Thursday, April 24, 2014

Part 8 -- How Humanity Saved the Biosphere. 'Ecologism' and 'Pro-Decadence Ideologies'.








To My Readers,



Below is the eighth part of my multi-part re-rendition, in this blog, of a rare, classic hardcopy pamphlet, written by an anonymous collective author, one which -- very early-on, in the 1970s -- '''smelled a rat [smelled the 'Rocke-Nazi' rat -- in my opinion, the biggest, rottenest rat in all of human [pre-]history to-date -- the most rabid, the most massively "ambitious" mass torturers, and mass murderers, in all of human history, who make the bloody Vlad The Impaler pale to an infinitesimal in comparison] in the "Global Warming", "People Are Pollution" rap''', and circulated, in <<samizdat>> fashion, a rather comprehensive warning to humanity about this new "eu"-genocidal ploy, which remained scarcely-known until years later, when an updated version of this text became available on the world wide web.


The internet version of this text is entitled --

Crises by Nature:  How Humanity Saved the Biosphere   



For the Resumption of Humanity's Ascent, and, with it -- and by means of it -- the Regeneration of Our Planetary Biosphere,

M. Milankovitch














Crises by Nature
 How Humanity Saved The Biosphere

by
Capitalist Crisis Studies
[with modifications by M. Milankovitch]
Table of Contents









VIII -  'Ecologism' and 'Pro-Decadence Ideologies'

Certainly the “ecology movement”, as a “grass-roots” mass phenomenon, expresses, and is nourished by, the deep currents of maturation within the human race which are emergent in this time, currents which are also the wellsprings of a non-Leninist, non-Stalinist, non-Trotskyist, Non-Maoist, non-Castroist -- non-state-capitalist -- political-economic-democratic, and thus truly Socialist movement. 


Ecological ideas manifest a sense of organic totality, an awareness of the global consequences of local action or inaction, and of ‘self-reflexive’ responsibility for such action or inaction. 

The Zeitgeist is alive in this movement, wherever it encourages thinking in terms of the biosphere as an [auto-]dynamical organic totality. 

In this respect, ecologistic thinking represents a dawning of a more conscious precursor of dialectical reason among broad layers of the population of humankind.


 
Certainly the concern with the laws of social reproduction, as they relate to Nature; the concern with the proper care and reproduction of the planetary ecosystem, which is the “natural basis” c78 of all human life, our “real body” (Marx) c79, together with the idea that the choice of technology is a matter for public deliberation and social policy, not an affair of private property — all of which animate this ferment as a mass movement — reflect the new consciousness unfolding, in the contemporary social individual, connected to the historical experience unfolding around him/her; a consciousness without which the transition to a democratically self-planning society would be impossible.





The question which must be addressed, once these valid moments are recognized, however, is this --

Does the ecology movement finally go with or against the movement of Capital in its decadent phase? 


The historical continuum forks ahead of us into basically two contrary contours of possibility, with very little in between -- Socialism or Neo-Barbarism. 


Does the ecology movement at last empty out into the whole stream of contemporary capitalist ideology and policy, plunging with them headlong into the rapids of ruin, the runaway social entropy of contracted social reproduction? 

Or does it truly break with that current, veering off toward a new region of social negentropy, a new and higher organization of society? 


Does the ecology movement represent a fruition, or a diversion, in the final analysis, of the critical energies gathering force within the human race as we confront the self-destructive consequences of our present socioeconomic activities and organization, and begin to consciously confront the task of rectifying them? 

Do the conceptions of the "laws" of social and biospheric reproduction prevalent in the ecology movement point the way toward a new state of society, historically conscious, ecologically responsible, spiritually and materially prosperous, or do they augur, if implemented, social (therefore also ecological) catastrophe instead?

 


There is no doubt here that capitalist society — or rather, the human race during the stage in which it incarnates Capital c80 — turns outward against Nature with a previously unprecedented rapacity. 


By “Capital”, I mean that cybernetical organization of social practices and resulting feedbacks and dynamical "laws" produced by any society based upon exchange-value and wage-labor. 

This rapacity is particularly evident during the decadent period of Capital, when capitalism passes from its status as a preponderantly self-organizing system into that of an increasingly self-disorganizing system. 

