The greatest part of Venice, Italy found itself underwater a few days ago:
‘The reaction is to cry’: In flooded Venice, visitors take selfies as residents reel
Washington Post
The tourists stayed when flooding arrived this week. But Venetians say the toll of repeated inundation has led to a sense that life in one of the world’s most improbable and spellbinding cities is becoming unviable.
It isn’t just one or two coastal cities threatened by rising ocean waters, it is all of them: Shanghai, Tokyo, Saigon, Dhaka, Jakarta, Miami, New York City, London, Mumbai. Even cities that are currently well protected with flood defenses such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam and New Orleans are at risk; also inland cities such as Cairo and Washington, DC. As ‘Time Machine Earth’ retreats into the Pliocene, 2+ million years ago, polar and glacial ice is melting and sea levels are steadily increasing. Much of this rise is literally baked into a ‘cake’ as latest increases in carbon gases haven’t registered their effects, yet.
Areas don’t have to be permanently inundated to be rendered uninhabitable. Repeat cycles of extreme rainfall, flash floods or tidal surges cause damage to buildings, bridges, roads, subways, and underground utilities that become too costly to repair or mitigate. The post-tropical storm Sandy flooding did billions of dollars worth of damage to New York City subways. Repeated floods of similar magnitude would financially cripple the marginally solvent transit system and render it unusable. Without its subway, New York City would no longer function as a commercial city; perhaps only as a tourist attraction like Venice is today. The foregoing presumes all else in New York remains the same, which would not be the case after repeat floods.
In the Pliocene, temperatures were 2°- 3°C higher than recent pre-industrial period; both polar ice caps largely melted away. Sea levels were 80+ meters higher than they are now. In real estate terms, 80 meters means Wall Street towers would be inundated to the 20th floor. Venice would be 79 meters underwater. Much of Netherlands, Denmark, Bangladesh and almost all of the world’s coastal cities would be gone, so would south Florida. The Gulf of Mexico would extend up the Mississippi valley to Memphis.
This week, in an event known as an “acqua alta,” a tide of more the six feet surged in from the Adriatic Sea and quickly covered 85 percent of the city. The flooding was the most severe in 50 years. But similar if less drastic flooding is becoming common. Some experts warn that Venice could be underwater within a century.
“One of the things I’m looking at, you know, is people are tired… You’re starting to see that in people’s conversations and faces that they’re weary and tired” from repeated bouts of coastal flooding. Unable to elevate their historic structures, have resorted to trying out their own flood protection barriers.
Houston, one of the world’s great ‘energy cities’:
A Rice University study published earlier this month found that nearly 20 percent of flood victims surveyed in the wake of Hurricane Harvey reported post-flood PTSD, depression and anxiety. And more than 70 percent said the prospect of future flood events was a source of worry.Harvey was the third “500-year” rain event to hit Southeast Texas in three years. This week, Tropical Storm Imelda also earned that distinction, as some areas received more than 40 inches of rain, paralyzing the area as highways morphed into parking lots and first responders performed more than 2,000 rescues Thursday alone. And many residents are now asking themselves: Is Houston worth it?
Imagine how Houston residents will feel after their city is under fifty meters of water or even ten. Also imagine where these folks will go after their Great Flood. Outside of communist China, there are exactly zero vacant cities waiting on higher ground for new occupants. The locals there will certainly have plenty of their own problems and won’t be too keen on welcoming tens of millions of climate refugees, just like most folks aren’t pleased with the current relative trickle.
Problems scale geometrically against the level of rising water. Our habit of taking each economic problem in isolation from the rest suggests flood problems are episodic and localized. As long as a particular flooding event is brief, it can be made note of, then the notes filed away. Business returns to normal after debris is swept up and the water is gone. The floods in Venice are a local condition resulting from the location of the city at the north end of the Adriatic Sea. Sirocco winds and storms from north Africa along with high seasonal tides push seawater hundreds of miles up the relatively narrow channel between the Italian shoreline and the Balkan coast. The surge of water northward has nowhere to go except into the streets and plazas (and buildings) of Venice. This combination of wind and tide is intermittent, so is flooding from storms. When the wind stops and the tide changes the water flows away. Puddles are mopped up and the storekeepers ready themselves for the horde of cruise ship passengers looking for souvenirs. The same tides and weather don’t flood Naples or Barcelona. Damage from tropical cyclones is limited to areas within the storms’ paths. A typhoon in Manila has no immediate effect in Buenos Aires. Rainfall from a slow-moving weather system may flood an area one year then not again for decades. Due to intermittency, flood events are unpleasant but manageable.
