Lauerdale Paradox

Description

1. by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark:

"Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in exchange, and to augment private riches. But this is not the case for public wealth, which encompasses all value in use, and thus includes not only what is scarce but also what is abundant. This paradox led Lauderdale to argue that increases in scarcity in such formerly abundant but necessary elements of life as air, water, and food would, if exchange values were then attached to them, enhance individual private riches, and indeed the riches of the country — conceived of as “the sum-totalof individual riches” — but only at the expense of the common wealth. For example, if one could monopolize water that had previously been freely available by placing a fee on wells, the measured riches of the nation would be increased at the expense of the growing thirst of the population.

“The common sense of mankind,” Lauderdale contended, “would revolt” at any proposal to augment private riches “by creating a scarcity of any commodity generally useful and necessary to man.” Nevertheless, he was aware that the bourgeois society in which he lived was already, in many ways, doing something of the very sort. " (https://monthlyreview.org/2009/11/01/the-paradox-of-wealth-capitalism-and-ecological-destruction/)

2. Jason Hickel:

"A long view of the history of capitalism reveals that growth has always depended on enclosure. The Lauderdale Paradox first articulated by James Maitland holds that an increase in “private riches” is achieved by choking off “public wealth”. This is done not only in order to acquire free value from the commons but also, I argue, in order to create an “artificial scarcity” that generates pressures for competitive productivity. Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but rather abundance.

I build on this insight to show that such an approach not only embodies an alternative to a growth-oriented economy, but in fact offers an antidote to the driving mechanism of growth itself, thus releasing both humans and ecosystems from its grip. By advancing a theory of abundance, degrowth provides a feasible political pathway toward an ecological economy fit for the Anthropocene." (https://www.academia.edu/38601467/Degrowth_A_theory_of_radical_abundance?email_work_card=title)

Discussion

Marx and the Lauderdale Paradox

by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark:

"In opposition to Say and Mill, Marx, like Ricardo, not only held fast to the Lauderdale Paradox but also made it his own, insisting that the contradictions between use value and exchange value, wealth and value, were intrinsic to capitalist production. In The Poverty of Philosophy, he respondedto Proudhon’s confused treatment (in The Philosophy of Poverty) of the opposition between use value and exchange value by pointing out that this contradiction had been explained most dramatically by Lauderdale, who had “founded his system on the inverse ratio of the two kinds of value.” Indeed, Marx built his entire critique of political economy in large part around the contradiction between use value and exchange value, indicating that this was one of the key components of his argument in Capital. Under capitalism, he insisted, nature was rapaciously mined for the sake of exchange value: “the earth is the reservoir, from whose bowels the use-values are to be torn.”

This stance was closely related to Marx’s attempt to look at the capitalist economy simultaneously in terms of its economic-value relations, and its material transformations of nature. Thus, Marx was the first major economist to incorporate the new notions of energy and entropy, emanating from the first and second laws of thermodynamics, into his analysis of production.12 This can be seen in his treatment of the metabolic rift — the destruction of the metabolism between human beings and the soil, brought on by the shipment of food and fiber to the city, where nutrients withdrawn from the soil, instead of returning to the earth, ended up polluting the air and the water. In this conception, both nature and labor were robbed, since both were deprived of conditions vital for their reproduction: not “fresh air” and water but “polluted” air and water, Marx argued, had become the mode of existence of the worker.

Marx’s analysis of the destruction of the wealth of nature for the sake of accumulation is most evident in his treatment of capitalist ground rent and its relation to industrial agriculture. Ricardo had rooted his agricultural rent theory in “the original and indestructible powers of the soil”; Marx replied that “the soil has no ‘indestructible powers’” — in the sense that it could be degraded, i.e., subject to conditions of ecological destruction. It is here in Marx’s treatment of capitalist agriculture that the analysis of the metabolic rift and the Lauderdale Paradox are brought together within his overall critique. It is here, too, that he frequently refers to sustainability as a material requirement for any future society — the need to protect the earth for “successive generations.” A condition of sustainability, he insisted, is the recognition that no one (not even an entire society or all societies put together) owns the earth — which must be preserved for future generations in accordance with the principles of good household management. For a sustainable relation between humanity and the earth to be possible under modern conditions, the metabolic relation between human beings and nature needs to be rationally regulated by the associated producers in line with their needs and those of future generations. This means that the vital conditions of life and the energy involved in such processes need to be conserved.

