Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 14:01:24 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: Heartfield verses the trees The best way to understand Heartfield's pro-capitalist apologetics on environmental questions is to place them in the context of the attack on Marxism that comes from the Greens themselves. The Greens, and some socialists who have been influenced by them and the Frankfurt School simultaneously, have charged Marxism with being indifferent to pollution, destruction of endangered wildlife, indigenous peoples. Their complaint is that all of nature is sacrificed on the altar of capitalist development, or in the case of the former Soviet Union, socialist development. They blame poisoned rivers, ravaged forests and filthy air on the capitalist drive for profits while at the same time decrying the tendency of Marxism to uncritically accept this "development" paradigm. What Heartfield does is embrace the Green caricature of Marxism and says, "That's right--that is what Marx intended--and we're FOR it." Moreover, he is not content to align himself with the worst abuses of the environment that went on in the name of "Marxism" in the former Soviet Union, like Rolf Martens does. He takes this one step further and identifies with a wing of the capitalist class itself, namely the cheesy, low-rent corporations that are ravaging the Amazon and Borneo rain-forests. Its interesting that the most elite circles of the ruling class are concerned about this wanton destruction of natural resources, while a band of "Marxists" enlists as spear-carriers for the lumpen-bourgeoisie that is torching old-growth forests in Brazil and East Asia. In class terms, the mainstream Greens in the United States like the Sierra Club have an orientation to the old-line, oil-based wealth of the Pew Charitable Trust, while Heartfield has an orientation to arrivistes like Frank Perdue who is turning the rivers of North Carolina into toilet bowls for his poultry farms. Heartfield whispers into Perdue's ear, "Don't be afraid of taking risks, Frank. More feces, that's the answer, more feces." Heartfield patronizingly reminds Doug Henwood that Marx was caught up in the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and bestowed it upon humanity. Prometheus, in this view, becomes a paradigm of development and exploitation of nature. The Prometheus paradigm is used against Marx by those who understand him in a crude "productivist" manner. For example, Green-anarchist John Clark complains that: "Marx's Promethean...'man' is a being who is not at home in nature, who does not see the Earth as the 'household' of ecology. He is an indomitable spirit who must subject nature in his quest for self-realization...For such a being, the forces of nature, whether in the form of his own unmastered internal nature or the menacing powers of external nature, must be subdued." So Heartfield's answer is so what? What's wrong with subjecting nature in this way. If Marx said it, it's good enough for me. But DID Marx say anything like this? First of all, Marx had a much more complex understanding of Prometheus than this. For Marx, Prometheus was not simply the god who introduced mastery over nature to humanity. He was also the god who fought against arbitrary rule. He was a symbol of rebellion who attracted figures such as Beethoven, Byron and Shelley as well. To view the Promethean model as simply a call for unfettered development is to an injustice to the Greeks as well as to Marx. In Aeschylus' "Prometheus Unbound", the gift of the god is understood as labor, craftsmanship and creativity, not just technology. Such a gift facilitated the growth of democracy. The notion that Marx advocated nothing but domination over nature reduces the dialectical complexity and tension in his body of work to Chamber of Commerce propaganda, which LM has dedicated itself to. Let's review Marx and Engels' views. (For this analysis, I am drawing extensively from John Foster Bellamy's "Marx and the Environment", contained in the Monthly Review collection of articles on postmodernism. This article is a MUST for understanding these issues.) Marx believed that humanity and nature were interrelated. He wrote in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 that: "Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply mans that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature." This bears no resemblance to the man OVER nature model of Heartfield, does it? Marx advocated RATIONAL CONTROL over the interaction between humanity and nature. This is at the essence of the socialist project. This approach, while given lip-service in Living Marxism, is rejected. The LM propaganda mostly advocates letting 'development' take its own course. It boils down to a highly callous view of our interaction with nature. It really isn't even a formula for humanity over nature. It is rather one for capitalist development over humanity and nature combined. Heartfield doesn't complain about the extermination of old-growth forests and indigenous peoples in the Amazon or Borneo. He complains about the protesters in Oxfam and Greenpeace. This, of course, has nothing to do with socialism. It is rather LM's left-cover for the lumpen-bourgeoisie. While Marx could never have anticipated the sort of environmental disasters that are occurring in East Asia today, he was keenly aware of the ecological ramifications of