Food Shortages, Social Unrest and the Low-Input Alternative - TopicsExpress

Food Shortages, Social Unrest and the Low-Input Alternative heathwoodpress/food-shortages-social-unrest-low-input-alternative/ ..Biel’s reading of entropy is basic. It registers the necessary conversion of inputs from the environment to some socially useful product. The system of capital converts inputs of natural resources and labor into what is ultimately the capital necessary for the reproduction of the system of capital. Here, food crises go hand in hand with environmental depletion on the widest, systemic scale, all the while such depletion is compounded by climate change and human economic policies. Economic policies may harmfully ramify entropy in a system. Of course one must carefully consider the role of the dominant neoliberal agricultural policy that sustains industrial and factory farming methods as a cause of food crises, both at the level of methods of production and at the level of food price regulation. Naturally, bad policy may lead to a narrowing of the options available for the system of capital to dissipate its entropy into an environment. Commonsense blog reviewer Luigi Russi puts this point well in a recent review of Biel’s The Entropy of Capitalism: Entropy, however, also refers to the ability to process information. In other words, as the system loses its ability to process diverse information and transform itself accordingly, it becomes responsive to only a narrow set of conditions and produces an even narrower set of responses that increase its fragility. So, for example, Biel looks at the progressive inability of the system of capitalism to process information that contradicts its basic core-periphery dynamics and becomes caught in a spiral of financial instability and militarisation. This occurs because, on the one hand, finance – by reaping profits from risk – offers distorted feedback by promoting the multiplication of risk through speculation, thereby muffling the stabilising feedback about the unsustainability of capitalist accumulation (which requires constant dissipation into an environment, which effectively becomes a “periphery”). Militarisation, on the other hand, is the response of late capitalist regimes to the increase in feedback which the system is unable to process and which is therefore bagged as chaos and subject to militaristic repression.[10] For Biel, the political economy of the system of capital deploys such regimes of accumulation (modes of converting inputs to outputs) in order to sustain itself, while the very logic of these regimes generates irresolvable contradictions, for example, when it comes to providing solutions to problems in food production... #agriculture #capitalism #poverty #democracy #commons #systems #food #agribusiness