File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 530


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



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