--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781608461042" library_document_id: "4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe" source_sha256: "46dee6b4497d88f0c925457d635dd321964c6f4b00bbc137e1d31adde30698c7" pdf_physical_page_count: 426 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 320 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe?start=320&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=320&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=310&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=330&limit=10" --- # Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=320 | PRINTED_PAGE=320 Food and capitalism The years 2006-8 provided a hint that capitalism is creating another ecological barrier to itself-that of not being able to produce enough food for those who live within it. Soaring food prices raised questions as to whether it was beginning to exhaust its capacity to keep food production rising, as commentators pointed to rapidly declining rates of global food output growth.31 This was not the first time there have been such concerns. Malthus had argued in the early years of industrial capitalism that there was no point in raising the living standards of the mass of the population, since this would prompt them to have more children at a faster rate than food production would rise to feed them. Marx and Engels rejected this view that a natural barrier to human welfare existed as an apology for exploitation by a defender of the system. But they did hold, as we have seen in Chapter Three, that capitalism itself created obstacles to food provision once it had developed beyond a certain point. This was because capitalist agriculture removed the nutrients necessary for fertility from the soil more rapidly than it replaced them.32 Marx and Engels did not put the issue at the centre of their analysis of capitalism for the simple reason that they could see that by the 1 860s and 1870s the system was capable of substituting for the depredations of agriculture in its old established lands by the production of foodstuffs in North America, with the opening up of the prairies to agriculture. The issue became of marginal concern to most Marxists after their death because the use of mineral fertilisers was able to compensate for the loss of natural nutrients. Worldwide food production kept ahead of population growth right through to the end of the 20th century. There were horrific famines and persistent long-term malnutrition for hundreds of millions of people, but these were a result not of under-production but of class-induced poverty. Signs of impending absolute food shortages in South and East Asia in the 1960s were overcome by the "Green Revolution"-the introduction of new grain types dependent on big inputs of fertiliser and increased irrigation. These were normally combined with the spread of various forms of capitalist agriculture in place of the subsistent peasant farmer. 320 The Runaway System ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=321 | PRINTED_PAGE=321 The increases in food yields were very real-it is stupid of some "organic" critics of modern agriculture to claim otherwise-with wheat yields growing between 3 and 4 percent a year between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, and rice yields between 2 and 3 percent. But over the last two decades the increases have fallen until they are barely ahead of (declining) population growth: "Output from the Green Revolution has reached a 'plateau"' .33 Ever greater quantities of fertiliser are required to increase output, water sufficiency becomes a growing problem, concentration on a very narrow range of crop types increases the dangers from plant diseases, and world acreage devoted to food is not growing. As a World Bank Development Report admits: Many agriculture-based countries still display anaemic per capita agricultural growth and little structural transformation . . . The same applies to vast areas within countries of all types. Rapid population growth, declining farm size, falling soil fertility, and missed opportunities for income diversification and migration create distress as the powers of agriculture for development remain low. 34 The problem is not that somehow, after 200 years, Malthus has been vindicated. Means exist to raise food output to cope with world population, expected to grow another 50 percent and then slowly decline. The problem is the existing "structure of agricultural accumulation". 35 Global agriculture since the mid-1970s has been increasingly structured by a handful of agribusiness corporations, mainly based in the US, that control agricultural innovation, supplying the inputs (seed varieties, fertilisers, pesticides, agricultural machinery) for the world's farmers, big and small. Their interest is in keeping those inputs standardised (so keeping down their own costs of production), with as little regard for particular local growing conditions as possible. Their research has "focused on innovations that reduced costs rather than enhanced yields".36 The result has been little in the way of innovation to suit the needs of the world's 400 million small farmers-except to preach GM crops as a magic solution, regardless of their potential side-effects on local ecologies and the inapplicability of those so far developed to conditions in very wide parts of the world. Meanwhile, individual developing countries have reduced agricultural investment to around 4 percent of GNP compared with 10 percent in 1980.37 Yet, as Ronald Trostle of the US Department of Agriculture's economic research unit says, "it was always publicly funded research that was more likely to concentrate on innovations that would increase yields and production, particularly in parts of the world where farmers are unable to pay royalties for new varieties of seeds" .38 The New Limits of Capital 321 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=322 | PRINTED_PAGE=322 The dangers to the world's food supply were brought home sharply in 2007-8 when grain prices internationally surged, creating the risk of starvation for hundreds of millions of people. Rising food prices were hurting many of those small farmers who bought as well as sold food. "Food security" suddenly joined energy security as a concern for governments. In the short term the ability of farmers in Europe and North America to cultivate land which had been left idle under "set aside" schemes raised the possibility of filling some of the gaps in the global food supply and there were limited falls in some prices by the beginning of 2009-although not to the level of two years earlier. The crisis was more likely to be an omen for the future-the threat of immense hardship to hundreds of millions of peoplethan the immediate onset of global catastrophe.39 The "real risk" remained of a "food crunch at some point in the future, which would fall particularly hard on import-dependent countries and on poor people everywhere", reported one study.40 