File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 93


Date: Wed, 05 Nov 1997 13:57:55 -0800
From: Mark_Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Final Crisis, was Re: New List


James, far from being a deluded chiliast, I base myself on facts which are
almost commonplace by now. You have to read the right books. Proyect pointed
some out, but the Capitalism, Nature, Socialism current is itself part of the
problem and much as I respect John Bellamy Foster and the O'Connor's, they too
have missed a large part of the point -- but that is the subject of another
posting.

Far from relishing the thought as you suppose, most Americnas are appalled at
the prospect of there being half a billion of their fellow citizens in the
foreseeable future, but the demographic trendline is there, and it is there for
the planet as a whole. The present population of around six billion is forecast
conservatively by the UN to rise to 10bn in the next half century.

But the ecological footprint required to give 500m Americans a lifestyle similar
to what they currently enjoy is so large that it directly imperils runaway
global warming and a general collapse of ecosystems, soil fertilty and much
besides. Therefore the facts are that living standards are going to fall, in
America and everywhere else. The facts are truly awesome, in reality. The lack
of energy inputs and the 20th century's mining of US soil fertility and water
tables plus the growing US population, guarantee that the US will not be a
food-exporter within two decades. The implications for Africa, China and India,
are spectacular. The implications for the stability of the world capitalist
system should not need spelling out on this list. The US balance of payments
deficit is set to become a universal casus belli. More than that, in the same
way that the 19th century growth in innercontinetal economies (USA, Germany,
Russia) fatally undermined British-controlled global (maritime, coastal)
production relations, via sterling and the Gold Standard -- exploding the world
system in 1914, so will American-controlled world production relations explode
early in the next century, but this time there will be no cavalry to come to the
rescue: no looming oil-fuelled, food-surplus fuelled American Century.

The world's population is rising because half of it are still teenagers.
Capitalism, as KM repeatedly said, has its own law of population, and its
accumulated reserve army is not going to go away; demography is like a cruise
liner, you can't slow it down or change its direction easily. That is why
history has got capitalism by the balls, and why what is going to happen is what
has already begun to happen in eastern Europe and elsewhere: population
implosion, pestilence and war *simultaneously* with the working of the
inexorable demographic trendlines (that's dialectics).

Your general optimism is entirely delusional. Capitalism's sucesses this century
have not been based on science, technology, or even on increasing productivity,
so much as on environemtal rape and more than anything on the plunder of oil
resources. The system has not managed to evolve through this process onto a
sustainable basis, but IN the process it HAS comprehensivley buggered the
environemnt, which is set to collapse in all sorts of unpredictable ways, so
(forget the bullshit about fuel cells, wind turbines and photovoltaics, because
that's what it is, bullshit) what the future holds for us is going to be dark,
cold (especially in regions lying on the same latitude as the frozen northern
bits of northern Canada, and currently enjoying non-Canadian conditions because
warmed by the Gulf Stream but not for much longer, ie, Europe, because yes, we
are likely to get Siberian weather as a paradoxical - dialectical- by-product of
global warming) hungry and generally beastly.

You are not hearing this because you don't want to believe it and in less than a
nanosecond someone is going to post in a lot of blather about the Meadows, Club
of Rome, doomsayers crying wolf and other crap. Someone else is going to say
this is all obscurantist green misanthropy, that I hate people and secretly want
to deprive non-white humanity of the good life I have hitherto enjoyed.

But they would be wrong. Read the literature. Go figure. Then ask yourself why
it is that the very people who have always argued that capitalism is a
transient, historical mdoe of production, that socialism or barbarism will be
its only alternative fruits, and that revolution is what we must prepare,
namely, the soi-disant Marxists, have ceased to argue any such thing? They call
me a Stalinist, but it is exactly stalinism's false optimism about the onward
march of humankind which I do nto share, but which has become a crippling bal
and chain around the necks of the revolutionaries who simply no longer get the
big picture.




     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005