Multiple Economic Fractures in Mordor

David Harvey and the Contradictions of Capitalism

by Bruce Lerro / December 10th, 2022

Orientation

The golden age of left-wing economists

In part because the 1960s was still a period of capitalist abundance, there were few socialists in Yankeedom who pointed to the economic contradictions of capitalism as a motivator for the coming revolution. “Western Marxists” ignored the economy, imagining capitalism could go on forever. As first anarcho-communist and then as Situationists, the group I was in never talked about any economic laws that would drive the economy into a crisis. But a couple of my comrades, one from France, had been closely studying a book by Lyn Marcus (later his public name became Lyndon LaRouche) called Dialectical Economics. Here was a wake-up call for all of us to get back to economics, especially since by the late 1970s the days of economic abundance were over.

Throughout the next thirty years, good economic Marxists like Richard Wolff, David Harvey, Robert Brenner and John Bellamy Foster have carried the torch for political economy. However, it was not until The Great Recession of 2008 and the Occupy movement in 2011-2012 really brought economic crisis into the foreground of life in Mordor. Since then, more Marxist economists have emerged such as Michael Perelman, Michael Roberts, and Anwar Shaikh. They have all added depth and scope. Non-Marxist economics such as Michael Hudson, Steve Keen and Jack Rasmus have made acidic analyses of finance capital. The great value in all these economists is that they speak in natural language, not mathematical language. This makes it easier for the Yankee population to understand them.

Varieties of capitalist crises theory and their rivals

In his book The Long Depression Michael Roberts asks four key questions from which he derives eight possible answers about the nature of economic turmoil or even whether there is a crisis at all.

• Is capitalism subject to economic crisis?

Within the camp which says no, a second question is answered.

1b) Do periodic fluctuations need fixing?

If the answer is “yes” you are a Keynesian like Paul Krugman. If the answer is “no” you are a libertarian like Milton Friedman. For the libertarians capitalism only goes through “business cycles”.

Within the camp that says “yes”, that capitalism is subject to crisis, a second question is asked:

• Is the kernel of the crisis found in production?

If the answer is “no” you are an underconsumptionist like Marxists David Harvey or Rosa Luxemburg.

If the answer is “yes” about the kernel of the crisis found in production, there is another question:

2b) Are crises more than struggle over wages and profit shares?

If no, you are a profit-squeeze supporter. Economics associated with this are Baron and Sweezy and Richard Wolff.

If the answer to the kernel of the crisis is found in production is “yes”, a further question should be:

3a) Are crises integral to the accumulation crisis?

If the answer is “yes” you follow Marx’s argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is advocated by Michael Roberts, Anwar Shaikh and Robert Brenner.

If the answer to the question is crisis integral to the accumulation process is “no” then a further question is asked.

4a) Does extra-consumption come from outside the system?

If the answer is “yes” you are a follower of Rosa Luxemburg or David Harvey and claim that capitalism has limited resources and needs imperialism to survive.

If the answer is “no” to the question then there is second question.

4b) Does extra consumption come from state intervention?

If the answer is “yes” you are a post Keynesian such as Steve Keen.

If the answer is “no” you are a Malthusian.

In this article I will be drawing from David Harvey’s book The Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. I picked this book, not because I agree with Harvey’s theory of crisis, but because he lays out the contradictions so exhaustively. I am not a political economist by training but I have studied hard to understand him. What is most important for my readers to understand is that there are a great number of reasons that capitalism is in very, very, very serious trouble.

What is a contradiction?

Harvey says a contradiction is when two seemingly opposing forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity, a process or an event. A contradiction can be produced either by innovations, disasters or slow decline.

Contradiction 1 Exchange-value is More Important than Use Value Though Use-Value Matters More in Real Life

The use value of a house is contained in the cost of its production. This includes all the materials that went into building the house as well as the cost of labor to complete the house. The use value of the house is its protection from bad weather conditions, prowlers, a place of comfort, privacy and social reproduction, including sex and taking care of children. The use value of a commodity is relatively stable.

But the exchange value of housing is not fixed. It is interdependent on surrounding houses. Property values can go down on my house if my neighbors’ houses are not kept up, even if my house has been kept up. On the other hand, a house that is not kept up can sell for a high price if it is located in a gentrifying neighborhood. Harvey points out that there have been property market crashes in 1928, 1973, 1987 and 2008. The contradiction is that use-values are captive to exchange values and this constantly destabilizes the economy. Harvey says exchange value is always in the driver’s seat.

Contradiction 2 Money is Valued Above the Social Value of Labor

Harvey identifies four constructive functions that money provides:

• It is the means or medium of circulation. Before money, with barter exchange was dependent on both parties having goods the other wanted. Money overcomes the incongruity in immediacy of goods and services that limits direct barter.
• It provides a single measuring rod for economic values of all commodities.
• It provides a way to store value.
• It delays the need to buy a commodity immediately.

But there is a gap between money and the labor that ultimately produces it. Money hides the social labor that went into its material form. The problem is that money, which is supposed to be used to measure value, itself become a kind of commodity— that is money capital. Its use value is that it can be used to produce more value profit or surplus value. Its exchange value is, for example, an interest payment.

Commodity money such as gold and silver are rooted in tangible commodities with definite physical qualities like:

• It is relatively scarce.
• The supply is relatively inelastic so they maintain their relative value against all other commodities over time.
• These metals do not oxidant and deteriorate.
• The physical properties are known and their qualities can be assayed accurately so their measure can easily be figured out.

The problem is these commodity moneys are awkward to use on a daily basis of coin tokens. Bits of paper and then electronic moneys became much more practical in the exchange of goods. They are good at storing value but not so good in circulating commodities.

The problem is also the desire for finance capital as a means of social power becomes an end in itself. This distorts the concrete relation of the money that would be required simply to facilitate exchange. It also throws a monkey wrench into the supposed rationality of capitalist markets. Harvey writes that one of the most dangerous contradictions of capital is that of compounding growth so that with the abandonment of the metallic base, money could be printed infinitely by whoever was authorized to do so. This is exactly what is happening now with the Fed freely printing money without any foundation in gold or any real social wealth. Money out-of-control from material products is what leads to financial depression.

Contradiction 3 Private Property and the State Often have Conflicting Interests

Keeping refugees and immigrants out vs the need for cheap labor

The kind of rationality the state typically imposes is illustrated by its urban and regional planning practices.The job of the nation-state is to protect their borders from unwanted refugees or immigrants. On the other hand, capitalists need migrants to work under-the-table for dirt cheap wages. Capitalists indirectly fight with the state over the status of migrant workers.

Capitalists vs the matriarchal state

Secondly, the state can be divided into its matriarchal and patriarchal functions. Matriarchal functions include unemployment insurance, pensions, welfare, road construction and repair. The patriarchal state functions include the military, the police and prisons. Capitalists are against the matriarchal functions of the state because they cut into profits. However, capitalists are more than willing to invest in the police to protect them, prisons to house the unemployed or the military to take the natural resources of other countries.

Patriotism vs global trade

Even within the patriarchal state there are contradictions. On one hand the military is very patriotic and expect that people will buy Yankee cars. Harvey says the state is interested in the accumulation of wealth and power on a territorial basis. On the other hand, capitalists will seek to make a profit anywhere in the world and will import foreign cars and many other goods. As many of you know, capitalist oil businesses were making profits from Germany during the Nazi era and the Yankee state had to force them to leave.

