The International Division of Labour
Today, the international system, or, more specifically, the international division of labour, is undergoing portentous changes that threaten to subordinate whole societies.
One of the flagships under which these changes are justified is that of the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and specifically those dealing with the development of environmentally renewable energy.
As it is presently being pursued, this ‘Green Transition’ gives every impression of functioning as a means to subordinate countries and peoples (nation-states and swaths of society) to a relatively centralised, globally-integrated division of labour, with its core (or several cores) and peripheries—to use Latin American ‘dependency theory’ terminology—albeit the present phenomenon is distinguished not so much by the emergence of new inequalities between nations as by a general increase in inequality, where even the ‘winners’ of recent history, those countries that have prospered under the Bretton Woods system, find that their middle class is being dynamited.
To wit, the project operates to:
- reduce national self-reliance in terms of energy supply, by
a. promoting legislation to limit autochthonous resource exploitation, and
b. promoting the installation of large-scale renewable energy infrastructure purchased from foreign entities - reduce society’s self-reliance in terms of purchasing power and consumer freedom, by
a. justifying the expansion of the money supply in order to fund the purchase of infrastructure while also devaluing the currency (given a lack of those conditions that would promote dynamism and so index the new volume of money in circulation to productive activities), and
b. phasing out older technologies to which people are accustomed, and for which decentralised manufacturing, repair, and customization are common.
Green SDGs are particularly relevant to Europe, given their importance in shaping EU policy and funding schemes (the present Multiannual Financial Framework and Recovery and Resilience Fund).
Indeed, so far, the model Europe seems to be opting for in terms of its ‘green transition’ requires that the development, production, and distribution of relevant technologies be carried out by entities with large economies of scale, with local government and business only coming into the picture ‘downstream,’ as implementers.
There is a real danger that this will function to increase inequality, as an expansive monetary policy nourishes generous funding streams which channel capital into established (often non-European) partners. The latter’s position in the market will thereby become consolidated, resulting in a nearly perfect inversion of the principle of subsidiarity (which is supposed to guide the EU).
Renewables and ‘Resilience’ against Local Self-Reliance
Consider the example of solar panels:
The Commission’s agenda … to quickly switch Europe from its reliance on Russian natural gas to other sources of energy … aims “to double solar photovoltaic capacity by 2025” … though it also includes wind and hydrogen … the Commission had proposed a directive for a speedier method for planning and approving energy projects. Instead of examining and approving projects one-by-one through individual environmental impact assessments as is currently the case, the regulation would mandate that ‘dedicated ‘go-to’ areas for renewables should be put in place by Member States … It would also enshrine in EU regulation solar and wind energy projects as worthy of ‘overriding public interest’ status. But being overridden is exactly what rural communities, usually the targets for ‘renewable’ energy-project installation, fear.
According to a group opposing the move in rural Spain:
In recent years our territory has seen a veritable flood of wind and photovoltaic industrial estates in the best-preserved areas, usually in the ridges of mountain ranges and in the most threatened steppes … These are large-scale projects, with dozens of giant wind turbines or thousands of photovoltaic panels for hundreds of hectares, and kilometres of evacuation lines that will transform the environment.
And just as the needs of local communities are displaced, so too are the interests of the nation. The constitution of large-scale renewable energy sites relies on international suppliers. This is combined with bans on exploiting local resources, including fossil fuels, for which local industry and technology already exist or could be easily set up. The result is to reduce national energy independence.
As an example, we may refer to Spain’s 7/2021 Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition, which has equivalents in other EU Member States. We will limit ourselves to citing articles 9 and 10 (my translation):
From the entry into force of this law, no new exploration authorizations, hydrocarbon research permits, or exploitation concessions for the same … shall be granted in the national territory, including the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone, and the continental shelf.
From the entry into force of this Law, no new applications will be accepted for the granting of exploration permits, research permits, or direct exploitation concessions … on mines, of radioactive minerals … on nuclear energy, when such resources are extracted for their radioactive, fissionable, or fertile properties … no new requests for authorization of radioactive facilities of the nuclear fuel cycle for the processing of such radioactive minerals shall be accepted.
