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Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment

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Sustaining Tourism, Sustaining Capitalism? The Tourism Industry's Role in Global Capitalist Expansion
Robert Fletcher
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Department of Environment, Peace, and Security, Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica

To cite this article: Robert Fletcher (2011) Sustaining Tourism, Sustaining Capitalism? The Tourism Industry's Role in Global Capitalist Expansion, Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment, 13:3, 443-461, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2011.570372 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2011.570372

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Tourism Geographies Vol. 13, No. 3, 443461, August 2011

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Sustaining Tourism, Sustaining Capitalism? The Tourism Industrys Role in Global Capitalist Expansion
ROBERT FLETCHER
Department of Environment, Peace, and Security, Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica

Abstract This article contends that international tourism may be one important means by which the capitalist world-economy seeks to sustain itself in the face of inherent contradictions that threaten its long-term survival. Marxist critics have long identied an inevitable tendency towards crises of overproduction (over-accumulation) within the capitalist system, provoked by what Marx termed the central contradiction between imperatives of production and consumption. Subsequent analysts have highlighted a variety of so-called xes by which overproduction crises can be forestalled through spatial and/or temporal displacement of excess accumulated capital. Building upon this analysis, I outline a number of such xes intrinsic to the development of the international tourism industry. In addition, I suggest that ecotourism development in particular provides additional xes for capitalisms so-called second contradiction between the imperative of continual growth and nite natural resources. In sum, I propose that advocacy of global sustainable tourism by a transnational capitalist class may play an important role in sustaining capitalism as well. Key Words: Capitalism, neo-liberalism, conservation, ecotourism, sustainability, Marxism

Introduction Virtually every tourism study currently published begins by highlighting the industrys spectacular growth over the past several decades. In this respect, tourism is commonly pronounced the worlds largest industry, although some commentators dispute this (e.g. Wheeller 2004), and others question whether tourism constitutes a unitary industry at all (see Higgins-Desbiolles 2006). Frequently cited United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) statistics, which must of course be read with caution (Mowforth & Munt 2003), claim growth between 1950 and 2008 from 25 to 922 million international tourism arrivals generating $US944 billion in receipts and averaging 4 percent growth per year (UNWTO 2009a). Greenwood (1989: 171) goes so far as to call tourism the largest scale movement of goods, services, and people that humanity has perhaps ever seen.
Correspondence Address: Robert Fletcher, Department of Environment, Peace, and Security, PO Box 1386100, Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica. Fax: 506-2249-1929; Tel.: 506-2205-9090; Email: retcher@upeace.org ISSN 1461-6688 Print/1470-1340 Online /11/03/0044319 DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2011.570372
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This growth is particularly striking with respect to ecotourism in particular, broadly dened as travel emphasizing an encounter with a natural (as opposed to built) environment and, more narrowly, in The International Ecotourism Societys (TIES) well-known phrasing, as Responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people. As Martha Honey (2008: 6), former Executive Director of TIES, observes, Ecotourism is often claimed to be the most rapidly expanding sector of the tourism industry. Again, estimates differ by denition and data source. By 1997, the UNWTO estimated that ecotourism, broadly dened, now constituted at least 20 percent of the total international tourism market and was growing 30 percent per year (UNWTO 1998). Recent estimates claim 157 to 236 million ecotourists worldwide each year, generating between $US30 billion and $US1.2 trillion (West & Carrier 2004: 483). In this article, I analyse tourisms dramatic growth over the past half-century as a function of capitalist expansion, whereby the world capitalist system seeks to overcome inherent contradictions that may threaten its long-term survival through various spatial, temporal and environmental xes. I describe a number of such xes that tourism growth in general, and ecotourism in particular, may be seen to provide. Based on this analysis, I suggest that tourisms remarkable success may be due in part to its vital function in sustaining capitalism and, thus, that contemporary discussions of sustainable tourism may belie an underlying concern for this former function as well. I begin by outlining conventional explanations for tourism growth from both supply- and demand-side perspectives. I then suggest that these various explanations may be conceived more productively as interconnected elements of a single capitalist process. I outline previous research describing tourism as a form of capitalism and highlight the surprising lack of attention within this literature to the role of tourism in providing capitalist xes, a phenomenon analysed elsewhere with respect to other capitalist processes. I conclude by discussing how tourisms function in this respect may be affected by the twin spectres of climate change and the economic crisis we are currently facing. Explaining Tourism Growth Generally, three overlapping theories are offered to explain tourism growth, alternately emphasizing demand- or supply-side dynamics. On the demand side, tourism growth is commonly attributed to a desire on the part of an increasing number of people in the post-World War II period for touristic experience, fuelled by a quest either for authentic experience lacking in everyday life (MacCannell 1999), an inversion of ones normal routine (Graburn 2004) or a chance to gaze upon exotic sights (Urry 2001), among other explanations. In addition to these pull factors, tourists are seen as pushed or facilitated as well by post-war changes in the nature of (post-)industrial labour. As Honey (2008: 10) describes, With paid vacation time,

