(Translated with DeepL and edited)
The economy is made up of a set of public and private enterprises and administrations. This interdependent whole is broken down into production functions, which are functionally grouped into sectors, branches and inter-sectoral industries. Every economy grows, shrinks or remains stationary, i.e. it reproduces itself dynamically, either positively or negatively, or it treads water. As all these production functions are interdependent, this implies that this whole must find its mathematical resolution in a precise space, controlled for its interactions with the outside world. This space is that of the Social Formation – SF -, whether national or multinational, which is also the space of the macro-economy and consequently of the State, more or less the guarantor of the general interest, at least according to its class nature. Every production function produces a given quantity of goods or services, which have a unitary production cost and selling price – or exchange value. Given the interdependence of production functions, it is already clear that the exchange value – or price – of goods and services and the structure of relative prices are formed within the given SF. External trade is mediated by external balances, and therefore by the SF exchange rate, which reflects the competitiveness of its social capital.
All production functions have the same structure, involving the same variables: capital – fixed or circulating, materialized in the capital actually used in the production of each product (what Paul Sweezy called “used-up” capital), labor power and profits. The sum of these variables gives the exchange value or market price, which oscillates around it in a competitive regime, or is given ex ante in a scientifically planed regime based on exchange value. However, the relative weight of these variables in the various production functions varies, although the rate of profit remains the same in the given SF. This rate is defined as the ratio of profit to capital employed and to the cost of labor power. Similarly, the equality of this rate – but not of profit volumes, which depend for their part on lower unit prices enabling the conquest of markets – is given ex post in a competitive regime based on the mobility of the factors of production and especially on the mobility of capital, whereas it is given ex ante by scientific planning based directly on exchange value freed from price oscillations.
Bourgeois resolution models for the prices – or exchange values – of these interdependent sets always take a form derived from the quadratic resolution model proposed by Tougan-Baranovsky, whether by the latter himself, or by Léon Walras and his “groping” “market of markets”, or by all the input/output models including Piero Sraffa’s derisory neo-Ricardian matrices.
We’ll see below that simultaneous quadratic solving is based on a set with the same number of functions and unknowns and thus has absolutely nothing to do with solving the economic problem of exchange value – or price. It’s just a game, the worst instance of a Model superimposed on the Reality to be apprehended. Its fatal problem, which is that of bourgeois economics in all its forms, particularly marginalism, consists in reducing the duality of every commodity to a one-dimensional subjective “utility”, whereas every good or service, labor power included, is characterized by its use value apprehended in quantity and by its exchange value apprehended in “monetary” exchange value or price.
However, economic reproduction given by the simultaneous resolution of all production functions must respect both reproduction in quantities and in exchange values or prices. This was Marx’s great scientific discovery in his critical analysis of Sismondi’s annual income, which offered a delimited set allowing diachronic and synchronic comparative analysis, and Quesnay’s Tableau, to name but these two. This leads to Marx’s Equations of Simple Reproduction, which we can immediately compare with Tougan-Baranovsky’s so-called Synthetic Model. Marx’s two Sectors of Production include the entire economic space of the SF, since the Means of Production Sector “Mp” refers to capital “c” in the generic production function, and the Means of Consumption Sector “Cn” refers to labor power “v”. For its part, “pv” is the surplus value or profit corresponding to the surplus labor that the employer pockets. The rate of profit is given by pv/(c+v). We can then imagine all the sub-sectors and branches we want, or even recomposed intersectorally in filières. Simple Reproduction (SR) opens onto the logic of Expanded Reproduction (ER), or dynamic equilibrium, once the Marxist Law of Productivity has been clarified on the basis of Marx, which I alone have accomplished:
Marx’s Model of Simple or Stationary Reproduction is as follows:
Sector I of MP: c1 + v1 + pv1 = Mp (in quantity and exchange value or price)
Sector 2 of Cn: c2 + v2 + pv2 = Cn (idem)
The Equations of Simple Reproduction synthesized by Bukharin on the basis of Book II of Capital are :
