Saturday, July 26, 2008
Needed: Economic Regime Change
There are some good, if very frightening, articles on climate change, sustainability, 'peak oil' and capitalism in the current edition of Monthly Review. You can access most of these articles free on the website. The Introductory article by Bellamy Foster, Clark and York is particularly impressive. The authors make the case for seeing the ecological crisis today as, in the end, a problem of political economy and demonstrate that any attempt to avert climate catastrophe that does not face up to the incompatibility of ecological sustainability and the logic of capital accumulation will fail.
Labels: Ecological Crisis
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
'Savage Capitalism' and Ecosocialism.
I'm very very impressed by the pullout section on 'Savage Capitalism' in the Sept issue of Socialist Resistance (pdf.) (scroll down to pp9- 16). This is a link from the MacUaid blog. It's a well written, well argued and highly accessible (without being simplistic) account of how capitalism is producing environmental crisis which it cannot itself solve and an introduction to 'ecosocialist' ideas. This is just the sort of propaganda that left wing groups should be producing.
Labels: Ecological Crisis, Ecosocialism
Monday, July 23, 2007
Capitalism, Crisis and Wellies
Capitalism has a tendency towards occasional highly disruptive crises. These can stem from a number of factors (although they often combine and are difficult to separate out). Amongst these factors are 1) the tendency for the organic composition of capital to rise (the good old TRPF), 2) problems of over-accumulation of capital, 3) intensifying international competition driving down general rates of profit, 4) uneven development and sectoral imbalances leading to bottlenecks, over-production, mismatches of supply and so on, 5) financial market instability leading to panic, capital flight and 'contagion' and 6) (while remaining wary of the Glyn and Sutcliffe thesis) we might say that high wages can constitute a drain on the rate of profit.
There's another distinctively 21st Century type of capitalist crisis emerging however - ecological crisis. This is a 'non-economic' kind of crisis given rise to, in great part, by capitalism's driving imperative - accumulation. Capitalism, as Kovel and Löwy point out, is a 'system predicated on the rule: Grow or Die!'. Could it be that while the last great global capitalist crisis - the inter-war slump - was often represented, symbolically, by those photographs of unemployed men in flat caps standing around in the sooty streets of the industrial north, the next big crisis will, later, come to be symbolised by images of people in wellies wading through flooded villages, towns and cities?
There's another distinctively 21st Century type of capitalist crisis emerging however - ecological crisis. This is a 'non-economic' kind of crisis given rise to, in great part, by capitalism's driving imperative - accumulation. Capitalism, as Kovel and Löwy point out, is a 'system predicated on the rule: Grow or Die!'. Could it be that while the last great global capitalist crisis - the inter-war slump - was often represented, symbolically, by those photographs of unemployed men in flat caps standing around in the sooty streets of the industrial north, the next big crisis will, later, come to be symbolised by images of people in wellies wading through flooded villages, towns and cities?
Labels: Ecological Crisis