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shorter hours of work, less physically taxing jobs, and better education, vacationers began to demand personal development as well as relaxation and entertainment. In this analysis, the growth of ecotourism in particular is seen as part and parcel of the development of so-called new or alternative tourism in the 1970s in an effort to escape the type of standardized packaged tours characteristic of conventional mass tourism and experience destinations off the beaten path (Poon 1993; Mowforth & Munt 2003). This perspective is contested, however. Several critics contend that there is in fact little evidence for the claim that there exists a particular type of ecotourist driving the industrys growth through a demand for eco-friendly experiences. Rather, these critics assert, consumers have simply responded to an increased supply of nature tourism services what Sharpley (2006) calls a supply of nature developed by operators in search of prot through developing a niche market neglected (or created) by mass tourism (Wheeller 1993; Sharpley 2006). On the supply side, then, researchers suggest that tourism growth has been spurred by several different factors. The rst involves the desire of industry operators to develop protable enterprises. Fundamental in this respect was the development of the commercial airline industry in the 1950s (Honey 2008). From this perspective, as mentioned, ecotourism can be seen to be spurred by the desire to exploit a niche market in response to saturation of the conventional mass tourism market by other operators. Alternatively, tourisms rise can be attributed to efforts on the part of international development planners to promote the industry as a strategy for economic growth, particularly in less-developed nations that have not seen substantial benets from conventional development measures. Thus, Munt (1994: 49) describes tourism as a last-ditch attempt to break from the connes of underdevelopment and get the IMF to lay the golden egg of an upwardly-mobile GNP. Indeed, since the 1960s tourism has been embraced as a development strategy by a great number of development planners, including transnational institutions such as the United Nations and World Bank, international aid agencies such as USAID, and national governments worldwide. From this perspective, growth in ecotourism specically can be understood as an innovation of tourism development strategy in the face of problems associated with mass tourism development. By 1979, recognition of mass tourisms negative social and environmental impacts prompted the World Bank to suspend loans for tourism development, and the following year saw the Manila Declaration of World Tourisms pronouncement that mass tourism does more harm than good to people and societies of the Third World (quoted in Honey 2008: 1011). In the mid-1980s, however, ecotourism in particular was newly promoted as an alternative form of development that might evade these problems, a conviction reinforced by the crystallization of the international sustainable development agenda following the 1987 Bruntland Report and 1992 Rio Summit. This shift was further strengthened by the embrace of ecotourism during the same period by international conservation non-governmental

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organizations (NGOs), such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Conservation International (CI), as a strategy for integrated conservation and development (West 2006). Of course, these different explanations for tourisms growth are not mutually exclusive and are often viewed as acting in concert. In this combined narrative, then, the dramatic post-war growth of tourism is attributed to the development of a symbiotic feedback loop among three relatively independent groups of actors: alienated tourists seeking extraordinary experiences; industry operators endeavouring to provide these experiences in order to glean a prot; and development/conservation organizations seeking to harness the exchange between these two groups in order to promote their own goals. In what follows, I seek to challenge this narrative to a degree by suggesting that rather than viewing these different groups of actors as relatively independent, if intimately intertwined, we can better understand tourisms rapid rise by framing these groups as even more closely conjoined as components of a single process by means of which the capitalist world-system harnesses the tourism industry in order to fuel its expansion and attempt to resolve internal contradictions. In short, I suggest, tourism development may constitute one of the signicant dynamics by means of which capitalism sustains itself in the present era. Adopting this perspective, I believe, provides for a deeper understanding of the dynamics and causes of tourisms growth than previous analyses have offered. While tourism has been described as a form of capitalism for some time now (see, for example, Britton 1982; 1991), its analysis in this respect remains underdeveloped, as several recent reviews have pointed out (Bianchi 2009; Gibson 2009). As Bianchi (2009: 487, emphasis in original) describes, the preoccupation with the discursive, symbolic and cultural realms of tourism has for the most part been undertaken at the expense of any sustained analysis of the structures and relations of power associated with globalization and neo-liberal capitalism. By the same token, while the various means by which capitalism is able to forestall an inherent tendency towards crippling crisis have been documented at length (e.g. Harvey 1989; 2006), the role of tourism in this process has never been systematically elaborated. In the discussion to follow, therefore, I synthesize and build upon previous analyses of the relationship between tourism and capitalism in order to develop a comprehensive framework for understanding tourism growth as an element of capitalist expansion. This analysis builds upon recent work describing the conuence between capitalism and natural resource conservation as well (e.g. Sullivan 2006; Brockington et al. 2008; Castree 2008; Brockington & Duffy 2010). I do not wish to overstate my case, however. My aim is to ascertain, for heuristic purposes, precisely how far analysis in the terms suggested here can be pushed before it becomes untenable. Neither do I intend to present capitalism as a homogenous entity with autonomous will and initiative. A variety of commentators, however, contend that the development of the capitalist world-system at present is directed by a relatively

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coherent transnational capitalist class with a common interest in perpetuating the system from which they benet by promoting global economic growth based on a cultural-ideology of consumerism (Brockington et al. 2008: 5; see also Korten 2001; Sklair 2001). This transnational capitalist class, I will show, largely directs the global tourism industry as well. Thus, it is possible to analyse tourism growth from the perspective of capitalism without necessarily attributing false agency to the system itself.

