From a discord discussion I had with a liberal friend.
There is no -> arrow of progress to humanity, there’s no direction to it but what we make. It’s not inevitable that societies end up centralized and authoritarian and industrialized. The conception of savagery needs to be re-examined, because much of the sustainable knowledge of the earth was lost in the European drive to “civilize” and industrialize the world.
As the Amazon is burning, we’re actually discovering entire civilizations, with roads, monumentalism, and technologies centered around balance with nature rather than profit or violence, in addition to having decentralized food production, that was capable of supporting vast networks of people spanning great distances.
Technology can be a boon to humanity, but I believe under our current system, investment into sustainability and long term health of humanity and the ecosystem is untenable. As a capitalist enterprise, you have no choice but to do whatever you can to improve margins. If you do not, your competition will, and they will drive you out of business.
This is an accepted law of economics, though most people don’t know that it comes from Das Kapital.
To understand the current economic system and the driving forces behind it, only a materialist dialectical view encompasses enough nuance to have any chance of explaining things.
So if we start with the Labor Theory of Value, which I can’t explain in a discord comment, but can at least summarize..
Starting with some terms:
Labor Power: Marx: “aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being”
Labor: The work that adds value to raw material commodities.
Labor is purchased by Capital for a wage based on time. It is entirely necessary that the wage does not meet the value produced by the labor, for if it did, there would be no profit.
So there is inherently a necessary labor period in every wage workers day.
This also means that there is necessarily a period where the worker produces excess value beyond what their wages entitle them to. This is known as Surplus Labor.
Raw materials used up and energy inserted into a commodity do not create new value but simply transfer their value to the product. In the machines, and factories themselves, this value transfer is shown as wear and tear, and is expressed as depreciation.
The only value added into the materials comes from the labor power itself.
Even an “automated” production plant will eventually rust away without human intervention in the form of labor.
So now that we know what surplus value is, we know also that the driving force behind capitalism is the production of surplus value.
The creation of this surplus value comes in many ways, from speeding up machines, to creation of higher quotas, or extension of shifts, or by telling your warehouse workers to piss in bottles on your packaging floor, but no matter what, it comes from Labor Power.
Since the surplus value is now located in the commodity, the capitalist must now sell that commodity to harvest both the necessary value to pay the workers, and the surplus value to pay himself.
Now, we can get to “competition”, which, many would have you believe drives innovation, and they’re not totally wrong, but it drives innovation in methods of extracting value, not in sustainability nor ways that improve the health of the worker.
Competition means that one must do that which lowers your costs to compete with the other capitalists who lower their costs, or one will not have a business any longer.
This results in more and more exploitation of the working class and innovations in exploiting raw materials.
In the dawn of the US, this necessitated the genocide of the natives to allow westward expansion, and the enshrinement of chattel slavery to ensure cheap labor power to create commodities.
In the gilded age, this meant 12-16 hour days 6 days a week, debtors prisons, child labor exploitation, continued use of slave labor to build infrastructure.
In the post modern age, this meant exporting as much labor as possible to nations who had not had labor revolutions.
Today, it means making Amazon employees piss in bottles and FedEx drivers dying of heat stroke.
All of the negative externalities of capitalism are inherent to the system. From the cyclical collapsing of the economy, to the continual erosion of labor rights, the expansionism and imperialism, and the hoarding of capital, they are not flaws in the system that can be reformed away, but inherent features. The collapsing of the economy allows for consolidation of capital by the elite(we’re seeing this happen in real time, right now), the erosion of labor rights allows for further surplus value creation, expansionism and imperialism allow for further exploitation of raw materials and labor and for the creation of new markets to sell their commodities.
That’s before we even get to the conception of private property and land ownership, which inherently contains within it the Roman right to jus utendi et abutendi — The right to use or abuse, giving carte Blanche for atrocities to the environment all around the world for hundreds of years now.
Then we can get to Mutual Aid, which is the driving force in humanity, and is directly what has allowed us to achieve such great things. Things like Salk refusing to patent Insulin, like radical resistance to the institution of slavery didn’t happen because of capitalism, but in spite of it. Humans are generally good, but when your system incentivizes sociopathy and individualism, it’s no wonder why our structures are breaking down.
Infrastructure is declining not because we didn’t invest into it, but because the system cannot invest into it. Because the only times it has done so in the past were either for military purposes as the interstate system was(it was also purposefully targeted through minority communities) or to stave off revolution as was done in the new deal, where FDR explicitly told Capitalists they could either support the New Deal or they’d be facing the Bolsheviks within the decade.
The few bits of infrastructure we get are poorly made, poorly maintained, and privatized to ensure continued profit extraction from the workers. Cars are still prioritized because they generate so much capital. Trains are more efficient, significantly faster, and can be made entirely sustainable outside of periodic battery replacements. Hundreds of millions of electric individual passenger vehicles is not efficient, not sustainable, still runs on rubber wheels, still relies on mass fossil fuel burning to cover peak charging, and does nothing to address the urban heat Island effect created by pavement roads taking up roughly 60% of cities. So now what are they pushing? Car sharing. Because we’ve progressed to the point of capitalism where the only way to ensure rising margins is to create “as a service” style scams that extract wealth in perpetuity for little to no investment. We’ve reached a point where there is no longer even a proletariat class in the United States. There is the Precariat, precariously perched one sick month from homelessness and suffering, that precariousness constantly serving as a reminder of what will happen should you choose not to conform.
In Andor, there was no recuperation of revolutionary potential to give the disaffected a feeling of catharsis, so unrest is able to build up until it reaches critical mass and spills out in people seeking to organize and overthrow. With anti capitalist media on every corner, one can feel part of something without ever having to get together and create something to challenge the system.