Neocon war of all against all vs liberal laissez-faire trade policies

Lastly, the patriarchal state often opposes capitalists in its international ambitions. For example, neocon foreign policy war mongers like Victoria Nuland wants war with Russia and China. Liberal capitalists on the other hand, want to trade with China. Capital is not the only agent involved in the pursuit of technological advantages in civil society. The state apparatus looks for superior weaponry, surveillance and other methods for policing the population.

Contradiction 4 Capitalists Acting in Their Own Short-term Self-interest Undermine the Conditions of Their Own Reproduction

If the use value of a product and the price of the commodity were the same, there would be no room for capitalist profit. One the one hand, the common wealth created by social labor comes in a great variety of use values from the most basic knives and forks, to the food we eat, to the cars we drive. to the houses we live in and the clothes we wear. The capitalist private appropriation of common wealth along with the expropriation of social labor is legally sanction under normal conditions of trade. But there is a dark unseen and illegal side of the market which Harvey includes such as robbery, thievery, swindling, corruption, usury, predation, violence which goes unaccounted for. In addition, there is market cornering, price fixing and Ponzi schemes. All these activities weaken the socio-production process. Harvey writes:

It is stupid to seek to understand the world of capital without engaging with the drug cartels, traffickers in arms and the various mafias and other criminal forms of organization that play such a significant role in world trade. (53)

All this swindling and double-dealing is labor expended in counter-production which weakens the amount of energy left for production. This production includes the amount of wages paid and products consumed by workers to get to the next day.

Contradiction 5 The Class Struggle Over the Proportion of Wages given to Workers as Part of the Working Day

Harvey states that one of the most outstanding aspects of the capitalist system is that it does not appear to rely on cheating. For Marxists, labor has two aspects. On one hand, labor as human species is activity which distinguishes us from the rest of the animals and produces all real social wealth. One the other hand, there is labor power which is a commodity the capitalist rents for roughly half the working day. This “fairness” of the wage rests on the assumption that laborers have an individualized private property right over the labor they are capable of furnishing. But in reality, workers have a social property right over their labor because the cooperative social labor of all the workers in factories and offices produces all the wealth.

The commodification of labor power is the only way to solve a seemingly intractable contradiction within the circulation of capital. This contradiction is that in a fully functioning capitalist system, where coercion, cheating and robbery are supposedly ruled out, the exchanges should be based on the principle of equality – we exchange use values of products with each other and the value of those use values should be roughly the same. For all capitalists to realize a positive profit requires the existence of more value at the end of the day than there was at the beginning means an expansion of total output of social labor. Without that expansion there can be no capital. Zero growth defines a condition of crisis for capital. Here there is no room for profit. So where does the profit come from? As Harvey says, there must exist a commodity that has the capacity to create more value than it has itself. That commodity is labor power.  And this is what capital relies upon for its own reproduction. It’s the exploitation of the extra five or six hours of the workers’ pay that is pocketed by capitalists. In reaction to workers joining in unions for higher wages and better working conditions capitalists will:

• lock workers out or close the businesses completely:
• refuse to invest or reinvest in workers or infrastructure;
• deliberately create unemployment and create an industrial reserve army; and
• move jobs to peripheral world countries for their cheap land or labor.

So there is a long-term, relentless struggle between capitalists and labor over the proportion of wages given to workers on a given day.

Capitalist contradictions about education

Another part of this conflict is over education. On one hand, capitalists want to keep workers as uneducated as possible so that they find out as little of the workings of capitalism as possible. But on the other hand, capitalists must make workers more creative in order to fix problems on the job. The problem for capitalists is they can’t control how the workers may use their creativity on the job to undermine capitalism one way or another.

Contradiction 6 The Contradiction Between Fixed and Circulating Capital

Capital investment takes three forms: as an investment in fixed capital – machinery, plants, land and investment and an investment in variable capital which is labor power. Labor power is remunerated afterproduction has occurred, whereas the means of production are usually paid for prior to production (fixed capital). But capital also invents the circulation of commodities. When the commodity is sold, then capital becomes liquid again. In the circulation of commodities, the speed of its circulation is also important. If one capitalist can circulate their commodities faster than another they have a certain competitive advantage. So they attempt to accelerate the turnover time of capital.

Limitations of making a profit on fixed capital

However, there are limits to the speed of circulation. To paraphrase Harvey, if I want to make steel, the iron ore and coal are still buried in the ground and it takes a lot of time to dig them out. There are not enough workers close by who are willing to sell their labor power. I need to build a blast furnace and that takes time. There are physical barriers to reducing this turn-around time to zero. Workers, furthermore, are not automatons. They may lay down their tools or slow down their labor process. (73-74)

Once the steel is finished it has to be sold. The commodity can sit on the market for some time before the buyer shows up.  The capitalist has a vested interest in securing and accelerating the turnover time of consumption. One of the ways is to produce steel that rusts so fast it needs rapid replacement: planned obsolescence (73-74)

These problems center on the category of long-term investments in fixed capital.

In order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space – anchored on the land in the form of roads, railways, communication towers and fiber-optics plants, airports and harbors, factory buildings offices, houses, schools, hospitals.  More mobile forms of fixed capital are ships, trucks, planes and railway engines. (75)

Capital in danger of social sclerosis

The part which is moveable capital cannot be replaced during the item’s lifetime without loss of value. As time goes by the sheer mass of this long-lived and often physically immobile capital for both production and consumption increaserelative to capital that is continuously flowing. Whole sites are abandoned and wasted as in the rust belts of Mordor. On one hand, in order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space. Yet capital has to periodically break out of the constraints imposed by the world it has constructed. As Harvey says, it is always in mortal danger of becoming sclerotic. Why?

Capital is forever in danger of becoming more sclerotic over time because of the increasing amount of fixed capital required. Fixed and circulating capital are in contradiction with each other but neither can exist without the other. The flow of that part of capital that facilitates circulation has to be slowed down. But the value of immobile fixed capital (like the container port terminal) can be realized only through its use. It is generally much slower.

From physical goods to spectacles

One solution for capitalists is to sell events rather than physical commodities. Harvey says there is a huge difference between, for example, the live transmission of a World Cup football match and lugging around bottled water, steel girders, furniture or perishable items like soft fruit, hot pork pies, milk and bread. Commodities are variably mobile depending upon their qualities and transportability. Production, with some exceptions, like transportation itself is the least mobile form of capital. It is usually locked down in place for a time. In shipbuilding it is considerable.

Contradiction 7 The Contradictory Nature of Low Wages vs Capitalist Realization

The goal of capitalism is to sell as many products as it can at the cheapest possible price. But in the process of making a profit the capitalist must:

• exploit labor power (surplus value) so it can raise the price of a commodity;
• realize the sale of the product in the market – which is far from easy

The problem for capitalists is that if wages are kept low the aggregate demand of laborers won’t be enough to buy the products off the shelf. So if the cost of social reproducing of the laborers is being forced back into the household, then those laborers will be less likely to buy goods and services off the market. Lack of aggregate effective demand creates a serious barrier to the continuity of capital accumulation. Working class consumer power is a significant component of that effective demand. Yet if the capitalist insists on paying minimum wage how can the workers buy the products?

Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, the problem for capitalist was in the production of enough surplus valuebecause of unions were strong and wages high. When unions became weaker, wages dropped beginning in the 1970s. Then the problem for capitalists was was not in the achievement of extracting surplus value but in cultivating conditions for its realization since workers had less money to buy commodities. This is why in the early 1970s capitalists began issuing credit cards to workers in order for capitalist profits to be realized.