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Tourism and Capitalism Brockington and colleagues (2008) observe that the rise of global conservation in general is often described as a process by which conservation interests initially opposed to capitalist development gradually adapted to the reality of a capitalistdominated world by learning to accommodate and access the resources of large commercial interests in order to further their conservation ends, resulting in an increasing convergence between conservation and capitalism over time Rejecting this explanation, the authors contend that in reality capitalism and conservation or at least what they call the mainstream conservation practised by the largest environmental NGOs (e.g. CI, The Nature Conservancy, WWF) have been conjoined from the conception, writing, The problem with this argument . . . is that it assumes a separation that does not really exist (Brockington et al. 2008: 198). Rather, they suggest, mainstream conservation should be understood, in substantial part, as one means by which capitalism expands through creating economic value in natural resources left in situ rather than extracted and processed, and commodifying, in the process, spaces and things that had not previously been valued in monetary terms. The authors identify the promotion of ecotourism, which like conservation in general is commonly described as an oppositional force to conventional capitalist resource exploitation via mass tourism (see Honey 2008), as one important aspect of this process. While of course not all ecotourism is aimed at facilitating biodiversity conservation, the activitys dramatic surge in popularity in recent decades is closely tied to its ostensive function in this regard (West & Carrier 2004). Yet Brockington and colleagues analysis of the specic means by which ecotourism exemplies capitalism is little developed. In what follows, I build on their insights and others to construct a comprehensive picture of tourisms function as a component of capitalist growth. This is certainly not to suggest that all (eco)tourism is necessarily the handmaiden of capitalist expansion, merely that the industry as a whole plays an instrumental role in this respect. The study of tourism as a form of capitalism can be seen to have begun with Britton, who proclaimed the industry a product of metropolitan capitalist enterprise (1982: 331) and a major internationalized component of Western capitalist economies (1991: 451). In subsequent years, other researchers have built upon Brittons analyses to describe how the tourism industry has evolved in concert with

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global capitalism (e.g. Lash & Urry 1987; Urry 2001). In its origins as a small-scale, elite enterprise, tourism of the Grand Tour variety reected early liberal capitalisms nascent entrepreneurial structure. The rise of mass tourism centred on collective prepackaged holidays in the post-war era, by contrast, coincided with the consolidation of an organized, Fordist regime of accumulation emphasizing increasingly larger vertically-integrated rms. Finally, the 1970s saw the rise of new/alternative tourism offering a variety of exible, individually-tailored trips concurrent with capitalisms shift towards a novel disorganized, post-Fordist form centred on exible accumulation (Harvey 1989) through diverse structures. This has led to the development of a myriad niche or boutique markets designed to offer an outlet for every tourists particular taste, including such diverse (and disturbing) products as war, sex and slum tourism (Munt 1994; Gibson 2009). Similarly, a number of researchers note that in its approach to development and conservation, ecotourism often encompasses elements of neo-liberal capitalism (cf. Harvey 2005). In particular, ecotourism is seen to embody such characteristic neoliberal mechanisms as privatization, marketization, commodication and deregulation in its emphasis on employing nature-based sightseeing as a force for locally-directed economic development based on individual entrepreneurship through afxing monetary value to in situ natural resources and thus creating both a market and incentive for their sustainable management (see, for example, Vivanco 2001; 2006; Duffy, 2002; 2008; Mowforth & Munt 2003; West & Carrier 2004; Bianchi 2005; Carrier & Macleod 2005; Author 2009; Duffy & Moore 2010; Neves 2010). West and Carrier (2004: 484), therefore, describe ecotourism as the institutional expression of particular sets of late capitalist values in a particular political-economic climate. Recognition of these dynamics helps set the stage for a systematic analysis of the relationship between tourism and capitalism. One must go further, however, to examine the ways in which tourism, in its co-evolution with capitalism, may full functions vital to the latter.

