Capitalist Technology and
«The Poverty of Power» by Dick Roberts The debate over nuclear energy has now become a burning question throughout the world. Important mobilizations in Europe (especially in Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, West Germany, and France), North America, and Japan have taken place against the construction or expansion of atomic power plants. The question of nuclear power was at the center of the election campaign in Sweden. Within the workers movement it is stimulating a heated discussion in which the reformist workers parties have for the most part finally taken a position favoring the immediate construction of atomic power plants. In France, for instance, on the eve of a possible accession to government of the Union of the Left, the Socialist and Communist parties have announced their intention to continue the nuclear program, while modifying its pace and the modalities of its application. The stakes are thus extremely high. A book on this subject, entitled The Poverty of Power, by Barry Commoner (Knopf, New York, 1976), has recently been published in the United States. This work presents a powerful case against the development of nuclear energy. In his analysis Commoner, who is an international scientific authority, uncovers the links between this problem and the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. In the article below, which we have taken from the July 1977 issue of the International Socialist Review, monthly supplement to the American revolutionary Marxist weekly, The Militant, which reflects the views of the Socialist Workers Party, Dick Roberts analyzes this important work by Commoner. Roberts is co-editor of the Infemational Socialist Review and a member of the National Committee of the SWP. he demonstrations against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, in May spotlighted the rise of a movement in this country that is already well advanced abroad - in Japan, Western Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. The featured speaker at the rally of more than 1,300 protesters in Seabrook was Dr. Helen Caldecott, a pediatrician who is a leader of the Australian struggle. Caldecott underlined the international character of the movement. "This doesn't just involve Seabrook, "she said, "it involves the whole world. ... Your president Jimmy Carter doesn't have a moral leg to stand on unless this country stops nuclear power now...." Caldecott also reviewed the known medical effects of radioactive pollution. It is, she said, "absurd to spend millions of dollars seeking a cure for leukemia, cystic fibrosis, and cancer and then invest billions in an industry that propagates those diseases - that is insanity. " Yet precisely this insanity is a key plank of President Carter's energy program, according to Barry Commoner, who analyzed the details of the "National Energy Plan" in the May 29 Washington Post. A close reading of the 103-page White House proposal, says Commoner, shows that the plan "mandates the massive introduction of liaht water nuclear reactors (the type projected for Seabrook - D.R.) at a rate far exceeding the pace achieved in the last few years. ... By the turn of the century, nuclear power plants would generate a major part of the nation's power, and since we would then heavily depend on electricity, there would be no choice but to continue the nuclear fission system. " While President Carter's program is widely believed to oppose further development of breeder reactors, potentially the most dangerous type of nuclear power generators, Commoner emphasizes that the logic of these proposals points toward breeder development. "With uranium supplies depleting and rapidly rising in price, it would then be necessary to extend the supply of fissionable fuels - by adding breeders to the system. " Commoner underlines that the actual wording of the White House document states that "the President has proposed to reduce the funding for the existing breeder program, and to redirect it toward evaluation of alternative breeders, advanced converter reactors and other fuel cycles. " The chilling meaning of these lines is reinforced by a quotation from Commoner's recent book, The Poverty of Power.
