The Changing Climate - 1992

This post is a follow-up to a post from a few years ago. At a second-hand store, I'd found a Reader's Digest Atlas, published 1987, that had some curious statements about climate change. The paragraph that I thought anachronistic is below. It read as though it were from the 1970s.

There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2°C) could initiate a new ice age. The advancing glaciers would imprison so much of the world's water that the oceans would shrink, stripping the seas from the continental shelves.

I returned to the second-hand store months later and bought a copy of the atlas. At least, I thought it was the same book. I recently re-read the paragraph and had one of those "everything you know is wrong" moments. It read nothing like I remembered. I found the original photo I took and the paragraph I thought was dodgy appeared to be the only change across the two-page spread when compared to the 1992 printing.

Original photo, take 2022, from the book probably printed 1987

The 1992 printing, with amendments

We inhabit a thin, damp tissue of the atmosphere, where hospitable warmth and moisture are maintained in a critical balance. What we think of as the planet's "normal" weather patterns are typical only of the period in which we live.

Clues to the climate of the distant future lie in the facts of the past. There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2C) could initiate a new ice age.

A much more immediate threat is of global warming, with man's ever-increasing use of fossil fuels and destruction of forests, which release huge amounts of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. We are also producing more methane and other gases. These gases block the escape of the Sun's reflected infra-red radiation back into space. Without any of this "greenhouse effect" our world would be so cold as to be uninhabitable, but man is now tilting the balance too far in the opposite direction. An increase in global temperatures would raise sea levels and might eventually change worldwide patterns of agriculture and population.

Many other forces interact to create changes in the Earth's climate. These include tilts in the planet's axis and changes in its orbital path, sunspots that swell the stream of radiation emitted by the Sun, and spasms of volcanic activity that hurl veils of dust into the atmosphere and may slow down warming.

The amendments from the 1992 printing are superb. They predate the climate denialist movement, starting from the 1990s, that continue today. I wouldn't be surprised to read an atlas from 2025 that reads like the 1987 printing.

Climate Change

Preamble

While the war in the Ukraine goes on, fuel prices increase. This prompted a work colleague to stop driving their diesel car, for recreation, on the weekends. As they told me this, I thought "I ride to work everyday, to prevent just that little bit more carbon from going into the atmosphere, and you cruise around, in a huge vehicle, for pleasure?"

In the Anthropocene, each litre of petrol burnt in a car melts over a tonne of glacial ice. (Based on 652g carbon per litre of petrol) 

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science, Paul Behrens.

Behrens calculated that from initial inputs at HOW MUCH ICE IS MELTED BY EACH CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSION?

According to the USGS, there 24,064,000 km3 of ice and snow in the world.

According to Winkelmann et al. (2015), it would take about 10,000 GtC to melt (nearly) all of this ice.

If we divide 24,064,000 km3  by 10,000 GtC, assume the density of the ice is 1 kg per liter, and do the appropriate unit conversions, we can conclude that each kg of carbon emitted as CO2 will ultimately melt about 2,400 kg of ice.

If you do the units conversion, this means that each American on average emits enough CO2 every 3 seconds to ultimately add about another liter of water to the oceans. The Europeans emit enough CO2 to add another liter to sea-level rise every 8 seconds, and the sub-Saharan Africans add a liter of seawater’s worth of CO2 emissions every minute.

[...]

Admittedly, by the time scales of our ordinary activities, ice sheets take a long time to melt. The melting caused by a CO2 emission today will extend out over thousands of years.

HOW MUCH ICE IS MELTED BY EACH CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSION?

Returning to the discussion with my colleague, it doesn't matter all that much what each of us do; whether I ride, religiously, or they drive, obsessively. We're just two people out of eight billion. Two people that have contributed vastly more carbon to the atmosphere than almost all of those other eight billion and orders of magnitude more than any humans have ever.

I've burnt tonnes of carbon over my life, in various ways. What is obscene is that I don't even know how much carbon I've dumped into the atmosphere. All the work to calculate this could have been done decades ago. The entire climate change problem could have been calculated, mitigated and resolved decades ago. It wasn't mitigated. And it won't be mitigated.

The political and media idiots think we can adapt to climate change while the billionaires think they can escape to Mars.

We have condemned the future to a world of climate chaos.

420 ppm

We hit 420 ppm of CO2 at Mauna Loa observatory in April 2022. In pre-industrial times, before 1750, CO2 was about 280 ppm. It's increased by 50%.

Our ancestors may have looked a bit like this artist's depiction of the proconsul the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere.

...when was the last time that CO2 levels were this high, and what was the climate like back then? There is no single, agreed-upon answer to those questions as studies show a wide date range from between 800,000 to 15 million years ago. The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didn’t Exist

We are now a people living outside of time.

