Liam Campling + Alex Colás: A tragedy of the commodity at sea (ep340)
“There is no question that fish populations have been decimated by industrial fishing. But I would argue that’s not because of the tragedy of the commons. The logic underpinning industrial fisheries isn’t a logic of use values—catching fish in order to eat. It’s a logic of exchange-values—catching fish in order to sell to make profits.””
How might we re-envision “international collaboration” beyond the political framework of nation-state institutions? And what could it mean to work more strategically in socio-ecological activism, targeting the choke points and the arteries of trade of global capitalism?
In this episode, we welcome Liam Campling, a Professor of International Business & Development at the Queen Mary University of London, and Alejandro Colás, a Professor of International Relations, Birkbeck, at the University of London. They are co-authors of Capitalism and the Sea.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Alex Colás: Well, let me kick off with perhaps the most harrowing association of sea and unfreedom, which is the Atlantic slave trade or indeed slave trades prior to the 17th century.
There's a conception of the sea, which is very much that of, say, Robinson Crusoe and the idea of an individual going out to sea, being stranded on an island and somehow making it through ingenuity and their imagination and fortitude and resilience. A new world, creating a new reality that is going to be prosperous and is going to generate wealth and peace and prosperity. So that image of an industrious individual is actually what Karl Marx himself called a Robinsonade. Something that we pick up.
The reality, of course, was precisely the opposite for a good two or three centuries across the Atlantic Ocean with the enslavement of millions of Africans for the purposes of profit-making and the forcible put of that labor use in plantations [which] was instrumental to the development of industrial societies in Britain and then in other parts of Europe as well. So that is perhaps the best example of how the Robinsonades of this world, which to bring it to the 20th and 21st century, often appear in the shape of so-called "free trade" or the ideas of the container ship, making the world smaller and more prosperous, actually overlook the realities of very deeply stratified, racialized, hyper-exploitative, opaque practices on ships and at sea today in order to transport 90 percent of everything, as the book's title goes.
There are all kinds of interactions onshore and at sea, which are, as I was saying, hyper-exploitative and discriminatory, sometimes involving, in extreme cases, modern-day slavery, which are hidden away. So what I guess we're trying to say in the book is that the relationship between capitalism and the sea is certainly one of opportunity and of innovation and profit-making. There's no question that there have been plenty of changes and transformations, and indeed, to some extent, progress through the sea and via the generation of markets, but those are always deeply unequal. In other words, they benefit some while simultaneously, necessarily, not benefiting others. That's really at the heart of what we're trying to say.
This fantasy is a fantasy in the double sense, that it's unreal, that it hides certain realities, but also that it's just one-sided: it gives us one version of reality, which tends to benefit those parts and those peoples of the world that are already powerful, privileged, and prosperous.
Liam Campling: Yeah, take, for example, the maritime logistics and centrality to holding together an ever-more complex world economy of just in time production and moving intermediate goods around the planet to be assembled very often in China.
There is no question that that process has cheapened goods on a global scale. But the question that has to be asked is at what cost?
Alex was pointing out that the various labor regimes of the planet are in competition against each other in order to make those products ever cheaper, which the sea enables, [which are] very often ignored. But there's another layer is here I think that's also crucial and that really does throw up the fantasy of this liberal utopia, which is the ecological contradictions and they are no more seriously felt than in the ocean.
Andreas Malm, who points out that the future is already embedded or enmeshed in the sea in the sense of the deep heat that it's been storing from all activities over the last hundred years and especially in the last twenty-five years. So these liberal fantasies are fantasies on another level as well because ultimately they cannot be sustained, they will be undermined through global warming.
Kamea Chayne: The basis of your view is that the separation of Earth's geography into land and sea has had significant consequences for the development of our global economy today, and it can feel a little abstract to understand this. So I wonder if you could clarify how this creation of the binary of land and ocean has played out and ties into this historical backdrop you just offered?
