Nestor Miguel dijo:
>
> there is no way that a socialist
> society exists but with a strong industrial backbone. Among other
> reasons, because of the social and psychological consequences of an
> industrial economy, which have to do with the definition of self that
> each individual member of the formation can generate.
You seem to assume we have a choice. I don't think we do. At the moment each
American sits literally and metaphorically atop a pile of 50 + tonnes of
steel and 400+ tonnes of concrete embedded in the built environment,
railways, roads, etc. In the next 40 years there may be 3bn more humans. To
give them even today's built environment will require a lot of resources:
150 bn tonnes of steel for starters. That is 30 complete new USA's. Do you
think we can do that, under ANY colour of flag? What will happen to the
climate if we even try? Where will the primary energy come from? The
agricultural land? The water? And this is just the new kids on the block:
I'm not even talking about 4bn people who already exist and do not enjoy
US/Euro standards.
Today we use around 30bn bbls oil/year. Even the most wildly optimistic
forecasts do not assume oil production can ever rise above 50bn bbls/year,
or that the production peak can be delayed beyond 2040. Yet to give the
whole world, today's average European energy consumption standards
(I don't even speak of *US* profligacy) we'd need to produce 90+ bn
bbls/year.
This is why "development" is a hoax, a chimera. In this
century, we won't be standing still, we'll be sliding backwards,
and we are NOW: we're at the top of an avalanche
which is gathering speed downhill.
We are deep into an era of first relative, and later absolute,
deindustrialisation. Look at the record. The best efforts of
world industry have produced productivity growth rates since
1973 of 1.7% p.a. (depending on who you believe); that has
barely kept pace with previous population increase and makes
no allowance for externalities, ie, for capitalist environmental chickens
coming home to roost, or for increasing entropy in the energy and raw
materials economies. So this is already an era of decline. And now
the rate of decline is set to become vertiginous: we're looking at
the collapse of fisheries, water-resources, the energy economy,
and more (not to speak of warming).
You're a statistician, you don't need my help to work it out.
Industrialisation as we have known it is simply not an option. If you even
try it, you can only end up with still worse social injustice and inequality
than we have right now. The planet is now divided into two communities:
the gated one, and the barrios outside. Sandwiched in between is your
privileged and highly corrupt "industrial proletariat". This traditional
working class is now very small class, numerically. Today less than 200m
people out of a potential workforce of 4 *billion*, are employed in
the multinational corporations. But these corporations account for
two-thirds of the total mass of profits made in the global economy.
This small number of classically-defined proletarians is not, on the
whole, very interested in revolutions: they have everything to lose,
and almost nothing to gain, from helping out their poorer, lumpen
brothers and sisters, the vast army of the newly-landless
dispossessed slum dwellers of the world.
So this is the REAL big picture: and if the elites understand it, they
must surely have already lost interest in capitalism because it's
just too dangerous, too self-evidently unsustainable.
The big bourgeoisie completely dominates all the major social
spaces, of cultural production, and of science and technology, including the
political and social technologies of control and manipulation. It has made
an ally out of a corrupted, leaderless and demoralised industrial working
class. The only problem it has left is how to dispose of the other
two-thirds of humanity. It's main ally is the powerful productive complexes
it controls. Industry and *industrialisation* have become objectively the
face of the enemy, the enemy in motion. Marx predicted as much, in the
Grundrisse, BTW. So one of two outcomes is possible: either the working
class will turn aganst its masters, led by scientific/technical fractions
grown even more terrified of the stark political insanity of the regime,
than they are of the sans culottes outside the gates. This is one option.
It can happen, for example when workers in fields like genetic engineering
become too scared by their own work to continue without protest.
Or the working class and the intelligentsia will join the Big Bourgeoisie
and turn against the masses, in an orgy of annihilation. That is what
happened in Germany, when the most "advanced", most "leftwing"
and "socialist" vanguard of the world's working class: the German
industrial workers: fought for Hitler.
Fascism doesn't work not because it is nasty and unfair but because it
cannot resolve capitalism's underlying, and inherently insoluble problem.
Fascism can get rid of some of the people for some of the time, but it
cannot get rid of enough of the people all of the time, to maket
capitalism viable again.
The only way to stop ecocide, democide and resource-depletion, is
to get rid of capitalism altogether, forever. This means also getting rid of
(and not extending and further developing) capitalist industry, science
and technology. We cannot develop it, we have to stop it, to finish
with it. Instead of large-scale industry, of massified, concentrated,
urbanised societies supporting massively centralised scientific-technical
industries, we have to have decentralised science. Instead of sciences
of *accumulation* (which always coproduce massive concentrations
of power and wealth, which always coproduce poles of wealth
amid oceans of misery, and which always coproduce injustice, a blighted
environment, and a world where people everywhere are corralled up
in nations that are prisons) -- we need true life-sciences. We need to
recreate a world where the human being is the template, and where
the things we make are built to a human (not inhuman) scale.
The biggest buildings we shall have will be the public libraries.
When we think of human rights, we have to relearn temporality:
we cannot sacrifice the rights of yet-unborn
generations for the rights of those now alive. Sustainability alone
guarantees human rights in perpetuity. But you know all this, anyway.
Mark
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