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In a message dated 11/30/03 12:25:57 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
In what sense do you mean your claim that "urban life is unsustainable?" Do you mean we need better cities, or that cities themselves have to go? Please clarify. Your 11/27 posting appears to argue against the continued existence of urban living of any kind. True or false?
Comment
1. "Urban living" has been around for a very long time. The urban enclaves that took shape on the basis of the industrial curve have been undergoing change for the past one hundred years, which might be expressed as the rise and fall of the industrial era. The bourgeoisie itself - or rather those treated as bourgeois property holders, have no interest in maintaining the previous industrial forms of our urban enclaves, that grew up on the basis of say . . . the steel industry or auto industry and all the feeder industries and their town that supplied auto and steel. Urban renewal and relocation - incorrectly called "white flight" was an indication of a deeper social process at work. The decline of the industrial workforce automatically means the decline - unsustainability, of the industrial enclaves that housed the industrial workforce and its administrative apparatus. I live in the city that Henry Ford Sr. built as his base of operations and it was the most prosperous community in American in the 1920s and 1930s - a small city surrounded by Detroit. Thomas Edison lived about a half a mile from my home. Sustainability is not a concept of one thing but a moving organic process of life. 2. The industrial urban enclave can not be sustained in relationship to what is called the countryside or agriculture, or what became manifest as the antagonism between "town and country" or what is the same a certain division and hostility between urban town folk and county -agricultural, folks. This is so because modern production and technology has in fact rendered the country folk "urban" - without the industrial form, by making it impossible for them to live solely on the basis of mobilizing the produce of the land. The countryside has been called "small-town" America in America for a couple of decades and this means small time urban. True or False?
3. The Urban industrial centers, as we know them today, on the basis of reproducing a deadly entropic discharge - pollution, to our environment and man, is not sustainable on the basis of bourgeois production, whose production for production sake has as its byproduct - pollution and the destruction of the biological integrity of the earth.
The current form of reproduction - production for production sake, or to try and realize a profit, which might or might not happen, demands a continuous supply of energy or stable energy source. This demand for a stable supply of energy drives the energy companies who existence is based on production for production sake - seeking profit or an expanding value, which in turn is the motive - impulse, to further degrade the biological integrity of the earth and acquire petroleum without regards to its quantify or impact of earth. This is so because biological integrity and quantitative dimensions does not govern the process of production, but primarily impacts the price form - although the science of biology and biosphere integrity is well developed in our society. That is to say, we already have a sense - instinct, of right and wrong.
Our current Urban enclaves and way of life is unsustainable, not because it is unsustainable but because it is wrong.
4. The inherent limit of earth presupposes that there is an inherent limit to fossil fuel. An enormous debate has raged for 30 years over the junctures that indicates whether or not we have crossed the threshold in which petroleum - oil, discovery and processing has entered its phases of absolute decline. This debate becomes complex because alternative energy sources can only be created on the basis of the fossil fuel whose quantitative dimensions are limited on earth by definition. Another level of the debate is that a more complex technology producing an alternative energy source, requires a greater expenditure of fossil fuel energy, which more rapidly depletes the indigenous fossil fuel sources that one is trying to preserve. Hence "alternative energy source" - as a thing in itself, is not solution and one is still faced with the question of sustainability of existing society.
From the standpoint of sustainability - which fragments and sections of all classes and strata in society are fighting over in an attempt to sustain themselves, the issue presents itself as hitting the wall of the thermodynamic barrier and/or property or a technological barrier. Neither is mutually exclusive.
No matter what ones particular point of view, the way we currently live is not sustainable. Nor does our current way of living need to be sustained. My personal inclination is to take over Coke Cola and spend the rest of my life working to purify the waters on earth. Yes, this project will require energy, but hey - we will just have less Coke. :-)
What rationale person allocates energy expenditure to making candy bars, McDonald's and Burger King products; a zillion model vehicles that are more than less the same or a market for 17 million cars in America when we can reconfigure the transportation system to meet everyone collective and individual inclination? Many people do not want a personal computer and those that may one no longer want it. The question is a rationale expenditure of energy and labor or the deadly unsustainable logic of production for production sake.
Urban life being unsustainable - in my opinion, means the form of lives we are currently living and not the form of urban life that existed in say Sumerian society, where that, which was urban was organized in the Temple cities, or even Vienna a couple hundred years ago. :-)
I have crossed horns with Mr. Proyect on this question, but it was not on the basis that our current lifestyle could be sustained. Our current form of society - and this includes our Urban centers, cannot be sustained in the form that they arose. Even the bourgeoisie does not want to sustain them. Industrial urban society is undergoing collapse in front of our noses and we have to learn to smell what is happening.
Yes, or No?
The question is "what is to be done" and this is not a political question, but a deeper question of how do we survive, sustain and insure the cultural development of life on earth? How do we insure the life of the mind? Proletarian revolution is very important but we need to begin thinking about what we are talking about.
Ugh . . . calling people the Feds, even if you believe this, is not a good thing to do. If you really believe this then challenge them to carry out a program to help people. I have fought with folks over politics and been mad, but I do not want Lou or anyone else to bust my chops. Or look me up while they are in Detroit.
Melvin P. |