Alex Colás: We start from that very basic premise that the ocean’s biomass, it's the minerals that line the sea subsoil can be extracted, can be appropriated. We spent a lot of time looking at that. I'm sure Liam will have something to say about this in just a minute. But it's done under circumstances that are radically different to that which would be the case on land. The attempts at enclosing the sea, which have been successful through the exclusive economic zone, take on a very different form to that on land where enclosures have historically, certainly since the advent of capitalism, been about fencing land, appropriating land as exclusive property. That's something that is much harder to do at sea, not least because also the biomass moves itself, it doesn't respect boundaries or territories.
Liam Campling: I'll just add, briefly, that when we think about our lives, we have a terrestrial view and that the ocean is very often just a backdrop. You know, if you're lucky enough to live in a coastal city, for example, you'll be looking out at the ocean. Perhaps you'll be using boats on a regular basis. But for most of us, despite the fact that the ocean is 70 percent of our planet's area, it's a tiny part of the story in our minds.
Despite that, it's a central place as a place of work, as Alex was mentioning earlier, for the people that work on boats and rigs and vessels and so on. There's also a place of circulation, that the movement of goods and people and ideas. It's been precisely through the global ocean that the civilization that we now have has been been made possible.
When we think about civilization, we still tend to see it in a quite binary way, by thinking about the land as separate from the sea; but they're always entangled.
So if you look at the history of the vast majority of civilizations, they very often have a seaward gaze. I think it's our attempt in the book was to try to move beyond the ways in which people historicize capitalism as being primarily about the land. But to think about the relationship between the sea and the land, as were always were already dynamic and how we do things, how we live. I think that that often gets missed, not least because we are terrestrial beings ourselves as a species.
Kamea Chayne: And I guess to speak to this further in terms of what you call nautical-internationalism, you share about how the sea has facilitated the development of international public and commercial law. And with that, the foundations for multilateral governance across nation-state borders. For a lot of people, this sort of international cooperation feels necessary and is even what gives people hope in terms of offering a platform for something like global climate action. But you highlight the limitations of our present multilateral efforts, maybe based on how they've been set up and what parts of the foundation holding up this web of relations that they are at the core unwilling to question.
Can you elaborate on this contradiction you see, and why this form of global cooperation that so many look up to and legitimize as where meaningful structural change for the world can come from, perhaps isn't enough to facilitate the systemic overhaul that a lot of people recognize we need?
Liam Campling: There's one key to that introduction, and that's the centrality of the state in the state system. In the book, we take an open view on the possibilities of state cooperation for producing, let's say, better outcomes. The creation of the exclusive economic zone in the 1970s and customary international law and the law of the Sea in the 80s as being some of those examples.
So on the one hand, it was very much driven by former colonial powers using their overseas countries and territories as small islands in order to expand these incredible areas of oceanic territory, which are much bigger than the U.S. For example, you said the U.S. use. That is enormous when you start bringing in various overseas territories and this is the same for the French and the British and others. So there's this very strong story of appropriation. You contrast that with somewhere like China. It played a very minor role in these negotiations and it didn't have overseas territories because it didn't have colonies in the same way that the West did.
So as a result, this is part of the story of the current conflicts that you see on a maritime scale. In fact, you see this increasing nationalism, the opposite of nautical internationalism. Now one of the reasons why I think that this is such a hot issue right now is precisely because of the highly uneven outcomes of those negotiations. However, at the same time, lots of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and other coastal states were very keen to be able to capture control over this area of oceanic space, the exclusive economic zone, because it gave them a claim on any marine resources or seabed resources that were existing within that area.
Many countries, in fact, depend upon that part of the ocean and consider themselves to be oceanic states, especially in the Pacific islands. These are tiny areas and landmass terms. But a country like Kiribati, its exclusive economic zone is the size of Western Europe, so they depend upon it.
So on the one hand, you have this quite contradictory process. On the other hand, you have another aspect of oceanic internationalism around the legal systems, which is the RFMOs, or the regional fisheries management organizations, where countries of the world get together and try to find ways to manage resources. In many cases, the system is highly fragmented and you see a classic North-South divide playing out.
