Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Does the revo also mean there won't be modern transportation,
> chemical fertilizers, mechnized plowing and reaping, etc.? Then
> there's truly no way to sustain a world population of more than, say,
> a billion people, maybe fewer - meaning that at least 80% of us have
> to go.
>
No, the revo will not be responsible for the loss of modern transportation
and the collapse of the agro-system which is based on using soil to hold
down plants while petroleum-derived chemicals are applied, for the purpose
of creating what are called 'phantom acres': ie, we use sunlight trapped a
long time ago to artifically boost production:
"Catton expands on the "ghost acreage" concept raised by Georg
Borgstrom, who was talking about food. The term in Borgstrom
referred to imports from elsewhere, meaning supplementation of what a
region or nation has available internally with the product of some
other region's or country's land and sunlight./1/ Catton initially
is interested in imports from elsewhen, meaning the use of
fossil-fuel energy, or supplmentation with the product of land and
sunlight from long ago. He uses "fossil acreage," meaning the
"energy we obtain from coal, petroleum, and natural gas...the number
of additional acres of farmland that would have been needed to grow
organic fuels with equivalent energy content."/2/ Dependence on this
fossil acreage yields dependence on "phantom carrying capacity" that
evaporates when the fossil fuels become unavailable./3/ A few pages
later, he defines phantom carrying capacity as "either the illusory
or the extremely precarious capacity of an environment to support a
given life form or a given way of living"
(Chris Kuykendall)
The revo will happen *because capitalism's energetics basis has collapsed*.
That is why transport, agrobiz etc will also mutate in forms which will
look like a collapse.
Of course an enormously wasteful system like the US contains enormous
potentials for energy saving and no doubt something approaching normal
life could be sustained by using 50% less fossil, and in time much less.
There are Marxists who think that's just another profit opportunity
and to a degree they are right. But what you have to reckin with is that the
history of capitalist accumulation was predicated logically on the existence
of fossil fuel and the ability to constantly cheapen this input and to
increase
energy efficiency. My question is not so much about whethere normal
life can be preserved albeit with some very important changes. I just don't
see how capitalism can survive or be the agency of those changes, and that
is why there will be and already is, a developing crisis. It won't go
aware just be pretending it aint there. It is there.
I have yet to see you embrace this even as a hypothesis. The collapse of Big
Oil will have devastating side-effects including on food production. It will
quite inevitably require many more people to go work on the land. You may
not like that, but you still have to explain what is the alternative.
Yelling at people that they are atavists, apocalyptics etc, doesn't answer
any more than Jim Devine throwing queenie fits answers the questions.
Whenever I raise the issue I get literally dozens of offlist emails from
lurkers on pen-l who want to no more but are not willing to expose
themselves to ridicule from the 'orthodox' list-professors.
> Where are the Marxists? This neo-primitivist vision is quite
> anti-Marxist, and it's quite reasonable that Marxists are not
> participating in your vision. It comports perfectly with the politics
> and preferences of Brown and the fuzzies, though.
But no marxists round here are promoting such a vision; it's a phantasm of
your own. You're locked in struggle with figments of your own imagining. And
how is Mandel present?
Try to answer the question: do you think oil is an exhaustible and
irreplaceable energy supply, or not? Do you side with Morris Adelman, the
guru invoked by your own resident oil expert Greg Nowell, and think that oil
is 'Infinite, a renewable resource' ? If you accept that it is running
out, what do YOU think we should do? What is YOUR
plan, apart from asking me for mine?
Mark