Mp = (c1 + c2)
c2 = (v1 + pv1)
Cn = (v1 + pv1 ) + (v2 + pv2)
Here, on the other hand, is Tougan-Baranovsky’s derisory quadratic game – to solve it, he needs the same number of functions and variables, so he invents the Gold Sector in “c3”, which takes the place of the value of labor power…:
c1 + v1 + s1 = c1 + c2 + c3
c2 + v2 + s2 = v1 + v2 + v3
c3 + v3 + s3 = s1 + s2 + s3
Let’s return to the bourgeois epiphenomenal form of the problem, at best. When all the functions of production are left to the “invisible hand”, the resolution of the system, its reproduction, takes place according to the logic of the capitalist acquisitive mentality materializing in the accumulation of individual private capital. No one has to worry about simultaneous reproduction in terms of quantity and price. Corporate reinvestment, and the private bank credit that complements and accelerates it, will inevitably go where immediate profits are greatest. This interplay of the “invisible hand” therefore produces over-investment or expansion in certain sub-sectors and branches, inevitably accompanied by under-investment or contraction in others, thus upsetting the underlying quantity-price equilibrium – over-production/under-consumption. This excess will soon be purged by cyclical crises or Trade Cycles – and therefore by the enormous systemic capitalist waste – which characterize the capitalist mode of production.
But none of this can be grasped within the Supply/Demand schema and its strictly micro-economic equilibria. (For a brief overview of the ex ante/ex post inanity of the S/D scheme, see this .) Even the neo-liberal monetarist theory of Efficient Capital, which claims that all speculation accelerates the mobility of capital, thus bringing the system back to equilibrium more quickly, is blind or, better still, more inept than the marginalism that underpins it. For bourgeois theories, and for all variants of marginalism, any distinction between the real economy and the speculative economy is unknown, because it is totally obscured in its ontological space. Reality inevitably imposes itself on narratives – in this case, those of the “dismal science” – so books on economic history, more “Baconian empirical” to borrow a phrase from the great epistemologist Koyré, have to fill in the gaps left by mainstream economics textbooks, giving us accounts of crises such as those by John Galbraith or Minsky. On the contrary, the scientific basis of Marxism in this field is synthesized by Lenin in the Laws of Motion of Capital, which gives, according to the forms of capital – pre-capitalist merchant, merchant, banking, industrial, financial, internationalization of productive capital and today hegemonic speculative capital – the specific course of cyclical and structural crises, i.e. the concentration/centralization of capital and the overproduction/under-consumption in a given SF.
Like all bourgeois high priests, Keynes was perfectly familiar with Marx’s work, if only through Sraffa. He he tried to save the system it in spite of itself. He therefore retained the set of production functions randomly balanced by the market and by the “market of markets”, while insisting on two corrective elements: 1) the resolution of the set had to respect full employment – in its full-time, full employment version – thus reducing the acuteness of the social and political crises threatening capitalism head-on since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and since the Great Depression triggered in 1929 in the USA ; 2 ) the exogenous rebalancing of the whole by State intervention on the side of Sector I of Mp – public enterprises and public or at least State-controlled credit – and on the side of Sector II of Cn, consequently of the renewal but also of the biological reproduction of the labor force in a household. The advantages of such a rebalancing through planning – whether German capitalist during the Great War or Bolshevik – had been proven. In particular, the German case had shown how planning, controlled by the capitalist ruling class itself, made it possible to eliminate the enormous waste in reproduction caused by private capitalist accumulation, a waste that endangered the security of the State in wartime and ultimately the global position of the national bourgeoisie in the “imperialist sharing of the world” denounced by Lenin.
For Keynes, within the set of interdependent variables, full-time full employment is the determining variable. This over-determines the entire relative price structure. For the Cambridge, UK, economist. a great connoisseur of Paul Lafargue whom he does not quote, this over-determination was bound to lead to the secular decline of the working week, according to the sharing of productivity gains. Without it, the system would be doomed. He therefore envisaged the possibility of his grandchildren living in a society of 15-hour working weeks (see here). Too bad he didn’t know that other great reader of the great Marxist Paul Lafargue, Boris Vian, who already foresaw the 2-hour week and the pianocktail.