In that process, you see rich countries, the Europeans, for example, or the East Asians, really trying to dominate coastal states. But then you go to somewhere like the western central Pacific and the coastal states there are primarily islands that work together in a genuinely bottom-up process of internationalism. In doing so, they have wrestled control from the distant-water fishing nations of this giant tuna fishery, the largest tuna fishery in the world, and are managing it much better than all of the other countries. So what this story tells us is a couple of things. But the most important thing, perhaps, is that...
Top-down, liberal internationalism can have its benefits, but very often it's a set of rules that are written in the interests of those of the powerful.
The multilateral system as a whole works like that. On the flip side, in the case of the Pacific island countries, they essentially wrote the rules themselves in their own interests, and their interest is the long-term sustainability of the oceans because they are oceanic states. So in the process of standing up to the big, distant-water fishing nations, they have created a much more sustainable fishery.
Alex Colás: That's a good illustration of how our approach to the relationship between land and sea is not of saying either-or but rather both, and in the sense that the sea offers, as Liam was just outlining, opportunities for international cooperation at the same time as it reinforces certain hierarchies and those dynamics are relatively open. All we're trying to emphasize is that the sea is quite a unique space for that dialectic between opportunity and obstacle. It's distinctive, it's peculiar, but not exceptional. You are never far away from land when you're at sea.
Kamea Chayne: I guess what I want to clarify is that I feel like oftentimes when people think about international cooperation, what they envision is the heads of nation-states coming together to negotiate and form some sort of agenda or plan that they then carry out. But there is another way to envision international and global cooperation that is based on perhaps inter-communal cooperation and cooperation between everyday people.
Liam Campling: Yes. The way that we think about multilateralism is very much in a top-down way, but actually, the real hope is in this bottom-up process. So whether they are these small, “insignificant” islands working together or crews on boats collaborating in order to try to get a better deal for themselves but also in having more forward-looking approaches to the environment.
So take, for example, the International Transport Workers Federation, which is a federation of all transport workers (maritime and non-maritime.) They have been working for many years to try to better regulate working conditions, but also environmental conditions at sea because the International Transport Workers Federation knows that the future of its members is in a sustainable planet. So you see the labor movement putting considerable pressure on employers and governments to try to move beyond fossil fuels, or at least certainly to move beyond the especially dirty fuels that international shipping uses. There's a lot of hope there.
I would say it much less so with the current system of top-down, essentially hypocrisy that we see around us. We saw it very much at COP-26. It's unlikely without the bottom-up pressures, this genuine internationalism, that world leaders will do anything of meaningful outcomes.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I wrote a very critical piece of COP-26, so I'm absolutely there with you. I labeled it as smoke and mirrors because I personally have not seen actual, tangible change coming from these sites where supposedly the changes can come from. Also, because I understand sustainability to necessarily involve the decentralization of power, which is not going to come from the sites where the global powers are essentially congregating.
And this next question might be more for Liam, but to dive deeper into a more specific part of how the sea has been taken advantage of, a chapter of your book focuses on the fishing industry and how its commodification has impacted traditional and local subsistence-fishing communities, leading you to the conclusion that we are not facing a tragedy of the commons, but a tragedy of the commodity.
This reminds me of when I interviewed John P. Clarke of Between Earth and Empire, we explored a parallel thought in that it's not really about the tragedy of the commons, but it's the tragedy of a loss of community, as well as a tragedy of the loss of the commons. So we covered how this prevalent view of our human nature and society might be understood in alternate ways. But how might we understand the drastic decline in global fish populations, as well as the increased strain on subsistence fishing communities through the angle of commodity?
Liam Campling: So first of all, I have to tip my hat to Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, who wrote a great book called The Tragedy of the Commodity, which is on oceans and fisheries, which I pinched that phrase from. The oceans are very often pitched as being a tragedy of the commons, according to Hardin's thesis, and it's become almost a form of common sense in the way that people think about fisheries.