Contradiction 8 Contradiction and Alienation of Labor

Harvey says there is an important distinction between the technical and social division of labor. By technical he means a separate task within a complex series of operations, that anyone can do. By social he means the specialized task that only a person with adequate training or social standing can do, like a doctor, or an architect. In the technological division labor, the unity of mental and manual aspects of laboring was broken.

The meaning of the term “alienation” has psychological and sociological components. As a passive psychological term, it means to become isolated from connection to others whether at work or in leisure. As an active psychological state, it means being angry and hostile or feeling oppressed, deprived or disposed of. The person acts out that anger, lashing out without any clear definition. Teenage rebellion movies of years ago, The Wild One or Rebel Without a Cause, are examples.

As beautifully laid out by Bertell Ollman, sociologically alienation means the worker is estranged from his or her product of labor as well as the process of work. He/she is also alienated from other workers, from nature and from their own creativity. As Marx said it is only outside of work that the worker has the possibility to achieve any personal fulfillment. Uneven geographical development in the divisions of labor and the parallel increase in social inequality in life choices, are exacerbating that sense of alienation. This creates a danger for capitalists in the form of labor unions, strikes, labor parties and agitation for socialism. On one hand, the accumulation of capital requires squeezing the life out of the worker. On the other hand, this repression creates militancy on the part of workers.

Contradiction 9 Automation Might Shrink the Ratio of Necessity and Freedom vs Automation as the Driver od Unemployment

One of the mythological stories told by capitalists is that technological innovation would lead to more leisure time for workers. Well, since about 1970 in Yankeedom, we have seen an increase in the amount of full-time work from 40 hours to at least 50 hours per week. This is because capitalist motivation is not to create more leisure for workers, but to replace workers, especially militant workers, with machines.

On the other hand, automation and artificial intelligence now provide us with abundant means to achieve the Marxian dream of freedom beyond the realm of necessity. In other words, the population could have more leisure time to use their creativity for new inventions, new arts and new sciences. Full advantage could be taken of automation and artificial intelligence. But for the capitalists the more time that has been released from production, the more imperative it has become (for the capitalist) for the workers to absorb their leisure time in consumption. It has no room for authentically free time which neither produces nor consumes commercial wealth.

Contradiction 10 Technological Innovation vs Monopoly Capitalism

From competition to monopoly

According to Harvey, the development of technology first became a focus for capitalists in the second half of the 19^thcentury with the rise of the machine tool industry. Harnessing energy like the steam engine was applied to multiple industries. The classic Marxist argument is that through capitalist competition, the productive forces (technology) increase and outdistance the capitalist capacity to use this productive power. This overabundance of products creates the conditions for socialism. But what Marx didn’t anticipate is that capital demonstrates a trend towards monopoly rather than competition. This is a less favorable environment for innovation.

Wealth of Nations is the founding myth of liberal economic theory. Capital is imagined as constructed by a plethora of molecular and competitive collisions of individual capitalists moving freely and searching for profitable opportunities within a chaotic sea of economic activity. But in fact by the end of the 19^th century, corporations has overwhelmed Adam Smith’s competitive invisible hand. All this is news to market fundamentalist economists. Right-wing market libertarians present monopolies as an exception to the rule, rather than the predominant way of life under capitalism. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart and Apple are all examples of oligarchies tending towards monopolies. The tendencies in many sectors of the economy – pharmaceuticals, oil, airlines, agribusiness, banking software, media and social media – suggest strong tendencies towards oligopoly, if not monopoly. In fact, says Harvey, most capitalists, if given the choice prefer to be monopolists rather than competitors

Lenin saw capital moving into a new phase of monopoly power associated with imperialism at the turn of the 20^th century when the big industrial cartels combined with finance capital to dominate the leading national economies. This view re-emerged in the 1960’s with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capitalism. The crisis of the 1970s – stagflation and inflation – was widely interpreted by Marxists as a typical crisis of monopoly capital.

Why monopolies put the brakes on innovation

Capitalism today limits the rate of technological innovation because:

• The organization of cooperation and divisions of labor must be made in ways to maximize efficiency, profitability and accumulation. This means that innovations that will not be very profitable, such as long-lasting technologies, will be repressed.
• The capitalist needs to facilitate the acceleration of capital circulation in all its phases, along with the need to annihilate space through time. What I mean is increasing speed of transport and communication reduces the friction and barrier of geographical distance. This requires minimizing capitalist occupation of space.
• Capitalist must shorten the turnover time by shortening the lifetime of consumer products (planned obsolesce).
• Capitalist can shorten the lifetime of products’ shift from the production of things that last to the production of spectacles which are ephemeral and contain faster turn-around time.
• Capitalists technologies of knowledge are used to identify consumer preferences.
• The speeding up and turnover time by the use of the technologies of finance. Beginning with invention checks and credit cards, the goal is faster turn-around time. The rise of cyber moneys, like bitcoin, is just the beginning of an inexorable descent of the monetary system into chaos.
• Capitalists must not only speed up the realization and consumption process, but they must develop technologies that speed up the workers. This includes time motion studies, the Hawthorn experiments, and surveillance. This attempted control encompasses not only physical efficiency but also the rise of robotization. As Harvey writes, robots do not complain, answer back, sue, get sick, go slow, lose concentration, go on strike, demand more wages, want tea breaks or refuse to show up.

All this means is that that the because the capitalist must speed up the production and consumption process, it is far from the ideal conditions of innovation. Scientific innovators are in no hurry and want their products to last. The contradiction is that capitalists want scientific innovation to create ever new processes and products. Yet in their efforts to shorten the turnover time of products, they undermine the innovative processes themselves. They will not be able to innovate at the pace that would develop the productive forces and would stagnate and shrink the rate of profit.

Contradiction 11   Globalization of Capital: Promises and Perils

The division of labor within capitalism is now taking place at a world-wide scale. Harvey writes that what is now in place is radically different from anything that existed prior to 1850.

There are three sectional classifications of the division of labor between:

• primary – agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining;
• secondary – industry and manufacturing; and
• tertiary – services, finance, insurance and real estate sectors.

On one hand a world market in grains can forestall a local crop failure. At its best all capitalist countries have the technology to support each other during famines, extreme weather, floods, earthquakes and droughts. The fact that capitalist countries limit these interventions to countries that are their allies does not limit their potential to serve the whole world.

One the other hand, as Harvey points out today the clothing factories in Bangladesh, the electronics factories of southern China, the maquiladora factories strung along the Mexican border or the chemical complexes in Indonesia are all interdependent.  Small disruptions in a supply chain can have very large consequences. A strike in a key car parts factory in one region of the world can bring the whole production system to a halt everywhere. Supply chain blockages thanks to Covid result in delays in both the process of production and the delays on the product.

Contradiction 12 Uneven Geographical Developments: Super-Concentrations of Production  and Wastelands

The capitalist division of labor has reached a world scale and this results in uneven pockets of production with high concentration of work in some areas and wastelands in other areas. Time is money for capitalism. Traversing space takes both time and money. As much as possible the near elimination of transport costs and times is a factor in location decision making. This permits capitalists to explore different profit opportunities in widely disparate places.

Harvey writes that what arises is “agglomeration” economies where many different capitals cluster together. For example, car parts and tire industries locate close to car plants. Different firms and industries can share facilities and access labor skills, information and infrastructures. However other regions may become wastelands increasingly bereft of activities. They get caught in a downward spiral of depression and decay. The result is uneven regional concentrations of wealth, power and influence.  Affections and loyalties to particular places and cultural forms are destroyed and treated as anachronisms. Large blotches of the world become wastelands where nothing is grown and people can no longer live.