Water levels that rise generally due to melting polar ice render all coasts equally vulnerable. When world sea levels are a half meter higher, Venice, Italy will flood almost continuously … so will Venice, California. There will be damage everywhere: Shanghai, Tokyo, Saigon, Dhaka, Jakarta, Miami, New York City … Manila and Buenos Aires. Flooding in these places will be unmanageable. The choice will have to be made to abandon some- or all of these places at enormous cost or try to defend against the water at expense that may prove insufficient … also at enormous cost.
Effective mitigation efforts would also have to scale geometrically. When there are only a few places with seawater flooding problems, dikes, locks, tidal gates and dams prevent flooding as they do in Amsterdam and New Orleans. Protecting all the coastal areas at risk including cities, port facilities, nuclear power stations, desalinization plants, refineries, military bases, farmlsnd and other infrastructure would be an immense task, likely beyond current industrial capacity. Ironically, this effort would be necessary to provide the protections that are right now available for free. There are also no guarantees any affordable mitigation would be sufficient longer term. Dike systems that protect against three meters of water fail at four meters. At 60 meters, efforts toward any mitigation at all would be a laughable gesture; a waste of time and resources.
Migration costs scale geometrically. The thousands of families who moved from New Orleans to Atlanta after Hurricane Katrina represented a modest increase in housing demand in Atlanta. Newcomers doubled up with friends and family or they took short-term lodging in motels and in vacant apartments. New Orleans was not permanently submerged or destroyed. After the storm waters were pumped out, the government provided inexpensive ‘FEMA’ trailers as temporary housing for those looking to return. These trailers were cramped and uncomfortable, some gassed inmates with formaldehyde, but residents could return to the city and remain until their houses were rebuilt. In Atlanta, the local market for housing was able to absorb the permanent newcomers. Meanwhile, the federal government and insurance companies provided funds to repair wind and water damage as well as improve flood defenses.
Millions of families migrating from the coasts would be a second great flood. Multitudes — billions — would be on the move around the world. As human population has expanded it has become urbanized, most of the largest urban centers are at sea level. Because there isn’t enough replacement housing, people looking to escape the water would take shelter where they could, filling sprawling camps or shanty towns. Around the world, a billion humans live in slums right now. This is without any floods; with them, the slum population will increase significantly, perhaps more than double.
This is more than a matter of simple replacement. The flood disruptions would be enduring; unlike New Orleans after Katrina, there would be little chance of return in any meaningful sense. Good housing, land- and tax value, adequate employment, vital services and commerce would be ‘swapped’ for ad-hoc settlements with few services or possibilities for earning a living. Trade- and social networks of trust that formed around specific places over periods of years would be disrupted as these places are abandoned. It is hard to see how would this be good for any sort of business, even those which have so far profited from the misery of others.
The microeconomic measurements of opportunity cost and depreciation of capital stock are difficult to make because disruptions tend to compound unpredictably with scale. Theories of replacement- or pent up demand break down when cities and countries are ruined and citizens are destitute. Venice is old, certainly depreciated, but what is it actually worth? It is certainly more than the income the city generates from tourism. What would it take in dollars and cents to recover tourist income after it is lost to the flood, or would such a thing be possible? Industrial economies at this moment are unable to gain positive returns. We borrow dollars to return pennies of GDP. We find it difficult to repair and replace infrastructure that is inadequate or has simply worn out. How we might build replacements on the needed scale with persistent flooding and disasters underway is hard to imagine.
Providing food, water and sanitation for the multitudes would be a related, almost biblical crisis. Disruptions would include clogged ports, transport breakdowns and malfunctioning markets. These would be amplified by climate-related problems ‘down on the farm’: loss of topsoil fertility, water shortages, desertification and diminished crop yields caused by rising temperatures and changes in prevailing weather patterns. Ironically, with the floods, there would be diminished ability to access drinking water along with food. With the world economy unable meet current obligations, it is hard to see how these compounding needs will be met.
It won’t matter if the migrants came at once or over a period of years or even decades: the destruction of assets and the process of relocation are not productive. There is no return to persons losing their homes and businesses. Once-costly housing at the point of abandonment is worth very little or nothing, so is once-valuable land that is underwater. Retreating families would generally lack the means to obtain permanent housing pretty much anywhere. At the same time those with better fortunes would cause a steady increase in demand on higher ground, making shelter even less affordable for the rest. Confronted with the scale of the problems and their permanence, government- and private administrators would act as they do now: stand off to the side and wring their hands! Meanwhile, the same institutions would be seen as the agents of failure and ruin; they would become irrelevant or overthrown with this chaotic process feeding back unpredictably into the crisis.