We can't get the carbon out

Unfortunately, though we absentmindedly dumped hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (36.3 billion tonnes for 2021 alone) we don't have any way to get it back out beyond some "interesting" proposals. They are:

• Trees: This won't work because they provide no permanent means to sequester the carbon over the long term. To work, they would need to take in the carbon and lock it away for tens of thousands of years. Also, as the planet heats, trees are increasingly burning, putting the CO2 back into the atmosphere decades before they otherwise would have naturally.
• Ocean fertilisation: Fertilise the ocean with iron particles to promote algal blooms that will grow, capturing CO2, die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, sequestering the carbon as it does so. There are no figures for actual carbon sequestered by this method.
• Direct air capture (DAC): The IEA have a page on it. 19 operating plants, capturing 8000 tonnes of CO2/year, maybe getting as high as about 1,000 Mt CO2/year captured by 2050. However, that's the "maybe" future; current levels are: 0.01 Mt/year CO2 removed vs 36,300 Mt/year added (next year, the rate per year added will have increased more than the increase in the rate removed). If we wanted to use only DAC to clean-up our carbon pollution, it would have to increase by 25 million times its current level, with absolutely no extra emissions involved in any of that scaling up (building, operating, maintenance and decommission of the facilities).
• Direct seawater capture: There is a recent paper on this. Seems less daft than DAC ("water contains nearly 150 times more CO2 than air per unit volume"). There are no operating plants.
• Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage: This is taking plants that would otherwise release the CO2 when they die and using human intervention to store it. The 5 facilities are removing 1.5 Mt CO2/year. We would need to quickly ramp up to 30,000 times that rate, with no increase in emissions to achieve that, for it to deal with current emissions.
• Biochar: a process to burn organic matter to make charcoal that could pull CO2 into it. According to UKBR, we might be able to capture as much as 10 billion tonnes/year by 2100 (but we're currently dumping nearly 4 times that annual right now).

Can we bounce it back?

The other geo-engineering approach to reduce global heating is to bounce the shortwave radiation from the sun back into space before it can become outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and then be potentially absorbed as heat by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Below are some of the proposals.

• Space mirrors: Not even sure why anyone would suggest this. Sunlight doesn't have to be reflected in space, it's sufficient to simply absorb it; any way to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth.
• Space sunshield: A more complete idea than space mirrors. Although probably the most outrageous idea, something we could lose control of, and probably not even feasible in the huge scale of the shield that is required... other than all that, maybe?
• Stratospheric aerosol injection: This is what the Indian government does in the fictional book Ministry for the Future. Without reducing our carbon use, it would have to be done for all time.
• Marine cloud brightening: Create more clouds so they can bounce the sunlight back before it hits the land/ocean. We would never be able to stop doing this either. If we stopped, the sun might get through again. Also, do we want more clouds?
• Cirrus cloud thinning: Cirrus clouds are up high. Apparently they act like a blanket in the same sort of way that CO2 does. If we reduce them, maybe more of OLR will get past. But how are we going to do this without messing anything else up?
• Terrestrial mirrors: Someone calculated we'd have to cover 2.3% of the world with mirrors to stop the heating. That is an immense area. But once you build the mirror, it'll work for years (unlike the cloud/aerosol-based solutions that require constant energy inputs). It doesn't seem like anyone is seriously considering mirrors, but they seem like an okay idea to me. Low tech. Low energy input to build. Would have a local and regional effect.

Geo-engineering in general

I'm not concerned about the idea of geo-engineering. We're already doing that on a monumental scale. But the ideas above seem, as something who isn't a physicists, like they're not actually achievable given a limited amount of hydrocarbons we have to do it with. They look like bad, coffee-stained, "back of napkin" ideas by a high-schooler. Not necessarily crazy...

Why didn't we stop burning carbon?

I don't really know.

We could blame the West. They've contributed most of the carbon that's in the atmosphere, even if China and India will take over soon. However, many people in the West didn't significantly contribute to this.

We could blame overpopulation. Yet, only about 20% of the world populace alive today have significantly contributed to CO2 levels.

We could blame fossil fuel corporations. They have lied about climate change, constantly, decade after decade. For sure, these denialists are the greatest criminals that have ever existed - far worse than Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, etc. These denialists have helped transform the future, condemning billions to suffering and death. But we went along for the ride using the petrol, diesel, plastics, fertiliser, pesticides, synthetic clothing, fossil gas for heating, electricity, kerosine for air travel. Their lies weren't very difficult to see through. It was simply easier to hop on the denial-wagon with them.

We could blame capitalism. Afterall, there is no profit in preventing climate change. Yet capitalism exists only as a vicious world religion for the ever expanding accumulation of capital.

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.” Therefore, save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. But what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.

Karl Marx, Capital volume 1, chapter 24

Capitalism trapped us in an obsession with ourselves, an obsession with value, and while we've been doing that for the past 270-odd years, we didn't notice that we've now condemned those that come after us to a life of ever increasing harshness, suffering and death. And yet, capitalism is only an ideology we created for ourselves. At every point we've had the option to ditch it and adopt a new way of interacting with each other and the world. We didn't do that.

From the 19th century (Foote 1856, Tyndall 1859, Arrenhieus 1896), to Callender 1938 and Keeling 1958 in the 20th Century, and then conclusively with GISS, Hansen and the senate enquiry 1988 and the first IPCC report 1990 we've known what we've been doing but we did it anyway. 34-166 years of an increasing level of certainty until we knew for sure, 32 years ago; followed by 32-34 years of denial and inaction.

Yet, it was only 32 years to completely transform our interpersonal and environmental relationships, globally. All 8 billion of us, cooperating to prevent what is coming after hundreds and hundreds of years (thousands?) of not doing anything remotely like that. It's not especially surprising that we failed. The denialists, corporations, policy-makers and capitalists have been especially egregious scum and villainy these last decades, but odds were extremely slim of being about to turn this around anyway.

Ultimately, I don't even blame capitalism. Anthropogenic climate change is an extremely unfortunate side-effect of treating this planet like a garbage dump. We've been doing that for a very long time already. Capitalism simply allowed us to scale that up by more than two orders of magnitude times faster than any natural rate (a rate no-one in the past 10,000 years of civilisation has even the remotest experience).

Carbon dioxide from human activity is increasing more than 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age. 

