From: "Siddharth Chatterjee" <siddhart-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 1998 13:54:35 +0000
Subject: Re: M-I: "Ecological" catastrophism



James Heartfield:

> Which Mark Jones shrugs off. But of course Boucher is absolutely right.
> Marx poured scorn on this approach of reducing society to nature,
> particularly in his attack on Ricardo's theory that falling soil
> fertility explains social crises, 'naively taking this antagonism for a
> social law of nature' (Quoted in Pilling, Marx's Capital, p61).
> 
<snip>
> 
> So, faced with social crises, the bourgeois fetishistically attributes
> these to natural scarcity. Reading society throught the prism of the
> natural sciences renders fluid relations as fixed, thing-like and
> natural. So a natural science interpretation of available resources
> necessarily abstracts from the changing character of social production,
> just as a mathematical estimate of the problems of pollution in the
> nineteenth century would come to the obvious conclusion that by the year
> 1998 we would all be up to our ears in horse shit.
>

But who is being fixed and immovable here? If Marx was living today 
and he looked around the world and saw the ecological devastation 
being wrought by capitalism, devastation which will surely affect 
the means of production (rain forest burning, species and resource 
destruction, global climate change, e.g., floods in Bangladesh have 
been attributed to the wholesale logging in the Himalayan slopes in 
India), what would be his prescription? Would he have changed his 
views due to the new data (dialectical law: slow quantitative changes 
lead to sudden qualitative leaps) as he did about the supposed 
benefits of colonialism in India and his advice to Vera Zasulich in 
Russia?

The key Marxian concept in this instance is this: at a CERTAIN POINT 
of time, the relations of production become a FETTER on the means of 
production - this point James Heartfield does not grasp. The question 
is: today on a worldwide scale, has the relations of production 
become a fetter on the means? Does capitalism still possess 
revolutionary attributes or today it and its development, 
imperialism, are concretely holding back the creative potential of 
billions of human beings and destroying their chances for a better 
life?

<snip>

> Jones is right on the tactical point. Any alliance is justifiable if the
> principles on which it is based are sound. But these principles are not
> sound. Naturalistic social theory leads to reactionary conclusions.
> Jones' own paraphrase of Lester Brown demonstrates as much:
> 

Any alliance, like the one that Heartfield and LM have made with the 
right-wing think tanks in going after the environmentalists? Here is 
one example of a theory of LM and their boss supposedly derived from 
'Marxism' which has lead concretely to "reactionary conclusions", 
that of justifying the attack on the environmentalist movement and 
supporting reactionary outfits like the Cato Institute, Wise Use 
Movement, MNCs., etc. Then he quotes Mark Jones 

MAJ
> >Therefore, Brown is quite right: if the uppity Chinks have the gall to 
> >demand a lifestyle like yours and mine, they really will bugger it for
> the rest of us and the ice-caps will melt.
> 

This quote from Mark is certainly strange coming as it does from a 
person of his caliber. Taken out of context (perhaps Mark can supply 
the whole paragraph), the quote has racist connotations. And 
of course, James takes delight in rubbing it in since this is the 
third time that he has flashed it to the list.  

Sid


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