It is unlikely the US would provide funds after New Orleans floods repeatedly, certainly not after the city’s flood defenses are overcome. As with New York’s subway system, repeat fixes to New Orleans and its levees would ultimately cost more than the rest of our seemingly ‘rich’ country can afford. The US can create money or borrow infinite amounts but the country cannot create or borrow work which requires energy and materials; these are physical things that cannot be cajoled into service by public relations departments or deployed by fraud. The same resources that have been relentlessly exploited for the past 150 years would be called upon for further service. There is increasing doubt as to whether resources will be available, or what a pauperized — and flood-damaged — country can muster. Would the country have any money or would the money have worth? Would there would be enough funds in circulation to gain energy or work or would citizens, faced with the prospect of more destruction, abandon ‘money’ altogether?
All of this leaves out other climate- related disruptions: wars, expanded range of diseases and other pests, fires and debilitating heat. All of these carry their own costs that compound flooding disruptions in unpredictable ways.
Following along this line of reasoning: the ‘first mover advantage’ lies with those who can understand what is taking place under their noses. When does this occur? Simply posing the question risks precipitating its own, unbearable answer. Inhabitants of threatened cities would want to be second movers if they can’t be first. As with finance crises, once losses are recognized there is a stampede of ‘investors’ rushing to exit their positions all at once. The same thing will happen as flood losses are recognized. It’s reasonable that individuals paying attention in Miami and Savannah and other low-lying areas have already cashed out and decamped to more secure ground. After this cadre there is some undetermined mover as the ‘marginal agent’ who triggers the rout. What comes after? Nobody wants to find out.
Poor Venice. The creative labor of generations over a period of 1,500 years = “Meh, it’s just old junk.”
Unknown photographer; Dresden after Allied bombing raids of February 13 -15, 1945
Venice is a form of human and civilizational capital accumulated slowly over the course of centuries. As capital, Venice has value, the latter being a characteristic of non-renewable natural resources such as gold or petroleum. Even as gold can be salvaged after a disaster, there is no possible ‘replacement Venice’, nor can it be renewed. Just as there are no adequate replacements for the cities destroyed by aerial bombing during World War Two, there can only be new, uglier buildings in the old places or — in the case of Venice — a farcical copy in some out of the way place in China or Las Vegas.
Is Amsterdam worth it? Netherlands under 9 meters of water, Floodmap
It’s impossible to say how long the process of capital annihilation will take for Venice to become a soggy ruin. It could happen a few years from now should one of the great polar ice sheets break up. Already, the warmer ocean has undermined the seaward layers of ice in Antarctica and Greenland that have so far held land bound glaciers in place.
West Antarctica is considered the most vulnerable of Earth’s three major ice sheets. It rests in a deep, broad bowl that dips thousands of feet below sea level – exposing it to warm ocean currents. It would raise sea level by 11 feet if it collapsed.
Industrial humans don’t bother with consequences while they play with fire, just like they never bothered in the past. Costs have so far resided comfortably in the future as ‘someone else’s problem’. All of a sudden the future is at our doorsteps and costs are outrunning our ability to meet them. Those who were supposed to be the bag holders for today’s follies turn out to be us and our children.
“In this war of every man againstevery man[nature] nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place there. Where there is no common power, there is no law; and where there is no law, there is no injustice. In war the two chief virtues are force and fraud. Justice and injustice are not among the faculties of the body or of the mind. If they were, they could be in a man who was alone in the world, as his senses and passions can. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude. A further fact about the state of war of every man againstevery man[nature]: in it there is no such thing as ownership, no legal control, no distinction between mine and thine. Rather, anything that a man can get is his for as long as he can keep it.”
— Thomas Hobbes ‘Leviathan’
Values: we used to have them, but they were slaughtered on Flanders Fields along with ten million children. We used to have prices but bailing out billionaires turns out to have rendered the numbers nonsensical. What do we have now? Cheap illusions and too much water.
For those safe from the rising seas, the ocean acidification will fcuk you up instead
Living around 5300′ elevation, the only flood we’ll likely see is refugees. Although, that flood is likely to be quite dangerous in its own right.