"If the nuclear-power program is based on the breeder according to current projection of power production it will eventually involve about 130 million pounds of plutonium. If only one millionth of this material were to escape into the environment as it circulated through the intricate steps of the 'plutonium economy,' some 78,000 cases of cancer would result, or about 1600 per year. If four/ten-thousandths of the material were lost to the environment, 600,000 cancers per year might result. " Commoner states in his Washington Post article that Carter's "plan would commit the country, without its consent, to an ominous nuclear future. ... The answer is to begin an open public debate on these, the real issues of the energy crisis. " This debate concerns not only the pros and cons of various forms of energy but also the character of the capitalist system itself, which imposes on society dangerous and irrational means of energy production. Nuclear power The Poverty of Power is a handbook for this debate. The author, Barry Commoner, is a director of the Scientists' Institute for Public Information (SIPI), which publishes the magazine Environment. He was an initiator of the St. Louis Committee for Environmental Information. He is also the author of The Closing Circle and Science and Survival. The Poverty of Power presents a powerful indictment of the capitalist system: "It may be time, " Commoner writes, "to view the faults of the U.S. capitalist economic system from the vantage point of a socialist alternative - to debate the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. " While Commoner's answers to the crisis caused by capitalism's wasteful use of energy resources and escalating destruction of the environment have flaws, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, the boldness with which he poses important and difficult questions is a major contribution to the discussion of these issues. Commoner documents case after case of the profit-motivated destruction of useful natural resources and the parallel development of agricultural, transportation, and industrial methods that are irrational when measured in terms of social benefit rather than profits. The case of nuclear power is the most glaring. Not only does it involve enormous expenditures and horrendous risks, but the federal government has buried nuclear technology in secrecy and blocked public discussion and debate of the program at every step. According to Commoner, estimates by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the American Physical Society concluded that an accident at a nuclear plant killing about 50,000 people had a 1-in-100,000 chance of happening. What does such a probability mean? Experts have recently calculated that the collision of two 747s that took place in the Canary Islands had a similar probability of occuring. In the Canary Islands disaster fewer than 600 people were killed. A nuclear power catastrophe would kill as many as a hundred times that amount. Commoner estimates that the costs of nuclear power production are rising more rapidly than those of coal production and that by 1986 the cost of electricity from nuclear reactors will rise above that of coal-fired plants. Nuclear power, consequently, is hazardous and costly, but the reserves of natural gas, oil, and coal are finite. Moreover, the production of power from these sources - especially coal - is environmentally destructive and dangerous to health. Commoner opts for solar power, an energy source that is safe and inexhaustible. But Washington is trying to suppress the development of solar power. Most revealing is a report of the Atomic Energy Commission's "Solar Subpanel (IX)" that came to light only because Commoner, with the help of Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, pressured the government to release it. Commoner reports, "If the various solar technologies were developed according to the subpanel's recommendation for 'an accelerated orderly program having a high probability of success' at a cost of $1 billion, they would contribute a total of 21 percent of the nation's electrical demand, or about 5.5 percent of the total energy budget, in the year 2000. " But no such government allocations are being made. Commoner states in his Washington Post analysis of Carter's energy program that "research on alternative breeders .. • would, like the present development of the plutonium breeder, be so expensive as to preclude all but minor research on other energy systems. " Energy efficiency Part of Commoner's argument against the capitalist misuse of energy is his assertion - well buttressed by facts - that it is inefficient. He argues that the first and second laws of thermodynamics raise two concepts that ought to be applied to all energy usage. According to the first law, the energy of the universe can neither be created nor destroyed. It is essentially constant. When energy is used for a specific purpose - for example, heating a house - the total amount of energy is conserved - although it doesn't all end up being used for the given purpose. Energy efficiency, according to this law, is measured by "the ratio of the amount of heat delivered to the rooms to the amount that is generated when the oil is burned. Commoner stresses the implications of the second law of thermodynamics, according to which the amount of energy in the universe that is dissipated as heat, and thus no longer available to do work, is constantly increasing. The amount of useful energy is constantly decreasing.
