And further, speculation generates profits too, but this is still not generating new value, but value changing hands. When prices become inflated extremely out of proportion to the concrete value of the commodities being speculated on, it can become toxic (like the housing bubble). All profit in the circulation process is tied to and depends on the original surplus value produced when the commodity is manufactured. As soon as it’s produced, it embodies all the concrete surplus value it will ever have, and everything else is generated by circulation. Marx was clear on this. His speech “Value, Price and Profit” was helpful to me in grasping it.

This is not to say that the circulation of commodities isn’t necessary to realize this value: it is. But while the price may be higher down the retail chain, concrete value has not been added.

To understand service employees as members of the petit bourgeoisie, I found “Classes in Contemporary Capitalism” by Nicos Poulantzas to be extremely helpful. This was written in the 1970s, during the rise of service economies in imperialist social formations, and so is somewhat out of date, but it is still really useful.

He called service employees “the new petit bourgeoisie” at the time. That sector of the petit bourgeoisie is not really new any longer, and I don’t think that the label of petit bourgeoisie (without a different qualifier than just “new”) is very useful today. (I think it‘s accurate, but confusing). I think service employees are emerging as a distinct fraction of the petit bourgeoisie, with their own experience (impoverishment), emerging ideology (individualism paired with despair), and political practice (Occupy) and representatives (Ron Paul, Black Bloc, NGOs).

And so, in my opinion, it can be confusing to lump them together with the traditional petit bourgeoisie (like doctors and small retail owners), even though their relationship to production is still qualitatively the same: assisting in the circulation of capital.

This confusion is in fact causing them to define themselves as workers. Because in fact their experience is closer to workers than to the traditional petit bourgeoisie. And many people move between the two fairly seamlessly (it’s not a big jump in pay or training from unskilled factory work to retail service, whereas there’s a huge gulf between retail service and high-level professions, even though the latter two are technically in the same class and the first two are not).

This is all *not* to say that this class, and others, don’t have a role to play in revolutionary struggle: they absolutely do. Just like capitalism can’t function without them, the revolution can’t either. ALL dominated classes need to be aligned with the working class, for revolution to succeed. That’s the reason that revolutionaries work among them. And often they are the first to become politically active, to respond to changing conditions.

The point that is often forgotten though, and which I am insisting upon, is that productive workers, the working class, as the ones who are at the core (or foundation) of the entire capitalist economy, who produce the surplus value that allows the existence of profit and its re-investment as new capital, is the only class in fundamental antagonistic contradiction to capital. By emancipating themselves as workers, they have to destroy all the myriad social relations (in the economic, political and ideological fields) that make up capitalism. This puts them in a unique position.

Classes struggle to reproduce themselves. Service workers struggle for market equality, to sell their services for higher prices. They are dominated and crushed by entities with more market power. They can hurt capitalists by blocking the flow of capital, and that’s very positive. But their struggle, by itself, will not lead to the elimination of capitalism. Their struggle for fairness and equality will be confined to the market, where they operate. That is the boundary, the limit, of that struggle.

Workers who produce surplus value are the only ones who, by asserting their interests and following them through to their endpoint–stopping exploitation–can end the production of surplus value, and thus the reproduction of capital. Only they can follow through to the goal of overturning capitalism. No other classes will go that far (and that has been shown, historically, time and time again). This is why the working class must lead the revolutionary process, if we are to achieve the defeat of capitalism. They have to build an alliance with all the other dominated classes, who will together overturn the system. But their line must lead, or capitalism will be quickly reproduced/restored (as occurred in the Soviet Union and China).

In China, there was, like in the US, a difficulty in that the proletariat (the working class) was very small in number. They relied heavily on an alliance with the vast numbers of small peasants (who are in the petit bourgeoisie) to win power. But while this was necessary, it was a contradiction that unfortunately did not get resolved favorably for the proletariat, a loss which led to what we see in China today. Those inside the Party who took the capitalist road did so because they represented the petit bourgeoisie, and the line representing the proletariat was defeated.

