File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 257


Date: Mon, 08 Dec 1997 01:38:04 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Against Nature TV Documentary


Bedggood:

>Thanks to James for posting the TV transcript. Very good enema 
>for the intellectually constipated Westies.

Does Bedggood agree with LM that sulfur dioxide might have a greenhouse
effect on the planet earth? How "intellectual" is this claim? Anybody who
wrote a technical paper making such a unscientific claim would get fired
from a job or flunk a course. LM is to earth science as Lysenko was to
biology.

>Proyect accuses him of trotting out 
>formulae, Justin of boiler plate slogans. Isnt it interesting that as 
>soon as a troskyist on this list talks of the need to organise a 
>solution that does not depend on sweet talking the bosses, people get 
>upset. 

I find abstract calls for socialism as the answer to any social problem
under capitalism worse than useless. The Daniel DeLeon sect in the
USA--called the Socialist Labor Party--has been doing this for the entire
twentieth century while the class struggle rages all about them and they
are ignored. Trotskyism of the kind that you and Rodwell espouse is a
variant of this approach. It is intellectually vacuous. It relieves you of
the responsibility of, for example, knowing anything technical about
ecology. If you have no feel for the technical issues, then you really have
nothing to say. Unless you want to publish laughably unscientific
information about Mount Pinatubo like LM does. 

>
>Its also interesting to hear people trying to reclaim Marx as a 
>founding greenie, as if nature was divisible or not already social.
>Marx is all about saving labour you can't get more conservative than that.

Marx came to his ecological views because, unlike the brain-dead
Trotskyists and the capitalism-worshipping LM,  he been studying agronomy
and organic chemistry in some detail. He believed that agricultural
chemistry was more important than all of the economists "put together." His
agricultural research led him to the conclusion in 1868 that capitalist
agriculture "leaves deserts behind it." His section on "Large Scale
Industry and Agriculture" in volume one of Capital is virtually a red-green
manifesto:

"Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and
causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one
hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other
hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e.,
prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form
of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to
lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time
the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural
labourer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the
maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its
restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and
under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In
agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the
sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer;
the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and
impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of
labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the
workman's individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of
the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance
while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern
agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and
quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste
and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in
capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the
labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility
of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting
sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the
foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the
more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production,
therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various
processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all
wealth-the soil and the labourer."

Louis Proyect




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