[lbo-talk] [Fwd: A World Turned Upside Down by George Monbiot]

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Sep 22 15:44:00 PDT 2005


Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
>
> Another issue - you seem to assume that there is a plan or at least a
> consistent logic to capitalism.

It's difficult to know how to respond to such bizarre or crude misunderstandings. One's first impulse is to see them as deliberate lying for the sake of a momentary rhetorical advantage. But that is unlikely. And at this point I've deleted three or four further speculations as to what might be at the root of Wojtek's odd response.

The whole point about capitalism, and the reason for its immense flexibility, is that it is planless. Surely Wojtek has heard the phrase, "anarchy of production." And surely he has also heard the phrase, "invisible hand." How do roughly the right number of heads of iceberg lettuce get delivered to Manhattan every day? It works out _as though_ there were a plan of some sort. (There are of course difficulties there: harvesting schedules of iceberg lettuce, as in the case of strawberries, are utterly beyond the grower's control. (I recall an anecdote in some magazine article about 50 years ago of an Arizona lettuce grower putting his whole crop on a freight train _and then_ getting on the phone trying to sell it to someone along the route.)

(The phrase "consistent logic to capitalism" is opaque to me and I won't try to comment on it.)

It is this total lack of plan in capitalism that grounds my skepticism in respect to control of global warming. My forwarding of Monbiot's article had been partly in response to the following.

Gar Lipow had written earlier: There may be a shorter term empirical question here. Given the will, I think eliminating the carbon emissions is technically easier that a lot of people think.

And my point had been that the ease of the technical solution was trivial on account of the difficulty or even impossibilty of finding that "will" Gar so flippantly presupposes. There is an old joke about three men marooned on desert island when a case of canned food floats ashore. I forget the first two suggestions, but the third man, an economist, begins: "Assume a can opener." I think this is what Gar is doing.

And in response to that skepticism on my part, Doug Henwood had wrtten: "I think you're underestimating the flexibility of capitalism. . . ."

My reply now, it is precisely the immense flexibility of capitalism which grounds my doubt. Doug has used this phrase, "flexibility of capitalism," so often that it has become merely a ritual in his practice, its material grounds no longer present in this thought and practice. The flexibility of capitalism consists in its absorption and/or defeat of anti-capitalist forces, as a herd of cats is flexible in response to efforts to control them. The reason capitalism will probably not be able to handle global warming is precisely because it is to flexible.

Carrol



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