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POVERTY OF POWER Measurement of efficiency in terms of this law, says Commoner, is based on the recognition "that energy in itself has no value unless it can be used to produce work by flowing from one place to another, that every human activity, such as heating a home, requires work; that the value of energy is measured by the work it can do; and that the efficiency with which energy is used ought to be measured by how closely the amount of available work used to accomplish a task corresponds to the minimum amount that the task requires." An « oil shortage »? Commoner makes a powerful case that current energy sources are used in inefficient and unnecessary, as well as ecologically destructive ways. His argument for the large-scale development of solar power is convincing. Unfortunately, Commoner advances this idea within a framework that concedes too much to the concepts now being advanced by the energy monopolies and their propagandists. He accepts the claim that U.S. capitalism is now seeking "energy self-sufficiency" and implictly agrees that this is a desirable goal. Thus he points to "the sharp decline in the rate of domestic oil production that made the country dependent on foreign oil and set the scene for the 1973 oil crisis and the ensuing economic difficulties." Taking a closer look, Commoner stresses that the reason for the sharp decline in the rate of domestic oil production over the last two decades was the profitability of the oil trust's operations abroad. "Despite confusing disagreements among oil geologists, it is now clear that, in round numbers, some 350 billion barrels of domestic crude oil are available to us. (This consists of the existing reserve of 35 billion barrels plus about 320 billion barrels available from anticipated future discoveries.) At the present rate of oil consumption (slightly more than six billion barrels per year), this amount would take care of the total national demand for oil, without any imports, for a period of fifty to sixty years" emphasis added). President Carter's energy speech cited a fake CIA report claiming that a disastrous shortage of oil would hit by 1985, less than ten years from now. Propaganda coming from the government and the energy trust is designed to make people believe that there are real and imminent shortages of oil that justify the higher prices that the energy trust demands. Further, Commoner's fifty- to sixty-year supply estimate assumes that no oil will be imported. In reality, the United States is today importing more than 40 percent of its petroTeum. The energy barons pretend to be opposed to imports in order to justify their attempt to raise prices of domestic oil and to whip up sentiment against Arab and other semi-colonial peoples who nationalize their own natural resources. But the oil trust has no intention of ending these imports. Once the oil leaves the Middle East and other nations in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), it 28 is entirely owned and distributed by the giant U.S., British, and Dutch oil cartel (and some lesser competitors), which derives tremendous profits from this operation. The grand scheme of these powerful imperialist interests is to raise oil production and prices, not in order to stop imports of OPEC oil, which are highly profitable to them, but in order to raise their profits on non-OPEC oil sources. If the United States were to continue importing oil at present levels (and in fact, imports are increasing), it is obvious that domestic reserves would last much longer - up to a century if Commoner's estimates are correct. The sources of raw materials such as oil and coal are finite - unlike sunlight, for instance. The profit hunger of capitalism leads to the anarchic misuse of natural energy resources without regard to social and environmental consequences. Obstacles are placed in the way of developing energy resources that threaten monopoly profits. It is high time, as I think Commoner would agree, to take the decision-making power on such questions out of the hands of the corporations and to allow the people of this country to discuss and decide how energy can be provided in ways that meet human needs. But the claims of the oil trusts that we will see an exhaustion of oil sources in the near future and that they need higher prices is a fraud. « Energy self-sufficiency » Commoner's argument is weakened by his attempt to argue the case against the capitalist energy trust from the standpoint of their fictitious goal of energy self-sufficiency. U.S. imperialism is not and cannot be self-sufficient in energy - or in any other commodity it produces and sells. U.S. monopolies exploit global resources and markets. Firms such as Exxon sell more oil abroad than they do in the United States; taken as a whole, the production and sale of goods by the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. firms constitutes the third largest gross national product after the United States and the Soviet Union. This global parasite would starve without foreign sources of energy, raw materials, labor, and markets. It will hardly benefit the American working people or the people of the world to try to establish "fortress America." The people of the semicolonial lands and workers states such as China especially need access to American goods and technology. A recent publication of the Labor Department, for example, estimates that the productivity of American farmers is one hundred times that of farmers in China. The fact that the United States has not given China one single tractor is more significant in social terms than the fact that American tractors are fossil-fuel guzzlers. The American people also need access to the products of other countries. Any attempt to impose economic autarky in oil or any other major industry could only be carried out