The period around World War I marked this turning point. 


But it must equally be recognized that this outgoing rapacity turned outward against external Nature is but a reflection of the rapacity which the ‘Capital mentality’ also turns inward against human Nature. 

Capital inherently exploits, loots, and brutalizes both. 


But Capital is an historically specific and inherently self-limited instar in the maturation of the human species. 

It is not tribalism, nor feudalism, nor is it the democratically self-planning society whose original name was “Socialism”. 

Nor can categories like “Technology” or “Urbanism” be meaningful if postulated apart from their “historically-specific”, ‘epochally-specific’, content, a content which changes as the basic state of society and of ‘social-relations-of-production ontology’ changes. 


What we have before us today is not “Technology” in general or as such. 

Neither is it feudal technology, or socialist technology. 


It is specifically capitalist technology, and capitalist urbanism. 



That is, the present, specific manifestations of these historically general categories are forms of capital; the forms which these categories exhibit when filtered through capitalist institutions -- through the "social relation of [social re-]production" that Capital IS. 


They are technology and urbanism as moulded by the inherent system-properties of Capital. 

They are objectifications of that very specific social relation of production which “Capital” is --
“...capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing, and lends this thing a specific social character.”

“Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production.”

“Capital is rather the means of production transformed into capital, which in themselves are no more capital than gold or silver in itself is money.”

“It is the means of production monopolized by a certain section at society, confronting living labour-power as products and working conditions rendered independent of this very labour-power, which are personified in this antithesis in capital.”

“It is not merely the products of labourers turned into independent powers, products as rulers and buyers of their producers, but rather also the social forces and the future... (illegible break in manuscript) form of this labour, which confront the labourers as properties of their products.” c81



What we know today of technology and urbanism is not only technology turned into a capital — technology as a capital and the city as an expression of capital accumulation, concentration, consolidation, and centralization — but moreover, it is capital as a technology c82 and the geographical morphology of humanity turned into the body of capital.




Of course, then, the shape of technology, so too the patterns of human settlement on the land — the patterns of “human geography” — along with all other dimensions of our present social morphology, will have to be transformed into congruence with the new system-"laws" of a new social relation of production, as we make the transition to an economically-democratic as well as politically-democratic self-planning society, the only kind of ecologically sound society which is possible now. 



But it is the quality of ‘capital-congruence’ — not of “bigness” or of any of the other such superficial-empiricistic predicates arbitrarily pried loose and fetishized from superficial, shallow, ‘skin-deep’, ‘surface-only’, i.e. ‘impressionistic’ accounts of contemporary social phenomena — which has to be sublated within contemporary technology, urbanism, etc. in order to arrive at their social[-ist] quality. 

Within that new configuration of society, some things will still be “big”, some that were “big” will become “small”, some that were “small” will become “big”, some social organs will be “decentralized” and some will be “centralized” — not according to some blanket preference for either “bigness” or “smallness”, centralization or decentralization, but rather in accord with the coherence of the new social relation of [human-social self-re-]production -- for the predicates “big”, or “small”, “centralized”, or “decentralized”, in themselves, in the abstract, are simply not the heart of the matter.



If the ecology ideology is blind to social form, and insensitive to historical specificity; unconscious of the operation of the social relation of production, which always resides at the heart of socio-morphogenesis, then it cannot help but go wrong in the remedies it proposes. 

Seeing the rapacity of Capital’s technology, and the putrefaction of its contemporary urbanism, but unable to discern the presence of “Capital” in either, it can only turn against “Technology” and “Urbanism” -- and “Science” in general -- and, given that tool-making and settlement-formation and knowledge-accumulation reside close to the essence of humanity, cannot help but finally turn against humanity itself -- with the help of "a little funding", and of other "help" -- from the ruling plutocracy, which has its own reasons for imposing an anti-productive-forces, anti-science, anti-human -- humanocidal -- ideology, world-wide. 


There is an historic name for this misanthropism and nihilism, this human anti-humanism, arisen to ideological hegemony and official social policy:  Fascism. 

