Mark says:
>The issue is their economic availability to capitalism--and the
>price the rest of us pays.
Naturally we want to make costs of industrial inputs (fuels included)
-- as well as labor power -- dearer to capitalists, monkey-wrenching
the circuit of accumulation, hoping to push capital into a crisis &
turn it into out advantage. Hence the importance of environmental
movements (be they environmental justice, protection of habitats of
endangered species, or whatnot). The majority of Greens themselves
-- even radical ones -- don't have such a strategic understanding,
however, and it's a job of Marxists to put environmentalist concerns
back into class politics & vice versa. Minus the anchor of Marxist
theory & revolutionary project, Greens naturally gravitate toward the
ideas of "sustainable capitalism," Zerzan-style anarcho-primitivism,
moralist anti-consumerism, & other dead ends. Our job at bottom is
not to help capitalists manage accumulation in a Greener fashion; our
job is to make it first harder & then impossible for them to manage
it in any way.
At 6:25 PM -0400 6/22/01, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>Michael Perelman wrote:
>
>>I don't know what the biggest risk is for capitalism: Third World upheavals,
>>financial implosion, global warming, overcapacity, or resource constraints.
>
>None of the above -- the tendency to overaccumulation inherent in
>capitalism, supply bottlenecks created by neoliberalism, ecological
>strains on the conditions of accumulation, etc. -- in itself is a
>_terminal_ risk for capitalism, nor will be the combination of any
>or all of the above, I think. As long as there is no political
>force to abolish capitalism & establish socialism, capital can
>always turn a "risk" into a new opportunity for further
>accumulation. Stagflation of the 70s was solved by union-busting in
>the North & debt deflation & deindustrialization in the South & the
>newly capitalist East, as well as by displacing the formerly
>partially socialized costs of reproducing labor-power back onto the
>working class. Another crisis brewing now can be no doubt solved in
>favor of capital again (e.g., socialization of costs to write off
>bad loans in Japan), unless we build unified political agents to
>reject the anti-working-class solutions (including war & fascism)
>that capital inevitably presents to us.
>
>Since the neoliberal solution included debt deflation &
>deindustrialization in the South & the East, naturally we want to
>reverse them, thereby stopping massive capital outflows from the
>South & the East to the North which has helped the ruling class. In
>the North as well, the working class need to learn to demand more of
>all goods: higher wages, more free time, more social programs, more
>environmental cleanups, etc. The job of the working class, in the
>North or South or East, in short is to demand more, not because
>doing so is a viable long-term goal under capitalism, but precisely
>because it isn't. The more the working class organize themselves to
>make demands energetically, the more likely capitalism enters into
>another serious crisis -- in other words, the working class, by
>organized demands, must create a crisis & turn it into its favor (=
>an opportunity to fight for socialism from the position of strength).
>
>Yoshie
That's the political strategy I argue for.
Yoshie