The Fix is In Marx, in the Grundrisse (1973), identied as capitalisms central contradiction the tension between capitalists desire to extract prot from the system and the necessity for sufcient capital to be transferred to the workforce so that production could be consumed (see also Harvey 1989). Capitalism prots by appropriating labours surplus value, of course, necessitating that workers be paid less than the full sale value of their product. If workers are paid less than this full value, however, then, on aggregate, they will be unable to purchase what they have produced, leading to overproduction, over-accumulation and economic stagnation. Marx saw this tension as an inevitable feature of capitalism that would eventually contribute to the systems self-destruction. Subsequent researchers, however, have

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identied a number of mechanisms by which capitalism is able to alleviate overproduction crises through economic growth. Thus, they contend that capitalism requires continual expansion in order to survive what Sandler (1994) calls the GOD (grow or die) principle. Harvey (1989), for instance, observes that excess capital may be reabsorbed into the system by means of a variety of different spatial and/or temporal displacements or xes, thereby (temporarily) forestalling an overproduction crisis. Tourism can be seen to provide a number of such xes. Harveys spatial x entails exporting excess capital to a new geographical location where it can be reinvested in novel development. International tourism development can be viewed as an ideal means by which this is accomplished, and ecotourism in particular, in its quest specically for relatively undeveloped areas, can be viewed as the epitome of this strategy. Thus, Costa Rica, for instance, has become an important site for the displacement of foreign tourism capital seeking new outlets, particularly since the 1980s, increasingly attracting both lone entrepreneurs in search of isolated natural retreats and such powerful global players as Barcel o, Marriot and Four Seasons (Honey 2008). The capacity of ecotourism specically to provide a spatial x is identied by Robbins and Fraser (2003) in their study of forestry policy in Scotland. A temporal x, by contrast, involves displacing excess capital into future return, either by investing in ventures that will realize prot down the road or by reducing turnover time, that is, the speed with which money outlays return prot to the investor, such that speed-up this year absorbs excess capacity from last year (Harvey 1989: 182). One means that Harvey identies by which the latter is accomplished is the selling of not a durable product but rather a transient event that is instantaneously consumed, thus reducing turnover time to a minimum. As an activity predicated on the sale of transient events, tourism may be seen to provide a temporal x as well. A whitewater rafting excursion, for instance, is entirely consumed by the end of the trip (although it may be extended to a degree through further merchandizing of photographs and other paraphernalia) and must be purchased anew to be re-experienced (Fletcher 2009). Combining the forms of displacement identied above into a composite timespace x, according to Harvey, is accomplished principally through the provision of loans, which simultaneously displace capital into new spaces and into the future as well, to be recovered upon repayment. Lending for tourism development, therefore, of the type widely provided by the World Bank and United Nations Development Program, among many other organizations (Honey 2008), accomplishes this timespace x as well. After suspending its tourism loans in the 1980s, for instance, the World Bank began lending anew in the 1990s and, by 2009, was providing more than $US550 million annually (Hayakawa & Rivero 2009). In a number of ways, then, we can view tourism development as providing a means for capitalism to nd outlets for excess capital that might otherwise provoke an overproduction crisis, and thus assisting the system to sustain itself over time. In addition to providing an outlet for capital from other sectors, tourism expansion

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may help to overcome over-accumulation within the tourism industry itself as well through facilitating the displacement of capital from locations that have become overdeveloped to those newly on the rise, as Butlers (1980) classic tourism area life cycle demonstrates. In addition to providing temporal and/or spatial xes, there are several other ways that tourism might contribute to capitalisms self-maintenance as well. One of these concerns tourisms status as a service economy. As noted above, an overproduction crisis is provoked by a dearth of capacity for consumption on the part of manufacturing labourers due to capitalists desire to extract maximum prot from the system. This problem can be resolved in part, however, by redistributing capital to another category of labourers, for instance service workers, who are thereby enabled to consume the production that industrial workers cannot. By paying workers to perform a service such as tourism, therefore, capitalists receive a twofold benet. First, some workers are provided with the funds necessary to purchase the commodities that others have produced, thereby ensuring the continuation of the system without the need to reduce prot extracted from production. In so doing, secondly, capitalists simultaneously receive a valued service as well. This is certainly not to deny that of course much work created by travel is poorly paid, deskilled and insecure if not dangerous (Gibson 2009: 530), and may thus be merely another means of extracting surplus value from workers labour. Yet a proportion of tourism workers are in fact quite well paid for instance, waitstaff in high-end hotels and restaurants, or the collection of itinerant international adventure tour guides I have previously studied (Author 2009). In the USA, for instance, entire resort towns (e.g. Aspen, Colorado) survive largely due to this mutualism between wealthy visitors and local service providers (Coleman 2004). Neither does this dynamic imply overt collaboration between capitalists and governments nor even conscious intention on the part of capitalists themselves. Rather, individual capitalists simple desire to spend excess accumulated wealth on the purchase of luxury services, coupled with collective mobilization on the part of diverse actors and rms to provide such services, is sufcient to stimulate substantial growth in this regard. Given the relatively low wages earned by most tourism workers this dynamic may be of minor signicance to the overall capitalist expansion process, however. In addition to helping to resolve the central capitalist contradiction, ostensibly sustainable forms of tourism such as ecotourism in particular may help to resolve what James OConnor (e.g. 1988; 1994) calls capitalisms second contradiction as well. In OConnors analysis, efforts to resolve the overproduction crisis through growth tend to provoke a second crisis, what Marx (1973) called a metabolic rift (see Foster 2000), due to the fact that capitalisms need to continually expand in order to survive is ultimately predicated on the extraction of nite natural resources. As increased production increasingly taxes limited resources, rents for such resources rise, thus augmenting production costs, decreasing demand and eventually provoking economic stagnation once more.

