Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 15:40:16 -0500
Subject: M-I: Gregory's post reformatted
From: jschulman-AT-juno.com (Jason A Schulman)


--------- Begin forwarded message ----------
From: Gregory Schwartz <grishas-AT-yorku.ca>
To: marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: M-I: Dialectical materialism and the environmental crisis
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 13:49:10 -0600

I am new to the list and, up until now, have only been a passive 
observer. In any event, I wanted to reply to the recent debate between 
Louis and James Re: dialectical materialism and the environmental 
crisis.

>Dialectical materialism has gotten a bad reputation from its use in
Soviet apologetics, but, >despite this, an updated version can provide
insights into the environmental crisis that >historical materialism
simply can not.
>Jean-Guy Vaillancourt's essay "Marx and Ecology: More Benedictine than
Franciscan" is >contained in the collection "The Greening of Marxism"
(Guilford, 1996) raises this question 
>In a most perceptive way. (By the way, there's an essay by this guy
named Michael 
>Perelman titled "Marx and Resource Scarcity" in there as well. It's
pretty gosh-darned 
>good.)

I too have read Benton's and O'Connor's edited books, and concur 
unequivocally with Louis' remarks ALMOST in their entirety. In other 
words, I see that there has to be a "Greening of Marxism" as it were, as 
a necessary theoretical and methodological point of departure against 
both the capitalist hegemony and the logic of productivism, which almost 
invariably gives rise (as it did in the Soviet Union, albeit there are 
many other not unimportant reasons for their bureaucratic-productivism, 
which has to do with the hunger to reproduce a system that - as it 
did/does for the ruling class in capitalist states - would maintain 
their power) to degradation of the environment. Andre Gorz (despite 
being misread by a number of Marxists as somewhat post-modern) presents 
an excellent logical illustration of some Marxist contradictions in re 
nature. This is not to say that Marx's writing, as well as Engels' 
excellent exposition of the dialectic of nature does not provide a sound 
conjectural substructure. Not for a moment! It was Marx who said that 
"As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great 
well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its 
measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use 
value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for 
the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, 
for the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of 
destitution and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and 
hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus 
labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of 
society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, 
scientific, etc. development of individuals in the time set free, and 
with the means created, for and of them."

Well, what does that mean? This means that the END is human development, 
which is divorced from labour for the third party (be it a capitalist 
factory, a late-capitalist welfare bureaucracy, or the Soviet 
style-ubiquitously subordinating-state/society/firm machine). This means 
that humans must develop and administer democratically the seeds as well 
as the fruits of their labour (i.e. direct ownership, control and 
management of the means of production and answerability to immediate 
community material demands). As much as I hate blueprints, this to me 
seems a sage plan to socialize production, democratize the social-psyche 
and usher socially judicious state rooted in government by the soviets 
(i.e. councils) and ecological sustainability not as some dogma, but 
rather as a way of life. I anticipate that neither Marx nor Engels would 
greatly disagree with me here, for this schematic weds the best of the 
two worlds, which need not be (as James suggests) separated by the 
dampening Promethean myth.

At the beginning of the post I did say that I agree with Louis ALMOST 
entirely, and this refers to his later mail which puts a damper on 
revolutionary thought.

>You got the same problem as every other "revolutionary communist" who
shows up here. >You run out of things to say. Unless it is part of your
catechism, you've got nothing to say.

Unless I misread you, Louis? It appears to me that you are turning into 
a typical Kautskyan, who would embrace social-democracy and later 
perhaps strike a (Faustian) deal with Mephistopheles. It is precisely 
because you lack clear revolutionary vision that truck-driving, 
uranium-pellet chewing radicals who, in absence of any meaningful 
theoretical substructure and clear understanding of the massiveness of 
the communist revolutionary project feel justified in rejecting 
ecological propositions (which I see as indispensable elements of 
Marxism) as superfluous. The point is Socialist Democracy (not 
social-democracy, which is some sort of German Christian Democratic 
pseudonym) as a transitional stage which will socialize EVERY sphere of 
human life (including the political and economic sphere that interacts 
with the environment). Revolution is an indispensable political act 
that, for Gramsci for instance, meant exposing the capitalist hegemony, 
elucidating false consciousness of the working class that is engendered 
upon it by the hegemonic capital, and wholly dismantling the bourgeois 
state. These are all revolutionary acts that need not necessarily be 
taken in a "Trotskyist" (however that has been misinterpreted) sense. It 
is the scientific and cultural knowledge (including knowledge about the 
fragility of the bio-sphere and the need to redress infinite growth 
stimulus of early Marxists) that should produce a new regime. But this 
regime cannot come about without the first step: a proletarian (in a 
Gorzian sense: neo-proletarian) revolution. If you want to jump over the 
abyss to the tenth step (i.e. communism conferred by green (as well as 
other) logic) by relying on the hand of the wholly unmodified political 
milieu dominated by pluralist logic and bourgeois trickery, you and your 
project is bound to fall to the bottomless pit of history. (To some 
extent, despite the "violent revolution," this happened in Russia. Where 
today, after a massive collapse of the unformed socio-political milieu 
that was permeated by the still-present bourgeois logic, the idea of 
socialism is ubiquitously rejected in its entirety.) No compromises! A 
revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat (however unpopular the 
phrase may be today). Rosa Luxemburg said it best: "Yes, dictatorship! 
But this dictatorship consists in the *manner of applying democracy*, 
not in its *elimination*, in energetic, resolute attacks upon the 
well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, 
without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But 
this dictatorship must be (as it was for Marx) the work of the class and 
not of a leading minority in the name of the class-that is, it must 
proceed step by step under their direct influence, subjected to the 
control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing 
political training [including ecological training set in a 
class-conscious framework] of the mass of the people."

Regards!
---
Gregory Schwartz
Department of Political Science/
Post-Communist Studies Programme
York University
Toronto, Ontario
grishas-AT-yorku.ca



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