On another line of thought, much of the wealth in this country has been redistributed to the coasts. Due to our modern lifestyles money has flowed from the heartland into Silicon Valley. The same for money flowing into NYC due to all of the creative financing scams of the past decades. So, watching the coasts flood into oblivion after relocating much of our so-called wealth to these doomed locations is a fitting analogy for our poor decisions in this dog-eat-dog socio-economic system.
Uh oh, shale profits peaking. I thought you had to have profits (i.e. positive free cash flow) for them to peak.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/u-shale-seen-profits-peak-000000077.html
You’re on a roll Steve! On the subject of slums, I highly recommend Mike Davis’ book “Planet of Slums”. Excerpts from last chapter:
The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a “Third World” in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural “semi-proletarianization,” the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.2
Structural adjustment, it would appear, has recently worked an equally fundamental reshaping of human futures. As the authors of The Challenge of Slums conclude: “Instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade.” “The rise of [this] informal sector,” they declare bluntly, “is … a direct result of liberalization.” Some Brazilian sociologists call this process – analogous to the semi-proletarianization of landless peasants – passive proletarianization, involving the “dissolving of traditional forms of (re)production, which for the great majority of direct producers does not translate into a salaried position in the formal labor market.”3
This informal working class, without legal recognition or rights, has important historical antecedents. In modern European history, Naples, even more than Dublin or London’s East End, was the exemplar of an urban informal economy. In this “most shocking city of the nineteenth century,” as Frank Snowden calls it in his brilliant study, a “chronic super-abundance of labour” survived by miracles of economic improvisation and the constant subdivision of subsistence niches. A structural dearth of formal jobs – permanent unemployment was estimated at 40 percent – was transformed into an overwhelming spectacle of informal competition.
… Today there are hundreds, even thousands, of Napleses. In the 1970s, to be sure, Manuel Castells and other radical critics could persuasively criticize the “myth of marginality” that correlated slum housing with economic informality by pointing to the large numbers of industrial workers and public employees forced to live in sub-standard housing in cities such as Caracas and Santiago.5 Moreover, in Latin America at least, the dominant urban labor-market trend during the previous era of import-substitution industrialization had been the relative reduction in informal employment – from 29 percent in 1940 to 21 percent in 1970 for the region as a whole.6
Since 1980, however, economic informality has returned with a vengeance, and the equation of urban and occupational marginality has become irrefutable and overwhelming: informal workers, according to the United Nations, constitute about two-fifths of the economically active population of the developing world.7 In Latin America, adds the Inter-American Development Bank, the informal economy currently employs 57 percent of the workforce and supplies four out of five new “jobs.”8 (Indeed, the only jobs created in Mexico between 2000 and 2004 were in the informal sector.) Other sources claim that more than half of urban Indonesians, 60 to 75 percent of Central Americans, 65 percent of the populations of Dhaka and Khartoum, and 75 percent of Karachians subsist in the informal sector.
… If the informal sector, then, is not the brave new world envisioned by its neoliberal enthusiasts, it is most certainly a living museum of human exploitation. There is nothing in the catalogue of Victorian misery, as narrated by Dickens, Zola, or Gorky, that doesn’t exist somewhere in a Third World city today. I allude not just to grim survivals and atavisms, but especially to primitive forms of exploitation that have been given new life by postmodern globalization – and child labor is an outstanding example.
… The world capital of enslaved and exploited children, however, is probably the Hindu sacred city of Varanasi (population 1.1 million) in Uttar Pradesh. Famed for its textiles as well as for its temples and holy men, Varanasi (Benares) weaves its carpets and embroiders its saris with the bonded labor of more than 200,000 children under the age of 14.44 In exchange for tiny loans and cash payments, incredibly poor rural Dalits and Moslems sell their children – or their entire families – to predatory textile contractors. According to UNICEF, thousands of children in the carpet industry are “kidnapped or lured away or pledged by their parents for paltry sums of money.”
… The most ghoulish part of the informal economy, even more than child prostitution, is the surging world demand for human organs: a market created in the 1980s by the breakthroughs in kidney transplant surgery. In India, the impoverished periphery of Chennai (Madras) has become world renowned for its “kidney farms.” According to a Frontline investigation, “for eight years between 1987 and 1995, the slum in Bharathi Nagar in Villivakkam, a Chennai suburb, was the hub of the kidney trade in Tamil Nadu. At the height of the boom, partly fueled by foreigners flocking to South India for kidneys, the slum was called Kidney Nagar or Kidney-bakkam.” The area’s slum-dwellers were mostly drought refugees struggling to survive as rickshaw-pullers or day laborers. Journalists estimated that more than 500 people, or one person per family, had sold their kidneys for local transplants or for export to Malaysia; a majority of the donors were women, including “many deserted women … forced to sell their kidneys to raise money to support themselves and their children.”55
@Bachs_bitch Amazing passage, thank you for posting it.
