Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1991).

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transformation process. The former refers to "far from equilibrium,"self-organizing structures which enhance the equally "far fromequilibrium" dynamics of the system as a whole, while the latter refersto the economic appropriation and transformation of this wealth forhuman use, which is often obtained at the expense of the self-sustainingcapacities of the system.

As an emergent system's property, low entropy is based on, butcannot be reduced to, its parts. It is an emergent property and dependsnot only on the constituent elements but, most of all, on the proportionwithin and the links created between elements. Here again we find avital difference between systemic and mechanical time: while the lattercan be considered in a reductionist way, as a discrete interval with nointrinsic quality, or as simple linearity, systemic becoming is essentiallydialectical and has to be understood within the complexity of theinterrelations whereby the whole system and its parts are bothdependent upon and inseparable from one another.43 Reality can nolonger be described in terms of single quantities and isolated objects,but has to be understood in terms of proportions, qualities and dynamicrelations. Centered on mechanical time practice and conception, itshould not surprise us that, as Illich pointed out, one of the mainaspects of Western modernity is the loss of the notion ofproportionality, a central aspect of the non-modern cultural tradition.

Everything that exists is thus a link within the web of systemictime dialectics. As a process, it is as much the emergence of pastdialectics as it is the basis for future emergent systems. With humanintervention another temporality is added into the global process.45 As ahistorical being, human beings' material practices will reflect differentcultural and historical temporalities and rationalities which, in turn, willlead to different human/nature dialectics.

We've already seen how deeply the capitalist historical order isgrounded in a mechanical time concept and practice. Moreover, as

43 See Morin, op. cit.44 Ivan Illich and Matthias Rieger, "The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr,"Resurgence, 184, September/October, 1997 and "Beauty in Proportions,"Resurgence, 185, November/December, 1997.

45 In order to avoid an anthropocentric and modernist bias it has to be noted thatwhat characterizes all living beings and systems is their active intervention inthe dynamics of the whole; thus we have to acknowledge that to interfere inecological processes is a prerogative not only of human beings or of capitalistsociety. Our present intervention is meant to be historically specific and has tobe understood as such, which is the purpose of our discussion here.

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Polanyi noted, the "Civilization of the nineteenth century was uniqueprecisely in that it centered on a definite institutional mechanism....Market economy is an institutional structure which, as we all too easilyforget, has been present at no time except our own, and even then it wasonly partially present."46 As he showed, "market economy implies aself-regulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it isan economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices."47

A society based on markets means a society based on quantitativeindicators as its major driving force. In Marxist terms, this is a societycentered on the commodity form and exchange value, rather than onuse value. Such a society could only emerge in the framework of aquantitative and abstract time conception in which the concept andpractices of homogeneous and mechanical time predominate overqualitative systemic time, both in production and distribution.

Everything and every being is the product of different timedialectics and thus incorporates past time dynamics; in capitalistsociety, however, based on the commodity form, the balance of thesedifferent time dialectics is supposed to be maintained through theregulatory workings of the market mechanism. To work, the systemrequires time to be translated into prices, that is, "time is money."Nevertheless, the translation of time into prices only works in the caseof the quantitative mechanical time of human production. As we willsee, it is impossible to translate effectively the qualitative, creative andirreversible systemic time into a quantitative price system. Therefore,the market will fail as a regulator of the general time dialectics onceprices, on which the decisions of the different social actors are based,necessarily fail as an accurate time index.

The reason is that, in their commodity form, things are alreadyconsidered as objects, isolated and out of time, to which a price can beassessed. But if we consider things as parts of a dialectical process intime, products of past dialectics and irreversibly affecting future ones,there is no longer a unique, fixed quantitative time index that can reflecttheir role within the more general systemic time dialectics, whichdepends on proportions, qualities and the kinds of links created withinchanging conditions, among other factors. In short, prices as accuratetime indexes would have to be timely and dialectically changingthemselves.

46 Polanyi, op. cit., p. 37.47 Ibid., p. 43

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The translation of mechanical production time into value andprices is the essence of value theory in economics. In the classical, and,later, the Marxist tradition, this was studied in terms of how abstractsimple labor expended in time can be seen to incorporate its value intoa product, which, according to historical distribution conditions, will betranslated into prices. Here prices are a "time index." They reflect theincorporated human labor time in a given commodity. Nevertheless,prices are very limited, as they ignore the incorporated creative time ofastronomical, geological, biological and cultural evolutionaryprocesses. To come back to Smith's example, they represent thehunter's labor time, but not the beaver's and the deer's existential time,much less the working of the ecosystem as a whole or the culturaldynamics within which these hunters emerge.