The neo-liberal monetarist counter-reform, a Nietzschean philo-Semite one at heart, attacked this socio-economic compromise, which could only ultimately lead to the overcoming of the hegemony of the capitalist market and of the parasitic forces of money. Keynes spoke of the euthanasia of rentiers. The most idiotic of these, the “grandmaster” of them all, was the Austrian-Jewish Fascist Ludwig Mises, advisor to the Austrian Chancellor before the Anchluss, a man who never changed his mind even after fleeing Austria to save his skin. In fact, as a good theocratic racist exclusivist, he was more afraid of the German example of war planning, which proved that the systemic waste of the system could be eliminated, than of the Bolshevik example, which could give rise to mass ideological anti-communist hysteria to counter it. As for the example of German war planning, all that had to be done was to replace the war economy with a socially-oriented peace economy, which in fact was done in the West as early as 1943, out of fear of the Soviet advance after the Victory at Stalingrad.
However, the ideology of the market and its “invisible hand”, determining the merit of each individual according to the prowess of his acquisitive mentality, remains the ultimate refuge of the racist, often theocratic exclusivism of all self-elected superior groups – or “races”. Indeed, as the saying goes, “money calls to money”, which puts Menger’s “life chances” in their true a-democratic light.
Mises’s socio-economic and philo-Semitic Nietzschean eugenics are bluntly expressed in his book Socialism. On p. 475-476, for example, we read – that the public hospital creates disease, which is otherwise merely a holistic question of Will. Ergo, abolish the public hospital – which those in power are now systematically doing – and voilà…! Incidentally, the half-billion Dalit comrades don’t really have the luxury of being ill, having a longevity that fluctuates around 42 years.
After the war, discredited by the people’s thirst for a Welfare State and Social Security guaranteeing the real citizenship of the people as a whole, this neo-liberal monetarist counter-reform with its Chicago School was relegated to the university basements, notably in Chicago with its Hayek, Friedman et al. flanked by second-rate cabalist pseudo-philosophers à la Leo Strauss, inspired by Carl Schmitt. So it had to bide its time until Thatcher took over in the UK, followed by Volcker at the FED (1979) and Reagan as President of the U.S. (1982). (See this) With the dismantling of GATT customs protections, we witnessed the extroversion of the economic multiplier, which allowed some to discredit the domestic social policies – let’s call them Keynesian for short – of the advanced capitalist State.
At its core, therefore, monetarist neoliberal counter-reform is profoundly proto-fascist, with the socially minimalist State expected to eliminate, through its exclusivist narratives and its monopoly of force, all the purported obstacles facing the « market ». This quickly led to the negation of classical liberalism (A. Smith, John-Stuart Mill etc), through the concentration and centralization of global capital in the hands of a few MNCs and then of a few neo-mercantilist transnationals, whose aim was to ensure a “return” to the cruder domination of the exploitation of Man by Man. At the end of the Second World War, marked by the Victory of Stalingrad, despite the cooptation of many Nazi and fascist dignitaries and scientists in the West, priority was given to the New Deal, its trade-union and social counterweights, and the establishment of strategic planning within a mixed society supported by Social Security and public credit. It is worth noting that the latter costs nothing except the costs of its management. In fact, a return to public credit is today’s number-one requirement if we are to eliminate once and for all the philo-Semitic Nietzschean parasites of private finance, particularly global speculative finance.
Between the syncretism of Keynes, who sought to empirically reconcile capitalism, full employment and social security on the basis of better statistical data, and the neoliberal monetarist counter-reform of Mises and the Chicago School, there were what Joan Robinson called the “Keynes bastards”, a group that quickly became predominant in Western, and hence global, academia, including Hicks – who attempted to generalize Marshall’s two-variable system of capital and “wheat” – a catchword substituted for Marx’s concept of “socially necessary labor”, later overshadowed by Sraffa’s “basket of commodities producing commodities” – but Hicks didn’t go beyond three variables in a system of simultaneous resolution that didn’t even take income structure into account, a shortcoming shared with Pigou and Samuelson, among many others.