Capital never has to address its systemic failings because it moves them around geographically. Since myopic capitalists treat these wastelands as “externalities” the problem grows worse. The heads of nation-states are enslaved to capitalists and are in no position to address the geographical mess capitalists have created. There are, however, limits to continuous centralization through agglomeration. It results in overcrowding and rising pollution. In addition, labor may become better organized in its struggles against exploitation because of its regional concentration.

Contradiction 13 Finance Capital vs the Physical Economy

There are two ways in which capitalist crises might be produced:

1) chronic inequalities produce imbalances between production and realization; and

2) financialization of profit means capitalists will not invest in their own infrastructure.

In the case of financialization, what makes the current phase special is the phenomenal acceleration in the speed of circulation of finance capital and the reduction in financial transaction costs. If all capitalists seek to live off finance, insurance and real estate interests and are just speculating in asset value or living off capital gains the gap between finance capital and the real physical economy grows.

The problem of compound interest

Harvey points out that – Michael Hudson in the Bubble and Beyond is one of the only political economists who takes the issue of compound growth seriously. He says that most people do not understand very well the mathematics of compound interest.

Nor do they understand the phenomenon of compounding growth and the potential dangers it can pose. Harvey writes that compound interest curve rises very slowly for quite a while and then starts to accelerate and by the end the curve becomes a singularity as it sails off into infinity. Harvey goes into much more detail on pages 223-228 of his book.

There is one form that capital takes which permits accumulation without limit and that is the financial form. Today finance capital is now unchained from any physical limitations. In Mordor today the Fed issues fiat moneys that can be created without limit. Adding a few zeros to the quantity of money in the circulation is no problem for them. The danger is that the result will be a crisis of inflation. The contradiction is in disparities between accumulation process that is necessarily exponential and the conditions that might limit the capacity of exponential growth. These conditions are the requirements to invest in the physical aspects of the economy such as buildings, harnessing of energy and infrastructure.

Fictious capital instruments

Besides the printing of fiat money another financial instrument in the purchase of assets includes debt claims. Harvey writes an asset is simply a capitalized property title. This was paralleled by the creation of wholly new assets markets within the financial system itself such as currency futures, credit default swaps, and CDOs.

This was fictitious capital feeding off and generating even more fictitious capital.

Harvey writes there is a labyrinth of countervailing claims that were almost impossible to value except by way of some mix of future expectation, beliefs and outright crazy short-term betting in unregulated markets with no prospect of any long-term payoff.

Contradiction 14 Capital’s Relation to Nature

Liberal environmental politics has preferred to ignore entirely the fact that it is capitalism that produced the current ecological crisis. Harvey writes that they nibble away at issues on the periphery of the capitalist system while they never reach the core of the system that is producing the problem. “Deep ecologists” wrongly call Marxism “Promethean” which has a disregard for nature and claims that only human history matters. But John Bellamy Foster has dedicated the better part of his life arguing for the belief that Marx was ecologically sensitive and had a concept of capitalism as creating a “metabolic” rift with nature.

In addition, by training David Harvey is a geographer and has written books on a Marxist criticism of what capitalism has done to the natural world. The change in climate and the frequency of severe weather events is increasing.  Catastrophic local events can be readily accommodated by capital since a predatory disaster capitalism is ready to go. But pollution problems do not get solved, only moved around in uneven benefits and losses. The capitalist system is not prepared for the slow, cancerous degradations. Harvey says that whereas the problems of in past were typically localized, they have now become more regionalized such as acid deposition, low level of ozone concentration, stratospheric ozone holes, habitat destruction, species extinction and loss of biodiversity.

Conclusion

Harvey points out that this one-at-a-time presentation of capitalist contradictions does not address that all these contradictions are feeding into each other forming an organic whole. Do capitalists understand these contradictions? For the most part, no. Most are enthralled with market fundamentalist theories. A minority have read Marx. But even so, their short-term material interests as capitalists blocks them from understanding the full ramifications of their system. So capitalists as a class do not understand their system. They blithely roll along accumulating finance capital and pay no attention to the fourteen fractures I’ve identified. What problems occur are dismissed as “business cycles”. As the fractures deepen we can count on capitalists to ramp up  their ideology and distract us with more extreme forms entertainment, including football games, escapist movies and increasing violence in movies coupled with special effects.Facebook

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.

EO: Bearing Witness in the Hell of Speciesism

by Randy Shields / December 11th, 2022

Once upon a time Dostoevsky wrote a passage in The Idiot (1868) about an abused donkey passed from owner to owner which inspired Robert Bresson’s classic 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar.

Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, 56 at the time, watched the Bresson film and it became the first, last and only movie that ever made him cry.

Now, at age 84, Skolimowski and his co-writer and wife Ewa Piaskowska give the world EO, a partial homage to Au Hasard Balthazar and the most broad-based attack on speciesism in a feature film. EO is making plenty of audiences cry.

The title character EO is a small gray big-eyed Sardinian donkey (played by six different donkeys) who begins the film in a Polish circus and ends up in Italy. Animal protection legislation puts the circus out of business and splits up EO and his beloved human co-performer Magda which starts a worse series of events as no humans will take responsibility for EO unless they can exploit him/her. (Right with the times we don’t know if EO is a he or a she, although with six donkeys that definitely qualifies as a “they.” I’m going to refer to EO as a female in this article.) This sweet beast of burden is always looking for a friend – a horse, a human, a junkyard dog – and is frequently used to facilitate the enslavement of other animals.

There are echoes of Koyaanisqatsi and White God (a girl and her dog) in EO (a girl and her donkey) and the sensibility is very much like Okja (a girl and her pig) and Gunda. Stylistically, though, EO is the anti-Gunda: Gunda’s black and white minimalistic, music-less, human-less barnyard is replaced by a pulsating soundtrack, a slew of villains seen and unseen, great distances across Europe, tunnels, forests, windmills and mountains. Striking images of EO on a hillside at sunset, lost in a forest at night and standing on a small arched bridge in front of an enormous dam/waterfall and looking into the maelstrom will linger long after viewing.

When showing animal abuse on screen a director’s challenge is to keep people watching without overwhelming them. It’s a truism that many people are “too sensitive” to watch films of animal abuse but not sensitive enough to stop paying for the brutality, terror and injustice that goes into every piece of meat or a fur coat. Skolimowski skillfully navigates this by not showing most of the violence but simply showing the fear of the animals or letting us hear the violence. This will be a small comfort to many but I didn’t see anyone walk out of the movie.

After the circus folds EO is shipped to an equestrian center where a majestic white horse, tethered in an indoor riding ring, runs in circles with less freedom than a hamster on a wheel. EO accidentally knocks over a display case of equestrian trophies and is then shipped to a petting zoo where she’s ridden by special needs children. EO is visited one night by Magda who brings her a carrot muffin for her birthday. As Magda dances in the moonlight, thinking about the old days of the circus, we’re sure of EO’s love for her but Magda seems lacking as she obeys the commands of her jealous (of EO) boyfriend to leave and never sees EO again. The patriarchy is always seamlessly woven into speciesism. (See Green Paradise Lost by Elizabeth Dodson Gray or The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams.)

Seeking Magda and escaping the petting zoo, EO walks through a Jewish cemetery, reminding us that there are all kinds of holocausts although only someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer can get away with comparing them: “In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might makes right.” (Enemies, a Love Story.) And: “For animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” (The Letter Writer.) For different but similar slaveries, see Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison.