This discussion may seem very esoteric to some, but to understand these things is extremely important for those who want to fundamentally transform society. When a proletarian line is not leading the revolutionary process, there are huge consequences. The world would be quite different now if the working class had not lost power in China.

Capitalism is currently facing a convergence of crises: of overproduction, financial instability, and ecological catastrophe. Yet they can’t ease up on production, but continue to forge ahead. It reaches such irrational proportions that in China, there are 12-24 massive cities built each year that have no people living in them. This was recently covered by “60 Minutes.” At the same time, 80% of that country’s rivers no longer support life.

Industrial/extractive expansion is causing global, terminal ecological crisis. If unchecked, pollution, water shortages, nuclear radiation, soil depletion, global warming and geo-engineering could wipe out all life on Earth. But the internal structural economic crises are, for capitalists, even more urgent than the ecological crisis. The ecological crisis is simply collateral damage, an effect or consequence of their main pursuit. The capitalist growth imperative cannot be denied.

There is conflict within the capitalist class over the character of growth: concrete surplus value extracted from labor power on the one hand, vs., on the other hand, forms that are increasingly unstable (such as debt, deficits, and fictitious or inflated value based on speculation). As industrial production has surpassed the capacity of markets to consume its products, the pressure of too much capital to invest has forced states to relax regulations and allow more fictitious value into their economies, leading to the current global dominance of the financial/investment sector.

Massive amounts of money pouring into stocks, commodity markets, metals, bonds, credit, currencies, and other instruments of speculation (Bitcoin – how abstract can you get?!) has been causing instability as the amount of fictitious value in the economy increases. As investors begin to acknowledge that their investments aren’t based on real value, this fictitious value becomes toxic. Financial crises occur as investors sell off their worthless investments. After prices collapse, the risks once again become attractive and buying begins anew.

Governments attempt to regulate and stabilize crises while doing everything possible to stimulate economic growth. Growth based on real, concrete value can fundamentally only be achieved by constantly increasing the rate of exploitation (the extraction of surplus value from the working class). The global “structural adjustment” measures they’re currently imposing are attempts to shift back into more industrial production, which produces the real, concrete value on which their entire economy ultimately rests.

But the crisis of faith in the financial sector is also impacting industry, because the two forms of capital have become so intertwined. Industry has come to depend on credit at every step: to capitalize itself, to operate, and to facilitate the consumption of goods (plus they’ve become dependent on the inflation of the speculative value of their companies – their stock price). Cycles are becoming more volatile: credit dries up, then pressure builds until it must be released again into the economy, but these measures must be ever more extreme (such as the Fed dropping interest rates to near 0%), which undermine the system overall even more.

As industrial capital declines relatively in power, and the financial sector experiences ever-more volatile boom-and-crash cycles that reverberate through the global economy, banks have fewer options they can exercise in response, because they’ve already implemented whatever they can do to facilitate growth (they can’t go below 0% interest rates). These current forms of capital are reaching their ultimate limits.

To deal with this, capital has begun to be increasingly diverted into private/state hybrid enterprises. This is a way to force more commodities into the economy and to increase production for its own sake (for immediate destruction rather than for use). These enterprises include wars, foreign “aid,” geo-engineering, disaster response, and government subsidies (such as for farming). In addition, there is an increasing flow of public funds to private hands through the privatization of public institutions (prisons, detention centers, schools, military), the increased commodification of more social needs, and the creation of ever-more toxic “needs” (such as pollution creating the need for more health care and insurance). The state will mandate and/or partly fund the masses’ increased involuntary consumption of all of these (through our taxes, through laws such as Obamacare, and through increased numbers of people being forced into institutions of various types).

As capital puts increasing pressure on wages while profiting off the warehousing of populations, the working class will be pushed into virtual slavery through prison labor and work-for-food arrangements (both of which are on the increase worldwide).