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Collapse

Collapse. It's coming. It's a bit scary. It's not possible to know what it'll be like and how it'll form. When I first started thinking about it I was horrified and incredulous. I was thinking of the end of the human species. Now I think that climate change doesn't necessarily mean human extinction. Certainly, it's the end of neoliberalism and globalisation. I can imagine fascism taking hold and holding on for many decades but not "a boot stamping on a human face - forever." (George Orwell, 1984) Fascism requires large amounts of energy and stable natural conditions so that humans can turn on each other. It'll be difficult to attack yourself when you're constantly reeling from one climate catastrophe after another. Capitalism will hang on, after all those leave, for as long as it can, but it too can't survive.

We could choose planned decline, if we wanted. De-growth. De-populate. Re-wild. Keep as much of the good stuff we received from industrial society as we can. Decline while delaying collapse as long as possible. I don't think that'll happen either though. It's looking more like we'll go out in a blaze of self-immolation.

So, we're Doomed?

As a species, we're not doomed by anthropogenic climate change. However, tens of thousands of other species are already doomed to go extinct. At this rate, with no change in our activity, Capitalism and complex civilisation will not be able to continue much beyond the 21st century. Billions of people (instead of the current millions) will suffer this century and many will die from climate change (heatwaves, crop failures, increasingly intense and frequent disasters, climate wars, etc.) But humans could survive in many areas of the world well beyond this century.

Extinction Rebellion (XR), one of the groups trying to do something to stop what's coming are interesting in that they overestimate the effect of climate change (and the larger environmental devastation) on humanity, calling it an "existential crisis" - while underestimating what's required to get governments to act on climate change. They claim "evidence shows that we need the involvement of 3.5% of the population to succeed". I suspect XR believe this because of that underestimation of the scale of the challenge. It's not because oil companies, politicians and the rich nations are (merely) dickheads who don't care. They are dickheads. They're liars and they're evil. Nevertheless, they can't fix what would have required systemic change. They're dickheads but also not idiots - they're not going to do anything that would end their way of life.

XR are also correct in the statement that "we have the worst possible leaders at the worst possible time in history". This is the age - the 21st Century - when we have committed the greatest crime against humanity that any people have ever committed. It's greater than all previous crimes combined. All the holocausts and genocides, all wars and oppressive regimes, they are nothing next to the fossil fuel catastrophe.

Is there no hope?

There is no hope. Climate change is here now and we are doing nothing to prevent it. We could do much to slow it, but it's useless to be delusional about what's going to happen. We'll surpass 1.5°C of warming. We'll surpass 2°C not long after. The possibility to prevent 4°C of warming by 2100 is vanishingly small while we do nothing. For the past 32 years, we've looked at graphs like the below and talked about how we'll implement the policies. Yes, we'll all do "net zero", later.

What we need to be looking at is the following graph. The "current policies" with the only current policy in effect.

Australia

There was a federal election in Australia recently. The winners claimed to be ending "the climate wars". Presumably all they mean by that is the end of decades of denialism that has become part of the Australian pop culture. All they've done is shifted to functional denialism, with the approval of the the Scarborough-Pluto gas project (i.e., no intention to do anything - I guess that's stage 2 of The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report). It's bad faith denialism. Doublespeak. The Australian governments UN climate agreement is only concerned with electricity. Nothing about transport, construction, agriculture, heating, fashion and all the other contributors to CO2 emissions. Nothing about mitigation.

July 2022 (as I publish this): The floods are back, again.

Acceptance

After decades of living through climate change, I kind of accept it now. That doesn't mean I don't think about it a lot. Doesn't mean I wouldn't want to be a part of doing something to stop climate change. Doesn't mean I'm a doomer.

It means I'm letting it go a bit. I won't join the nihilistic hedonists that is the Australian Way. But I accept it's happening and I'm along for the ride. I'm learning to accept the decline of complex civilisation.

I may even get to explore some of the beautiful ruins before I go.

The Changing Climate

I found two pages about climate change in a Reader's Digest Atlas, published 1987. That's one year before Hansen's US Senate committee testimony. Is that a good enough excuse? (The emphasis below is mine.)

The Changing Climate

We inhabit a thin, damp tissue of the atmosphere, where hospitable warmth and moisture are maintained in a critical balance. What we think of as the planet's "normal" weather patterns are typical only of the period in which we live.

Clues to the climate of the future lie in the facts of the past. There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2°C) could initiate a new ice age. The advancing glaciers would imprison so much of the world's water that the oceans would shrink, stripping the seas from the continental shelves. New York City would lie under an ice sheet thick enough to bury the Empire State Building twice over. Montreal, Detroit, and Chicago would be entombed in snow, and the Midwestern prairies would survive only as wind-whipped steppe. Japan would become a peninsula of Asia, and you would be able to walk from England to France. On the other hand, some scientists believe that a rise of only a few degrees in global temperature would start a meltdown of the polar ice sheets and flood low-lying cities worldwide.

Many forces interact to create changes in the Earth's climate. These include tilts in the planet's axis and changes in its orbital path, sunspots that swell the stream of radiation emitted by the Sun, and spasms of volcanic activity that hurl veils of dust into the atmosphere.

1. ICE COVER. Ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe, New York, Berlin, Stockholm, Montreal, and Copenhagen would be buried beneath the ice if such conditions returned. 

2. CONTINENTAL CONNECTIONS. The sea level was lower, baring continental shelves and creating land bridges, Asian nomads migrated to America over the bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. 

3. GREAT LAKE. Fed by melting snow from the Rockies, the now-vanished Lake Bonneville grew almost as big as today's Lake Michigan. 

