John Bunzl wrote:
>
> Yes, although I'm not sure about 'rooting out' competition altogether
> because it is, on one level, natural and, at the same time, what drives us
> towards cooperation when we see competition getting out of control - as it
> is currently in the global market.
I think explaining in terms of the individual misses the forest for the
trees.
The consequent need to regain control
> over competition through cooperation may be an explanation for the
> development of government and the law, judiciary, etc.
> And as for the 'ideological managers and engineers of our society', I think,
> in a sense, we should feel sorry for them.
Pity isn't what comes to mind when I think of Rupert Murdoch or Ted
Turner.
Why? Because when you can't see
> any way out of a competitive situation that is out of control (as
> globalisation and the free movement of capital is), what choice do you have
> but to rationalise that situation by pretending you are in control of it
> whilst claiming it be 'natural' and 'inevitable'?
That's not how they, the ruling class, views it though. The conservative
wing simply deny that there are any problems or what look like problems
are beneficial (global warming will keep the ice age at bay etc.)The
liberals think that what problems there are can be solved through
current institutions or slight modification of current institutions e.g.
putting more liberals on the Supreme Court. A few taxes here and there
or a maybe a few regulations here and there. Or as Bill Clinton (or
rather his speechwriter) would say "what's wrong with America can be
cured by what's right with America."
Malthusian doomsayers who spend a lot
of time studying ecology like Sarah Postel believe
that ecological crisis can be solved through free market
capitalism.Postel is the freshwater guru and Pew Foundation (Sun Oil)
fellow. She spends 300 or so
pages in Pillar of Sand (I'll review this-- extreme
Malthusian-environmental determinist dogmatism. She buys wholesale into
Jared Diamond's analysis and doesn't mention the word "capitalism" in
300 odd pages) describing how fresh water is
being depleted and how water/irrigation is the sole causal factor in
historical change, to come to the conclusion that free
market capitalism is the
solution.Astounding. New, as yet unspecified, technology will allow
double the work taken from the same amount of water.She really misses
the forest for the trees. Reminds
me of the people I used to meet in philosophy of science seminars who
thought that the amino acids in your brain will explain political
economic phenomena. Money from oil companies makes me skeptical. What do
oil companies have to gain by proving that water tables are being
depleted?
I would phrase the problem differently by saying that the system is one
ruled
by Capital which cannot control itself. Here is a passage from Istvan
Meszeros explaining this idea:
THE SHADOW OF UNCONTROLLABILITY
This is how the chickens produced by displacing the system's
contradictions through the constant enlargement of scale - on the model
of the imaginary roulette player and his bottomless purse mentioned
above - are beginning to come home to roost. For today it is impossible
to think of anything concerning the elementary conditions of social
metabolic reproduction not lethally threatened by the way in which
capital relates to them -the only way in which it can. This is true not
only of humanity's energy requirements or of the management of the
planet's mineral resources and chemical potentials but of every facet of
the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by large scale
de-forestation, and even the most irresponsible way of dealing with the
element without which no human being can survive: water itself. In
Victorian times, when some localities were turned into fashionable
resorts, some cynical entrepreneurs produced bottled air with the name
Health Spa on the flasks, to be released in the bedrooms of the
credulous wealthy people when they returned home. Today, if capital
could corner the atmosphere and thus deprive the individuals of their
now spontaneously practiced 'unsophisticated' mode of breathing, it
would certainly devise a bottling plant and ration the produce to its
pleasure, with total authoritarianism, thereby prolonging its own life
span indefinitely. Perhaps in futurologist think tanks capital's
apologists are already busy working on such a project as they certainly
are now engaged, generously sponsored, on 'non-lethal weapons research'
targeted against smaller nationalities. However, it is very doubtful
indeed, whether the 'full-scale production phase' of capital's
all-important air-bottling plant can be reached fast enough to rescue
the system -and humankind - from the explosion of its devastating
antagonisms.