State control over production and over the allocation of resources, in conjunction with privately appropriated profit, plus the socialization of losses, is an economic aspect of fascism. Slave labor is another aspect. This trend is still emerging but is gaining strength. It is being attacked by some sections of capitalists for now; while at the same time they are competing to enter it, and are pushing for its expansion in order to ease their own entry into it. They recognize it as one of their only options of survival as capitalists.

There is an intensifying contradiction between short-term and long-term viability, and there’s a need for a major shift in how capital reproduces itself. In the current conjuncture, capitalism must destroy toxic value and restructure the whole economy. In this transition, their long-term needs as a class clash with their immediate imperatives as individual competing capitals/blocs.

It may seem irrational that capitalists can’t work together to solve their common problems without all the drama and crisis. They can cooperate to a certain degree, and they do, but the relationship between them is essentially antagonistic. Capital’s laws of motion–specifically its primary mechanism of competition–supersede the interests of individual capitalists. When forced to deflect immediate catastrophes, they do manage to act collectively through the political representatives of the particular sections of their class (Republicans and Democrats), and through the state as a whole, which represents their class as a whole. (A recent example is their raising the debt ceiling barely in time to remain solvent another day).

Obama is doing his best to manage the immediate conflicting needs of different blocs of capital as he implements policies that lay the basis for the long-term viability of the system – putting in place the political and economic structures for fascism and facilitating the transition of capital investments into alignment with it. The fact that he’s a Democrat encourages the compliance of the masses, directing their demands into channels that will benefit capital as a whole and closing off all other options. Until a real alternative becomes available, they’re trapped between politicians who pay lip service to their needs while crushing them, and others who openly don’t care about them at all.

This is a very brief and preliminary introduction to several concepts that are important to grasp if we are to comprehend the nature of our enemy. These definitions are extremely limited and (like all theory) in a constant mode of revision.

***
Mode of production: The matrix of social relations (economic, political, ideological) that define the nature of a social formation, determined by the dominant ways that items for social consumption are produced, accumulated and distributed. Capitalism is the dominant mode of production in the world today, developed from 10,000+ years of class-divided society.

Social formation: All of the internal contradictions within the structures and practices (economic, political, ideological) comprising a coherent group system that reproduces itself in a constant dynamic of construction and destruction. Social formations include nations, businesses, families, etc.

Capitalism: a mode of production in which the social product is produced through the exploitation of workers as they convert natural materials into commodities through the application of labor power, plus the private ownership of the means of production and private appropriation of surplus value by non-producers (capitalists).

Classes: Dynamic social forces engaged in struggle determined by the antagonistic relations of production. The fundamental contradiction under capitalism is wage labor vs. capital, which is manifested by constant struggle between the two fundamental and polarized classes: the working class and the capitalist class. This struggle occurs within a matrix of economic, political and ideological relations (ultimately determined by the economic). (This is in contrast to a sociological view of classes that categorizes individuals using specific criteria or attributes, such as income).

Economic base: The economy of any class-divided social formation consists of the combination of and relations between laborers (labor power), the means of production, and non-laborers (who appropriate surplus product).

Superstructure: The dominant ideology and the exercise of political power, that together justify, sustain, support, protect, and perpetuate the economic base.

Social surplus: Wealth or products that are not consumed by a social formation (society) or necessary for its reproduction, but can be used for exchange (trade) with other social formations.

Use-value: The quality of fulfilling a need. Many things have use value but no exchange value (examples: fresh air, water, a hug, a haircut, a family meal).

Exchange value: Standardized worth in the context of the market, relative to the worth of other items it can be traded for.

The Labor Theory of Value: The exchange value of a product is based on the socially necessary amount of labor power (measured in time) that is generally required to produce it. For example, if one person spends an hour catching a fish, they might trade it for an amount of blueberries it took an hour to collect. Absent other factors, it wouldn’t make sense to trade a day’s worth of fishing for an hour’s worth of blueberry picking.

