by
David Harvey
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But for fixed capital circulation to be fully effective, a number of preconditions must exist:
[...]
This requires 'a certain level of productivity and of relative overabundance, and more specifically, a level directly related to the transformation of the circulating capital into fixed capital ... Surplus population (from this standpoint) as well as _surplus production, is a condition for this.'
Capital tends, as we have seen, to produce surplus populations (an industrial reserve army) and surplus products (commodities facing problems of realisation). It thus systematically produces conditions conducive to fixed capital formation. [...]
to ponder: is this analogous to investing in education, healthcare etc (i.e., temporarily taking some capital out of circulation to invest in the long-term) and if so, are pro-capital forces who oppose those investments not just engineering their own downfall
[...] Different productivities of labour according to natural differences (e.g., cheap food from fertile land in a favourable climate), the different definitions of wants, needs and desires according to natural and cultural situation and the dynamics of class struggles, mean that the equalisation of the rate of profit will not be accompanied by an equalisation of the rate of exploitation between countries. In the event of trade between countries, 'the privileged country receives more labour in exchange for less, even though this difference, the excess is pocketed by a particular class, just as in the exchange between labour and capital in general'. [...]
One of the reasons that a troubled global capitalism survived as well as it did after 2007-8 was because of China's sustained growth of productive consumption. The Communist Party leadership in Beijing almost certainly did not set out to save global capitalism, but this is in effect what they did.
basically the govt pushed for a massive construction boom during the downturn, not necessarily because the country actually needed these new buildings/cities, but because it was the best way of holding economic depression at bay
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession--as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life--will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they my be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
from Essays in Persuasion
But when workers heard the ruling class say “tighten your belts,” they correctly understood that such a program was never going to apply to the wealthy. It would always mean: lower your expectations. And accept a worse tomorrow for your children. The entire history of the labor movement was clear: it was the class enemy who told them to do more with less. In 1980, the Democrats’ share of the union-family vote dropped from 63 percent to 50 percent. Reagan won with Morning in America while Carter lost with his Protestant hand-wringing over decadence and materialism.
Volcker and Carter weren’t environmentalists (nor were they anti-environmentalists), but their belt-tightening policies fit all too neatly with an environmentalism increasingly focused on consumer cutbacks. And the corporate drive to make such regulation a matter of voluntary consumer choices quickly made it a middle-class lifestyle, the antithesis of Mazzocchi’s vision. As companies moved jobs overseas to cut down on labor costs, it was all too easy to blame environmentalists and diffuse the power of the environmental-labor united front.
re: Carter exhorting the American public to embrace environmental austerity in 79 (fewer trips, less heating, etc)
That McDowell coal miner might be skeptical about climate change but that’s only because those are the cards (and the economy) capitalism has dealt him. Instead of trying to get him to #FuckingLoveScience, we should be trying to organize him into a socialist program of full employment and democratic control of production to rebuild the country and the world with an eye on radically lowering emissions.
Cap and trade doesn't disciple capital; it coddles it. It does alarmingly little to force a sharp break from fossil fuel dependence. In fact, it actually establishes barriers to the comprehensive zero-carbon transition we need by giving big emitters an easy out. Instead of making the big, risky investments necessary to ditch carbon-intensive technologies outright, they can simply purchase cheap offset credits from other countries, deferring the vital work of building a carbon-free future.
"discipline" I think
[...] We have to recognize that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature. Even those who acknowledge this in one breath will still fall back on metaphors like reduced “carbon footprint” — as if we could just step more lightly and allow nature to repair itself. This is, paradoxically, one of the most anthropocentric positions imaginable, since it presumes that it is the eternal and natural state of the world to be habitable for humans. But God didn’t create the world specifically for us. Natural history is indifferent to humans and every other living being, and is characterized by chaotic change and mass extinctions, not homeostatic balance.
In response to the charge of hubris and Prometheanism, it is just as important to emphasize that though we accept the inevitability of attempting to “plan” nature, the socialist project does not aim at controlling nature. Nature is never under our control, and there are always unintended consequences. But just as we cannot trust either the market or a policy elite to automatically produce just economic outcomes, we cannot assume that an unmolested nature will provide us with a safe and abundant world in which to live, in this or any other social system. And so, in the process of achieving the post-scarcity order that the Marxist biologist David Schwartzman calls “solar communism,” we will take up the task of cleaning up the mess capitalism has made, and creating an Anthropocene more rational, democratic, and egalitarian than the one we now inhabit.
Venture capital is designed to demand large returns in the short term. This makes VC firms unlikely to support the sort of research that produces technological breakthroughs, which requires generous financing over long periods of time. Science operates on a different timetable than capitalism.
Bill Gates' fund is a 20-year one, as opposed to the more usual 10-year one, but that's not enough