There is no way to translate systemic time into a price system,since this existential time is essentially qualitative and unique. Creativetime, for example, of artistic production or intellectual insights, cannotbe reduced or evaluated by means of quantitative time expended. Thistime is discontinuous and relates to a qualitative, internal time. Marketcompetition, on the other hand, requires (as classical political economyalready acknowledged) the common basis of exchange value, abstractedfrom the uniqueness and qualities of the different use values. It requiresthat working time (whether of machines or humans) be translated into aquantitative price system. It is only in the case of a monopolistic use ofresources, or when prices are fixed by extra-market means, that theyreflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the working of a systemicproduction process. But in this case the working of the marketregulatory process is impaired and the conditions of capitalistproduction are, to use James O'Connor's term, politicized.48

Thus, qualitative and unique time only appears as a constituent partof prices in monopoly situations, as in the case of non-reproduciblecreation mentioned by Ricardo or of Schumpeter's entrepreneurs whomake extraordinary profits (or rents) for a while, before their creativeinnovations become widespread and routine. Another example:restricted access to a natural resource allows those who control thisresource to impose monopoly prices, and thus appropriate thebiospherical evolutionary time incorporated within this commodity, asin the case of oil and natural gas; or when intellectual property rightsassure monopoly rights for those who own them. In these cases, prices

48 James O'Connor, op. cit.49 While in the case of natural resources, monopoly is granted by geographicaland geological factors (that is, the control of space), in the latter this monopoly

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reflect a political, qualitative and subjective situation, not the requiredeconomic logic of incorporated value time.

Ricardo, in his value theory, had already excepted the domain ofart production from the laws of incorporated labor. The reason isrevealing: every work of art is unique, the fruit of a non-repeatablecreative act. Each work pertains to the irreversible time domain ofsystemic "becoming processes" and not to the repeatable domain ofmechanical production. Its value is a monopoly value, which cannot begiven by purely economic means.50 It is only when "art" is produced as

has to be ensured by legal means. The traditional argument for such propertyrights — that this is the only way to stimulate investment on research and thusenable their capitalization — clearly shows that you cannot treat the systemicdomain by applying the market competition principle. This is particularly clearin the case of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge of plant medicine andagricultural varieties. Both are the consequence of a long systemic biosphericand socio-cultural dialectics and were up until now kept outside the capitalistmarket as common heritage. The capitalization of this domain passes throughthe establishment of monopoly rights which will ensure the capitalization ofthis wealth by the big bio-chemical multinationals in what has been (rightly)termed biopiracy, which is nothing other than the appropriation of this systemicdomain by the market by means of power. For this discussion see Shiva, op.cit.; Joan Martinez-Alier, "The Merchandising of Biodiversity," CNS, 7, 1,March, 1996; and Laymert Garcia dos Santos, "A Biodiversidade e a Questãodos Direitos Intelectuais," Ambiente & Sociedade, 1, 1, 1997.50 As Ricardo stated, "there are some commodities the value of which isdetermined by their scarcity alone. No labour can increase the quantity of suchgoods, and therefore their value cannot be lowered by an increased supply.Some rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of peculiarquality, which can be made only from grapes grown on a particular soil, ofwhich there is a very limited quantity, are all of this description." (DavidRicardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, in Piero Sraffa,ed., The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo [Cambridge: UniversityPress, 1970], p. 12.)

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a commodity, in the time of its mechanical reproduction (to take WalterBenjamin's classical idea), that it is subjected to the laws of marketcompetition and the laws of economic value production. This is thecase in the modern music and film industries, or when great art worksare reproduced and sold as T-shirts, posters or classical musiccollections.

The same line of reasoning can be followed if we consider creativetechnical innovations. A linear time reasoning cannot be applied to thecreative functioning of the human mind, and therefore the applicationof market regulation to this domain becomes very uncertain andineffective. The way capital tries to avoid this problem is through akind of "large numbers" law: through large research groups you canhope to get an average comparative advantage in gaining innovativebreakthroughs.