Commodity: A product manufactured primarily for its exchange value, from natural materials using human labor power. (Its use value is secondary, required only enough to make it sellable, i.e.: someone has to have a reason to buy it). Commodities are fungible, which means they’re standardized for the purposes of exchange, and have little or no qualitative variation (one ton of steel is reliably similar to another ton of steel). Examples of commodities are grains, lumber, iPads, fuels, currencies, frozen waffles, and labor power itself (sold by the worker in units of time).

Expropriation/extraction (aka: original, primary or primitive accumulation): Obtaining control of natural resources to continuously feed the productive process. This is done through various coercive means of dispossession, from conquest and overt theft to more subtle forms of domination and extortion. Examples include invading a country and seizing their forests or oil fields, dumping grain to ruin farmers and then buying their land at firesale prices, using eminent domain to obtain drilling rights under someone’s land, and using drag nets in non-territorial ocean waters.

Surplus Value: The residue of the social process (involving the economic, political and ideological spheres) of capitalist production, which manifests as the theft of labor power (exploitation) during the conversion of natural materials into commodities. Only human labor power produces new, material surplus value. The buyer of labor power (the capitalist) appropriates the surplus value generated in the process of commodity production.

Reduced to its economic essence, surplus value is the portion of exchange value of a commodity that exists as labor power crystallized in it. The capitalist pays workers less than the value of what they produce. What’s left after paying their wages, and after paying fixed costs such as machinery and inputs, is surplus value. For example, if a worker is paid $2 an hour to produce t-shirts that are sold for $50, and fixed costs associated with their production are $3, then the surplus value is $45.

Capitalists can pay less than labor power is worth because of the relations of production: their private ownership and control over the means of production, which forces the working class to sell their labor power for survival. Private ownership is accepted by the members of a society because of a combination of ideological domination (the cultivation of belief in the “right” to private property) and coercive force.

Capital: The social (economic, political, ideological) process of the production of surplus value. It is ever-expanding because surplus value must be re-invested and becomes new capital. The production of surplus value is how capital reproduces itself.

Profit: The revenue accumulated by an exchange of values.

Surplus value and profit are not identical. Surplus value is the productive form of profit, which is crystallized as new material value. Profit can also be generated in other ways, which do not directly involve (though they do, as a whole, ultimately rest upon) commodity production. Non-productive profit (or fictitious value) is the result of the circulation of capital (in the form of interest, the sale of services, or unequal exchanges ). Fictitious value becomes toxic when speculation overinflates it to a point that it can begin to destabilize an economy.

The production, accumulation and re-investment of surplus value is the essence and purpose of capitalism, the way that capital reproduces itself. As it grows, capital pushes itself into every investment opportunity it can possibly locate within the global economy, and violently opens up new opportunities when necessary. When inevitable crises of overproduction occur, capital increasingly relies on non-productive (fictitious, and ever more toxic) means of self-reproduction (such as financial speculation), putting the system ever-deeper into an unsolvable predicament.

Liberation is possible, and, more to the point, necessary for the survival and well-being of all life on this Earth. It’s up to us to make it happen.

http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=344375

What I sent them, answering their questions, is below (I’m not sure what, from this, was actually used)…

1) How does it feel to be one of the few women in the cartoon world?

It’s hard to make a living as a cartoonist, no matter the gender. In the last decade or so, being female has become much less of a novelty in the cartoon/comics world. I actually don’t think about that very much. In some instances it has probably been one factor (secondary, among others) when I’ve been passed over for jobs or received lower pay, but I can’t control that, so I move on, and keep trying a lot of different things to get my work seen and to find ways of making an income from it. My (far left) political views are actually much more of an obstacle to achieving the traditional view of “success” than anything else. Not to mention the collapse of print media. These have been much more significant factors for me.

2) Politics and cartoons. An uneasy bond?

Some people make comics for entertainment, and they tend to keep politics out of it in order to build the broadest audience possible. Cartoonists have even told me they don’t say what they really think in their work, because it wouldn’t sell as well. To me, this is a criminal waste of talent. But I blame the capitalist system, not those forced to make unpleasant decisions in order to survive within it.

