Reflections on Robert Biel's *The Entropy of Capitalism*

At the conclusion of The Communist Necessity I wrote: "the window in which we can make revolution is closing as the world approaches the armageddon promised by the logic of capital."  The intention of this claim was to point out the necessity of organizing in the face of capitalism's depletion of liveable existence, arguing that we needed to get our shit together because, due to capitalism's internal logic, it might be too late to continue waiting until the current mode of production has played its course.  At that time I had not read Robert Biel's The Entropy of Capitalism––though I had helped edit the second edition of his earlier manuscript, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement––and he was nice enough to write a blurb for the back of The Communist Necessity… I really wish I had read his most recent book, however, considering that The Entropy of Capitalism dove-tailed with the conclusion of my book.

Yep, same picture as last post.  Um… I thought I'd have another post before this review!

For the "window in which we can make revolution" really is closing, as Biel demonstrates in The Entropy of Capitalism.  More significantly, he demonstrates how and why this window is closing: using thermodynamics, Biel articulates the limits of the capitalist system and how it has passed the point of disarticulation, degeneration, and static disintegration.  Without rejecting the mainstays of historical materialist analysis of the capitalist mode of production (i.e. the labour theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), he proves this logic by resorting to systems theory.  In some ways this recourse to thermodynamics functions as analogical logic to breathe new life into marxian language that often seems stale; in other ways this filter is not simply analogical or metaphorical––Biel really does intend us to understand capitalism as a closed, thermodynamic system that is moving towards an entropic destiny.

Disappointingly, Entropy was published in 2011 and, amongst the noise of left-wing academic theory, failed to make a significant theoretical signal.  Despite its eventual publication with Haymarket it still fell under the left-wing radar… Maybe this is because we are living in a period where chic theories belong to those who are already established, who have nothing really interesting to say, and whose significance is marked by a degree of obscurantism that seems exciting to those who have the time and wherewithal to bother with academic publications.  When I read this book I was simultaneously reading several books from the Semiotext(e) "interventions" series, particularly Mauricio's Lazzarato's books on the recent crisis, which possessed a larger cache/interest than Biel's Entropy, even though they covered the same terrain… And the fact that the latter dealt with this terrain in a more concrete and systematic manner than the former apparently didn't matter.  We would rather accept vague analyses than critiques that attempt to produce concrete analyses of concrete situations; the latter demand action, the former only academic interest.

It's not just the source material.  Biel has demonstrated his ability to use Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, and others––indeed, the same source material as Lazzarato or even the Tiqqun collective––but in a manner that is actually historically materialist, that is concrete and rigorous.  In Entropy he is not simply playing with a smorgasbord of theory, as these others are doing, but drawing on other traditions to bolster a rigorous analysis of the system as a whole.  It becomes pretty clear that this is the case when, within the first 100 pages of his book, he demolishes Lazzarato's (and others') claim about the "dematerialization" of capital during the recent crisis (where M-M supposedly replaced M-C-M) by pointing out that this supposed dematerialization is, in fact, a rematerialization considering that the material foundation of speculation, virtual, and fictitious capital requires a massive industrial corps in the third world to produce and refine the basis of its materialiazation (i.e. silicon and super-conductors require a more labour intensive process, hence this "virtual capitalism" cannot exist without an intensive labour process that produces the material basis of its circuits).  Even still, he can employ these chic theorists to bolster his claims while pointing out their limitations… Agamben's failure is that he is "eurocentric"––go figure!

But I digress.  The entire problem with The Entropy of Capitalism is that it is difficult to describe.  Unfortunately, the publisher has produced a poor description that makes the book seem uninteresting: thermodynamic systems theory, capitalism and crisis, energy and entropy… I admit that I waited too long to read this book because this description caused me to think it was both niche and extremely daunting.  Thankfully, it is neither.


Niche?

Entropy is the precise opposite of a "niche" text in that, rather than being about a rarified problematic, it is about a whole bunch of things that are connected to the very large problematic of capitalist crisis. The title sums it up: it is about the entropic nature of capitalism and what this means.  In order to be about this––that is, in order to demonstrate that capitalism is a system that cannot help but lead towards collapse (and here he treats collapse/crisis/catastrophe in the thermodynamic sense where he literally means entropy), Biel is examining environmental crisis, economic crisis, the war on terror, securitization, governance, and an entire host of 21st century capitalist phenomena as part of the same process of entropy––a process inversely determined by the opposite struggle tendencies that, in extremely limited attempts to forestall entropy, capitalism appropriates and distorts.  Not only does he demonstrate how this constellation of phenomena are interlinked, he also manages to say something fresh about them.

The difficulty in trying to summarize this book (and part of the reason why I don't fault the publisher for providing a less erudite description) is that, due to its breadth, it is very difficult to explain Entropy in a succinct manner.  Since Biel had to innovate his approach to political ecology/economy so as to provide a systematic and concrete analysis of capitalism's crisis limits, we lack the language to succinctly summarize this innovation without sounding boring.  To claim, as the back of the book does, that "Biel explores the interaction of social and physical systems, using the conceptual tools of thermodynamics and information," might be generally accurate but: a) it doesn't really give us a coherent picture of what the book is actually doing; b) it sounds kind of boring, or at least borderline dry––but more on this later.

