Richard Duchesne:
>Not trying to tease - and would rather have this post ignored - but
>really, how can anyone try to make Marx into some ecologist just on
>the basis of a few pages in Capital on soil fertility. Foster would
>accomplish alot more if he stop projecting his own thoughts onto
>Marx, and simply present them as his own.
Marx and Engels wrote about the relationship between society and nature
throughout their career. One of the more important aspects of John's book
is the restoration of the importance of materialism to their research. Marx
collaborated with Engels on the conception of "Dialectics of Nature" and
even contributed a chapter. This book, which was not published until after
Lenin's death, also contains the chapter "The Role of Labor in the
Transition from Ape to Man" which has often been available as a separate
pamphlet. Here, as a reminder, is what it states:
"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on
us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results
we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who,
in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to
obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the
forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying
the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the
Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so
carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by
doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their
region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their
mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it
possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during
the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware
that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading
scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in
the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able
to learn its laws and apply them correctly."
Louis Proyect
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