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According to Martin OConnor (1994), adaptation to the reality of this second contradiction has provoked a wholesale shift in the nature of capitalism, exemplied by the newfound global concern for sustainable development that crystallized in the late 1980s. In the previous regime, with certain exceptions of course (Robbins & Fraser 2003), natural resources were viewed predominantly as inexhaustible, to be exploited when needed but otherwise considered external to production. In the new regime, which this latter OConnor calls capitalisms ecological phase, by contrast, natural resources have been internalized as integral conditions of production to be managed in the interest of ensuring their sustainable exploitation into the future and thus forestalling the ecological crisis that the former OConnor foretells. Boyd and colleagues (2001), drawing on Marxs (1967) distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labour, identify a similar shift in contemporary capitalism from formal to real subsumption of nature (see also Smith 2007), and Garland (2008) elaborates upon this dynamic in her recent analysis of the rise of a conservationist mode of production. Escobar (1995) observes that, in addition to sustainable harvesting, another means by which ecological capitalism may approach natural resources is by promoting their consumption in situ. Building upon this observation, Robbins and Fraser (2003) identify ecotourism as exemplifying this ecological capitalism. Unlike Escobar, however, who saw both sustainable management for extraction and in situ use as forms of ecological capitalism, Robbins and Fraser identify the ecological phase exclusively with the latter, characterizing sustainable timber management as representative of the previous regime. By generating capital based on in situ consumption of natural resources, in the form for instance of visits to protected areas, ecotourism may thus be viewed as an exemplary means by which capitalism seeks to resolve OConnors second contradiction and provide for ecologically sustainable economic growth. In this, sense, then, sustainable tourism may be seen as providing an environmental x (Castree 2008) similar to the various spatialtemporal xes that it, as a component of tourism in general, provides capitalism as well. Yet this is still not the entire story, for in addition to helping to forestall an ecological crisis, ecotourism may capitalize upon this very same crisis as well (Igoe et al. 2010; Neves 2010). Klein (2007) contends that neo-liberal capitalism in general displays the remarkable ability to turn crises to which it has contributed into opportunities for economic growth, and Brockington and colleagues (2008) build upon this analysis to suggest that international conservation in general may actually gain value from the disappearance of the biodiversity it seeks to preserve, as that which remains grows increasingly desirable. Neves (2010) identies this dynamic in cetourism (whale watching), whereby the activitys value has increased in concert with its objects depletion. Munt (1994) notes that, through new tourism activities such as ecotourism, capitalism is able to transform crises to which it has contributed into marketable commodities, selling poverty and class struggle, for instance, as touristic experience.

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In addition, ecotourism may be seen to capitalize on the loss of undeveloped areas due to the expansion of extractive capitalist production, in the same manner as conservation generally. Many ecotourism sites, in fact, explicitly market themselves as desirable destinations based on the probability that they will cease to exist down the road (Mowforth & Munt 2003). In this respect, ecotourism may function as a form of what B uscher (2010) calls derivative nature, in that resources are valued not in and of themselves but rather in terms of their projected worth relative to a hypothetical future scenario of degradation and loss. Of course, the extent to which this process results in a net gain for capitalism as a whole is debatable; it is, however, a means of generating at least some value from a situation that would otherwise constitute a wholesale failure. Tourism and the Absorptive Class Returning to the triad of actors centrally involved in ecotourism described at the outset, the role of industry operators in promoting the interests of capitalism through tourism is obvious. International development planners particularly transnational institutions such as the World Bank and IMF have long been critiqued as instruments for the propagation of global capitalism as well (Escobar 1995; Korten 2001). Brockington and co-authors (2008), with others (e.g. MacDonald 2008), level a similar critique at many international environmental NGOs. The role of tourists themselves in this process is less obvious but still apparent. In this respect, it is signicant that the origin of mass tourism is identied with the middle class (MacCannell 1999) and that, with the subsequent embrace of such tourism by other class groups, the current growth of new tourism in particular remains strongly associated with the middle class as well (Mowforth & Munt 2003; Fletcher 2009). As Mills (1956) observes, a new or professional (Ehrenreich 1989) middle class arose with the consolidation of Fordist capitalism after World War II in order to manage both the increasingly larger and multinational rms dominating production under this regime and the rapidly growing economy as a whole. This new middle class, of course, became the consumers of the expanding tourism industry, facilitated by the general economic growth which saw median family income in the USA double between 1945 and 1973 (Savran 1998: 46) a three-way symbiosis. Stander (2009a; 2009b) contends that this group functions as an absorptive class helping to alleviate capitalisms overproduction crises. It does so, rst, by absorbing through its consumption the bulk of industrial production so that capitalists can realize prot. Ehrenreich (1989) notes that since the 1950s the new middle class has indeed received tremendous pressure to consume increasing quantities of this production. This observation resonates as well with Mills (1956) and Hochschilds (1999) contention that much of the labour performed by this class involves personal relations-orientated service work. As noted earlier, employing (well-paid) service workers not only provides a needed function in its own right but also allows capital to

