The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
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- Global unevenness and global competition amongst capitalist nations devalues the total amount of surplus value and further intensifies conflict between capital and labor.
- Advanced capitalism monopolizes control and in so doing so increases detrimental environmental practice which are dysfunctional to the environment.
- Labor power purchased as a commodity and used to produce surplus value beyond the wage needed for subsistence sets the stage for the alienation of labor followed by the monetary fetishism.
| Kolin 2/7 [Andrew Kolin; Andrew Kolin is a professor of political science at Hilbert College. He received his PhD in political science from the City University of New York Graduate Center; 2-7-2022; ProQuest Ebook Central; Lexington Books; https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umichigan/detail.action?pq-origsite=primo&docID=6869943; SK]
Global unevenness and global competition amongst capitalist nations devalues the total amount of surplus value and further intensifies conflict between capital and labor. In addition, this increases the tendency towards an accumulation crisis impacting the environment occurs as capital scrambles to obtain new resources. The physical environment is captive and transformed as capitalism attempts to span the entire globe. This global movement of capital especially within the dominant highly developed centers of production extract on an accelerated pace the fossil fuels needed to further create surplus value. In the short run this is driven by the movement of advanced capitalism towards the goal of achieving a higher rate of profit. Advanced capitalism monopolizes control and in so doing so increases detrimental environmental practice which are dysfunctional to the environment. While this is taking place, less advanced capitalist nations are focused on catching up, attempting to gain access to natural resources required for primitive accumulation. The resulting increase use of fossil fuels by advanced capitalism coupled with the mimic desire to do the same by underdeveloped capitalism only serves to increase degrading the environment. The cumulative impact of climate change is associated with the global drive to accumulate capital. “. . .the volume of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is the highest it has been for hundreds of thousands of years. Changes in biospheric integrity. It has been estimated that species and are going extinct at the rate of about 1000 times greater than in preindustrial times. Bio geo chemical flows . . . as much as 50% of nitrogen ends up in lakes rivers and oceans where can cause abrupt ecosystem changes such as the notorious dead zone in Mexico. Stratospheric ozone depletion. In the 1970s scientist learned that widely used chemicals will destroy the ozone the blocks harmful radiation from reaching the surface of the earth. Ocean acidification. A proportion of CO2 emissions dissolved in seawater making it more acidic than in preindustrial times. This can interfere with the growth and survival of corals many shellfish and plankton causing the collapse of essential food webs and drastic reduction in Fish eye Marine mammal population. Freshwater use. Heavy withdrawals for agricultural and industrial uses are depleting major aquifers while melting glaciers are illuminating the source water of many rivers. Land system change. About 42% of all ice-free land is currently use for farming: that land formally supported 70% of the worlds’ grasslands 50% of savannas and 45% of temperate deciduous forest. Laws of this land reduces biodiversity and has negative effects on Earth’s climate and water systems. Atmospheric aerosol loading. Most of what is cold air pollution consist of microscopic particles and droplets called aerosols. Inhaling them causes about 7.2 million deaths per year. Introduction of novel entities. There are over 100,000 chemicals and plastic polymers in commercial use today. For almost all very little is known about the individual or combined effects on human or ecosystem health.”4 These are some of the visible indicators of how capital accumulation generates this life and death cycle in the environment. The abnormality of capitalism is manifested as its overall dysfunction in terms of the periodic breakdown and crisis of accumulation. The social effects of capitalism as a dysfunctional social system can be understood in relation to Marx’s fetishism of commodities as an example of money as the ultimate objective measurement placing value on people and things. As a byproduct of capital cumulation money functions as it arbitrarily assigned value and importance in terms of what the market will bear. In a strict psychological sense this fetishism narrows the human personality so that it overly emphasizes material needs at the expense of larger social needs. From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx presents the idea of labor as the fulfillment of basic and social needs. His idea of social needs are those collective needs which are necessary. The development of social needs is to be understood as unalienated labor, which is in control of the productive process. Labor power purchased as a commodity and used to produce surplus value beyond the wage needed for subsistence sets the stage for the alienation of labor followed by the monetary fetishism. A decline in profits increases the tendency to ramp up the production of surplus value. In principle, democracy is at odds with a capitalist economy, as Erich Fromm discusses in Escape from Freedom. The culture of capitalism embraces this escape from having responsibility for social freedom in favor of authoritarianism. As Fromm explains, “The feature common to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self, his interests, his wishes. The only possible happiness lies in the submission to these forces.”5 Especially in an accumulation crisis, an emerging form of authoritarian capitalism increases the tendency of capitalism to self-destruct. Capitalism is powerless to effectively resolve its inherent contradictions, confronting the environmental limits to capital accumulation but continues to extract resources which function to undermine the life of the environment. Capitalism diminishes the global quality of life and increases the movement towards greater global destruction. In its Hobbesian version of a war of all against all the culture of capitalism as Pacman (eat or be eaten), nature is regarded as something to conquer and exploit. It leads one to question the very sanity of a capitalist social system and what could be in Fromm’s words a sane society: “A society in which no man is a means towards another’s ends, but always and without exception an end in himself; hence, where nobody is used, nor uses himself, for purposes which are not those of the unfolding of his own human powers; where man is the center, and where all economic and political activities are subordinated to the aim of his growth. A sane society is one in which qualities like greed, exploitiveness, possessiveness, narcissism, have no chance to be used for greater material gain. . .”6 As a less than sane social system, capitalism moves forward with the sole obsession towards accumulating capital. Through the process of accumulation, the power of capital strives to overcome and overwhelm barriers to accumulation, reducing the quality of life to a more primitive, barbaric state. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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