Yoshie:
>Mark should stop putting the question as an oft-thwarted attempt at a
>prediction -- e.g., "will energy be available at current requirement
>projections at environmental costs most people can stand and at
>market prices compatible with those particular requirements within a
>capitalist context?" That's a perspective of a political spectator.
No more so than Marx reading and writing about the soil fertility crisis of
the 19th century. His answer to this was not activism in the narrow sense
but a "maximalist" call in the Communist Manifesto for the reconcilement of
city and countryside.
>The idea is, instead, to think like a political organizer & ask, "how
>can we *make* environmental regulations, clean-ups, & thus production
>& distribution costs of industrial inputs like energy -- as well as
>the value of labor power -- impossibly costly to capitalists & *push*
>the system into a crisis & *turn* it into our political advantage?"
No, this is inadequate. The questions we are dealing with exist on an
overarching basis and have little to do with organizing people. For that
matter, you can a completely wrong analysis of the overarching
questions--as David Harvey does--but have the right response on activism,
which he does. In reality, Marxism has failed to keep pace with ecological
questions since the 1920s when early attempts at such an understanding in
the USSR were short circuited during the mad rush to industrialize in the
face of the fascist menace. That being said, some of the outstanding
Marxist ecologists of the 20th century made their mark during this period.
There are important theoretical questions that have to be sorted out. Not
only do you have David Harvey's peculiar take on the question--stating
blandly that there is nothing you can do to destroy the planet through
pollution, etc.--but you also have Jim O'Connor's "second contradiction"
thesis which has been attacked by Burkett and Foster. Although I tend to
agree with these two, I think that much of their analysis revolves around a
scholastic defense of the proposition that Marx was an ecological thinker.
While this is true, it is inadequate to the challenge facing us. In general
the most probing analyses of the environmental crisis comes from
organizations like the Worldwatch Institute. Because of theoretical
failings and institutional weakness, our movement has not been able to
offer a counter-analysis to Worldwatch. This would require scientists with
a leftwing orientation to tackle questions like fossil fuels, water
utilization, industrial farming, environmentally linked illnesses such as
cancer and asthma, deforestation, species disappearance, etc. Not only must
these questions be addressed, they must be related to each other in a
comprehensive materialist fashion. Marxists are not just activists. They
are scientists. While economists obviously have a duty to understand the
financial/economic crisis of the last few years as evidenced by Brenner's
NLR article and all the various responses to it, our movement also needs
people like Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin to write articles in the
popular and specialized press about the mounting ecological crisis.
Ultimately this form of high-level analysis will be linked to activism, but
only in the manner that Marx's writings on the operations of the capitalist
economy became linked eventually to the formation of the First Communist
International.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