How much propaganda was (and still is) devoted to the denigration of peasant cultures and living arrangements? It is now clear to me that western empires have used “development” as an excuse to uproot and enslave the world’s people and ruin the planet.
What can one do about this besides move to higher ground and grow turnips? Perhaps start to unpack the euphemisms that fill our public discourse?
There is a lot of good discussion going on at “Our Finite World,” Gail Tverberg’s blog. People are talking about mitigation from a physical perspective. What about working on our language?
I am an old leftie raised on Wood Guthrie “Your waters are turning our darkness to dawn, Roll on Columbia roll on.” It is hard for me not to respond positively to the reawakening of the left right now. The trouble is that the left, through the kinds of misunderstandings shown in BB’s post, is on the wrong track.
Hope you all have your families and friends close by as we go into the “holidays.”
Ellen
The sad truth is that any leftist project for rejuvenation will have to confront the same physical constraints as rightist ones. I think this is the biggest reason why genuine socialist internationalism never caught on, and still doesn’t.
The costs of building and maintaining Industrial Might and Magic have to be shifted on to someone. The left’s answer to that are vague promises of a universally equitable prosperity. All we need to do is elect enlightened, visionary “leftists” into power. The “Green New Deal” boldly asserts that the very *process* of supplanting the entire fossil-fuel infrastructure will boost the economy, create millions of jobs, and brush aside all entrenched contradictions.
Orwell was in many ways the prototype cynical middle-class socialist, forever hopelessly awaiting the Godot of morally pristine yet invulnerable and all-consuming revolution. But he at least recognised the root of the problem in ‘Wigan Pier’, the best thing he wrote by far:
For in the last resort, the only important question is, Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his heart no Englishman … does want it to disintegrate. For apart from any other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon keeping a tight hold on the Empire … Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.
Human habitat is degrading in too many ways for me to list right now. Long before we get several feet or more of SLR the population will be declining due to the inability to produce the quantities of food that we now do.
Truth is I believe that as soon as all of the converging conditions of collapse become obvious and inevitable we will probably kill off ourselves with social chaos. Peak Civility!
@B’sB
Have you read the 18th Brumiere of Louis Napoleon? Marx struggles with how a massive social change among the working class can yield up such a dud as LN. Just because everyone gets together and votes doesn’t mean that the outcome will be pleasant. Remind you of Obama? Trump? Worry you about Bernie? Worries me.
Like it or not massive change is coming. We just don’t know what it will be. My belief is that the US will eventually try to induce consumer spending by giving out money and they will call it a Green New Deal. It will be looked at as progressive. That will fail and currency will collapse. During that time the drones and the coups and the military actions will make life miserable for most of the world as we try to keep the empire going. Orwell is correct, we are all part of that as we lead our comfortable lives.
However, more and more people in the US are not leading comfortable lives. (I am not convinced that most people care about floods and famines and insect death so long as they are comfortable.) Austerity is becoming less and less acceptable everywhere in the world. Trump’s antics are organizing the left beyond my wildest dreams. That is why I think there has to be/will be an attempt to write down debt and try MMT.
But will the banks and corporations accept that even for a brief time? And if they won’t accept it what are their options? If history is any guide they will start a big war hoping to kill off all of the pesky people demanding social change. It worked in 1914 so they could try it again.
Everyone is pretty confused myself included. Those of us who have time and inclination to try to think things through might begin to look at the problems with the left. (We are well aware of the problems of the right and the neoliberals.)
First of all, I am not convinced by all the talk about class struggle. The noble proletariat made up of industrial workers has been a huge dud. The unions never really accepted women, they were anti-environmental and generally wrong about things. I belonged to a union once and we caused each other no end of grief. Moreover, as you point out, the industrial system has succeeded in producing masses of uprooted unemployed workers who aren’t going to be organized through work places. How are we to organize all of the disparate people in the world? Through factory coops? I don’t think so.
(Stalin was a creepy butcher – I can’t believe there are lefties trying to rehabilitate him!)
Anyway, as David Harvey says (I really like a lot of what he says) the end of industrial capitalism will be very good for the environment. It looks as though that is going to happen eventually anyway so how do we think through options? I get that most people on this blog will have a very dystopian response.
