[forwarded from the A-List, by Stan Goff. Mark Jones]
Pat Bond's article, to which this responds, is pasted in below. I feel compelled to weigh in here, and invite criticism, given that I haven't had time to sit down and work the following reflections out in a very rigorous way. These are very tentative musings. Pat Bond has opened up a critically important area of discussion here, one that scientific socialists in particular need to grapple with at the level of epistemology, if we are to repair our theoretical roof. It was Luxemburg who raised this question with regard to imperialism theory, I think, of the center-periphery dynamic and the question of material unsustainability. In fact, in this polemical contest between her and Lenin (who said socialism will be constructed on electrification), she has been vindicated, I think. It was a glimpse she had, but we now have the scientific understanding necessary to flesh out this question and to expand and improve our understanding of the *materialism* in historical materialism. Marx glimpsed the sustainability issue as well with his questions about soil degradation and capitalist agriculture, when he was studying Liebeg. In fact, it is Marx still who forces us back to a dialectical consciousness, to a critique of the Cartesian separation of subject and object ( a real issue for ecologists and feminists as well), to the questions of reification and mystification (that is, epistemology and ideology). In three plus years of (sometimes painful and tedious, but generally very fruitful) discussions on two international listservs between marxists, social democrats, deep ecologists, and feminists, some in which Pat Bond participated, the primacy of epistemology became achingly clear. It was at the level of "how we know" that we continually encountered our worst impasses. And one place where misdirection (in the sense of magic tricks) seemed to often plague both ecologists and (variously orthodox) socialists was this self-same Cartesianism - human/subject, nature/object - which quietly led us to uncritically accept a notion of technology as somehow separated from nature, and as existing independently as it were from social relations; a fundamental rejection of the most valuable insights of marxism. It was a real testament to the power of capitalist ideological hegemony, and leads me to believe that we are way behind the power curve, so to speak, in the development of theory related to ideology (include here every scientific insight and every new field of study that occurs along a continuum reaching from sociology through neurobiology, with semiotics and linguistics occupying very important spaces). Alf Hornborg, a Swedish ecologist who has done very important work here states: "It is not enough to say that the specific *forms* of technology are socially constructed; ultimately, the whole idea of a technological 'realm', so to speak, rests on social relationships of exchange [I quibble with him here, as he conflates exchange with production/reproduction, but...]. This implies that what is technologically feasible cannot be distinguished from what is socially, i.e. economically, feasible. [Hints of dependency theory here] If, since Newton, the machine has served as a root metaphor for the universe, an advocate of a less mechanistic world view might begin by demonstrating that even the machine is an organic phenomenon." It is this understanding that helps clarify the interpenetrating relation between an independent material universe, our interpretations of "reality" generally, our technical knowledge, our social relations, and the whole notion of "development." Let's begin by admitting that "development" and "sustainability" are problematic concepts, theoretical minefields of the first order, in fact. There is a value judgement implicit in the notion of "development," if it can mean anything at all. To simply reduce it to evolution of *whatever* is tautological. Development is evolution, and evolution is development. We are chasing our tails. There is a subtext in the connotation of the term that implies "improvement," and this introduces the question of "for whom?". (Even if we provisionally accept the bourgeois nonsense that the "for whom" is everyone, or humanity generally, we are faced with the very real dilemma that this historical process is consuming the foundation of its own existence, because "development" is made synonymous with "growth.") But marxists have done a creditable job of partially resolving this issue by demonstrating that capitalist development, at least, is based significantly on the material exploitation of people's labor power, therefore, all development is socially constructed and historically contingent. Marxists have also identified the predominant role of specific technology (instruments of production) in development. (Marxists haven't done such a great job of escaping dogmatic interpretations of Marx that ignore the role of unremunerated (women's) labor, and non-monetized, finite resources from the natural world... but we're getting better. Here is that Cartesian subject-object relation, wherein men subjugate nature/women.) "Sustainability," however, requires us to go deeper into our own materialism and begin to understand accumulation and development globally, and as a physical (as in laws of physics) phenomenon, and relate that understanding of physics to our social organization. The most popular understanding of the term, sustainability, appears to be willfully ignorant of the most axiomatic forces in the physical universe and how those forces respond to "development." While this is forgivable in the general population, where the mass intellect is still so thoroughly commodified and mystified, it is downright cynical when this willful ignorance is deployed by the ruling class, and downright astonishing when it is tacitly accepted by "scientific" socialists. The latter case is one, I suspect - given my own experience - of our not having been adequately exposed to physics, in particular, to thermodynamics (which I might refer to alternatively as "energetics"), which is the aspect of physics I will dwell on here. But it is also an epistemological problem if we fail to account for Hornborg's point that there is no such thing as a technological "realm." Not only do we need to extend our theory more deeply into materialism this way in order to understand our period, we need to retroject this insight into an analysis of the collapse of Eastern European and (possibly now) Asian socialism, which in different ways (Soviet and Maoist) both adopted an understanding of technology that was fundamentally undifferentiated from that of capital. (The original Maoist orientation, in fact, that privileged the countryside, actually demonstrated a deeper understanding of these issues, but the trajectory of Chinese socialism, under both internal and external pressure, shifted toward "market socialism" which has now transformed China into a massive and growing urban energy sink.) If by "sustainability," we mean something akin to systemic inputs equalling systemic outputs - a kind of ecologic/economic perpetual motion machine - then we have fallen into a trap. Nature does not act that way. Nature is not in a state of equilibrium, not some cosmic homeostasis. Contrary to the proverb of Ecclesiastes, There is nothing NOT new under the sun." God does play dice with the universe, even though the dice are probably loaded. Matter-energy changes form constantly, sometimes gradually, sometimes violently, in ways that will never be perfectly penetrable by human consciousness, and in very non-linear ways. And in our little cranny of the universe, there has been a dialectical development between our environment, our interventions in it, and our consciousness. To be meaningful at all, we have to alter that conception a bit, and arrive at some approximation of "sustainability" as ensuring some life-essential matter-energy forms are reproduced indefinitely in this biosphere, of which we are a part. The torturing of syntax required just to express this concept in a non-Cartesian way is more evidence of ideological hegemony and epistemological inadequacy. (Linguistics and semiotics, eh. Or maybe just my own lack of facility with the language...) What is thermodynamics, or energetics? Well, its the study of something we don't understand very well: Energy. I include a definition at the end of this post. You may refer to it as necessary to confirm the kinds of assertions that follow related to the inverse relation of "value" and "entropy." Everyone has heard me ranting about fossil fuel. I've even been accused of having an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Maybe. But paranoids might have real enemies, and obsessives might obsess about real phenomena. (-; It's not the oil, you see, it's the energy. Development (as in capitalist core-infrastructure) and underdevelopment (as in lack of *self-determining* insfrastructure in the exploited periphery) are interdependent polarities on a shared social axis, where value is drained from the latter into the former, for the purpose of maintaining a ceaselessly-expanding accumulation regime (making it ultimately unsustainable in an economic sense). Marxists all know that "value", that is, exchange value, is a social transfer of embodied labor (including unremunerated labor largely from women, dammit!). Let's think about that same social transfer as the transfer of energy, just to put this on a strictly physical basis. Later, I will reiterate why and how the separation of economics from ecology is completely arbitrary, albeit useful for the purpose of examination. In our biosphere, we have the most efficient counter-entropic process known to humanity; photosynthesis. Think of entropy as the level of dissipation of energy, with dissipated energy being that energy that is less able to move matter, or do "work." Most of our energy originates from the sun. Photosynthetic plant life is a self-reproducing set of structures that "capture" that energy and store it in chemical form (as sugars and proteins and lipids and so forth). So plants concentrate energy into low-entropy forms. (Low entropy = more work potential, high-entropy = less work potential) We actually measure that energy in heat equivalents, like BTUs or calories or even joules. Even when plants die, they keep a lot of their stored energy. That's why we can pick up a piece of dead wood, set it on fire, and it releases a lot of heat. Every time energy is transferred, there is some wasted, or "dissipated." So a bug eats a leaf and gets some