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