We may also cite elements of European Commission policy that incentivize Member State reliance on long, global supply (and, therefore, de facto, on large foreign companies), despite the fragility of these in recent years. The Commission’s draft ‘Resilience Dashboard’ provides a good example:
Apart from general ‘trade openness,’ the Dashboard assumes resilience is increased by what are called ‘backward and forward participation’ in global value chains. Briefly, these refer to the percentage of a country’s total gross exports that are made with goods previously imported from abroad, that is foreign value-added as percentage of domestic exports, (backward participation), and the percentage of a country’s exports that are in turn used by other countries to make their exports (forward participation). The Dashboard assumes that these lead to a “higher capacity of economies to harness the benefits of global cooperation.” Successfully producing exports that make use of mainly local resources—because a country happens to be resource-rich and has developed an industry around that resource—would then, presumably, be tallied-up as somehow rendering the country less resilient and more vulnerable to economic shocks … the above also appears to discourage local sourcing of resources.
Expanding the Money Supply to Centralise the Means of Production
To the degree that wealth is concentrated by entities that have no long-term incentive to reinvest in Europe or pay their windfall out to a European workforce—and to the degree that economic policies impede genuine (individual and communal) entrepreneurial venture—the expanded money supply will not index to new, productive activities in a dynamized internal market (I am not, therefore, arguing against ‘printing money’ in every circumstance, but the way it is being done is unlikely to lead to positive social outcomes). Instead, the operation will have succeeded in devaluing the euro and depressing the purchasing power of middle and working classes. Indeed, the collapse of the middle class is one of the principal consequences of the pressures to which we are being subjected.
The impoverished citizen will also have to navigate his reliance on new technologies which, for now, society, especially in lower-income zones, is less used to, and for which local markets have yet to establish reliable supply chains or workshops able to repair and customise.
In the short-term, at least, the challenge facing local government and the business sector is one of identifying and promoting policies, on the government side, and financially sustainable business models in the private sector, capable of interfering with larger entities snatching up funding opportunities, as well as producing economic dynamism able to absorb the inflated money supply.
New technologies, including ‘green’ energy, could certainly be ‘humanised,’ that is, adapted to a human scale in which the size of communities and the productive activities its members must carry out are compatible with human flourishing, with edifying sociability and the exercise of traditional virtues. But just as surely, they can also be concentrated in the hands of state-corporate oligarchs to whom the human subject becomes a human resource, a wage-slave, consumer, or both.
The latter would be a repeat of those British (but quickly universalized) enclosure policies which began to be implemented in the 17th century. Depriving the labourer of the chance to buy land (and gradually pushing the farmer off that land which he owned) was seen as a means to avoid his idleness with regard to national industry and large-scale export markets (that is, to avoid his rugged self-sufficiency and the resilience of village life). This terrible deprivation was vigorously defended by prevalent establishment voices at the time (see Arthur Young’s 1799 General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lincoln, for an example).
Conclusion: A Question of Control
Today, however, the new industries barely need us. We have seen how no attempt was made to turn the COVID-19 recovery package into some kind of Keynesian jobs program (even as the economically liberal alternative of deregulation and facilitating business formation is likewise blocked). New industries are largely automated. They need upkeep and occasional visits from engineers, not a large workforce (or at least not in countries where workers are accustomed to higher salaries).
In centuries past, the possibility of industrial technology’s integration into ‘human-scale’ workshops was defeated by the imperative for large economies of scale to feed export markets. ‘Trained artisans’ were replaced by ‘ordinary labourers’ (as Andrew Ure recommended in his 1835 Philosophy of Manufactures), even as the commons were replaced by the factory floor.
A similar process is being attempted today, albeit in the context of new technologies and an already globalised economy (where the diversity of the bygone artisan’s skills is analogous to the differentiation of a nation’s productive capacity). And as Arthur Young observed, the ability of people to avail themselves of the commons made them foci of resistance to this process, both individually and as communities. It is no wonder, then, that the desire to shorten supply chains and create national enterprises able to reap the benefits of technological advances is labelled as retrograde ‘nationalism’ by the political establishment.
