G'day Julien,
I've a pounding and messy ear-infection and am full of codeine; my body
can't sleep, and my mind won't wake ... but it's better to while away the
time in cyberspace than it is to decide the future of some poor student when
one is in such a condition, eh?
>In opposition to the capitalist system of which politicians are often only
>playtools, there is a society organized on other principles which can and
does
>resist. Since I can't see the capitalist system solving the environmental
>problem on its own before it's MUCH too late, I have to imagine resistance
>coming from somewhere else.
Agreed.
>Mark has been ranting for a while on how capitalism needs expansion. I have
>yet to see sound economic reasoning or empirical evidence for this even if
I
>can hardly deny that it has a tendency to expand.
Well, this obviously ain't the place to discuss the tendency of the rate of
profit to fall. I'll just say that I think the argument is compelling,
myself, and that this does in fact explain the need for new markets, new
realms of commodification, more waste, more natural mayhem, and periodic
bouts of capital destruction. So I'm with Mark on this one. And you sorta
admit there's some empirical evidence when you allow "I can hardly deny that
it has a tendency to expand", don't you?
>I argue that the beast can be tamed for there are other
>relations down here than economic relations.
Absolutely, Julien! We managed a real PR triumph with that Olympics
display, and most of it was because of 50 000 volunteers, who got worked
into the ground for no pay, and because Australians really are typically
very easy to be around (I say this as a wog, so I'm allowed to blow that
particular trumpet). Some ever-so-sensible Marxists have wailed at the
obscenity of such exploitation at the expense of those who might have earned
a wage doing that same work essentially in the interests of private capital.
And they're absolutely right. But they miss something, too. And what they
miss is a whole heap of evidence that our relations are not entirely
subordinated to the exchange relation. Sure, this often works for capital
(it gets us into uniform during wars, makes us behave ourselves even though
our kids are starving, stops us running a coin across the boss's BMW etc),
but it's the raw material of resistance, too. I moved to a small hamlet two
years ago, and am muchly struck by how potent and generalised are non-market
transactions when the population is small enough to develop mutual trust,
share an awareness of mutual interests, enforce communal sanction etc etc.
And I live only twenty kliks from a city where I lived for fourteen years
without noticing such things. That's not a cry for some sort of
small-is-beautiful pastoral idyll (it can't be done unless a couple of
billion of us die off, after all, and that is precisely what we must fight),
but it shows there's a mode of awareness and society there to be nourished,
wherever we live.
>We don't have to wait for the
>"bourgeois" to get their act together. This would be Bunzl-esque. I'll dare
to
>say that not only the working class has an autonomy (Tahir, don't scream)
but
>that the whole society has an autonomy as to facing environmental issues.
We do. But the price for such resistance can be high (which is the nation
state who would dare, for instance?). And the institutions we might have
utilised for such resistance aren't there any more. We'd need new
institutions, likely based on units other than the nation state, but with
some sort of convincing democratic constitution. Difficult stuff to
picture, eh? Still, the tendency we discern in social phenomena like
Seattle, Melbourne and Prague are potentially very powerful - if they don't
get us those new institutions, they do get us a large transnational sense of
agency among the Great Unwashed and they might yet get us a nervously
responsive group of suits, who have to get used to not getting their own way
for the first time in thirty years. But the tide must not ebb - it must not
be turned by the tender words of a Woolfenson or a Summers ...
>We aren't talking about alienation of class consciousness or about the rate
of
>profit. We're talking about people's food and bodies getting alienated,
about
>widespread antibiotic resistance and increasing number of cancers.
Make that distinction if you need to, Julien. I see no need for it, myself,
but we're still on the same page, I think.
>We're talking about the real infrastructure (not the arrogant wannabe
economic
>infrastructure) beign wrecked, suffering blows from all directions.
Today's *Australian* reports that the Antarctic ozone hole is bigger and
deeper than last year - which is not really news in itself, as that much has
been true for fifteen years - but what is news is that the rate of depletion
has sped up substantially. I had a skin cancer cut out of my head the other
day and the doctor who wielded the knife averred that I must have spent
decades al fresco in the tropics to get so damaged a pate. Nope, said I,
frigid bloody Tasmania is where that damage was done.
>We're talking
>about capitalist trying to patent living organisms. This is not simply
>"commodification of the formerly ex-market transactions". This means war,
>and not class war but a war between life and death.
I'm old-fashioned enough to see no contradiction between the two.
>Expect stronger reactions
>from society to those issues than to the one of surplus value. The
reactions
>might not be savory to us, but I'll bet you there will be some pretty
powerful
>ones. And that's without an ecological collapse under the pressure of
>overpopulation. The reactions to that one might be even less savory but
are
>even more unavoidable.
I remain to be convinced population presents *the* *immediate* risk *in
itself*. So great do I suspect the benefits would be of better farming
practices (after all, many countries use 80% of their arable land and 70% of
their water on farms) - and I dare include the advent of GM crops in this;
publicly funded and coordinated land rejuvenation (even here we see signs of
that happening); the decline of the traditional automobile (this, too, is an
imaginable scenario), and so on, that I submit population growth is not our
most immediate concern. It's all a matter of the energy/matter costs to the
environment represented by the average human. Sadly, we're all stuffed in
twenty years if trends on that criterion persist in concert with current
population growth trends (that Trayner essay Mark put on the site is a scary
read). But to single out population is effectively to blame those
populations who are growing. And we all know who they are. Always 'the
other', eh? Always the victim is at fault ...
Anyway, we need an awful lot of rapid change if we're to alter the per
capita energy/matter costs in a world of rising populations - so much change
that anyone advocating it could rightly be called a radical. And proper
population control requires a public guarantee of a comfortable old age for
all who do not have seven children so that two sons might survive to feed
them in their dotage. That means socialism or a feminism so radical that
daughters might have equal capacity to finance the old dears. Here, too, I
speak effectively of social revolution. 'As radical as truth itself,'
someone once said ...
>As you say, in the past to save ourselves we changed the rules of the game.
>We can do that again. Economic relations are social relations and thus are
>relations between *us*. We can change them. Down with TINA!
There it must start! DOWN WITH TINA!!
>First, it should be obvious that most shareholders are not concerned about
surplus value at all.
Well, your Euro and my dollar are in the cross-currency toilet right now -
and I am given to believe this is because return to capital is bubbling
along at 21% in the US at the moment, whilst yours and ours sputters along
at 12 or 13% (which were damned fine numbers once upon a time). The US
economy is sucking the worlds value out of it like a monstrous black hole -
a virtuous cycle there is by definition a vicious cycle for everyone else
(lower currency -> inflation fears -> higher interest rates -> lower returns
to capital -> lower currency -> inflation fears -> e.t.bloody.c ...). But
yeah, there's a lot of 'gambling on what other gamblers thing the other
gamblers are thinking' going on - that never lasts, as Keynes noted so
prettily. A lot of banks are producing a lot of credit out of nothing; all
on a premise they must know is illusory ...
>They just have too much money on their hands to spend it anyway.
>As to the mega-mergers, the regulators would have to allow them first.
Well, the Warner merger is an absolute whopper, conferring potential
monopoly power across a great slice of foreseeable media applications. 'No
worries' say the regulators.
TINA, y'see ...
Hope all's well, mate (well, except for imminent global dissolution,
anyway),
Rob.
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