4. DRY LAND. Monsoons were weaker than today, with the result that in West Africa the Sahara stretched farther south than its present extent. 

5. LARGER LAKES AND INLAND SEAS. Because of lower temperatures, there was less evaporation in arid lands, and some lakes and inland seas increased in size. 

6. POLAR HIGH. Vast high-pressure cells lingered over the polar ice sheets. Strong winds blew silt across the barren areas surrounding the ice and created dust storms.  

From Hell book review

I'm planning to read a good portion of Alan Moore comics. I got to From Hell this week. My review:

A most unnecessary book. It is the only book I've read where I found the appendix more interesting than the book itself.

The best line is

“The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”

It's no "opium of the people" schtick from Marx - which describes religion nearly perfectly - but it's up there.

I learned what a twopenny hangover was. However, having just read this, it appears I already learnt that decades ago when I read Down and Out in Paris and London, while on a George Orwell back catalogue read and had merely forgotten. The joys of old age - you can forget and learn something you forgot you'd already learnt. I remember thinking, when I was young, "gee, wouldn't it be great if I forgot the plot of Star Wars? I could then watch it for the first time."

A funny snippet from the appendix that also happened to explain something I thought was a bizarre inclusion:

Although the weights removed from Druitt's pockets were described as "stones" by the policeman who was summoned after watermen had pulled the decomposing body form the river, I have chosen to suggest this was deliberate blurring of the evidence. I have no reason for supposing this to be the truth, and indeed only brought the bricks into the scene so that I would have another opportunity to say malignant and unfounded things about the Freemasons.

I also learnt that the Golden Dawn aren't just a bunch of Greek fascists.

I don't have particularly negative things to say about this book. It is simply a book that never needed to be written. The world has enough books that have a fascination with violence against women.

Old Age Marxism

The following is a response to Paul Cockshott's review of Michael Heinrich's Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, New Age Marxism. Read Cockshott's review first.

Biology

Cockshott begins his review by criticising Marx's and Heinrich's biological metaphor:

The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known

I'd agree with Cockshott that to suggest humans are better than other apes is ridiculous. There are no higher and lower forms of life, just ones that are successful (extant) and unsuccessful (extinct). However, other than using sloppy language, I'm not sure that Heinrich and Marx are saying anything controversial. If one replaced "lower" with "less complex" and "higher" with "more complex," there wouldn't be an issue. They're not actually suggesting that humans are better than other apes and they're not even really talking about evolutionary biology.

Value Theory

It's when discussing value theory that Cockshott goes awry:

The establishment of capitalist industry went hand in hand with the development of artificial sources of power: coal then oil. We also all know that in today’s world the owners of oilfields are fabulously wealthy, so might energy not be the source of value?

There are a couple of problems with this:

1. It appears as if Cockshott is suggesting that value only came into being at the beginning of capitalism. But value relates to commodity exchange, not capitalism as such. There were commodities before capitalism and therefore there was value before capitalism. Since coal and oil use, at least in any generalised form, came after commodities, how could they be the source of value?!
2. Cockshott makes a logical jump from oil/coal to energy. Oil/coal is not the same thing as energy. There have been lots of different sources of energy throughout human history with vastly different uses. E.g., burning wood for heat and food; burning candles for light; oil/coal for industrial production. Can one really jump through wood-candles-coal-oil to energy, from there to a value theory, without any theoretical complications?

Cockshott's argument is that the labour theory of value is lacking, so we must look to what science does.

If one adopts the normal method of science, the answer is simple. You see what price structure would be predicted by the labour theory of value, what price structure would be predicted by the energy theory of value, and see which theory gives the better predictions. Such tests have been done, and they show that actual prices correspond much more closely to what the labour theory of value predicts than to what the energy theory predicts. But as we will see in the next section Heinrich’s approach prohibits this sort of scientific test.

Does science really work like this? It's true that empirical measurements are essential to science, but it's at least misleading, probably downright wrong to apply empirical results to a poor theory. For a scientific theory to be accepted, it needs to make coherent, logical arguments in a purely abstract form that then fits fairly well with reality. If the theory is faulty, the evidence is irrelevant.

As an example, I could propose f = mac (force = mass * acceleration * crap). Most of the time c is 1, but occasionally I decide that it's 1.5 or .5 for masses that I have a peculiar distaste. Now, it could be, with God's favour, that the world really does agree with my formula, f = mac. Or it could be the case that we never come across masses that I don't like (e.g., invisible pink elephants). (My formula would be essentially f = ma.) Neither of these possibilities have anything to do with the fact that this formula is logically inconsistent with other physical laws.

My point: you have to sort out your theory, regardless of the evidence! Cockshott suggests you can "go through the passage from Marx above and wherever there is a reference to labour substitute energy or power and the essence of the argument would be unchanged." If that were true, Marx's labour theory of value would be wrong. It would not be theoretically sufficient. It would need to be revised or abandoned.

I do not agree for a moment that you can substitute terms in Marx's theory. For a start, Cockshott missed a crucial section, the fetish of the commodity. This grounds Marx's value theory as part of the social consciousness of humanity. The commodity, abstract labour, value-form, etc. is a psychological trick.

Abstract Labour

Cockshott truly breaks with my reading of Marx in the notion of abstract labour:

So abstract labour is the abstract expenditure of human physiological effort and society has only a certain amount of this effort available to it which can be expended in different concrete forms.

This concept is indeed ‘naturalistic’ and ‘a-historical’. It is naturalistic in that it depends on our adaptability as a species, our ability to turn our hand to any task. It is a-historical in that any society with a division of labour has abstract labour.

