Another summary
A complex system is a system in which ‘participants’ and their contexts are either modified by other participants and events in the system or self-modify in response to those participants and events. All living ecologies are complex systems, including social systems. Complexity has several important, and routine, implications including:
“Primitive accumulation” is a somewhat confusing Marxist term for pre-capitalist modes of accumulation. Primitive accumulation is the accumulation, and breaking of social bonds, necessary to raise the capital to make private investments. The term points out that capitalism does not start off with a blank slate and that the accumulation of capital did not simply arise because some people worked harder, or had more talent, than others.
Capital/capitalism arose out of several pre-existing processes, such as:
None of these processes by themselves guarantee capitalism, but the people who can do this violence to create capital, can come to make a ruling class, capture the State, and instigate legislation to allow their violence to be sanctified by law.
Ideals of private and bounded property are developed to stop those who have been dispossessed from taking their property back. Wages become ways of the business owning what the wage earner produces or creates. The ecology becomes something to be plundered and dumped on until it starts to fail. The ruling class usually get a religion, or form of economics, to support all this violence as non-violent evidence of God’s will and the natural talent of the despoilers etc.
Primitive accumulation does not stop with the birth of capital, and even today wealthy people are given public lands cheap, the power to pollute and poison, companies can use the courts to deprive others of property, they bribe state operatives for powers to despoil and steal etc.
Inquiries in Australia suggest that it is standard for businesses to defraud customers, and defraud their workers of promised wages. Yet despite this, it seems rare for someone at a high level in the business to suffer for this theft; the worse that happens is that the business has to pay it back sometimes. On the other hand, theft from employers is treated quite seriously, people go to jail for that. Capitalism legitimates and encourages ongoing primitive accumulation. In the 2008 financial crisis we could frequently read about forged, or heavily misleading, contracts, and it was the customer who lost their homes, the banks were given taxpayer bailouts and sold the homes from under people.
Corporations are tools whereby the owners and controllers avoid responsibility and liability for the results of their actions, frauds and thefts. Who benefits from this system is clear.
Competition can exist, but only to the extent that it does not threaten the rulers and buyers of state power, as a whole. Businesses often collaborate to charge the maximum price and the lowest wages, as that is what the system rewards. They try and repeal any legislation which may have given workers or independents any comeback against them.
Supporters of corporate power, argue that the State should support even fewer people in their ability to challenge capitalist power, and that the state should give more power and more rewards to those with wealth, and we end up with something like we have now.
Capitalism requires a State, and will always build a State, in order to function and protect its capital and its property. There is no such thing as anarcho-capitalism, other than as an ideology which functions to hand over more of the State to the corporate sector
There is no ideal single book to learn about Victorian ‘sage’ John Ruskin’s economics, but there are lots of scattered ideas in various books. Some say that at the time he had more influence on British Labour politics than Marx…. Ruskin is not always admirable perhaps, but he braved a lot of criticism and ostracism to make these points
Ruskin argues economics should be about both the conditions of survival and the generation of wealth rather than riches. ‘Riches’, he defines as appropriation from another, ‘wealth’ the general benefit: wealth is tied in with the cultivation of souls and the provision of beauty: “There is no wealth but life.” Riches can brought about through death and injustice. As such, wealth involves the higher pleasures natural to humans. Not surprisingly, for Ruskin, economics should encourage manufacture and appreciation of art and beauty, but also of care for others.
True economics also grows out of social affections and associations and a recognition of those affections and ties.
“Independence you had better cease to talk of, for you are dependent not only on every act of people whom you never heard of, who are living all around you, but on every past act of what has been dust for a thousand years. So also does the course of a thousand years to come depend upon the little perishing strength that is in you.”
Economic theory is about relationship and structures relationship. Ruskin argues that, recognizing this, the rich have obligations to the poor and their workers. He is paternalistic, although often his model involves a woman tending her household. He considers the relationship between an employer and a worker to be ideally, and perhaps necessarily, one of voluntary kinship. To him contemporary capitalists simply avoided their responsibilities to others (praising their own ‘individuality’) to the detriment of the nation. They were helped in this avoidance by a liberal economics which strips all that is valuable about human life, relationship and art away. Liberal economics reduces life to covetous calculation and demand. Laissez faire, which avoids or breaks any human ties with others is simply the principle of death and the destruction of common-wealth. It is also the death of real economics.