My background, however, is not in comics but in editorial cartoons, which must be aggressively political and opinionated to be effective. This has been discouraged in recent years (since newspapers have collapsed) by timid editors who have become afraid of “rocking the boat” and losing their jobs. Most have decided that it’s better to run bland and inoffensive cartoons that illustrate, rather than comment upon, world events. But this has been a loss for editorial cartooning, and for readers. The best cartoons make sharp, even harsh, points that stir up thinking, debate and controversy.

3) You once said that this system cannot be reformed. What’s the alternative?

Capitalism is inherently exploitative, ecocidal, and expansionist. Even the nicest capitalists in the world can’t change its miserable and destructive nature. For me, to put it bluntly, the only alternative that can decisively eliminate capitalism is for the working class to liberate itself – to seize political power and control over the means of production – and eliminate surplus value (which is how capital reproduces) by abolishing wages and private accumulation. Only this can lead to the end of class-divided society, and to the atrocities that capitalism inherently generates.

4) You co-wrote the book “The Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad”. What do you think about the current events in India?

Patriarchy, and the violence used to enforce it – particularly rape and the threat of rape – is a deep-rooted global horror. All forms of oppression, of women and other social groups, are not to be tolerated, must be resisted and combatted—both for their own sake, and because they widen the divisions among the masses and strengthen the domination of the ruling class over us.

In fact, when Derrick Jensen and I discussed writing the novel, we were directly inspired by the Gulabi Gang – the group of women in India who organize resistance to the oppression of women, including by beating men who abuse their wives. A similar form of organization existed in Mao’s China. We wrote the book to spread the example of, and to encourage, organized resistance to oppression and domination.

5) Is there a chance for the environment or we ‘re done?

So much of the environment is already done. 94% of the ocean’s large fish are done. 78% of the world’s old-growth forests are done. The million people who die of pollution-related causes are done. It’s too late to save the 200 species who went extinct today, or un-ruin the lives of those already destroyed by global warming.

The question today should be, can any life on Earth still be saved? I fear not, but this is no excuse to give up. We can’t understand the interplay of all the variables and the possible surprises that may be favorable. The future is unwritten, as they say. As long as we are not yet dead, we must fight for life to continue.

6) How difficult is it for you to sketch from an independent perspective about something you believe in?

It’s not difficult at all; it comes naturally. I love doing work that I believe in. It makes me feel that my life has meaning and purpose. The hard part is when, to survive, I need to take a job I don’t believe in. Nothing is more tedious and boring to me than producing work that doesn’t further the goals I care about. It feels like a terrible waste of time, though it’s unfortunately sometimes necessary.

7) Is the “Occupy” movement alive or dead?

The answer to that depends on how you define “Occupy” – is it encampments, or a mood? Certainly the states have effectively defeated and removed the camps that were Occupy’s initial physical manifestation. This has led to many people becoming pessimistic and becoming inactive, but many others cannot go back to sleep. They are continuing to oppose and resist the system in many creative ways. The desire for radical transformation is there.

I don’t think “Occupy” had developed into a real movement, but rather it was a global mobilization, an uprising. A lot of work remains to be done to build the kind of movements that will be necessary to defeat capitalism and imperialism. People are out there trying to do that, but they are up against an extremely organized and ruthless enemy. It will be a hard road, with no guarantees.

But doing the work to build these movements is our only option. Certainly the social contradictions that sparked Occupy are still there, and not going away. Life for the majority of the world’s people will only get worse, unless we defeat this evil system that feeds off our blood and sweat.

8) How did you see the reelection of Obama?

Unfortunately I think it contributed to the de-mobilization and pacification of the people in the US. Obama is a ruthless tool of capitalism/imperialism (as all their politicians are – that is their job), but the system’s propaganda machine has been successful in portraying him as a (the only) progressive alternative to the frightening and ruthless Republicans. Presented with this awful non-choice, many understandably chose what they considered the “lesser evil.” But this is a mistake, because it lets the system off the hook.