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recirculate back into the economy to facilitate consumption of production that most manufacturing labourers particularly in the post-Fordist area of offshore outsourcing lack funds to purchase. In addition, Stander asserts that the absorptive class alleviates overproduction crises by seeing their investments devalued during the recession resulting from such crises, thus reducing surplus capital and restoring conditions for economic recovery. He writes that

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the absorptive class has also to absorb the shock of re-current economic crises in that they have to experience much of their personal surplus assets destroyed and thus help the capitalist system to nd a new equilibrium where it can launch into a new phase of production during which capitalists can derive a high rate of prot (Stander 2009b).

Moreover, it is possible to discern in the new middle classs consumption of tourism another means by which capitalism is able to exploit crises it has helped to create. Copious research suggests that the type of labour performed by this class group in the service of capital generates substantial discontent due to its alienating and de-authenticating nature (Mills 1956; Ehrenreich 1989; Hochschild 1999). Members of the new middle class are thus motivated to attempt to escape these conditions through leisure activities in which qualities seen as lacking in everyday work life can be pursued (Lyng 1990; MacCannell 1999; Fletcher 2008). This process can be seen in this class groups embrace of new tourism activities such as ecotourism in the 1970s in concert with the development of post-Fordism. Both Harvey (1989) and Arrighi (1994) contend that post-Fordism arose in response to a world-systemic accumulation crisis resulting in the global recession of 1973 as a spatial x in search of new markets to sustain previous levels of prots. Harvey, along with Friedman (1994), suggests that this crisis provoked a profound cultural shift towards post-modernism within advanced industrialized societies. This post-modern shift, in turn, motivated the consumption of new forms of tourism (Mowforth & Munt 2003). Moreover, the alienation from non-human nature wrought by many (particularly the sedentary, indoor, mind-based, new middle class) forms of capitalist labour an important aspect of Marxs metabolic rift may be seen as one of the motives spurring ecotourism in particular (Smith 2007; Fletcher 2009; Neves 2010). In undertaking tourism in response to capitalist work conditions, the new middle class consumes the services provided by the tourism industry, allowing owners to realize prot, while in the process assisting simultaneously to further distribute to other service workers the funds necessary to absorb still more production. Thus, we can see that the new middle class forming the vanguard of tourism consumption may serve, in variety of ways, the interests of global capitalist expansion.

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Tourism and the Transnational Capitalist Class As noted in the introduction, various critics suggest that the world capitalist-economy is managed in substantial part by a relatively coherent transnational capitalist class. The inuence of this class can be seen in the history of tourism development, as previously outlined. According to Sklair (2001), one role of this transnational capitalist class is to attempt to resolve the internal contradictions that would otherwise threaten the system that sustains them. One of the means by which they do so, at present, may entail promotion of the international tourism industry. From its inception, post-war mass tourism was explicitly managed as an element of capitalist expansion by a coalition of private and public interests. While the former core of the capitalist world-economy Western Europe and, particularly, Great Britain was crippled by World War II, the USA emerged from the conict with its infrastructure largely intact and its economy revitalized by a dramatic increase in wartime production. To sustain this economic productivity in the post-war period, however, would require a dramatic global expansion. As US Undersecretary of State Clayton pronounced in 1945, Weve got to export three times as much as we exported just before the war if we want to keep our industry running at somewhere near capacity (quoted in Savran 1998:45). One important strategy among many in this effort was the provision of international development aid, which was often contingent upon the hire of US rms in funded projects (Escobar 1995; Korten 2001). And while its role in this regard has never been emphasized, I would suggest that stimulation of the tourism industry functioned signicantly in this effort as well. Post-war mass tourism growth was underwritten by government support of US corporations in the explicit interest of economic expansion. As Honey (2008:41) describes, After World War II, the U.S. government used its surplus of military aircraft to subsidize the aerospace industry. It created nancial institutions, such as the ExportImport Bank of the United States, that gave low-interest loans to corporations for purchase of U.S.-made aircraft and equipment. U.S. assistance programs constructed and enlarged airports overseas, improved long-haul navigation, and nanced development of long-range and wide-bodied aircraft. Other nations were encouraged to establish their own national airlines as well, usually requiring jet aircraft, navigation equipment, and services from the Boeing Company and other U.S. corporations, the purchase of which were frequently nanced by the [U.S.] ExportImport Bank (Honey 2008: 41). Thus, the growing global tourism industry was dominated increasingly by a small number of rms based in wealthy countries and supported by their home governments. This trend merely increased in the 1980s, as neo-liberalization championed by the IMF and World Bank increasingly opened societies throughout the world to competition from foreign rms in search of new markets in which to invest excess

