Because of travelling I missed responding a month ago to Kenneth McKendrick's post on LBO-talk (below).
I accept his references that Marx (and Zizek) assert capitalism's continual tendency to revolutionize the means of production *within the existing capitalist property relationship".
My point about the North Pole turning to water, was that this will require production controlled by social foresight (Marx's phrase to the First International). Furthermore I was thinking that with the extreme concentration of finance capital, the conditions for socialism are maturing within the capitalist mode of production.
The melting of the North Pole is sufficiently dramatic that despite all the difficulties of international coordination, governments will come together to bring increasing aspects of production under social control.
(And in view of the drama of the 1997 world financial crisis, they will increasingly want to stabilise and control the dynamics of the financial system, including of course the switching of funds by transnationals between different countries on a daily basis. We will therefore start seeing a fusion of global finance capital with an emerging world government, full of contradictions, national and class, but emerging nevertheless. The molten Pole may become a symbol of this programme because it requires not just a revolutionizing of the means of production, but a revolutionizing of the mode of production.)
Chris Burford
London
At 19:19 21/08/00 -0400, you wrote:
>On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 23:38:42 +0100 Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org> wrote:
>
> > As a result it will become impossible for them to think of capitalism
> in a
>purely laissez faire manner without a framework for environmental
>responsibility...
>
>If responsibility means control and possession... One of the crucial
>points of
>capitalism is its capacity to revolutionize its means of production...
>"taking
>care" (controlling) the environment will simply require a revolutionized
>means
>of production/consumption (if anyone pays attention to the spreading
>destructive wake of pollution and desolation). Such a revolution is well
>within
>the means of the current system but certainly won't have any bearing
>whatsoever
>on current class divisions.
>
>ken
>
>PS. I should have a review of The Fragile Absolute in a few days. So far so
>good, I'm 60 pages in and Zizek hasn't mentioned Christianity yet (aside from
>some passing remarks in the introduction).
>
>"[Capitalism] has drowned the most heavenly esctasies of religious
>fervour, of
>chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of
>egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value,
>and in the place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has
>set up
>that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for
>exploiation,
>veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted nake,
>shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." - Marx
>
>"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the
>instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
>them the whoel relations of society." - Marx
>
>"The ultimate limit of capitalism is Capital itself, that is, the incessant
>development and revolutionizing of capitalism's own material conditions, the
>mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing
>but a desperate forward flight to escape its own debilitating inherent
>contradiction..." - Slavoj Zizek