Deepwater Lesson: Expropriate the Expropriators

[Catherina]

Deepwater Lesson: Expropriate the Expropriators
Means Of Production Gone Wild: BP, Karl Marx and the Eco-Tragedy
by Paul Street

Sunday, June 06, 2010

“If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.” — Bob Herbert, June 1, 2010

Imagine “the Associated Producers, Rationally Regulating Their Interchange with Nature”

Amidst mass capital-imposed structural unemployment and ever-escalating environmental collapse, the ongoing epic British Petroleum-Deepwater Horizon spill – more than 40 million gallons and counting (far beyond the previous record set by the Exxon Valdez) in the Gulf of Mexico – ought to be something of a teachable moment for radical opponents of the profits system. "The realm of freedom,” one such opponent, Karl Marx, wrote in the third volume of his magnum opus Capital, “can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind force of Nature, and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature.” By “socialized man,” Marx meant (in the masculinized language of the Victorian era) civilization in a new era of classlessness – the real (he felt) match for homo sapiens’ liberated “human nature.” Contrary to Cold War stereotypes that equate socialism and communism with the dungeons of Stalin and Mao, Marx did not see that desirable post-capitalist age as one of state dictatorship and productionism, with the state as capitalist, directing the toiling masses’ tasks and extracting surplus from above. He envisaged rather an egalitarian time after the working class majority had “stormed heaven” (his description of what the ill-fated 1871 Paris Commune had attempted) in a great self-liberating struggle to seize the organization of production and work from bourgeois expropriators and exploiters. The newly empowered citizen-workers would put these core human activities under popular control to meet human needs with the least possible investment of human and natural power.


...

“Too Deep to Be Drilled in the First Place”

The current ecological disaster is straight out of Marx. Consider Marx’s call for the “associated producers” to “rationally regulate” humanity’s “interchange with nature” (the production process, essentially), something he knew to be impossible under the unelected dictatorship of capital. It is plainly irrational to build the many precarious deep water offshore oil drilling operations that British Petroleum and other leading multinational corporate petro-tyrannies manage around the world. It only takes one big and inevitable screw up for such operations to yield a colossal ecological catastrophe like the one currently underway in the Gulf.

Sane and reasonably knowledgeable and engaged citizen-workers organized as empowered and “associated producers” would never agree to let such a genie out of the bottle, with such potentially disastrous consequences for livable ecology. As the liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted yesterday (I am writing on the morning of Wednesday, June 2, 2010): “If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.”

Money Speaks for Money

Consider also Marx’s core analytical distinction between “use value” and “exchange value.” For rational and associated citizen-producers, the point of liberated humanity’s core economic activities (its “interchange with nature”) would be to create goods and services of real and lasting human utility without damaging people or the environment. Under capitalism, however, everything, including the core human activities of work and production, is “drowned in the icy water”of capitalists’ egotistical profit calculation. The holy market (supposedly “free”) is the reigning regulating mechanism, the master arbiter of economic decisions. The dominant consideration determining what gets produced and how and for who is exchange value: how much money can investors make off this or that economic activity in the near term? “Money speaks for money, the devil for his own.”



British Petroleum (BP) has been raping the Gulf’s Coast sea-beds for many years in the obvious and simple pursuit of capitalism’s holy grail: market reward in the form of investor profit. In service to that simple objective, the sine qua non of capitalist production, BP and other giant transnational corporation have quite logically and normatively (within the amoral reckoning that lay at the soulless heart of the profits system) used bribery and threat to discourage and undermine anything approaching rational public regulation of their own particular deadly “interchange with Nature.” Now that their perverted priorities have interacted with its awesome techno-destructive capacities to produce the Deepwater calamity, we confront their socially produced and record-setting oil slick as a “blind force of Nature.”

Means of Production Gone Wild

Consider also Marx’s core distinction between the “forces of production” (the technologies employed in economic production) and the “relations of production” (the social/class relations governing the purpose and structure of techno-economic activity). Under capitalism, Marx observed, the awesome new means of production developed in the industrializing West could not be put to the rational purpose of enhancing the common good. Only a radical-democratic working class revolution could turn exciting new techno-productive capabilities into means for generalized freedom and abundance. The really existing production forces of the mid 19th century were shaped by and subject to the selfish imperatives of the owners, for whom the point of economic modernity was to extract as much surplus value and profit as possible fro the working class, the broader society, and the ill-fated Earth.

Like so much else in today’s world economic system, the BP disaster is yet another case of the forces of production gone wild and deadly because of their captivity to and perversion by the profits system’s amoral and sociopathic imperatives. It’s nothing new. Again and again since Marx and other radical enemies of capitalism wrote, we have seen the profit imperative yield the ugly fruit of ecological catastrophe and a constant assault on the physical health of human beings and other living things. It’s nothing new. Think mass corporate cigarette production (and marketing), Bhopal, the Amoco Cadiz spill, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez, the ongoing cancerous pollution of water, soil, food, and air and, of course, global warming, intimately related back to leading auto and oil corporations’ purchase and dismantling of the United States’ once-impressive electric trolley and inter-urban rail systems (the list goes on). Marx was horrified by the pollution of British and northern European air and waterways by the textile industrialists of his day. He repeatedly denounced the ruination of soil fertility and forests by the relentless egotistical calculations of capitalism.

...

Read the rest here: http://www.zcommunications.org/deepwater-lesson-expropriate-the-expropriators-by-paul-street


It's time to look at the big picture because the BP catastrophe is directly tied to capitalism. There is no such thing as regulated capitalism. It's like a tame scorpion, there's no such animal.




"One day a scorpion arrived at the bank of a river he wanted to cross, but there was no bridge. He asked a frog that was sitting nearby if he would take him across the river on his back. The frog refused and said, 'I will not, because you will sting me.'

"The scorpion replied, 'It would be foolish for me to sting you because then we would both drown.'

"The frog saw the logic in the scorpion's words, and agreed to carry the scorpion across. But when they were halfway across the river the scorpion stung the frog. The stunned frog asked, 'Why did you sting me? Now we will both die!'

"The scorpion replied, 'Because I'm a scorpion … and that's what scorpions do.'"