through brutal assaults on the living standards of the people in this country - and would be doomed to failure. The world is economically interdependent and, barring nuclear war or disasters of comparable scope, it is going to remain so. Commoner undoubtedly believes that there is an advantage to taking the capitalists' propaganda about energy self-sufficiency at face value and answering it. I think, however, that he would be on even stronger grounds if he emphasized both the phoniness of their claims and the grave social irresponsibility of any program for U.S. "self-sufficiency in the social reality of our times. Commoner vividly describes the way the search for profit has undermined America's transportation system. He points to the advantages of the electric railroad as a fast, energyefficient, and environmentally sound mode of transport. Commoner spells out how General Motors conspired in city after city to buy out and dismantle trolley lines in order to replace them with its air-poisoning buses. He calls attention to the gigantic government investment in highway construction, which paved the way for diesel truck usage at the expense of railroads. He notes the railroads' policy of cutting back the amount and quality of passenger service because it is not profitable. «Capital productivity» The Poverty of Power lays bare the anarchic and increasingly deadly social results of a system whose motor force is the profit drive. Commoner adds an important dimension to this argument, using the theories of physics. Even more, Commoner recognizes that this analysis of American capitalism requires serious consideration of the socialist alternative. He locates a central cause of the energy misuse in the tendency of the profit rate to fall. This process was explained by Karl Marx in Capital. The fact that a scientist of Commoner's stature is beginning to consider the contributions Marxism can make to the understanding of the social and environmental crisis of capitalism is much to be welcomed. Unfortunately, there are mistakes in Commoner's analysis that could stand in the way of mounting a clear-cut attack on the problems he pinpoints. Commoner tries to show that the capitalist use of energy is inefficient from the standpoint of capitalist profits. It has a low "capital productivity, " he believes. Commoner seems to want to persuade capitalism to go over to less destructive technological methods because the more destructive methods are also less profitable. Secondly, he seems to believe that there are inherent qualities in particular energy sources, for example petroleum, that lead to its destructive misuse. Thirdly, he argues that industries with lower capital intensities are preferable, since because they are labor-intensive, they will provide more jobs.
Finally, Commoner sometimes confuses monopoly-induced destructive aspects of technological advance with technological advance itself. A passage in The Poverty of Power presents Commoner's essential views on these matters. Let's first look at it and then analyze it from a Marxist standpoint to see if the differences can be clarified. Commoner writes, "In 1971. . . the average energy productivity for all manufacturing was $14.42 of value added per million BTU (British thermal units) of fuel. Among the twenty-one major sectors of manufacturing (productivities ranged) from $1.90 per million BTU (petroleum refining) to $7.64 per million BTU (paper products). The value for the chemical industry was $8.69 per million BTU, counting only fuel, and $4.85 when fuels used for raw materials were included. Near the other end of the scale of energy productivities were leather and leather products -$62.04 of value added per million BTU of fuel. "The average productivity of capital for all manufacturing industries was $1.13 of value added per dollar of fixed assets (buildings and production equipment). Among all manufacturing sectors, petroleum refining had the lowest capital productivity ($0.34 of value added per dollar of assets), followed by primary metals $0.49), paper ($0.58), and chemicals ($0.80). The comparable figure for leather and leather products was $3.64. "The average productivity of labor for all manufacturing was $12.43 of value added per man-hour of production workers. In this measure of performance, the positions of the industries were reversed: Industries with high energy and capital productivities generally tend to have a low labor productivity. Petroleum refining had the highest labor productivity of all sectors of manufacturing ($28.43), followed closely by the chemical industry at $27.75. Leather and leather goods were near the other end of the scale: $6.25 of value added per man-hour. "Thus, compared with other sectors of manufacturing, petroleum refining and the chemical industry. . • yield remarkably little economic value (measured by value added) relative to the amounts of fuel and capital that they use and the employment opportunities they generate. If it is important to society to maximize the productive output that is gained from the investment of energy and capital, and to enhance employment opportunities, then in comparison with all other major industrial sectors the social value of the petrochemical industry is very low." Commoner sees in the lower "capital productivity" of the petroleum refining and petrochemical industries a confirmation of Marx's theory of the falling tendency of the profit rate: "Marx believed, " says Commoner, "that as capital accumulated, the amount of its fixed forms (productive machinery) - which is related to what he called the 'organic composition of capital' - would increase. This is the denominator in the profit equation, and Marx believed that as this denominator grew, the rate of profit would fall." Commoner comes very close to Marx's theory without discovering the genuine content.
