war and the state

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Thu Aug 29 17:31:20 PDT 2002


Gordon Fitch wrote:
> >Yet capitalist development in the United States has
> >progressed to a point where the per capita income is many,
> >many times what is necessary to sustain life -- everyone's
> >life -- in relative comfort...

Jenny Brown
> Never fear, there's enough to go around, we'll each get a fragment of luxury
> yacht in our dinner bowls, seasoned with Rolex springs.
>
> Maybe I'm being simplistic, but isn't the point that humanity's technological
> and organizational capacity to feed, clothe, house and care for each other is
> now much greater than capitalist organization of production can provide? And
> that the stifling of production over much of the world is the hallmark of
> capitalism now? Or, as Wadi'h Halabi put it at the recent URPE conference,
> 'capitalism is wasting 95% of humanity's time.'

There are two phases to capitalist progress. In the first phrase, capitalism builds itself up by supplying existing physical and traditional needs and wants like food, clothing, shelter, basic tools, and so on. During this period, everyone _must_ buy, or thinks they must, so the workers can be sweated 16 hours a day. Meanwhile capitalists reinvest, invent or cause to be invented, become more efficient and so forth, in order to get bigger profits.

But at some point, demand for their goods driven by basic wants is overwhelmed by the exponentially increasing powers of production. Now a problem threatens: there will not be enough demand to supported continued capitalist progress. Not only are goods becoming cheaper so that people may work less and thus escape from the bourgeoisie's treadmills, but the rents which capital can command must decline along with the demand for the goods they can be used to produce.

In order to keep the system going, the capitalists have to figure out how to produce _scarcity_. Scarcity means having less stuff or power to get stuff than one desires, so one way of producing scarcity is to destroy stuff, especially other people's stuff -- hence the utility of war, imperialism, waste (private and governmental), environmental destruction and reconstruction, social decay, boom and depression cycles, and so forth. But most of these are dangerous so they have to be approached with caution. The other way of dealing with the problem is to increase desire for the stuff produced by capitalists -- any stuff. This is a complex process. It's not just advertising, but a whole way of life, which most of the population is induced to join at some level. This is one reason the 8-hour day is useful: it gives the workers enough time to go buy all the stuff they produce and use it up, break it, or get tired of it and throw it out. If they're Welfaristic or charitable they can not only buy it for themselves, but for others as well, and get rid of it that way.

This sort of scarcity production is usually integrated with the first, destructive mode of scarcity production, for instance, the great suburban sprawl-out which hales people into SUVs and the parking lots of endless malls and industrial parks, thus creating major environmental problems, infrastructure costs, and of course energy needs which can be used to drive the occasional war and thus create yet further scarcity.

So I wouldn't say capitalism stifles production at all; what it does is run it in circles to ensure that it never produces _time_, if you know what I mean -- because time is freedom from The Man, and he doesn't want that.

-- Gordon



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