Maximising of one-dimensional output is an economic imperative

The low productivity of diverse, multi-dimensional systems and the high productivity of uniform, one-dimensional systems of agriculture, forestry and livestock is therefore not a neutral, scientific measure but is biased towards the commercial interests for whom maximising of one-dimensional output is an economic imperative.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p.140

The reductionism of scientific forestry

'Scientific forestry' was the false universalization of a local tradition of forestry which emerged from the narrow commercial interests whcih viewed the forest only in terms of commercially valuable wood. It first reduced the value of diversity of life in the forest to the value of a few commercially valuable species, and further reduced the value of these species to the value of their dead product – wood. The reductionism of the scientific forestry paradigm created by commercial industrial interests violates both the integrity of the forests and the integrity of forest cultures who need the forests in its diversity to satisfy their needs for food, fibre and shelter.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p. 18

Work should not be glorified

The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward. The epiteths thrown at homeless beggars, the demonization of those on the dole, the labyrinthine system of bureaucracy set up to receive benefits, the unpaid 'job experience' imposed upon the unemployed, the sadistic penalisation of those who are seen as getting something for free – all reveal the truth that for our societites, remuneration requires work and suffering. Whether for a religious or secular goal, suffering is thought to constitute a necessary rite of passage. People must endure through work before they can receive wages, they must prove their worthiness before the eyes of capital. This thinking has an obvious theological basis – where suffering is thought to be not only meaningful, but in fact the very condition of meaning. A life without suffering is seen as frivolous and meaningless. This position must be rejected as a holdover from a now-transcended stage of human history. The drive to make suffering meaningful may have had some functional logic in times when poverty, illness and starvation were necessary features of existence. But we should reject this logic today and recognise that we have moved beyond the need to ground meaning in suffering. Work, and the suffering that accompanies it, should not be glorified.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 125

The history of capitalism is the history of the world's population being transformed into proletarian existence

While work is common to every society, under capitalism it takes on historically unique qualities. In pre-capitalist societies, work was necessary, but people had shared access to land, subsistence farming and the necessary means of survival. Peasants were poor but self-sufficient, and survival was not dependent on working for someone else. Capitalism changed all this. Through the process called primitive accumulation, pre-capitalist workers were uprooted from their land and dispossessed of their means of subsistence. Peasants struggled against this and continued to survive on the margins of the emerging capitalist world, and it eventually took violent force and harsh new legal systems to impose wage labour on the population. Peasants, in other words, had to be made into a proletariat. This new figure of the proletariat was defined by its lack of access to the means of production or subsistence, and its requirement for wage labour in order to survive. This means that the 'proletariat' is not just the 'working class' nor is it defined by an income level, profession of culture. Rather, the proletariat is simply that group of people who must sell their labour power to live – whether they are employed or not.. And the history of capitalism is the history of the world's population being transformed into proletarian existence through the advancing dispossession of the peasantry.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 86-87

Emancipation is not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, 'synthetic freedom' recognises that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless. Under a democracy, for example, we are all formally free to run for political leadership. But without the financial and social resources to run a campaign, this is a meaningless freedom. Equally, we are all formally free to not take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer. In either case, various options may be theoretically available, but for all practical purposes are off the table. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom. As Marx and Engels wrote, 'it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means'. Understood in this way freedom and power become intertwined. If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons. Achieving this involves at least three different elements: the provision of the basic necessities of life, the expansion of social resources, and the development of technological capacities. Taken together, these form a synthetic freedom that is constructed rather than natural, a collective historical achievement rather than the result of simply leaving people be. Emancipation is thus not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul, but instead a matter of constructing and cultivating the right attachments.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 79-80

A conspiracy of the rich

What sort of justice is it when some aristocrat, goldsmith, moneylender or, for that matter, any such individual who either does nothing at all or else something quite remote from the real needs of the commonwealth, enjoys a life of luxury and elegance thanks to his idleness or his inessential services, while at the same time a labourer, a wagoner, an artisan or farm-worker sweats so hard and so long that a beast of burden could scarcely bear it, and at work so essential that no commonwealth could survive for a year without it; yet they earn such pathetic recompense and live such wretched lives that the condition of beasts actually seems preferable, since beasts don't have to toil without a break and their food is scarcely worse – in fact, to them it's more tasty – nor of they fret about the future. But men like these are compelled for the present to labour that brings scant reward, and are haunted by the prospect of a penniless old age, for their daily wage is so far from meeting their current needs that there's no chance of any surplus being put aside that they might rely on when they're old.

Now isn't it an inequitable and selfish society where such rewards are lavished on the nobility (as they're called), and on goldsmiths and others of that sort, who are either parasites, or flatterers, or purveyors of idle pleasures? And where, by contrast, no decent provision is made for farm-workers, or colliers, or labourers, or carters or artisans, without whom the commonwealth couldn't even function? When their best years have been used up in drudgery, when they are word down by age and sickness and are quite destitute, an ungrateful society, disregarding their long hours of work and the extent of their services, repays them with a wretched death. But there's more: the rich are forever fleecing the poor of some of their daily pittance, not only by private fraud but even by official legislation. In this way what initially seemed an injustice, namely that those who deserved most from the commonwealth received least, has now been converted from an abuse into an act of justice by the passing of a law. So when I survey and assess all the different political systems flourishing today, nothing else presents itself – God help me – but a conspiracy of the rich, who look after their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth. They plot and contrive schemes and devices by which, for a start, they can cling on to whatever they have already accumulated by shady means without any fear of losing it, and then take advantage of the poor by acquiring their works and their labour at the lowest possible cost. Once the rich, in the name of the community (and that, of course, includes the poor), have decreed that these fraudulent practices are to be observed, they become laws.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 119-120

When money is the measure of all things

When money is the measure of all things, futile and unnecessary trades are bound to be practiced, just to meet the demands of luxury and indulgence.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 65-66

Urban life and class struggle

The collective labor involved in the production and reproduction of urban life must therefore become more tightly folded into left thinking and organizing. Earlier distinctions that made sense – between the urban and the rural, the city and the country – have in recent times also become moot. The chain of supply both into and out of the cities entails a continuous movement, and does not entail a break. Above all, the concepts of work and of class have to be fundamentally reformulated. The struggle for collective citizens' rights (such as those of immigrant workers) has to be seen as integral to anti-capitalist class struggle.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) p. 139

Capitalism cannot do without monopoly powers

Plainly, the economic space of competition has changed in both form and scale over time. The recent bout of globalization has significantly diminished the monopoly protections given historically by high transport and communications costs, while the removal of institutional barriers to trade (protectionism) has likewise diminished the monopoly rents to be procured by keeping foreign competition out. But capitalism cannot do without monopoly powers, and craves means to assemble them. So the question upon the agenda is how to assemble monopoly powers in a situation where the protections afforded by the so-called "natural monopolies" of space and location, and the political protections of national boundaries and tariffs, have been seriously diminished, if not eliminated.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) pp. 95-96

The monopoly power of private property

All rent, recall, is a return to the monopoly power of private ownership of some crucial asset, such as land or a patent. The monopoly power of private property is therefore both the beginning-point and the end-point of all capitalist activity. A non-tradable juridical right exists at the very foundation of all capitalist trade, making the option of non-trading (hoarding, withholding, miserly behavior) an important problem in capitalist markets. Pure market competition, free commodity exchange, and perfect market rationality are therefore rather rare and chronically unstable devices for coordinating production and consumption decisions. The problem is to keep economic relations competitive enough while sustaining the individual and class monopoly privileges of private property that are the foundation of capitalism as a political-economic system.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) p. 94

Pure commodification erases monopoly advantages

The bland homogeneity that goes with pure commodification erases monopoly advantages; cultural products become no different from commodities in general.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) pp. 92-93

Capitalist urbanization destroys the city

Capitalist urbanization perpetually tends to destroy the city as a social, political and livable commons.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) p. 80

Pseudocommunity and collective isolation

Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most effective field of operation. The efforts of all the established powers since the French Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally culminated in the suppression of the street itself. Describing what he terms "a one-way system," Lewis Mumford points out that "with the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control" (The City in History). But the general trend toward isolation, which is the underlying essence of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consumption. This reintegration into the system means bringing isolated individuals together as isolated individuals. Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts and housing developments are specifically designed to foster this kind of pseudocommunity. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the ruling images – images that derive their full pwer precisely from that isolation.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 123-124

An intrahistorical rejection of history

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is brought under the sway of this time's development. But this history that us everywhere simultaneously the same is as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production, time cut up into equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and this also to the global spectacle.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 111

The victory of a profoundly historical time

The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement – a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy, history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 109

Fundamentally spectaclist

The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle – the visual reflection of the ruling economic order – goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 35

What is urbanism?

What is urbanism? A superstructure of neocapitalist society, a form of "organizational capitalism," which is not the same as "organized capital" – in other words, a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. Urbanism organizes a sector that appears to be free and accessible, open to rational activity: inhabited space. It controls the consumption of space and the habitat. As superstructure, it must be distinguished from practice, from social relationships, from society itself. [...] It is only from an ideological and institutional point of view, however, that urbanism reveals to critical analysis the illusions that it harbors and that foster its implementation. In this light, urbanism appears as the vehicle for a limited and tendentious rationality in which space, deceptively neutral and apolitical, constitutes an object (objective).

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) pp. 163-164

Modes of using and consuming

What we have finally to say is that we live in a world in which the dominant mode of production and social relationships teaches, impresses, offers to make normal and even rigid, modes of detached, separated, external perception and action: modes of using and consuming rather than accepting and enjoying people and things.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 298

We must make a distinction between technique and mode of production

But we must then also make a distinction between such techniques of production and the mode of production which is their particular social form. We call the technical changes improvement and progress, welcome some of their effects and deplore others, and can feel either numbed or divided; a state of mind in which, again and again, the most abstract and illusory ideas of a natural rural way of life tempt or at least charm us. Or we can fall back on saying that this is the human condition: the irresolvable choice between a necessary materialism and a necessary humanity. Often we try to resolve it by dividing work and leisure, or society and the individual, or city and country, not only in our minds but in suburbs and garden cities, town houses and country cottages, the week and the weekend. But we then usually find that the directors of the improvements, the captains of the change, have arrived earlier and settled deeper; have made, in fact, a more successful self-division. [...] An immensely productive capitalism, in all its stages, has extended both the resources and the modes which however unevenly, provide and contain forms of response to its effects.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) pp. 293-294

The complaints of change

It is useful, for example, to see three main periods of rural complaint in which a happier past is explicitly evoked: the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth; the late nineteenth and early twentieth. And it is clear enough that each of these corresponds to a period of exceptional change in the rural economy, which we find directly reflected in varying ways. But it is not only that each of these reflections comes to include other social and metaphysical ideas. It is also that the convention of the country as a settled way of life disturbed by unwanted and external change has been complicated, in our own century, by very similar ideas about towns and cities. The complaints of rural change might come from threatened small proprietors, or from commoners, or even, in the twentieth century, from a class of landlords, but it is fascinating to hear some of the same phrases – destruction of a local community, the driving out of small men, indifference to settled and customary ways – in the innumerable campaigns about the effects of redevelopment, urban planning, airport and motorway systems, in so many twentieth-century towns and even, very strongly, in parts of London. I have heard a defence of Covent Garden, against plans for development, which repeated in almost every particular the defence of the commons in the period of parliamentary enclosures. Clearly ideas of the country and the city have specific contents and histories, but just as clearly, at times, they are forms of isolation and identification of more general processes. People have often said 'the city' when they meant capitalism or bureaucracy or centralised power, while 'the country', as we have seen, has at times meant everything from independence to deprivation, and from the powers of an active imagination to a form of release from consciousness.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 291