Indications were that the food price rises of 2006-8 had not simply just been a result of speculation during the last phase of the mid-2000s boom. Early in 2009 a report could tell how "food prices are poised to rise again" as long-term "resource scarcity trends, notably climate change, energy security and falling water availability", would put pressure on prices and production.41 The food shortage of 2008 showed the way in which the different elements of crisis endemic to capitalism in the 2 1 st century can interact with each other. For the shortage was not just as a result of the exhaustion of the benefits of the Green Revolution. It was also a product of the probable efects of climate change, with crop failures in Australia due to drought and in Europe due to flooding; of the typically perverse capitalist way to ofset climate change and energy security by devoting a third of the US maize crop and half the European oil seed crop to the production of biofuels;42 of the rising oil price, which forced up the costs of fertilisers and fuels on which 21st century farming depends; and of the sharpness of the boom part of the capitalist cycle in the early and mid-2000s, which massively increased middle class meat consumption, especially in China. 322 The Runaway System ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=323 | PRINTED_PAGE=323 It is the sort of interaction of the economic, the environmental and the political we should expect to see repeated again and again in the 21st century, producing recurrent, very deep social and political crises that frame the choice between global catastrophe and revolutionary change. The New Limits of Capital 323 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=324 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=325 | PRINTED_PAGE=325 The Runaway System and the Future for Humanity Anthony Giddens published a book with a strange title in 1999 at the high point of illusions in globalisation and the "new economic paradigm" . He was (and still is) Britain's best know academic advocate of the "third way" that ditches old social democratic attempts to tame capitalism and was aptly described as "Tony Blair's court sociologist" .1 Yet the title was The Runaway World. It conveys the image of a bolting horse, which governments, social movements and individuals alike cannot stop but have to try to balance on precariously. The best they can do is to try to influence where it is taking them by spurring it on with investments in social capital on the one side and reining it in with cutbacks in welfare expenditures on the other. Yet the succession of crises and wars that have punctuated the last four decades show the futility of such efforts. The runaway world is, in fact, the economic system as Marx described it, the Frankenstein's monster that has escaped from human control; the vampire that saps the lifeblood of the living bodies it feeds off. Its self-expansion has indeed led it to encompass the whole globe, drawing all of humanity into its cycles of competing in order to accumulate and accumulating in order to compete. Its expansion has been marked, as much in the 21st century as in the mid-19th century when Marx did his research for Capital, by fits and starts, by frenzied forward motion suddenly interrupted by deep crises. Running through the cycles of expansion and recession has been the other feature Marx pointed to: downward pressure on profitability causing capitalists to try to cut back on wages and welfare benefits at the same time as pressuring people CHAPTER THIRTEEN 325 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=326 | PRINTED_PAGE=326 to work harder, even though in doing so this cuts into the market for consumer goods produced by other capitalists. We have seen how these elements came together to produce the great slump of the inter-war years, renewed crisis in the mid-1 970s, and the long drawn out Japanese crisis of the 1990s. We saw also how they produced the debt economy bubble culminating in the great crash of 2007-9. We will see this happen again repeatedly, in one form or other, in the decades ahead. In some important ways, the system is even more chaotic than in Marx's account. The very size of the units that make it up means that it has lost some of its old flexibility. The destruction of some capitals through periodic crises which once gave new life to those that remained now threatens to pull these down as well. Life support systems provided by the state may be able keep the system from complete collapse but cannot restore it to long-term vigour. At best they provide a feverish spell of brief exhilaration before yet another collapse. And the cost of providing the life support systems sooner or later stretches the resources of the state close to breaking point. Modern states are creatures of the capitalist system, evolving to service the needs of the geographical clusters of capitals that constitute it. The more these clusters depend on their relations with the rest of the global system, the more they need the power of states to provide for their interests within it. Yet each state can only achieve this goal by pressurising other states, and in the process adding to the instability of the system as a whole. The measures national states take to aid the capitals based within them during a crisis necessarily infringe on the interests of capitals based in other states, increasing the instability still further. Their significance is not limited to a particular economic crisis. They provide a foretaste of what the rest of the 2 1 st century is going to be like. Capitalism is a restless system. Whether in boom or slump, in peace or war, in a great city or the remote countryside, it never stands still. Competitive accumulation remoulds everything it touches and then, when it has hardly finished, remoulds it all again. The very speed of change itself has enormous importance. It means that the relative economic weights of the different states within which the units of capital are based are continually in flux, just as the states have to try to intervene to protect their capitalists from the recurrent convulsions of the global system. 