======================================================================
Title:       The Tragedy of the Worker
Date:        2022-02-10
Tags:        reading, capitalism, environmentalism, box3
Link:        https://spool-five.com/box3/20220210t000000--the-tragedy-of-the-worker__reading_capitalism_environmentalism_box3/
Word Count:  374
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#books[1] #Capitalism[2] #philosophy[3]
=>[1] https://spool-five.com/box3/20220530t000000--books__box3/
=>[2] https://spool-five.com/box3/20220601t000000--capitalism__box3/
=>[3] https://spool-five.com/box3/20220602t000000--philosophy__box3/

A book by the Salvage Collective.

Found/available on gemini[4]:
gemini://beyondneolithic.life/salvage_collective/tragedy_of_the_worker/index.gmi
=>[4] https://spool-five.com/box3/20220616t000000--gemini__box3/


-Part 1 - M-C-M and the Death Cult-

>
>
> As Andreas Malm has fiercely and beautifully argued, capitalism did
> not settle
> for fossil fuels as a solution to energy scarcity. The common assumption that
> fossil energy is an <span class="underline">intrinsically</span>
> valuable energy resource worth competing
> over, and fighting wars for is, as geographer Matthew Huber argues,
> an example
> of fetishism. At the onset of steam power, water was abundant, and, even with
> its fixed costs, cheaper to use than coal. The hydraulic mammoths powered by
> water wheels required far less human labour to convert to energy, and
> were more
> energy-efficient. Even today, only a third of the energy in coal is actually
> converted in the industrial processes dedicated thereto: the only
> thing that is
> efficiently produced is carbon dioxide. On such basis, the striving for
> competitive advantage by capitalists seeking maximum market control ‘should’
> have favoured renewable energy.
>
> Capital, however, preferred the spatio-temporal profile of stocks due to the
> internal politics of competitive accumulation. Water use necessitated
> communal
> administration, with its perilously collectivist implications. Coal,
> and later
> oil, could be transported to urban centres, where workers were
> acculturated to
> the work-time of capitalist industry, and hoarded by individual enterprises.
> This allowed individual units of capital to compete more effectively with one
> another, secured the political authority of capital and incorporated workers
> into atomised systems of reproduction, from transport to heating.

<!--quoteend-->

> This is the tragedy of the worker. That, as avatar of a class in
> itself, she was
> put to work for the accumulation of capital, from capitalism’s youth,
> amid means
> of production not of her choosing, and with a telos of ecological
> catastrophe.


-Part 3 - Dead Zones-

> Mass extinction is punctuated by the production of what the environmentalist
> Jonathan Lymbery calls ‘dead zones’: the conversion of wild ecosystems
> into dead
> monocultures. In Sumatra, these dead zones are made by burning rainforest
> and,
> amid the stench of death, planting palm crop.