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POVERTY OF POWER Labor theory of value In the first volume of Capital Marx centers his attention on the contradictory character of technological advance under capitalism. He develops the thesis that technological advance poses insuperable contradictions for capitalism. For only human labor power produces new value in production. The value of raw materials, including energy sources and machinery, is merely transferred in the production process to the newly manufactured goods. (The value of these commodities itself derives primarily from the human labor power expended in mining, processing, or manufacturing them. Machinery and raw materials themselves do not produce value, as Commoner seems to think. But capital accumulation takes the form of an ever-increased scale of production. New and more costly machinery is introduced. Products absorb more raw-material and plant value; they are less the product of labor power consumed. in production. Every technological advance tends precisely to increase the amount of transferred value in a product and to decrease the amount of new value added by the living labor in its production. This is what Marx meant by the falling tendency of the profit rate. The pocket printed-circuit calculator of today is more the product of machinery, and consequently of "stored-up dead labor" (that is, labor already carried out and embodied in commodities such as machines), than the cumbersome mechanical desk calculators of five years ago. Its value - as has been brought out in the cutthroat competition of the past few years — is consequently much less. Prices have dropped, and so have the stock prices of the companies that manufacture calculators. The falling tendency of the profit rate is consequently inseparable from the labor theory of value. The profit rates involved in the production of individual commodities fall because less living labor is exploited in their production. This is not the same as Commoner's declining "capital productivity, " because no capital (raw materials, plant, and equipment) is productive. Furthermore, the profit ratio has nothing to do with the physical qualities of the commodities produced, whether they be oil or leather shoes. What counts is the labor/capital ratio: Marx's analysis of capitalist society develops all of the crucial dynamics from the pivotal relationship between wage labor and capital. Commoner's list A peculiarity of Commoner's list of industries and productivities is not immediately evident. This is that according to Commoner's incomplete presentation of the operations of the falling tendency of the profit rate, the profits of the industries he examines should go in the reverse order. He ranges industries, it will be recalled, from those with lowest "capital productivities" to the highest, from those industries 30 with the least living labor involved in production to those with the most. But actual profits in these industries tends to go in precisely the reverse direction. Profits in the capital-intensive petroleum and petrochemical industries tend to be considerably higher than in the leather-goods industry, for example. Commoner never specifically deals with this question, although it is extremely important in the context of the energy debate. The oil trusts themselves use their immense capital needs as a justification for higher prices. Commoner often seems to accept this contention and to advance the following reply: "Yes, your capital costs are rising, your profit rates are falling. This is what Marx predicted. Capitalism cannot afford any further technological development in energy. " Yet the truth of the matter is that the U.S. oil monopolies are the wealthiest, among the most profitable, and certainly the most powerful capitalist trusts in the world. How does this square with Marx's falling tendency of the profit rate that would seem to say that corporations with these huge capital needs should have the lowest profit rates? For Marx, the resolution of this apparent contradiction lies in analyzing the ways in which the capitalist system tries to overcome the falling tendency of the profit rate. This is a ceaseless dynamic that takes place on several levels. Suppose, going back to Commoner's list, that the products of petroleum refining and the leather-goods industry actually sold at the marketplace at their value. In this case, because so much more living labor is directly involved in producing leather goods and there is very little transferred value, the profits in leather goods would be fantastic. In petroleum refining, where the costs of plant and machinery are immense and there are many fewer laborers to exploit, profits would be minimal. But such a situation could not last long. It would soon lead to an immense shift of capital out of petroleum refining and into leather goods. After all, capital is concerned only with profits. As more and more capital flowed into leather goods, and more and more leather goods were produced, it would soon become necessary for the capitalists to slash prices in this industry in order to stay in business. The end result would be that leather-goods products would sell at prices below their values. At the same time, as capital flowed out of petroleum refining, shortages would soon appear, and the capitalists there would be able to raise their prices, ultimately selling petroleum above its value. Precisely such ebbs and flows of investments do continually take place under capitalism, and they inevitably lead to an equalization of the profit rates: Those goods produced at Tower organic compositions of capital tend to sell below their value; the goods produced by higher organic compositions of capital sell above their value.
