You gotta love the energy-economics people. They really are trying so hard to understand why whatever has propelled this system for several centuries suddenly no longer works. They rightly deduce that a program of ever-increasing material use is not going to last long on a finite planet, nor in a finite universe, for that matter. (Notice how the loopiest, burn-baby-burn folks believe ardently in eternity, and many of the agnostic modernists are now squawking about a steady-state universe with no beginning and, crucially, no end.) Some energy economists also rightly note that as waste from this system builds up, the costs of staying in place are increasing. It is more materially and energetically expensive to live in a world that is constantly being forced to rebuild. So we are all running the Red Queen race, devouring more of the Earth just to keep from falling behind — or going under.
But what the energy economists almost universally miss — perhaps because of demographic blindness — is that it’s not just energy from fossil fuels that is running short. It’s energy from human inputs. It’s work. Labor. Energy turned into output.
This country wasn’t built on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels did not become a part of this economic system until the last century or so. Yet this system was already expansionist, hyper-consuming and imperialist from the moment white people got off their boats. And all empires run not on generalized energy, but on coerced, extremely low-cost labor, actual productive work done at no cost to the imperialists. Otherwise they’d not be able to afford imperialism…
Not only that, but the entire structure of every society is based on the labor of care work, which in nearly every post-Paleolithic society is done without remuneration. (Because motherhood is its own reward… among other platitudes…) Without all this free labor mostly from women, mostly from brown-skinned women within EuroWestern culture, there would be no culture, no country, no body. There is no way to pay for raising the next generation while simultaneously caring for the present one. That labor never ends and has no productive output aside from living bodies, nothing for sale in that. It is not merely that you can’t make a profit from the endeavors of care work, it’s that there is no revenue stream at all.
Men figured that out long ago and decided that the only way to fuel a society where wealth accrued to the non-laboring group was to take away female autonomy so that they were forced into labor without pay or recognition of their work. Then the elites in this new system decided to depersonalize most men as well, forcing them to do the work that care-working women couldn’t manage while raising new people. In other words, all economies are built not upon mineralogical energy, but upon the energetic labor of care — which is never included in economics.
How could we possibly account properly for care work? We can’t. Because we can’t pay for it. We can’t monetize it. And even if we could, it’s hard to see who would pay those costs and therefore start that revenue stream flowing. (Maybe a tax on wealth, since all wealth is built on unpaid care work…) Any way you look at it, it seems that care work is far more costly than any monetized system could afford. Hence, like the cleaning up of toxic messes of all kinds, economics ignores those costs.
And it’s not just Mom who is unpaid and unrecognized. This is true of all work. The more closely associated with care work or manual labor any industry is, the less that industry pays its laborers. This has nothing to do with energy or material use and everything to do with the low status of the actual work that is necessary to a culture of hierarchical wealth distribution (both the work and the low status being needed…). Accountants universally make more money than cleaners, even out-earning the owners of cleaning services. Accounting is a higher status job because it is firmly divorced from any sort of actual or necessary work. The pay reflects that status, not the productive output of the job. If there was more care in accounting, it would not pay as well. White-collar jobs like accounting are, by definition, free from the messy but necessary and productive work of caring for the world.
This holds true between industries, but pay within any given industry also increases the further the job is from any productive output. In every workplace, those who do the most actual work, that which is most necessary to the business, are the people who are paid the least. Restaurant managers are paid more than line cooks and waitstaff, though the restaurant would function perfectly well without management — and founder if it had no cooks. Similarly, the people who do the actual work of banking, the people who draft contracts, who keep the records and file the mountains of regulatory paperwork, who process the transactions and who deal with customers, the people who do actual banking labor are the lowest status bankers and are rewarded accordingly. The guy with titles and a corner office is paid ten to twenty times what the tellers earn (and has those titles and that private office) to do nothing more than sign his name and drone on in meetings (that invariably interfere with actual work done). In fact, he famously doesn’t know how to do anything. He could not do actual banking work, could not be actually productive in the minimal ways that banking is productive. He would be incapable of keeping any part of the bank operational if all the low-paid laborers left their stations. He is not paid to be a banker, nor even an expert advisor to bank workers. He is paid to be a dominant male. His status and pay are a function of being a body that does not do work, a parasite on the labor of other bodies.
