>>CB: Again to keep using this phrase becomes willful slander and misrepresention. "Too many " is always a relative term. "Too many" relative to what ? We may reach a point that there are too many people to keep warm, make food for relative to the amount of fuel by way of a fossil fuel based energy regime. The phrase "too many people" is too abstract. Too many people relative to what specifically ?
Capitalism, with its private property relations, would more like let billions die than make a drastic rationing to save people as presumably socialism would with its people before profits approach. << Reply The above capture the essence of the dispute. I actually have been painstakingly specific. The issue is not "rationing to save people" but the "social relations" - in their entirety, of bourgeois society. "Social relations" embrace all relationships between man and man and man and nature, but there has been a tendency to view the issue from the standpoint of class formation and class fragments riveted to the technology regime. Other have expanded the definition of social relations to include the shape of industrial society and the details of its market relations. In the context of asking about DMS emphasis on "social relations" versus "depletion theory" - I sided with DMS and had did so in the past, because this approach opens the door to examining what is actually produced and why. He cannot be wrong to take this approach. There is no over population crisis or one looming on the horizon. The crisis is the social relations. "Too many people is not abstract in the context of the material cited in part 1, 2 and 3 of "notes." The opening line in part 1 begins: "Eating Fossil Fuel" (_http://billtotten.blogspot.com/_ (http://billtotten.blogspot.com/) ) is a wonderful title. Why do we eat what we eat?" Further in part 1 it is quoted: >>US Consumption In the United States, each person consumes an average of 2,175 pounds of food per person per year. This provides the US consumer with an average daily energy intake of 3,600 Calories. The world average is 2,700 Calories per day. <33> Fully nineteen percent of the US caloric intake comes from fast food. Fast food accounts for 34% of the total food consumption for the average US citizen. The average citizen dines out for one meal out of four. <34>" Let's examine the proposition: "We may reach a point that there are too many people to keep warm, make food for relative to the amount of fuel by way of a fossil fuel based energy regime." The issue is not food relative to the amount of fossil fuel and people or the idea that we may reach some mysterious point in the future where we run out of fossil fuel in relationship to food production . . . that is the dispute. The approach deployed was to challenge the definition of food itself because bourgeois society creates a set of eatable substances necessary for its reproduction. Everyone calls this mass of eatable substances food when it is not food and does not need to be manufactured in the first place. Everything eatable is not food, but rather wrong food. This historically evolved and built up consumption pattern grows out of historical ignorance of the metabolic process. This consumption pattern that is historically built up gives the market pattern its specific shape and substance. Second, Marx was referenced in his outline of the evolution of "needs" in human society and how bourgeois property and bourgeois production inherits and creates a set of needs unique and fundamental to its self reproduction. Part 1, 2 and 3 of "Notes" have very little to do with Mark Jones writings. I beg to differ with his theoretical underpinnings on a broad number of issues, including the law of value, which provoked his initial response to some material I had written on Marx mail. Part one of "Notes" end on this the following theme and no where is Mark Jones mentioned: "Americans are also grand consumers of water. As of one decade ago, Americans were consuming 1,450 gallons per day per capita, with the largest amount expended on agriculture. Allowing for projected population increase, consumption by 2050 is projected at 700 gallons per day per capita, which hydrologists consider to be minimal for human needs. <36> This is without taking into consideration declining fossil fuel production. (Eating Fossil Fuel: (_http://billtotten.blogspot.com/_ (http://billtotten.blogspot.com/) )." I do not believe that I slandered Mark or anyone else and cited the material and sources for which "Notes" was directed. Here is how part 2 of "Notes" begins: >>"Scientists define "carrying capacity" as the population of a given species that can be supported indefinitely in a defined habitat without permanently damaging the ecosystem upon which it is dependent." The above definition lacks a framework of production, reproduction, the property relations, the shape of the aforementioned and the infrastructure that sustains all of this. Perhaps it is best to look at what is in front of us and what our society is experiencing and talking about in their daily living."<< How can one speak of a crisis of sustainability without examining the universe of commodities (the social relations) and the energy tag they carry? No one ask why we drink the amount of water we drink? What drives the amount of water the individual consume as a mass, is not population growth but the metabolic process of the living organism or what is consumed and its properties. Wrong consumption is a process that creates its own cycles of wrong consumption and gluttony. We are dealing with the metabolic process of man and the sources I quoted was Arnold Ehret, along with the book "Acid and Alkaline" and the work of Alfredo Bowman (Dr. Sebi). Wrong consumption is historically evolved and a social relations of production, although this is not how I articulate the issue as politics. As politics the issue is consuming wrong food that should not be produced in the first place. There is a gigantic infrastructure with a definable energy consequence geared to wrong production. This gigantic infrastructure of wrong production does not need to be shared in a communistic manner but abolished along with the abolition of property, whose last and final form is bourgeois property. The mass consumption of Oreo cookies is a bourgeois property relations that appears as a social relations of production and reveals the specific character of the market pattern. How I arrived at my particular presentation of the market pattern was not on the basis of theoretical Marxism but biology and the metabolic process that is man. Everyone in our society basically knows that we eat and consume wrong. Science has not been deployed to unravel our authentic metabolic process. At least 90% of everything we eat in our society is harmful to our species and the earth and this is becoming obvious to everyone in America. The issue of over consumption that is called sustainability and the carrying capacity of the earth is presented wrong because man does not exist on the earth, but rather in the earth. Mark Jones was not slandered but engaged from the standpoint of the metabolic process that is man. More later Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