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capital accumulated during the 1970s crisis (Arrighi 1994). As a result, nascent domestic tourism industries worldwide were quickly controlled by foreign operators (Mowforth & Munt 2003; Honey 2008). Hence, as Truong (1990: 11011) observed some time ago: The general trend in integration in international tourism is that rms from industrialized countries tend to dominate the market . . . This entails a division of labor according to which Third World countries, with few exceptions, merely provide the social infrastructure and facilities with little or no control over the process of production and distribution of the tourist-related services at an international level. Indeed, researchers note that as much as 90 percent of tourism revenues leaks out of poor host countries due to domination by foreign operators (Mowforth & Munt 2003: 175). This appears to have resulted, as quite a few commentators observe, in increasing consolidation of the industry over time in the hands of a small number of interconnected transnational players (e.g. Britton 1982; 1991; Duffy 2002; 2008; Mowforth & Munt 2003; Honey 2008; Gibson 2009). According to this analysis, then, a small number of increasingly interrelated transnational tourism operators control much of the goods and services that tourists consume globally. In this respect, tourism expansion can be viewed as an instance of the accumulation through dispossession that Harvey (2005) nds characteristic of neo-liberal capitalism in general. These operators also control much of the advertising by which tourists are enticed to consume the products offered. Transnational tourism operators work hand-in-hand with other important tourism promoters, including international development agencies and national governments, which are of course dominated by members of the transnational capitalist class as well (Korten 2001). Chapin (2004) and MacDonald (2008), among others, contend that international environmental NGOs promoting ecotourism development have become part and parcel of this collaboration as well, increasingly relying on powerful transnational corporations to provide funding for conservation initiatives. This reinforces Sklairs (2001: 8) analysis that in the current era the transnational capitalist class has supported the consolidation of a sustainable development historic bloc undergirding the sustainability movement (see also Igoe et al. 2010). From this perspective, the increasing promotion of so-called sustainable tourism around the world can be seen as part and parcel of the transnational capitalist classs continued domination of the global tourism industry. This is certainly not to suggest that all tourism development is entirely dominated by this transnational capitalist, or even that all such development necessarily succumbs to the logic of capital accumulation outlined above. Just as Gibson-Graham (1996) asserts in general that descriptions of capitalism as a hegemonic system can obscure the numerous non-market interactions and mechanisms that exist within the

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interstices of the dominant order, tourism can at times be employed by local actors and communities to facilitate small-scale, grassroots forms of alternative development at odds with the industry consolidation pursued by the transnational class (HigginsDesbiolles 2006; Honey 2008). Yet it is clear that the post-war growth of the industry as a whole has been substantially directed by a small group of transnational players and that its function in facilitating capitalist expansions is part and parcel of this reality.

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The Future of Tourism One important question following from the preceding analysis concerns how the function of tourism as an agent of capitalist expansion might change as a result of the current global economic recession, which Stander (2009b), among others, describes as a classic overproduction crisis. This crisis has precipitated an unprecedented slowdown in a global tourism industry that had experienced nearly continuous, substantial growth for the previous half-century. The latest UNWTO assessments available as of this writing indicate that 2009 saw an unprecedented decline in the global tourism industry of 4.3 percent (UNWTO 2010: 3). The last quarter of 2009 witnessed a slight reversal in this trend, with international arrivals increasing 2 percent, and the rst two months of 2010 suggest a continuation of this trend, with an estimated 7 percent growth worldwide (UNWTO 2010). Despite this recent resurgence, 2010 numbers remain below the industrys peak 2008 levels (UNWTO 2010), leading to speculation that tourisms nearly 60-year expansion period may have reached an end. If this prediction is born out, will the loss of tourism as an outlet for over-accumulation have repercussions throughout the capitalist world-economy? Will the system, on the contrary, nd new ways to exploit tourism as a strategy to recover from this current crisis? For instance, while some observers are suggesting that the current crisis represents the end of neo-liberalism (Harvey 2009), a number of national governments are responding to this crisis by attempting to revive their tourism industries through further reducing barriers to foreign capital (UNWTO 2009b). Will this latest stage of post-Fordist capitalism, on the other hand, give way to yet another stage, displaying a novel structure the nature of which we cannot yet foresee? Or does this current recession nally signal capitalisms exhaustion of its potential for crisis displacement and thus the imminent demise that Marxists have long been predicting? Such questions are compounded by the growing global focus on mitigating anthropogenic climate change. One of the main critiques increasingly levelled at tourism of late concerns its contribution to climate change via long-haul air transport, upon which the industry fundamentally depends (G ossling & Peeters 2007). This constitutes a particular problem for ecotourism, which as discussed above is commonly touted for its ostensive environmental benets (West & Carrier 2004; Carrier & Macleod 2005).

