(Mark is temporarily off LBO-talk and Marxism mailing-lists. He is also
permanently off PEN-L, don't ask me why. I thought that this post which
just appeared on the leninist-international mailing list, which he
moderates, would be interesting to others. I also passed Greg Nowell's
comments on the Barrons editorial about oil shortages, as well as the
editorial, on to him.)
The root causes of the world crisis lie within the sphere of production as
well as circulation. In a sense the entire history of industrial capitalism
is a history of the deployment of fossil fuels and machinery to substitute
for muscle power and biomass energy; and the trajectory of rising social
productivity can be plotted on a graph whose vertical axis is labelled
'hydrogen' and whose horizontal axis is labelled, 'carbon'. Increasing
productivity means decreasing the carbon consumed in fuel energy and
increasing the proportion of hydrogen. There is an imperative about
this, far beyond the requirements of mere competition which force
capitalists to take the value out of products, primarily by reducing
material, energy and labour inputs. The deeper imperative, inscribed at
the level of the mode of production, is intimately linked to the
historical destiny and fate of capitalism. For if the process of
'dematerialisation' is insufficiently rapid, the system runs into
increasing entropic difficulties: roadblocks assail its attempts to
restart and renew cycles of accumulation. The present growing
disintegration, systemic breakdown and anarchy within world capitalism are
symptomatic not so much of disorders within the sphere of circulation
as of ineradicable problems arising within production itself.
The crises within circulation are only manifestations of a deeper malaise
resulting from the long-term slow-down in rates of productivity growth,
themselves arising from the growing technical difficulty of
'decarbonising' energy systems and dematerialising production, and
the growing loss of energy-efficiency within the global energy system.
This is true despite the vaunted improvements in energy production especially
in oil and gas expro, and in the equally vaunted 'virtualisation' of
production
and delinking of energy inputs to material outputs.
The next century is billed as the 'hydrogen' century, when carbon will at
last be effectively excluded from the energy cycle, and humankind at last
'freed' from its dependence on carbon-laden fossil fuels. Like a cat in
a sack, capitalism tries to squirm free of its difficulties, and it is
said that once the transition to full hydrogen systems is achieved a new
productive cornucopia will be realised and capitalism will have immortalised
itself, thus escaping the baleful destiny we Marxists have allotted it.
It will be a Houdini-like escape, from the pressing toils of massive
population
increases, growing environmental devastation, economic collapse,
disintegration
of the world market, and the fearsome consequences of global warming. But
the optimists take comfort from the prehistory of capitalism's escapes,
its seemingly endless ability to renew its socio-technical basis.
Unfortunately, this optimism is based on illusion. The 'hydrogen'
world of decarbonised energy systems is a chimera. And if it WERE to
be achieved, it would be at the price of the final hypertrophy of capitalist
commodity production, the final extrusion of value from the product. As
we know, the absence of value makes valorisation impossible.
Paradoxically, the present crisis is simultaneously a crisis of both
over-production and under-production of capital. Capital is copiously
available, but can find few profitable outlets. At the same time, it
is self-evident that in every country outside the metropoles capital
is not abundant, it is extremely scarce, and the mass of humankind
is condemned by its absence to grinding poverty. World capitalism
is hog-tied as much by its previous successes as its failures.
Valorisation has been slowed from a flood to a turgid trickle because
the values of inputs has been relentless whittled away over many decades.
This explains the superabundance of idled surplus capital. The
precocious success of 'decarbonisation' and dematerialisation has
produced this outcome, one where the greatest reserve army of
labour in history -- more than half of humankind: confronts
the greatest accumulation of productive power known to history,
across a social nomansland which leaves each inaccessible
to the other and has resulted in locking the majority
of humankind out of the benefits of production and indeed out of
society and in a sense, out of history.
Any real new upswing or serious resumption of production (I do
not mean the kind of illusory boomlets which always occur within
real depressions, and did for example throughout the 1930s,
when the 'turning of the corner' was monotonously proclaimed
and always proven wrong within days or weeks) is certain
to be short-lived since it must press against the absolute
limit of valorisation inscribed within the mode of production
itself, and which history has now as it were brought to the surface.
A new phase of devastatingly-powerful positive-feedback loops has begun,
a chain reaction in which all the negative tendencies of crisis reinforce
and intensify each other, and in which the economic crisis must increasingly
become a political one ('politics is the concentrated expression of
economics': Lenin).