Robert Solow formulated this “bastard synthesis” in the 1956 essay that won him the Bank of Sweden’s pseudo Nobel Prize: This implied allowing equilibrium to take place at the “physiological threshold”, which is nonsensical hyper-Malthusian nonsense, since the physiological threshold for the workforce is elastic as it depends on civilizational conditions, including the development or absence of trade unions, collective agreements and Social Security, or even mixed planning. We need only add the penalizing externalization of the Keynes-Kahn Multiplier caused by the dismantling of the protective Gatt tariff system and its replacement by global free trade and the WTO’s definition of anti-dumping. As we know, the latter automatically excludes any reference to deferred wages which finance Social Security and to minimum environmental criteria, in order to force a race towards the lowest global bid, focused above all on individual net wages, which are destined to tend towards an ever lower gobal “physiological threshold”. This is what I’ve been denouncing for years as the desire of the monetarist neoliberal ruling classes to impose a “return to the society of the new domesticity and new slavery”, a society in which the Nazi industrialist Schindler is a Just Man and the Jew Stern his master and chief accountant – the Communists who opened the gates of the camps being the designated enemy, Stalin being worse than Hitler…
Let’s remember that in a set of interdependent production functions, the structure of relative prices in a given SF will depend on the organic composition of capital, i.e. the relative weight of capital and labor, the rate of profit remaining the same, in each of them, and that the resolution of the system – quadratic or Marxist – will be over-determined by the weight given to one or more determining variables, for example full employment for the variable labor power … or the artificially high price of energy.
In any economic system, rising productivity will “free up” part of the workforce, so that unless labor-intensive new or intermediate sectors are introduced, recourse to the Reduction of the Work Week will be the order of the day, which basically only socializes and redistributes productivity gains through planning. For Marginalists, full employment – precarious if need be, by dividing a full-time job by 2 or 3 to lower unemployment as defined by the ILO – can only be achieved by removing the obstacles present on the labour market, which amounts to treating human labour power in its liquid form as a factor of production like any other, apprehended solely in money form, a nonsense that dates back to Jean-Baptiste Say reading Ricardo on paper currency and already demonstrated by Marx in his Parisian Manuscripts of 1844.
Before moving on to a succinct analysis of the disaster resulting from the IPCC’s warming nonsense, we need to say a word about the complementary role of macroeconomics and microeconomics. The latter concerns each of the production functions taken separately; as a result of competition, they will seek to be more productive than their competitors, i.e. to produce, in the same working time but with an organic composition deepened by the use of technology and work organization, more identical or highly elastic products, at a proportionally lower unit cost… and with a similarly smaller labor force, estimated in physical workers or working hours, while the real wage of the labor force that remains employed remains identical to what it was before, when measured according to the output of said production function. Measured in relation to overall intersectoral production, the same real wage translated into monetary terms will fluctuate according to the respective productivity: if the productivity of Sector Mp increases, the same real wage will imply more Mp but will buy less Cn than before, at least if the productivity of this latter Sector remains unchanged. (Productivity in Sector I will lower the unit price of Mp, while that of Cn will remain unchanged). We can see that as productivity rises in both sectors, the standard of living of working people will rise, as the “structure of v” becomes more complex. Except that the rise in productivity, which intensifies work for the working people it affects, also “frees up” part of the workforce, i.e. it also creates unemployment – And thus structural inflation, at least if unemployment benefits are financed by additional money issuance rather than organically through social security contributions. (We refer the reader to this and this).