(And now does the glass ceiling on women’s wage-earning capacity make more sense?)
We are so confused about reality that we see this domination everywhere, when it is in fact almost exclusively a human trait, one that manifests in other beings only when they are forced into close contact with humans. In the real world, those that do the most necessary work, those that care for living bodies, receive the highest rewards. They are rewarded with actual benefits such as healthier bodies and more successful reproduction. But they are also rewarded with what counts as status in other beings. The mother tree, in her long senescence, will be fed by other photosynthesizing bodies and by mycelia, who get nothing at all out of the transaction, for decades — even if that caring tree has been cut to a bare stump and all her weighty body removed from the community. She is that well-loved and remembered. An elephant matriarch who has worked her long life to care for her herd is mourned for generations. Those who never knew her in life gather about her bones and keen in her memory. Even stars… those that shower care on their small corners of the universe are surrounded by others. Black holes have nobody, not even a name remembered in time.
Domination cultures are black hole systems. They suck labor from bodies and give nothing, not even light or memory, in return. You can’t account for that… And for that reason, economics utterly fails to understand what it is analyzing.
Yes, energy is crucial. We need to feed all those laboring bodies. We need to give them at least the minimal shelter necessary to keeping those laboring bodies alive. We need to move the laboring bodies about. But the more critical need is the laboring bodies. Without human labor there is no production, no need for energy. And without care work there are no bodies at all.
From an economist’s point of view, the great mystery of the late 20th century was why economic growth, far from accelerating under post-communist and increasingly unregulated, neoliberal sway, instead showed a determined inclination to decline. Some blamed oil. But this decline at this specific juncture in history was not due to peak oil, nor to peak cheap oil, nor even to the mounting debilitation of burning oil to fuel the economy. It was because during the 1990s, globalization reached the end of the cheap laboring markets. From the 1970s on, industry was increasingly flailing all over the globe trying to find exploitable bodies, people who had no protections, forcing them to work for near zero wages and dumping all the resultant “external” costs onto their heads. From the 1990s onward, there were no more free bodies, especially free bodies close to a market in which to sell. Goods needed to be shipped all around the globe to satisfy this need of low-cost labor combined with the need for someone to pay for it by buying crap — all at prices high enough to generate profits.
(Tangentially and relatedly, at that same time globalization also reached the end of robust consumer markets.)
Another tangential issue that economists miss out on is the fact that growth is relatively defined. This post-war economic expansion, this economic progress that began in the mid-20th century and ended in less than a generation, was not universally experienced, nor even universally named progress. It was an increase in mostly monetary wealth that was largely restricted to one demographic group, the high-status, dominant male that does very little work. Some others benefitted indirectly by being closely associated with that non-laboring group, but most of the world saw financial and material regression with the expansion of imperial capitalism. They had to pay for more of their needs, those which they used to produce for themselves at no monetary cost, and they did not command sufficient wages to pay those new costs, because the capitalists would not — could not — pay them sufficient wages and still be capitalists. Hunger and homelessness increased everywhere because more and more people were forced to work for wages rather than work directly to meet their needs — and those wages were never equal to the costs of buying needs, never mind being any measure of productive output in the system or in their lives.
Progress is definitely a matter of perspective. Not many of my Native friends would call the 20th century a time of progress.
Now, the energy economists are spot on in saying that energy sources are depleting, becoming lower in quality, and most importantly becoming much more expensive to source and refine. They are also right when they say that every dollar spent is a claim on energy, or maybe more accurately, on work done within the economic system. What they are missing is that both work and energy are not measured in oil. Energy expenditure and work done are not even confined within the economic system and therefore measurable. Most of the most essential labor is completely outside the analyzed economy.
