Peter Hollings wrote:
SimPol ("Simultaneous Policy") is an attempt much like what Doyle describes
below to address global externalities by forging an international grassroots
consensus on policy initiatives to be undertaken simultaneously in multiple
countries. See: http://www.simpol.org/ .
Peter Hollings
-----Original Message-----
How do we connect to each other. What do we mobilize to?
We can say if... global warming then global power structures to fit the
problem scale. If the whole system must be re-built as if a world war level
of threat was happening, and that is probably not large enough to encompass
global warming, then it would have to include how everyone connects to
everyone in a much more defined and closely regulated way. What else can
one say it means to stop wasting energy, but to address every single
wasteful element in every day life, and immediately require everyone to
change in a matter of years not decades.
There is no known social mechanism of such cross border attachments, but
that is exactly what is being called for.
No matter what happens, failure to meet the demands in advance of global
warming these changes force everyone to face the challenge one way or the
other. So the radical demand is not directed at energy, but at social
change and specific structures that can make human social structure work in
the face of a severe crisis. Nothing can happen before the social structure
question is brought to the front of the solutions agenda.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
Would you or someone care to agree, disagree or comment on the
implications for us of this passage from page 805-6 of Meszaros's Beyond
Capital:
To say that capital's unrestrainability has run its course means that
the system itself has lost its viability as the controller of
sustainable social metabolic reproduction. This is not a question of
looking far ahead into the future.The limits are visible in our
immediate vicinity, as are the dangers that go with the inability or
refusal - and in capital's case the two coincide - to exercise
restraint. For today even the most eager defenders of the established
order, with enormous established interests to defend, are willing to
concede that some restraints must be adopted, at least in some areas of
economic activity, as in husbandry of prime material and energy
resources, as well as with regard to 'population control', even if they
are unable to offer practical solutions, other than the general
prescription that everything must remain within the structural
parameters of their system. They used to argue in a confidently circular
fashion that the expansionary dynamics successfully defines and extends
the limits. Today that argument is obviously untenable. However, despite
the concession of the need for restraint, no indication is ever given
how the capitalist system could function on that basis - i.e., what
could be restrained in it and who should be in control of the
restraining process meant to overrule the material imperative of
expansion - while retaining its viability as a totalizing mode of social
metabolic reproduction. In fact, the possibility of capital's restrained
operation appears in the writings of its ideologists either as the
nightmare pf the "stationary state" of economic reproduction, or as
something to be exorcised with a gratuitous insult against Marx,
attributing to him, as we have seen above, the mindless advocacy of a
'communist steady-state equilibrium'.
Naturally, the question of restraint cannot be separated from the
objective characteristics and structural determinations of the system in
relation to which the need for restraint arises. In this sense, to
expect from capital to restrain itself is nothing short of expecting a
miracle to happen. For capital could adopt self-restraint as a
significant feature of its mode of operation only by ceasing to be
capital. As Marx had pointed out:
If capital increases from 100 to 1000, then 1000 is now the point of
departure, from which the increase has to begin; the ten-fold
multiplication, by 1000%, counts for nothing; profit and interest
themselves become capital in turn. What appeared as surplus value now
appears as simple presupposition, etc., as included in its simple
composition. [Grundrisse, 335]
Thus the need for restraint - even if what is at stake is nothing less
than human survival - is diametrically contradicted by the innermost
determinations of the capitalist system. For capital's mode of
production would collapse very quickly if it was compelled to operate
within firmly circumscribed, as opposed to constantly expandable,
limits. No partial remedies are conceivable in this regard, and
certainly none that could be implemented by the personifications of
capital in any of their actually feasible embodiments. This is why it is
necessary to envisage the institution of qualitative systemic changes at
a time when the dangers arising from the uncontrollability of capital
intensify, due to the system's structural unrestrainability.
Capital is the most comprehensively alienated mode of control in
history, with its self-enclosed command structure. For it must operate
by strictly subordinating the producers - in every respect - to a system
of decision-making radically divorced from them. This is an irremediable
condition due to the totalizing - and in its objective implications from
the outset globally expansionary - character of the system which cannot
share power, even to a minimal degree, with labour. Thus the alienated
control process must be inexorably defined as the logic of capital,
which in its turn calls for the definition of the controlling personnel
as the personification of capital in command over labour. The separate
group-identity of the personifications of capital is the necessary
corollary of capital's objective logic, corresponding to the system's
key defining characteristic as a separate, alienated command structure.
For this reason there can be no question of reforming the capital system
even through the science-fiction cloning of the 'enlightened caring
capitalists', nor indeed of radically changing it through the
postcapitalist metamorphosis of the inherited system's personifications
into hierarchically operating political controllers of surplus-labour
extraction. For capital cannot help being a hierarchical command system,
and its economy - through whatever historically different forms of
personification it might be operated - a command economy.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