Marx's theory is the opposite of this view. It is concrete labour, actually doing stuff in the world, that is the only transhistorical, ahistorical or naturalistic conception of labour in Marx's theory. Concrete labour existed before capitalism, before class society. Abstract labour is vastly more modern and arises with commodity exchange. Abstract labour did not arise with the division of labour because many societies - those based on slavery or serfdom, for example - hardly measured and compared work at all. To the extent that they were not based on the exchange of commodities, they were not societies based on value and abstract labour. The key thing lacking in Cockshott's theory in these paragraphs is a clear understanding of the history of social production.

I.I. Rubin sorted out the issue of abstract labour and physiological effort long ago:

Marx never tired of repeating that value is a social phenomenon, that the existence of value (Wertgegenstandlichkeit) has "a purely social reality" (C., I, p. 47), and does not include a single atom of matter. From this it follows that abstract labor, which creates value, must be understood as a social category in which we cannot find a single atom of matter. One of two things is possible: if abstract labor is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form, then value also has a reified-material character. Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract labor must also be understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labor with the historical character of the value which it creates. The physiological expenditure of energy as such is the same for all epochs and, one might say, this energy created value in all epochs. We arrive at the crudest interpretation of the theory of value, one which sharply contradicts Marx's theory. (Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Chapter 14: Abstract Labour)

Cockshott's theory becomes incredible problematic when we bring in temporal concerns. If abstract labour is physiological effort, what can you say about that effort when the value of the commodities you've already produced halve in value because a competitor produces the same commodity for much cheaper? How does your physiological effort - that you've already expended - suddenly disappear into the ether? As abstract labour is the substance and measure of value, you've got a problem explaining where it went to.

Cockshott says:

On the other hand there is no doubt that were we to accept Heinrich’s reading we would have to abandon any claim that Marxian analysis of value was scientific. Science rests on the testability of its propositions and has to be wary of hypothesising causal entities which are in principle unmeasurable. If we say with Heinrich that the labour time that creates value can not be independently measured, can only be inferred from the price at which things sell, then you no longer have a testable theory.

Yes, it's true, we don't have a testable theory in the same way that a lot of the physical sciences do. If you tried to measure every aspect of commodity production, concrete labour-time, physiological equivalents, prices, etc. you would not arrive at Marx's critique of political economy. You would arrive at the tools of appearances that we already have: supply/demand curves, employment rates, economic statistics, etc.

Marx's critique has many complexities and subtleties that does not make it appropriate for empirical measurement as proof in the way Cockshott would prefer. One huge issue, for example, is moving from value to production prices and average profits. (See: Value and Production Price)

Finally, possibly the worst part of Cockshott's review, is a comment on a quote from Marx to Kugelmann:

“It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves.” One can scarcely have a more explicit assertion of the natural and a-historical basis of abstract labour than that.

However, Marx was not talking about abstract labour in slightest! He was simply talking about the necessity for humans to work. Humans, from the time when we developed self-awareness, have had to work to survive. We need to gather, sow, reap and kill for food. We need to bring-up the young, collect water and dispose of waste. We need to look after the old. We will have to do this until we cease to exist as a species. Nothing, not pre-class society, slavery, serfdom, mercantilism, capitalism or communism is going to prevent this necessity for work. All that changes is how we organise work in society, as the most social species on the planet. What does abstract labour have to do with it? It is nothing but the form of how we are choosing to work at the present time, under capitalist conditions.

To suggest that abstract labour is going to be the form of society, not only of capitalism, but also communism, brings nothing but horrible images of totalitarian monsters into our mind.

Down with measurement!

Critique of the Gotha Programme

The Critique of the Gotha Programme (text) was written by Karl Marx in 1875 as a response to a document by the nascent Social Democratic Party of Germany. It was one of Marx's last writings (he died in 1883). The Wikipedia page describes the SPD as "one of the first Marxist-influenced parties in the world." It's difficult to see how that could be true given Marx's deep criticisms of the Gotha Program (which was adopted by the party). It is not until the Gotha Program was eventually replaced by the Erfurt Program (text) in 1891 that the statement on Wikipedia starts to have some truth to it. Engels wrote a critique of the Erfurt Program.

As usual, I've made the text into an e-book: http://sdrv.ms/10zf70H

Wealth, Value and Labour

I remember reading this document ten years ago and being immediately confused by Marx's distinction between wealth and value. I remember Anthony patiently trying to explain it to me. I kind of half got it, but not really. It's taken fifteen years for me to understand the entire scientific critique of political economy that Marx presents. Even a year or two ago I still refused to accept it on scientific grounds. I could not fully grasp the basic distinctions and categories. Turns out that Marx was correct.

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning.

I'm not alone in my failure to understand Marx's critique. The SPD didn't understand it in 1875. They don't understand it today. Most Marxists don't understand it. To the great misfortune of millions of people, the pre-existing communists of the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. didn't understand it either. Marx is clear, but it is difficult to understand, especially if you grow up in a world almost entirely dominated by the bourgeois mode of production. To make matters worse, there are a lot of people who don't want to understand it or don't want you to understand it.

The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

The only other modern scientific theory that has come under sustained attack is the theory of evolution. That attack, almost entirely by religious forces, continues into the 21st century. Nevertheless, even at its most ferocious, the scale of the attack on evolution barely registers compared to the scale of the attack on the scientific critique of capitalist society.

Higher and lower stages of communism

The Critique of the Gotha Programme gets you thinking about a future communism. One of the notable things Marx discusses is the lower and higher orders of communism. I used to find this splitting of the idea of communism problematic, but I don't think I do anymore. Marx's justification is:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

Lower order communism is best described as "To each according to his contribution."