Biel's use of thermodynamics is a way in which to look at a mode of production as a system that breathes new life into old concepts that might seem stale.  Moreover, it does provide a methodology in which to talk about a lot of things as interconnected phemonema.  If the capitalist mode of production is understood as a thermodynamic system, and we can map out its core logic (tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the laws of capitalist accumulation and capitalist reproduction, the class structure, etc.) by examining this system as one that is both social and ecological, then we can also understand how its order cannot help but lead towards a static situation where it uses up its energy margins, fails to regenerate itself, offsets its closed and degenerating logic in "sinks" that hasten its degeneration.

I know I'm summarizing a lot here, and thus simplifying what Biel is trying to do, but that's the problem with a book like this… And I really need to read it again, and return to sections multiple times, to do it justice.  This is not because the book is incoherent (quite the opposite, in fact) but simply that it covers so much terrain that it is very difficult to provide a review that does it justice when there is so, so much I want to talk about, and could go on about for hours, packed into these 350 pages.

Just as an example: the chapter on the war on terror is, by itself, one of the best engagements with the post-9/11 terrorist discourse and imperialist wars.  I could write an entire review about that chapter, treating it as an isolated essay, because there's so much that Biel provides for those of us in the anti-imperialist camp who seek to clarify the meaning of today's imperialism.  And it is not that he is saying anything entirely new, but that he is using new ways to say what the best elements of the anti-imperialist camp have said, and unifying a lot of what this camp has said according to his overall framework.  Which of course, at the same time, makes it difficult to separate this chapter from the book as a whole: what he saying about the war on terror is precisely what he saying about environmental devastation, is what he is saying about the financial collapse, is what he is saying about securitization, is what he is saying about eurocentrism, is what he is saying about capitalist attempts to find (and fail to find) correctives to its degeneration.

Or how about the breadth of empirical examples he mobilizes throughout the book to demonstrate that capitalism is well past the point of senility?  The fact that a single avatar on "Second Life" takes more energy to sustain per year than what a citizen in a developing country uses to actually live per year is something he puts out there but, interested more in the macro problem that produces this, cannot spend time exploring the micro significance.  Or the biofuel industry's supposed "greening" that is in fact an attack on human existence since it uses food to make an alternative to crude oil, thus leading to massacres of third world populations.  Or the fact that it is a popular practice in Texas for people to turn up their air conditioners so as to have log fires.  Or the claim that both the Malthusian and anti-Malthusian arguments about scarcity are incorrect: there is simultaneously not scarcity (yes, this is manufactured by corporations who dump grain into the sea rather than give it away for free) while there also is scarcity (there is only so much of the surrounding environment––both human and non-human––that the capitalist system can "sink" itself into without rendering the basis of human existence obsolete).  Or the debates about Karl Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism" that he mentions briefly as background of his understanding of imperialism that could be a corrective for two strands of current anti-imperialist analyses: i) those who seek to return to Kautsky's theory (i.e. Panitch and Ginden); ii) those who are so afraid of Kautsky's theory that they don't realize that imperialist competition can be mediated, even if temporarily (and possibly to the detriment of human existence), through ascendent US imperialism.

Point being: there's just a lot in this bloody book.  But so what if there's a lot?  If there's too much it might be too daunting, that frightening book you keep on your shelf and leaf through, from time to time, to build up your courage to deal with its contents.


Daunting?

There are two ways in which this kind of book can be daunting: i) by being dry as fuck, a political economy text that is so concrete and filled with empirical examples that it's a chore to read; ii) by being theoretically arcane, seemingly exciting but so detached from reality due to its love of obscurantist jargon that doesn't require any appreciation for the concrete.  Sadly, both of these tendencies often function in an either/or relationship––either you're stuck with the onerous concrete that is so dry that most people who try to read these texts fall asleep before they can figure out what this concrete means, or you're stuck with the exciting realm of confused theoretical engagement that rejects the concrete in favour of a theoretical smorgasbord.  The former is rigorous but boring; the latter is lacksadaisal but exciting.  Then there is the worse combination of the two: something both dry and theoretically opaque.  But Biel's book is the best combination of the two: rigorous and theoretically engaging.

A confession, here… Although I ultimately learn more from those extremely dry political economy texts that nearly put me to sleep––because they are rigorous and appreciate concrete reality––I often prefer to read those half-assed works of theory that spend more time inventing new terms and making up reality than actually engaging with reality.  Of course I end up hating the latter for their failure to, well, account for reality in a rigorous sense ("I'm just going to say stuff about stuff and provide a fancy term that means the stuff I say should be accepted!"), but I still find myself drawn to the concepts they produce.  Marx, after all, produced a conceptual language that was useful in investigating reality and I think it is important to generate new theoretical concepts to account for the fact that reality has changed rather than simply returning, again and again, to terrain that has been made fecund by over-reliance on these once fresh terms.  Case in point: I appreciate political economists such as David Harvey for intervening in a rigorous way so as to protect marxist political economy, but I still find them a chore to read.