We already know that the space of macroeconomics overlaps with that of Social Formation, where exchange value – and prices – are created, since without this delimitation there can be no mathematical or Marxist resolution. All that would remain would be the super mess of micro without macro, driven by the acquisitive mentality of private capital accumulation, a nonsense worthy of Jean Tirole – but not of his mathematical training. (We know that Tirole, to date, can claim 4 great ideas for 4 great catastrophes, the first of which concerns his apology for financial deregulation as early as 1993 with a Harvard colleague, which through the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999 led to the subprime crisis of 2007-2008, i.e. the greatest crisis after the Great Depression. You’ve got to earn your Nobel Prize, don’t you? As for the rest, it’s almost enough to look at his titles: single contract leading to the Italian Jobs Act and the Loi Travail, “imperfect competition” self-regulated in favor of the Gafams by the Gafams themselves, the rest being as behavioral and ipcc-ist as one could wish…)
What needs to be added is that, contrary to marginalism and all forms of neoliberalism and monetarism, a well-managed or planned macro-economy is the necessary basis for a flourishing micro-economy : for instance, since goods have to circulate, a universally accessible public transport network is a considerable advantage in terms of production costs and interconnection with consumers; the same goes for the general qualification of the workforce through national public education, or for Social Security, which costs half as much when it’s mutualised and public.
The macroeconomic competitiveness rate is given by the Social Capital production function, which is the sum of Sectors 1 and 2. This rate of macroeconomic competitiveness of the Social Capital of the SFs is the basis of the exchange rate of the national currency, since it allows comparison between SFs of the main economic rates, i.e. the rate of competitiveness – or micro productivity for each production function – given by the essential ratio of the organic composition of capital noted v/C, or C = (c + v), the rate of extraction of surplus value or exploitation noted pv/v and the rate of profit noted pv/(c+v). This is important because no SF can live in autarky, and each must integrate the composition of its external balances into the equations of its national production functions.
Let’s turn now to the economic disaster set in motion by the IPCC and ratified by the Paris Agreement and its aftermath. As for the IPCC’s narrative nonsense demonizing CO2, the volume of which follows climate change rather than precedes it (permafrost, phytoplankton, feedbacks, etc.), and the fact that life on Earth is carbon-based, and other such warming shibboleths, I refer you to the English texts in the “Ecomarxismo” category of my website http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org . Let’s not forget that, since 1979, global warming data have been shamefully falsified, since they are based on satellite measurements taken in the absence of clouds, given that clouds permanently cover half the globe! Or the ppm CO2 measurement taken on Mauna Loa, one of the World’s 16 largest and most active volcanoes: recently, despite the Covid and the economic slowdown, the ppm CO2 has risen, and in fact there was an eruption in December 2022! People are being taken for fools. As far as the Paris Agreement is concerned, I refer you on the same site to this, for the prohibitive rises in commodity prices to this and for ipcc-ist financial speculation to this. On raw materials and metals, including those needed for the “ecological bifurcation”, see for instance the online videos by engineer Aurore Stéphant.
Let’s deal briefly here with the predicted disaster in terms of the relative price structure of the SF, with the induced deterioration of external balances and the explosion of prices, debilitating given as “inflation” requiring restrictive intervention by central banks. France’s current trade deficit, accompanied by the deterioration of its net external position largely due to the price of energy and electricity, is just a foretaste. For Olivier Berruyer’s analysis, see here. (« 200 MILLIARDS DE DÉFICIT : le fiasco du commerce français ! »)
Raw materials and energy as a whole – not just electricity – are important inputs in virtually all production and exchange processes. They affect production costs, and hence selling prices. It is clear from what we have written above that if the prices of these essential inputs are raised arbitrarily, the whole internal price structure will be altered, as will the exchange rate, creating a loop through the deterioration of external balances and the exchange rate. The system will become economically irrational, and will rapidly run its course, both domestically and against its external competitors.
