Throw away those economics textbooks, turn away from society and start measuring the carbon to hydrogen ratio. Where Marx saw the limit to capitalist production as capital itself, Jones dreams up a physical limitation drawn from the natural sciences. Not the relative displacement of living labour by dead capital as Marx argued, but the falling rate of hydrogen to carbon is the cause of economic crisis.
>Subject: Mark Jones on the world crisis
>the entire history of industrial capitalism
>is a history of the deployment of fossil fuels and machinery to substitute
>for muscle power and biomass energy; and the trajectory of rising social
>productivity can be plotted on a graph whose vertical axis is labelled
>'hydrogen' and whose horizontal axis is labelled, 'carbon'.
...
>The next century is billed as the 'hydrogen' century, when carbon will at
>last be effectively excluded from the energy cycle, and humankind at last
>'freed' from its dependence on carbon-laden fossil fuels.
...
>it is
>said that once the transition to full hydrogen systems is achieved a new
>productive cornucopia will be realised and capitalism will have immortalised
>itself, thus escaping the baleful destiny we Marxists have allotted it.
...
>Unfortunately, this optimism is based on illusion. The 'hydrogen'
>world of decarbonised energy systems is a chimera.
--
Jim heartfield