Does capital need a commons fix

South Atlantic Quarterly

Seeking Wisdom, 2021

Humanity stands at a critical juncture. We can continue down our current road, the capitalist road, and watch as the planet is rendered uninhabitable by climate change, resource depletion, and the toxic waste generated by the combustion of the planet by industrial technology and as human civilization is destroyed by the capitalist combustion of human capacities and human relationships. Humanity will be either fully instrumentalized as a tool of Capital or displaced by machine intelligence, or both, and the planet will belong to Capital: not the historic human bourgeoisie, with all its many vices but also many human virtues, but rather to the emergent autonomous intelligence running like software on the hardware of humanity and its artifacts. And Capital, like a great asura, will do the only thing it knows how to do. It will attempt a tragically misunderstood and impossible theosis: a pure productivity without consumption. This is the spiritual and civilizational ideal of capitalism, prefigured the Reformed doctrine disinterested benevolence, and analyzed so brilliantly by Weber in the Protestant Ethic (Weber 1920/1968). But it is quite impossible. Thermodynamics will make certain that. And what will be left instead will be nothing but pure combustion. We can continue down our present pathway or we can chart a new one. But for this latter task our existing theory is nowhere near adequate. Marx (Marx 1867/1996), while he opened up the the field of Capital for scientific investigation, had only a very limited experience of Capital and thus only a very limited vision of what it would become. Dialectical and historical materialism and critical theory have extended Marx's analysis, interpretation, and critique, but they remain in many ways the science of an earlier capitalism and an earlier stage in history, when Capital was something owned by the bourgeoisie and thus by at least a small part of humanity and history really was the history of class struggles. Today Capital owns us all, indeed constitutes us (even the bourgeoisie) and the struggle is between humanity and our common home-the Earth-on the one hand, and an emergent intelligence which threats to destroy us. Marx still believed that capitalism was necessary, progressive stage in our development. We believe that it is a potentially fatal evolutionary dead end. These questions about the adequacy of Marx's analysis are further complicated by the history of "actually existing socialism," which, while it sometimes made real contributions to human liberation and human development, has not, on the whole, proven itself to be an authentic form of transition to communism, understood to include at the very least the decommodification of labor power and the restoration of creative control over labor to the workers themselves. On the contrary, historic socialism has on the whole, radicalized and extended proletarianization and has served the interests of primitive accumulation, with the result that it is better understood as a

B. Laperche, N. Levratto and D. Uzunidis ed., Crisis, Innovation and Sustainable Development. The ecological opportunity., Cheltenham, UK – Northampton, MA, USA. Published by Edward Elgar, 2012 pp. 207-230., 2012

Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Politica, 2022

This paper offers a critique of Nancy Fraser's expanded conception of capitalism as an institutional social order. Fraser builds a social-theoretical basis for thinking about "non-economic" struggles over social reproduction, the degradation of nature, and state power as central to a progressive, anti-capitalist political agenda. Rather than only challenging capital at the point of production, as the classical Marxist tradition was wont to do, Fraser wants anti-capitalism without economic reductionism. Fraser's is also a crisis theory of capitalism, which generates a theory of social change as well as a normative critique. The main question is methodological and can be summed up as, "Is less perhaps more?" On this basis, it argues that stability may be a better starting point than crisis, which raises more fundamental normative problems with the system than the ones that Fraser captures.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2011