Can we expect to administratively set the prices of these essential inputs, or even of other inputs, or even without taking into account the realities of the micro-economic productivity rate and the macro-economic competitiveness rate? The answer is no. Yet this is exactly what speculative green ecologists do when they set non-economic targets under the guise of ecological externalities that need to be taken into account to avoid catastrophe, the new end-of-the-world invented for the “new pastoral kids led on crusade”. In his latest Report 2024, Zucman proposes nothing less than a « fiscal IPCC » (!) to finance the ecological transition he deems necessary, not from an economic point of view, but according to the priority of decarbonisation sought by the IPCC. (See here the report is available in English.) Let’s also stress that this irrational crusade against CO2 contributes absolutely nothing to preserving the environment or human health. Global competition and trade with partners better managed than our SF, such as China, will soon expose the catastrophe. Pseudo-norms from the IPCC or the EU, such as the carbon tax, will do nothing to change this. All the more so as our markets are mature, while the wealthier middle and working classes continue to grow in China and emerging countries.
Unlike the Montreal Protocol, today it is our major partners and competitors who control both cutting-edge technologies, patents, economies of scale and solvent markets, as well as increasingly global trade standards. In the case of the Montreal Protocol, the U.S. and allied leaders invented the problematic narrative of CFCs being responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. It then became imperative to change all fridges and air conditioners, an operation far more lucrative than simply renewing existing fleets despite their programmed obsolescence. But, of course, Dupont de Nemours had the alternative patents. Today, this is no longer the case for solar energy, wind power, batteries, rare earths and, very soon, microprocessors, which will soon be manufactured on new substrates – wafers – which will enable us to redefine international standards and be well positioned for the Object Internet and 5G. The latter not only concerns the distribution of media content, but above all the staggering amount of data entering the simulations that are now indispensable in all fields and processes of conception, design and manufacturing. Rapid data transfer and processing have become major strategic assets.
Indeed, the example of the single European electricity market, and the suicidal sanctions imposed on Russian oil and gas, are illuminating. They give a good idea of the catastrophic effects to be expected from the ideological war waged against fossil fuels in the name of the fight against CO2, which has no climatic causal effect and is otherwise beneficial to vegetation and crops that store it naturally, whereas the real problem, in terms of environmental protection and human health, concerns above all fine particles – PM 2.5 and PM 10 – and other greenhouse gases.
The single electricity market, which sacrificed France’s advantage with its nuclear fleet, was designed to subsidize the construction of intermittent and totally inefficient renewable solar and wind energies. They were also designed to legitimize the destruction of State-owned companies – EDF/GDF – by offering private individuals paying income tax, which is no longer the case for half of all working people earning too little, to install private solar panels and wind turbines using tax credits. The result was a form of clientelism well in line with the logic of neo-liberal monetarist public policy, based on the philosophy of flat taxes and tax expenditures. Ultimately, the cost of this policy choice is passed on to customers and users.
Add to this the fact that 100% renewable is technically impossible due to the intermittency of sun and wind. This is why the EU decided to create a totally artificial competitive electricity « market ». It forced public producers to sell part of their electricity production, at an administratively fixed price, to distributors who produced not a single kilowatt-hour. Under the Arenh scheme, EDF is obliged to sell part of its production at low cost to its distributor competitors, who do not produce a single kWh!
This irrational drain is doubled by a crony privatization carried out surreptitiously under the guise of the “fair market price” achieved thanks to this artificially created competition. As if this were not enough, the system reaches the height of its absurdity with the fact that the price of electricity delivery contracts is simply determined by the spot market, particularly that of gas. Since electricity is difficult to store, gas – or coal-fired power plants must be used in extremis to complete a contract, as nuclear power plants cannot be handled so erratically. It is therefore wrong to suggest that prices on these contracts are determined by marginal cost or by the last unit produced, which is Marginalist hogwash; in fact, it is the last power plant called into production to close the contract, which often runs on gas and whose price is determined on the spot market, i.e. at the level that is generally the most expensive.
To add insult to injury, as the polytechnician Gerondeau pointed out, since nuclear power cannot be ramped up quickly in line with fluctuations in demand, and since inefficient renewables have to be subsidized, when electricity from the latter is available – solar or wind peaks – it is used as a priority, reducing production from nuclear power, which nonetheless boasts much lower production costs! And what can we say about the philo-Semite Nietzschean sanctions against Russian oil and gas in favor of American shale oil and gas, which are far more polluting, almost 4 times more expensive and in short supply… as we know, the USA is now preparing to buy Venezuelan oil.