I think that anyone who survives the process of capitalism’s demise should be looking at radical decentralization and land reform. The repair of natural systems will have to be everyone’s job. How that takes place will depend upon the unique circumstances that obtain in the places where people find themselves. You can call it socialism if you like but it needs to be very different from the state centralized and managed bureaucratic socialism that we think of in the 20th century.
A few people are beginning to think this way, I hope.
PS
I really like herring and potatoes – and turnips. We will be lucky to have even those IMHO.
Well said. I would only argue that we, in effect, have MMT already. It hasn’t failed yet.
@Ellen, I concur with Steve that Marx understood the problems with capitalism but failed to place them within the larger context of industrialism. Industrial development necessitated alienation, imperialism etc. and it’s not at all clear whether it occur in a way that did not.
As for Trump – basically a more respectable David Duke imo. Trump’s real base only care about their own, and see America as a failed state ruled by degenerates as far as they’re concerned. I don’t buy the Jacobin/Baffler variant of leftie narrative about most Trump voters yearning for a social democracy adamantly denied them by arrogant, cruel and unsympathetic elites. Sure, the elites are selfish and greedy (like everyone) but they were always so. At bottom, neoliberalism was far more an outcome of a system that was always unfair, unsustainable etc., than a series deliberate ideological choices made by short-sighted capitalists. I concur with Ken Barrows that we’re living under MMT already, (I would add) in the form of relentless universal asset inflation propped up (for now) by US hegemony.
As you adumbrate, our problems are deeper and more interconnected than anyone on the left is willing to acknowledge. And the by now completely insane Trumptopians seem to have merged all good and evil into the orange Moloch straddling their febrile blood orgy. Bernie will achieve nothing if elected but he still has my imaginary non-American vote!
This era is scary, capricious and confusing, yet also profoundly meaningful. Only the greatest of geniuses can be its voice.
Wait – when did Steve say that about Marx? I must have missed an interesting discussion along the way.
I do not think of asset inflation as a form of MMT – probably I am confused about that. Helicopter money is probably what I meant. How else could we forgive debt – even just student debt – without huge deflation? We will just have to forget about collateral for loans and print. Once we do that, who knows what will happen?
Contradictions everywhere you look. Expecting the central government – no matter how honorable its leaders – to come up with universal solutions is unreasonable. We have to acknowledge moral guidelines and then find our own ways locally as circumstances allow. What we westerners thought was working for the past 500 years now appears to be leading towards to some sort of disastrous denouement that we cannot really predict. As you say, scary, capricious and confusing, but we do all have a moral tradition to turn to, even if recent events have made a mockery of it. Think globally act locally is still a reasonable goal perhaps? Also, in times like these we need more artists and musicians to be stepping forward and we need to have more fun.
Steve wrote a couple of articles last year, Marx & Debtonomics:
https://www.economic-undertow.com/2018/06/25/marx-to-debtonomics-part-two/
That was a good piece – not sure that was exactly what Steve was saying about Marx and industrialization. Of course the Victorian thinker that was Marx did not have to come to grips with the laws of thermodynamics – work is heat and heat is work. That is the scientific argument against waste based industrial capitalism apart from all of its moral, social and psychological issues. That is really what Marx would have had to understand in order to conclude that the system was not profitable – I think.
In order to stop all of this we would have to remove all taxes from labor, prevent the “circulation of capital” and make lending at interest (usury) illegal.
No by industrialism I meant the broader energy picture.
The surplus value labour produces requires cheap resources and cheaper labour elsewhere, which are facilitated via direct/indirect colonialism. The “surplus” is the effect of where the energy is flowing – from imperial periphery to centre, then to capitalists and the govt., then trickling down to the working classes of the centre – the “labour aristocracy”.
The elites placate the privileged working classes with reforms and improvements in living standards from that surplus, so they eventually stop wanting to bite the hand that feeds them – perhaps a nibble every once in a while. Indeed the demand created by this redistribution is also essential to keeping the whole system going.
Meanwhile, “democracy” happens because overt repression of the favoured class of workers/consumers isn’t necessary anymore. By now they are enthusiastic participants in & cheerleaders for an economic system (can one even call it “capitalism”?) that benefits them at the expense of the rest of humanity. When the surplus starts running out, nobody knows what the solution or next step is, who or what to blame, where to turn for comfort. That is where we are right now. Everyone is connected to and dependent upon everyone else but no one understands anyone including themselves.
The only hope, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, is to be in Love’s debt to one another. And on that note, happy Xmas/holidays to all.
New Article!