Not so with Biel.  Without abandoning the concrete basis of historical materialism he is able, as aforementioned, to summon other elements of radical theory to his project (i.e. Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben) and yet does so without ending up in the kind of theoretical backwater that, for example, most of the authors of the Semiotext(e) interventions series (i.e. Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, Lazzarato, Berardi, Raunig, etc.) find themselves in.  Why?  Because he still has an appreciation for the concrete and academic rigour, but this appreciation is not entirely boring.  (I'm keeping in mind, here, that anything that is slightly academic will of course be found "boring" by people who have been dispossessed of the intellectual privilege to appreciate theoretical/political literacy.)  Hell, Biel even draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "rhizome" in a useful manner… He does all of this without giving up on the core theses of historical materialism: the concrete is preserved, and and overall rigour determines the way in which he pulls theoretical concepts into his analysis.

Best of all, he is able to throw out new conceptual language that allows us to appreciate his historical materialist foundation, shedding new light on old concepts.  Distilled through his attention to thermodynamics, we are provided with the following (and this is not an exhaustive list) of conceptual periodizations: accumulation regimes, self-propagating chaos machines, exterminism, paraimperialism, cold imperialism, path dependencies, feedback loops, sinks, a regime of regimes… Interested in what these mean?  Read the book.

Most importantly, The Entropy of Capitalism is eminently readable.  To be fair, this readability is premised on a general political literacy, but there is readable and there is readable.  Most radical political texts require a certain level of political literacy––the vast majority of these are still either boring or arcane for even the supposed initiate!  In terms of the latter problem, where texts seem exciting because of their willingness to produce a constellation of new theoretical concepts and creative-seeming engagements of reality, the arcane nature is the result of a delinking from the concrete: while it is correct to recognize that pure empiricism will most probably produce a positivist apprehension of reality––statistics cannot give that epistemic level required to unify crude facts––there is also a tendency to deform reality by not examining empirical reality and hammering the concrete into an idealized theoretical framework.  Entropy avoids this since it is thoroughly grounded, a fact that the reader cannot miss if s/he is reading it simultaneously to any chic piece of theory talking about the same phenomena.


The imminence of catastrophe

In 2013 some journalists were claiming that the state of affairs was sacroscant, that the majority of the global population enjoyed a lifestyle that was unknown to previous generations––that capitalism had indeed made the world better.  At the very least, Biel's book is a corrective to this fantasy because it demonstrates beyond any doubt that capitalism is dragging existence towards extinction and that, for the world as a whole, capitalism is ruining everything on a greater level than ever before.  He's even able to account for these myopic reports of capitalism's sanctity, explaining their ideological deficiencies.  Indeed, reading this book makes the claims in the aforelinked article seem extremely silly… How in the holy hells any journalist could claim that things were better when the divide between rich and poor was increasing by all available statistics, when more wars were proliferating, when the life world was being further depleted, when climate change was becoming more severe, and when entire crops were being turned into biofuel at the expense of poor people having access to food is either willfully ignorant or beyond cruel.

Although I have some lingering questions about the suggestions of organization and strategy Biel proposes at the end of Entropy (they can be read as an endorsement of an autonomist style practice, though this is only one reading), or some of the claims he makes about China vis-a-vis imperialism (it is unclear whether he thinks China is a nascent imperialist power), these are minor problems (if they are that) in what is ultimately a very thorough and masterful work.

One thing that struck me during my reading of this book, over and over again, was how its analysis of capitalism's systemic limits was relevant to so many conversations and events I would encounter.  Like when I walked into a packed bar where a spectacular boxing match in Las Vegas, between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, was being broadcast and all I could see was the entropic character of contemporary capitalism: a spectacle which was a "sink" of billions of dollars, in a city that is a metaphor of the worst capitalist accumulation regime (a city that, in the words of Mike Davis, exists against both ecological and social nature), between two colonized bodies, complete with a jingoism that all is well with the imperialist world order.

Most importantly, though, is the sense of the imminence (and immanence) of the "socialism or barbarism" maxim that Biel conveys: capitalism's systemic decadence truly is in danger of ravaging the life world, and may even succeed in producing a "Mad Max" scenario no matter how hard some of its less "hawkish" ideologues might try to keep it "sane" by appropriating (and containing) the creativity from the resistant margins, if we don't get our shit together.  And when I think of so many people who know that capitalism must go, but who are content only to write about it or participate in the same styles of practice that have done nothing to really challenge the system, I feel that they just don't know what's at stake.  Or if they do, they have responded with the wrong answer to the right question.  On this last point I might part ways with Biel if his concept of resistant assemblages means the autonomist/movementist solution to the problem––where multiple rebel movements just add up and produce the necessary tipping point––because, as I argued in my book, this catastrophic reality should really force us to think through the necessity of communism, the necessary steps required to wrench history away from its current drive towards armageddon, that we have learned through history.  In this context, simply participating in disconnected prefigurative politics in the hope that they will add up out of fear of some enclosed, top-down organizational strategy will not help us overcome this manifold crisis of capitalism; it has already delayed things for decades.