fun_yunchables wrote:returning back to the rural/work from home dialectic, i was reading some schumacher essays (a bit anachronistic since they are from 1973), but quite poignant in the points brought up
This reminds me of a book that I read a long time ago, written by some Marxist whose name I can't remember, that looked at the transition from hydro power to coal power in Europe during the industrial revolution. The ideology of capitalism would suggest that this energy transition took place because of the law of supply and demand: coal became cheaper than hydro and so became the dominant energy source in industrializing nations. What this book discovered was that for the first three decades or so of the transition to fossil fuel, coal was actually far more expensive than hydro, yet in spite of this fact coal extraction skyrocketed and coal-fuelled production steamed ahead. So, why did this transition take place if it contradicts the so-called "laws" of the free market? Well, because hydro power encouraged distributed locals: small settlements along waterways that were materially limited in size and productive capacity. These small, distributed settlements greatly inhibited the power of capitalists, as the scattered towns and villages precipitated by hydro energy were limited in terms of population, and thus did not supply employers with the massive surplus populations that render labourers fungible and thus more vulnerable to the most brutal forms of exploitation. When you're one of two shoemakers in town working at the local shoe store, your employer can't exactly compel you to work unreasonable hours for an unreasonable wage, because if you quit, he's fucked. Why coal then? Because it is transportable, because it allowed capitalists to move great sums of energy into the cities, concentrating the work force and thereby undermining the solidarity of workers. You can't exactly walk out on your employer when there are hundreds of working class folk more than willing to take your place on the production floor. What the book uncovered was that the transition to coal had nothing to do with the law of supply and demand, and everything to do with reorganizing society in such a way that the capitalist's power was increased and the worker's power was diminished.
This suggests four things:
(1) Localization/regionalization is indeed a strong antidote to capitalist exploitation.
(2) However, a localized system is the result of an underlying material reality. In the example above, localization is the direct result of hydro power. This begs the question: is localization/regionalization/de-urbanization achievable in a fossil-powered system? My answer would be a definitive "no".
(3) This means that if we want to re-localize, it would involve a fundamental shift in the types of energy we use to power our grids, and would likely also entail a
decrease in productive capacities: we would have to do with less, use less, make less, consume less.
(4) The solution, from this point of view, would be to decrease "productivity" (a loaded, highly subjective term in the first place), to produce
less, by powering our grids using forms of energy that are both more difficult to transport and less intense than fossil fuels (e.g. solar, wind, etc.). This solution would obviously require some type of revolutionary force, as capitalism only functions by ceaselessly increasing its productive capabilities. The capitalist presupposition that productivity is "good," in and for itself, is one of the first things that we need to question in these kinds of conversations. What types of work are deemed productive and what are the effects of our highly contingent definitions of productivity?