326 The Runaway System ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=327 | PRINTED_PAGE=327 The problem is acute for the US, at the top of the global hierarchy. Its position had depended on its being the policeman for the whole system, offering general protection, Mafia style, to the other ruling classes, while using that position to privilege the position of US based capitals. Crises make those capitals need that privileged position more than ever. The failures in the "war on terror" meant that already in the mid-2000s other states felt more empowered to challenge such privilege, shown by China's increased sway in Africa, Russia's in parts of the former USSR, and the BRICS in global trade negotiations. Then came the crisis that began in 2007 with widespread predictions that it would dent US global hegemony even more just as many of its great corporations looked to that hegemony to help them out. US imperialism might be temporarily chastened as it contemplated the way in which some of its recent adventures have rebounded to its disadvantage-just as the Vietnam War did. But it can not abandon its global position, even if defending it leads to further assertions of military might in other poorer countries, with devastating and destructive consequences. Increased troop deployments were meant to ensure the retreat from Iraq did not turn into rout in Afghanistan. Significantly, Barack Obama's first budget increased, rather than decreased, military expenditure. And so did the budgets announced in the same month for Russia and China. The bloody road which led from Korea to Vietnam and from Vietnam to Iraq is not yet at an end. But that is not all. The "new", environmental, limits of capital will react back upon its old economic limits. Climate change, peak oil and global food shortages will add to the overall economic instability of the system expressed in the boom-bust cycle, the downward pressure on the rate of profit and the flows of capital from industry to industry and country to country. We had a glimpse of this in the first half of 2008. Rising food and energy prices produced an inflationary surge which added to government dificulties in dealing with the credit crunch at the same time as causing protests, riots and strikes in a score of countries. We can expect many more clashes within and between states as problems of food security and energy security lead to shifts in surplus value from some sections of capital to others and provoke popular outrage. And all the time climate change tipping points can suddenly impact unexpectedly on hundreds of millions of people's lives, in much the same way that economic crises and wars do, but even more destructively. The Runaway System and the Future for Humanity 327 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=328 | PRINTED_PAGE=328 The starkest recognition of the possible consequences came from the US Department of Defence, the Pentagon, at the time when the official position of the US government was still to refuse to recognise the reality of climate change. It warned of the danger of "food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production", "decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patterns, causing more frequent floods and droughts", and "disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess". The outcome, as it saw it, would be an increased occurrence of resource wars and civil wars: As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world, leading to two fundamental strategies: defensive and offensive. Nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves. Less fortunate nations, especially those with ancient enmities with their neighbours, may initiate struggles for access to food, clean water, or energy. Unlikely alliances could be formed as defence priorities shift and the goal is resources for survival rather than religion, ideology, or national honour . . . There would be "an increasingly disorderly and potentially violent world" .2 This will be disorder in a world in which eight of the biggest states possess nuclear weapons that are targeted at others, scores have "conventional weaponry" much more destructive and horrific than that of the Second World War, and proliferating civil nuclear energy can provide conventional weapons with deadly targets. The runaway system threatens more than devastating periodic slumps and horrific wars. It puts into question the very possibility of sustaining human life on Earth. The system of alienated labour is approaching its highest point of destructiveness. The question is whether those who produce that labour are capable of seizing control of its wealth and subjecting it to conscious control. 328 The Runaway System ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=329 | PRINTED_PAGE=329 CHAPTER FOURTEEN Who Can Overcome? The decisive question We live in a system which is unstable, which breeds economic crises and wars, and which is eating up the very environmental basis it stands on. This is going to lead its component national sectors into repeated social and political crises in the course of the 21st century. Just as the 20th century was a century of wars, civil wars and revolutions, so too is the 21st century. But this leaves open a decisive-the decisive-question. What forces exist that are capable of taking on the system and transforming the world? For classical Marxism, the answer was simple. The growth of capitalism was necessarily accompanied by the growth of the class it exploited, the working class, and this would be at the centre of the revolt against the system. It was not the first exploited and oppressed class in history. But it differed from the 200 or so generations of peasants and slaves that preceded it in very important respects. Capitalist exploitation was concentrated in huge workplaces in giant industrial conurbations, giving the working class power at decisive points in the society in which it found itself. Such exploitation tended to produce homogeneity in the conditions of its members as capital repeatedly reduced diferent forms of concrete labour to abstract labour. And capital required an exploited class that has a level of culture-of literacy, numeracy and knowledge of the world at large-greater not merely than preceding exploited classes, but also than most preceding ruling classes. These factors combined to create the potentiality for it to take control of society as a whole into its own hands in a way that was not true of its predecessors. But potentiality was not actuality. The development of capitalism was not a simple smooth upward process that had its impact on the exploited class it created. There was unevenness over time, with the concentration of workers into centres of exploitation during booms and the expulsion of some from those centres during slump. There was geographic unevenness, with some centres arising in connection with national states before others, and then sometimes declining as new centres supplanted them. These forms of capitalist unevenness led to unevenness within the working class, with different levels of skill and payment arising, with competition for jobs and security of employment between different groups of workers, with sections of workers identifying with the particular state that controlled them because it seemed like a locus for achieving reforms of the system. Nevertheless, for classical Marxism, this was a class which would be driven to unite periodically by the very pressures of the system upon it. Skill differentials which had arisen at one point would be eroded at another. Competition between workers would fade as they fought together to achieve overriding common goals. National ideologies would lose their hold in the face of the horrors of imperialist wars. 329 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=330&limit=10)