File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9804, message 122


Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 19:16:06 +0100
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: capital


Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:

>     As for the biosphere, sorry, but you are all
>wet on this one.  The concept was due to Vladimir Vernadsky
>and is fully dialectical in its proper formulation,
>allowing for the interaction between humans and the
>non-human portion.

Barkley, you are right, and it is the case that Vernadsky very
much influenced Teilhard de Chardin. The latter's notion of 
the 'noosphere' in turn strongly influenced some Soviet
discussions about the meaning of Communism. Other names to drop 
include Bedyayev and Gurdjeff.
 
It was Vernadsky who invented Gaia theory, not Lovelock. 

The Soviet debates about society and nature began in 1919 with
Lenin's first wildlife preservation decrees, and continued even in the
1930s. 
Gaia and Vernadsky remained subjects of discussion among some
Soviet communist party circles to the end; discussion which had 
practical results in the theory of the 'nuclear winter', which
relied upon a conception of the biosphere/noosphere still lacking in 
the West to this day (even in California). In recent years, as I'm
sure you know, there has been a revival of interest in these ideas
in the _Sobornost'_ school, mainly in Petersburg. But Marxism
has been abandoned in favour of mystic notions of Slavonic
'exceptionalism'.

So much drivel is talked about the cavalier attitude Soviet
planners showed to nature, Soviet 'ecocide' etc (and I say that while
thoroughly recommending Feshbach's work) that it is well to rememember that
there were other possible directions which Soviet socialism could have
gone in: it didn't happen and industrialisation and 'mastery of nature' won
out but only because of encirclement and the imminence of Nazi attack,
obviously.

Mark

PS
Doug wrote:
> And only someone completely in the grip of capitalist
> psychopathology could conceive of "the biosphere" as capital.

I presume that Barkley was referring to the 'valuing natural
capital' theorists, Costanza, Cleveland et al, who whatever one may think
of their methods, are hardly in the grip of capitalist
psychopathology.
In fact, that's a current of thought we ought to be talking about,
and I for one will, now that we have moved beyond the banalities of
LM's 'Crisis? Wot crisis?' school of global-warming denialism. There
was an interesting debate on pen-l about carbon permit trading, which
might be a good starting point. What is the Marxist critique of 
Costanza et al?



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