Another way capital has of controlling the process of humancreative activity is by maintaining the vital distinction betweeninventions and innovations. While inventions are hard to bring underthe control of capital (since they belong to an essentially differenttemporality), innovations (in the Shumpeterian sense of the economicmarket application of previous inventions) need, in contemporary largemarkets, the financial, commercial, technical, and logistical basisprovided by large capitals. In this way, their economic exploitation canbe brought under the control of these capitals. By deliberatelyseparating the time of inventions from the time of innovations, and byprotecting the former through patents and intellectual property rights,capital tries to avoid disturbances and threats that would represent thefree irruption of the discontinuous temporality of creative time into therequired common basis of free-market regulation.

In fact, patents and intellectual property rights are monopoly rights,and in this example, we can see the highly politicized way in whichsystemic time is translated into prices (the only way through which thistranslation can be done). Once they are tradable, they are subjected toone-dimensional market logic and begin to be treated "as i f they werecommodités. While, on the one hand, this monopolistic barrierthreatens the working of free-market regulation, on the other, it protectscapital's temporality by allowing it to apply the temporal logic ofcapital's accumulation to the innovation process once the disruptivetemporality of inventions is controlled and politically protected.

In this case, we can see a fundamental trait of the dialecticsbetween these two temporalities, namely, that the social mechanicaltime of capitalistic production is, in fact, dependent on the more general

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systemic time of creative evolutionary processes, be it in terms of thehuman ability to create new forms and inventions, or in terms of thecosmological, geological and biospherical creative time dialecticswhich created the physical basis of all economic activity and ofexistence itself. Notwithstanding, one central aspect of the capitalisttime dynamic is that it tends to hide its dependency on this systemictime and even to ignore it completely in the social process of valuecreation and in the workings of its price system. In this sense, we cansee that commodity fetishism is not only hiding the social and politicalconditions of the production and reproduction of capital, but also thesystemic time dynamics which are essential for the working of thissystem. This latter veil is even more important in the sense that whileprices reflect value (and thus social mechanical production time), theytend to completely ignore the working of the systemic time on whichthis process is based.

The economic value of capitalized nature is given by theincorporated labor to get it from nature to the market, ignoring its realproduction cost and time. The absence of extra-market restrictions (bethey cultural, political, or monopolistic), that is, the introduction offree-market competition, causes them to be subjected to the labortheory of value, in which value is given only in terms of incorporatedhuman labor. As we saw, human labor time is only a very minor part ofthe complex time dialectics that lie behind a product, merely the laststage when matter and energy are assembled in its commodity form.But it is the only time which is relevant for economic value, and is thusthe only time that will be reflected in prices. As long as there is freeaccess to natural resources (or human inventions, reflecting the workingof a systemic time on a human level), prices will ignore systemic timedynamics. At this point, not only do the qualitative relations betweenhumans appear as quantitative relations between things in the market,but also these quantitative relations ignore and hide the creativeworking of past systemic time dialectics to which these things in factowe their existence.

It is this ignorance of the underlying systemic time dialectics whichlies behind problems related to the loss of biodiversity. The presentrichness and complexity of life on our planet is the fruit of a long,irreversible and complex systemic time, in which the differentastronomical, geological, chemical, physical, biological, social (if weconsider the different species) and cultural (if we consider humanintervention) time dialectics were articulated. It is a time which, asGault pointed out in his analysis of kairological time, reaches deep intothe past and far into the future, by contrast to the narrow horizon of

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mechanical time.51 Biodiversity, too, becomes an integral part of thispast-future axis, in which the importance of a single element (orspecies) lies not only in its present actual or potential use, but in theway different species which may be irreversibly lost could be crucialfor future "far from equilibrium" systems.

Only within a mechanical time framework can the economicvaluation of single species be conceived. It is only within thisframework, too, that the global value of an ecosystem's biodiversitycan be expected to be obtained by simple summing-up of single values,ignoring the emergent properties which arise from the interrelations andinterdependencies of the different species within the whole.

5. Market Prices and Time

To sum-up, in a system based on free-market regulation, priceshave to accurately reflect the underlying time dialectics in order toensure the stability of the system. But, in fact, there are only two waysin which prices, as a quantitative index, may relate to creative,qualitative systemic time, which is at the heart of all geo-biosphericaland human creative production. Both are essentially contradictory andtend to impair the system itself, thus revealing the essentialcontradiction of a system based on the free market, and thereby ofprices as the market's main organizing and driving force.