 And Fascism will remain the finality of Ecologism so long as its believers fail to learn the lessons of historical specificity, and to come to recognize, in the ecology crisis, just one additional dimension of the general crisis of capitalist civilization in which we live, presently intensifying toward its historical paroxysm and climax, in which we must decide the future of the human race, or rather, whether the human race is to have any future at all.



The looting and polluting of Nature which we are witnessing, and participating in, today must be comprehended as a "lawful" outcome of the nature of Capital; an inevitable tropism of its systemic feedbacks. 


The ecology movement raises a valid demand when it insists that ecological damage by industry be registered in the social accounts as an economic cost, and a human cost. 

In no way can the costs of ecologic reparation be properly conceived as extrinsic to the costs of social reproduction. 

Nature is all that our species has ever had to work with. “Technology” in general is simply humanity, human Nature working with[in] Nature as a whole — both as natural material and as "natural law". 

Technology is the creative “détournement” of Nature, the turning of natural necessity back upon itself to accomplish the novel ends and productions (syntheses) whose possibility and conditional necessity arrived in this universe with the emergence of human nature within, and from out of the womb of, universal Nature. 

All artifacts and instruments are forms of Nature, natural materials as developed further by mankind, expressing the natural tendencies or “natures” of these materials as evoked and actualized via human intervention.


Nature is our means of production whether in the form of the land and the vegetation that we cultivate, the machinery or other implements with which we equip ourselves, or the faculties of our own bodies which we use in production. 

For these bodily faculties are likewise products of Nature, as modified by “the labor of history”, that is, by the action of the species upon itself since its birth out of Nature. 


What I’m getting at is that “Nature” is the only technology we’ve got.  

Human-nature’s “Technology” is just a higher form of Nature.


 
However, capitalist accounting, and capitalist practice in general, inherently excludes recognition of ecological cost “externalities”, and capitalist society systematically “loots” its natural basis — that is, appropriates and consumes Nature’s formations without meeting the costs of continuity which this entails. c83 

Modern society relates to its natural basis in this way for historically specific reasons — reasons which have nothing to do with “technology” per se (unless the mere consumption or depletion aspect is to be fixed upon, and then pre-human natural processes like Fermentation and Photosynthesis would have to be admitted also into this category, as pre-human “natural” technologies, as well). 

The reasons have rather to do with the nature of Capital.  

The “looting of Nature”, the using up of the use-value of an aspect of Nature without restoration, partially compensates technodepreciation. 

Technodepreciation refers to the losses/write-offs on account of fixed capital, debit to the profit account, which result from the growth of the productive forces, or of (use-value) productivity, which Capital itself initially promotes, as this growth takes effect in an environment of new entry competition.


Technodepreciation is the process which epitomizes and focalizes the self-contradiction of Capital. c84  


That is, the looting of Nature is one of the primary ways the capitalist system is enabled to cover-up, for a time, its immanent tendency to lower its own rate of profit, or rate of return on investment; to slow down the rate of capital accumulation, its prime vital sign.




Briefly, development of the “productive forces” — that is, the self-continuing self-development of the social self-force of human species-society’s self-re-production; of self-accelerating ‘human-species socio-mass’, or ‘human negentropy self-productivity’ — as embodied in (a) design-improved/cheaper substitute products, with higher utility and social “re-productivity” than those of the older vintages for which they substitute, (b) improved, higher-productivity/lower-operating-cost equipment, and/or (c) cheaper equipment due to attainment of higher productivity in the production of that equipment itself, all cause losses to the owners of the earlier vintage product inventories and/or equipment producing competing products thus rendered “obsolete” in pricing and/or in utility, earliest vintages which must often be written-off against profits, and scrapped, due to their obsolescence.  

These losses manifest once the improved/cheaper product and/or equipment is brought to bear upon the old profit-and-price structure that prevailed based upon the older product/equipment, say by newly entering competitors employing that improved/cheaper equipment to produce their competing product [commodity] offerings.  

Since these losses, or lower earnings, due to competition-enforced now below-cost pricing, now returned by the past, “sunk” fixed capital investments, embodied in that now obsolete/over-valued equipment and/or product, subtract out in forming the current profit-loss account, this process of ‘technodepreciation’ manifests as a fall in the ratio of profit to original or “historical-cost” investment in every accounting/reporting period during which the occurrence of such ‘technodepreciation’ is recognized. 