energy, but some of that energy is lost during the metabolic process of the bug. So the bug is a higher entropy form than the leaf. And the bird that eats the bug is still getting energy that originated from the sun, but the bird is warm-blooded, and she is giving off dissipated heat constantly. She "wastes" more energy or heat, so she is higher entropy than the bug. Then the large predator, like the human, eats the bird for energy. In fact, we are very high entropy forms, because we do something none of the rest of these species do. We exploit energy inside our bodies through metabolism, like the other critters do, but we also exploit energy (and DISSIPATE it) outside our bodies, or extrasomatically. We burn things. Wood. Coal. Oil. Work is energy dissipation. Humans have always dissipated a lot of energy. We are entropy's best friends here on earth. When we make things that work, like machines, these are dissipative structures. When we use machines that require very low-entropy inputs, like fossil fuels that are the end result of about a billion years of patient photosynthesis (remember, we have NO technology that can replace photosynthesis for counter-dissipation), we are dissipating energy at breakneck speed. I refer you here to http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf for a great exposition of this. Here's the rub. Price (monetized value) is based (at least partly) on embodied socially necessary labor in the production process. But in a *growth-driven* (capitalist or socialist) economy, where technology becomes an ever increasing set of dissipative structures, the energetic base of that very same economy is undermined. The same process that generates "growth" or "wealth" generates entropy. Energy itself is productive potential, if it can be directed by human energy (and consciousness!). But something unique is added to the accumulation process when energy is traded as a commodity, *with a price.* At one time, that energy was in the form of slaves. Now it is wage labor, but even more significantly, fuel. Exosomatic, super-low-entropy, fossil fuel. The average American home is using the equivalent physical energy of 50 slaves. We won't even begin to calculate transportation. So this "commodity" is far more than a commodity. It is a "force multiplier" of production, but, conversely, it is also a hugely energy-dissipative process. We must see this process as going somewhere. Where it is going, in the aggregate, is toward a clear and unbreachable thermodynamic wall. There is no existing technology that is not dissipative, and nothing replaces photosynthesis as the fundamentally essential capturing (counter-entropic) process for energy in our biosphere. In a sense, a sustainable society (which must be socialist, as I will show later), will have to take into account a ratio between techno-mass and biomass. Sustainability will be determined, in the last instance, by the ability to reduce aggregate dissipation below the aggregate photosynthetic "capture." But aggregations do not tell the whole story. In fact, if we stay with aggregates, we are reducing our interpretation to an input-output model, and we are both fetishizing and reifying. Machines and technology are commodities, socially constructed but sitting in front of us as if independent in their existence, seen as a combination of material and knowledge, with social relations concealed. Similarly, energy forms can be fetishized, not just as a failure to apprehend the concealed social relations, but as a failure to see their concealed thermodynamic history. Oil, for example, which has taken hundreds of millions of years to concentrate energy, has had half its total energy dissipated by combustion in just over a century. Marx taught us that false consciousness is largely based on reification, our predominant epistemological error, wherein we treat an abstraction like it is a material thing. Social constructions, like growth-development and technological forms, are now treated like god-given material parameters, irreducible and inescapable. This reification serves capital by closing off broader epistemological options. And the reification of aggregation (above) conceals the reality of techno-mass concentration in urban, especially core-urban, centers, which are energy sinks, dissipative concentrations, the equivalent of economic/ecological black holes that suck in minerals, fossil energy, and biomass (often through labor itself) from the periphery. What is per-capita energy use for an average American, as opposed to an average Haitian? What political reality underwrites this ratio? Inside these epistemological boundaries, "sustainable development" becomes a grim oxymoron. And "growth-development", it must be said, was an external imperative for encircled socialism (and still is!). But it was EXTERNAL. As much as I hate to agree with Trotsky on anything, he something right. Value was rattling at the borders of the revolution. But "growth-development" is not an external imperative for capitalism. It is intrinsic to it. No system with property and profit as its motive force can escape this. No system that fails to rationalize the whole system in accordance with needs (and one of those needs is energy) in a self-reproducing way, can hope to prevent humanity from racing over the