One is by simply ignoring systemic time and consider value solelyin terms of human incorporated labor time (or production time/cost, inthe neoclassical formulation), which can be organized in terms ofmechanical time discipline. Value is dissociated from wealth and thewhole society is organized around the commodity form and thesupremacy of exchange value over use value (in Marx's terms) andsubjected to a continuous process of rationalization (in Weber'sterms).52

The main contradiction of this solution is that, although it allowsthe constitution of a market society, it ignores the fact that society andlife itself are tributaries of systemic time dialectics, and thatquantitative and abstract mechanical time is only a minor aspect of timeitself. As we saw, mechanical time is a tributary of systemic time andvalue is a tributary of previously created wealth (which we can see ingeneral terms as a system's negentropy). Moreover, the essential

51 Gault, op. cit., pp. 151-5252 In this example, we can clearly see that Weber's rationalization process is, in

fact, the way in which society and the social appropriation of nature is moreand more organized in terms of (and around) a mechanical time discipline.

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dynamism of the capitalistic continuous creative destruction process isbased on an essential human feature which is irreducible to the logic ofmechanical time. The creative workings of the human mind cannot beconsidered in terms of a "homogeneous abstract labor time" whichincorporates value to the final product.

Once the fundamental decisions in the system are based on priceswhich only reflect value and thus incorporated mechanical labor time,the market will at best regulate mechanical time dynamics (theeconomic conditions of production and distribution), while unable toregulate the systemic time dialectics which are crucial for thesustainability and maintenance of the system as a whole.

The second way to articulate prices in terms of underlying systemictime dynamics is by trying to fix prices through non-marketmechanisms, by political and legal means. This means prices aredissociated from value (in the economic sense that prices no longerreflect the incorporated labor time or production cost) by trying to makethem reflect real wealth.

There are two main contradictions inherent in this solution. Thefirst one is that it impairs the functioning of the free market itself andthus of the free-market society as a whole by promoting what JamesO'Connor terms more social forms of production conditions, and whatPolanyi saw in terms of the impairment of self-regulation and the riseof protectionism and political intervention.53

The second contradiction is that quality is irreducible to quantity. Itis impossible to internalize qualitative and complex externalities, as aremost negative environmental, political, cultural and social side-effectsof the workings of the economic system (which threaten to impair thesocio-economic sustainability of the system). In other words, even iffixed by non-market means, prices will fail to fully reflect theunderlying systemic time dialectics and thus cannot ensure asustainable market society.

53 Here it is important to bear in mind the classical and Marxist thesis that, onthe aggregate level, value equals price and that differences between price andvalue on the local level, due to monopolistic or non-economic distributionfactors, represent a net transfer of surplus value between the different sectors,and, in Polanyi's analysis, help explain the rise of the authoritarian regimes ofthe 1930s, which should warn us about the risks of the present neo-liberalglobalization process (Polanyi, op. cit. and James O'Connor, op. cit).

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As I argued previously,54 the internalization of these externalitiesimplies that the qualitative effects and imbalances due to the workingof the economic system have to be translated into a quantitative priceand that this quantitative price will lead, through the workings of theregulatory market mechanism, to the actions required by the differentagents involved in the socio-economic process. Both assumptions arewrong. Externalities are qualitatively changing over time and dependon a huge variety of other factors. The effect and importance of anisolated factor also depends and varies according to its conjunction withother factors. Thus, proportions are more important than the singleisolated quantity. These subtle and changing nuances cannot betranslated into an unique, fixed and abstract quantity. Moreover, once agiven externality is fixed by non-market means and translated into aprice, nothing assures that the aggregate consumption and the use of theresources will be kept within the required proportions, that is, that thequantitative price will be translated into the required qualitativebalances.