[...] the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Marx described higher order communism as:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Of course, money needs to be abolished immediately. However, there is no longer a need for labour vouchers. We have these wonderful machines - computers and the Internet - that we could use to track peoples' contributions and ensure necessities are distributed correctly. The logistics of this isn't trivial; keeping track of billions of people wouldn't be easy. However, Facebook already tracks one billion accounts. It isn't a monumental effort to extend this infrastructure so we could record vital information on the entire population of the planet. A new form of distribution needs to be quickly realised. A disruption to distribution (or a failure to transform existing distribution) is where there is a huge risk to lives from starvation and disease.

If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.

The state

There are some interesting comments on the state in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx is very critical of the idea of the "free state." Engels, in his letter to August Bebel, sums it up really well:

All the palaver about the state ought to be dropped, especially after the Commune, which had ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term. The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen ["commonalty"] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.”

Marx has some good stuff on the state and education:

"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people!

Ultimately, Marx seals the fate that the SPD succumbed to.

The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the program — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases.

Communist utopia in Spain?

While browsing the Interwebs, I came across a book about a small town called Marinaleda in Andalucía, Spain. The town was described as a communist utopia. Intrigued, I found a copy of the book to see what it was like.

“If you work it with your hands and water it with your sweat, the earth is yours, worker”

The book, Utopia and the Valley of Tears, written by Dan Hancox, an English author and journalist for the Guardian, is an account of the Hancox's trip to Seville, Marinaleda and nearby towns. It contains a sizable interview with Sánchez Gordillo, where the content of the communist experiment is revealed.

The town is no utopia, but I was a little deflated to discover that it's old-school communist too - not the communism I'm looking for. It could best be described as a "workers' paradise."

I got the impression that things in Marinaleda started out okay. First, they had to secure land:

We saw that the Duke of Infantal had the most lands – 17,000 hectares between Andalucía and Extremadura. So we fought the Duke for twelve years! We occupied his land, we cut off roads, and at the same time we pressured the government.

[...] the Marinaleños kept going and going – occupying, protesting, disrupting; direct action gets the goods, as the saying goes. After 12 years of struggle, with 1992’s Sevilla World Expo just round the corner and the authorities’ resolve finally weakening, incredibly, they won, securing 1,200 hectares of the Duke’s land.

Every communist movement has to secure land. Their method of expropriation seems entirely appropriate. It's what happened next that concerns me:

With the land they had won through occupation, they began planting, deliberately choosing crops that would need industrial processing, to create more work back in the town, in the factory. “Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs, so we created a complementary industry to transform our agrarian products: peppers, artichokes, favas, broccoli, olive oil and olives”. The idea, he says, is that “la tierra es de quien la trabaja” – the land is for those who work it. The town co-operative does not distribute profits: any surplus is re-invested to create more jobs. Everyone in the co-op earns the same salary, 47 Euros a day for six and a half hours of work (which they try and keep equivalent with public service wages) [...]

[Quoting Sánchez Gordillo:] our goal is to make jobs. Instead of pocketing the profits we reinvest them back into the project. That’s why we believe the land should belong to the community that puts it to work, and not in the dead hands of the nobility.

There are quite a few things wrong here.

1) Why would you want to deliberately increase the amount of work that Marinaleños had to do? The whole point of communism is to take the massive surplus generating power of machines to reduce work to the absolute minimum. What the Marinaleños are doing is the exact opposite. Though perfectly in line with (pre-)existing communism, it isn't a good approach. A better approach would have forged a path where machines are used and the work-day reduced.

2) What about the so-called non-workers? I assume they don't receive the salary. Some may say that "if you don't work, you don't earn" but have they really investigated what work is? Does the category of non-work extend to house-work? Do women house-workers only earn via their husbands? None of this is discussed, neither in the book nor other articles I've read.

3) "Land for those that work it" has been the catch-cry for colonists for the past five-hundred years, displacing indigenous populations and killing millions of people. Do you really want to be associated with that history and present day reality? Instead, what about "land for those who need to live from it"? In that way you include primitive, peasant, and industrial workers and can exclude those who don't need it (i.e., the nobility).

4) The fact that the co-operative re-invests profits to create more jobs is the very definition of capitalism, not communism. It is hardly a distinguishing feature of their form of organisation. If capitalists didn't re-invest their profit they wouldn't be capitalists. By doing the same, the Marinaleños are in no way distancing themselves from capital social relations.

As for the rhetorical "dead hands of the nobility" phrase, what is that supposed to mean? That because the nobility don't work, their hands are figuratively dead? Isn't that the same argument that the bourgeoisie use to seize power from the aristocracy?

Content of the work

A friend raised a good criticism of the type of work. It's not only tedious, but gruelling labour.

We walk over to the farm’s olive oil processing plant, where four or five men in blue overalls are working the machinery. The olives are stripped from the branches by the first machine, then cleaned by the next, then smashed into pulp, filtered, and filtered again. They produce 300,000 litres of olive oil a year.

Not only have the Marinaleños chosen labour intensive work, but generally fairly unappealing work.

Undoubtedly, whether capitalist, feudal or communist, dull and tedious work needs to be done. Thankfully, a lot of people like doing a lot of different things, we shouldn't all have to do horrible work all the time. What separates communism from other highly organised societies is the idea that we can reduce this labour to a minimum. We have seen that quantitatively and qualitatively, the town of Marinaleda are not attempting to do this.

“This is how we’ve built 350 homes.”

