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When they’re not hijacking capitalist tankers, communists often find themselves asking for sacrifices from people who have the least to sacrifice—it is not a social strategy that appeals to many people with the most, after all. While the other strategies rely on access to substantial flows of resources, whether state revenues or union dues, communists, as we’ve seen, worry about stocking subsistence levels of potatoes. This necessity births a lot of invention, but the mortality rate is high. It’s low-stakes to proclaim “Everything for everyone!” when you don’t have anything in the first place. And if your movement has to figuratively and sometimes literally fight for what it has all the time—including and especially primary mediations such as shelter, food, medicine, and freedom from incarceration—there’s a limit on the remainder of care left to go around, the free abundance of which is supposed to be the commune’s greatest weapon. Communes threaten to gather rather than solve capitalism’s problems, drawing together people with desperate needs and few resources to assist them. That’s what happened at the communized Sheraton in Minneapolis, which could not manage the collective discipline necessary to continue. As M. E. O’Brien writes of protest camps, “They require an enormous quantity of uncompensated collective volunteer hours, often from people who depend on the camp for their material survival while organizing.”70 That’s a delicate balance and not something that anyone can nail down in perpetuity. O’Brien concludes that the commune can’t simply spread because people next door see how well yours is working: “The structural conditions of proletarianization, market dependency, and state violence make such a vision of a revolutionary transition impossible without generalized insurrection, and leave such communities inherently unstable, inaccessible, and isolated,” she writes.71 Communism is a martial plan, and that could be unappealing to people who mistakenly believe they live in a peaceful society. Perhaps communism only seems reasonable in the mad light of unexpected fire.
One unseasonably hot day in the winter of 2022, I stepped through my door in Washington, DC, to the sound of birds screaming. At least that’s how I interpreted the racket in the trees. And I didn’t blame them. This weather must be driving the animals absolutely crazy, I thought. They can feel in their bodies that things in general are going wrong, and there’s nothing they can do about it. It took me a moment to remember that I am an animal, too, that I could feel in my body that things in general were going wrong, that the weather was driving me crazy, and that every conversation I’d have that day would start with the same avian squawk: “Can you believe how hot it is?” Even if we’d prefer to think of ourselves as the inside to animals’ outside, humans and nonhumans are stuck together in this planetary crisis.ii
Global industrial animal production reaches apogetic heights in the American Midwest, where vertically integrated pork manufacturers intertwine their workforce and their pigs in each other’s biology to a staggering degree. For his study Porkopolis, anthropologist Alex Blanchette embedded in an Iowa pork town that births, raises, and kills millions of animals every year. What he found was not a “project of human mastery over hogs” but rather an unfolding model of modern meat that “revolves around remaking the lives and labor of human beings to make them amenable to capitalist animality.” The meat and poultry industry is difficult to mechanize and automate because, no matter how hard corporations try, it’s impossible to standardize living things. Even the largest-scale firms depend on a lot of workers to make quick and precise judgment calls about something intrinsically variable, such as where to cut a subtly individual carcass or how to sexually stimulate a particular sow for artificial insemination. Instead of humanizing the industry, this dependence has incentivized firms to industrialize people. Blanchette writes of a firm that puts potential employees through tests at the company health clinic to determine where their bodies are strongest so as to match them with the part of the pig they are best suited to repetitively disassemble. When he asked workers how the disassembly line was transforming their physiologies, “some men enthusiastically lifted up their T-shirts to reveal subtly different patterns of muscular development etched across their backs, while others showed how one of their wrists, arms, or fingers differed from others in size or shape.”33 Slaughterhouse injuries have changed, from acute maimings to the more affordable chronic muscle and nerve damage. Capital intends to get the most out of its pigs and its people, no matter if what results is gruesome and obscene.
jeez
If capitalists rob nature, and if nature undermines capital, everyone ends up broke. Where is the money supposed to come from? It’s a real concern: The World Bank called the early 2020s the “slowest half-decade of GDP growth in 30 years,” driven by timid capital investment.45 There are fanciful solutions—asteroid mining, for example, or magic software—but the likely answer is much more prosaic: us. If climate change means the future is progressively less guaranteed, then capital looks to protect itself by reducing costs instead of riskily planning to increase output or venture into new fields. For firms, that could mean consolidating with competitors, hiring consultants to “trim the fat,” wheedling subsidies out of the government, increasing prices, reducing product quality and/or quantity without changing the price, or getting customers to do some of the work for them.v But the tried-and-true way to reduce costs is to increase the rate of labor exploitation. That can be as simple as neglecting to award raises to employees fast enough to keep up with the cost of living or as dastardly as union busting or wage theft or child labor. In 2021, UNICEF and the ILO issued a joint statement warning that they had measured the first increase in decades in the number of child laborers around the world. In the United States, the Economic Policy Institute tracked ten state-level bills meant to weaken child labor protections, concluding that such efforts “are part of a coordinated campaign backed by industry groups intent on eventually diluting federal standards that cover the whole country.”46 The ILO estimates that ten million additional people fell into what it calls modern slavery between 2016 and 2021.47 By attacking the working class, capital can find a way out of its profit squeeze, and indeed we’ve seen workers and consumers rather than capitalists pay for the slowdown in growth.