6. Two Examples in Brief

As Martinez-Alier argued for the case of biodiversity and modernagriculture, "the increase in production for the market spoils the veryconditions necessary for this production, namely agriculturalbiodiversity."55 This agricultural biodiversity and knowledge (as well asthe case of traditional medicine) were built up within a long process ofcultural and social dialectics of particular societies. The very fact thatyou cannot translate this evolutive process into a single market price,and that these practices are still inserted within systemic social andcultural practices, places them out of the market and out of theaccumulation circuits of capital based on mechanical time. The way tocapitalize them is to insert these communities within the modern marketcircuits and subject their organization logic to the temporal logic of themarket. Another way is what Vandana Shiva calls "biopiracy," that is,the appropriation by capital of inherited cultural and biologicalknowledge and wealth by means of intellectual property rights. Here wesee again that systemic time can only be capitalized in terms of amonopoly price, which, in this case, is appropriated by the bigmultinational chemical and pharmaceutical companies who imposetheir regime of property rights on traditional communities. Geneticengineering does not create new genes, nor do most medicines

54 Andri W. Stahel, "Capitalismo e Entropia: os Aspectos Ideológicos de umaContradição," in Clóvis Cavalcanti, ed., Desenvolvimento e Natureza: Estudospara urna Sociedade Sustentável (São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 1995).55 Martinez-Alier, op. cit., p. 44.

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incorporate new active substances. They only capitalize them by givingthem their commodity form through human manipulation.

Another case where we can clearly see these contradictions is theexample of fossil fuel consumption and the greenhouse effect. Thepresently existing fossil fuel stocks are the product of long and complextime dialectics of geo-biochemical evolution of the living earth system.It includes many time processes such as plate tectonics, volcanicactivities, physical soil erosion and sea sedimentation, biological andecosystem processes and regulations, and so on. These complexprocesses have been the way by which, until now, the increasingradiation of the sun has been counterbalanced, resulting in a remarkabletemperature stability over the ages (with periodic fluctuations reflectedby different ice ages). Moreover, through these geo-bio-physiologicalprocesses, vital proportions of O2 and O3? as well as other gases (likemethane, SO2, etc.) were retained and recycled within the biosphere,assuring stable conditions for the evolution and maintenance of life forthis long time-span. Through human intervention, particularly in thiscentury by the constitution of our energy-intensive mass-consumptionsociety, a new temporality, the mechanical time logic of the industrialsystem, is added to this process. This intervention is such that it hasmanaged to reverse the slow tendency of the declining CO2 content ofthe earth's atmosphere, which until now has been the net effect ofglobal systemic time dialectics, as well as disrupting other atmosphericdynamics which act as life-supporting systems.5

The intensive use of fossil fuels started under the aegis of capitalistmechanical time and thus follows its intrinsic logic. For example, thevalue of these fuels is given by human production time, which is onlythe labor required to capitalize them and not the millions of years of thesystemic time within which they were produced.57 From the long span

56 To cite a few examples: the depletion of the troposphere ozone layer and thechange in the sulphur cycle (which, up to the industrial age, was mainly basedon sea plankton emissions, which carried sulphur back to the terrestrialecosystems and which now has been doubled by human emissions, leading toacid rain problems). Human intervention is also changing the pace and place ofrainfall, cloud formations and sea currents, adding further instability to thesystem. Oxygen, up to now a free gift of systemic biospherical dynamics, isbecoming a scarce resource in most metropolises of the world and can alreadybe found as a man-made commodity in Japan's big urban centers. Human-madevalue replaces wealth and it seems dubious for anyone to think that we arebetter off.

57 See, for example, Enzo Tiezzi, Tiempos Históricos, Tiempos Biológicos(México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990).

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of systemic time and its long-term processes, the carbon cycle enteredthe short-term and accelerating historical time of the capitalistaccumulation process. From a naturally produced wealth, performing avital role in the global evolutionary process, it became a capitalizedcommodity produced (or transformed) and consumed according to thelaws of market supply and demand and the economic and politicalrequirements of the global accumulation process.

The problems related to the greenhouse effect and the depletion ofthe stock of global mineral and biological reserves, as well as thehighly politicized and often militarized way in which these questionsare treated, are a clear sign of the contradictory character of theseprocesses.58