I don't like how Marinaleda works, but there is a definite attraction to the way they create housing for the community. Land is assigned and houses are collectively built. There are no mortgages.

The new houses have been built on land on the fringes of the town which was municipalised, made public property for just this purpose. “Once we had this land, we prepared it, negotiated with the Andalucían government to obtain materials, and then we called the people who needed housing. We give them land, materials, and architects for free, and they put in their labour from the beginning of construction to the end.” Each plot consists of 90 square meters for construction, and 100 square meters for a patio or garden – normally three bedrooms, a bathroom, living room, kitchen and courtyard.

Bourgeois houses, to be sure, but it's nevertheless an impressive feat, and appears to be a genuinely communist moment.

The rub: to prevent people from profiting, residents cannot sell their houses. (A Job and No Mortgage for All in a Spanish Town)

You can't sell your house? Good.

“You know you have to work on Sundays?”

One Sunday a month in Marinaleda is designated a Domingo Rojo (Red Sunday), where the townspeople work for free for the mutual benefit of the town [...]

[...] the dream that housing should belong to everyone, because you are a person, and not a piece of merchandise to be speculated with. The dream that natural resources, for instance energy, shouldn’t be in the service of multinationals but in the service of the people.

Why Sundays? Why not have every fourth Friday for collective projects? That you have to work on Sundays goes to the core of their form of communism. It is a workers' paradise, not an attack on work and the role of being a worker. And they go against two hundred years of working class activity on this. God may have given us Sundays (or Saturdays/Fridays depending on the god), but it was the working class that gave us the weekend and the eight-hour day. Why haven't the Marinaleños given themselves a three-day weekend yet? I guess, with a 6.5 hour work day (as opposed to the 7.5 hour Spanish standard) they have effectively done this. But the psychological effect of an extra day without work is much greater than one less hour a day.

Bourgeois criticism

I've read a few bourgeois criticisms of the Marinelda, none of which actually attempt to engage with the content of the project, but nit-pick with holier-than-thou hypocrisy claims, such as:

Analysts and political opponents dismiss Mr. Sánchez’ populist bluster, noting that while he portrays Marinaleda as a Communist oasis, it depends heavily on money from the regional and central governments it decries. The materials for each house, for example, cost the regional government about $25,000. (A Job and No Mortgage for All in a Spanish Town)

Where do these "analysts" (un-named, un-analysable) think a project like this is going to come from? Who cares where they get their money? Money has that wonderful property of leaving no smell. Maybe money comes from the forced labour of billions, yet it leaves no trace. Oh, guess what? The people living there are also labour-power created and nurtured under modern Spanish capitalist conditions. What hypocrites - they can't even attempt communism without having first come from a communist society!

The end

The book covers more than Marinaleda and Sánchez Gordillo. It touches on the economic crisis in Spain and the 15-M Movement and the Indignados. The author clearly has a sympathy with some sort of an idea of communism. It was enjoyable reading about his youth and engagement with communist ideas - reading Homage to Catalonia, distancing himself from Stalinism and all existing communism, etc. It was an enjoyable read about an aspect of Andalucian life that I was completely unaware of.

As for Marinaleda, I don't want to be overly critical. I think in some ways they've entirely missed the point. In other ways, they're attempting an inspiring communist experiment. The self-reduction they've done in supermarkets is certainly a critique of capital in practice. However, they must drop the 20th century ideology of workerism if they want to genuinely contribute to the movement of communism.

What the town of Marinaleda does is allow us to imagine how to create a new way of living. It'll need to be different from what the Marinaleños are doing, but it's an interesting point of departure.

Reading Capital Politically, Part 3

This blog entry contains the final set of quotes from Reading Capital Politically. These quotes are generally concerned with the money-form of value. Overall, a very quotable book, it would seem.

We can see now that just as the relative value form finds its meaning only in the equivalent form so it is that the working class recognizes itself as working class only through its relation to capital. Indeed, it is working class only within that relation. The relative form thus expresses the perspective of the working class. Destroy capital and there is no more working class as such. And, conversely, the refusal to function as working class (i.e., to work) acts to destroy capital. Put in the language above, the mass of workers have their joint condition as working class reflected to them through capital acting as a mirror which mediates this recognition.

Children work for capital to the extent that they produce their labor-power for future roles as workers (waged and unwaged), but they are not directly waged. They, like housewives, are supported by the resources (money) obtained by their waged father or mother. The relation with capital is mediated directly for the father by the money wage, but for the children and housewives there is also the father/husband. In these circumstances the fact that children and women in the family work for capital is hidden by their condition of wagelessness. They appear to stand only in some private relation to the male wage earner but not to capital.

This was one of the main aims of colonialism - the creation of a world-wide reserve army. And poverty continues to be the tool by which vast millions are kept alive but (it is hoped) easily available when it suits capital's purpose. These reserves are then drawn upon either for immigration into areas where their cheap labor can be used to hold down the wage demands of more powerful workers (e.g., Mexican and Caribbean labor drawn into the U.S.; workers from Mediterranean countries brought into northern Europe) or for employment in their own areas when runaway shops seek out their cheap labor locally. Of course, time and again things have not worked out so well and the struggles of the unwaged have made them unfit for capital's factories.

Another way the class struggle refuses the mediation of money is the refusal of price. This is the essence of direct appropriation and includes not only the price of labor-power but also the prices of other commodities. It involves self-reduction of utilities or housing prices, changing labels in a supermarket, using 15-cent slugs instead of 50-cent tokens in the subway, or total elimination of price through shoplifting, employee theft, or Black Christmases where commodities are seized. This refusal of price is a refusal of capital's rules of the game. The refusal to accept the role of money is the refusal to accept everything we have seen going into the determination of money - the whole set of value relations. This is the working-class perspective with a vengence.