On the other hand, much of the measured economic system is both unneeded and detrimental. Consider the economic contributions of industrial scale entertainment and screen-based media, disaster capitalism, war and other forms of violence, land speculation and “development”, and the entire FIRE sector. None of this meets any biophysical need. None of this is necessary. All of it makes meeting needs more difficult. And most of it actively and intentionally harms living bodies. This all makes me wonder just how little energy we actually need to be alive and well even in modern terms. Wouldn’t we be better off if there was a bit less economic expansion and a bit more actual work done? How much of the halt to mid-20th century progress comes not from depletion in resources, but from the literal destruction of the Market and every body within it?
Regardless of the philosophy of progress, economists, even energy economists, are still missing large parts of their essential equations. It’s not just climate change and biophysical collapse — though those would both diminish if there was less “progress”. It’s not just increasing costs of resources and the drying out of formerly fluid and fungible markets. It’s not any one thing. It is all things. But for the sake of our tiny capacity for managing multivariate calculus, let’s focus on the essentials. Which does not reduce down to oil. No… Rising costs and increasing debility in the system are due to three essential things:
First, there are no more lands to conquer. Imperialists can no longer claim land and the resources found therein for free. In fact, this economy requires land scarcity. It is built on the premise of ever-increasing property values, even as the material resources within lands are extracted. That precludes an abundance of cheap land, and it translates into ever-increasing rents which circles around to become ever-increasing costs to business and to doing any work, productive or otherwise. As land costs first become a thing and then become an increasingly costly thing, the system, which is still based in material reality and still needs material space in which to exist, suffers the burden. All costs go up with land values. (Just ask the “fixed-income” folks who are facing the dilemma of owning a more valuable house in an economy that pays for its public services through property taxes.)
Second, and this is the part that the energy economists focus upon, there are no more cheap resources. It is more expensive to extract any given unit of material, because all the cheap, easy-to-exploit sources are tapped out. We are left with relatively inaccessible resources, like oil mined from the bottom of the ocean or rare earth element deposits located almost exclusively in China, and lower quality or diffuse sources, like tar sands or fracked hydrocarbons or bauxite found as sporadic nodules dispersed throughout miles of hard rock rather than rich veins spilling out into the sunlight. All of these materials cost the economy more to extract, more to process, and much more to ship where they are needed. The energy folks are very much right in saying that all of this is energy-dependent. (But then so is everything…) But it’s maybe worse than even they think because the basis for all these processes is not merely generic hydrocarbon, but high quality diesel to fuel transport and to generate the high temperatures necessary to smelting ore from rock, to producing concrete and glass, and to refining or forging just about everything. And we are very much out of new sources of diesel.
These two causes of increasing debility are generally acknowledged, though the increasing cost of land is usually referenced obliquely, as a cost to society or to individuals. Economists don’t much count it as a direct debit on productive output. But the third cause of systemic cost increase is largely invisible, because we actively deny that it exists. The third increase in economic debility comes from the end of cheap labor.
Of course, this is not because industry is suddenly paying people higher wages, nor is industry assuming more responsibility toward keeping their labor force alive and well by providing access to the means of meeting bodily needs. Nope. Labor is still extremely exploitative, and the most necessary tasks, those that we all need done in our lives if we are to live at all, are not counted as “labor” at all. In fact, industry actively competes with necessary labor by taking more and more hours from each body and sucking more and more bodies into the laboring force (note that word, “force”…) while providing nothing to those workers to meet their needs. No, industry is not suddenly afflicted with altruism.
The increase in labor costs is two-fold. One, there are no more new labor markets for EuroWestern industries to enter. This means that the race to the bottom is done. There is no place that is not part of this system. And once a labor market is tapped, it inevitably rises in cost, not because the workers are paid more, though that does happen slowly and slightly. It is largely because local management and local regulations increase costs. However, the end result is that there are no more bottoms to feed on. (We’ve hit bottom in so many ways.)