To suppose that this contradiction can be resolved within theinstitutional framework of the market economy requires that prices bean adequate reflection of underlying time dialectics, and that the social,economic and political decisions based on these signs be in harmonywith the requirements of the more general systemic time dialectics. Itrequires that prices be an accurate time index, not only of themechanical short-term accumulation requirements of capital, but of thelong-term systemic dynamics of the living earth system. But how canthe working time of plate tectonics in conjunction with the bloomingand sedimentarization of the biota over the earth's surface be assessed?How can the different desertification processes due to global climatechange be translated into prices? What is the price of rural migration,urban overpopulation, deaths due to famine, the losses of ecosystemsand biodiversity, and so on, which are related to the spreading of thesedeserts? What is the price, solely in terms of socio-politicalsustainability, of the different xenophobic movements which emerge inthe different migration centers? Many pages could be written on"externalities" due to global climatic change: what is really the eco-taxthat should be imposed on fossil fuels in order to ensure that theirprices reflect their ecological value? Should this be a uniform andunique quantity, or are there cases where the use of fossil fuelsincreases the global sustainability of the system? Finally, in the purelyhypothetical case that such a price is actually found (which it cannotbe) and that the political will to implement it is achieved, would thisprice ensure the sustainable use of these resources or would they still be

58 To see this we have only to think of the constitution of OPEC or the difficultyof finding a political commitment to restrain global emissions, as well asexamples such as the Gulf War and the conflicts between native peoples andthe oil companies in various parts of the world.

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abused by those for whom its transport forms a minor part of theirbudget? Would Concord, military jets, and car races be abolished? Orwould the distance between the rich and the poor increase, leadingthereby to a higher social and political stress of the system, thusreducing global sustainability?

7. Conclusion

The high complexity and the huge array of systemic linkagesbehind the production and consumption of such a simple element asfossil fuel should convince us that it is unrealistic to believe that acomplex, changing, multi-dimensional dynamic dialectical process canbe expressed by a single price. Or that the emerging result of all humanactions based on one such price would actually ensure the sustainabilityof the system as a whole.

The impossibility of translating the workings and requirements ofsystemic time into a quantitative price system — as well as the dangerof not doing so by ignoring them — is, in fact, a sign (or, if ourargument is correct, the essence) of what Polanyi termed the Utopiancharacter of the free market. As he pointed out, "while history andethnography know of various kinds of economies, most of themcomprising the institution of markets, they know of no economy priorto our own, even approximately controlled and regulated by markets."59

In non-capitalist societies, the market system has always been a sub-system of the larger socio-cultural system and through variousqualitative means (political, cultural and social restrictions andenhancements), the social and human/nature relations were regulatedand controlled. By regulating human action in this way, societies alsoregulated the way in which human time relates to the larger geo-biospherical time dynamics by determining the pace and the intensity inwhich given resources were used or protected.

The various kinds of traditions and cultural restrictions, the centralrole played by the idea of nemesis, or limits which should not betransgressed by humans in their pride, hubris, at the risk of punishment— these have always been the way in which different societies haveordered and regulated their relation to their environments. To try tomimic a past golden age and to place their rituals within a sacred,strong time — different from ordinary social time — was also a way ofslowing down and keeping social time within boundaries, to insertsocieties within the higher whole of the systemic evolution dynamics.The desire to restore a past golden age harmony, with its clearly settled

59 Polanyi, op. cit., p. 44.

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rules and limits, was a way of directing the present and thereby thefuture of those societies, rather than a nostalgic longing for the past.Instead of a sign that societies were immobile and bound to their past,as our modern prejudice makes us believe, such cultural restrictionsmade it possible to place the dynamics of their development withinproportions and the large past-future axis of the systemic time.60

The long secularization process within the Western tradition is theway in which systemic time has gradually been ignored and suppressedby the abstract and purely quantitative expression of mechanical time.The idea that all could be regulated by means of an entirely free marketis only the culmination of this process. As Gault showed, in ourchronological time, the future is deprived of substance and thus open tobeing produced by humankind. It is open to planning and technocraticcontrol, an idea which can be found in most official discussions aboutour present crisis where the problem is seen as a matter of bad planningand of historical development which has to be redirected. In thisconception, humankind is still master of its own future, in spite of theinsight which can be gained from the thermodynamic time conception(and which was a constituent part of traditional systemicrepresentations), whereby nature and thus the future have irreducibleautonomy and indeterminacy. On the part of human society, thisrequires a dialogical attitude by which human society responds tonature no longer seen as a passive object, but as a subject on its ownrights.61 It is this central idea that constitutes the core of Michel Serres'plea for a "Natural Contract" that sets the basis for co-evolution inwhich human history is embedded and a constituent part of what wecould term the larger "systemic becoming."62

Ecological crises are certainly not a prerogative of man, asLovelock, for example, shows by pointing to the various periods ofmass extinction and radical changes in the composition of life on earth.Nor are they exclusively a feature of modern capitalist society, as thehistorical records assembled by Pointing remind us.63 But in no otherperiod can we observe such a strong "systemic role inversion," by

60 For a discussion about traditional time conceptions and practices, see MirceaEliade, Le Mythe de l'Eternel Retour: Archétypes et Répétition (Paris:Gallimard, 1964) and Aspects du mythe (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).61 Gault, op. cit., particularly p. 156.62 Michel Serres, Le Contrat Naturel (Paris: Éd. François Bourin, 1990).