Inflation means rising prices due, not to increases in labor input, but to monetary deflation. Prices are the money equivalents of the value of commodities which are expressed in the price form. To raise prices means to increase the amount of money (gold or paper) being exchanged for goods. If the amount of money the working class holds is fixed, then the amount it can buy decreases accordingly. In this way, the amount of value the working class receives for its labor-power is reduced, and the amount of surplus value that capital gets is increased.

[...] it is easy to raise prices simply by circulating more paper so that a given quantity of commodities, being represented by an increased quantity of paper, has higher prices (assuming velocity of money constant, etc.). This was just the idea of Keynes, then Lewis and others. The state could print more money, or expand money via the credit system, and thus raise prices, which would decrease the value of each unit of money and thus undercut working-class wages. This undercutting could be done whether working-class wages were constant or increasing.

Reading Capital Politically, Part 2

My last posthad a selection of quotes from Reading Capital Politically. There were so many that I retained some quotes until this blog entry.

[...] the overwhelming majority of the people are put in a situation where they are forced to work to avoid starvation. The capitalist class creates and maintains this situation of compulsion by achieving total control over all the means of producing social wealth. The generalized imposition of the commodity-form has meant that forced work has become the fundamental means of organizing society - of social control. It means the creation of a working class - a class of people who can survive only by selling their capacity to work to the class that controls the means of production.

Most fundamentally, the view of the commodity as use-value is the perspective of the working class. It sees commodities (e.g., food or energy) primarily as objects of appropriation and consumption, things to be used to satisfy its needs. Capital sees these same commodities primarily as exchange-values - mere means toward the end of increasing itself and its social control via the realization of surplus value and profit.

The preoccupation of the working class with exchange-value and the preoccupation of capital with use-value, however, are both the outgrowth of capital's success in imposing its social system.

Because of our need for this use-value of food, capital understood early on that its control over food as a commodity gave it control over workers. This was why the most basic means of production stripped from workers in the period primitive accumulation was land - the traditionally necessary precondition for producing food. Thus the fundamental use-value of food for capital is the power to force the working class to work to get it.

One way in which the old dichotomy between politics and economics has often been posed has been to label as "economism" struggles by workers which are deemed solely quantitative, for example, more wages, shorter workday, and so on. These struggles are said to be within capital, which is itself essentially quantitative. "Political" struggles are only those that challenge the "quality" of capital itself, that is, that threaten the "revolutionary" overthrow of capital via the seizure of state power. From what we have seen already, it should be apparent that struggles over the length and intensity of the workday (how much the commodity-form is imposed) are at once quantitative and qualitative: quantitative because they concern the amount of work that will be done for capital, qualitative because they put into question the realization of enough surplus value to maintain capital's control

[Quoting Marx:] ". . . the idea held by some socialists that we need capital but not the capitalists is altogether wrong. It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labor -- and these are its own product -- take on a personality toward it, or what is the same, that they are posited as the property of a personality alien to the worker. The concept of capital contains the capitalist."

Men do benefit from women's work; whites do benefit from blacks' lower status; local workers do benefit from immigrant workers' taking the worst jobs. Therefore, the struggle to destroy the divisions generally finds its initiative in the dominated group, since the other side cannot be expected to always work to destroy its privileges. The efforts to overcome racism, sexism, imperialism, or the exploitation of students in the 1960s were led by the struggles of blacks not whites, women not men, peasants not Americans, students not professors or administrators.

[...] to conceive of the value of a commodity as being the direct result of the work of producing that individual commodity is to lose the social character of value and to see it instead as some metaphysical substance that is magically injected into the product by the worker's touch.

[Quoting Marx:] ". . . the real level of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities, or, more accurately in this context, creating the product. Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. . . . If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e., if we take all the members comprising the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour."
These very important concepts should lead us once and for all away from any tendency to try to grasp value in terms of individual cases.

When Marx wrote, for example, in Chapter 15, Section 3, on the employment of women and children, he saw these persons being drawn ever deeper into the industrial machine to be chewed up daily and left to recuperate at night in the same fashion as male workers. There was no need for any special theory about the family, housework, or schoolwork, because these constituted negligible parts of the day. But later, with the expulsion of women and children from the mines and the mills and the factories, with the creation of the modern nuclear family and public school system by capital, such a theory is vital. Today, we must study how capital structures "free time" so as to expand value. We must see how housework has been structured by capital with home economics and television to ensure that women's time contributes only to the reproduction of their own, their husbands', and their children's labor-power. We must see the desire for the reproduction of life as labor-power behind capital's propaganda that it is in the interest of the individual or the family to have a "nice" home or a "good" education.

Both housework and schoolwork are intended to contribute to keeping the value of labor-power low. The more work done by women in the home, the less value workers must receive from capital to reproduce themselves at a given level. The more work students do in the school, the less value must be invested in their training and disciplining for the factory (or home).

[...] the labor an "average person" can perform, say, in the United States of 1775 and in the United States of 1975, or in the United States of 1975 and in upland Papua of 1975, is quite different. When put concretely this way, the vagueness of the notion vanishes. Workers of all these periods and places could be trained to perform "average labor" today in a New York City factory or office. But the amount of training our 1775 farmer or our 1975 tribesman would require would be substantially more and of a different order, involving not just linguistic, mathematical, or mechanical skills, but regularity and discipline.