These are comments by Mark Jones that appeared on the m-i list, where I
posted the entire Boucher article. (For anybody at all interested in
Marxism and ecology, the fall '96 issue of Science and Society is a must.
Perhaps Dave Laibman can provide details on how to get a copy.)
Louis P.
--------------------------------------
Lou,
I'm surprised just how weak Boucher's arguments are.
Boucher utters warnings about deflecting to the right, or forming tacit
alliances. Such 'alliances' have been fruitful in the past: Ruskin and
Carlyle.
Marx and Darwin.
As Louis Godena has been arguing, we move in political ellipses and the
parallels and congruences right-to-left intensify precisely at moments of
shared or felt crisis. We should not be so prissy and virginal as Boucher
wants.
I've just been following a sustainable-economics seminar discussing the ideas
of Richard Douthwaite which come down to (a) ideas about tax and fiscal policy
reminsicent of doomed political campaigns like the British wartime
Commonwealth
Party, with positively loony notions of interest-free capital funding
sustainable, localised, autarkic communitarian economies and (b) the kind of
implicit authoritarianism which indeed Edward Goldsmith promotes (understated,
but there). But the debate was worth it even so, if only because there was so
much hard fact among the dross.
With Boucher, it's the opposite. Long on proper thinking, short on the kind of
seriousness and the sheer data-input you find day-by-day on this List for
example.
I don't believe in autarky and these romantic blood-and-soil ideas of the
deep-ecos like Douthwaite (I hope I'm not being unfair, I think he's an
alright
guy) are a politically tragic response to triumphal 'global'
hurrah-capitalism.
They are political dead-ends and if for example the Japanese revive a
Co-Prosperity Sphere in the wake of some Persian Gulf debacle which has US
imperialism back on the ropes, then we shall find ourselves solidarising with
the 'left-wing' of the international bouirgeosie, ie Anglo-Saxon imperialism,
just like in 1941. The ideology of autarky is fascism, not more nor less, and
the sterility and obscurantism of autarkic messages was amply revealed in the
sustainable-economics seminar, which got nowhere fast in analysing the real
problem, which is the connection between global hegemony and unbridled growth
and ecological crisis.
But having said all that, we share important common ground in the recognition
that capitalism is nature-destroying. I hold this truth to be self-evident!
The ESSENCE of contemporary capitalist restructuration, the form it has
taken since 1973, is to relaunch accumulation along the axis of the so-
called dematerialisation path, of increasing energy efficiency and
reducing entropy, 'virtualising' goods and services, and I think that
66% of 'growth' has taken this form, and only one-third the form of
'traditional', extensive growth. Nevertheless, DESPITE that, US per
capita energy consumption has continued to grow, world GNP
has continued to grow, doubling in two decades, the population has
increased by a further billion souls, who definitely will never
experience the 'benefits' of fossil-fuel based industrial capitalism
-- for them 'dematerialisation' will always be the principal fact of life.
Capitalism has been forced onto the dematerialisation path because in 1973
the
'limits to [fossil-fuel based, extensive] growth' became apparent, intruding
into the corporate boardrooms with unassailable, unarguable force. The
political and buisness disarray of the 70s and retrenchment and downsizing of
the 80s (so well documented by Doug's Wall St) were the signs of world
capitalism slewing round in its tracks like an ocean liner, trying to get on a
new growth path. The collapse of the rust-belted, technically-slothful USSR
was
50% a symptom of that. Boucher says:
> The grow-or-die hypothesis (or as
> Sandler calls it, GOD) has been an article of eco-Marxist faith for
> decades, but I believe that Sandler's critique of it is excellent, and
> won't try to improve on it.
>
I haven't read [Blair] Sandler and if someone can scan it and send it me
pls do, &
thanks. But: (1) yes, GOD is not just an article of faith, but the core of
Marxian accumulation theory, except that Grow AND Die is more correct ('the
integument must burst asunder') as Marx's own POV. And (2) nonetheless it is
perfectly possible to imagine ways in which the fatal bursting asunder
might be
almost indefinitely delayed. If capitalism downsizes the population by 50%
thru
nuke war then colonises the solar system, for eg, the cancer can spread.
But so
what? We are not 2nd International fatalists, are we? As Carrol says, it won't
fall if it isn't pushed, and that is what revolutionary parties are for. That
is also Marxist ABC.
Boucher says:
> Politically, the left should consider any belief that it shares with
> ideologies extending rightwards all the way to the reactionary, anti-
> immigrant proponents of population control, as a priori suspect.
Why apriori? A posteriori, perhaps. I wouldn't write off tactical alliances
with anyone. I'll sup with the devil as long as the spoons are still Marxist!
