contradictio.de

Ruthless Critisicm (February 2013):

Superstorms, droughts, floods, refugees …

Climate Change: Product of globalized capitalism and subject of debate between the states that organize it

[Translation of a talk in Germany by an editor of GegenStandpunkt, the Marxist journal, 2007]

The majority of science has now come to the conclusion that climate change is a reality, that the earth is really warming and this warming could have catastrophic consequences. There are also some dissenting voices who argue that climate change is essentially a climate hoax, that science and weather reporting already fail to accurately predict tomorrow’s weather and therefore it is impossible to be able to predict what the climate will be like in 2050.

The question whether global warming is possible, likely or virtually certain, whether the probability is 20, 60 or 80 percent, and whether the warming amounts to 2, 3 or 6 degrees – these questions can’t be decided as a layman; the climate research for it is just a little too complicated. But one also does not have to decide this question:

The politicians who intend to take measures and responsibility for climate protection have faced up to these scientific findings and assume that climate change is a sure thing, that catastrophic changes are to be expected. So, regardless of any statistical probability, one can simply examine which measures the respective states deem advisable and take in matters of climate change, which interests they omit, which come into play in each case and according to which standards they are handled.

First, however, to the thing itself, climate change and its causes.

1. Climate change and its immediate cause 1.1. Natural and anthropogenic greenhouse effects 1.2. Environmental protection = protection of capitals

2. The States – balancing national concerns and international disputes
2.1. The Stern Review
2.2. Climate refugees and failed states – an order problem!
2.3. Lucrative pollution of the environment and emissions trading
2.4. “Climate protection can only be international” – climate protection as capitalist site policy
2.5. How the debate is carried out and its results
2.6. The world climate and the character of predictions

3. New energy policies in view of the anti-terrorist world war situation
3.1. The consumer – a useful idiot on behalf of imperialist energy policy

http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/climatechange.htm

cf:

http://doku.argudiss.de/?Kategorie=KuF#207

“Fair Trade”

The capitalist world market as a challenge to the consumer’s morality

Consumers are regularly informed about the nasty things that go into their consumer products: the African child slaves in chocolate; the impoverished miners of Bolivia and the Congo in cell phones and hard drives; the badly paid, overworked seamstresses of Pakistan or Bangladesh who die in catastrophic fires in clothes; the Chinese workers driven to suicide in iPhones and iPads …

Consumers are further informed about the multinational corporations headquartered in the west that benefit from the lack of health and safety regulations, from the never-ending workdays and starvation wages, using these methods to reduce their costs and make profits.

That’s what our free market economy looks like in the developing and newly industrialized nations: it literally walks over corpses.

What does that tell us? Does child labor, slave labor, starvation wages and regularly occurring work-related accidents prove how much worse the capitalism in the South is, or do the repulsive conditions there prove that the same calculation rules there and people play the same role as cost factors of capitalist wealth as in the North – just on the basis of lower productivity and competitiveness?

Actually, the special forms of poverty that can be seen in the “Third World” are based on the fact that people there are subjected to the same compulsion to work for wages as the inhabitants of the “industrial nations.” Both here and there, all the means of labor are separated as property from the workers and monopolized in other hands. Both here and there, workers can only live when they live for capital. The difference is based on this commonality. Some are just able to make ends meet with the wages they earn; others are destitute or starve because they can’t meet the compulsion to acquire their means of sustenance by serving somebody else’s property.

So should we expect improvement from “our” global multinationals so that they make their profit-making in the South as wonderfully dignified as it is in the North? And what should practically follow from such reports and the due outrage? Should we become the enemy of the economic system or its conscience?

Everybody knows that moral appeals are useless; but they also hardly uncover the truth about the capitalistic economy and its sponsors: it is clear that the capitalists change nothing voluntarily, one must force them. But conscientious consumers – so the redemptive idea that they can surely force the capitalists to change for the better: the buyer takes responsibility in place of those who are economically responsible and makes the world a better place by using the power of little money to mentor the managers of big money: When shopping, they pass over the commodities that are produced with evil exploitation practices and help the ethically clean profit-makers make their profits.

This much fantasy about their own power, to be able to correct the world by more conscientiously choosing from the wide array of commodities and paying higher prices for ethically unobjectionable sneakers, cell phones, etc., and this much cheap good will can’t be bothered by the fact that the global manufacturing multinationals have discovered in even this product quality a means of their competition and lure the buyer with “social responsibility certificates.” This is obviously not considered a mockery of the original critical concern, but its success.

http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/

Uncle Sam fucks you

The military will not need to lower its physical standards as it opens direct combat jobs to women, senior military officials said Thursday.

The new order, signed Thursday by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, will open as many as 237,000 new jobs to women…. “The department’s goal is to ensure that the mission is met with the best qualified and most capable people, regardless of gender,“ Panetta said. President Obama said allowing women to serve in combat marks another step toward the country’s founding ideals of fairness and equality. He said the decision will strengthen the U.S. military. “Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger, with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love.” – USA Today, January 25, 2013

“War is the father of all things” (Heraclitus) – and also of women’s liberation. Its reality in the 21st century has endowed us with its latest stage (for now). After the fairer sex has already refuted all the prejudices about female inhibitions in the prisons of Abu Graibh in the most illustrative way, it is only logical that the US Army has opened the way for them to conquer other male domains. Now the girls are at last allowed to take part in the killing and dying for the nation and can decently make their way in the hierarchy instead of having to sleep their way up the ladder in a tiresome and degrading way. We are entirely sure that the career-oriented gals as GI Janes will have some creative ideas for raping in the wars of the 21st century. Fuck you!

http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/