The second reason labor costs are much higher is more counterintuitive. Or perhaps counter-narrative. We keep telling ourselves that our tools of efficiency are increasing productivity. And yes, we are producing more crap than we ever have. But a large portion of that crap is just adding layers of complexity to the production process. It takes many more labor hours to produce any given need in this system. And this fact is waived away as so much nonsense.
If you listen only to the narrative, then you are probably thinking I am an idiot now. (You might be right… but not about this…) So let me break it down. Let’s take car manufacturing because I think that’s what many people see in their heads when they think “industry” and “labor”. A car was once made on one assembly line with materials that were mostly regional and with tools that were fairly cheap, simple, and long-lasting. And these tools were also made near the automobile factory from regional materials. The car was then sold relatively close to the factory — at least on the same continent anyway — and quite often from the factory directly to the buyer in the early days. This was how cars were produced when it was highly lucrative to produce cars, and the lucre went to workers as well as management. Those were “good jobs”.
Compare those early days to today. Now, each part of a car is made in a different place by a whole factory worth of workers that is often larger than the original assembly line for an entire car. The materials that go into a car are sourced from everywhere, requiring mines and refineries, processing and shipping from all around the globe. The tools that assemble each piece of a car are similarly sourced and manufactured from everywhere and require vast labor pools that never existed when a car was made mostly by humans in one factory. Moreover, the tools are increasingly complex, with manufacturing similarly broken into components for each tool part, such as silicon wafers from South Korea or precision drill heads from Brazil. And all of these tools require constant maintenance and replacement. There are more workers charged with fixing the assembly line tools than there are actually assembling any cars, likely more than there were in entire factories before things were so completely mechanized.
Of course, cars are much bigger and more intricate than the Model T. Much more goes into each car, and in addition to the increased material costs, that increase in material costs more in labor as well. Some of those labor costs are included in the cost of materials. The cost of steel includes some of the cost of the steel-making labor force. So there is some overlap of the increase in material and labor costs. But while the cost of the materials that go into a car or the car-making process has some finite limit based on material thru-puts, the cost of human labor – and especially the labor that produces nothing, the management and the accounting – will continue increasing forever.
Or until we actively stop it.
In our regressive and inverted human ideas of order, those that dominate, those that order people to labor on their behalf, that do very little actual work, certainly the least work necessary to sustaining a life, the people who hoard the means of sustenance and make other bodies pay for those basic needs, the people who are least tainted by work done to care for the body, and most of all the people who have nothing to do with primal production, the birth and raising of children, those people who contribute the least to the world (and who not coincidentally spread the most harm throughout the world) are the people who are most rewarded. The less actual productive output that comes from a job, the more that job pays. The less tangible output a human produces, the higher that person’s status and pay.
This has the unfortunate consequence of constantly increasing costs regardless of material availability, and there is no limit to those cost increases because there are no material limits on money. These managerial and accounting and leadership roles are not tied to any physical reality, only airy human ideas. Within a system that must grow to sustain its economic base, that is in a system that is based on profits and especially on credit repaid with interest, these non-material jobs will proliferate and will constantly inflate costs throughout the system. Because they can pay themselves whatever they feel they deserve, which is hardly a limit. Because they must be more wealthy and therefore more worthy of domineering status than those they dominate. But mostly because this is the way this system works.
Capitalism is designed to suck wealth out of the world and bestow it upon those whose domineering, imperialist forefathers set this system rolling over us all. It is designed to turn land, materials and labor into money and status for the few who own capital, by which we mean, the means to meet needs. This economic system rewards owners simply for being owners — for being people who dominate others and keep the means of sustenance out of public reach — not for any productive role that they fill. And in the context of credit, those rewards will constantly, of necessity, increase, increasing the costs of all things, because the rest of the world must pay these owners more and more — we must give them profit over the cost of owning all the things — in order to sustain our own lives.
