RE: Re: RE: Reply to Clark

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephen E Philion wrote:
>
>
> Actually Brenner was an epigone (funny how that word has really taken
> hold) of Maurice Dobb. If Brenner's writing is based on historical
> ignorance, you'd likewise make the move that Maurice Dobb's writing was
> also ignorance at work?

There was some excuse for Dobb, and for Marx come to that, because an awful
lot of work has been done since the 1950s digging in parish registers and
the like and that has deepened our understanding of what actually went on in
the English countryside. It's much more difficult now to argue that what
happened was unique etc, and I think everyone accepts this including Brenner
and Wood. Probably I'm too dismissive of Brenner, but I think the volume of
his work, the evident attention to detail, is undermined by the erroneous +
speculative conclusions he sometimes reaches. I think that when studying
this period: primitive accumulation in 18th c England, broadly speaking:
that after a point the law of diminishing returns applies, because we still
don't really know enough, and never will, and there are too many
unquantifiable variables, noise in the data and other imponderables, so you
get into arid speculation, and I think we've reached that point in this
discussion.

One thing that occurs to me is that you can indeed, as Yoshie was saying,
draw analogies with what is the situation today in many peripheral and
semi-peripheral countries, because the same forces are at work. And what you
see is highly contradictory and capable of interpreting in quite different
ways: and if this is so about what is happening right before our eyes, then
obviously it's even more problematic when it comes to understanding what was
going on 300 years ago. What we see today is the same kind of Malthusian
trap being sprung as was the case in England in the 18th c. There is
dramatic population growth, and dramatic economic growth, going cheek by
jowl with equally dramatic mass impoverishment, land-hunger,
eco-despoliation, privatisation of commons etc.

In the 18th c, the malthusian trap was kept open by in effect internalising
entropy and making it into the mainspring of industrial development and
accumulation: because what else is the search for relative surplus-value, if
it is not a way of converting a problem (land-hunger, resource-shortage,
population pressure) into the possibility of growth? But for this to happen
successfully, you have to have a possibly unique confluence of factors: you
have to have, not only an 'empty world' in Herman Daly's term, ie one that
is relatively unpopulated and easily capable of colonising (but we now have
a full world) and not only immense scope for technical improvements, in
terms of energy intensity (but we don't now, because we are reaching a
theoretical limit in the transition from more to less efficient energies, ie
we have transited historically from wood, water, animal power, to coal, to
oil, and finally to hydrogen and electricity, and there is almost nowhere
else to go, the laws of physics being what they are) and finally also you
have to have very easily accessible low-entropy reserves of energy and raw
materials. In the 18th c all the growth indicators were set to positive, but
now they are almost all set the other way, and the return on energy invested
(ROEI) of the latest oil and gas discoveries is actually very poor indeed,
in historical terms; even coal is now getting quite energy-expensive to
extract. As Cutler + Cleveland have shown, the almost uniquely decisive
single factor in raisng productivity, is increasing energy efficiency. Even
better information systems, shortened circulation time etc, can be boiled
down to this.

It is all very well to say that if you even dare to mention resource
constraints you're some kind of physiocrat and you don't understand the
sublime mysteries of relative surplus-value extraction, etc. I am constantly
nagged at for this. But this objection is actually very close Samuelson's
notions of infinite substitutability *even of energy resources*; which is
absurd, and no better than Julian Simon's false optimism. Energy really does
matter.

Each new cycle of industrialisation during the past 300 years has seen two
related things happen: first the focus has moved away from smaller locales
to bigger ones. From Coalbrookdale to Birmingham, and then from England to
Germany, and from Germany to the USA. Now Asia. And each new phase coincided
with the introduction of essentially new energy systems, in each case
dropping one or more atoms of carbon from each fossil-energy molecule: from
coal, to oil, to natural gas. (It is not the carbon which gives the energy,
it is the hydrogen in the hydrocarbon molecule.) If you look at a graph of
these changes you can see, for instance, how the rise and fall of the
British empire maps onto the rise and fall of coal. But this movement from
intrinsically lower to intrinsically higher energy forms is not an
unmitigated good, and here's the rub. It turns out that the most efficient
energy for capitalism was petroleum; oil is better than coal, but is also
better than either electricity or natural gas or hydrogen, for most
industrial and transportation functions. There is a bleak message here. I
think that while there can still be debate about the size of fossil energy
reserves, it is becoming clear even to the unaided eye that there are now
serious problems about oil and natural gas supply. My position hasn't
changed. Per capita energy global consumption is a key index of human
progress. It peaked, as far as I can see, in 1980. From US Census Bureau
figures you can show that global p.c. energy consumption rose from 3.7 boe
(barrel of oil equivalent) in 1860 to 11.7 boe in 1973, where it stalled,
before rising to 11.9 boe in 1980, since when it has declined and is now
back to the 1973 level.

You can interpret this in lots of ways: the most senseless and idiotic way
is by talking about increased energy efficiency, which is more or less a
myth. Yes, energy per unit of GDP has fallen in the main OECD countries, but
unfortunately achieving this has entailed absolute increases in OECD per
capita energy consumption. This has only deepened inequality between the
Golden Billion and the Rest.

To be sure that anything fundamental was happening, one would I admit have
to wait another 10 or 20 years, all else unchanged, and obviously a lot
depends on demographic change. I don't believe nothing else will change! The
world-system is too unstable for that. So this 28-year stagnation or slight
fall in per capita energy consumption, 1973-2001, is a serious indicator
that something fundamental has come unstuck.

Incidentally, in 1998 global per capita gall/day oil-equivalent consumption,
according to the EIA, was like this: US and Canada, 2.9 gals/day; Other
Industrialised, 1.4; RoW, 0.4 and Total World, 0.6 gals/day (US gallons).

Some folks have a lot of catching up to do, and now they never will. The
Malthusian trap may not have sprung yet, but the jaws are still open.


Mark Jones