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Currently, the tourism industry, like the airline industry as a whole, is thus desperately striving to address this dilemma. It is doing so in a variety of ways, including promoting increased efciency in airline design and fuel consumption (G ossling & Peeters 2007). Most prominent among these reactive strategies perhaps has been the promotion of carbon credit purchasing to offset air travel emissions, yet this strategy has been criticized widely as ineffective (see, for example, B ohm & Dabhi 2009). Hence, at least one former offset proponent, an NGO promoting responsible travel, recently reversed its longstanding endorsement of carbon offsets, asserting instead that the only way to truly reduce tourisms climate implications is for people to travel less (http://www.responsibletravel.com/Copy/Copy902116.htm). If such calls are widely heeded, the retraction already suffered by the global tourism industry due to economic recession may be exacerbated further. In this respect, then, tourism as a capitalist industry might be approaching the ecological limits that James OConnor predicted with no further environmental xes available. This possibility demands further investigation, building upon the growing body of work exploring the multifaceted relationship between tourism and climate change (e.g. Hamilton et al. 2005; G ossling & Peeters 2007; G ossling et al. 2007). Conclusion For neo-Marxists, an important question concerns why capitalism has not yet succumbed to the internal contradictions identied by Marx and given way to the End of History (Fletcher 2001). In an early response to this question, Lenin (1916) famously pronounced imperialism the highest stage of capitalism in its capacity to provide new outlets for excess accumulation. The end of formal European colonialism, however, has not witnessed capitalisms demise; thus, subsequent researchers have continued in Lenins legacy to describe the various ways that capitalism succeeds in (temporarily) forestalling its self-destruction. While tourism development conforms to many of the mechanisms these researchers have identied, its importance in facilitating capitalist expansion has been underemphasized to date. In the above, I have sought to highlight and systematize the myriad ways in which tourism development provides spatial, temporal and environmental xes for capitalisms tendency towards overproduction and unsustainability. In sum, I suggest that, as one of the largest and fastest-growing industries in the world, a major component of globalization, tourism deemed a form of neo-colonialism by many (Munt 1994; Mowforth & Munt 2003) might be viewed as one of the important means by which the capitalist world-economy has sought to sustain itself in the post-war era. If, as Weaver and Lawton (1999) contend, sustainable tourism has become the dominant paradigm within the global tourism industry as a whole, then this may be due in part to the need to sustain capitalism as well. Tourism is, indeed, one of the few novel capitalist industries to appear on the world stage in the post-war period (along with petroleum production, tourisms closest

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competitor for the status of worlds largest industry). In the several prior centuries of European colonization, capitalists had scoured the globe in search of any remotely marketable product. Hence, the post-war push to create markets for new so-called non-traditional commodities, such as non-timber forest products, as a means to stimulate development for impoverished peoples in less-developed societies has often proved futile. As West (2006: 214) contends, If there were markets for these products, wealthy and powerful people located at the core would certainly have already found a way to get them out of the periphery. Tourism, however, has in fact emerged as a powerful new product found in core and periphery alike (yet dominated, as with most other industries, by actors in the core), transforming from the minor pursuit of a handful of elites to become perhaps the worlds foremost growth industry over the past half-century, one of the chief means by which capitalism has been able to expand its commodication of natural resources on a global scale. At the same time, however, due to its relative novelty on the world stage, and notwithstanding the many pitfalls enumerated above, tourism may also at times hold the potential to be harnessed as an oppositional force by those (such as the rural poor in less-developed societies inhabiting those places most sought by ecotourists) who have heretofore been largely excluded from established commodity markets and conventional forms of economic development based upon these (Higgins-Desbiolles 2006; 2008). This potential, as Higgins-Desbiolles insists, calls for further conceptualization and investigation. This analysis has been primarily theoretical, seeking to outline in macro-socioeconomic terms the logical structure according to which tourism development can be seen to facilitate temporary resolution of contradictions inherent in the capitalist world-economy. In addition to the future research directions outlined above, further investigation is needed to test this model empirically by assessing whether it conforms to the actual process of tourism development in particular contexts and historical periods, in the manner pioneered by Robbins and Fraser (2003) and Neves (2010). Future research might also further investigate, following Igoe and colleagues (2010), the concrete relationships among various elements of the transnational capitalist class involved in tourism development, as well as differences in this classs inuence and composition in diverse locations (Duffy & Moore 2010). Study of this sort would do much to redress the current decit in understanding the precise nature and extent of tourisms role in historical processes of capitalist expansion and transformation.

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Notes on Contributor Robert Fletcher is Assistant Professor of Natural Resources and Sustainable Development at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in Ciudad Col on, Costa Rica. His research interests include development, ecotourism, globalization, environmental governance, climate change, and resistance and social movements. He has conducted eld research concerning these various issues in Chile, Costa Rica and the USA.