Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 08:40:10 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Rev Thomas Malthus returns


Heartfield:
>Surreal. The goal of communism is - the persistence of wage slavery
>without the bourgeoisie! 

Well, if you think that communism will be achieved by supporting capitalist
development, you are surely mistaken.  Unlike you, I advocate resistance to
the capitalist class on all fronts, including their gangster activity in
the Amazon and Borneo rainforests.

>We have a saying in England 'what's that got to do with the price of
>fish?'. It is supposed to illustrate the narrow-mindedness that cannot
>go beyond the most banal observations of everyday life.

The NY Times reported the other day that cod, tuna, swordfish, and other
important ocean foodstuffs are disappearing and that we are literally
eating the "seed corn." More and more, consumers are turning to seafood
lower on the food chain. For example, as crab disppears, people eat faux
crab made from cuttlefish and other species that crab normally feed on.
Homo sapiens has been here for tens of thousands of years and seafood has
been a steady part of our diet. That it might disappear over the next 20 or
30 years has oceanographers deeply alarmed and the bourgeois press is
reporting on this phenomenon. What they don't explore is the cause. And
that cause is capitalist industrial fishing. Each firm has no goal except
to remove as many marketable fish from the ocean as possible. They are not
interested in conservation. So the capitalist system is working to exhaust
a nonrenewable resource. These sorts of problems were only hinted at in
Marx, since the ecological crisis as such did not exist in the 1850s.
Malthus wrote about farming and came to some incorrect conclusions. Despite
this, we as Marxists have to confront rapidly disappearing nonrenewable
resources such as land, water, and wildlife. Your problem is that you are
stuck in an 1850 time-warp and pretend that the problems don't exist. You
also believe that "economic progress" is a good thing, but such a classless
analysis puts you in bed with the big bourgeoisie. That is why you
publicize the ideas of people like Julian Simon.

Louis Proyect




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