[lbo-talk] DC blizzard dooms cap and trade

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Wed Feb 10 20:57:06 PST 2010


Anybody here take Polanyi's arguments about land and labor (OK, so he was wrong about money) being fictitious commodities - phenomena not produced as commodities but treated as if they were by capital (and those operating under capitalist ideological hegemony)?

O'Connor claimed to draw on Polanyi to make his second contradiction argument where the fictitious commodification of the ecological, personal and communal conditions of production, and of life, exhausts them and the treatment of the non-capitalist realms where "nature," "labor" and "space" are produced as sinks for capitalist waste degrades their reproduction... though, having worked pretty closely with him, I'm pretty sure he drew a great deal more on Neil Smith's Uneven Development - where the parallel is drawn between the naturalized social production of markets (where commodity and labor markets have qualitatively different dynamics and consequences) and the naturalized social production of nature, laborers and space.

Markets can be produced for all sorts of things but marketizing some material and social phenomena generates different contradictions than marketing others. Damn, I hope this is coherent, just realized I'm really really tired.

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>wrote:


> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara
> <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >
> > ...Capital is value in motion – it
> > succeeds in reproducing itself ultimately only by expanding. So-called
> > capitalist solutions are no solutions at all – emissions trading is
> > obviously a scam, and can only be a scam, since if carbon credits are
> > strictly and permanently limited carbon markets are not markets, as no
> > expansion is possible.
> >
>
> This is nonsensical. Are venues for buying and selling rights to land not
> markets either?
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319



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