Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:31:00 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Rev Jones/False Criticism


In message <CMM.0.90.0.891308090.kbevans-AT-panix3.panix.com>, boddhisatva
<kbevans-AT-panix.com> writes
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>               Comrade Heartfield,
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>       I'm a little confused by your response.  By "the environmental
>crisis" I meant the bad and growing pollution problem.  Certainly you'd
>have to agree that many natural areas have been severely damaged by abuse
>and dumping.  The watersheds of most heavily populated areas of the world
>have significant contamination of metals, heavy organics and toxic
>organics, at least where there is or has been any industry. 

Your use of terms here is unconsidered and unclear.

You say 'pollution', but in doing so you appeal to a commonsense notion
that does not have a straightforward meaning (and like all commonsense
notions, masks an ideological framework).

>From the standpoint of nature there is no difference between unspoilt
and polluted. Nature is indifferent to its form. Take whatever standard
you like from 'bio-diversity' to 'natural beauty' and you will discover
that you are looking at a human standard, presented *as if* it were a
natural one.

Granting that pollution is a human rather than a natural standard, it
needs to be understood for what it is, and not what it purports to be.

Clearly the metabolism between man and nature is more extensive than
before - more matter passes through man's hands than in less developed
societies, as a consequence of the increased productivity of labour. A
considerably greater number of use values are created, that are in turn
the basis for the massive increases in population, life expectancy and
quality of life over the last century. Clearly such increased production
creates a greater mass of non-use values, 'pollution', also.

However, the evidence that these are more destructive than the new use
values is simply untenable. On the contrary, problems with air and water
quality are far greater in the less developed world than in the West. In
the Indian sub-continent respiratory diseases arising from burning wood
and dung are a real health hazard, as is unclean water.

What is more puzzling is that the perception of pollution works in
inverse proportion to its decrease. It is marked that the politics of
environmentalism are largely Western in their origin and support, and
yet pollution in the West has been declining for more than a generation.
Increasing life expectancy perhaps makes us less tolerant of things that
we used to take for granted, like coal-smoke, leaded petrol, cigarette
smoke and so on.

But more importantly, the perception of pollution is a fetishised
expression of social alienation. 'Pollution' has always been a coded way
of describing, and damning mass societies. Whether it was race
pollution, or 'the miasma' social historians have always understood that
the discourse of pollution was an instinctively relocated hostility to
the masses.

We can see that very much at work today, where it is apparent that
'pollution' is just code for population. That is the meaning of the
Munich sign 'you're not in the bottleneck, you are the bottleneck'. On
this list goods that were once recognised use-values, like cars, are
seen as 'pollution'. Barely disguised beneath the surface of the
complaints against pollution is the classical petit bourgeois fear of
and contempt for the masses.

'Pollution' is not a thing, but people, in the real meaning of this
discourse. It is not cigarette smoke, but cigarette smokers who offend,
not cars, but car-drivers, not heavy industry, but industrial workers,
not chemical plants but plant workers that are the source of the
environmentalists anxieties.

At its core, the modern environmental movement gives a fantastic and
fetishistic expression of the profound sense of alienation individuals
feel from society, where they experience other people as so much
'pollution'. That's why it is a movement that has its origins in the
West. It is in the West that the sense of social dislocation that is
expressed in the modern environmental movement is most developed.
-- 
James Heartfield


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