This is the fault of the Left. We are too weak, as yet, to present a real alternative to what capitalism is offering. People have allowed themselves to be content with slight enlargements of bourgeois democracy, such as gay marriage and allowing women into combat. These are not real advances. As if it’s a victory for women, to be “allowed” to fight for imperialism! No, thank you.

Now that Obama is solidly back in office, and he continues killing people and destroying the world for capitalists interests, his spell will hopefully wear off and people can assume the necessary mindset for building a real movement that can challenge the system.

9) From a financial point of view, how difficult is it to be an independent cartoonist?

It’s frankly awful. Many people assume that with several books published, and cartoons that are fairly popular, that I’m able to make a good living. The reality is that for the last several years (my “most successful” years as a cartoonist in terms of work and awards), I haven’t been able to even afford to rent an apartment or buy health insurance. And this is after working about 12-14 hours a day. I once figured out how much I make per hour, and it turned out to be about half of the minimum wage. Last week, I applied for a part-time job unrelated to my field. I don’t want to take the time away from my organizing and cartoon work, but may have no choice.

A small number of cartoonists are able to “make it big” or manage a good living, but they are a tiny minority. Most of my colleagues are struggling to keep their heads above water, especially since the collapse of print media. This is the situation in many creative fields, not just cartooning.

10) What kind of feedback you get from your readers?

My readers keep me going. They are wonderful, so supportive and encouraging. When they tell me that my work helps them to understand a political reality or a theoretical point that helps them in their struggle, then I feel very satisfied and happy. This is what my work is for.

When active organizers or protesters use one of my cartoons on a leaflet, or on a poster at a demonstration, that is so wonderful to me. Right now, I’m putting together a series of cartoons paired with short, accessible texts about what capitalism is and how it works, intended for use in presentations and discussions, for organizing. It’s called, “Capitalism Must Die! How to Kill Capitalism Before It Kills Us.”

I also get negative feedback – my share of online trolling, insults and even death threats. But usually I don’t even read those. It does nothing positive for my state of mind. Those types of comments don’t strengthen me, so I ignore them. I have a mission to fulfill, and avoid distractions when I can.

11) Is there a funny side in everything?

This depends on how large your capacity is for grim humor! Personally, I do see a lot of humor in life, and I laugh a lot. If one can manage to have a generally positive temperament, life feels better, and we don’t give in to despair. Despair is defeat. Instead we can strive to view obstacles as challenges, and crisis as opportunity.

http://saltyeggs.com/stop-the-keystone-xl-pipeline-sure-but-we-cant-stop-there/

Our worst nightmares reverberate with the prediction of respected scientist James Hansen: if we don’t stop TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, then it’s “game over” for stabilizing the climate. With final US governmental approval (or not) to complete the pipeline looming, struggle over it is intensifying.

In late January, representatives from more than 25 First Nations in what is currently known as Canada and the US met in South Dakota to pledge mutual support in halting all Alberta tar sands oil production projects, including specifically the Keystone XL pipeline.

On February 17, tens of thousands rallied in Washington, DC, to demand that the Obama administration reject the XL pipeline. Even the members of the Sierra Club were sufficiently alarmed that the staid ENGO had to lift its 120-year ban on civil disobedience.

Protesters want to believe Obama’s promises to take “act decisively” on climate change. (His statement is suspiciously vague enough to leave the door open for insanely dangerous projects such as geo-engineering, the next big gold rush. It also certainly incudes increased production of natural gas through fracking, which is destroying our water supply. What it doesn’t include is limiting greenhouse gas emissions from their primary source: existing power plants.)

They also want to believe John Kerry, who will lead the State Department review of the pipeline plan, when he describes himself as a “passionate advocate” for taking action in response to climate change (his wording, like Obama’s, is extremely careful not to call for preventing it but for responding to it). (Before making his decision, this “passionate advocate” has promised to divest nearly $750,000 of his money from Canadian tar sands companies Suncor and Cenovus).