The immediate future is therefore going to be one in which the growing
dislocation in the world system, the fragmentation of world-capitalism,
its loss of functional unity, the collapse of the world market and of the
integrity of its unifying institutions -- will all continue to accelerate.
All these phenomena are of course, also crises of US imperial hegemony. It
was already clear more than a year ago that the Asia meltdown was in
reality a crisis of dollar suzerainty and ultimately of US hegemony,
and this was so despite the triumphalism of Wall Street which rushed
its carpet baggers to Asian capitals to buy up assets at firesale
prices.
From the point of view of marxian value theory, capitalism's chronic and
deepening energy crisis appears as a term in the general equation of
capitalist
accumulation, in which the tendency of the rate of profit to fall itself
produces a growing and unusable reserve army of labour, a chronic crisis of
rising organic composition, and an inability to transform the
historically-endowed technical composition of capital. Gross facts determine
capitalism's complete inability to ever incoporate the bulk of humankind
into its orbit. For example, in the west there is an existing infrastructure
of 50 tonnes of steel per capita, more than 10 times that in the third
world peripheries: to bring the Third World to the same gross level
would require increasing world annual steel production from the present
level of 700m tonnes p.a. to more than one billion tonnes p.a. and
sustaining that level of production for more than a hundred years.
This will not happen and this single fact by itself explains why
'development' is a hoax.
Marx definitely assumed that all terms of the equation were internally
satisfied
-- that is, if capitalism 'detected' a secular energy-crisis, or a crisis
in any
other input, its own laws of motion would act to counter it. Therefore the
argument advanced by Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Deléage and Daniel Hémery
is not a marxist one, it is Ricardian/physiocratic. However, criticising
the argument may make it useful for our purposes.
They argue that energy entropy overrides all the other capitalist laws of
motion, but this is very far from being a new idea, it had a certain
popularity in the 30s and again in the 50s, but it always leads into the
shallows of physicalist, Leontiev-style input-output theories of capitalist
crisis and in general was comprehensively criticised by Marx within
his general critical reduction of ricardianism.
Marx's object of analysis is the laws of motion of capitalist
reproduction in their totality, and he concluded that there is
a historical limit to capitalism and that this mode of production
will be superseded by ANOTHER, with an entirely different social
AND MATERIAL basis. Such a conclusion cannot be derived from
the entropy thesis of capitalism's historical limit, nor does
that offer anything more than a speculative insight into the
kind of sustainable social ecology which must come after capitalism.
Debeir, Deléage and Hémery are wrong in positing the notion
of an overarching social law of entropy. And their insistence on making
what is actually an externality into a determinant of theory, reduces
theory iutself to arbitrariness and actually takes away all certainty.
Unlike Marxism, this theory of energy-entropy may not result in the
disappearance of capitalism at all, may even help 'immortalise' it. This
also makes it necessary to criticise the theory of energy-entropy as a
social limit.
A year ago, Lou Proyect and myself discussed "In the Servitude of Power:
Energy and Civilization through the Ages", by Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul
Deléage and Daniel Hémery, Zed Press, 1986
After we exchanged postings, I wrote privately to Deleage and engaged him
in a fruitful dialogue which I shall post in some form at a later date.
Here is Lou Proyect's original posting about Deleage et al followed
by an extract from the book (posted first in November 1997):
Recent reading has convinced me that it is time to reconsider dialectical
materialism, the unjustly maligned attempt by Marx and Engels to provide a
unified analysis of society and nature. Dialectical materialism has gotten
a bad reputation from its use in Soviet apologetics, but, despite this, an
updated version can provide insights into the environmental crisis that
historical materialism simply can not.
Jean-Guy Vaillancourt's essay "Marx and Ecology: More Benedictine than
Franciscan" is contained in the collection "The Greening of Marxism"
(Guilford, 1996) raises this question in a most perceptive way. (By the
way, there's an essay by this guy named Michael Perelman titled "Marx and
Resource Scarcity" in there as well. It's pretty gosh-darned good.)
Vaillancourt singles out Engels's "Anti-Duhring" and the "Dialectics of
Nature" for special consideration since they are more directly concerned
with nature and ecology than any of the previous writings of Marx and
Engels. They are also considered bulwarks of dialectical materialist
thought. The "Dialectics of Nature" contains the famous chapter "The Role
of Work in Transforming Ape into Man."
Most people are quite familiar with the paragraph that describes how the
"conquest" of nature can have unexpected results:
"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on
us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results
we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who,
in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to
obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the
forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying
the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the
Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so
carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by
doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their
region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their
mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it
possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during
the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware
that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading
scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in
the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able
to learn its laws and apply them correctly."