Monopoly
However, at the same time as there is this competiton between capitals across various industries, leading to the equalization of profit rates, there is ever-intensified competition within each industry, leading to monopoly. Monopoly also flows from the efforts of the capitalists to overcome the falling tendency of the profit rate - in this case by eliminating the competition that produces it.
An industry will introduce technological advances if it can thereby manufacture more goods at lower costs. But this means that it must widen its control of the market. Other competitors are also trying to do the same thing, and if some are not eliminated, the market will be flooded with too many low-cost goods. The big fish can only become bigger by eating smaller fish. To the extent that monopoly can reduce competition in this way it can also retard, for a time, further costly technological advances. And the search to keep plant and equipment costs down is accompanied by an effort to control global sources of raw materials and energy in order to keep these costs down as well. The industries that are favored in this process are precisely those with the highest organic composition of capital. As capital costs increase, fewer and fewer firms or even syndicates of firms can raise sufficient investment to "stay in the field. " At the same time an average monopoly profit rate arises in monopoly competition, once again favoring those monopoly corporations with the highest capital magnitudes. If we come back to Commoner's list we can understand why it is that the profit rates actually tend to rise with Commoner's lower "capital productivities. " The higher the costs of the capital equipment and raw materials absorbed in a given industry, the more certain is the development of monopoly. Further, there is a tendency for wages to be higher in the more monopolized sectors, a fact Commoner entirely overlooks. In 1971, the same year for which Commoner gives us the declining labor productivities for petroleum refining, chemicals, and leather goods, the average hourly wages in those industries were $5.34, $4.20, and $2.61, respectively. Without the possibility of superexploiting labor in small and weakly unionized shops, an industry like leather goods would long since have disappeared. Given all these considerations, Commoner's figures on petroleum refining are quite misleading. He tells us that in 1971, 34 cents (1 calculate an even lower 29 cents) of value was added for every dollar invested in plant and machinery, the lowest capital productivity on his list. When we break through the illusion that the machinery itself adds even minimal value we can still see there is a tremendous amount of machinery in petroleum refining for each dollar of profits. But the U.S. oil trust has overcome this "problem" by establishing the world's largest and most powerful monopoly cartel. In 1974, for example, the year after the oil boycott, U.S. investments in Middle East petroleum stood at $1.613 billion.
In this admittedly profitable year, the returns on these foreign holdings were a whopping $8.431 billion for the single year.
It is a "capital productivity" of $5.22 per dollar of investment - almost twenty times higher than the 29 cents on domestic refining. Besides this, of course, the U.S. oil trust also rakes up tremendous profits on its domestic wells, which would not show up in Commoner's statistics on petroleum refining. In singling out the one facet of the oil trust of petroleum refining Commoner overlooks the more important aspects of the petroleum trust as a whole.