But actually, it's an extremely narrow vision of how fisheries work and how human beings work and interact. He, as you probably know, Hardin was very right-wing. He believes that there are too many people on the Earth and that ultimately some would have to die. So he came from an extremely cynical perspective.
But there is no question that fish populations have been decimated by industrial fishing. But I would argue that's not because of the tragedy of the commons, agreeing with Longo and colleagues, that it's a tragedy of commodity because the logic underpinning industrial fisheries isn't logic of use-values: catching fish in order to eat them. It's a logic of exchange values: catching fish in order to sell them to make profits.
So that is infinite, insofar as you can continue to sell those fish that you've caught and processed them in some way to maintain their existence as a commodity. So ultra-low temperature freezing, put them in a can, or whatever it might be. Then you're going to find a market and look at the global consumption of fish products and the OECD countries. It's very hot.
The outcome of that, of course, has been a complete divorce from the ecological basis by which that commodity exists now. On the one hand, this is a very bleak story for the reasons that you set out. On the other hand, there have been quite strong examples of certain countries better managing their national resources in very recent years, including the United States. It's been rebuilding fisheries.
Now, the reason why it's been able to rebuild fisheries is not because of the tragedy of the commons according to Hardin, it's because of the role of the state acting in a more responsible way and very often undermining or blocking the narrow interests of industrial capital or big business.
Now, big business is propped up on the global scale in international fisheries by a system of subsidies. Around $20 billion dollars a year is given to marine capture fishing in order to extract fish unsustainably. Now that's not management, that's not the kind of good subsidies, that's bad subsidies: to make fuel less expensive or to build boats and so on. So we were talking earlier about multilateralism. The World Trade Organization just last week was supposed to have completed the Ministerial Conference 12, and one of the objects for the signature was an agreement on fisheries subsidies.
Now, the agreement that was drafted was, in the end, a very soft agreement, despite 20 years of negotiations and it being backed up by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals as being one of the SDGs. The way that it ended up being drafted was essentially in the interests of distant-water fishing nations. So it's almost like we're coming back to square one now. In all of that story, small-scale fishers are completely ignored, despite the fact that they’re very often their own operators, they're going out to fish themselves, taking the risks themselves, supplying important protein and nutrients to their local communities.
Now, I don't want to paint an overly-romanticized picture of small-scale fishing, because very often that's also a brutal, difficult occupation. But certainly, small-scale fishers have a much deeper tie to the ocean than the various companies that have been historically engaged in marine fisheries such as Unilever or Heinz, or even private equity, like Lehman Brothers before it collapsed, which was a major owner of tuna factories and boats. These companies just have no interest in the sustainability of that resource, insofar as it allows them to maintain profitability.
So the tragedy of the commodity is really this question of the fetish of the commodity, the seeking of ever-expanding value, and how that hides the real relationships at play, which are the exploitation of people working on boats and the appropriation of the global ocean.
I think that having that clear-sighted view of what's actually happening can help us at least take a few steps back and engage it more quickly.
Kamea Chayne: Hmm. It sounds like a shift away from blaming this on human nature as just “how things are” to the incentives that have been intentionally created and that are embedded within the system that we essentially made up.
To take a step back, so maybe this is for Alex. But if we were to look at the broader global commodity chains, shipping containers, as you say, are "far more than a mere freight technology." You say it's "a political artifact that facilitated a new international division of labor in the course of the 1970s, where global commodity chains deliver just-in-time production and assembly of goods across different low-cost geographical locations."
Can you speak more to how the development model of the shipping container created the essentialness of this fossil fuel-dependent global economy and obviously how it simultaneously exploits undervalued labor and the preexisting injustices created from the wars enabled earlier by the ocean?
Alex Colás: You've mentioned war. This is a good example that there is a narrative of what we now know as the 40 or 20-foot equivalent unit, the container that says that it was an innovation in response to the slowness and the friction in the global trade system. But in fact, the reality, in many respects, is that it required friction to emerge. Specifically, the Vietnam War or the very long and fraught process of transforming waterfronts, be it in Brooklyn, in New York City, or in the London docks in the 50s and 60s, really antagonistic class-struggle strikes and union-busting and legal innovations created the kinds of conditions for what we now know as containerization—a very mechanized, now increasingly automated process. So the first thing to say is that...
