Date: Tue, 09 Dec 1997 18:26:16 -0800
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Against Nature


There are no natural limits to capitalism. James Heartfield misrepresents 
his opponents as usual. And I do not "repeat the mantra 'you people 
in the third world just cannot have what we have, I'm sorry, it's not 
my doing, that's just the way it is'. The dog-in-manger implication of 
this is foreign to me. I have never said this even once. 

I believe the opposite -- that it is the west which will have to change, and
that socialism if it happens will entail a radical levelling-down 
and a redistribution from the west to the rest. Heartfield also 
attacks me for this, which is having his cake and eating it.

On this basis alone -- massive redistribution -- would population pressures 
reduce as the capitalist law of accumulation (including accumulation 
of people) was eliminated. At the same time living  standards in the 
third world would improve. LM is selling  third worlders a false, a 
fraudulent prospectus when it pretends that the third world can 
have a western standard of life while capitalism and the world market
still exists. They cannot. Capitalism breeds poles of plenty amid oceans 
of want. Living Marxism supports that. I do not. Their marxism is a cynical 
charade. They are turncoats looking for a warm nest to retire in.

The limits to capitalism are social. But they are material in form, they
are real and confront the world with the inevitability and force of
laws of nature. It would be easy, for example, to arrest global warming.
It is necessary only to dispense with cars, and put electricity
production and also agriculture on a sustainable basis. That, of course,
is not going to happen. Therefore global warming will continue and we
may discover that the social limits to capitalist production and to the
expansion of the reserve army of labour, take the form of a qualitative
change in the world's climate system. It is useless, of course, to
expect Heartfield, whose breezy style and hallucinatory grasp on the
facts reminds one of doorstep Jehovah's Witnesses, to address this
simple truth.

The Third World cannot have western food consumption standards, which in
any case are unhealthy and bizarrely over-indulgent. The limits on 
capitalist agriculture are not light years away, they are based ultimately 
on the planet's biomass and its capacity for photosynthesis, as well as 
on the limits to oil supply, which is already critical in keeping the lid 
on third world agriculture. 

Where third world argiculture  is subsistence farming it is still largely 
human, horse or ox-powered and wood or dung fuelled. Where it is cash-crop 
agriculture it uses the kind of inputs lauded by Heartfield and Boddhisatva 
even more intensively and abrasively than in the west. It is not just food. 
Large chunks of Kenya and other east African countries are given over to 
carnation and rose growing, and the vast quantities of herbicides and 
pesticides used have produced a horrific catalogue of eco and social effects, 
inlcuding birth defects, blindness, epidemic cancers. That is the price 
they pay for the posies western men present to their women. 

Of course, it is possible that in the next heroic stage of
Monsanto's biotech revolution, much food will be algae cultured in vats.
But this will represent a further degradation of living standards,
forced by the growth of population. 

The capitalist law of population has always 
worked to encourage population growth, or to prevent the conditions 
emerging in which it might be self-limiting (as in
the communist state of Kerala, which has a fertility rate of 1.7, ie,
the population does not quite reproduce itself. The per capita GNP is
less than $1,000, but the high levels of literacy and general culture
and the socialist policy towards women have worked to reduce the
exponential rate of population growth experienced elsewhere in India,
where a more purely capitalist law of population still applies).
This does not mean, of course, that the effect of the capitalist law
of population is not both genocidal and immiserating. It is.

Boddhisatva raises some points about oil reserves.
The official US government estimate for Caspian reserves is between
19-29 bn bbls. That is about 10% the Saudi level, which is probably a
politically-motivated over-estimate. As we know, there are lies,
statistics and oil reserve figures. But I am not going to repost unless
anyone asks me, the mass of data I uploaded earlier which suggests that
the present rough balance between global supply and demand will change
in the next decade into generalised oil shortages. Anyone who thinks
that oil will last forever should (a) ask why in that case we aren't all
knee-deep in the stuff, because it ought to be bubling unstoppably out
of the ground and (b) should take a look at what has happened in the
last two decades to oil production in Texas, the North Sea and Mexico.


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