In the absence of miraculous solutions, capital's arbitrarily
self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of causality and
time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of
humanity. For all those who continue to postulate that 'science and
technology' will resolve the now no longer deniable grave deficiencies
and destructive tendencies of the established reproductive order,
,as'they always did in the past', are deceiving themselves if they
really believe what they say. They ignore both the prohibitive scale on
which the problems continue to accumulate and would have to be resolved,
within the constraints of the actually available or realistically
extendable productive resources-(as opposeded to fictitious projections
of boundlessly multiplying resources plucked out of the sky so as to
hypostatize the permanent viability of'growing out of the constraints)
and the time limits due to the great urgency of time inescapably imposed
on everyone by the objective character of the ongoing developments...
In the period of capital's historical ascendancy the system's ability
to brush aside the spontaneous causality of time and rhythm of nature -
which circumscribed and 'hemmed in' the given forms of human
gratification brought with it a tremendous
increase in productive powers, thanks to the development of social
knowledge and the invention of the tools and practices required to
translate it
into emancipatory potentiality. Since, however, these developments had
to to take place in an alienated form under the rule of a reified
objectivity - capital - determining the course to follow and the limits
to transgress, the potentially with nature had to turn into its
opposite. For the scope of practicable science and technology had to
be strictly subordinated to the absolute requirements of
capital expansion and accumulation. This is why they always had to be
used with extreme selectivity, in accord with the only principle of
selectivity available to capital even in the historically known forms of
postcapitalist systems. Thus even the already existing forms of
scientific knowledge which could to some extent counter the degradation
of the natural environment must be left unrealized, because they would
interfere with the imperative of mindless capital expansion; not to
mention the refusal to pursue the necessary scientific and technological
projects which could, if funded on the required monumental scale,
redress the worsening state of affairs in this respect. Science and
technology can only be pursued in the service of productive development
if they directly contribute to capital-expansion and help to displace
the system's internal antagonisms. Nobody should be surprised,
therefore, that under such determinations the role of science and
technology must be degraded to positively enhancing global pollution
and the accumulation of destructiveness on the scale prescribed by
capital's perverse logic, instead of acting in the opposite direction,
as in principle (but today in principle only) they could.
In the same way, on another plane, the advancement of the powers of
agricultural production did not bring with it the eradication of famine
and malnutrition. For doing so would, again, contradict the imperative
of 'rational'capital expansion.'Sentimental' considerations
concerning the health or even the mere survival - of human beings cannot
possibly be allowed to disturb or disrupt the 'market-oriented'
system's 'hard-headed decision making processes'. The spontaneous
rhythm and
recalcitrance of nature are no longer credible excuses for justifying
the living conditions of countless millions who
had to perish in misery in the last few decades, and so continue to
perish today.
The priorities that must be pursued, in the interests of
capital-expansion and accumulation are fatefully biased against those
who are condemned to famine and malnutrition, mostly in the Third World
countries.
But it is by no means simply the case that the rest of the world's
population has got
nothing to fear with regards to the future. The productive and
distributive practices of
the capital system in the field of agriculture -- from the irresponsible
but highly profitable use of chemicals which accumulate as poisonous
residues in the soil to the destruction of water tables, and to large
scale interference with global weather cycles in vital regions of the
planet, by exploiting and destroying the resources of rain forests
etc.-- do not promise much good to come for anybody. Thanks to science
and technology in their alienated subservience to profitable global
marketing strategies, in our times exotic fruits are made available all
year round --for those, that is, who can afford to buy them, and not for
those who labor under the rule of a handful of transnational
corporations.
But all this happens against a background of the highly irresponsible
productive practices we all watch powerless. The costs involved are
nothing short of endangering--in the interest of short-sighted profit
maximization only--tomorrow's potato and rice harvests for all. Besides,
already today the 'advanced productive practices' pursued endanger even
the meager staple food of those compelled to labor for 'exportable cash
crops' and have to go hungry for the sake of maintaining the health of a
crippling 'globalized' economy...
...thus even humanity's distant future must be perilously mortgaged
because the capital system as such must always pursue its own course of
action within the narrowest of time scale, ignoring the consequences
even if they foreshadow the destruction of the elementary conditions of
social metabolic reproduction.
Istvan Meszeros *Beyond Capital* p173-7, Monthly Review
Press.1995.
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