Capital on a clearcut

Pulp capitalism as a tendency of forestry

Abstract

In Finland, forest carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and the overall state of forest ecologies are in decline. Simultaneously, the material demands of the forest industry are rising while the profitability of the industry is falling. We analyze these compounding crises in forest ecologies and forest economies through the tendency of pulp capitalism. We examine historically how the unruly natural forests were brought within the capital relation by increasing their legibility through the methods of scientific forestry. In addition, we scrutinize the economy of pulp capitalism through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and explain how falling profitability in the forest industry increases the material intensity of production. Capitalist production processes attach to specific resources that are beneficial for the realization of surplus value. Production based on pulpwood has two competitive advantages: Pulpwood has a low-quality threshold and it conforms to the temporality of capital. These structural attributes enable the material intensity of production to be increased. Pulp capitalism helps to understand the cul-de-sac of Finnish forest politics where the economic interests of the pulp and paper industry have become incompatible with other societal and ecological needs that forests are expected to serve.