What is less frequently quoted is the paragraph which immediately follows:
"And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better
understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate
and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional
course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the
natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a
position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural
consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more
this progresses the more will humanity not only feel but also know their
oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and
unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, humanity and nature,
soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical antiquity in
Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity."
When Engels states we will know our "oneness with nature", he is really
hearkening back to the classical materialist roots of Marxism. After all,
Marx wrote his PhD thesis on the philosophy of nature in Democritus and
Epicurus. These philosophers are in the materialist tradition begun by
Parmenides and Heraclitus, who lived a century before. This tradition is
continued in the philosophy of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, who
are the forerunners of the science of nature and even of scientific ecology
itself. The opposed philosophical tradition of Plato, which posits a
duality between mind and nature, is certainly at the root of Christian
theology itself which Engels attacks.
Was Engels's studies of the dialectics of nature something that he did
while Marx's back was turned? There is a tendency to blame Engels for
everything that has gone wrong in Marxism. While the Frankfurt School
thinks that everything went wrong after 1844, when Marx and Engels
supposedly dumped "humanism", it is the Althusserites who put the blame on
Fred himself. They set the date when everything went to hell in a hand
basket a little later, when Engels dumped historical materialism and
replaced it with dialectical materialism, in order to promote a silly
belief that Marxism and the physical sciences had some relationship.
In reality, both Marx and Engels oscillated between an anthropocentric and
a nature-centric perspective. When they discover Darwin after 1860, the
nature-based perspective begins to hold sway as well it might. The tension
between the two poles can best be explained by the lingering impact of
Hegel, whose philosophy emphasized historical and socioeconomic factors and
incorporated a deeply-felt humanism.
Vaillancourt sees a subtle difference between the two subtly different
nature-centrisms of Marx and Engels after 1860. "For Marx, the dialectic is
situated more within science, within the human context--that is, than
within nature itself--while for Engels, especially in his later works, the
dialectic is situated in the very heart of matter, independent of man.
Engels investigations into the dialectics of nature were encouraged by
Marx. Both saw this investigation as being grounded in philosophy rather
than science, but understood that scientific research could only help to
strengthen the overall philosophical project."
In the late 20th century, we have begun to understand that nature can not
simply a act as a faucet for the unlimited supply of raw materials and as a
drain for noxious industrial waste that results from the transformation of
raw materials into commodities by labor. Engels's comments on the
despoliation of the Alps have been written large as we see huge sections of
the planet being wasted by a profit-starved lumpen-bourgeoisie today.
In Martin O'Connor's collection "Is Capitalism Sustainable" (Guilford,
1994), we find an interesting essay by Jean-Paul Deléage titled
"Eco-Marxist Critique of Political Economy" that is clearly informed by the
sort of dialectical materialism that can help us to understand and resolve
the environmental crisis.
Deléage describes the faucet/sink view of nature as an expression of
capitalist ideology. Ricardo was typical of this view when he wrote, "The
brewer, the distiller, the dyer, make incessant use of the air and water
for the production of their commodities; but as the supply is boundless,
they bear no price." Deléage's whole purpose is to quantify the
unquantifiable: the environmental costs of capitalist production.
The key to this is energy, understood in its broadest sense as the
transformation of natural resources into the raw material of production.
"For example, when one shifts from copper extracted from porphyritic ores
at a 1% concentration, to 0.5% and then to 0.3% ore, the energy cost of a
ton of metal increases from 22,500 kilowatts to 43,000 and 90,000 kilowatts
per ton of copper, respectively."
As capitalism grows old as a system and as resources become more scarce,
the level of energy expenditures tends to rise. For example, half a century
ago, over 10 times more oil was discovered per meter than today; the cost
of an exploration well of 30,000 feet is 120 times higher than that of a
well of 5,000 feet. The nuclear industry represents the most extreme sorts
of costs, measured in this fashion. The costs, however, are not encountered
when uranium is extracted from the earth, but when after the ore has been
transformed into energy. The radioactive wastes require an inordinately
expensive treatment, since the half-life of plutonium 239, for example, is
24,600 years. That is why the nuclear industry is so dangerous. The
capitalist class does not want to invest in the storage capabilities to
protect us from such wastes. They would prefer to send it off to places
like Mali to poison poor people of color.
Agriculture is the most highly visible aspect of the capitalist economy's
tendency to attempt to pay for these hidden costs in a destructive manner.