Taken logically, what Boucher is saying is pure Trotskyite sectarianism: it
means you cannot ally with anybody who isn't a paid-up
fourth-internationalist.
Or do we agree to ally with liberals like Al Gore but not deep-ecos like
Goldsmith? Where's the logic?
> When the
> idea that the planet is in urgent danger of collapse is found not only
> among Marxists, but also in the writings of liberals (e.g., AI Gore's Earth
> in the Balance, Herman Daly and John Cobb's For the Common Good, Bill
> McKibben's The End of Nature) and conservatives (e.g., Garrett Hardin's
> Living within Limits, Robert Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy," Thomas
> Homer-Dixon's Environmental Scarcity and Global Security, E. O. Wilson's
> Biophilia), a certain skepticism about its progressive nature is warranted.
> This is not to say that the left should refuse to share any concepts with
> the ideologues of capitalism. Presumably the earth can continue to be round
> even if both anarchists and fascists believe it to be.
Ah, there actually ISN'T any logic. We shouldn't be seen dead reading Daly or
Gore, even if they are right -- except that Boucher doesn't even believe in
science! As he later says.
> Furthermore, rejection of the prophecies of doom would also put us in
> embarrassing company,
Who's he afraid of being embarrassed by? What matters is what the politics of
our alliances are, and whether they are transparent, and whether or not they
are clearly serving our own interests. Was Mao wrong to ally with Chiang
kai-shek against the Japs? Was Stalin wrong to ally with Churchill against
Hitler? No time-wasting about popular fronts pls.
> Indeed, while the political argument is the least profound one, it is
> perhaps the most closely linked to practice. An impending sense of
> ecological doom may stir people to action, but the impulse it generates is
> a very crude one.
No, it isn't. It runs the whole normal political gamut from fascists in the
ALF
to kindly sentimentalisers like Bill McKibben.
> Fear of the future is more
> likely to make them selfish or even paranoid -- qualities that American
> politics already possesses in more than ample amounts.
Nothing in American or Brit for that matter popular history suggests this. The
best times in the workers' movement was always in the face of fearful threats.
Next we get Boucher on science, and it's pitiably weak:
> The political danger of catastrophism is matched by the weakness of its
> scientific foundation. Given the prevalence of the idea that the entire
> biosphere will soon collapse, it is remarkable how few good examples
> ecology can provide of this ...
> The effects on human society can be far-reaching, and often extremely
> negative for the majority of the population. But one feature has been a
> constant, nearly everywhere on earth: life goes on.
Mass extinctions but life goes on? A little too solipsistic for my taste.
> Humans have been able
> to drive thousands of species to extinction, severely impoverish the soil,
> alter weather patterns, dramatically lower the biodiversity of natural
> communities, and incidentally cause great suffering for their posterity.
> They have not generally been able to prevent nature from growing back.
>
This is not very bright. No concept of deep-time, geological time a la S J
Gould. Even the whole history of civilisation in the present interglacial is
just a blip. But there are precious few examples from the fossil record of
mass
exticntions as dramatic AND FAST as the one going on now. We don't know what
the effects will be. This is just the man falling from a skyscraper saying
'so far, so good' etc.
> As ecosystems are transformed, species are eliminated -- but opportunities
> are created for new ones.
So, that's all right then. In place of everything we lose, we get Polly the
cloned sheep etc.
> The natural world is changed, but never totally
> destroyed. Levins and Lewontin put it well: "The warning not to destroy the
> environment is empty: environment, like matter, cannot be created or
> destroyed. What we can do is replace environments we value by those we do
> not like" (Levins and Lewontin, 1994).
Not empty at all. This is surely wrong. The whole surface of the earth's
landmass has been worked thru the intestines of earthworms. Then 60% of it
reshaped by humans. Not a square inch is as it was in England. The warning
is not about change per se it's about not turning beauty into a lavatory.
That is what destroying an environment means. It doesn't HAVE to mean more
than this for it to be a political matter.
> Indeed, from a human point of view
> the most impressive feature of recorded history is that human societies
> have continued to grow and develop, despite all the terrible things they
> have done to the earth.
Well, this is already a value-judgment that cannot be taken at face value.
It's
unclear to me at least that modern capitalism represents 'growth and
development' whatever that means anyway. What we have done is irreversibly
altered and lost things we don't understand and don't (often) even know we've
lost, and for what?
> Examples of the collapse of civilizations due to
> their over- exploitation of nature are few and far between. Most tend to be
> well in the past and poorly documented, and further investigation often
> shows that the reasons for collapse were fundamentally political.
>
> For example, the demise of classic Maya civilization in the 9th century
[snipped long excursus about Mayans to show he spent time in a library]
Actually the Mayan civilisation collapsed not for the reasons he states but
for
the same reasons the Roman empire collapsed and the Dark Ages, "replete with
hierarchical, warlike, societies based on
rituals of blood-letting and human sacrifice by an elite class", happened in
Europe.