The new enclosures are less about forcing us to work in those sectors and in those ways favoured by the political class, than they are about naked discipline. The immediate economic motive of the old enclosure laws, then, is missing, but its core remains. In place of the need for workers, with its counterfeit morality (what Max Weber called the ‘Protestant work ethic,’ in his famous statement of casuistry born of a spurious reading of history), today’s ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ per the World Economic Forum, has its own counterfeit morality—its own slew of saccharine pseudo-ethical appeals to being inclusive and saving the planet.
So long as most people rely on large corporate entities for their livelihood, with their human-resource (political-correctness) departments, and so long as new technologies are not appropriated by people in ways that allow communities to prosper, these will remain in control.
Energy Transition as Class Warfare and National Subordination
The International Division of Labour
Today, the international system, or, more specifically, the international division of labour, is undergoing portentous changes that threaten to subordinate whole societies.
One of the flagships under which these changes are justified is that of the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and specifically those dealing with the development of environmentally renewable energy.
As it is presently being pursued, this ‘Green Transition’ gives every impression of functioning as a means to subordinate countries and peoples (nation-states and swaths of society) to a relatively centralised, globally-integrated division of labour, with its core (or several cores) and peripheries—to use Latin American ‘dependency theory’ terminology—albeit the present phenomenon is distinguished not so much by the emergence of new inequalities between nations as by a general increase in inequality, where even the ‘winners’ of recent history, those countries that have prospered under the Bretton Woods system, find that their middle class is being dynamited.
To wit, the project operates to:
a. promoting legislation to limit autochthonous resource exploitation, and
b. promoting the installation of large-scale renewable energy infrastructure purchased from foreign entities
a. justifying the expansion of the money supply in order to fund the purchase of infrastructure while also devaluing the currency (given a lack of those conditions that would promote dynamism and so index the new volume of money in circulation to productive activities), and
b. phasing out older technologies to which people are accustomed, and for which decentralised manufacturing, repair, and customization are common.
Green SDGs are particularly relevant to Europe, given their importance in shaping EU policy and funding schemes (the present Multiannual Financial Framework and Recovery and Resilience Fund).
Indeed, so far, the model Europe seems to be opting for in terms of its ‘green transition’ requires that the development, production, and distribution of relevant technologies be carried out by entities with large economies of scale, with local government and business only coming into the picture ‘downstream,’ as implementers.
There is a real danger that this will function to increase inequality, as an expansive monetary policy nourishes generous funding streams which channel capital into established (often non-European) partners. The latter’s position in the market will thereby become consolidated, resulting in a nearly perfect inversion of the principle of subsidiarity (which is supposed to guide the EU).
Renewables and ‘Resilience’ against Local Self-Reliance
Consider the example of solar panels:
According to a group opposing the move in rural Spain:
And just as the needs of local communities are displaced, so too are the interests of the nation. The constitution of large-scale renewable energy sites relies on international suppliers. This is combined with bans on exploiting local resources, including fossil fuels, for which local industry and technology already exist or could be easily set up. The result is to reduce national energy independence.
As an example, we may refer to Spain’s 7/2021 Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition, which has equivalents in other EU Member States. We will limit ourselves to citing articles 9 and 10 (my translation):
From the entry into force of this Law, no new applications will be accepted for the granting of exploration permits, research permits, or direct exploitation concessions … on mines, of radioactive minerals … on nuclear energy, when such resources are extracted for their radioactive, fissionable, or fertile properties … no new requests for authorization of radioactive facilities of the nuclear fuel cycle for the processing of such radioactive minerals shall be accepted.
We may also cite elements of European Commission policy that incentivize Member State reliance on long, global supply (and, therefore, de facto, on large foreign companies), despite the fragility of these in recent years. The Commission’s draft ‘Resilience Dashboard’ provides a good example:
Apart from general ‘trade openness,’ the Dashboard assumes resilience is increased by what are called ‘backward and forward participation’ in global value chains. Briefly, these refer to the percentage of a country’s total gross exports that are made with goods previously imported from abroad, that is foreign value-added as percentage of domestic exports, (backward participation), and the percentage of a country’s exports that are in turn used by other countries to make their exports (forward participation). The Dashboard assumes that these lead to a “higher capacity of economies to harness the benefits of global cooperation.” Successfully producing exports that make use of mainly local resources—because a country happens to be resource-rich and has developed an industry around that resource—would then, presumably, be tallied-up as somehow rendering the country less resilient and more vulnerable to economic shocks … the above also appears to discourage local sourcing of resources.