Massive use of fertilizer and conditioning of the soil requires significant
energy resources, mostly derived from petroleum and byproducts. In Britain,
6.5 calories of fossil fuel produced 1 calorie of food; the ratios were
6.1/1 in France in 1973 and 9.6/1 in the USA in 1970. 16.7% of energy
consumed in the USA in the early 80s, according to some scientists, went
into agriculture and food-production. The problem with all this, just as it
was in the wasteful agriculture in the Alps described by Engels, is that it
has environmental consequences.
Agricultural waste is one the biggest problems today that capitalism has no
capacity to resolve. It is a daily feature on the news programs, as we
discover that pesticides or fertilizers are producing mutant frogs in
Minnesota or killing entire species of fishes in Montana, which all points
ultimately in the direction of human birth defects. Deléage states:
"Most problems accumulate in the final phase of the productive process, in
the form of waste. This applies, for example, to fertilizer, particularly
to nitrates no longer held down by the colloids of the vegetal soil, but
instead carried away by running water. This irrationality has already led
to genuine ecological catastrophes in certain regions of Europe where
intensive agriculture is practiced. Thus, in late May 1988 the North Sea,
from the southern shores of Norway and Sweden to the northern shores of
Denmark, was invaded across some 7.5 million hectares by a sudden
proliferation of the seaweed Chrysochromulina polylepis, which destroyed
all other forms of life to a depth of 10 meters below the surface of the
ocean. The cause of this ecological catastrophe was the saturation of the
seawater with nutrients, particularly nitrates used by farmers of the
regions adjoining the North Sea, 50% of which are carried to the sea by
rain and rivers. One must add multiple accidents of various kinds
registered downstream of the estuaries of rivers flowing through regions of
intensive agriculture. Such accidents occur every year in France along the
shores of Brittainy. Across the Atlantic, in the estuary of the Saint
Lawrence River, a proliferation of diatoms led to three deaths and hundreds
of cases of food poisoning in 1987."
Deléage sees the second law of thermodynamics as key to understanding these
problems and resolving them within a socialist framework: economic
activity, intended to satisfy human needs, runs against the general
tendency of the universe to move toward a state of greater disorder, of
higher entropy. By definition, the overall increase of entropy associated
with the productive process is always greater than the local decrease of
entropy corresponding to this process. In other words, for example, the
amount of energy that goes into industrial farming is much higher than the
human energy associated with subsistence farming. When we drive a car, a
gallon of gasoline that is burned in the process increases the entropy in
the environment. When we produce a sheet of copper, the disorder entropy of
the ore is decreased, but only at the expense of increased entropy in the
rest of the universe.
Human beings are not immune from this process, which takes place at the
level of matter itself. That is why the project that Engels began with
Dialectics of Nature is worth understanding and building upon. We are not
apart from the natural world, since we are composed of matter ourselves and
the energy we expend in transforming matter into commodities transforms the
natural world and society itself ultimately. All of the processes are
dialectically interwoven.
Marx focused his analysis on the relation between labor and capital. The
path that Engels set foot on but did not complete needs to be navigated by
our generation of Marxists. In the face of such life-threatening problems
as global warming, it would be foolish to think that we have no particular
need to address them, or, even worse, that Marxism is for production at the
expense of the environment.
The class struggle has been understood by Marxism as having purely a social
dimension, but it is high time that we developed a much richer and deeper
understanding of the natural underpinnings of the class struggle. Economics
is not simply a function of labor; the natural world is intimately
involved. This involvement confronts us every day of our lives. To
anticipate what this will mean in the sharpening class confrontations of
late 20th century capitalism, it is sufficient to look at East Asia. There
is an ecological crisis as well as a financial and economic crisis and they
are interrelated. Lumpen-capitalist exploitation of the Borneo rain-forests
has resulted in out of control forest fires that have spread a toxic haze
thousands of miles. The forest-fires are out of control because El Nino has
caused a drought in the area. Scientists attribute the intensity of El Nino
to global warming. Meanwhile, global capitalism is attracted to East Asia
because ecological and trade union limits are hardly to be found. Indonesia
is a prime example.
The socialism that we have to create must attack all of these problems
because they are interrelated. You can not satisfy the economic
expectations of people living in Brazil or Indonesia unless you are
prepared to satisfy the overall needs of the planet to remain economically
viable, which requires first of all clean air and clean water. To come up
with these answers, we have to develop an ecosocialism that is
scientifically informed. It also must be theoretically grounded as well.