Capital flows unceasingly toward arenas of highest profit and away from those where the prifit rate is declining. It is these ebbs and flows that give the capitalist economy its fundamentally anarchistic nature. Neither coal, nor petroleum, nor petrochemicals, nor even uranium is the problem. It is the development of these energy sources by capitalist monopolies. In capitalist competition the stronger monopolists will drive ahead more forcefully. It is true, as Commoner emphasizes, that capitalism was hit by an across-the-board profit crisis in 1974-75. But in one of the years of that crisis (1! 74) the oil trust recorded its greatest profit leap. To an important extent capitalist crises are precisely resolved by improving the positions of the strongest monopolies against the weaker ones and especially, of course, at the expense of the working class. It would be a mistake for the environmental movement to pursue the line of Commoner's attack, bent at convincing monopoly that its methods are unprofitable. To begin with, this is not the case. But even more important, it deflects the movement from the central axis of mass actions directed against the monopolies and their governments. Technology This brings us back to the final point of the contradictory character of technological advance under capitalism. Marx himself warned against the dangers that automatically spring from capitalist technological development. He pointed to harmful effects on the soil of nitrogen fertilizers used to improve crop yields, a practice that Commoner details and criticizes in The Poverty of Power. Artificial manures were introduced in the 1840s, and it was the German chemist Baron Justus von Liebig who called attention to their effects on the soil. In 1867, in the chapter of the first volume of Capital devoted to "Machinery and Moder Industry, "Marx wrote, "To have developed from the point of view of natural science the negative, i.e., destructive side of modern agriculture, is one of Liebig's immortal merits." Expanding on this, Marx wrote: "In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and
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Directeur de publication: Jean-François Godchau Imprimerie Rotographie, Montreuil No. de com. par.: 59117
POVERTY OF POWER quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress toward ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer. " The contradictions of capitalist technological advance proceed on many levels. The falling tendency of the profit rate itself has contradictory effects. On one side, acutely aware of the costs of capital improvements, the capitalists resist technological advance. On the other side, however, when competition forces them to the wall and they do undertake a technological revolutionization, it has explosive and destructive consequences. For the capitalist system, health, safety, and environment are factors of third-rate importance. Technology is not developed and introduced with such human needs in mind but solely in order to defend and accelerate profit. It is profit - and profit alone - that determines what technological innovations are introduced and how they are used under capitalism When an innovation is profitable — as the ruling class beassistance is provided - it is introduced. When an innovation appears insufficiently profitable - such as solar energy or electric-powered railroad cars - it is blocked. Human needs simply cannot enter into this equation without undermining and disrupting the capitalist system. That is why the ruling class fears those such as the Seabrook demonstrators who insist that health and the preservation of the environment must be prime considerations.
The introduction of new technologies under capitalism is also, as Commoner grasps, an attack on the living standards of workers.
Technology and workers
Commoner, as we have seen, favors returning to more laborintensive industries in order to provide jobs for the unemployed: Making leather shoes provides more jobs than making shoes out of plastic.
But we have also seen that the wages in the leather-goods industry are much lower. It is crucial to respond to the dangers posed by capitalist methods of technological development with demands that protect workers, not demands that would increase workers' burdens.
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If a particular technology is found to be dangerous and detrimental to society, as is clearly the case with the construction of nuclear fission reactors, the workers must join environmentalists in demanding that the ruinous practice be stopped. In some instances, this would mean going back to more laborintensive processes for a time. If conditions in a workplace endanger health or threaten the environment, the workers must have the right to shut that workplace down. Such a course is necessary not only under capitalism, but under a workers government and in a socialist society as well. The elimination of a dangerous technological innovation in a given field should not put an end to the search for more productive technologies that make life more enjoyable and labor less onerous. Under a democratically planned socialist economy, technological development can give prime considersation to all human needs - including human health and the preservation of the ecosystem. Workers must not pay for the elimination of unsafe and unsound conditions with the loss of jobs and lowered living standards. Nor should they be victimized by the introduction of new technology. Shorter workweek Two traditional demands of the labor movement meet these requirements head-on: shortening the length of the working week with no reduction in pay and union-scale wages for retired and unemployed workers. If technological advance allows industries to produce more goods with fewer workers, we should respond: No layoffs. Don't fire any workers. Let us work fewer hours with no reduction in pay. These demands seek to shift the costs of technological advance onto the backs of the capitalists. It would be a great step forward for the environmentalists to champion the goal fought for by the workers movement for more than a century: the drastic reduction of the hours of necessary labor for all workers everywhere so that the masses can participate to the fullest in the development of human society. Today environmentalists are penetrating ever more deeply into the increasingly dangerous consequences of capitalist technology. Commoner's The Poverty of Power is itself a persuasive argument for replacing capitalist anarchy with socialist planning. And there is much the socialist movement can learn here.
At the same, time, environmentalists have much to learn from Marxism. They should widen the scope of their analysis, as
Commoner suggests, in order to perceive the capitalist roots of the environmental crisis. And they should join forces with the working class in the struggle to replace capitalism with socialism.