Yoshie:
> Is it possible to provide all human beings with food, clean
> water, sanitation, shelter, energy, medicine, education,
> transportation, etc. that are necessary to meet historically
> developed minimum needs (setting aside other needs & desires for the
> time being) under socialism?
>Or is it impossible since we are
> running out of fossil fuels & clean water soon & the population is
> exploding, as Mark says?
Please stop attributing to me views I don't hold, it makes discussion
pointless. Oil, gas and water will never run out. The issue is their
economic availability to capitalism--and the price the rest of us pays.
We discussed population before, and you said the same kinds of things then.
I have one exchange dating from May 1998, when oil was about $10 a barrel
and some people were busy discussing folies du jour like Tulip-o-mania,
Zizek and Butler, and Greenspan's damascene conversion on the New Economy.
Seems like a different era, hey?
-------------
Subject: Marx on surplus population
Sender: Mark Jones
Date: 17.05.98
Recipient: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> The limits and scarcities that marxists should be primarily concerned
about
> are artificial--not natural--ones.
Why?
> This is not to say that nature places no
> constraint upon social activities, be they labor or anything else. It
does,
> in that the social world is embedded in the natural world. However,
> marxism, both in theory and practice, primarily addresses itself to what
is
> _social_, both in terms of constraints _and_ possibilities.
If this was so, would Marx ever have talked about modes of production,
machinery, agriculture, desertification etc?
> Marxists should
> pay attention to the natural world, but we are _not_ naturalists.
Meaningless.
> Let's think about the politics of food, for instance. Is it because we do
> not produce enough food that there are millions of the working class
people
> who suffer from hunger and malnutrition now? No, it's not, even though the
> ruling class and their media want us to believe that. As of now, we have
> enough food production capacity to feed people all over the world
> comfortably, don't we?
So you think the problem is merely one of distribution? Redistributional
social
justice politics, has nothing to do with Marxism. Environmental justice
politics also has nothing in common with Marxism.
> It is because of social relations of capitalism--the
> contradiction between labor and capital--that masses of people are hungry,
> and how to rid ourselves of those social relations that exploit and
oppress
> people because of their class, gender, race, nationality, and so on is the
> main object and objective of marxist theory and practice.
People are not exploited 'because of their race, class' etc. Just as you
reduce
Marxist politics to a politics of social justice, so you reduce Marxist
economics to a branch of sociology + pursuit of bourgeois right. All 'civil
rights' (from which discourses of social justice derive) depend on bourgeois
right, ie, the primacy and sanctity of property relations: but property
relations, for Marxism, are merely a mystification. They are forms of
production relations, not the presuppositions of production (and therefore
the
material basis of exploitation is not jurisprudential, but rooted in
production). Marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production is not a
theory of exploitation. Marx specifically criticised such notions. It is a
theory and narrative of value production, and the forms value assumes in the
circuits of capital. This is not an optional extra to a notion of
exploitation;
it is the core of the theory. That is why it is not struggles around
distribution but struggles around production which matter, because
production
is the centre of gravity of capitalism.Specifically, Marxism asserts that
the
production of capital is constrained by its material basis (extent and
limits).
The reason there is hunger in the world is because the rate of accumulation
is
historically too low to prevent the formation of surplus population, and the
reason for that is because the rate of increase of social productivity is
too
low to generate enough capital to give the whole population First World
living
standards.
When Marx wrote of the production of surplus population, he called it 'the
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation'. (Cap I p798, Penguin ed).
It
is impossible to develop Marxism while abandoning core concepts like this.
Who
is defining the political and theoretical terrain? Racists who fear
immigration,
or their liberal opponents who manage to neuter theory in the name of
an apologetic 'political correctness'?
This 'absolute general law' is today central to understanding the
conjuncture,
more even than in Marx's day, and far from avoiding the issue, we need to
relentlessly pursue it: ' The production of a relative surplus population,
or the setting free of workers, therefore proceeds more rapidly than
the technical transformation of the process of production that accompanies
the advance of accumulation ... in proportion as the productivity of
labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than
its demand for workers'. (p789) 'The constant movement towards the towns
presupposes, in the countryside itself, a constant latent surplus
population,
the extent of which only becomes evident at those exceptional times
when its distribution channels are wide open... The third category of
the relative surplus population is the stagnant population...' (p796).
