----- Original Message ----- From: "Jordan Hayes" <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com>
This 'personalizing of the crisis' has to stop: if the Fortune 1000 would recycle, individuals wouldn't have to! It's so overwhelmingly the problem of industry that it's not even funny. If commercial trucks would only get from 4mpg to 10mpg everyone in China could own 4 SUVs and it wouldn't make a difference.
Sheesh.
/jordan
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Methinks you've forgotten the principle of effective demand......
On a closer examination of the class of algorithmic machines proper, we find in them, as a general rule, though often, no doubt, under very diverse computations, the apparatus and codes used by the hardware engineer or programmer; with this difference, that instead of being human implements, they are the implements of ecological computations poorly performed given current circumstances, or perhaps, an ignorantly contrived stochastic system made of biotic and abiotic susbsystems. Either the entire set of algorithms is only a more or less altered computational edition of the old handicraft tool, as, for instance, the power-loom,[5] or the working parts fitted in the frame of the machine are old acquaintances, as spindles are in a mule, needles in a stocking-loom, saws in a sawing-machine, oil rigs off coastlines and server-farms in an air-conditioned warehouse. The distinction between these tools and the ecosystem dynamics of the evolutionary algorithmic machine [proper] called earth, exists from their very genesis; for they continue for the most part to be produced by handicraft, or by manufacture, and are afterwards fitted into the larger ecology of machines, which is itself the product of evolutionary-cum-algorithmic-machinery. [6] The machine proper is therefore an ecosystem that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools and computations the same operations that were formerly done by the various modules of human minds with similar computational capacities. Whether the motive power is derived from human beings, or from some other [Turing,Von Neumann] machine, makes no difference in this respect. From the moment that the tool proper is taken from humans, and fitted into environments, a machine takes the place of a mere implement. The difference strikes one at once, even in those cases where human beings continue to be the prime mover. The number of implements that humans can use simultaneously, is limited by the algorithmic complexity of his/her own historical ecologies of creativity and production, by the fecund yet finite number of his/her bodily organs. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S1
But it is only in the fatuous, so-called "new economy" that the conversion of knowledge and computations for the umpteenth time acquires technical cognitive and emotively stultifying capacities. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the algorithmic/machinic expression of the creativity of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capitalized value, of "dead" labour/know-how, that dominates, and speeds up/past living labour-power-cum-know how. The contingent and unnecessary attempt at the separation of the intellectual powers of production from cognitive/manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of global finance, with it's own, self-absorbed algorithms of accumulation, as evidenced by Black-Scholes, VAR and other various of computations of capitalized commands over the net present exchange value of labour-power, is, as we have already shown, a desperate attempt by contemporary industry to escape the biospheric constraints of evolution as erected on the foundation of computing machinery... http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S4
...The same holds good for every kind of refuse resulting from a knowledge process, where that refuse cannot be further employed as a means in the production of new and 'independent' use-values. Such an employment of refuse used to be seen in the large machine factories in Manchester, where mountains of iron turnings were carted away to the foundry in the evening, only to re-appear the next morning in the workshops as solid masses of iron. One wonders whether the great contemporary corporations listed as the Fortune 500 every year have the knowledge to do the same with the almost infinite waste stream they [and we] spew into the planet's diverse ecologies without rendering asunder the very forms of contract and property that have brought our species to the current conjuncture... http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S4
The existing productivity of labour/knowledge, from which it/we proceeds as its basis, is a gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch16.htm
It is not energy that is scarce, but knowledge.
Ian