edge of an abrupt energy step-change that will result in a massive dieoff of humanity. Inside these epistemological boundaries, we are trapped in a deadly zero-sum situation, that Hornborg says we deny and call a "cornupcopia." The Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse for a time, but without a genuine periphery to exploit, it collapsed. With that collapse, Russia was not transformed into a core industrial state, but into yet another economic colony, a new addition to the periphery, and a dieoff of historic proportions is underway there now. The rest of us aren't as far behind as we think. With an entropic material foundation, society itself is now organized in a way that can only increase disorder. This is the dialectic behind sustainababble. Stan Goff Are economists still unsustainable? by Patrick Bond In economic theory, unquestionably the most famous line ever uttered is the following: 'I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that'. The in-house memo that carried this wisdom was signed more than a decade ago by the World Bank's chief economist, Lawrence Summers, who later became US treasury secretary and is now president of Harvard University. Was it meant to be 'ironic', as Summers claimed? When The Economist magazine published the leaked memo in early February 1992 (and actually endorsed the impeccable logic), Bank president Lewis Preston was visiting Johannesburg and humbly conceded, 'Sometimes very smart people say very stupid things.' But it wasn't stupid, it was a menu not only for the introduction of market-based values in the Rio UN Conference on Environment and Development a few months later. It also served as the clarion call for a subsequent decade of displacement of pollution to the Third World, and of the commodification of nature and indeed all elements of life, including water and even air. It is time for economists to confess and repent. Our profession led the way to environmental unsustainability during the go-go 1990s because of the confidence we had that market forces are the primary determinant of human behaviour and that they maximise social well-being, so long as market imperfections are not overwhelming. Thank goodness that more attention to those imperfections was the hallmark of a subsequent World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz. His contributions to 'information-theoretic economics' won him the Nobel Prize last year. Recognising the need for paradigmatic reform, Stiglitz coined the term, 'Post-Washington Consensus', and repeatedly took his International Monetary Fund colleagues across 18th Street to task. Because of that, he was let go from the Bank in September 1999 and then joined Columbia University. In the run-up to the WSSD, on August 16, Stiglitz called for the IMF to be closed down because its economists are incapable of change. What kinds of reforms have been proposed for the dismal science, to make it more sustainable? Some, in the tradition of John Maynard Keynes, are designed to roll back free-market economics because of a recognition that states must correct imperfections such as insufficient consumer buying power, and excessively monopolistic behaviour by large corporations. But perhaps the most powerful environmental accounting in the field of economics comes from Herman Daly, who also worked in the World Bank before resigning in frustration. Daly, who moved to the University of Maryland in 1996, argued that we must 'internalise the externalities' associated with pollution or ecological damage. Under prevailing conditions, the ready solution is not to build these costs into the market, but instead simply to displace them to somewhere political power is negligible and the immediate environmental implications are less visible, in the name of overall economic growth. After all, Summers' memo continued, inhabitants of low-income countries typically die before the age at which they would begin suffering prostate cancer associated with toxic dumping. And in any event, using productivity as a measure, low-income Africans are not worth very much anyhow. Nor are African's aesthetic concerns with air pollution likely to be as substantive as they are for wealthy northerners. One of the most devastating critiques of such neoliberal understandings of environmental economics is University of Oregon professor John Bellamy Foster's essay on 'The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line'. Foster cites three fatal contradictions: . the radical break with all previous human history necessitated by the reduction of the human relation to nature to a set of market-based utilities, rooted in the egoistic preferences of individuals; . the radical displacement of the very idea of value or worth, resulting from the domination of market values over everything else. It is this widespread humanistic sense of systems of intrinsic value that are not reducible to mere market values and cannot be included within a cost-benefit analysis that so often frustrates the attempts of economists to carry out contingent value analyses among the general public; and . [market-based environmental] solutions, while sometimes attenuating the problems in the short term, only accentuate the contradictions overall, undermining both the conditions of life and the conditions of