Windpower and even BP among the big names . . . reacting to a slowdown in the clean energy sector". The "credit crunch" was "starving wind and solar developments of urgently needed cash" and the situation was " being exacerbated by prices crashing to record lows in the carbon trading market". <sup>18</sup>
None of this means that government "signals" have no effect at all. They are encouraging new areas of investment in things like wind and photoelectric power (but also in energy-absorbing biodiesel). New capitals-or innovative old capitals-are emerging that will fight for more space and more resources for their wares. Emissions will probably rise less rapidly than otherwise, although it is unlikely they will decline in the short term. But the equivocation will persist with governments and industrialists proclaiming their commitment to resist climate change one day and their determination to extract the maximum amount of oil or coal from the earth the next.
The needs of capital and the needs of capitals
The expansion of capitals in competition with each other-or as Marx put it, the self-expansion of capital-leads them to an orgy of carbon energy use just as they recognise it as self-destructive.
The phenomenon of capitalism damaging its own environmental basis is not completely new, even if it has never occurred on the scale it is today. In the early 19th century competitive accumulation in Britain led to a lack of concern about the physical health, even the physical survival, of capitalism's workers. It was a neglect that would inevitably be damaging to youthful industrial capitalism as well as to the working class, since it threatened to exhaust the supply of fit and able labour power for exploitation.
Marx summed up what was happening:
The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus-labour), produces thus, with the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour power itself. It extends the labourer's time of production during a given period by shortening his actual lifetime.
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The Runaway System