But back to the car factory and labor costs… An understanding of capitalism as it actually is reveals the reason that labor costs will always increase, regardless of the output of cars, regardless of the material availability of car-related resources like energy-dense fuels, regardless of the market’s ability to support those increasing costs. Yes, the labor costs that actually produce cars or any of the materials or tools that go into producing cars is finite. These costs are limited by material availability, by the time necessary to do that labor, by the need for cars, and finally by the ability of buyers to purchase cars — which is probably the firmest and most immediate limit. However, the “labor” costs of those that manage, that track money and materials, that own the means of production, that lead (which is a euphemism for domination) are not tied to reality and are therefore unlimited. Not even the ability of the market to buy cars — indicated by sales of actual cars — is a check on the increases in salary and benefits that these unproductive people will award themselves. They are parasites on this system. Maybe worse than parasites. Even a virus is held in check by the death of the body it feeds upon. These leaders and owners have no such boundaries. The CEOs of car manufacturing companies continue to pay themselves ever-increasing benefits packages, even to the detriment of their own failing companies (while taxpayers are forced to foot the bill). The cost of each car sold therefore bears that burden, and this proliferates throughout society as inflation.
But there is another unreckoned side to labor costs that is revealed in a better understanding of capitalism as it actually is. Contrary to all our stories of economy, the number of productively laboring bodies in this system has not decreased and will not decrease. Parasitic management and increasing financial finagling does not eliminate the need for the labor that is necessary to produce a car. Wealth extraction is, instead, added to the cost of productive labor. Moreover, in this system that must extract more and more wealth out of production —ie make profits — the number of productively laboring bodies increases and will increase until material limits are reached. (But never breached…)
This, too, is counter-narrative. We tell ourselves adorable stories of ever-increasing productivity, how our clever tools and machines are allowing each laboring human body to be more productively efficient, how the costs of waged labor (that which actually produces any goods or services) are constant while the volume of goods and services produced and sold increase exponentially. But all this is a fantasy.
For starters, labor costs do not measure the number of wage hours needed for a given task. Wages are not a measure of laboring bodies. Wages are a measure of what the system is willing to pay for labor. Obviously, a small number of well-paid workers earns the same wages as a large number of poorly paid laborers. So when we shipped manufacturing to unregulated labor markets, this is what caused an increase in “productivity”. It was not a case of fewer labor hours needed to make a car, nor were there more cars made at the outset. The increase in productivity was instead a measure of the lower wage costs associated with each car produced. The number of wage hours — the labor done — was constant but the wages paid per hour were vastly reduced.
And then we started replacing wage hours with machine hours and really ratcheted up the distorted “productivity” story. Within a given factory, there is still human labor needed to run the machines and to keep the machines running. There are just as many bodies in a car factory today as there were at the outset of car manufacturing, but most of them are now tending to the machines rather than being directly involved in car assembly. Moreover, these laboring bodies who control machines are also accorded higher status in our system than the manually laboring bodies on the assembly line, so these machine tenders earn higher wages. Thus labor costs increase within the factory. This may be controlled and held down by locating the factory where labor is less rewarding. But it is not true that there is more output from each paid wage hour. The output is the same.
And that is only within the factory.
Beyond the factory walls, there’s a much greater increase in human labor necessary to each car produced by automation. An assembly line of human bodies requires the work done to source, transport and manufacture the various components that go into a car. There is iron ore to mine, refine into steel, and mold into an engine block, for example. All stages from mining to the final car assembly require tools and transport that all require human labor, and the more so with the number and complexity of tools used and the miles of transport in between each stage. But when the assembly line is composed of machinery — still run and maintained by human labor — then the number of laboring bodies is increased exponentially. There might be fewer bodies in the factory — though higher paid bodies by virtue of being less directly involved in manual labor — but there are vastly more bodies working to supply the factory with its automation.