i guess AI addresses this quite well, for now (both magic software and cutting costs)
Offloading costs and risks to labor and the public at large is a more viable solution for the capitalist class than a race to the bottom of the extraction barrel that would pit capitalist against capitalist and accelerate the earth’s chaotic exhaustion. Private green investments will help reduce climate change in the future, but they’re not immune to its effects now. Clean energy infrastructure doesn’t get an extreme-weather exemption—consider the unprecedented March 2024 hailstorm that smashed up a giant solar farm in Texas, leaving neighbors to worry about chemicals penetrating the water table, for example.48 Green stuff, then, is not an answer for investment capital, certainly not when it can’t lay the risks off on the public. Instead, profitable innovation means finding sustainable ways to steal from people, like generative AI software that chews up genuine creative work and spits it out again in flavorless chunks, for a fee. Constant downward pressure on the working class eventually causes people to start buckling. The wage—minus the unavoidable fees, fines, scams, and other connivances—ceases to be sufficient to reproduce people’s lives, forcing them to take extra jobs, to commit crimes themselves, to forage for food, to migrate. The price of labor drops below its cost, and capital increasingly finds its gains at the working class’s direct expense, digging into bodies like a long rope on the bare palms of someone sliding down.
[...] Major defense stocks have performed extraordinarily well in the twenty-first century, catapulting over the also vibrant S&P 500.54 And minor defense companies have had good luck being acquired by those big ones. “It’s just, sadly, a good business to be in right now, given the state of affairs in the world,” defense analyst Roman Schweizer told Defense News about the American rocket weapons industry at the end of 2023. “We don’t have enough weapons,” added Chris Brose, chief strategy officer for the defense startup Anduril, which began as a border-surveillance automation company. “That pie needs to grow, and we want to help win a share of the growing pie.”56 The market knows, on some level, that these rockets only exist to destroy people and property, but Lockheed Martin investors don’t have to factor in those costs. As far as capital is concerned, the best thing a substantial number of the world’s people can do for accumulation is get hit with an expensive American missile. It’s worth noting that the US Department of Defense is the world’s largest institutional fossil fuel user: The military and its associated industrial complex have an annual carbon bootprint the same size as the forty-five least-emitting nations combined.
lol damn
[...] But beyond being pro-technology the government has also uncritically accepted much of Silicon Valley's rhetoric of disruptive innovation. It is remarkable that the Bay Area technology industry can continue to see itself as a collection of scrappy non-conformist outsiders while accumulating the greatest collection of private fortunes in the world. [...]
the way the industry sees itself - useful to draw out for Tribune piece
An investigation by Vanessa Houlder of the Financial Times showed that up to a third of the price gap between hotels and Airbnb rentals is due to tax differences, with hotels being subject to business taxes and value-added taxes that almost all Airbnb hosts avoid, while many Airbnb hosts benefit from the Sharing Economy allowance mentioned above. Airbnb also avoids costs such as commercial-level fire and safety protection and accessibility features, which its competitors must pay to install. [...]
also think about the labour implications ... more flexible, less "downtime" ie squeezing out more work per dollar
The Sharing Economy is a movement: it is a movement for deregulation. Major financial institutions and influential venture capital funds are seizing an opportunity to challenge rules made by democratic city governments around the world, and to reshape cities in their own interests. It’s not about building an alternative to a corporate-driven market economy, it’s about extending the deregulated free market into new areas of our lives. An enthusiasm for “the end of ownership,” the title of one Andreessen Horowitz blog post on the Sharing Economy, is difficult to take seriously when it comes from those who actually own the companies involved. [...]
For many economists the story was simple and the villain was clear: “regulatory capture” by those taxi medallion owners who suck all the money out of the taxi system without delivering value. Take them out of the picture, improve efficiency by better matching drivers with customers to cut down on the dead time between rides, and we have a new age for urban transit.