63 Pointing, op. cit. and James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia — A Biography ofour Living Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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which a sub-system exerts influence and perverts the functioning of thelarger whole.

Paradoxically, we can see that in the same Western culturaltradition that established mechanical time as an absolute truth, thescientific negation of this view also emerged. Relativistic physicsassessed the inseparability of matter, time and space, pointing to a fourdimensional time-space continuum; modern complex system theoryshowed that human consciousness is not an autonomous flux in time,but only exists as an emergent property of the material working anddevelopment of the human body and historically given human culture.64

With quantum physics the notion of separate subject and object brokedown. And it is finally in the studies of contemporary thermodynamicsthat the negation of the dream of human mastery over nature, or thelimits of the industrial episteme, are stated.65 It is, as such, an historicalirony that thermodynamics were born out of the study of the steamengine, the emblematic symbol of the industrial revolution and thedream of capitalist progress and conquest.

The idea of an ecological reconversion of society (and alldiscussions surrounding the idea of sustainability) require themechanical time of present human economic practices to bequalitatively controlled and restricted by political, cultural and ethicalmeans aimed at restoring the awareness of systemic time dialectics, ofwhich humans are but a part. As such, it is a political question —political in the deep sense of different historical options open to humanfree will, not only of institutional politics. It is the quality of theseoptions and the way in which this political debate will be carried outand translated into action that will determine not only the quality of ourfuture societies and environment, but probably the very possibility ofhuman survival tout court. Leaving these questions to be answered bythe free market means leaving the organization of the whole to themechanical time logic of capital, which destroys the systemic basis onwhich its own dynamic is based.

The essential openness, novelty and autonomy of systemic timedialectics means that nature cannot be reduced to scientific forecastingor to technological control. Nor can human beings be reduced toskinnerian behaviorism and thereby fully controlled and molded bytechnocracy and centralized powers. Human essential systemic

64 See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, El Arbol del Conocimiento(Madrid: Editorial Debate, 1996) and Albert Einstein, La Relativité (Paris: Éds.Gauthier-Villars, 1991).

65 See Prigogine, op. cit. and Martin O'Connor, op. cit.

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autonomy will always manifest itself as resistance, whether in more"rational" or "irrational" forms, frustrating the centralized social controlprojects. Ignoring this reality may result, as Martin O'Connor argued,in the controlled order ending up in catastrophe.66 This tragic result ofthe enlightenment control project should make us aware, more thanever, of Jung's warning about the unconscious and unwilling results ofconscious projects. As he argued:

Our intellect has created a new world that dominatesnature and has settled it with monstrous machines.These machines are so unquestionably useful that wecannot even imagine the possibility to getting rid ofthem or escaping from the subservience to which theyhave lead us. Man cannot resist the adventurous cryof his scientific and inventive mind, or cease he tocongratulate himself for his conquests. But at thesame time, his genius displays a mysterious tendencyto create more and more dangerous things, whichincreasingly represent more efficient instruments forhis collective suicide.67

Based on a mechanical time concept and practice, which is at theheart of a society centered on the commodity form, in modern industrialmarket society humankind forgot that it belongs to and is dependent onthe more general systemic time dialectics, of which the economic sub-system is but a part. We have lost our sense of proportion, of qualityand of relatedness, which, as Illich pointed out, also means the loss ofour sense of ethics and beauty.68 Nevertheless as a result of our hubris,such a loss of proportion may, as traditional myths always warned, endup in tragedy.

66 Martin O'Connor, 1989, 1993, op. cit.67 Carl G. Jung et a l , O Homem e os seus Símbolos (Rio de Janeiro: NovaFronteira, 1992), p. 101.68 Illich, 1997, op. cit.

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