Protesters desperately want to encourage or pressure these men to do “the right thing.” They want to believe they have the capability of making an ethical choice.

In reality, the choice is not theirs to make. These politicians are nothing but puppets. They represent the interests of the ruling class, the capitalist class. They are installed in office and given specific jobs to perform: to regulate capital’s flow and accumulation, to smooth the relations between competing capitalists, and to keep the masses sufficiently pacified so they don’t get in the way.

Capitalism can deal with a few thousand people protesting and getting arrested. In fact it helps bolster its legitimacy, serves as proof of how democratic the system is. Those in power tolerate dissent; how nice. (Never mind that they only pretend to listen to it).

No amount of symbolic action will stop them from extracting whatever fuels will make money for them at any given time. A million people could scream, chain themselves together, or set themselves and their children on fire in front of the White House, but this would not mitigate capital’s compulsion to expand.

If an action is not going to be effective, it’s not worth taking. Fighting losing battles is simply depressing. When we do decide to engage in these struggles for strategic reasons, we need to understand their limitations to avoid being demoralized.

Many people understand what we’re up against. They know that capital has no ethics, no limits to the atrocities it will perpetrate in the pursuit of surplus value (a form of profit). They recognize that it is not a rational entity; it will not respond to reason or pleas or threats. So some have been attempting to physically block or otherwise interfere with the construction of the pipeline.

But capital, faced with obstacles, will take alternate routes. While our attention has been focused on the Keystone XL, which would be capable of moving 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil every day, another Canadian company (Enbridge) has outfitted a pipeline network capable of moving more than a million barrels a day. The price of each barrel will rise by nearly $40 once it reaches Louisiana refineries. The decision to make $40 million a day additional profit to destroy the planet is not a difficult one for companies like Enbridge to make. $40 million a day is not to be denied.

Capitalism is facing structural economic crises that, for capitalists, are even more urgent than the ecological crisis. Too high a proportion of their economy has become based on debt and speculation—profit based on “fictitious” value. This is becoming increasingly unstable and untenable. The global “structural adjustment” measures they’re currently imposing are attempts to shift back into more industrial production, which produces the “real” value—surplus value—on which their entire economy ultimately rests.

Faced with impending annihilation as capitalists, they can’t afford to care—or even to pretend to care—about their likely future annihilation as carbon-based life-forms. They are impelled by economic forces more powerful than any addiction.

Tar sands, fracking, deep sea drilling, Arctic drilling, ecocidal agriculture, GMOs, prison labor, privatization of social services, sweatshops in “free trade zones”—however destructive or exploitative or evil the means, capital must expand. It has no choice.

Capital reproduces itself through surplus value. This is the new value that is created by the exploitation of labor power in the process of industrial production (converting the natural world into commodities). It is embodied in commodities until it’s realized as profit and re-invested as new capital.

Capital must accumulate surplus value. It is the blood, the fuel, the essence of capital itself. Therefore, capital will push itself into every investment opportunity it can possibly locate within the global economy, no matter how destructive. It will not stop. Capital’s pursuit of surplus value is a relentless force that is poisoning the air, water and land all over the world. It is capable of killing us all, of rendering the planet uninhabitable.

The problem is not the greed of individual capitalists. They are merely social agents who fill positions that are required and generated by capital itself. Capital has motion, needs, a life of its own. It cannot sit still and depreciate; it must expand by being invested somewhere. If one area of investment is blocked, it will find another. If we begin to block it effectively, it will annihilate us. Recall how effectively the police dispersed the Occupy encampments (once those in power decided to do it), and how quickly the Democratic Party and organized labor have been attempting to recuperate what is left of it for their own objectives. Capital will sweep away any obstacle, by whatever means are necessary.