EO then enters a forest at night but she’s out of place. Beautiful immersive cinematography by Michal Dymek follows fast and furious: a close up of a web-spinning spider, a swimming frog, an owl treating EO as an intruder. There are foxes and, hair-raisingly, howling wolves. Will the wolves attack EO? No, actually, because Satan’s minions are here too: green lasers from rifles start flashing throughout the forest like a rave and hunters begin blowing away the wolves.

EO then comes upon a soccer match and is made an unwilling mascot by the winning team and later beaten with 2 by 4’s by the losing team. In a broken bloody heap, EO seems to be dreaming of a robot dog moving through the grass, techno progress contrasted with a deficit of ethical progress. The human gods will try their damndest to recreate something that moves and performs like a real animal (almost exclusively to repress other humans) but they won’t treat real animals with even rudimentary respect.

(The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is currently torturing monkeys in his neuralink experiments. Fuck anyone who would attempt to “help” by torturing. George Bernard Shaw summed up Elon Musk a long time ago: “Any race of people who would use something as barbarous as animal experiments to ‘save’ themselves would be a race of people not worth saving.” EO stumbles into just about every setting of animal abuse except a vivisection lab.)

EO’s next stop is pulling a cart on a fox fur farm while a worker throws dead foxes into it. Skolimowsky doesn’t show the anal electrocution of the foxes but he does show their terror as each of them watch others being killed. The worker commands an unwilling EO to move and bends over behind her and gets kicked in the throat, definitely knocking him out and possibly killing him. The instant karma delivered to this speciesist brute is one of the rare feel good moments in the movie. Fuck the working class torturers too.

After an incredibly sure-footed and gripping 75 minutes or so the film loses its intensity with the introduction of many more humans, much more human dialogue, much less EO, a scene of random human violence at a truck stop and a countess (Isabelle Huppert) getting frisky with her priest stepson which seems like another movie altogether. Maybe with another viewing I’ll understand these puzzles. The strength of most of the film is that any dummy can get it.

I was expecting the film to do justice to EO’s character and struggles by building to a monumental emotional intimate denouement focused on EO’s last moments but, unlike Au Hasard Balthazar or Gunda, the movie pulls back emotionally, visually, artistically, politically.

A blurb after the film ends says no animals were harmed in the making of it. I’m against using animals in films but if directors are going to take advantage of its “legality” – and deliver pro-animal messages – they are able to simulate violence, suffering and death a la Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Amores perros.

(Some viewers will dispute that the film pulls back but your reviewer believes in seeing the captive bolt pistol, the futile attempts to escape the kill box, the expression in the eyes as the light and life goes out, the throat-slitting, the dismemberment and turning of innocent beings into blasphemous nothingness – and spiritual terms are correct because EO and Balthazar and all the other non-humans are being crucified every day. “Completely humble, completely holy,” said the great Bresson about his donkey Balthazar. That’s how a film would do justice to the life and character of EO – after all, the audience has come all this way, let them walk now — or explode their prejudices and reveal their complicity as they’re mortified in their seats. They should be bawling their eyes out. It’s a war – act like it.)

EO is the perfect guide through Skolimowski’s inferno but the film is not perfect. It is, however, the most comprehensive non-documentary attack on animal exploitation ever filmed. Despite its flaws, EO should be seen, applauded and promoted.

After a December 4 screening at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles, Skolimowski and Piaskowska discussed the film, saying it was “made out of love for animals and nature” and likening it to a “protest song.” The film does seem like the cry of an 84-year-old man sick to death of the cruelty in the world although he isn’t (yet?) vegan, or even a vegetarian, saying, “We reduced our meat consumption by two thirds and half of my crew stopped eating meat entirely.” And: “Do we really need to have bacon every morning?” No, my man, no more than we need to eat donkey every morning.

Despite my uneducated impertinent quibbles, EO has won many awards: Cannes Jury Prize, Cannes Soundtrack Award, New York Film Critics Circle Awards Best International Film and European Film Awards Best Original Score. Rotten Tomatoes critics rate EO as 96% fresh and the film is Poland’s Best International Feature submission for the 2023 OscarsFacebook

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Randy Shields can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. Read other articles by Randy, or visit Randy's website.

The Absolute Worst People on Earth: War Profiteers?

by Paul Haeder / December 17th, 2022

Ahh, the lords of war, and the companies’ stocks going up up up. Look at these thieves, Lockhead Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman.

Ahh, petal mines dropped by Ukraine forces on the Donbass:

“The West is silent as Ukraine targets civilians in Donetsk using banned ‘butterfly’ mines” by Eva Bartlett (Posted Aug 18, 2022)

Ukraine has good reason to believe it will not be held accountable for using them against civilians, given its Western backers’ and their allies’ penchant for using prohibited weapons on civilians without repercussions–including Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium in Iraq and Syria, and white phosphorous and dart bombs in Gaza.

The fact the Western media turns a blind eye is also a boon to Kiev.

Here, the stock bonanza. The top military murder incorporated, listed above. That’s how Americans, and their retirement funds, and those pension funds, invest (sic) in. Respectively: Lockhead Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman.

This is what occurs with Empire, and we know the UK, USA, Five Eyes, EU, all bought and sold by the lords of war. The other gender, right there as Lords of War.

These people are the absolute worst people in the world, along with the engineers and technologists and scientists who will do anything to get a grant cool million here, fifty mil there, for research into the tools of war. Anything to play god, play with humanity, play with the lethality of their wet horror dreams. Do not let the skirts and skinny jeans fool you. These are hardened, cold-hearted killers.

You can read that again. The idea is to proactively guesstimate the character and timing of oppositional narratives, and for the algorithms to produce NARRATIVE COUNTERMEASURES to stifle these embryonic developments of potential political opposition before they can even be coherently formulated and disseminated.

If that’s not the exact image of a boot stamping on a human face forever, I really don’t know what is.

And perhaps the most disturbing thing is that this entire project is (quite effectively, I might add) being sold in connection with narratives of liberalism. Of narratives pertaining to the increase of freedom, to the supplementing of individual agency, and to the bolstering of progress and human flourishing. (source)

Until we get this — dialing for war lords. One WNBA star for one Russian war lord who does business with EVERYONE:

And, the rot gut that is remote work for General Dynamics and others, I can attest, is so dispicable, since I have a family member who worked on General Dynamics web crap, internal local web design, and he was laid off recently, terminated, at age 62, after more than 20 years with the company.

No severance, and in Arizona, General Dynamics forces those laid off to apply for Arizona unemployment, but, somehow, after six months or three months, GD will pony up something? This relative would have just given up, but he’s jumping through the ugly unemployment hoops, which make a person feel like he or she is a scab, a loser. And, then, the PTO check comes, and so his unEmployment was denied.

So many class action lawsuits against General Dynamics:

Former General Dynamics workers can move forward as a class in their suit claiming the company didn’t give them enough notice that they were getting fired, a Virginia federal judge ruled, finding their claims don’t require individualized inquiry.

U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne said Monday that the workers’ claims that General Dynamics Information Technology violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act by failing to provide them at least a 60-day notice they were getting fired can be resolved on a classwide basis.

