Sandhydeep Tripathi

SOA-2102-1

Mitul Baruah

Geetanjali Sharma

Nature is important to the state because it serves as a location where nationality, territory, and

resources interact and provide the state with the opportunity to appropriate it and bring it

under the control of the market. According to Mark R. Duffield, "Nature has been

rediscovered to serve as a market,"1 and the state has been the mechanism for this

rediscovery. In this essay, I'll make the case, specifically with reference to Venezuela, that the

state's role is to bring nature within the purview of the market, and that by doing so, it

secures its survival by engaging in a type of symbiotic relationship with the capitalist.

However, later in the essay I also demonstrate how these characteristics of the state are

shaped by its ideology and how the state has always had an important role to play in nature.

The state has various means at its disposal to bring nature under its auspices, one of which

Fernando Crononil discusses is to conflate the identity of a natural resource so much that it

gets intertwined with the identity of the nation itself. He calls this the “foundations of an

emergent political discourse of national identity.”2 The conflation of a resource as a national

1
DUFFIELD, MARK. “The Liberal Way of Development and the Development–Security Impasse: Exploring the
Global Life-Chance Divide.” Security Dialogue, vol. 41, no. 1, 2010, pp. 53–76. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/26301185. Accessed 27 Nov. 2022.
2
Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. 5 ed., vol. 109, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/103.5.1733-a.
identity makes the state the guardian of the resource giving it the means to appropriate it and

giving it a way to enter the market. Coronil argues concerning Venezuela, “oil industry taxes

should not be seen as ordinary taxes but as means by which the state asserts its right to

participate in the industry profits.”2 James Scott in his study of the German forestry pointed

out that, “Bureaucratic and commercial logic, go hand in hand”3 The state's bureaucracy is

another weapon in the state's arsenal to bring nature under the purview of the market. The

replacement of the indigenous trees with Norway spruce and the restructuring of an entire

system with the sole motive of profits and industrialization was clearly an attempt of the state

using its various mechanisms to cash in on nature.

The state with its makeshift roles redefines itself to aid in the process of extraction and

accumulation as Coronil argues, “As foreign oil companies immersed themselves in the

business of extracting oil in Venezuela, the state acquired a new role as a national landlord.”2

A symbiotic relationship between the state and the industries results from the state using

protectionism rhetoric to aid capitalists in acquiring and appropriating nature. Coronil points

this out when he says, “the unprecedented duration of the Gómez dictatorship was

conditioned by the political support and economic resources given to his regime by the

international oil industry.”2 In this relationship of mutual assistance, the state and the market

assist each other to exploit nature and natural resources.

3
Scott, James C. Seeing like a State. Yale University Press, 2020.
A stark use of the state by the market to appropriate nature was in India where keeping the

rupee tied to the silver, the British maintained a cheap flow of credit from poor Indians

shooting the interest rates to unbearable levels. It exhausted the domestic hoards of grains

that Indian peasants had and eventually this draining led to famines. The Malthusian myth

perpetuated as a reason to account for the famines was but an excuse to exempt the State

from any culpability as Pomeranz has explained that “population pressures alone do not

explain why ecological problems greatly worsened after the mid-nineteenth century.”4

Additionally, Mike Davis refers to the famines in India as a "perverse consequence of a

unified market" in his discussion of them. This demonstrates how much the state shapes our

nature and environment and how the ideology of the state can transform its interactions with

nature.

Raymond Williams once noted “Nature contains, often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount

of human history.”5 Mike Davis points out how “there is little evidence that pre-British India

ever experienced a subsistence crisis”5 and how the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb during the

El-Nino drought “opened his treasury and granted money without stint.”5 The ideology of the

state is often reflected in its intent, when the British relied on and perpetuated the Malthusian

myth the Mughal emperors and emperors of the Qing dynasty used measures like “embargo

on food exports and anti-speculative price regulation.”5 The intervention of the state during

such calamities informs us that nature is not a stable backdrop against which us humans can

4
Pomeranz, K., "Two Worlds of Trade, Two Worlds of Empire: European State-Making and Industrialization
in a Chinese Mirror" in Smith, D., et al., States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy, London, 1999, p.78.
5
Davis, Mike, 1946-. Late Victorian Holocausts : El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
London ; New York :Verso, 2001.
orchestrate our affairs and often to go about living our life we need a body like state to

intervene with preventive measures. The want for legitimacy is another reason why the state

often undertakes such policies and the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is an example of the

same. In a world falling prey to global capitalist forces, what helped Chavez was not “any

major radical move or reform but his turning to anti-neo-liberal rhetoric unlike his

predecessors.”6 Various regimes have had various outlooks towards nature, while some

modern democracies like Switzerland have imposed carbon taxes and have an effective waste

management system whereas others like Nigeria have fallen prey to neo-liberal forces with

rampant exploitation of natural resources and unbridled corruption.

In conclusion, I have shown how the state using various tools tries to bring nature under the

purview of the market and it does so to protect its own survival. I have also shown how state

matters to nature in preventing calamities and it does so to often seek legitimacy which is

essential for its survival.

6
Ellner, S., 2008. Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Conflict and the Chávez Phenomenon. London: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, Inc..
 Works Cited

1. Duffield, Mark. “The Liberal Way of Development and the Development–Security

Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide.” Security Dialogue, vol. 41, no. 1,

2010, pp. 53–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26301185. Accessed 27 Nov. 2022.

2. Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. 5

ed., vol. 109, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/103.5.1733-a.

3. Scott, James C. Seeing like a State. Yale University Press, 2020.

4. Pomeranz, K., "Two Worlds of Trade, Two Worlds of Empire: European State-Making

and Industrialization in a Chinese Mirror" in Smith, D., et al., States and Sovereignty in

the Global Economy, London, 1999, p.78.

5. Davis, Mike, 1946-. Late Victorian Holocausts : El Niño Famines and the Making of the

Third World. London ; New York :Verso, 2001.

6. Ellner, S., 2008. Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Conflict and the Chávez

Phenomenon. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc..