1
" The claim made by many environmentalists that neither capitalism nor socialism can solve the crisis because ‘both rely on development’ therefore stands discredited. Though we may have to ration fossil fuel during a transitional phase, socialism does not have to now become a kind of green-primitivism. From ‘degrowth’, to ‘holism’ and ‘green populism’, there are too many variations of this idea to detail here, but suffice to say that they almost always consist of a nebulous fantasy ‘third way’ amounting to a form of social democracy (ie capitalism!). We must admit that the regrettably mixed environmental records of the Soviet Union and China have contributed to the prevalence of these attitudes, although it should be acknowledged that it was impossible to abolish the law of value while the rest of the world remained capitalist. This should be addressed, as natural resources are nationalised and then internationalised, by making natural resources the common patrimony of humanity, owned and controlled by an independent global trust that grants licences to planning agencies on strict conditions and also levies rents and surcharges (that go towards other public services, so as to prevent corruption). But socialist countries in future must take full advantage of the hemp miracle, for full automation is the key to abolishing the law of value and hemp is the key to achieving full automation without turbocharging climate change. The catastrophic prohibition of hemp and cannabis encapsulates Marx’s evaluation that capitalism alienates humanity and nature from one another – so it makes perfect sense that the key plank to socialism’s reversal of this alienation should be to end prohibition. "
― , Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown
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" Subsidy dependency has been coupled with the huge upturn in the so-called ‘financialisation’ of industry, whereby a company’s funds are increasingly dedicated to repurchasing their own shares in order to boost their stock price. In 2010, for example, the US American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) asked the US government to triple state spending on clean energy to $16bn a year, at the end of a decade in which the companies comprising the council had spent $237bn on stock repurchases.477 From 2008 to 2017, 466 S&P 500 companies distributed $4 trillion to shareholders as buybacks, equal to 53% of profits, along with $3.1 trillion as dividends.This is explained away on the social democratic left as shareholder greed. But it is driven by the need to valorise capital. We did not cover it earlier, but Marx identified the increasing role of share capital as one of the main counter-tendencies. "
― , Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown
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" Therefore, when labour-saving technology reduces total socially necessary labour time (per commodity – for an increase in the number of commodities made may increase socially necessary labour time in absolute terms), there tends to be a relative fall in the surplus value contained in the total value of commodities, ie less surplus value per commodity, despite the fact that the rate of exploitation has increased, ie that each worker is now giving the capitalist more surplus labour time and therefore producing more surplus value relative to their necessary labour. As Grossman says: “Technological progress means that since commodities are created with a smaller expenditure of labour their value falls. This is not only true of the newly produced commodities. The fall in value reacts back on the commodities that are still on the market but which were produced under the older methods, involving a greater expenditure of labour time. These commodities are devalued.”[67] The very possibility of crisis is contained in the contradictory nature of the commodity. It is at once an object of use, or use-value, and something that can be exchanged for another thing, an exchange-value. Since different commodities contain different magnitudes of value and therefore cannot be directly exchanged, the creation of money proceeds logically and historically from the contradiction. It is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their value, but the magnitude of their value which controls their exchange value. Exchange-value is the only form in which the value of commodities can be expressed. Someone will buy a use-value because they need or want it, but only if they can exchange it for something else, ie money. If they do not have enough money, they cannot buy it, and profit goes unrealised. But to focus on this final ‘surface level’ aspect is what produces the mistaken underconsumptionist theory, for it forgets or ignores where it arose from – the dual character of the commodity. "
― , Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown
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" The specific nature of capitalist commodity production shows itself in the fact that it is not simply a labour process in which products are created by the elements of production M and L. Rather the capitalistic form of commodity production is constructed dualistically – it is simultaneously a labour process for the creation of products and a valorisation process. The elements of production M and L figure not only in their natural form, but at the same time as values c and v respectively. They are used for the production of a sum of values, w, and indeed only on condition that over and above the used up value magnitudes c and v there is a surplus s (that is, s = w - c + v). The capitalist expansion of production, or accumulation of capital, is defined by the fact that the expansion of M relative to L occurs on the basis of the law of value; it takes the specific form of a constantly expanding capital c relative to the sum of wages v, such that both components of capital are necessarily valorised. It follows that the reproduction process can only be continued and expanded further if the advanced, constantly growing capital c + v can secure a profit, s. The problem can then be defined as follows – is a process of this sort possible in the long run?”[68] "
― , Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown
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" As of July 2017 public spending per capita had fallen by 3.9%.[58] But this figure obscures the the fact that the government is allocating proportionally less of its budget to public services. Per person, day-to-day spending on public services has been cut to about four-fifths of what it was in 2010.[59] Public sector employment was slashed by 15.5% between September 2009 and April 2017, a reduction of nearly one million jobs, primarily affecting women, who make up around two-thirds of the public sector workforce. Overall, £22bn of the £26bn in ‘savings’ since June 2010 have been shouldered by women.[60] Lone mothers (who represent 92% of lone parents) have experienced an average drop in living standards of 18% (£8,790). Black and Asian households in the lowest fifth of incomes are the most affected, with average drops in living standards of 19.2% and 20.1% – £8,407 and £11,678 – respectively.[61] The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) has said that the cumulative scale of cuts to welfare are “unprecedented”, with real per capita welfare cap spending in 2021-22 projected to be around 10% lower than its 2015-16 level.[62] The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government initially aimed to eliminate the deficit – the difference between annual government income and expenditure – by 2015. But weaker-than-expected economic growth forced the government to push the date back to 2025. The government tried to spin this as a generous easing of austerity, but it was merely giving itself several years longer to take on the deficit. In December 2017 the OBR said that GDP per person would be 3.5% smaller in 2021 than was forecast in March 2016. Contradicting the government, the OBR said the deficit would not be eliminated until 2031. The Institute for Fiscal Studies added that national debt – then standing at £1.94 trillion, with an annual servicing cost of £48bn – may not return to pre-crisis levels until the 2060s. Pressure on the public finances, primarily from health and social care, is only going to increase. In all of the OBR’s scenarios, spending grows faster than the economy. With health costs running ahead of inflation, the National Health Service (NHS) – already suffering from a £4.3bn annual shortfall – requires a 4% minimum annual increase in funding to maintain expenditure per capita amid a growing and ageing population. "
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" Human labour power is a unique commodity in that it produces surplus value – the amount of value that goes to the capitalist after the worker has been ‘paid’ for the part of the day that equates to the amount they and their family need to live on. The working day is split into two parts: necessary labour time and surplus labour time. Necessary labour time is the time it takes the worker (on average) to produce enough value to buy the commodities they need to reproduce themselves, ie to stay what is socially considered healthy enough to continue working. Surplus labour time is the time the worker works beyond necessary labour time. Since the going rate for labour power is necessary labour time, surplus labour time is surplus value that goes to the capitalist, realised through the sale of the commodities workers produce. For example: a worker in a toy factory is paid £10 a day to work 10 hours; she produces 10 toys a day, and a toy is worth £10 each. The capitalist is only paying the worker for her ability to work one hour each day to produce enough value to reproduce herself (one toy = one hour’s labour = £10). Her necessary labour time is one hour, and her surplus labour time that goes to the capitalist is nine hours. If the worker needs £10 a day to reproduce herself, then that £10 is the value of her labour power. If the capitalist cuts the daily wage below £10, he has pushed the wage below the value of labour power. (Indeed, struggles for better wages are usually struggles to push them back up to the proper value of labour power.) The price of labour power is determined like the price of any other commodity – on average, the cost of its production, ie necessary labour time. But if commodities are sold for the cost of their production then how does the capitalist make any profit? The capitalist purchases the worker’s human labour power – the ability to work – but, uniquely, always ends up with more than the amount it cost to purchase the commodity. The wage obscures the fact that the capitalist has only paid for necessary labour time. (Marx calls the social relations that are concealed by economic relations commodity fetishism.) Profit then is essentially unpaid labour. Wage labour is – especially for the poorest workers whose daily subsistence depends exclusively on the sale of their labour-power – wage-slavery. Marx’s investigations led him to realise that his analysis of capitalism must start with the commodity, since capitalism “presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities”.[66] What all commodities have in common is that they are all exchangeable – they all possess exchange-value. And as they are all products of labour, what they all have in common which gives them this exchange-value is general human labour in the abstract. Therefore, the total value of all commodities is determined by total socially necessary labour time – how long they took to produce. (The socially necessary labour time of each finished product includes that of each component that goes into it.) "
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" Any suggestion that the 'neoliberal state' is not already an interventionist state is sheer nonsense. Were the huge stimulus packages that bailed out the banks not interventionist? The capitalist state always, in the end, does what is necessary to sustain capitalism, regardless of the differing ideologies between social democrats, liberals, conservatives and fascists, who argue only over their various self-interests, how best to sustain capitalism and how much carrot and stick to use in managing the working class. Ultimately they form an anti-communist, anti-working class coalition. Bourgeois democracy is in effect a one-party state, ie an all capitalist state. Like any party, it comprises numerous factions. This reality is neatly obscured by the pretence of various party colours. "
