File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 320


Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 02:32:33 +0000
From: "M.A.&N.G. Jones" <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: [Fwd: Is growth still making us better off?]


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------CA847506D2FEFDBC4FF92B4E

Sustainable-economics is debating the latest Richard Douthwaite book,
amid the usual talk about the 'irrelevance' of Marxism, so I posted
this and for good measure a classic of Lou P's ('Ecology and the
American Indian').

Mark

--------------CA847506D2FEFDBC4FF92B4E

Message-ID: <34EB91CC.6B7CFC19-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 01:58:36 +0000
From: "M.A.&N.G. Jones" <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win16; I)
To: sustainable-economics-AT-csf.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Is growth still making us better off?
References: <199802181923.TAA19603-AT-mail.iol.ie>

A similar debate to this has been going on on the Spoons Marxism
lists. It began when one member of the Marxism-International list,
who is connected with the journal Living Marxism, began to defend 
LM's authorship of a notorious anti-environmentalist TV programme 
shown recently on the UK's Channel 4 TV. The programme
was called 'Against Nature'. The show, like LM, supported the kind 
of ideas normally associated with Fred Singer the climatologist
and global-warming denialist, and the late Julian Simon. 
Thus, ultra-right wing ideas were garbed in a  kind of pseudo-
marxist productivist rhetoric. Not only were the programme
scripts posted and critically destroyed, a wide-ranging
debate started on green issues.

Thus we have been discussing on Marxism-International the work of 
James O'Connor, whose new book 'Natural Causes: Essays in 
ecological Marxism' (Guilford Press) is just out, and of 
John Bellamy Foster and other 'red-greens'.

We have exhaustively posted and talked of, the work of Pimentel,
Gretchen Daily, Herman Daly and other mavens of ecol-econ -- and we
are about to make a start, I suspect, on Richard Douthwaite.

What is interesting is that these kind of debates go on everywhere,
but on parallel lines, in hermetic compartments. In the
discussions on this seminar there is an easiness about writing off
Marxism as a philsophical tradition and a politics which simply does
not reflect the strenghths of that tradition not merely as a
culture of activism with successes as well as failures, but
as a radical analysis of industrial society and capitalist 
economy which simply cannot be ignored.

Ralph Chipman, of the UN's curiously (and I would argue, oxymoronly)
named Sustainable Development Division, has given us the anti-radical
argument in its most extreme form. There is much to argue about here.
It would be nice to take issue with anyone who can be satisfied with a
definition of a poverty income of $1 a day, for instance. I'm not
clear how one even, in practice, establishes the existence of 
such an income. Beyond definitions, there is a need to question
the kind of judgments made.

Ralph says health and welfare has improved but there are issues 
involved  for example in the uncritical use of UNFPA demographic 
reports  and projections. I have been digging in the data myself, 
and the brief version of my scepticism is this: when the UN says 
that life expectancy in China in 1950 (for example) was 30 years, 
who actually was doing the counting in China, one year after the
Communists came to power, and what anyway is the meaning of comparing
fifty years of peacem, with the previous fifty years of civil war,
famine, Japanese genocide etc?  So I have a lot of doubts just 
about the raw data of the many alleged 'improvements' in longevity,
 mortality, morbidity etc which Ralph mentions. 

To take another example, Ralph says: 'A recent survey of the environment 
in Europe indicates that forest area is increasing.' But the reason 
forest cover has returned to parts of Europe and New England, for 
example, is because we don't use wood for fuel any more (there are 
other reasons to do with changed land use, but that's primary). 
Instead, we use fossil fuels, and the amount of energy we humans use 
that way exceeds the total amount of energy trapped by photosynthesis 
by the entire European and North American biomass each year. That is 
radically unsustainable. 

There is a report in Scientific American about impending conventional 
oil shortages, so the unsustainability is not just because of greenhouse 
or other eco-impacts, either. It's economic.

Since most of the benefits the world's population have allegedly known
since 1945 have been the result of increasing energy-intensity and the
conversion from a mainly coal to a mainly oil (and now gas) energy
base, and since it is clearly going to be extremely difficult for what
are still primarily industrial economies to make the transition to
non-renewables, there is much less reason for complacency or
self-congratulation, and much more reason for alarm, than Ralph
Chipman allows.