Expanding the Money Supply to Centralise the Means of Production
To the degree that wealth is concentrated by entities that have no long-term incentive to reinvest in Europe or pay their windfall out to a European workforce—and to the degree that economic policies impede genuine (individual and communal) entrepreneurial venture—the expanded money supply will not index to new, productive activities in a dynamized internal market (I am not, therefore, arguing against ‘printing money’ in every circumstance, but the way it is being done is unlikely to lead to positive social outcomes). Instead, the operation will have succeeded in devaluing the euro and depressing the purchasing power of middle and working classes. Indeed, the collapse of the middle class is one of the principal consequences of the pressures to which we are being subjected.
The impoverished citizen will also have to navigate his reliance on new technologies which, for now, society, especially in lower-income zones, is less used to, and for which local markets have yet to establish reliable supply chains or workshops able to repair and customise.
In the short-term, at least, the challenge facing local government and the business sector is one of identifying and promoting policies, on the government side, and financially sustainable business models in the private sector, capable of interfering with larger entities snatching up funding opportunities, as well as producing economic dynamism able to absorb the inflated money supply.
New technologies, including ‘green’ energy, could certainly be ‘humanised,’ that is, adapted to a human scale in which the size of communities and the productive activities its members must carry out are compatible with human flourishing, with edifying sociability and the exercise of traditional virtues. But just as surely, they can also be concentrated in the hands of state-corporate oligarchs to whom the human subject becomes a human resource, a wage-slave, consumer, or both.
The latter would be a repeat of those British (but quickly universalized) enclosure policies which began to be implemented in the 17th century. Depriving the labourer of the chance to buy land (and gradually pushing the farmer off that land which he owned) was seen as a means to avoid his idleness with regard to national industry and large-scale export markets (that is, to avoid his rugged self-sufficiency and the resilience of village life). This terrible deprivation was vigorously defended by prevalent establishment voices at the time (see Arthur Young’s 1799 General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lincoln, for an example).
Conclusion: A Question of Control
Today, however, the new industries barely need us. We have seen how no attempt was made to turn the COVID-19 recovery package into some kind of Keynesian jobs program (even as the economically liberal alternative of deregulation and facilitating business formation is likewise blocked). New industries are largely automated. They need upkeep and occasional visits from engineers, not a large workforce (or at least not in countries where workers are accustomed to higher salaries).
In centuries past, the possibility of industrial technology’s integration into ‘human-scale’ workshops was defeated by the imperative for large economies of scale to feed export markets. ‘Trained artisans’ were replaced by ‘ordinary labourers’ (as Andrew Ure recommended in his 1835 Philosophy of Manufactures), even as the commons were replaced by the factory floor.
A similar process is being attempted today, albeit in the context of new technologies and an already globalised economy (where the diversity of the bygone artisan’s skills is analogous to the differentiation of a nation’s productive capacity). And as Arthur Young observed, the ability of people to avail themselves of the commons made them foci of resistance to this process, both individually and as communities. It is no wonder, then, that the desire to shorten supply chains and create national enterprises able to reap the benefits of technological advances is labelled as retrograde ‘nationalism’ by the political establishment.
The new enclosures are less about forcing us to work in those sectors and in those ways favoured by the political class, than they are about naked discipline. The immediate economic motive of the old enclosure laws, then, is missing, but its core remains. In place of the need for workers, with its counterfeit morality (what Max Weber called the ‘Protestant work ethic,’ in his famous statement of casuistry born of a spurious reading of history), today’s ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ per the World Economic Forum, has its own counterfeit morality—its own slew of saccharine pseudo-ethical appeals to being inclusive and saving the planet.
So long as most people rely on large corporate entities for their livelihood, with their human-resource (political-correctness) departments, and so long as new technologies are not appropriated by people in ways that allow communities to prosper, these will remain in control.
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