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" The declining rate of profit To shore up our understanding of the declining rate of profit it is helpful to represent capital production with the formula c + v + s. The value of c is not increased in production but merely preserved by it, whereas v is the only part of capital that enables the capitalist to increase the value of their capital. s is the portion of the newly created value appropriated by the capitalist. The rate of surplus value is therefore s / v and the rate of profit is the ratio between surplus value and total capital, that is s / (c + v). The organic composition of capital, c / v, measures the difference between the rate of surplus value, s / v, and the rate of profit – ie, in general, the higher the organic composition of capital, the more capital-intensive the industry, and the lower the rate of profit; the more labour-intensive, the higher the rate of profit. Because the demands of capital accumulation, as well as the need to stay ahead of or keep up with competitors, compels capitalists to innovate in order to raise productivity, the fundamental tendency of the capitalist system is to increase the ratio of constant capital to variable capital. But when the organic composition of capital, c / v, increases, other things being equal, the profit rate, s / (c + v), declines. "
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" Senile imperialism What we are seeing then is this: the highest stage of capitalism has gone past its own high point and is elapsing as a historical epoch – automation is undoing the economic relations that underpin imperialism. The productive forces now demand a higher mode of production altogether. Monopoly capitalism had a chance of surviving despite the turmoil it wrought 100 years ago because it was still in its infancy, when the law of value still had plenty of life left in it given that full automation was a distant reality. Today imperialism is old and senile with nowhere left to go but ‘home’, and highly developed automation has brought the expiration of the law of value into view. This is being expressed, even as the world economy becomes increasingly integrated technologically, through the weakening of ‘globalisation’, which, contrary to neoliberal propaganda, was in retreat before the emergence of Britain’s ‘Brexit’ from the EU and the election of Trump. In 2015-16, the G20 economies introduced a record number of trade-restrictive measures, at 21 per month.[236] More precisely, the rising organic composition of capital in developing countries is undermining imperialist economic relations. Over-accumulations of capital are now so great that it is becoming more and more unprofitable to invest at home or overseas. "
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" But the contradiction remains and the cycle repeats itself: the capital investment needed to raise productivity through innovation means constant capital grows relative to variable capital and also, therefore, the surplus value produced by variable capital. Surplus value is converted into capital faster than it is produced and so capital once again over-accumulates. And because the overall mass of capital is now even greater than before, an even greater magnitude of surplus value is required alongside an even greater devaluation of capital in order to reproduce and expand it yet further. Crisis is therefore inherent to the system, as increasing magnitudes of capital become dormant while waiting for profitable conditions to return, and cannot be put down merely to ‘greed’, hoarding or the ‘bad’ or ‘erroneous choices’ of capitalists, politicians, economists and civil servants. Private and public debt rises not because of arbitrary overspending but in order to make up for the insufficient production of surplus value. "
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" At the beginning of the “The Uninhabitable Earth”, an article in New York Magazine that previewed the book of the same title, David Wallace-Wells writes: “Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a GHG warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.”[12] "
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" At 2°C “the ice sheets begin their collapse”.[13] Wallace-Wells says that while “most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving … most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them [to rising sea levels] within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade”. More than 600 million people live within 30 feet of sea level. At just 3°C sea levels would rise by 50 metres.[14] London, Brussels, New York, Buenos Aires and Mumbai, to name a few, would be permanently under water. The climate change crisis is an extremely serious existential threat. Before the IPCC’s 2018 report, it could feel as if the topic barely seemed to register with politicians, the media or the general public, either in collective denial or complacent about its supposedly distant effects. But now a collective eco-consciousness is taking hold – the effects are already being felt and can no longer be ignored. Since 2005, the number of floods has increased by a factor of 15, extreme temperature events by a factor of 20, and wildfires sevenfold; the 20 warmest years since records began have been in the past 22 years.[15] Since 1980, the planet has seen a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat.[16] The number of heatwaves affecting the planet’s oceans tripled in the past couple of years, having already jumped by more than 50% in the three decades to 2016, killing swathes of sea-life “like wildfires that take out huge areas of forest”, according to the Marine Biological Association.[17] This is adding to ocean acidification, whereby the CO2 in the oceans rises at the expense of oxygen, suffocating the coral reefs that support as much as a quarter of all marine life. Meanwhile, 95% of the world’s population is breathing dangerously polluted air, killing at least nine million people a year, damaging our cognitive ability and respiratory systems and even our DNA. Pollution itself “endangers the stability of the Earth’s support systems and threatens the continuing survival of human societies”, according to the Commission on Pollution and Health.[18 "