“The GDIT policies in the record provide flexibility as to where the employees worked, and those policies apply to the class equally without the need for an individualized inquiry,” Judge Payne said. (source) (more)

Raytheon and Patriot missiles. I taught at Fort Bliss, home of the Patriot, “first to fire . . . .” English course, that is, effective writing as an Army contractor. Amazing how that $3.29 bolt for the shrouding, somewhere around 16 total, for each missile, ends up costing us hundreds of dollars each. The graft, the triple-dipping, the entire scam that is the revolving door of lords/murderers of war and the private welfare cheating companies is also part and parcel here.

https://youtu.be/4LCXKve29wg

The Ukrainian military is dropping anti-personnel mines over the city, violating: Protocol II of the Geneva Convention. Ottawa Treaty. Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Despite being banned under the UN Ottawa Treaty since 1997, thousands of anti-personnel mines litter the parks, streets, schools and homes in Donbass. Residents risk severe injuries and even death if they happen to accidentally stumble upon the tiny ‘petal’ mines.

A ‘petal’ mine is a pressure-activated anti-personnel mine. It’s small and hard to see, making it the ‘vilest’ mine. Ukraine was reported to have disposed of some six million of these petal mines it had in service. But that is clearly not the case as it has been using them to bombard residential areas of Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities of Donbass for months. Dozens of civilians who accidentally came into contact with the landmines have been admitted to hospitals in Donbass.

Emergency services, sappers and humanitarian personnel have been working hard to clear the neighbourhoods of the insidious explosive devices, while the Ukrainian army continues to bombard cities with the mines. Brave civilians help sappers to spot mines, some of them even learn de-mining techniques themself.

It will take years to remove all of the mines, according to some experts. The Ukrainian army uses Uragan multiple launch rocket systems, which are able to throw more than 4,000 mines at a time.

The documentary takes a look at the arduous mission of the de-mining campaign in Donbass. Victims of ‘petal’ mines talk about the injuries they received, while sappers describe their work on the ground and underwater. (documentary, of course, banned on YouCIATube)

Again, I have mentioned this endlessly: the military industrial complex is the finance-insurance-retail-manufacturing-food-banking-education-pharma-ag-energy-mining-chemical-science-engineering-surveillance-et al COMPLEX.

Some of the largest companies that have declined to renounce future involvement in antipersonnel landmine production are General Electric, Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Thiokol. Some companies that have declined to renounce future involvement in production are now involved in developing technology to detect, remove, and destroy uncleared antipersonnel mines, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Mohawk, and Ensign-Bickford.

In the U.S., no single company is responsible for the production of antipersonnel mines from beginning to end. The Pentagon will usually award a contract to one large company which will in turn buy component parts from many other companies. Final assembly of mines is often done in government-owned, contractor-operated Army Ammunition factories. Thus, the landmine industry in the U.S. consists more of component suppliers than “mine producers” per se. Some companies that have supplied components for antipersonnel mines objected to their inclusion in this report by claiming that they are not “mine producers.”

The seventeen companies that declined in writing to renounce future involvement in antipersonnel mine production are: AAI Corp. (Maryland), Allen-Bradley (Texas), Alliant Techsystems, Inc. (Minnesota), also representing mine producers Accudyne Corp. (Wisconsin), and Ferrulmatic, Inc. (New Jersey), CAPCO, Inc.(Colorado), Dale Electronics, Inc. (Nebraska), Ensign-Bickford Industries, Inc. (Connecticut), General Electric Company (Connecticut), Lockheed Martin Corp. (Maryland), Mohawk Electrical Systems, Inc. (Delaware), Nomura Enterprise, Inc. (Illinois), Parlex Corp. (Massachusetts), Quantic Industries, Inc. (California), Raytheon (Massachusetts), Thiokol Corp. (Utah),48 and Vishay Sprague (Pennsylvania).

The thirteen companies that did not respond in writing to Human Rights Watch are: Action Manufacturing Co. (Pennsylvania), Aerospace Design, Inc. (California), Amron Corp. (Wisconsin), BI Technologies (California), Consolidated Industries, Inc. (Alabama), Day & Zimmerman, Inc. (Pennsylvania),49 EMCO, Inc. (Alabama), Formworks Plastics, Inc. (California), Fort Belknap Industries (Montana), Intellitec (Florida), Mason & Hangar/Silas Mason Co., Inc. (Kentucky),50 Primetec, Inc. (Florida), and Unitrode Corp. (New Hampshire). (source)FacebookTwitter

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Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

The (Re)Birth of Sol Invictus

by William Manson / December 15th, 2022

It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. License is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations–as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day!
— Roman philosopher Seneca, ca. 64 C.E.¹

Sol Invictus in marble

In the pre-Julian, Roman calendar, December was the tenth and last month (the sun’s annual circle of travel completed). In the Julian calendar, accepted with minor adjustments to the present-day, the two most illustrious Caesars were commemorated with the addition of “July” and “August.” Nonetheless, December remained the final month–when Saturn, a kind of Father Time, finished consuming the preceding twelve months.

Late December was a time of rejoicing and celebration in ancient Rome, the Saturnalia (December 17-23) being a time of festivities, gift-giving, and carnival-esque reversal of roles. In this brief rebellion against the regularity of social norms and roles, Romans reveled in a brief period of dis-order: masters, for instance, adopted the role of slaves and served them at table. Yet this brief reversal only served to legitimate the cyclical return of the cosmically-sanctified social order at the winter solstice.

The Greek historian Plutarch (ca. 46-120 C.E.) tells us that the cult of Mithras, an Indo-Iranian god identified with the Sun, was thriving in Rome before the early Christians had attained any significant following. Mithras was soon assimilated into, or syncretically fused with, the cult of Sol Invictus, whose cyclical rebirth, like that of Mithras, was venerated on–December 25. In the Roman iconography of the time, Mithras is often depicted as sharing the offering of a slain bull with Sol Invictus. This date of rebirth, within their imperfect calculation of seasonal cycles, was joyously affirmed as the “(Re)birth of the Unconquerable Sun.”

After the late autumn harvests, the Sun of course would noticeably begin to wane, decreasing in power and duration as Saturn consumed the remaining weeks of the annual cycle. (Saturn also consumed every week; thus, even today, the final day is of course “Saturday.”) The long winter months meant hardship: cold, illness, and sporadic food shortages. But the Roman astronomers, in their crude calculation of the endless, inexorable cycle of Nature’s regenerative return, heralded December 25 as a rebirth. In a sense, Time was merely cyclical, not linear; the celebration of Natalis Invicti was the renewed birth, not of a Christian “messiah,” but of the life-giving forces of Nature itself.

The veneration of the Sun, as the endlessly regenerative source of all life, was of course much older than the early Roman empire. Possibly the first monotheistic ruler, the visionary pharaoh Akhnaten (reigning ca. 1353-1336 B.C.E) abolished all rival gods and celebrated the solar disc Aten as the source of all life and renewed fertility in his poetic “Hymn to the Sun.” (The elderly Freud, in his final book Moses and Monotheism (1938), even maintained, probably inaccurately, that Moses was actually an Egyptian who brought a revised monotheism–more ethnic-nationalist with an exclusive tribal god–to the subjugated Hebrew people.)

The Roman emperor Aurelian, as late as 274 C.E., proclaimed Sol Invictus as his primal state-god. But the cult of the Christians, after having suffered terrible persecution and torture for three centuries, finally attained a decisive triumph when the Emperor Constantine, around 313 C.E., officially announced his own conversion to the rapidly growing Christian creed, and mandated tolerance toward the religion and its followers. Ironically, within decades the newly-sanctified and officially supported Christians began a campaign of persecution against the now-fading Mithraic cult.

What was lost? A sanctified awareness, and daily affirmation, of the endlessly regenerative cycle of life-giving power, originating from the Sun. In that sense, despite the invalid Ptolemaic model of the motions of sun-and-earth, daily experience was grounded in a pre-scientific recognition of human dependence upon the life-giving Sun and its seasonal cycle of fertility and abundant flora and fauna, all of which co-existed interdependently. In short: an ecological consciousness.

