The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Accumulation for the sake of accumulation entrenches us in a cycle of violence, exploitation, and eventually extinction
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- The GDP metric measures some of its economic ‘goods’, but omits the socio-economic and environmental ‘bads’.
- the real well-being of a nation
- has brought about a global hegemonic power bloc
Accumulation for the sake of accumulation entrenches us in a cycle of violence, exploitation, and eventually extinctionPillay ’18 [Devan; 2018; Former trade unionist, is Associate Professor and Former Head in Sociology, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, Co-editor of Labour and the Challenges of Globalization; Climate Crisis, The: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, “CHALLENGING THE GROWTH PARADIGM: MARX, BUDDHA AND THE PURSUIT OF ‘HAPPINESS’,” Ch. 7, p. 149-151] SPark The GDP paradigm is based on the assumption of continuous economic growth as an end in itself. This form of economic development arose with industrial capitalism and its treadmills of production and consumption, which are essential to the system’s forward momentum.2 Because this has brought about considerable improvements in the material conditions of living of vast numbers of people on Earth, it is deeply entrenched in modern society, which marvels at its creative and innovative powers. However, it also has immense destructive powers, characterised by massive social inequality, dispossession from the land, homelessness and slummification, widespread poverty and environmental degradation on a global scale. In other words, as Marx observed, industrial capitalism simultaneously develops and destroys. The GDP metric measures some of its economic ‘goods’, but omits the socio-economic and environmental ‘bads’. For example, as Lorenzo Fioramonti (2013) argues, social and physical diseases caused by unfettered capitalist growth, like crime and pollution, result in increased home security or medical expenses, which is recorded as a positive GDP increase - thus grossly distorting the real well-being of a nation. More expansive indices, such as the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index, give a better indication of well-being but still have at their core the GDP metric. Indeed, GDP has become a talisman of the growth paradigm - mesmerising whole nations and peoples into a seductive vortex that serves the interests of Capital3 as an end in itself. In what Antonio Gramsci (1982) called a process of ‘hegemony’,4 the paradigm is maintained by a variety of social mechanisms and institutions that pervade society. Capitalism has brought about a global hegemonic power bloc5 consisting of both economic and political or state elites - what Ralph Miliband (1988), drawing on C. Wright Mills, calls ‘power elites’, who form the apex of the dominant class.6 While these power elites compete with each other in various ways, often aggressively and sometimes violently (both amongst themselves at the national level and between national elites at the global level, such as in geopolitical and trade competition), they are united by their common interest in maintaining the essential features of the growth paradigm, or what Marx called the accumulation imperative of capitalism. The accumulation of profit has no intrinsic morality other than to recreate the conditions for further accumulation. As such, capital usually contradicts societal (in particular working-class) interests and nature, through various processes of dispossession, exploitation and domination. The power elite usually makes compromises (directly or through the state) only when faced with resistance of various kinds. This includes struggles for a greater share of the social surplus (higher wages and better working conditions, a social wage), resistance to dispossession of the commons (land and other public assets), resistance to environmental degradation and campaigns for greater democratic participation. In other words, capitalism has what Samir Amin (2004) calls a growth or ‘liberal virus’7 that operates within the logic of accumulation for the sake of accumulation. This is based on its inner drive towards compound growth (Harvey 2014) that demands maximum market liberalisation, as it scans the globe (including the oceans, deeper into the Earth, as well as within our bodies, and outer space) for investment opportunities. A key dimension to this is the system’s dependence on fossil fuels, what Elmar Altvatar (2007) calls ‘fossil capitalism’. This generates a number of crises on a continuous basis, at social and natural levels. Briefly, the social crises involve the increasing exploitation of workers through the informalisation of work, lower real wages, a declining social wage, rising unemployment, privatisation of the commons such as public land and services, and rising global inequality within and between countries. Almost half the world does not have enough to eat, while less than one per cent of humanity (based mainly but not exclusively in the north) possesses most of the Earth’s material wealth (Oxfam 2014; Piketty 2014). This usually fuels social instability, through rising crime and political upheavals (including terrorism), which tends to further expand the security state on global and national levels, leading to a vicious cycle. The social crisis is accompanied by ecological crises that can be grouped under three headings: the depletion of resources (in particular oil, which runs the system, but also rain forests and fresh-water sources, amongst others); pollution (including carbon emissions and their impact on climate change, as well as increasing waste and other industrial and vehicle pollutants that affect public health); and declining biodiversity (where animals and plants become extinct, with grave threats to the delicate ecosystem). This can bring human society to the precipice, where it faces extinction (Magdoff & Foster 2011). Capitalism is an unsustainable system dependent on perpetual, never-ending growth, undermining the value of the individual.Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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