Material reasons to do with soil fertility loss, over-taxation and perhaps
most
of all --climate change. The temperature fell by an average 2 degrees, and
that
was enough. Then it rose (too late for the Mayas), and we got the High
Medieval
period. Then it fell again, and Medieval Europe declined. Actually, I wouldn't
want to be too monocausal, but historians have fashions, and this retreat from
explanation by agricultural collapse is just one of them. In any case, all
this
again is sophistry. We are not talking about Mayan civilisation, we are
talking
about 21st century capitalism dominated by US imperialism. We don't need to
infer from examples, we have the thing sitting right in front of us.
According to the UN's own figures, more than fifty countries have experienced
average per capital GNP declines in the past two decades. The World Bank has
even abandoned GDP as a way of looking at living standards, it's so
unreliable.
According to the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator, which I happen to believe
in), US real living standards have been declining since the 1950s. Meanwhile
ecosystems ARE collapsing, and this is much more than merely counting
species-extinctions. Take the collapse of the ecosystem in the Southern Ocean,
which is ongoing, little udnerstod, but must have profound planetary
implications. Or the Aral Sea, Caspian Sea, North Sea, or the Arctic, or the
northenr tundras, etc etc: these are whole systems collapsing.
> Indeed, I believe a reasonable generalization is that
> the severity of an environmental disaster is negatively correlated with its
> area: the more damaging it is, the more society mobilizes to restrict its
> effects.
I'd like to see the hard science to back that one up. Is the decline in male
fertility (a very generalised problem now, not only confined to homo sapiens
either) a severe or a chronic environmental disaster? Worse or better than
Bhopal?
> The implication of this pattern would be that the environmental disasters
> which we really have to fear are those that are widespread but invisible.
> Global warming, destruction of the ozone layer, and similar atmospheric
> changes epitomize this kind of environmental damage. The fluidity of the
> atmosphere makes them the most widespread occurrences possible, covering
> the entire planet. But this same fluidity dilutes their effects, making
> them gradual and insidious rather than sudden and explosive.
Factually wrong. This is simply tedious to correct. He should look for example
at the latest (fourth-generation) Climate Change coupled atmosphere-ocean
models. They predict that climate change will have sharply localised effects,
and that's exactly the form it will take: wind and precipiation events;
sharply, disproportionately-risen temperatures at the poles etc.
> In this
> respect, then, the kinds of damage that modern societies can do to their
> environments and to themselves are unprecedented, and the ultimate argument
> against predictions that they will lead to social collapse cannot simply be
> based on historical evidence.
Then why waste time on the Mayas?
> Things do indeed happen which have never
> happened before, and the death of the planet just might be one of them. In
> the end, we will need to decide how to resolve this question not by
> appealing to the evidence of science, but by calling into question the
> authority of science itself.
Meaningless sentence.
> For the most regressive aspect of the coming-ecological-catastrophe
> argument, at least for Marxists, is that it takes the predictions of
> scientists as its starting point. If they say that the earth is going to
> collapse, then lay people will just have to believe them and decide how to
> react: by overthrowing capitalism, shipping Norplant to Third World
> nations, or heading for the hills with our semi-automatics. The underlying
> assumption is that science is the arbiter of what will happen to nature;
> politics must take that as a given, and go on from there. This kind of
> positivistic philosophy of science may still be prevalent in the political
> mainstream (although even there it is being seriously challenged). But
> Marxists supposedly got beyond it decades ago.
Sorry to say it, but actually James Heartfield argues better than this,
probably because he's had the chance to sharpen his wits against real
marxists...
> When dealing with questions
> such as the genetics of intelligence, nuclear safety, or the effects of the
> Green Revolution, the left has been in the forefront of those looking at
> science itself, and not just its "use or abuse," as a manifestation of
> ideology. Applying political economy to society's dominant beliefs --
> whether political, religious, cultural or scientific -- has been one of
> Marxism's leading intellectual activities. Except, ironically, when science
> tells us that the end of the world is near. Why?
Where have respected scientists argued that intelligence is inherited? Even
modern geneticists are not taken very seriously if they foolishly rush
into that debate, as some have recently, and why? Because the science is
still far from unarguable, and each time we hear that the laughter-gene or
Hitler-gene has been 'identified' closer scrutiny reveals no such thing: but
the scrutiny does not take the form of empty-headed arguments that 'science is
social relations' or relativistic crap like that. Arguments about genes and
intelligence are always going to be fraught with value judgments about the
meaning of intelligence, but the climate is an object, not a subject, and no
such reservations apply there. If science tells us that the collapse of the
Antarctic ice-sheets is going to influence the Gulf Stream, it is simply
foolish to start 'challenging the authority of science' without first checking
the facts. Boucher is an anti-rationalists. Marxism is scientific. That's the
difference.