Let’s conclude by recalling that all production and exchange – and consumption – processes involve the use of energy and electricity. The explosion of external deficits in France and other countries testifies to the irrationality of these purely ideological policies based on a-scientific and villainous narratives, aimed at creating a new CO2 original sin against which we can obviously do nothing since life on Earth is carbon-based, other than pay indulgences – green bonds – to the new high priests and “masters of the world”! (Can you here Svetonius laugh?)
Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that the SF tries to protect itself by imposing new tariff barriers at the border, barriers that we’d like to be invisible or at least compatible with the free-trade treaties now being imposed on emerging countries, which is the case with the carbon tax and the industrial taxonomy designed to inform decarbonisation … and the allocation of “permits to pollute” now listed on the stock exchange! (In the US this sends one back to Scopes 1, 2, 3.) To have any chance of success in terms of external balances, we need to dominate technologies, standards and norms and raw materials. This is no longer the case, contrary to the illusion created by the Montreal Protocol.
In our economies, which are moreover open to the mobility of global capital – and speculative capital at that – stubbornness in this direction must in practice be paid for by increased wage deflation in the hope of remaining competitive. The wage deflation which has trended to the bottom since Thatcher and Reagan came to power has now reached its socially tolerable limits. The philo-Semite Nietzschean “elites” haven’t yet grasped the full extent of the disaster, as this logic accelerates their headlong rush towards their society of choice, that of the “return to the new domesticity and the new slavery”, all facilitated by the guilt-inducing ipcc-ist green catechism. The Gilets jaunes’ revolt has shown that this choice is based on quicksand, and that recourse to systemic repression, the Nietzschean Hammer, will not suffice to induce the masses to accept their permanent socioeconomic and democratic downgrading, nor to persuade them to give up their mobility like the old peasants attached to the glebe, despite the nonsense about the 15-minute City.
In fact, even an entirely autarkic society could not pretend to artificially manipulate the internal structure of its relative prices, as History, which is always the history of the class struggle, has shown. We can see this today, as soaring energy and commodity prices, combined with the theoretical and reactionary ineptitude of central banks who know nothing about “inflation”, are causing real wages and living standards to plummet. In the long history preceding the capitalist mode of production, usury was religiously condemned and often capped by recourse to the “just price” imposed, if necessary, in an administrative manner (St Thomas the Doctor Summa, etc.), according to the requirements of social peace and the sovereign refusal to tolerate the State within the State represented by the private forces of money (see, for instance, Philippe Le Bel versus the Knights Templar. )
With today’s capitalism, the new administrative prices are, on the contrary, designed to serve financial speculation, now in its green garb. The consequence is that, instead of preserving the minimum standard of living of the popular masses, the logic set in motion aims, on the contrary, to reduce it to the lowest level, “physiological” if you like!!!! Such retrograde steps, imagined by the neo-Nietzschean-Rabbinical « pitres », are no longer in the cards, despite the illusions of “wars against terrorism”, clashes of civilizations, the torture of dissidents under medical control – Israeli style – and new green crusades for neo-pastoral kid crusaders.
Ecomarxist planning is quite different, precisely because it respects the scientific and technical data which, as Pareto himself understood, determine the technical composition of production processes, driven by the quest for the highest productivity, for example, in order to better anchor ideas, by resorting to greater energy intensity, which is more acceptable in environmental and economic terms. However, no more than any other bourgeois economist, Pareto knew how to reconcile technical composition and exchange-value composition. Since my scientific elucidation of the Law of Productivity, duly reinserted in the Equations of Simple and Enlarged Reproduction, this is now possible. All that’s needed, then, is to take Ecomarxist data into account to inform planning, i.e. the allocation of resources available for dynamic reproduction, taking into account above all the social priorities democratically defined by recourse to socialist democracy (see here), i.e. industrial and social democracy rather than political democracy in the bourgeois sense of the term, i.e. limited parliamentary representative democracy with little power over private ownership of the means of production, and therefore over profits and the credit needed for reinvestment.