All the machines have their own source, refining, assembly and transport trails with thousands of human bodies laboring at each stage — and again, the more so with the number and complexity of machines and the physical distance between each stage. The accountants monitoring the actual car assembly line can point to fewer bodies on their factory floor and say that each of those bodies is producing more output with the aid of these unpaid machines. Same number of cars rolling off the line plus fewer wage hours equals increased production — even though it takes orders of magnitude more labor to create all the machines that then put together a car, especially if all the processes take place all over the globe… where “costs are minimized”… apparently, by magic…
And now note one very crucial detail almost lost in all the accounting: the number of cars produced does not increase with automation. The final output, the thing that meets some need in society, the actual product, is still a car. But all the work that goes into all that crap that goes into making that one car is accounted as productivity even though it does not meet any actual need in society. It is merely the toolset used to produce something that meets a need. (For the moment, we will ignore the issue of whether or not a car meets any needs.) And yet all that increased complexity that goes into making one car is called increased productivity. It is a systemic increase in productive output — and wealth generated for the controllers of this system — though there is no increase in the product produced. See?… magic… or maybe charade is a better word for it.
And all this complexity increases the cost of the actual final product. Each car costs more. Because each car is the end result of much more input labor and materials.
Now, for the final touch of ironic reality… All this increased churning of labor and material into each car produced is limited by the actual availability of labor hours and materials. And the more complex the system, the harder the limits. If an assembly line worker can no longer do the job, it is likely that there is another local body that can do that work. However, if a machine in a Mexican assembly plant that has parts manufactured in Korea from parts that are manufactured in Cambodia from parts that are manufactured in the Philippines that has material inputs from Nigeria, Brazil, China (because again… China…) and that all require mining and shipping machines that have their own nearly infinitely regressive supply lines, if that Mexican assembly line machine breaks, it is not at all easy to even repair it, maybe impossible to replace it. The material and labor that goes into that chain is so vast that it is already breaking the planet. It can’t be exchanged or stretched or jimmied any more than it already is to stay within the limits of reality. Any breakdown is a hard stop on production.
And all that is just to keep the machine operating so that there might be cars produced.
Yet, all that sourcing and assembling and shipping — and especially the breakdown that causes more of everything — all that counts as gross world product. It counts as economic progress. And this is the vaunted progress that is faltering as we slam up against finite reality.
Do you see the sum of that equation? We are stretching the material and labor limits of this planet to capacity merely to increase the complexity of our production methods, not to increase production, not to better meet our needs, not to create abundance or well-being for any body. We are increasingly wasting more of our lives and the lives of this Earth without any increase in productive benefit. But of course, in that vast and complex process is the means to generate vast wealth for the very few bodies who dominate the system — and who, not unrelatedly, do no actual work.
Our problems are related to depleting energy as well as depleting every other thing that goes into these chains. Our problems are related to the closed system of land and increasing costs of immaterial management. But even more so our problems are rooted in this system that takes labor, that takes creative output from laboring bodies, to reward bodies that do no productive work. It takes more and more complexity, more and more materials and land sucked into the maw of this system to fuel that wealth extraction. But mostly it takes more and more labor from living bodies, more and more work, more and more time, more and more life. And this is the final limit.
And that would be a nice dramatic end to a very long and perhaps tediously repetitive essay, but for one important detail: all this could melt away and not only would the human world not end in fire and fury, but most of us would feel nothing at all at its passing. In fact, nearly all of us, nearly everything on this planet, would be materially better off. We would not be wasting our lives to produce complexity that enables more money to be squeezed out of finitude. We would not be wasting resources on all the things that do not benefit anyone. We would not be trashing this planet to make machines that make cars, among other useless products. We would have the time and the materials to clean up the messes, to tend to the hurts, to rebuild our real lives. And we would lose nothing.
But what of those that do no work? Well, they could sit in their darkening corner offices, counting their beans, writing their memorandums, redlining their budgets, until they eventually notice that nobody is coming to refill their coffee mugs and empty their trash cans. Maybe then they’ll come out and finally do something productive… wouldn’t count on it though… because they don’t know how.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