> Why has the left stopped short of applying the axiom that the ruling ideas
> of the age are the ideas of the ruling class,
It hasn't.
> precisely when dealing with
> an idea whose basis in evidence is exceedingly weak
why does he say the evidence for climate change is exceedingly weak? You only
have to consult the archives of M-Int, let alone journals like Nature, Science
etc, to know that far from being weak, the case for climate change is now
unarguable. The world is a sphere; and the climate has been
anthropogenetically
changed.
> and whose potential
> political import is enormous? Why have we accepted the premise that the
> predictions of global ecological catastrophe have the same philosophical
> status as universal gravitation or the periodic table --
because they do, obviously. If he thinks otherwise, instead of wasting time
with pointless speculations and rhetorical flourishes, let him say clearly why
he rejects the scientific evidence of climate change and other anthopogenic
effects. Let him come here and say that.
> as something that
> we'll have to deal with whether we like it or not? I believe that the
> reasons are two: one of long standing, the other specific to the era of the
> 1990s. The belief that humanity can destroy nature is the dark side of the
> West's centuries-old faith in the power of technology. For many years
> humanity's power to transform the world was seen as fundamentally
> progressive; since Hiroshima, it is recognized as potentially catastrophic
> as well. But either way, the supremacy of humanity over nature, for good or
> ill, is taken for granted (Ross, 1994). This shared belief has been
> additionally strengthened, for the left, by the intellectual confusion of
> the post-Cold-War era.
Very interesting, and nothing AT ALL to do with the facts about ecosystems
collapse, climate change, mass extinctions etc. All empty assertion, no
science.
> To put it crudely, the environmental crisis is convenient in filling the
> vacant ideological role once played by the proletariat, the Soviet bloc and
> the Third World -- as the agent of revolution. Lacking any realistic hope,
> at least in the short run, that capitalism will collapse from its own
> internal contradictions, as long predicted and hoped for, we have welcomed
> the idea that the transition to socialism could come out of a Green
> Apocalypse.
No, what we have seen is that capitalism intensifies the dangers to life. The
Bomb has not gone away. The paralysis of the workers' movement adds its own
dangers, removing one brake on the incipient madness we see for eg over Iraq.
Climate change is accelerating. The proletarianisation of the whole human
race,
forcing multimillioned masses into desperate shanty-megalopolises, makes
revolutionmary crises and risings a certainty. The BOMB IS STILL HERE, I
repeat. The world is much more dangerous to life than it was in 1917. Why
is it
wrong to mention this fact?
> This is particularly so if, as authors such as Isaksen and Sale
> have argued, the environmental crisis and the crisis of capitalism are
> closely linked. Personally, however, I am skeptical. I fear that if we wait
> for that momentous, revolutionary day when the destruction of nature causes
> the downfall of capitalism, we may find that it has been postponed
> indefinitely.
Who's waiting? We are doing all we can to propagandise, agitate and educate.
Boucher is part of the problem, not the solution. His arguments are weak,
disingenuous and factitious. On this list, Marxists for a long time now have
gotten used to dealing with the hard facts, and not long and irritating lists
of idees recu and bald assertions.
> If we are not able to transform our society fundamentally,
> nature will neither destroy us nor save us.
Evidence? Where in this whole article is one gram of evidence that a
combination of anthopogenic climate and environmental alterations cannot cause
precipitate social collapse? How in fact is Boucher different from a Wise
User?
> Nor, by creating a socialist
> revolution, will it do both at once.
Well, it would help, wouldn't it?
> We are stuck with the old- fashioned social forces, and whatever new ones
> we can create through the hard, patient work of organizing -- but no natura
> ex machina is going to come along and make the revolution. The end of the
> world as we know it just isn't around the corner.
Oh, come on. Who says it is? Is he saying we better not talk among ourselves
about climate change for example, in case scientists or greens are doing the
same? I think Boucher simply is not familiar with the literature
on these issues amd he could do worse than spend a rainy afternoon going thru
M-Int's archives before he puts his foot in his mouth again.
> What, then, is the most
> reasonable political strategy in the face of uncertainty as to the very
> future of the planet? For society as a whole, the precautionary principle
> certainly applies: future development should be oriented in ways that
> minimize the chances of catastrophe, in case the predictions of disaster
> turn out to be valid.
>
Ah, so Boucher does believe that it is necessary, ABSOLUTELY necessary, to
stop
car manufacture forthwith etc, and transfer to renewable energy systems, which
BTW will actually not happen without severe social dislocations and political
disorders? Then he's with us after all...
Mark Jones
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