It is impossible to analyse tidal movements of people which are at the heart
of so-called immigration crises, without understanding the general law
of population in the first place. That is why Marx spent so much time
analysing the matter. Immigration into the US is the direct result of the
previous creation of a surplus population, principally by driving peasants
off the land in the process of extending capitalist agriculture. There is a
one-to-one connection between the aggressive extension of monopolised
agriculture in the oppressed peripheral countries, and the creation of the
megacities in the South which are the sumps of stagnant surplus population,
and the ultimate source of contemporary tidal immigration into the US,
Europe
etc.
You say:
> As of now, we have
> enough food production capacity to feed people all over the world
> comfortably, don't we?
>
But the answer is, no, we don't. This is a classic Green argument: if
everybody
ate wholesome beans and vegetarian foods, there is enough food. But it is
utopian. What you propose involves not just redistribution, but a structural
change in the mode of [food] production itself. What will this change
entail,
and how can it be implemented? Once you start to examine the problem in
detail,
you discover that the level of food production we have today, which is
historically very high, depends upon the inputs which the total capitalist
system provides: everything from chemical inputs, pharmaceutical,
pesticides,
stockbreeding, biotech -- to distribution methods, the vertical organisation
of
agriculture, the existence of a large scale, powerful agronomy research
sector,
the existence of sufficient energy inputs etc. Third World food depends on
the
'Green Revolution' in agriculture which is itself just an aspect of modern
capitalism. This 'Green Revolution' which produces an abundance of food also
produces new 'surplus' populations, ie, former peasants made landless and
driven
into the cities. Since you object on spurious grounds even to the
terminology
'surplus population' you are unable even to define the problem, which is
that
the productivity of modern capitalist agriculture creates excess population
as
a by-product, and this reserve army of labour is now the source of most
immigration into the US.
Before you or Nathan chide me for my alleged racism you should think
again about the problem. Ironically, just as your alleged 'working
class' stance turns out to be not Marxist but a kind of Parsonsian
left-sociology, so too your rejection of what
you take to be Green positions also leaves you adopting utopian Green
slogans
about 'redistribution'. There is no chance whatever of persuading western
workers to give up meat-eating, but in the absence of any concrete politics
based on a real understanding of the contradictions of modern capitalist
agriculture, that is all you have: appeals to reason and conscience.
In fact, the very existence of a surplus population, which is actually a
hostage to capitalism and to the rich North, guarantees that modern
capitalist
agriculture, far from becoming sustainable or green/organic, will be still
more
intensified, capitalised, and imbued with the technologies of
gene-modification,
germplasm patenting, chemical saturation of soils etc: because there will be
no
other way to feed the hostage populations of the megacities which their very
process itself creates. Pools of hunger, scarcity, malunitrition, epidemic
disease etc are PRODUCED by capitalism alongside and together with the
enclaves of prosperity. Merely to repeat the mantra
> It is because of social relations of capitalism--the
> contradiction between labor and capital--that masses of people are hungry,
solves nothing, tells us nothing, shows us no way forward. The politics of
food is not simply a question of instructing workers living in the
privileged
west to eat pulses instead of burgers.
I am intrigued that you now even object to the term 'carrying capacity'.
There is no logical connection between this term and euthanasia, or a racist
anti-immigration politics. But it is quite impossible to analyse the
sustainability or otherwise of contemporary capitalist agriculture without
it. Perhaps you regard such analysis also as a 'waste of time'? But when
Marx called the agronomist Liebig 'more important than all the economists
out together' it was exactly because Liebig was the first to theorise
carrying
capacities and the limits to growth inherent in any ecosystem.
> I am in favor of
> Red-Green synthesis, but the Green theory and practice that does not
> foreground questions of social relations and chooses to lead us to dwell
> upon the Earth's 'carrying capacity' can't be and shouldn't be synthesized
> with marxism.
>
Whyever not?
Mark
