Zero-Sum Capitalism (fracking revisited)

One of the tensions within capitalism described so well by Marx is that tension between the promise of the ultimate freedom of the bourgeois economic subject on the one hand and the kind of world inevitably created by the crushing, race-to-the-bottom unfreedom of industrial capitalist value-production on the other.

Some might argue that the trope of industrial capitalism (and the Marxist critique) is a thing of the past.   Fracking proves the contrary.  The potential for massive consolidation of wealth into the hands of the few coupled with wide-spread environmental devastation lays bare the same tension within contemporary "post-industrial" capitalism.   In truth, we are living in the denouement of industrial capitalism, our language infused with the ideals and mythologies of 18th-19th Century Europe.  The fundamental tensions are alive and kicking.

The US of A came into its own at the high noon of both the assertion of the rights of the bourgeois subject (right to private property, right to the 'free' sale of one's own labor, etc) and the spread of the industrial revolution.   Thus, US mythologies invoke this contradiction at a deep level.  We celebrate individual freedom and self-determination while giving a smile and a wink to those who amass record profits through industrial expansion on a global scale.

Articulating the primacy of the bourgeois subject at the time of (or immediately preceding) the birth of our country were John Locke, Rosseau, and of course Adam Smith.  The latter's "invisible hand" has proven to be history's preeminent obfuscation of the truth of the fundamental contradiction identified by Marx.

The fracking issue shines a light (again) on two separate but related fallacies.   The first is that of the invisible hand commonly understood:  that by all pursuing our own individual self-interest, the self-interest of the whole is promoted.   This is contradicted by experience, and by logic.  Without regulation,  the net effect on the planet and its inhabitants (external costs included) will be a loss.

The second fallacy I'd call the "utilitarian fallacy", which is that it's possible to maximize self-interest for a large group of individuals in a finite system.  In other words, when a resident of rural Pennsylvania opens his or her tap and brown flammable sludge comes out, it's clear that the ends of the oil magnate are at odds with the ends of the rural Pennsylvanian.  This is zero-sum capitalism.

n.b. for an articulate rebuttal of Adam Smith's invisible hand, re-up on the Hardin essay Tragedy of The Commons.

Hardin, who was writing specifically about the issue of over-population, argues that the only way out of the problem "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon".   Perhaps he is on the right track.  There is something Hegelian about this idea, in that Hardin acknowledges a basic dialectical tension at work.  There is, he says, "no technical solution" to the problem.  The subject-object (essence - appearance) dialectic is really radical and mind-blowing, when you think about it enough.  The idea that we can, as subjects, move to create objective conditions that transform our very subjectivity.  WowoZowo.

As I continue to try to think about what such a transformation or 'overcoming'  might involve,  I want to write a response to a chapter in D.F. Wallace's The Pale King, the subject of which is the unique relationship of Americans to government regulation.   A character in the novel is arguing that Americans are essentially adolescent in this regard.   I think there may be something really important to this idea, as adolescence is the time (according to some) of the development of a more profound objectivity in human beings.