Breaking human ties also means that the higher pleasures cannot survive in capitalism. Capitalists have no thought for beauty, unless they monopolise it for themselves as a tool of status and as a demonstration of their ability to exclude others from its benefits. If profit is brought by destruction and ugliness (physical and mental) then that is what relationship denying capitalists will produce. Their riches depends on ‘illth’ – the very opposite of wealth, and this can be seen in despoiled landscape and the ruined bodies and souls of the labouring classes. Any difference between the labouring and the rich classes comes about by this illth and their conditions of living for labourers. It is a matter of violence, not virtue.
True economics is concerned with the circumstances of everyone not just the rich, and this concern also grows out of cultivation of nobility of soul. Labour is necessary, but only so far as it enables life outside of labour and manages holidays. Labour in a good economy should be joyful and creative, rather than confined to dank and ugly slums. It should also be about craft and responsibility, tasks which refine the soul, rather than the monotony of machinc production or rote tasks. The cultivation of craft and purity of produce is ultimately what delivers the wealth of real ‘goods’ that can be consumed well.
However, good consumption requires instruction, and higher values; another moral question for a real economy is whether people can use what is produced nobly or not. The point being that wealth does not consist in producing or owning massive numbers of possessions, but in the possessions that increase life and its value. This also implies that economics has to be in harmony with ecologies and its effects on the future.
“God has lent us the earth for our life. It is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us…as to us. And we have no right, by anything we might do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath… Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard of things that are to come… Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for”
An economics which puts relationships, beauty, cultivation of souls, ecology, well made lasting goods, and the long-term future in front of us, certainly seems unusual.
Old fashioned capitalism that did not rule the State, could have dealt with eco-system collapse – because it would not, and could not, have opposed action that affected everyone and was clearly for the public good.
Post 1980s neoliberal capitalism cannot because:
Unconstrained neoliberal capitalism finds it very hard not to be destructive, because businesses need maximal profit to survive competition, and if that means destruction then that is ok.
There are at least two ways of looking at the planet: one as isolated being, and one as relational being in which the planet exists in the cosmos, in relation to the sun, the solar system, vast emptiness and so on.
With the first view you can imagine manipulating and dominating the planet, because that is all there is. With the second the planet is what keeps you alive in the vast emptiness of space; without it we cannot survive, it is something that needs tending and repairing as best we can. It is our vehicle of life. There is no practical alternative, we cannot all move to Mars.
You cannot do politics the way we normally do politics with the planet because it does not negotiate – it just acts. In particular it has no truck with authoritarian politics, where people tell others what will happen and there is no negotiation or little interest in the way things work, because an ideology is more important than checking if that ideology works. I suspect the less well the ideology works, the stronger this tendency can be when bonded to group loyalty.
One problem with Republicans is not that there are not Republicans who don’t admit climate change, but it seems far more necessary for them to abuse Democrats than to discuss practical solutions. This is probably because they need to demonstrate that they are really Republicans to other Republicans. If we were of a particular brand of irony, we would call this virtue signalling.
Being virtuous in the face of destruction is not particularly useful, especially when that virtue favours destruction, but at least you know you are not betraying your identity group.
However, while it may not be possible to tell the planet anything, we can try to listen to the planet, paying attention to what is happening, and attempting to perceive what the results of our actions are with the planet. This is almost the exact opposite of geoengineering… Listening to the planet and using basic logic, we cannot keep dumping waste which cannot be absorbed and reprocessed by the system – and this involves changing our economic and manufacturing processes to change the waste we produce.
1) Producing goods involves waste and environmental destruction. This cost can be counted or not, depending on the power of the destroyer and the convenience of destruction. It still has an effect. How do we make sure that the waste an destruction can be processed by the Systems involved? If economics and waste breaks the boundaries of the earth system, then we are all under considerable pressure, if not dead. We are not yet able to treat the planet as if it was not a closed set of systems.
2) Wealth equals power in the market and in society. Power can be used to alter the structures of markets to prevent innovation and the distribution of goods to people who need them. This may not always have the effects intended, by those powerful. Hence a functional economics which is not just about protecting the wealthy, has to recognise politics and power inequalities and seek to subvert them.
3) Markets do not always work to maximise social benefits for everyone (through the “invisible hand” or otherwise, so it is probably false to claim that as a principle of economics. Perhaps we should more realistically start economics with looking at how markets do not achieve this, and are not intended to achieve this?
4) When dealing with climate change we should probably think about the general disorganisation, disruptions and costs that come from not doing anything. This is the base cost of action.
5) There is no reason to assume the least cost intervention will be the best, although it is, by definition, probably least costly to the powerful wealthy and therefore to be favoured.
6) We may need to identify those people who will resist any intervention, and why. This takes us out of economics.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 