Few things were more important, in Marx’s view, than the abolition of the big private monopolies in land that divorced the majority of humanity from: (1) a direct relation to nature, (2) the land as a means of production, and (3) a communal relation to the earth. Thus, he delighted in quoting at length from Herbert Spencer’s chapter in his Social Statics (1851), “The Right to the Use of the Earth.” There, Spencer openly declared: “Equity…does not permit property in land, or the rest would live on the earth by sufferance only….It is impossible to discover any mode in which land can become private property….A claim to the exclusive possession of the soil involves land-owning despotism.” Land, Spencer insisted, properly belongs to “the great corporate body — society.” Human beings were “co-heirs” to the earth.

Although Marx usually looked at nature from an exclusively human perspective, in terms of sustaining use values, he also referred at times to nature’s right not to be reduced to a mere commodity. Thus, he quoted Thomas Müntzer’s famous objection that, in the developing bourgeois society, “all creatures have been made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth — all living things must also become free.” (https://monthlyreview.org/2009/11/01/the-paradox-of-wealth-capitalism-and-ecological-destruction/)

Jason Hickel on Resolving the Lauerdale Paradox

Jason Hickel:

"The pattern by which capitalist growth generates scarcity was first noticed in 1804 by James Maitland, the 8th Earl of Lauderdale, in his Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase. Maitland introduced what became known as the “Lauderdale Paradox”.

He pointed out that there is an inverse correlation between “private riches” and “public wealth”, such that an increase in the former can only come at the expense of the latter (see Foster and Clark, 2009).

“Public wealth,” Maitland wrote, “may be accurately defined, – to consist of all that mandesires, as useful or delightful to him.” In other words, public wealth comprises goods that have an intrinsic use value even in abundance, including air, water, and food. Private riches, on the other hand, consist “ of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.” In other words, Maitland sought to explain how private riches depend on goods having an exchange value that increases in proportion to their scarcity. By way of example, he pointed out that if one were to enclose an abundant resource like water and establish a monopoly over it, one could charge people to access it and therefore increase one’s private riches.

This would also increase what Maitland called the “sum- total of individual riches” – what today we call GDP. But this increase, of private riches and GDP, can be accomplished only by curtailing access to what was once abundant and free.Maitland recognized that this was happening during the process of European colonization. He stopped short of theorizing enclosure (unlike Henry George and Karl Marx later in the century), but he did point out that colonialists would often resort to burning down trees that produced fruits and nuts so that local inhabitants wouldn’t be able to live off of the natural abundance of the earth, but would be compelled instead to work for wages and purchase food from Europeans in order to feed themselves. For the sake of private riches and GDP, what was once abundant and free had to be made scarce. The iconic example of this was of course the salt tax that the British Raj imposed on India. Salt was abundant and free all along India’s coasts, but the British banned people from gathering it and taxed its consumption in order to create what became a significant revenue stream for the colonial government. The abolition of public wealth generated private riches. We can see this same process happening today in the endless waves of privatization that have been unleashed all over the world since 1980, of education, healthcare, transportation, libraries, parks, swimming pools, water, even social security. At a time when globalization has run its course, trade protections have been dismantled around the world, wages are as low as they can reasonably get, and consumer markets are increasingly saturated, continued growth requires new rounds of what David Harvey (2003) has called accumulation by dispossession – the enclosure of the remaining stock of public wealth. Social goods everywhere are under attack – they must be made scarce for the sake of growing the GDP. People must be made to pay in order to acquire goods that they used to access for free. And in order to pay, they will of course have to work more, placing them once again under pressure to compete with one another to be ever-more productive – a pressure justified, again, for the sake of growing the GDP.

Indeed, our society’s obsession with GDP growth as the primary public policy objectivereveals the entrenchment of the Lauderdale Paradox as political common sense, the ultimate triumph of enclosure: the growth of “private riches” has come to stand in for Progress itself.

Meanwhile, conveniently – and tellingly – there is no indicator that charts the concomitant collapse of public wealth. This logic reaches its apogee in the contemporary vision of austerity, which was rolled outacross Europe in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. What is austerity, really? It is a desperate attempt to re-start the engines of growth by slashing public investment in social goods and welfare protections – everything from elderly heating allowances to unemployment benefits to public sector wages – chopping away at what remains of the commons so that people deemed too “comfortable” or “lazy” are placed once again under threat of hunger, and forced to increase their productivity if they want to survive. This logic is overt, just as it was in the writings of people like John Bellers and David Hume. During the government of BritishPrime Minister David Cameron and his Finance Minister George Osborne, welfare cuts were conducted explicitly in order to get “shirkers” to work harder and to be more productive (“workfare”, they called it). Scarcity must be induced for the sake of more growth, as Maitland pointed out. In the logic of austerity, scarcity and growth emerge as two sides of the same coin, just as during the enclosures." (https://www.academia.edu/38601467/Degrowth_A_theory_of_radical_abundance?email_work_card=title)