Capital's Biological Bubble
Biopolitical institutions run on the very Life they cannot produce
Underneath California’s Central Valley, the bread basket of the world relies on an ancient water source called the San Joaquin aquifer. While this aquifer was originally filled over long geologic ages, today California’s agricultural economy is depleting it well beyond the rate at which it can be replenished.
In fact, we’re seeing the ground in the Central Valley sinking by about an inch a year from these heavy water extraction rates. See this picture of a farmer demonstrating how much the land has sunk as we’ve drawn down the San Joaquin aquifer.
The US and the world-system are dependent on California’s Central Valley. California is the world’s fifth largest supplier of food, and for many specific items, the number one source — 75% of the world’s global supply of walnuts comes from California, and amongst US states it produces 99% of the almonds, artichokes, dates, dried plums, figs, garlic, kiwifruit, olives and olive oil, pistachios, raisins, and table grapes. These California farms provide 1/4 of the entire nation’s food, including 40% of all fruits and nuts.
Our current rate of production is completely reckless and short-sighted. We’ve been using up California’s most precious resource at an alarming rate. As this aquifer approaches non-usable levels of emptiness, we’ll begin to experience water prices shooting to astronomical levels, which will likely precipitate drastic rationing measures, crop loss, and food shortages. In short, this economic engine is burning its fuel faster than it can replenish its source.
The systems we take for granted everyday are all built on many such phenomena — I mentally refer to them as “bubbles.” While we usually think that a bubble is something which has no substance to it (like a memecoin or a tulip craze), I think we can see bubbles as any phenomenon where the present market value exceeds the capacity of the underlying material conditions to sustain that phenomenon. For instance, the value of land in the Central Valley does not price in the fact that the ability to grow crops there is rapidly accelerating towards zero. Not next year, and probably not next decade, but definitely not never.
Capitalist production and the circuit of Capital are bubbles in this sense too. The growth of Capital through the production of surplus-value depends upon a vast reservoir of energy which it cannot replenish for itself — the mundane activities of humans making a life together. Capital remains dependent on a whole range of things for which we pay no one and no one receives any remuneration. From making love to doing the dishes, from sleeping at night to raising our children, all of this “shadow work” invisibly supplies the material conditions for sustaining human civilization, both as a species and as cultural creatures.
But if this vast store of energy is like a reservoir, how did it get filled in the first place? How does it get refilled? And at what rate is Capital drawing on this reservoir of human potential which it didn’t ultimately create? We can get glimpses of this problem by looking at the ongoing collapse of global fertility rates — the single most indicative factor of where fertility rates start dropping off is whether that nation starts experiencing capitalist development. People start to get involved in capitalist production, they become consumers, and their political institutions become integrated into the global system of Capital. Wherever Capitalist modes of production move in to restructure human life, people just stop reproducing.
Here we see the number one challenge Capital currently faces — that its operation kills off the human vitality upon which it depends but which it cannot manufacture. Monocropping and pesticides make us sick, entertainment and social media reduce our attention spans and our capacity for strategic thinking, and financial incentives motivate the hollowing out of productive centers to have their capacity and expertise shipped overseas. By strip mining the material world to produce value in the symbolic world of the market, Capital lays the seeds of its own destruction. After all, Capitalism cannot make people want to have babies, but it nonetheless needs them to undertake the arduous and self-sacrificial journey of raising a child. This circle has to be squared for the production of surplus-value to continue unabated.
In light of Capital’s unsustainable burn rate then, we might understand the biopolitical state as having the task of cultivating the human species as a standing reserve of labor power. Biopower understands humans as a population possessing a whole host of capacities, flows, and trends, all of which need to be understood and optimized in order for Capital to sustain its own ongoing operation. After all, suicide is a public health problem precisely because Capital still needs us to wake up every morning and decide to go on living. What happens when we start opting out, either from the system or from life itself?
Our biopolitical institutions serve as experiments for applying scientific frameworks to the task of understanding those forces which give rise to these non-marketable use-values upon which Capital depends, things like life, love, learning, creativity, health, self-sacrifice, and craft. Implicated as they are within the Capitalist project, these institutions find themselves dependent upon these very phenomena which they cannot produce for themselves but which they seek to analyze, harness, and optimize at both the individual and population level. The vitality of these scientific bureaucracies depends on precisely those values and experiences which take place only incidentally within the process. While it cannot produce these directly, it nonetheless needs them to continue advancing its knowledge and reproducing its institutional structure.
Let’s just take the example of the Schooling Industry — I contend that the purpose of School is not learning, and that it only causes learning occasionally and incidentally. Taking the logic of ‘the purpose of a system is what it does,’ we can see that the disciplinary work of schooling has as its aim the subjective formation of compliant producer/consumers to populate a capitalist economy. Nevertheless, if no one ever learned how to learn in School, the educational system would not be able to function properly at all. It would not be able to command the support and funding of a society if it did not appear to work. Thus, although School cannot teach learning directly, the individual’s personal labor of discovering and activating their own learning powers during their schooling experience will be recuperated by the system to keep it functioning.
I think many of us can resonate with this experience — perhaps you had a teacher or a particular subject which captured your interest more deeply than others, and maybe it awakened something in you which you’d never experienced before. But the disenchantment seeps in so fast, because quickly the learner realizes that they have to do their work and show their work in the prescribed manner. They must make themselves legible for authority figures to validate their inquiry, and before long, they find that the spark is barely hanging on for its dear life.
The earnest pursuit of truth has been commoditized by the academia into the production of ‘knowledge’ and the conferral of recognition or status. I believe that every researcher got into graduate work because there was something deep down in their hearts where they sensed a spark of creativity. They encountered an idea, met a person, or read a text which made something come alive for them. But the university system immediately was able to exploit that wonder and curiosity, re-integrating it into the smooth function of the machine, and use it as motivation for that learner to engage in more and more ancillary activities of status seeking and objectifying their work in unhelpful ways.
Just like how capitalism runs on the wasteful and crazy activity of having sex and making babies, so too the university feeds on this playful spirit of seeking truth and wondering at the world. It cannot produce this feeling for itself, because all it knows is the repeatable techniques of scientific research, the analysis of information, or the modification of pre-determined thought forms. But it needs this spark to live in every one of us, or the entire theater begins to break down and fall apart like a house of cards. We supply the energy to keep the machine alive, spitting out its knowledge-widgets.
Nietzsche once said that a measure of a civilization’s greatness is how much energy it takes to stay aloft. This means that, in some real sense, everything is a ‘bubble’ in that vital phenomena must consume a fuel source, and in a finite universe, this source must be able to run out. The question in my mind becomes how one builds energy stockpiles, be they material, biological, libidinal, or spiritual, and then, what one chooses to do with the energy they’ve accumulated.
This vision of energy reservoirs which can be rapidly burned to generate lift raises the difficult question of how to honor the sacrifice of those who poured their energy into that reservoir. Can we even begin to imagine what something like a ‘civilization inheritance’ means, and then ask how we might become courageous stewards who put it work?
Right now, we’re more like someone burning their last matches for firewood. Yes, the fire will flare up for a time, but what happens after that? Instead of tearing through our resources like a drug addict on payday, how can we use this bubble to create the support needed for the next phase of development, a movement which is itself an even grander bubble?
Want to keep exploring these questions? I’ll be launching a 4-week mini-seminar called “The Violence of Care: A Critical Inquiry into Bureaucratic Power” as an initial phase of my ‘critical bureaucratic studies’ research project. What I post here at Samsara Media comes from my note-taking and reflection as I’ve been working through the reading material and thinking hard about what is at stake in the contemporary operation of power through bureaucratic institutions.