Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 06, 2024, 11:59 AMThe exploitation of labor power is the cash machine that destroys the environment.  Cheap labor is the resource that capitalism cannot live without.  Cheap labor is used to cheapen everything else.  As environmental conditions become unfavorable  getting things done becomes harder and profit suffers.  Capitalism fails.

Without a new frontier to exploit capitalism fails.  Profit must extract from a surplus.  The cancer will die, but it likely takes us with it.

I'd say, 'dead labor' qua Marx i.e labor embedded in goods over which the laborer has no control, or literally dead laborers sacrificed in the process of producing goods. The cheapness of a specific group of laborers can always be partially mediated to keep the system stable/functional, hence why not all labor has the same value. But the net value of all labor is always already cheaper than the net value of all goods under any capital system, i.e any economic system based on hierarchical command over the labor process.

Getting rid of 'capitalism' alone won't change this beyond the aforementioned partial and temporary mediations. We (or rather the parasitic classes) may well decommodify labor and goods when capitalist waste risks the stability of the capital system. But without universal democratic control over what gets produced how why, you still have 'dead labor'. An undemocratic structure can allow for guaranteed work and min wage, vital resources being centrally managed etc, but none of those things can be universal or irreversible. The metabolic order of inequality will always seek wasteful expansion, will always be threatened by some combination of social antagonism and resource limits, and always adapt thereto by reversing its concessions until the crisis subsides.

A lot of the eco-socialist discourse is around trying to 'balance' ecology and socialism which assumes those things can ever be at odds to begin. If people genuinely control the labor (and life) processes they will actively want to do everything in their power to ensure they continue far beyond their lifetimes.