Ecocide (quickly leading to omnicide) is an effect of capitalism, of commodity production. It is an extremely dire consequence, but nevertheless peripheral to the generation of capital. In order to stop ecocide, global capitalism must be destroyed. The generation of capital itself must be halted, at its source: surplus value.

We can’t stop it by attacking it only from the outside; we must go after it at the core, its inner contradiction. The only ones who can ultimately overturn capitalism are those who are, through being enslaved to it, producing it: the working class.

The fundamental internal contradiction of a capitalist society is capital vs. wage labor. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the most important contradiction—that’s a value judgment that will be made differently by people depending on their positions and interests. What it means, instead, is that the push-pull of the struggle between capital and wage-labor is what moves society in the direction it is going. It is the engine driving our society over an ecological cliff.

The production of surplus value is an economic process embedded in a social relationship. The contradiction between capital and wage-labor is manifested in class struggle between capitalists and workers. The relationship between these classes is an antagonistic one: workers are exploited by capitalists in the process of the production of surplus value. To force them to produce, and to accept exploitation, capitalists dominate workers economically, politically, and ideologically.

It is only by the workers overturning and destroying this entire ensemble of social relations through which capital reproduces itself, that capitalism can be stopped. When workers liberate themselves, they liberate all of society from the domination of capital. To end capitalism, those of us directly exploited by capital should intensify our efforts to organize ourselves and crush our enemy. We can only be effective if we are organized collectively; individually we are helpless.

What does that mean for those of us who are not workers, not part of the process of producing surplus value, but are still part of the “popular masses”? Those of us who are unemployed, or non-productive (service) workers, or students, or members of the progressive or radical petit bourgeoisie (“middle class”)—we can’t touch capital; we can’t get our hands on it. We can’t go on strike to make it stop reproducing itself.

We can still organize ourselves, however, and build alliances to expose and resist various forms of domination by capital, as well as its effects. Mobilizing as a means of building mass movements is positive and necessary. Strategically blocking the flow of capital and resource extraction can complement and enhance struggles at the point of production. There is a lot we can do to damage capital, and capitalism, and we should strive to maximize all of our efforts in that direction.

The struggle against the capitalist accumulation of surplus value must be led by those who produce it: the working class. This is the only class that can follow through to the end, to actually defeat capitalism. In line with that orientation, we should build alliances and offer solidarity for every form of autonomous (not co-opted by collaborationist unions) struggle. Because capitalism is at a global stage of imperialism, the struggle against it is also global. Inside the imperialist social formations, we must fight imperialism, as well as build solidarity for the struggles against imperialism by the international working class.

To liberate the world from the domination of capitalism, workers must overturn political domination (smash the current state and seize political power) in order to take the means of production and subsistence out of private hands. Only then, can profit be abolished. When the profit resulting from surplus value is no longer the motive force of expansion of production, then will we be free to figure out, and implement, a way of life that can be sustainable.

For now, our enemy is stronger than we are. We have to overcome that, and deal with the fact that if we begin to be effective, they will commit any conceivable atrocity to crush us. But we are potentially stronger than them. We have right on our side. We outnumber them. When we organize ourselves, we will be unstoppable.

Stop the Keystone XL pipeline: absolutely. But let’s not delude ourselves that that will be enough, or even close. Capitalism could easily absorb that loss and flow around it. If we keep on fighting its effects, we will never solve the problem. There is no quick fix. To stop ecocide, we must wage class struggle to overturn the entire system of global capitalism, all forms of domination that comprise that system and keep it in place, the entire matrix of social relations that brings tar sands oil pipelines into existence in the first place.

It indoctrinates us in its schools.
Its traditions train us in habits of individualism, competition, and subservience to authority.
Its ideologies reinforce structural oppression such as misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia and nationalism.
The nuclear family is a self-policing social unit enforcing the domination of children and women.

[EDITED: Made it just a few minutes later!!]

It will not collapse by itself. There’s no escape from our need to destroy it.

If you like these cartoons-with-texts, please consider contributing to make them into a book: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/capitalism-must-die