On  a seminar like this, none of this perhaps needs spelling out,
although obviously one could say much more in each specific case. In
particular, it is not at all clear to me or most people just how the
'reductions  in energy consumption and changes in consumption patterns
[which] appear to [Ralph to] be  essential' can actually be achieved
without precisely the 'revolution in thinking and lifestyles'
which Ralph says 'are not realistic in this context.'

Two things seem clear: if the optimists of liberalisation,
globalisation and big capital have got it wrong, and Bill Gates cannot
save it for us, then the world is in for a lot more of what has happened 
to S E Asia, which anywat follows what happened to
Latin America and Africa in the seventies and eighties and
Eastern Europe in the 90s. Clear that China and India are not going to
make it. Clear too that growing energy-entropy and systemic and
environmental shortfalls will continue to make it hard even to sustain
existing living standards in the rich North, as has been true since
the mid-70s if one used any measure except GDP. 

Maybe disaster will still be staved off.

The FAO, we know,  is confident that food supplies will be adequate
even if the world population doubles by 2050, given a continuing 1.8%
pa increase in grain supplies.

>From my reading of the literature, by now extensive, not many experts
share all of that optimism and some, e.g. David Pimentel, are
gloomy about the prospects. They have two kinds of reservations: 
first, the FAO's view on food security is based on its optimism 
about energy-security, and this is a  lacuna given that most 
people even in the oil industry believe that oil will run
out by 2050 or before, and oil is the essential input, for primary motive
power, chemical feedstocks, fertilisers, just about everything.

Without oil, modern agribusiness will collapse. It lay behind the
Green Revolution. But at the end of that epoch, the sustainable albeit
subsistence farming which the Green Revolution replaced, will be 
gone forever. In its place are likely to be large masses of people 
huddled in the cities where they were shepherded to make way for 
capitalist agriculture. They will not be able to feed or support 
themselves adequately. The land they used to work will be too degraded 
to support a sustainable 'subsistence' farming, so there will be nor
return. These vast semi-proletarianised masses will depend on food exports 
from the temperate capitalist north, which may indeed continue to produce
surpluses, as long as it hogs the last oil to itself. Or it may not,
as Pimentel suggests, in which case the South will starve.

Unfortunately, major systemic shocks, as Douthwaite says, are more
likely than not. Even if they weren't, we should need theoretical
anmtidotes not merely to the over-optimism of parts of the UN
or of Western governments, officially at least. We will ened to 
vigorously challenge 'alternative' critiques which actually entrench
the cource of the problems, and I'm thinking here of attempts to
put a price tag on 'natural capital', ie, to value eco-services
ostensibly as a way to make our use of them cost-effective, or anyway
to show that ecosystems are not cost-free. This, like the profound
immorality of marketing disaster by, for example, trading carbon licences,
only help eternise in our minds and in reality they very thing we
need to question, namely the idea that capitalist economy can be made
'sustainable'.

It seems clear that while most of on this seminar agree on broad
definitions of what is wrong, there is no consensus about policy
prescription and there is also genuine anguish about what we may all
have to give up in order to create a truly sustainable world. Despite
Ralph Chipman's Brundtland-style optimism, it is misleading and
disingenuous to speak of 'development' in the context of
'sustainability', when even a cursory inspection of the evidence shows
that there is no scientific or technical basis  for economic
development which is truly sustainable, ie, not dependent on fossil
fuels).

All of which brings me back to Marxism.

First of all, Soviet communism was hardly a paradigmatic example of
Marxist social theory in action. Secondly the relevance of Marxism as an
analysis of capitalism AND ITS TENDENCY TO CRISIS will  remain
as long as capitalism itself exists. It is sometimes forgotten that
what Marx undertook was not utopic visions of post-capitalism, but the analysis
of capitalist-economy itself.

What our own debates on Marxism-International and Marxism-Thaxis have
shown, if they have shown anything, is Marxism's continuing relevance
as the only social theory which demonstrates the futility of any
schemes for reform which do not acknowledge the deep underlying laws
of motion of the the world capitalist system.

As an indication of the high levels of debate which this recognition
can take us, I am taking the liberty of forwarding to the seminar a 
posting by my friend and co-thinker, Louis Proyect. It bears directly 
on any debate about sustainability which takes as a starting-point the
true significance of autarky and community.

Mark Jones

--------------CA847506D2FEFDBC4FF92B4E--




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

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005