The possibility of cheap goods circulating through containers is premised on that kind of violence, literal violence.
For example, the Vietnam War allowed the pioneering sea-land container enterprise to gain contracts from the U.S. federal government to transport material and weapons, sometimes to the Vietnam War front. So violence in that literal sense, but also violence in the broader sense of breaking the back of whole neighborhoods and infrastructures in port cities across the world. Certainly, if London is anything to go by, turning warehouses into penthouses. The Port of London is nowhere visible anymore in historic London. It's now like most other container ports, many miles away from the center of the city. So that's one aspect of the much more fractious, socially and economically friction-led process of containerization.
The other thing to say here, I'll pass on to Liam in a sec, is that containerization was premised on export-led growth. So it's no coincidence that its models like those of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and now China's coastal economies rely on containerization as that political artifact that facilitates a certain model of low-cost export-led growth that eventually is meant to lead those nations to climb up the value chain.
Liam Campling: On this theme of violence, may I add just two extra points? One is the question of violence in the workplace. The container ship isn't possible, of course, without seafarers. What's often missed when we think about the container vessel is the people who want to call them, and boats have got ever bigger, and the number of people working on boats has become ever smaller. So it's an increasingly isolated, alienated existence when you're on the boats.
As Alex pointed out, warehouses into penthouses, even when you come to shore, the turnaround time that is demanded of the boat owners to maximize the return on their investment requires that you spend very little time in these soulless spaces that have become container ports that are outside of cities. So it's worth taking a moment to think of the people who work on the boats.
But also then, as we've pointed out earlier, that the centrality of this network of container vessels plying the global ocean, simultaneously linking up locations from the East Asian superhighway through to Europe and North America, the movement of goods without which most people like us couldn't survive without. So there is this centrality of infrastructure the container vessel provides.
Then there's another layer which is the other shipping revolution. So that incredible specialization that you see in shipping—beyond just the containerization process, tankers, dry-bulk, and various other specialized shipping exists. For example, to transport timber or to transport cars on roll-on-roll-offs. So it gets to be quite a complicated landscape of these boats plying the oceans, shifting around this multitude of commodities without which the world economy, contemporary global civilization would most certainly collapse.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I absolutely want to really honor and center the workers who the entire maritime network and shipping industry and global trade is built off the backs of.
The question that I'm sure a lot are having to sit with is how exactly we can compost this current monster that is the global economy today, given how locked-in it feels and how entrenched within it we are. I'm at a point where I think being able to strategically target these sensitive spots of the system and the global network is necessary because otherwise, it's easy for other efforts to begin feeling performative, like a spectacle for ourselves.
It makes sense to me when you say that "in principle, seafarers, dockers and other trans-oceanic labor employed at the major chokepoints of global capitalism have the capacity to orchestrate international stoppages and boycotts. It would only take a small number of militant workers, organized in transnational alliances, to slow down or even block the arteries of maritime logistics." Yet in practice, of course, as you note, it is a lot more challenging. So I would love for you to share more about the roadblocks that you see here, as well as the possibilities of targeting these choke points and how we might learn to recognize them elsewhere.
Liam Campling: Thank you, Kamea, for reading our book so closely, and having such great questions, by the way. That's a wonderful one because you're setting up the subtlety by which we're trying to make an argument...We agree that chokepoints are important possibilities for organizing and for trying to improve working conditions.
We know, for example, from the International Transport Workers Federation’s Flag of Convenience Campaign, that it can work and the way that it can work—this is where it gets complicated—is through secondary strikes. So, for example, in this particular case, we saw dockers working with seafarers and refusing to offload boats that weren't part of the campaign, and what it saw was employers coming to the table and desperately trying to reach a deal.
