Capital has always been about speed up. Well yes, it's always been about speed up but it's
now investing more and more in immobile, fixed capital which is actually sunk capital. Now,
the point about sunk capital is how do you recuperate the value of the sunk capital? Well,
part of it is recuperated by the people who build it. For example, if you build a new airport then
the construction interests come in, the designers, the furnishing people and so on all come in,
and they get involved in producing the airport. And so, they have a very, very good market for
their business, and they build the airport. At the end of the day, the airport is complete.
Who is now going to use the airport? Well, they're only going to use it if the airport can actually
generate some traffic and if they can charge user fees for people using the airport. You can charge
the airlines and all the rest of it, but in order for the airport to be viable economically
there has to be enough traffic. So, the airlines industry has to expand in order to actually meet
the demand so there's enough traffic for the airport, so the airport airport can be viable and
that actually somebody will want to invest in the airport, own the airport because they can extract
from it user fees in all sorts of ways and make a good living out of the ownership of the airport.
But in order for that to happen, means that you have to be prepared to keep the airlines
flying all of the time for 20 or 30 years until the total value of the airport is recuperated.
But what happens when a pandemic comes along and you can't use the airport anymore?
Because nobody's going to fly anymore? So, all of those industries have got into very, very grave
difficulty during the pandemic because the motion was not there to support the fixed capital which
had been invested in the airports. So, this is the kind of dilemma which it seems to me that that
we're confronting now. The pandemic therefore is giving us a bit of a lesson about the evaluation
of fixed capital. Otherwise, the dynamics of a capitalist economy are supposed to be about
mobility and about growth and about acceleration. But increasingly, capitalism is becoming sclerotic
because it's got fixed back investments in the built environment which need to be validated,
need to be valorized as Marx would say. They need to be valorized by their use and the payment for
for that use. Then, this tension is all around us. I find it hard right now to imagine how this is
going to evolve. To what degree is this mass going to continue to increase at an exponential rate
and what are the costs of that expansion and how is that expansion occurring?
Is it coming to make it things move faster and more mobile or is it coming to be more sclerotic,
more heavy, more difficult to move? And to what degree is it going to become weighed
down by its own investment structures? This is the sort of problem which it seems to me is
looming in the not too distant future. I'm very pessimistic in a sense about the future of capital
at this particular moment, because I think the mass which is required to revive capital
accumulation in the style to which it was going before the invasion, before the pandemic.
For that to happen, it seems to me there's an almost impossible task of restoration of a mass
which is almost impossible to accommodate given the barriers and the fact that we only have a
a single globe with which to work, only a single climatic regime which is available to us, only one
system of economy which is which is available to us, which is the capitalist accumulation system.
Clearly the case for an alternative is very strong, and that is entirely why I want to call
this podcast. This is where we're talking about the anti-capitalist possibilities,
the Anti-Capitalist Chronicles and where they come from and where they might go to.