If we include the lives lost in the conquest of the Americas, that's, what, 50 million people, 10 million, 100 million? How much do their lives count? If you say these are included in "capitalism as a whole" (your phrase), then shouldn't capitalism as a whole be counted as incredibly inefficient?
The usual meaning of efficiency is "best use" of -- ultimately -- the productive force of labor in terms of overall human wellbeing. In general, there's little problematic about the notion of efficiency. The devil is in the details. What is "wellbeing" in a given historical epoch (the standard of efficiency) is not fixed once and forever. Societies are not homogeneous. So, who determines what is "best use" and what is "overall human wellbeing"? Concrete people in concrete conditions, to the extent they are effectively agents or makers of history in its many layers. As a rule, in functional capitalist societies, the main "deciders" (to use George Bush's term) are the capitalists. But, as they go, even under capitalism, working people evolve both as a productive force and as protagonists of history. As a result, their own notion of wellbeing evolves, and that's a standard of efficiency alternative to that of the capitalists. So, the notion of efficiency is a disputed territory, an arena of the class struggle. What people was able to produce one century ago is different from what people is able to produce now, what moved people one century ago is different from what moves people now, what working people tolerated a century ago is different from what they tolerate now, etc. This much is clear to me. What I usually try to do, something that those who've read my stuff here and in other lists can attest to, is follow Marx's lead with respect to the political economy of his time, i.e. not to reject the concepts of the economists tout court, but *to critique them*, in the sense of deriving from them further and further consequences (reducing them ad absurdum if you will) beyond the point where the economists leave them. It's like the category of profit under Ricardo or Mill, which Marx takes away and turns into a specific form of surplus value. That's what I think should be done with the apparatus of today's economics: toss the shell of ideological rationalization and keep the rational kernel, etc. And in this exercise, I've been insistent to the point of bugging people that we need to represent the concepts of the economists adequately, resisting the temptation to trivialize them or mock them for cheap political or ideological thrill. So, if efficiency is to mean best use of (ultimately) productive force in terms of overall wellbeing, then, indeed, all the shit that capitalism excretes has to be included on the debit side of the ledger. This is disputing a territory, as opposed to letting the capitalists appropriate unchallenged the concern about efficiency (best use of the productive force, which is the productive force of labor, which they appropriate gratis due to wealth inequality). But, in this light, the content of the category starts to reflect the POV of the working people as an emerging political force. It's not that merely by disputing the content of a term one secures some sort of progress. In a sense, all one is doing is giving conceptual expression to what is already a practical reality -- the movement that collectively asserts the interest of the working people, that collectively enforces a decreasing tolerance towards the garbage of capitalism, i.e. giving expression to a social rebellion! With that info, anybody can see what my view is with respect to the lives wasted and crippled as a result of capitalist progress (with or without quotation marks). On the other hand, if we contrast markets (not necessarily capitalism) to communism in general and in the abstract, as the tragedy of the commons argument does, then the question of which social structure is more efficient, becomes a question of historical viability. In that light, a sine-qua-non attribute of any workable social structure, mode of production, etc. must be endurance, ability to overcome competing social structures. It has to emerge in and through the struggle against them, prevail, replicate and sustain itself. Humanity can only solve what it can problematize. Communism, if it is to exist, must go through all that and prevail. Of course, the virulence of communism has to be defensive. The standards of what maximizes social wellbeing under communism are much more demanding than under any other social structure. Communism cannot be built at the expense of humans (or of the biological basis for human life), but as an expression of the humanity of producers. Thie whole process is associated with an emerging new human morality. Note that I am not questioning the possibility or the necessity to build communism. As a matter of fact, I'm convinced that -- within the boundaries of historical contingency and excluding a nuclear or environmental catastrophe -- communism will prevail *necessarily*. I have never been more convinced of this. I also hold the old view that there's an inherent fundamental tendency in capitalism to hit the ultimate limits with increasing acuteness, not through some agent-less mechanism, but through its spontaneous impact on -- mixed with an increasingly conscious self-transformation of -- the working people. In PEN-L postings, all this cannot be spelled out all at once. The posts would be unreadable -- as this already is. So, a bit has to be presumed or inferred from context and the rest is to be induced from the little we know about one another. Or not... as I noted in a reply to Jim. I said to him, I humbly admit that human communication has limits. My reasoning can be faulty. But nowhere do I imply that -- from the vantage point of some moral Mount Olympus -- that brutality, violence, Nazism, or rape are justified? A final clarification: I'm typing this, not because I feel any obligation to please Bill, in spite of the vehemence with which he demands me to answer his questions. I don't think he cares about my answers at all, since he's already established my moral inferiority on the basis of my "thoughtless use" of a word. So, this is for those who have not yet made that judgment.