Now, it had its limits. But we see there that there is a vision of how we might start to decompose the global economy. It's a vision of solidarity. We see people who don't have exactly the same interests willing to take a hit to support each other because they know that in the end, they will benefit as well, not just an individual, selfish level, but we will benefit, us as a species. Then, there are a couple of barriers there. I think one of the big ones, obviously, is nationalism and the reemergence of nationalism in the 21st century, which many people thought was dead. What we see there is the difficulty of organizing, for example, Chinese seafarers.
By that, I mean Chinese nationals. Because of the dominance of the single National Trade Union and the fact that it doesn't really function as an independent trade union tool. So what we probably need to see in order to challenge more nationalistic visions is the reemergence of place-based organizing, where one can imagine, for example, historically in Los Angeles and California, a coast-solidarity is being built between doctors and between those working in the inland empire, which is warehouse workers, rail workers and so on.
Through that type of understanding of a chokepoint, I think that we can see genuine movement, but I don't think that a singular approach is likely to work because we know that that capital is able to act extremely nimbly. We saw that with the blocking of the Suez Canal. Very often, that was seen as being an example of how a chokepoint can be a great success. Of course, if that was organized labor blocking the canal, we probably would have seen a much more brutal and rapid response rather than being a simple accident.
But secondarily, perhaps more importantly, what we saw was big business simply rerouting. In that rerouting bypassing the canal, they went around the Cape of Hope, and in doing so, profit margins weren't particularly badly hit.
If we really want to decompose the global economy, we need some combination of place-based organizing, solidarities across the global oceans, and recognizing the centrality of these chokepoints and using them in a way that's not just about narrow, sectional interests, but that is about actively building solidarities across the seas.
Alex Colás: One thing that has emerged for us from looking at the capitalism of the sea is the internationalist possibilities present both historically and also currently. I think we want to repurpose the progressive aspects of capitalism for more democratic social needs. No doubt, certainly in my mind, that might require some onshoring of manufacturing and supply chains. It certainly will mean narrowing thinning out those supply chains so that we consume less, especially less stuff that is socially unnecessary.
However, I would certainly want to see a post-capitalist system where we can import foreign goods, especially if their medicines or books or ideas or, you know, facilitate travel and transfer people. So at a very general level, both in the lives of workers and communities that have had a sea-facing life and history, but also in the more philosophical sense. There's an invitation to capture, reinvent, repurpose the possibilities of internationalism of the saltwater cosmopolitanism you were referring to earlier, in contrast to the sort of nautical internationalism from above.
Kamea Chayne: This ties so beautifully into my next question for you, because you were talking about exports earlier, Alex, and when I personally came to the realization that generally speaking, a lot of nation-states are exporting a lot of the exact same foods and mass-produced products that they're then importing from far away at the cost of community sovereignty and at the benefit of transnational corporations, or because of the disproportionately undervalued labor of those in “developing countries,” the system is set up to suck economic wealth out of these places and into the hands of those in “developed countries” with larger currencies, it led me to the thought that if those with economic and social privilege were to reestablish regionalized systems for food, and at least the most basic needs, to stop being reliant on this centralized system predicated on exploitation elsewhere, then that might actually help us to build leverage and even starve out the major corporations that currently are sustained by people being dependent on them.
But I wanted to talk this through with you because I'm still evolving my thinking. If I interpreted what you said correctly, your message is that while many believe that we need to quote "[delink] from the planetary factory as a matter of survival,” you think that we can embrace these connections enabled by the global economy and use that to create more democratic forms of governance and trade?
I would love for you to speak more to this sort of dynamic of reclaiming power through building more place-based systems and economies and also holding space to allow for continued trade, as you say, for medicines and so forth.
Alex Colás: I mean, I'll jump in here. It's a big question, and just to echo what Liam was saying earlier, that it's really a pleasure to have a conversation about the book as you're reading it because it seems to be chiming with the way in which we intended for it to be read. But I think this is a complex issue because it's about praxis where I sit. I don't think there is a blueprint for what is to be done.
