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AntiCapitalist MeetUp: ploughing wind turbine blades into shared gummy bears [1]

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Date: 2022-08-28

"It's been said that the 21st century is a race between the first and second contradictions. The first (contradiction), central to orthodox Marxism, is the contradiction between the forces of production on the one hand, and the relations of production on the other. The forces of production include things like forms of labour, scientific knowledge, co-operation, and technology, while the relations of production are the class relations arising out of private property in the means of production. (The late) James J. O'Connor subsequently identifies a second source of capitalist crisis, a second contradiction. This is between the forces and relations of production combined and the conditions of production, broadly speaking, between political economy and the environment..."

Anna Sturman at PPESydney writes about a divide haunting contemporary ecosocialism…. “the ongoing cleavage between work in the tradition of so-called ‘first-stage’ ecosocialism, such as James O’Connor’s ‘second contradiction’, and scholarship in the tradition of the metabolic rift school, ‘second-stage’ ecosocialism, associated primarily with the work of John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett and Brett Clark.”

One wedge in that cleavage could be misidentifying ecosocialism as the eco-fascism appropriated by violent right-wing movements including those favoring neoliberal solutions but mainly focused on intersectional hatred using race and class discourse in favor of political privilege and power hegemonies over subjugated cultures and populations.

The real juncture of ecosocialism comes from a variety of conflicts among land, labor, and capital.

At the Kochs’ Cato Institute, the right-wing reaction to efforts to mitigate such cleavage(s) relies on neoliberal markets and circular reasoning that negates regulatory solutions. Even moral suasion cannot prevail against the determinism of “free market” solutions to an ecological crisis that may be past the tipping point, insoluable by deregulation. They even suggest a scarcity of moral resources, which looks like “old tired ethics”. For those libertarians, the ‘wise use’ of such conventional wisdom is to capitulate to the current institutional arrangements and their often misidentified and misspecified, quantitative solutions.

At the level of critical practices, recycling and adaptive reuse are not comprehensive solutions in the absence of global, international policy regimes. A half-wild Earth cannot happen without major shifts in social relations and political systems. For example aside from the fossil fuel industry’s media disinformation about the landfill burying of expended wind turbine blades, recycling their composite materials can be made more efficient by modifying their organic constituents. It might not necessarily be the best media framing the use of material to imply one might “eat” a turbine blade converted into gummy candy.

The reality is to resolve the issues of sustainable growth brought about by the ecologically situated conflicts of capital and labor, regardless of any controversies and gaps in the value-form, considering the multimodal advances in both technology and conceptualizing commodities and money. The objective in sustainability and political economy is to conjoin the microfoundations of macroeconomics with their critical spatial and temporal regional locations.

The goal is to change the social structure of accumulation in which ecosocialism is an ever-increasing component in an age where capitalists hedge their bets by investing in both fossil fuels and renewable energy. Ultimately it is both governmentality and governance in a complete assessment of surplus value as an ecological construct.

Weinbaum and Bridges (1976) write that “capitalist accumulation creates its own necessities,” resulting in contradictions between social needs and the imperatives of accumulation. Capitalist firms must endlessly produce commodities for the sake of realizing surplus-value rather than producing things as use-values to meet the needs of people. While commodities must also have use-values, they are not produced to “satisfy directly the needs of the producer, and [are] worth nothing to the producer as a use-value,” (Clarke 1991, 86). What differentiates a commodity from waste is not inherent to the physical properties or use-value of the object. From the perspective of the capitalist firm, an object is a commodity if it can be exchanged for money to realize surplus-value. This is not a permanent condition, as some items and materials may have value in one period or context, but may not be exchangeable for money to realize surplus-value in others. An extreme example of this is the devaluation of commodities that occurs “in the event of a crisis of overproduction, in which the commodity becomes worthless… and may be discarded or destroyed,” (Clarke 1991, 86). We can see evidence of this in the global political economy of recycling, as campaigns promoting recycling and laws mandating household waste-sorting, over the past four decades, have been too successful. The current concern for municipal waste systems and waste management firms is an excess of materials in the recycling stream, as plastic and contaminated paper from the U.S. and U.K. have become an international “hot potato” (McCormick et al. 2019). This overproduction of recycling threatens the profits of waste management companies due to an oversupply of materials that industry does not want and contamination of valuable materials with other household wastes in single-stream or improperly sorted recycling. www.ppesydney.net/...

x You’re spreading misinformation. The EV recycling battery issue is a real problem. To date the only in-house closed loop recycling is done by Tesla. And even they admit that the challenges are extreme. It is not profitable and Very few components can be reused. — @cometogeather (@cometogeather) August 27, 2022

Almost everything that’s said about recycling is wrong. At the very least, none of the conventional wisdom is completely true. Let me start with two of the most common claims, each quite false: 1. Everything that can be recycled should be recycled. So that should be the goal of regulation: zero waste.

2. If recycling made economic sense, the market system would take care of it. So no regulation is necessary, and in fact state action is harmful. If either of those two claims were true, then the debate would be over. The truth is more complicated than almost anyone admits. There are two general kinds of arguments in favor of recycling. The first is that “this stuff is too valuable to throw away!” In almost all cases, this argument is false, and when it is correct recycling will be voluntary; very little state action is necessary. The second is that recycling is cheaper than landfilling the waste. This argument may well be correct, but it is difficult to judge because officials need keep landfill prices artificially low to discourage illegal dumping and burning. Empirically, recycling is almost always substantially more expensive than disposing in the landfill. Since we can’t use the price system, authorities resort to moralistic claims, trying to persuade people that recycling is just something that good citizens do. But if recycling is a moral imperative, and the goal is zero waste, not optimal waste, the result can be a net waste of the very resources that recycling was implemented to conserve. In what follows, I will illustrate the problems with each of the two central fallacies of mandatory and pure-market recycling, and then will turn to the problem of moral imperatives. www.cato-unbound.org/… When you cast policy issues in moral terms, you degrade the character of public discourse. You lead people to see conflicting priorities as an occasion for battle, rather than an occasion for compromise. You send the message that policy is best decided by appeals to one’s inner conscience (or, more likely, to the polemics of demagogues), rather than by appeals to impersonal cost-benefit analysis. And this is a very bad thing. If overusing landfills is a bad habit, then branding everything you don’t like as evil is a far worse one. If we’re determined to instill blind moral instincts that make people behave better most of the time, I’d like to nominate a blind moral instinct to respect price signals and the individual choices that underlie them—an instinct, for example, to recoil from judging and undercutting other people’s voluntary arrangements. I like it when my neighbors dispose of their beer cans properly. I’d like it even more if they’d stop trying to dictate other people’s wages, working conditions, housing contracts, and drug habits. By concentrating our moral resources on recycling, we not only crowd out that nobler mission; we actually undercut it, by sending the message that price signals are unreliable. Of course, some price signals are unreliable, but the whole point of the moral suasion agenda is to get things right most of the time, not all of the time. Every time a misguided locavore makes the world a poorer place by choosing expensive local food, it’s because she’s absorbed the false lesson that prices are generally a poor measure of social cost – a lesson first absorbed, I suspect, at the feet of the recycling propagandists she first met in elementary school. www.thebigquestions.com/…

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