Or, such ‘technodepreciation’ impacts may be accounted as a revaluation downward of the capital assets of the enterprise(s) owning the now obsolete/over-valued equipment and/or product inventories, i.e., as a “one-time”, or “special”, charge-off against current period profit or retained earnings.

Since such technological advances in productivity and utility are a continually-incentivized, hence continually re-occurring feature of capitalist competition, these obsolescence losses, if not compensated or covered up in the various ways which also develop as the capital-relation develops/accumulates further, would tend to lead to a periodic, or even to a secular down-valuing of accumulated fixed capital-value society-wide, hence to a decline in the society-wide average rate of return on investments, and would adversely impact the profits and the capital of the ruling plutocracy -- the owners of the most concentrated, most consolidated, most centralized capital assets -- most of all. c85  p5









The classic example of the “looting of Nature” is found in the modern petroleum industry. 

Petroleum is not economically valuable in itself, in general, or in all social epochs of human social evolution.  

It becomes valuable only in relation to a certain level of self-development of the social economy — of the level of human-societal self-reproductivity, or of the social forces of production. 

I.e., petroleum becomes socially valuable only when human society attains to the social-evolutionary stage of ‘molecular power’, appropriating social negentropy at the molecular level of organization of pre-human, ‘Nature-al’ evolution, but not yet, prevalently, at the deeper, earlier-evolved atomic level, or sub-atomic level, of human-social appropriation of pre-/extra-human-Nature [e.g., those levels wherein the possibilities of the technologies of nuclear fission power and of nuclear fusion power reside]. 


The state of social negentropy, the level of the productive forces, or of industrial organization, had, by the late 1800s, rendered mineral oil a valuable material, whereas, at earlier stages, it had been virtually useless, and hence, valueless; unsalable. 

Thenceforth, however, mere legal title to "hold" a piece of ground topping petroleum deposits, under capitalist juridical relationships, enabled the holder to pocket the proceeds of the sale of this material, without any further considerations of meeting any ecological reparations costs, or ‘costs of continuity’, thereby incurred. 

The land holder appropriates the product of Nature, in this case fossil fuel, gratis. 

Thus, once proprietorship was secured, extracting oil could be likened to “digging money out of the ground”, as opposed to what is required for profitability in “manufacturing” industry, wherein “production”, or the transformative application of machine-assisted human labor, is the key process potentially adding [profit-]value (and social-negentropic, or social-reproductive, use-value) to the final product.

That merely extractive “industries” -- precisely because of the costs, ecological and otherwise, that they can escape, given the atomistic accounting feedbacks of Capital — can be very lucrative, is reflected in the structure of the present global capitalist ruling class: the dominant multinational corporations and banking interests — which today represent the wealthiest and most powerful factions of the world bourgeoisie — arose to hegemony on the basis of the petroleum industry. 


I refer, of course, to that constellation of interests clustered around the Rockefeller family fortune, whose wealth originally centered in the Standard Oil Company, and which constellation recently captured, even more than previously, via the Trilateral Commission (founded by Chase Manhattan Bank President David Rockefeller), and the Rockefeller-"owned" New York Council on Foreign Relations, the Cabinet of the United States Federal government.




That said, a word of caution is in order regarding the concept of ‘ecological costs’ and ‘ecological reparations’. 

The concept as here invoked refers to costs-of-temporal-continuum for the biosphere, or for human society, and, as we have seen above, that continuum is not of a static, but, on the contrary, is of an ever-changing, progressive and cumulative, quality. 


Hence, this concept does not refer to some ‘equilibriumist’ notion of a restoration in the same quality, or of a replacement in kind. 

What must be “restored” is the equipotential for [further self-re-]production of Nature, and this can be achieved generally only as ‘reparation by further evolution’.

 
The cost incurred for econo-ecological self-reproduction by the consumption, or ‘ontological conversion’, of “nonrenewable” aspects of biospheric Nature -- such as coal, oil, aluminum ore, etc. -- is not of a kind which could be met by replacing bauxite with bauxite, by filling up large holes with man-made coal and natural gas, or by pumping petroleum back into the ground. 