Image credit: Mythology.net.

1. “On Festivals and Fasting.” In: Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic (p. 40). Dover Publications. [FacebookTwitterReddit

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Intellectual historian and psychoanalytic anthropologist, William Manson (Ph.D., Columbia) has published numerous scholarly books and papers, and is a longtime contributor to Dissident Voice. Read other articles by William.

Israeli lawmaker tables bill to limit banks raising mortgage rates

FILE PHOTO: The Bank of Israel building is seen in Jerusalem


By Steven Scheer

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The head of Israel's powerful parliamentary finance committee submitted a bill on Monday that would limit banks' ability to raise mortgage rates after central bank interest rate increases.

The Bank of Israel has raised its benchmark interest rate by 3.15 percentage points to 3.25% since April, with more hikes likely. Monthly mortgage repayments have soared by more than 1,000 shekels ($291), with high inflation an additional factor.

"To ease the financial burden, it is proposed that the interest rate set in a housing loan for the purchase of a single apartment used for living not change," Knesset Finance Committee chairman Moshe Gafni's bill said.

"And if it be decided to raise the interest rate at an annual rate exceeding at least 1%, the bank will be allowed to raise the interest rate on the loan at half the rate, and this in order to ease the financial burden placed on the borrowers."

If ratified, the new law would go into effect on the first of the following month, and apply to new loans. Gafni's United Torah Judaism party is in the incoming conservative coalition government of Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu.

The aggressive interest rate increases are aimed at countering inflation that has topped 5%, exacerbating already high costs of living.

Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron has warned lawmakers not to interfere with monetary policy decisions, saying the "magic solutions" they proposed to blunt the impact of interest rate hikes would hurt the weakest sectors of the economy.

He said any legislation to get around the higher rates would create risks for banks.

Netanyahu's presumptive finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, also caused a stir last week when he said his economic strategy would be infused with religious beliefs laid out in the Torah, predicting this would help the country prosper.

The Māui dolphin seafood ban is a rare win for conservationists – but just how significant is it?

Māui dolphin and the New Zealand sea lion are on a countdown to extinction – so why do politicians drag their feet?

The list of victories in marine conservationists’ never-ending struggle to halt the degradation of oceans is very short.

And so the decision of a United States court to place a temporary ban on New Zealand seafood exports from Māui dolphins’ habitat was greeted with first astonishment – taking even litigants Sea Shepherd by surprise – and then celebration.

But the courtroom win was not just a much-needed morale boost: it may be an important milestone in the battle to save other threatened native marine species.

“It is such a big deal,” says Liz Slooten, of Otago University’s zoology department. “This is probably the biggest thing that’s happened for Māui and Hector's dolphin conservation in decades.”

READ MORE:
* Only 54 Māui dolphins remain, leaked Department of Conservation report shows

* DoC faces questions over ‘hidden’ Hector’s catch

* How New Zealand's 63 Māui dolphins hold the key to a $263m export market

“To my knowledge, this is the first time that a major trading partner said to New Zealand: we're happy to buy your products, but only if your environmental standard’s the same as ours. And won't be the last time.”

Ever since we have known about them, Māui dolphins have been in peril.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
Māui dolphins, swimming between Port Waikato and the entrance to the Manukau harbour.

In 2002, the North Island Hector's dolphin was re-classified as a separate subspecies. Giving them their new official name: Cephalrynchus hectori maui, then-conservation minister Chris Carter warned there were perhaps only 100-150 still alive “making them as rare as the kākāpō”.

Their discovery sparked a long, futile battle to stop the species teetering into extinction. And the nocturnal, flightless parrot has fared much better: an intensive recovery and breeding programme had already started to show results when Carter made the comparison.

Two decades later, the kākāpō population now sits at 252. Māui went the other way – the population has crashed to about 50, collateral damage in our insatiable drive for economic growth.

Commercial set nets (or gill nets) are deemed to be the main human activity that threatens their survival as they roam shallow coastal areas and forage in harbours and estuaries along the West Coast of the North Island. (There are other possible threats – pollution, littering and a parasite found in cat poo).

It’s a gruesome death for a winsome, gentle creature. When a dolphin swims into a fishing net, often invisible in murky waters, it becomes entangled. Its lungs are small, roughly the same size as humans’, and within minutes it begins to suffocate.

Desperate to avoid drowning, it thrashes and struggles, breaking teeth or fins. The nets cut into its flesh.

BRUCE MERCER/WAIKATO TIMES
Twenty years ago, comparisons were drawn between the plight of the kākāpō and Māui dolphin. But the parrot population now outstrips that of the tiny marine mammal.

Over the years, successive governments have implemented plans to protect Māui, now recognised as the world’s rarest dolphin. Many marine conservationists agree these measures – mainly restrictions on commercial fishing – are half-hearted.

Deeply frustrated, Sea Shepherd began looking for other avenues. Direct action – the campaigns they are famous for – wasn’t an option in domestic waters, where authorities could arrest protesters and impound vessels.

Onshore, efforts were thwarted at every turn by a well-connected and politically savvy fishing industry, and a complex debate about a property right in fisheries for Māori, which is entrenched in law.

“It's very, very hard to get any more protection for marine life in New Zealand,” says Michael Lawry, managing director of Sea Shepherd New Zealand. So campaigners looked overseas, learning of legal action taken by conservation groups against the Trump administration.

In 2018, activists secured a ban in the US courts on seafood imports from Mexico caught with gill nets that were wiping out the critically endangered vaquita porpoise. With just 15 left, almost half the population drowned each year.

Inspired, Sea Shepherd took on the might of the US Government, with a lawsuit against the Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, NOAA Fisheries, and the Treasury Department. Jacinda Ardern’s Government joined the US defendants in fighting the case.

The marine conservationists petitioned the US Court of International Trade, adopting a similar argument: that New Zealand is not applying protections equal to those in place in US waters for critically endangered marine mammals.

They got lucky: the New York-based judge assigned to the case, Gary Katzmann, also oversaw the vaquita porpoise proceedings. Three years later, he granted a preliminary order immediately banning the import of snapper, tarakihi, spotted dogfish, trevally, warehou, hoki, barracouta, mullet, and gurnard caught in the dolphin habitat. In a ruling totalling more than 70 pages, he said the case is “likely to succeed”. It could take months to come back before the court. The ban could cost up to $2m a year in exports.

Lawry says the decision sends a strong signal that stronger regulatory control is needed. But the $4bn industry was quick to dismiss the ruling as procedural.

STUFF
With only 10-15 vaquita porpoise left, there’s a sad probability they’ll disappear in our lifetime.

Jeremy Helson​, chief executive of Seafood New Zealand, said: “Any assertion that this ruling in any way is a criticism of the Ministry for Primary Industries risk management decisions around Māui dolphins is not reflected in the court documents. The court has yet to issue its ruling on the substantive issues of the case.”

Teall Crossen​, an environmental barrister, doesn’t agree. She says the judge’s opinion was engaged on the substance of the case.

That comes down to how the two countries deal with the human-caused deaths of marine mammals.

The US has a zero mortality goal – and imposes strict requirements if the number of those deaths start to have an impact on the sustainability of a population.


BRADEN FASTIER/NELSON MAIL
McDonald’s in the US buys a lot of hoki, the main ingredient of its fish sandwich.

In New Zealand, any action is at ministerial discretion. The Government also chooses to use the Fisheries Act to make decisions about restrictions – not the stronger Marine Mammals Protection Act.

“Basically, the US law says you have to do something ... in New Zealand, it’s quite extraordinary that there’s no legal requirement,” Crossen says.

“If you want to protect marine mammals you have the ability [under the Marine Mammals Protection Act] to prohibit activities, and you can only do that if it's reasonable. When you’ve got 50 or 60 dolphins left, that would be reasonable. Under the Fisheries Act that you have to balance it with the utilisation of the fisheries resources. It gives them an escape clause.”

Crossen says the case may do significant harm to New Zealand’s international reputation.

“It exposes that the Government is not doing everything it can to protect one of the world’s rarest marine animals. It does seem that the US law is stronger.”

Slooten, who has been studying Hector’s dolphins since 1984 and was an expert witness in the case, says other countries are starting to take notice of where their fish comes from.

It is likely the US will require a traceability programme – and if New Zealand cannot prove where fish are caught, that could cost upwards of $200m worth of exports.

The European Union – one of the world’s largest markets for seafood – already has strict rules about product tracking and in recent years has taken a firm line on countries it believes are failing to deal with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

International environmental organisations are now putting pressure on the trading bloc to ensure that imported products are not contributing to the depletion of endangered species, such as sea turtles.

Slooten says the International Whaling Commission has already judged New Zealand’s measures inadequate, and has asked independent experts to review the model it is based on.

“To be blunt, the fishing industry don't seem to care very much for the dolphins, but they do care about dollars. Finally, someone has thought of an incentive that will get them to pull their finger out and solve this problem.”

But the industry disagrees that fishing is the problem – and says restrictions are working. Helson says vessel camera monitoring in the last two years “has seen no Māui or Hector’s dolphins at all, let alone any captures”.

Sanford chief executive Peter Reidie says his company – the country’s largest – withdrew from Māui habitat in 2016 “to avoid fishing where these beautiful creatures might be”. The company also supports a drone tracking programme.

He says remaining crews have changed their fishing methods.

“All this good work might be overshadowed by an attack via the courts by an organisation that has not been in touch with us as fishers to understand all the measures we have in place to keep all dolphins, but particularly Māui, safe from any risk presented by fishing.”

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
Could court action in the US extend to other threatened species – such as the New Zealand sea lion?

Buoyed by the win, advocates are already eyeing the decision with a view to future action. Lawry says Sea Shepherd believes there is scope for a similar case involving the plight of the NZ sea lion, or rāpoka, the world’s rarest.

With only 12,000 left, the commercial squid trawl fishery overlaps with foraging territory of the sea lions which breed at the Auckland Islands, and has led to the accidental capture in fishing gear. In 2019, Sanford voluntarily pulled all of its fishing vessels after catching five in the first eight weeks of the season.

Leatherback turtles are also captured in the surface longline fishery off the east coast of the North Island, and activists are also hoping a door may open for New Zealand’s imperilled seabirds – four native penguin species are already on its endangered species list.

The Antipodean albatross, likely extinct within 2-3 decades is also a casualty of the huge US tuna market.

Dec 12 2022

Japan picks 'war' as kanji character of the year

Agence France-Presse
December 12, 2022

The character is chosen in an annual event © STR / JIJI PRESS/AFP

Japan chose the kanji character for war on Monday as the symbol for 2022 after a year marked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the assassination of former leader Shinzo Abe.

The public votes in the annual event for the written character they think best represents the past year. Olympic-themed choices dominated 2021.

The mood was darker this year, however, according to the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, which organises the vote.

"The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the shooting of former Prime Minister Abe, and the rapid yen depreciation and inflation faced in daily life have caused anxiety for many people," the group said in a news release.

Japanese TV stations broadcast the announcement live, with Seihan Mori, master of the ancient Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto, writing the character on a large white panel with an ink-soaked calligraphy brush.

"I was surprised, frustrated, angry and sad by the war in Ukraine. I am also angry at myself for not being able to do anything about it," said one voter who picked the character.

Abe was shot in July by a man who reportedly resented the Unification Church over massive donations his mother made to the sect.

War -- also picked to represent sporting battles in baseball and at the World Cup -- was followed in the rankings by a character meaning both cheap and safe, with the weak yen and inflation adding to feelings of insecurity.

The character for fun and easy was ranked third, with one voter citing the opening of the Studio Ghibli theme park.

Japan chose "gold" as kanji of the year last year in honour of the Tokyo Olympics, which took place after a Covid-19 virus postponement.

The 2020 winner was "mitsu", meaning dense, crowded and close: three situations people in Japan were urged to avoid to prevent Covid-19 infection.

© 2022 AFP

France bets on tech and transparency to beat Chinese caviar

Agence France-Presse

France wants its caviar to become the gold standard 

At the fish farm near Bordeaux, Christophe Baudoin is running an ultrasound device over the belly of a large sturgeon to check its eggs.

"Caviar!" he shouts as the monitor shows the right sparkle around each little round ball.

"Over-mature!" comes the next shout, indicating the fish's pregnancy cycle has gone too far and the eggs have softened -- losing the crucial crunch. It will go back in the lake to await another cycle in two years.

For the company, Sturia, it's an incredibly laborious process -- they ultrasound some 20,000 fish a year for a total of 300 tonnes of caviar -- but climate change has made it vital.

Many fish are coming out "over-mature", in part because warmer waters have accelerated the pregnancy cycle.

For the guys standing in the water, scooping up the huge fish for inspection, the winter days when 10 centimeters (four inches) of ice coated the lakes are not entirely missed.

But the change is still shocking.

"It's been 10 years since we've seen any ice on these lakes," said Baudoin.

One in five of the fish died in 2021 when water temperatures hit 30 degrees, five degrees above a sturgeon's comfort zone.

"You might not know each one by name, but it's never nice to pull out a dead fish -- and of course the cost for the group is enormous," said Sturia boss Laurent Dulau.

Extinction threat

Fished to the brink of extinction in the wild -- including the once-rich Russian and Iranian waters of the Caspian Sea -- sturgeon now exist almost exclusively in farms, most of them in China.

Sturgeon were fished in France's Gironde river for centuries, but their eggs were given to children, old people and pigs until Russian nobles fleeing the Communist revolution a century ago showed locals their potential.

It became a delicacy in Paris after Armenian emigrants Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian convinced the Ritz Hotel in Paris to serve caviar in the 1920s.

Farming only started in France in the 1990s, and since it takes up to a decade to raise a sturgeon, progress is painstaking.

Unable to compete with China on quantity, French producers focus on sustainable and healthy farming.

The ultrasound avoids unnecessary killing and Sturia sends the meat to be used for rillettes pate, the collagen-rich gonads for cosmetics, and the skin for leather and a specialist glue favoured by violin-makers.

'Produce better'

Dulau said the focus on traceability and quality is rebuilding caviar's image after the over-fishing crisis.

"The idea is to produce less, but produce better," he said. "People will eat less because it's a lot more expensive, but it will be so good that they'll be satisfied."

But Michel Berthommier, of nearby Caviar Perlita, is frustrated that "nine out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10" French restaurants still source from China. He blamed middle-men for preferring the mark-up on foreign eggs.

"It's bizarre at a time when restaurants are always saying they source their products locally. We sell more to Singapore than restaurants 10 kilometers down the road," he said.

But he said the transparency of French production will win over buyers.

"There used to be a mystery around how these fish were raised and harvested. We have opened our books on how our fish live, how they are fed and selected.

"We can't be number one in production, but we can lead the way in creativity and science."