production The reason for this is the sheer dynamism of the capitalist commodity economy, which by its very nature accepts no barriers outside of itself, and seeks constantly to increase its sphere of influence without regard to the effects of this on our biosphere. An inkling of such problems was recognised in the famous definition of 'sustainable development' offered by Gro Harlem Brundtland's World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987: 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. However, Daly offered a tougher definition in order to highlight the difference between 'growth' and 'development' in a context in which the earth's capacity to act as a 'sink' reflects the physical ecosystem's limit to the absolute size of the global economy. Daly sought sustainability in 'development without growth beyond environmental carrying capacity, where development means qualitative improvement and growth means quantitative increase'. However, using this definition around the World Bank, Daly found, 'just confirmed the orthodox economists' worst fears about the subversive nature of the idea, and reinforced their resolve to keep it vague'. Daly proposed at least four operative policy recommendations for both the Bank and governments: . stop counting natural capital as income; . tax labour and income less, and tax resource throughput more; . maximise the productivity of natural capital in the short run, and invest in increasing its supply in the long run; and . move away from the ideology of global economic integration by free trade, free capital mobility, and export-led growth--and toward a more nationalist orientation that seeks to develop domestic production for internal markets as the first option, having recourse to international trade only when clearly much more efficient. These make a great deal of sense today. If the Washington Consensus was the ideology of the late 20th century, can ecological economics and a genuine recognition of market failure for most of the earth's human inhabitants inform heads of state negotiating a grand deal in Johannesburg? If so, they will have to change direction rather dramatically. (Patrick Bond teaches at Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management in South Africa. His new book, Unsustainable South Africa, is published by University of Natal Press, Merlin in Britain and Africa World Press in the US.) Patrick Bond phone (27)83-633-5548 fax (27)11-484-2729 [Thermodynamics Definition: The study of the laws that govern the conversion of energy from one form to another, the direction in which heat will flow, and the availability of energy to do work. It is based on the concept that in an isolated system anywhere in the universe there is a measurable quantity of energy called the internal energy (U) of the system. This is the total kinetic and potential energy of the atoms and molecules of the system of all kinds that can be transferred directly as heat; it therefore excludes chemical and nuclear energy. The value of U can only be changed if the system ceases to be isolated. In these circumstances U can change by the transfer of mass to or from the system, the transfer of heat (Q) to or from the system, or by work (W) being done on or by the system. For an adiabatic (Q=0) system of constant mass, DU=W. By convention, W is taken to be positive if work s done on the system and negative if work is done by the system. For nonadiabatic systems of constant mass, DU = Q + W. This statement, which is equivalent to the law of conservation of energy, is known as the first law of thermodynamics. All natural process conform to this law, but not all processes conforming to it can occur in nature. Most natural processes are irreversible, i.e. they will proceed in one direction. The direction that a natural process can take is the subject of the second law of thermodynamics, which can be stated in a variety of ways. Rudolf Clausius stated the law in two ways: "heat cannot be transferred from one body to a second body at a higher temperature without producing some other effect" and "the entropy of a closed system increases with time". These statements introduce the thermodynamic concepts of temperature (T) and entropy (S), both of which are parameters determining the direction in which an irreversible process can go. The temperature of the body or system determines whether heat will flow into it or out of it; its entropy is a measure of the unavailability of its energy to do work. Thus T and S determine the relationship between Q and W in the statement of the first law. This is usually presented by stating the second law in the form DU = TDS - W. The second law if concerned with changes in entropy (DS). The third law of thermodynamics provides an absolute scale of values for entropy by stating that for changes involving only perfect crystalline solids at absolute zero, the change of the total entropy is zero. This law enables absolute values to be stated for entropies. One other law is used in thermodynamics. Because it is fundamental to, and assumed by, the other laws of thermodynamics, it is usually known as the zero-th law of thermodynamics. This states that if two bodies are each in thermal equilibrium with a third body, than all three bodies are in thermal equilibrium with each other.]
