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 ---
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