I'm personally very skeptical about hard and fast utopias that are off-the-shelf.
And that we can, you know, just refer to as the sort of ABCs of socialism or communism or whatever other-ism. I think this is going to be perhaps an unsatisfactory answer, but a lot relies on how we do, how we organize, how we challenge campaign form, reorganize in struggle, oftentimes our daily lives.
Liam was mentioning the state earlier. I think that's a very powerful institution in most parts of the world, not everywhere, but in most parts of the world. Those of us that have at least some degree of political representation and political democracy can and should use the state and local authority: city authorities in the city. In London, the Greater London Authority still has got limited powers, but there are ways in which we can change procurement patterns. For instance, a lot of public money—and shipping is absolutely no exception—if anything, it's again at the forefront of subsidies and of public funds being used generally for private gain.
Therefore, the ways of thinking about having both the cosmopolitan and internationalist outlook—that is simultaneously one that is about reshoring and sustainability in the much longer term and about a much more democratic distribution of wealth—I think will mean specific campaigns and struggles at those sites, be they the local, the city, the nation, state, or region. From where I sit, that's kind of indeterminate. You know, it depends on what one is targeting. Certainly, Liam was mentioning carbon and decarbonization has to be connected, it seems to me, through reconfiguring our supply chains. Therefore shipping clearly is part of that, as is the global oil economy and the tankers that ply those fossil fuels through the seas.
But ultimately, it's really not about the sea or land, it's about what kinds of ideas and power do we have to reconfigure, for instance, the way in which we circulate around big cities or how new housing stock is built so that it is more efficient in terms of energy, or again in terms of how we consume food, trying to reduce, shorten, and narrow those supply chains and think more about the way in which, for instance, the way we consume food is connected to the way we produce, right?
So sometimes it's not even about supply chains but is about reducing the working week so that we work less so that we're more productive and that we perhaps have more time to develop skills and leisure that might eventually allow us to cook and eat in more communal ways. You know that we often see it on Netflix or in certain kinds of more romanticized versions of what it used to be like to consume. So it's a long way of saying that for us. Liam will come in here—make sure that I'm speaking for both of us—looking at capitalism through that terra-cross lens, looking at the connections between land and sea. That then opens up questions about, “ok, let's think about the specific location, the place, the power relations, the social relations that underpin a specific problem that we're trying to deal with,” be it decarbonization or be it workers rights, or be it environmental sustainability.
Liam Campling: Yeah, I'd just like to add just a couple of extra thoughts to that, and I especially enjoyed the way that you typify, Kamea, the sucking of economic wealth out of the Global South, in part by multinational corporations. I think that that's very evocative and about right. One of the chapters of the book is called Offshore, and although we have quite an expanded definition of offshore, one of the aspects of offshore is, of course, global tax havens, and there is a strong maritime dimension to some of those.
When we start looking at the interplay of the global tax system and the movement of commodities through containers, fast-moving consumer goods, or coal, or whatever it might be, you start to see this value-sucking mechanism playing out on a global scale. States very often have been rolled back, historically, from the 1980s onwards, through structural adjustment programs and from the IMF and the World Bank precisely to make them more export-oriented. That's given them, in some cases, a greater kind of wealth for some. But of course, it's also made them increasingly vulnerable to movements in the global economy and the vagaries of international finance on the other.
So although we saw this process at the state being rolled back with COVID, we've seen very much how the tentacles of the state can be very effective and fast-moving in order to deal with a real problem. But unfortunately, what we're seeing at the moment is, as we saw with COP26, a return of business as usual.
Instead of seeing ambitious approaches that try to get to the fundamental problems of the dumping of greenhouse gases and the extraction of biomass from the entire system, we see techno-financial solutions based around carbon capture and storage or carbon markets being touted and embedded in the COP26 process.
But what's missing from that story is precisely the off-shored trillions of wealth that are swimming around virtual bank accounts that should be the resource that could provide for the necessary socio-ecological transition.