Human production-consumption is not a borrowing of some fixed quality of Nature which needs to be repaid in the same quality. 


On the contrary, the evolution of photosynthetic capabilities in “exchange” for the consumption of the products of atmosynthesis; the evolution of an industrial species capable of appropriating and utilizing fossil fuels in “exchange” for the depletion by the photosynthetic biosphere of atmospheric CO2, and the evolution of a science capable of producing fusion/plasma technology in “exchange” for the depletion of fossil fuels, would exemplify the ‘reparations’ process as here conceived.


That is, any given stage of cosmic evolution, since it proceeds by consuming [converting; transforming] the products posited by previous stages, which products are relatively finite in extent, therefore incurs, ipso facto, as a condition of its own [even meta-]continuity, the “cost”, as it were, of self-transcendence; of giving birth to a succeeding stage, of expanding and superseding its original relationship to the rest of Nature, uniting itself to a different and wider aspect of previously-evolved Nature, once it has used up, or, rather, transformed into something else, its original basis. 


This “necessary cost” will not necessarily be “paid” in every locus/instance of its incurrence; its “non-payment” simply means that the process/stage of cosmic evolution in question, locally at least, will come to crisis and abort.


In the case at hand, this concept would mean that part of the “surplus” -- the “profits” in social-reproductive use-value or human social negentropic terms — realized through the productive consumption of petroleum, would be invested in research and development of a replacement for this species of ‘molecular power’, in preparation for its eventual demise through fossil fuel depletion, and in upgrading the quality of life so as to develop a human population capable of realizing and broadly utilizing such an advance. 

For example, part of the proceeds of oil exploitation would have had to have been devoted to fusion research. c86 

The prices charged for oil would have had to be set high enough to cover such R&D costs, reflecting, in that way, the true social costs of using oil and depending upon oil; of developing, mediated through a transient dependence upon them, to a later and enduring status beyond that dependence.

Moreover, the costs thus covered by the prices charged would then have had to have been actually and effectively invested in that fusion power R&D. 

Only then would the ecological costs of, in this case, social reproduction be being met. 


As we know, this has not been the case. 


The unmet, unrecognized costs have appeared as the fanciful, outrageous hyper-profits — “looted” profits — of the Global ‘dictatorship of Petroleum’ instead. 


These costs will eventually be registered in the form of an actual energy crisis in the future, and in the initial strain of a sudden, socialist crash program to develop and deploy fusion devices, or, in the social-reproductive collapse of petroleum-based industrial civilization, due to hyper-escalation/inflation in the price, and the eventual collapse in the supply, of petroleum-power products.

  

We have been dealing with the long-term social costs pertaining to “maintaining the biospheric equipotential for self-reproduction”; with the long-range equipotential maintenance program requisite to a viable society, that is, to a temporally ‘continuable’ process of social evolution. 

The short-term equipotential costs need also to be noted. 

Even from the point of view of social reproduction alone, any productive activities which in any way impair the Earth’s suitability for continued support of productive activities, including its suitability as a habitat for human beings and for the fabric of other organisms upon whose life and integrity human life depends, objectively incurs the cost of healing this damage as a true, direct cost of social reproduction. 

Damage or wear-and-tear to the natural infrastructure should be accounted — e.g., in the societal self-model of a democratically self-planning society (‘socialist accounting’) — as depreciation of the means of production, and acted upon accordingly. 

This means obviating, minimizing, or at least costing such losses, and then meeting the costs thus registered.

 
Capitalist relations -- as we know from the work of the ecology movement, as well as from our direct experience of unabated pollution -- systematically excludes recognition, or at least encourages evasion, of these “external cost” responsibilities. 

The anarchistic, atomistic system wherein the means of producing society are fragmented into competing private properties, and, consequently, wherein accounting of profit (gain) is similarly atomized, creates a situation such that what is a cost or damage for society as a whole does not necessarily feed back to the individual capital owner(s), who  most directly incur(s) that cost or damage, as a system-atically or legally imposed direct cost/damage to that individual capital, which would thus ‘incentivizing’ the owner(s) of that individual capital to curtail and/or economize-upon that social cost/damage which it is causing.

