Getting ready for the spring semester. But before I get submerged in
all that, I'll squeeze in my comments on Tom's reply to my post. I'll
try to rephrase his points (perhaps making them more general than
intended) and comment critically on them.
Tom: Let me know if I'm distorting your views a bit too much.
(1) Wind and solar electricity generation is becoming profitable
*mainly* because the means of production of wind and solar electric
generators are currently produced with cheap non-renewables, and the
latter are cheap *mainly* because a substantial part of their costs is
externally imposed on us.
My comment: IMO, the main interrelated reasons why this may be the
case are: (1) the production of means of production of wind and solar
equipment (all the way up the stream) is carried out in fossil-powered
plants with large sunk costs yet to be fully amortized. However, as
times goes by and these power plants get older, their current
advantage will decrease. As these barriers to entry to greener
methods of production of green equipment fall, green production
methods will become more widespread and reach their escape velocity.
Insofar as governments, under the pressure of working people
responding to the environmental crisis, tax non-renewables and/or
subsidize renewables, the external costs of the former and the
external benefits of the latter will get internalized via prices.
This will further reinforce the trend. And reason (2): There are real
technical difficulties to scale up the production of green equipment,
e.g. crucial pieces of this equipment require materials that, for
whatever technical reasons, cannot be easily (cheaply) produced in
mass, technology has not yet find plausible substitutes, etc.
However, I believe that these difficulties are also likely to be
overcome with time because the main forces driving the trend towards
green production (mainly the collective concern for the environment)
can only get cumulative strength.
I am very ignorant of the technical and economic aspects of wind and
solar compared to fossil fuel based generation. But my rough
impression is that the scale economies of the latter were offset to
some degree by the cost of transmission. Once the transmission
network exists, you have scale economies as the marginal cost of
another subscriber drops and drops. Though I imagine that the loss
from transmission is significant as the network gets bigger. Wind
and, more so, solar have the potential (in most places humans live) to
generate power next to the points of consumptions and thus lower those
losses.
(2) Modern capitalist production (mechanized and automated production)
is profitable and, hence, able to sustain itself *mainly* because
modern capitalists are appropriating wealth (and value) not produced
under capitalist conditions, but instead under modes of exploitation
of extra-economically coerced labor (pre-, semi-, or non-capitalist).
My comment: Although, ultimately, this is a question to be settled
empirically, there are logical reasons to be skeptical of this story.
If the argument is that modern capitalist production is a vampire that
sucks the blood of working people, that it owes its Dorian Gray's
renewal and expansive drive to working-people's blood and crushed
bones, etc. then I agree 100%. And note also that destroying the
environment *is* just a form of sucking the blood out of working
people's veins, because -- to reinforce the point I made with
reference to raghu's post -- there are *no* "environmental costs" as
separate from "labor costs"; there are only labor costs: All costs are
human labor costs.
In my mind, this goes back to Marx's "profit upon alienation" note on
James Steuart in volume 4. Or to the note in the Grundrisse about the
myth that certain peoples can live for long periods of time off
plunder alone. For plunder to be possible, Marx noted, there must be
something to plunder. Profit upon alienation, unequal exchange, etc.
entail that value (hence, wealth) is recurrently or continuously
produced in the first place. Capitalists cannot appropriate
*systematically* what does not exist in abundance and, therefore,
reproduced continuously or recurrently. Etc. Now, if a mode of labor
exploitation robbed by capitalism were so vigorously self-perpetuating
as to keep feeding the capitalist vampire via unequal exchange,
throughout what appeared to be the capitalist own golden age -- a
golden age that in this light appears as a fluke, merely parasitic --
then how come it allowed itself to be abused by capitalism in the
first place? It seems to me that unequal exchange (and the
pre-capitalist modes of exploitation on the other end of the unequal
exchange) was (were) central to the early stages of global capitalist
development -- say, up to the industrial revolution, or even up to the
early 20th century -- but from that point on it became increasingly
peripheral to capital accumulation. Not unimportant (still huge in
absolute terms, cf. the persistence of colonial and neocolonial
imperialism, a phenomenon with crucial political consequences), but
peripheral, and increasingly so.
My impression, based on an admittedly summary examination of factual
evidence (I always feel I could do more refined number-crunching, if I
only were to clone myself), is that the value appropriated globally
nowadays through extra-economic methods (from natural resource rents
to taxes to other super profits) is largely pumped out of the
*capitalist* circuit proper; they are mainly forms of *surplus value*,
value produced under plain capitalist conditions. (I mean, of course,
perfectly legally free labor is an abstraction. There are always a
myriad of legal and other extra-economic coercive bonds restricting
their movements, but I'm talking about the central tendency.)
(3) True economies of scale are small and result from "spreading set
up costs." What are usually called "economies of scale" are false
scale economies; they are *mainly* external benefits generated outside
of capitalist structures and appropriated gratis by the capitalists.
They are super profits that don't come from surplus value, but from
surplus labor extracted by extra-economic coercion.
My comment: This goes back to the issue above. I can agree with
viewing scale economies as resulting from "spreading set up costs," if
"set up" is broadly interpreted to mean the set up of
("non-rivalrous") means of production (space/time, language,
technology, physical structures, equipment, machines, inventories,
etc.) that workers can share productively -- and that is what I call
the scale of *labor cooperation*. And the "nonrivalry" of means of
production (of all goods, in fact, as all goods are means for us to
(re)produce ourselves) results ultimately from their size or quantity:
their "supply." However, this spreading of set up costs is so
pervasive and widespread through modern capitalist history that their
gains are definitely not modest by any account I can figure. So, yes,
there is an external benefit here that the capitalists pocket gratis,
but that external benefit is the result of labor cooperation,
marshaled mainly under capitalist conditions. Capitalism does that
(expands the scale of labor cooperation) mainly because it is driven
to refine and re-refine the mode of exploiting labor, and not (mainly)
because it sucks off the value produced in co-existing modes of labor
exploitation. Again, the latter happens, but it is secondary.
FWIW.
> Now Marx argued that increased labour productivity,as a result of the use
> of machines decreased the value (that is the embodied labour time) per item
> produced while increasing the proportion of "dead labour" (in the form of
> machinery) relative to living labour. Or, to use Allyn Young's terminology
> more roundabout production. But Hornborg's analysis suggests something
> radically different going on in Lancashire *and Dixie*, more akin to the
> production of "surplus profit" than of relative surplus value. Rather than
> reducing the total labour time (including that implied in differential land
> rent) incorporated into each unit of output, the cotton-spinning machines
> (and their metropolitan localization) enforced a regime of unequal exchange
> that enabled the cotton manufacturers to not have to pay for the labour
> incorporated in the raw materials. That is to say, the regime of unequal
> exchange was an "external economy" as Marshall defined it and as Chapman,
> Pigou and John Maurice Clark elaborated.
> It seems to me that we have to disabuse ourselves of the myth of "economies
> of scale." Beyond the modest savings from spreading set up costs, there is
> no such thing. Most so-called economies of scale are simply ways to
> externalize part of the cost of production -- that is to take advantage of
> external economies, one of the most pernicious of is unequal exchange.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