By that, I mean the socially just transition towards a decarbonized world where we're living in something like greater harmony with the planet, where we're living in a system based around more agroecological food systems, where there will be, of course, international trade, we would hope, because we wouldn't want everyone to be living in Antarctic islands, that sounds depressing. But we would certainly have substantially less international trade. But for all of that to happen, we have to consume less, and ultimately that's what it comes down to.
One of the problems, coming full circle back to the point of COP26 and the failures of multilateralism, is that it's very difficult for the contemporary capitalist leaders, state managers to accept on any level that we need to consume less in order to be able to sustain sustainable species.
Kamea Chayne: Hmm. Well, we're wrapping up the main portion of our discussion, but as these are often heavy topics, I wonder if you might have any additional insights or realizations you made through looking at our current crises through this maritime lens that might offer glimpses into our possibilities, as well as help guide our listeners towards perhaps actions that you recommend they take or questions that they might sit with after this conversation?
Liam Campling: One thing I would say, spinning back to this point on the relationship between the social and ecological is that it's increasingly obvious that our cultures of consumption are unsustainable. I think that there is a bit of a zeitgeist among at least certain segments of populations that there needs to be change, and I think that there is a willingness. Various global surveys during COVID have shown that there's an increasing awareness of risky tipping points and that there is a need to decarbonize and that there is a need for people to change their consumption patterns in order for us to be able to sustain ourselves as a species. So I think that there there is a growing awareness and I take some hope, I suppose, in that.
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Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Alex Colás: So I've got a book that's just come out called the Sea State by Tabitha Lazuli, which is a sort of fictionalized memoir dealing with the North Sea and her relationship as a journalist with an offshore man. I think it brings out the real, lived experience of the land and sea relationship very, very beautifully.
Liam Campling: I've been teaching with a colleague about environmental change and corporate strategy for the last three months, and we've finished with a little book called The Care Manifesto, by The Care Collective, and we've used it as a teaching tool. It's a great little book on trying to get beyond narrow political economy issues in how we understand the global economy, but also to embed community and ecology and kinship and how greater care in how we think and feel and be with each other is most obviously a central step forward. So that book is a neat little read, I think.
Kamea Chayne: What mottos, mantras, or practices, do you engage with to stay grounded?
Alex Colás: The mystery of the world is for me, one of the things that keeps me going. That round the corner, there's always something to amaze you. Not always a good thing, but it keeps one sort of alert and alive.
Liam Campling: Yeah. Similarly, I am a great believer in having a hopeful kind of view, even if the world feels like it's falling apart at times.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your biggest sources of inspiration right now?
Alex Colás: I'm really heartened by the new generations coming up in political activism. I was invoking earlier a realistic sense of hope, and I see that in people that I work with politically or that I teach in my professional contexts that are really hard-nosed and clear about the challenges that we're all facing politically, in the sense that we've been talking about, and I'm learning a lot from their sense of hopeful realism.
Liam Campling: Yeah, I'm going to be really boring here and say pretty much the same. I think that there is a genuine hope of how things can be changed among the generation of people who are teenagers and young adults, and now, of course, children. It's precisely through that clear-eyed view, because they have grown up with the climate crisis in a way that we have not, even though it was always a background hum. So their sense of urgency and their absolute unwillingness to accept any bullshit and to be played, which we saw in the 1990s, corporations playing their cards again and again, both by sowing the seeds of doubt around climate, but also by setting up, frankly, bullshit good golden trinkets in front of us around corporate social responsibility and so on. You know, as if voluntary shifts in consumption by individuals will change anything. We know that it will not. We know that it's part of a necessary story, but we also know that central to any sustainable future, socially and ecologically just future is going to be the capture of the state by democratic forces.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. This has been such a rich and multilayered conversation. I'm really excited to listen to you again, so I appreciate you so much. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Alex Colás: Well, I'm going to invoke Alexander Hamilton. You know, "we got to stand for something so that we don't fall for anything."
Liam Campling: Keep dreaming, but keep your feet on the ground.