That which would, in the dialectical accounting of a democratically self-planning society [an accounting which would measure the total relationship of that society to its natural environment] appear as a loss — for example, the pollution of lakes and streams — can today behave as if a profit, a gain (via avoiding disposal costs) from the point of view of a particular capital committing that pollution.

What we experience in polluted, carcinogenic waters; in smoggy, eye-stinging and lung-corroding air, in cancer-causing, heart-disease-causing, diabetes-causing capitalist pseudo-foods, and in side-effects-cascade-engineered capitalist pseudo-medicines, not to mention in late, “globalized” capitalism’s global arms-trafficing, global drug trafficing, and global human sexual-slaves trafficing, is anti-[use-]value, actively social negentropy-annihilating social entropy. 

This ever-deepening social entropy is the other side of capitalist [pseudo-]profit — the other side of looting profit; of profit realized through reneging on the socio-econo-ecological costs of human social reproduction, through cannibalizing humanity, and through cannibalizing the "natural basis" [Marx] of human-social nature, i.e., through cannibalizing that prolongation of human society back into pre-human/extra-human Nature which is the foundation upon which human-social Nature rests. 


The ecology crisis as a whole is but one of the signs of the decadence of Capital, of the increasingly  police-state, state-capitalist, proto-Fascist, pro-totalitarian phase wherein Capital profits and accumulates more and more by vampirism, by looting and parasitism, and less and less by actual production of fresh social-reproductive use-value; less and less by the growth of the productive forces, embodied in an advancing technical composition of accumulating fixed capital, less and less by human social negentropy expanding means. 

On the contrary, wherein paper capital grows more and more by profiting on the “production” of social entropy and social contraction; profiting on its imposition of a catastrophically contracting social reproduction, profiting on cannibalizing, contracting, and reversing the growth of the social forces of production, as epitomized by the non-reproduction -- the starvation and extermination — of the slave-labor populations of the Nazi concentration camps.

 
The rapacity and toxicity of modern society with respect to global, planetary Nature as a whole (including with respect to itself, as a part thereof!) is located not simply in “Bigness”, nor in “Technology”, as universal categories, still less in “man” in general, but rather in the historically specific organism of social feedbacks and tendencies — the specific dynamical properties — of the social relation of production called Capital.   

‘Capital’ — the largely unconscious but “self-organizing” capital-praxis of human agents — evolves quite "lawfully" out of earlier forms of exchange-value — commodities [barter] and, later, money [money-mediated exchange and circulation of money-and-commodities] -- once the ‘density control parameters’ of commodity production and exchange, driven by the growth of their social productive force, or self-productivity, within and among rapidly detribalizing kinship societies, expand beyond certain critical, ‘self-bifurcation’ thresholds. 

The specific kind of “Bigness” we experience today is the kind which inheres in the "laws" of political-economic motion of Capital; in the consolidation, concentration and centralization moments of "the law of Capital accumulation" first discovered by Marx, which describes our semi-conscious unified shaping of our entire social process by the cybernetics of  Capital qua “the Capital-relation”.


Capitalist “Bigness” — concentration, centralization, and increasing ‘oligopolization’, monopolization, and ‘state-ification’ of Capital, hence of political power, together with an accelerating state-power-based “guaranteeing” of private-Capital-[pseudo-]profitability — does not at all necessarily converge with what would be optimal from the point of view of human-social-negentropic use-value, or of self-expanding social self-reproductivity. 



But this doesn’t mean that “Bigness” in the abstract can be seized upon as a scapegoat -- as a cheap, quick and “simple” explanation of all of our problems. 


It doesn’t mean that “Smallness” or “decentralization” is ipso facto optimal from a human-social-negentropic use-value or social-reproductive view-point. 


Part of the folly of this whole tack resides in the relativity of qualities like “Smallness” and “Decentralization”. 

“Small” cannot exist apart from “Big” nor “decentralization” apart from “centralization”. 

All that can exist, all that we can ‘actualistically’ talk about, is certain possible “states” of interconnection of these pairs; certain possible complex unities, or patterns of interpenetration, of these dialectical opposites.



 
No doubt the mania for “Growth” exhibited by some capitalist spokespeople is an expression of, and an ingredient in, the rapacity of modern society. 