This means developing an appreciation for what Engels was trying to do in
Dialectics of Nature and expanding upon it as well.
Extract from From Deleage et al:
>From then on [after the publication of Grundrisse], the society/nature
relation was considered only in the framework of a purely economic theory,
that of ground rent. Most Marxists thereafter conceived energy problems
only as problems of production and exchange; they made them part of the
notion of productive force which, in a context of abundant resources, they
used mainly for rhetorical purposes. Energy became one of the main blind
spots of Marxist thought. This prolonged drift eventually led to the
irrational conviction that natural constraints would soon be overcome, the
chief credo of 19th and 20th century scientific ideology, an ideology which
the various Marxisms propagated through the world. This scientific creed
was to become their common disorder--but could it have not been otherwise
in the ideological climate of the time? In this regard, we will not concede
anything to the prevailing anti-Marxism. For without Marx's theoretical
contribution and that of his followers, we could not begin to address the
energy operations of the different socio-economic formations. At the same
time, however, we cannot be satisfied with the present undeveloped state of
Marxist thought on this issue. We note in particular that this undeveloped
state has opened the way to theories that, by contrast, make energy the
ultimate mover of human history, and ecology the single criterion of their
radical critique of industrial society, the key to a post-industrial
society to be based on information science, the new myth of these times of
economic crisis. Thus, many ecologists, such as H.T. Odum, make energy the
central concept of their analysis of society and describe social mechanisms
in terms of energy flows...
Ecologists are right to denounce the irreversible character of the
destruction of the biosphere. But they are wrong in believing that the
crisis will be resolved by a mere ecological survival programme. This is
the true limit of the energy models they advocate, for these models too
often boil down simply to a more rational management of energy flows. One
of the few exceptions to this energy reductionism is Barry Commoner. He has
brought to light the relations between different levels of what is commonly
called the energy crisis, without neglecting the social-economic moment,
confirming Marx's thesis that that capitalist society is incapable of
reconciling human beings with each other and humanity with nature. The
acuteness of the ecological crisis urgently requires the advent of a
society in which production choices are based on the real use value of
goods and no longer determined by the implacable logic of material
accumulation with its attendant ever greater waste of energy. Ecologists
are probably right to stress that the accelerated destruction of energy
reserves for the sake of growth contravenes the finiteness of the
biosphere. But they should also grasp this other obvious point: just as
productionist dreams cannot override the laws of ecology, ecologist dreams
cannot overcome the constraints of society and history.
The appeal of both of these approaches, the economic or narrowly political
versions of Marxism and the ecological interpretations of the economic
crisis, can be explained by their ultimate complementarity and the identity
of the logic underpinning them. Both turn one factor, whether capital, the
commodity of energy, into the single determinant governing the dynamics of
societies. Both block off the possibility of understanding their complex
and contradictory dynamic and, therefore, of acting on them.
The ambition of this book is to move beyond the limits of existing
approaches to the energy crisis. Not least among these is the proliferation
of empirical research, ever more fragmented and obedient to the current
trend in research--the infinite accumulation of findings--with its refusal
to look at the totality, to place the energy crisis in a historical
perspective. Such a perspective, however, is the only methodological choice
that can provide a solid foundation for the analysis of society's relation
to energy.
This historical perspective implies an analysis of past energy structures:
those of the ancient Western world and medieval Europe, imperial China,
industrial Europe and North America, as well as of the essential features
of the present energy crisis: oil crisis, break-up of the energy structures
of the Third World, contradictions of the nuclear chain. Four hypotheses
have ordered our investigation:
1) energy is the most restrictive but not the only mediation of humanity's
relation to nature and the fundamental condition for the existence of human
groups;
2) the mobilization of energies is organized within systems with social,
technical, political, mental and other dimensions, which we call energy
systems;
3) all energy systems are currently deteriorating and one of the crucial
battles of the future is the search for a path to energy transition and
substitution;
4) this transition cannot be reduced to simple technical developments, to
the designing of new energy chains. It necessarily implies an overall
transformation of society on a world scale. This transformation, whatever
is duration and pace, will be global. Until now, no revolution has truly or
lastingly challenged the material foundations of social organization. In
any case, these cannot be modified by fiat. Yet no social alternative can
be conceived today that would not establish a new energy system.
(From the preface to "In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization
through the Ages", by Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Deléage and Daniel
Hémery, Zed Press, 1986)
Mark Jones
--
http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~jones_m/frontline.htm
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