agriculture: "All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is progress towards ruining the long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of wealth--the soil and the worker." (Capital, vol. 1, "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry") When they did touch upon the problems of sustainability, Marx and Engels did make some telling observations. Marx wrote, "The development of culture and industry in general has ever evinced itself in such energetic destruction of forests that everything done by it conversely for their preservation and restoration appears infinitesimal." With regard to industrial waste, he argued for "economy through the prevention of waste, that is to say, the reduction of excretions of production to a minimum, and the immediate utilization of all raw and auxiliary materials required in production." Living Marxism never puts forward this type of call. It simply worships at the feet of the polluters. For example, in an attack on the concept of sustainable development, it says: "This scientific-sounding argument for putting conservation before development is really based on fallacious reasoning. Not only is there no shortage of natural resources today, but these resources cannot be considered as capital values. Natural resources are useful to us only because human effort and ingenuity have been expended to extract them." The notion that there is no shortage of natural resources today is pretty meaningless unless it is put within the context of long-term economic development on a global scale. This is something that Heartfield and company do not do. They share with the "productivists" of the mid-19th century the view that there are no obstacles to capitalist development. >From time to time, they give lip-service to the problem. For example, they admit that there might be a phenomenon such as global warming, but--big deal--some people will do better than others. Those that are not doing so well will just have to move to a more advantageous location, where the climate affords a more tolerable existence. This is not the sort of stance that socialist should take. The consequences of global warming can be anticipated in the sort of climactic changes that have already begun and that are reflected in "El Nino". The effects of these changes have been felt recently in Indonesia: "After four months, the man-made fires, set on the heavily forested islands of Borneo and Sumatra to clearland for crops, are spreading rather than shrinking. And with Indonesia suffering its worst drought in 50years -- a result of El Nino weather disturbances -- no one knows how many weeks or months it will be until the monsoon rains finally arrive to douse them..." "Well-connected palm oil plantation owners and pulp-and-paper companies in Indonesia have continued clearing land by burning off vast tracts of jungle, seemingly immune to laws or punishment. Firefighting has been disorganized, and villagers in some of Indonesia's worst-hit areas say they have received little or no help... "The fires have burrowed deep into vast peat bogs and seams of coal, where experts say they may continue to smolder for years. Environmentalists say that if the drought and the forest fires continue for much longer, and resume again when the next dry season arrives in June, the haze could be a continuing blight... "Already it has affected agriculture, and food shortages and rising prices are predicted. Reduced sunlight is slowing the growth of fruits and vegetables and reducing yields of corn and rice. The smoke is tainting cocoa crops. Birds, bees and insects have disappeared in many areas, disrupting pollination... "The delayed monsoon and the spreading drought have been caused by the warming Pacific waters of the El Nino weather pattern, which has begun to affect the region with unusual power... "The island of New Guinea -- including the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya and the nation of Papua New Guinea -- is already suffering. Hundreds of people are reported to have died from starvation, dysentery and influenza. Haze is slowing deliveries of relief supplies to remote areas that can only be reached by air. Officials say hundreds of thousands of people are in urgent need of food and water." Make no mistake about it. Heartfield and his gang are aligned with the Indonesian government and the palm oil plantation owners on this one. This is some bunch of "Marxists" we have in LM who spend all of their time attacking political activists who are trying to put a halt to the depraved indifference to human beings, animals and vegetation going on in East Asia today. Instead of writing attacks on Suharto and his thugs, they write smirking attacks on Greenpeace and Oxfam that have more in common with P.J. O'Rourke and Rush Limbaugh than Karl Marx. The problem with outfits like Greenpeace and Oxfam is that they lack an orientation to the working-class. The problem with Living Marxism is that it does have an orientation to a powerful class, or at least a section of it: the gangster sector of the bourgeoisie which is treating precious natural resources and people the way that slumlords treat their buildings and the people who live in them. They are interested in making a profit off of them and it doesn't matter who lives or dies in the process. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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