The theory of Ecomarxism presupposes the resolution of the problem of absolute and differential rent, i.e. the demonstration of the Marxist Law of Productivity, coherently reintegrated into the Equations of Simple and Enlarged Reproduction. I’m the only one to have done this following Marx. The lineaments of Ecomarxism are formulated in the Introduction and in the Appendix of my Livre-Book III, freely accessible here: https://www.la-commune-paraclet.com/Download/
Let’s take a look at a few key points concerning raw materials, including fossil fuels – once we’ve eliminated the IPCC’s ideological nonsense about CO2.
Scientific data is used both in the Dialectics of Nature – use values – and in the Dialectics of History – exchange values (natural or hard sciences and social sciences derived from historical materialism, for simplicity’s sake). Ecomarxist scientific planning uses and sponsors public research into available geological materials and resources. It can therefore have a precise idea of the quantities available and/or producible in relation to the short-, medium- and long-term needs of the Five-Year Plan. As the equations of its production functions, grouped into Sector 1 and Sector 2, are given ex ante in exchange value terms, the structure of relative prices is perfectly controlled. (I refer to my Synopsis of Marxist Political Economy, at the same link) In any case, any changes that do occur can be corrected, with planning easily readjusting itself according to quarterly – and even more frequent – data, thanks to the real-time information that can be made available using scientific statistics, i.e. based on the Equations of ER and its underlying SR. Planning can therefore be easily corrected without major upheavals, as already elaborated in Note 9 of my Book-Book III.
Furthermore, Ecomarxist planning will aim to favor products whose life cycle is better controlled with regard to optimal recycling, both upstream and downstream. For the rest, it will favor mass production with a life cycle of 6 to 7 years whenever the aim is to quickly satisfy real needs as equally as possible. On the contrary, whenever necessary, the renewal of these fleets will encourage high-quality production in short runs, or even better, in artisanal production. Real wealth will accumulate, but without resorting to antique shops reserved exclusively for affluent customers.
When it comes to the availability of raw materials and energy, Ecomarxism advocates protecting existing resources. Where supplies are limited, this will be done by reserving them first and foremost for needs for which no alternatives yet exist. Otherwise, we will aim for natural renewal – e.g. forestry or management of fish shoals at sea, etc. – or artificial renewal – e.g., biofuels, respecting strict agricultural zoning to protect arable land, while favoring dual crops in rotation, such as rapeseed, which simultaneously supplies biofuel and feeds for livestock. Guy Nègre’s compressed-air car plus adjuvants is superior to the electric or hydrogen car in terms of pollution, autonomy and price; moreover, by reserving the production of adjuvants to small farmers, we could save their standard of living while obtaining, in return, the maintenance of the landscape which also favours fire-fighting, for example in mid-hill areas or all those not involving protected arable land.
In all cases, public research will aim to find and design environmentally acceptable and massifiable substitutes.
Such a system is then legible, and its relative price structure can be determined according to the preservation and growth of the population’s quantitative and qualitative material standard of living, while aiming for the most favorable exchange rate. Degrowth is an absurdity induced by Marginalist GDP, now speculative at over 9% directly, so that its growth is combined with the barbaric deflation of wages and household “net global income”. A critique of Marginalist GDP is available here.
In reality, any socially advanced economy – preferably informed by Ecomarxism, which does not boil down to the primitive idea of circularity, which at best only concerns recycling – aims for sustained growth in the standard of living of its citizens, but this growth will mainly be qualitative. In other words, it will be driven by social needs, which, once basic material requirements have been met, will focus on social and human services, as well as leisure and leisure-time activities. To conceive of the overcoming of private capitalist growth, more aptly named private accumulation of capital, it is of course necessary to understand the difference between the capitalist “invisible hand” and scientific socialist planning based on the Equations of SR and ER duly informed by Ecomarxism.
Paul De Marco