Louis Proyect wrote: >Sigh. I am afraid you don't get it. There is no conspiracy afoot to promote >right-wing ideas through bribery. "A right-wing scholar in the pay of the >ruling class" is vulgar Marxism. I wish you would acquaint yourself with >the more refined version before deploying the vulgar alternative. Yes, I must try to remember to be less vulgar. >The ideological message of Hughes, Cronon and >Schama is that these problems are eternal and, by implication, that it is a >waste of time to change society, since it could very well be in the nature >of mankind to despoil nature. Cronon didn't write a book about the geography of capital, then? It was about the geography of eternity? >I regard this as unconscious capitalist >apologetics and maintain that it is critical to put forward the argument >that Wood does, namely that there is something DISTINCTIVE about the >capitalist system. M-C-M, that's what it is. We have to abolish this in >order to create the objective possibilities for an ecologically aware society. Don't forget the prime after the second M! That's what it's all about; if there were no prime, it wouldn't be worth the trouble. I read Hughes, Cronon, and Harvey as saying that humans have always had and always will have complicated and difficult relations with their natural environment, and that every society shapes and reshapes its physical environment in distinctive ways. You invoke "capitalism" and "socialism" at very high levels of abstraction as if the ecology of socialism were self-evident. Doug