But the “Growth” actually being referred to by them is that of Capital: namely, accumulation — of debt instruments, of monetary, and of other money-denominated paper titles to wealth. 

This “Growth” does not necessarily betoken any expansion of social use-value, of social reproduction, at all: Capital growth can indeed correspond to an increase in goods and services beneficial to society, and to a development of the creative powers of human beings through a deployment and consumption of those powers which is appropriate and conducive to their continual self-expansion. 

But Capital growth can also correspond to an increase of “goods” detrimental or wasteful to social reproduction (for example, weapons of mass destruction) or, as with speculative profits, to no goods at all, as well as to the destruction of the producers' creative powers, through reneging on the costs of reproduction of the working population:  the looting of wages and social services (the “social wage”) for profits. 

The mania for growth is thus an expression of the drive to self-accumulation inherent in the Capital-relation.
  

The self-destructiveness, the cannibalism manifest in this mania today is a reflection of the fatal self-contradiction inherent in that Capital accumulation drive: that previous Capital accumulation makes further socially-expansive/negentropic-and-monetarily-profitable accumulation of Capital ever more difficult as the Capital accumulation process proceeds, i.e., as the “Capital-intensity” of production increases. 


This self-contradiction, as a movement, is the famous Marxian “Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”, manifest empirically as the trajectory of growing indebtedness, followed by accelerating inflation, crash, depression and (usually) inter-capitalist war, and which we have attributed, above, in a way which is not explicit in Marx’s extant work, to the dynamic of “technodepreciation” or of the self-destruction of capital-value.

This Capital self-destruction is mediated by the conversion of previously-accumulated capital-value into non-value through its interaction, in the form of competition, with newly-accumulated capital-value, newer capital-value which is of a higher competitive technical composition i.e., of higher all-factors net-productivity, than is the older capital-value. c84

  

The purveyors of the Ecology ideology, owing to their pervasive ideological blindness to the social relations of production, and their blindness to the historically-specific, Capital-relation-related nature of the present world ecology crisis, and owing to an impressionistic empiricism insensitive to the more subtle and intricate textures of social causation, have drawn, for the most part, wrong conclusions about the present predicament of the human species, and of our planetary biosphere; have assigned the wrong causes to the problems, and have proposed social-reproductive disasters as solutions. 


Almost all of their advice comes under the heading of proposals to further enfetter — in fact, to catastrophically reverse — the growth of the productive forces of humanity, that is, to lower the level of negentropy of human society, to disaccumulate the human-species use-value, actual and potential, built up by the labor of centuries; to enforce a suicidal contraction of social reproduction, and a murderous ‘meta-genocidal’ contraction of the global human population. 

This is nothing but the blind, ‘contra-temporal’, anti-historical tendency of decadent Capital, coming lately to consciousness, or, rather, to false consciousness, and even mistaking itself for an opposition to capitalism! 


But Ecologism opposes capitalism only in the way self-contradictory capitalism at last openly opposes itself; the way decadent capitalism attacks and seeks to dismantle all of virtues and values, the structures, psychic and social, of ascendant-phase capitalism:  the idea of progress, of material and spiritual betterment through coherent and experientially-corroborated knowledge (“science”); the institutions of democracy and popular power, of public, all-classes higher education, and so on. 

Ecologism is a species of the ideology of capitalist anticapitalism; it is a pro-Decadence ideology. 

And this pro-Contraction, anti-productive-forces bent in public opinion comes at a time when a new upsurge in the productive forces, a worldwide scientific and cultural Renaissance, a globally planned program of quantitative and qualitative growth; of worldwide economic development and social reconstruction, inherently impelling us beyond the Capital-relation, provides our only chance for survival as a species, as for survival of this planet’s biosphere-noosphere as a whole.
 

This species-suicidal bent is by no means the accomplishment of the Ecology movement on its own. 

It has been helped astray by massive funding and other encouragement from the highest ruling circles of international Capital. 

In particular, the Rockefeller group has systematically selected and nurtured, with regard to population policy especially, the tendencies most convergent with its own plans, which amount to ‘multi-genocidal’ and ‘mega-genocidal’ dismantling of the human race. p6






 
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