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" Inextricably linked to the climate emergency is a broader environmental crisis. A third of the Earth’s land is now acutely degraded, with fertile soil being lost at a rate of 24 billion tonnes a year through intensive farming.[19] Generating three centimetres of top soil takes 1,000 years, and, the UN said in 2014, if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.[20] 95% of our food presently comes from the soil. Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960. The equivalent of 30 football pitches of soil are being lost every minute. Heavy tilling, monocropping multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. Agriculture is actually the number one reason for deforestation. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, often leading to land abandonment and desertification. Decreasing productivity has been observed, due to diminished fertility, on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Furthermore, tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon.[21] Forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a crucial role in absorbing GHG – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, more than all the traffic in the US. This is due to the thinning of tree density and culling of biodiversity, reducing biomass by up to 75%. Scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America – home to the world’s biggest forest, the Amazon, which is responsible for 20% of its oxygen – accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia. Every year about 18 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly one billion hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has been torn down. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century and they will vanish altogether at current rates within another. Earth’s “sixth mass extinction”[22] is well underway: up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades and almost half of land mammals have lost 80% of their range in the last century. Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and in some countries there has been an even faster decline of insects – vital, of course, for aerating the soil, pollinating blossoms, and controlling insect and plant pests. "
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" Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date. "
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" The vague contention that the economy must be decarbonised via the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy is inadequate when building the new infrastructure required currently relies on continued and expanded environmental plunder, such as the mining of cobalt and lithium for batteries. Resource extraction is responsible for 50% of global emissions, with minerals and metal mining responsible for 20% of emissions even before the manufacturing stage.[36] The ‘green’ industrial revolution proposed by social democrats may end up with a carbon neutral system of production by the time it is finished, but in the meantime it would be anything but. That mankind and nature have been so profoundly alienated from each other under capitalism requires that they be reunited if the planet is to remain habitable.[37] One of the ways that this alienation has been most concretely institutionalised has been through the international prohibition and under-utilisation of the hemp and cannabis plants, the most prolific and versatile crops on Earth that were used for thousands of years before capitalism for food, fuel, medicine, clothing and construction. As we shall see, not only does hemp remain capable of providing for most of humanity’s needs, it is the key not only to reversing desertification and stabilising the climate, but also furthering technological and industrial progress. We therefore argue that saving the planet is bound up with ending this alienation and completing the transition from a labour-intensive extraction-based economy to a hemp-based fully automated system of production. A green industrial revolution must be precisely that – green. "
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" In November 2013, Credit Suisse published research confirming this, saying that “US net business investment has rebounded – but, at around 1.5% of GDP, still only stands at the trough levels seen during the past two recessions”.[46] It showed that since the early 1980s, the peaks reached by net business investment as a share of GDP have been declining in each economic recovery. As John Smith writes in Imperialism In The Twenty First Century: “A notable effect of the investment strike is that the age of the capital stock in the US has been on a long-term rising trend since 1980 and started climbing rapidly after the turn of the millennium, reaching record levels several years before the crisis.”[47] Smith points out that in the UK the biggest counterpart to the government’s fiscal deficit (the difference between total revenue and total expenditure) of 8.8% of GDP in 2011 was “a corporate surplus of 5.5% of GDP, unspent cash that sucked huge demand out of the UK economy”.[48] The problem is even worse in Japan, where huge corporate surpluses and low rates of investment have been the norm since the economy entered deflation in the early 1990s. According to Martin Wolf in the FT, “the sum of depreciation and retained earnings of corporate Japan was a staggering 29.5% of GDP in 2011, against just [sic] 16% in the US, which is itself struggling with a corporate financial surplus”.[49] "
― , Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown
