Infinitys Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate, and Globalization

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Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried. The large biometric sensor contains a small near infra red light emitter. This is absorbed by the blood in the veins and arteries of the hand which produces an image of the pattern of veins in the hand. Converted into a data file of polar co-ordinates this generates a numerical template for each user. The Scotsman further reports that "Those behind the scheme now want to roll it out across Scotland and say it could be used to allow pupils to get in and out of school, register their attendance and take out library books.

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It also helps protects the identity of children who are entitled to free school meals and stops bullying to steal dinner money, say other supporters. What is certain is Got to the Scotsman news story and read the thankfully, very lively and informed debate on the topic and the way that it prepares a nascent generation for even more technologically based social control. Kent Schools Mio. Tainter argued that complexity is the key to understanding the vulnerabilities inherent to any society or civilization. Because survival involves cumulative problem-solving, each new solution brings a new level of social organization and complexity innovated to solve extant problem, which however brings its own set of new problems.

As new solutions are found, new layers of complexity are required. But each extra organizational layer exacts a price, whether it involves building canals or roads, or educating scribes, or innovating agricultural techniques. Each layer imposes a cost in terms of energy, a cost that increases as social organization grows more complex in its attempt to support more people, resources, information and management to solve a wider diversity of problems.

Thus, as civilization evolves, not only does it use up more energy, it becomes more complex in its organization and corresponding problems and loses efficiency. At that critical point, resources are insufficient to deal with stresses to the system, be they environmental problems, war, or rebellion, leading to the breakdown of overstretched institutions and the collapse of civil order. The collapse of the Western Roman empire, for instance, did not occur over decades through a single protracted collapse-process, but rather consisted of a series of crises over a period of centuries.

Each crisis led to the establishment of temporary stability at a less complex level of social organization. Each such level in turn proved to be unsustainable, and was followed by a further crisis and reduction of complexity.

The first major breakdown in the Roman imperial system came in CE, and further crises followed until the empire ceased to exist in CE. Following Tainter, and applying the insights of ecologist Crawford Holling, he argues that as civilizations are complex adaptive systems, they pass through cycles of growth, collapse, regeneration, and growth again.

Also, focusing on the example of the Roman empire, he argues that its expansion depended on its ability to extract agrarian energy surpluses from its peripheries, enabling the development of increasing organizational complexity in the core. Eventually, the complexity of the centre could not be maintained without instituting an even more draconian taxation regime, requiring more intrusive military policing.

These stresses are multiplied by two factors — the increased connectivity of the global economy and the heightened capacity of small groups to carry out acts of destruction. Homer-Dixon is thus deeply positive about the prospects for civilizational renewal. In this context, global crises are not simply symptoms of global system failure — they are simultaneously symptoms of civilizational transition.

Yet this approach is not free from theoretical and empirical problems. While he clearly recognizes that these stresses are generated by the global system itself, he does not systematically explore how and why this is the case. Yet this approach leaves out the fundamental question of specific military, political, economic, and ideological sub- systems of the global system, and the manner in which these interlocking sub-systems are structured in such a way as to generate intensifying global systemic crises.

Thus, Homer- Dixon is unable to identify the specific social-structural transformations required to create an alternative civilizational system capable of overcoming such crisis tendencies. We are left with the impression that complexity itself is the problem — that a simplification of our societies is the only solution.

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Capitalizing Contemporary Complexity Indeed, missing from most of complex adaptive systems theorists is recognition of the internal socio-political structure of civilization, as a hierarchical class-based order. Homer- Dixon, for instance, misunderstands the historically specific dynamics of the neoliberal capitalist global political economy, which are fundamentally different from the feudal tributary dynamics of growth and decline exhibited by past empires such as that of Rome.

Yet he makes no attempt to identify the distinctive socio-political relations — especially class, property and production relations — by which contemporary capitalism is constituted. Instead of acting like a smoothly functioning and predictable machine This is what happened in East Asia in mid, when a self-reinforcing feedback of investment, profit, consumption and more investment flipped overnight to a vicious circle of falling investment, failing banks and crashing consumer demand.

But his account of the Asian financial crisis is precisely what did not happen. The latter acted strategically to deliberately hype local shares, purchasing them in bulk and thus escalating their prices, then collectively selling them to local investors at their highest prices, thus reaping massive profits while leaving local share prices to plummet.

Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization

It is a very specific social form — originating in England in the sixteenth century and evolving since then — with its own peculiar dynamic, discontinuous from previous socio-economic systems which were largely tributary, sedentary, or nomadic. The central role of class in delineating the conflicting interests of different social groups in relation to the distribution of resources is underplayed.

Indeed, all the civilizations studied by Tainter and Homer-Dixon, among others, were deeply unequal class societies. Their over-exploitation of the natural environment was intimately linked with the unequal relationships of different classes to the materials and technologies of production. Consequently, they ignore the role of privileged classes in accelerating collapse by their unwillingness or inability to pursue wider social goods in lieu of their own narrow class interest. Ultimately, the sustainability of human communities and societies is predicated on the means by which they extract resources from the natural environment to produce food, clothes, energy and other products for consumption.

This transformation is effected by the exploitation of nature through labour to produce goods for social consumption. But this transformative exploitation of nature in turn correspondingly transforms human life. There is, in other words, a dynamic interrelationship between the structures of society and the way in which society exploits nature through labour and production.

It feeds back on language and even on human biology, with major transformations in way of life accompanied by changes in physical stature, diseases, immunology, rate of sexual maturation, demography and sensory perception. The first capitalist system, they show, was formed in England in the s. In other words, pre-capitalist social systems were largely defined by the access of peasant producers to their means of subsistence, in this case, productive land for agricultural or pastoral use.

There were, of course, wide and significant variations in the shapes that pre-capitalist systems took in different regions of the world. But their common feature was essentially that producers lived off the land, and ruling classes used force to compel them to pay tribute. In England, peasants were forced by local lords under feudalism , and later by the Crown under absolutism , to pay a percentage of their produce in the form of a tax or rent.

Lords did not exercise a direct claim to the land as such, which formally belonged to the peasant producers who inhabited and worked it.

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But they exploited their control over the means of violence to extract their tribute from peasants in their localities. Under pre-capitalist systems, there was little incentive to invest in improving the means of production. This situation changed with the mid sixteenth century rural enclosure movement. Faced with a variety of eco-demographic social crises due to the plague, lords faced increasing difficulties in extracting tribute from peasant producers, particularly due to lower rents and escalating peasant rebellions.

They responded to these crises by adjusting their claims, with Crown approval. Rather than demanding tribute, they began to claim legal ownership of the land itself, and exercised violence to force the peasants off the land. As this process intensified, greater numbers of peasants were expelled from the countryside. They no longer had access to their own means of subsistence and were homeless, leading them to seek out shelter in the towns and cities. As rural populations thus declined, the urban population swelled. Enclosure created a historically novel social condition.

Peasants were now dispossessed from the land, and had no means of subsistence — except to sell their labour power to those who now exerted control over that land. In other words, a quite unpredictable transformation in the relations of production was effected by the response of lords to crises in the tributary system. Thus, a new class of wage labourer began to emerge in England, where dispossessed peasants were compelled by their changed circumstances to work for others who now owned the means of production.

While the new wage labourers were politically free and equal, they were also economically subjugated by their condition of dispossession. These new social relations were the basis of capitalism, and they generated an unprecedented dynamic. Those who owned the means of production, in this case capitalist landowners, could now maximize their profits by lowering wages.

The lower the wages paid to the new wage labourers who worked their land, the greater the profits they could acquire. Profits could also be enhanced by producing larger quantities of better quality or apparently better quality goods. The better the produce, the larger the quantity, and the better value for money, the more likely it would outsell competitors on the market.

Capitalists whose workers produced poor quality goods at higher cost would inevitably have difficulty in the market compared to those whose workers produced more efficiently, at lower cost, at greater speeds, and with higher quality results. So capitalist social relations also transformed the very logic of the market, which was now driven by competition between rival capitalists.

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