In a message dated 4/10/2004 7:23:03 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
The world sewage system - even in the most modern countries, is
configured on the basis of man existing in a pathological condition (embedded with
ancient and modern forms of property expressed in our current form and reality of
the sum total of our "needs.")

If obesity is the number one cause of death in America - and it most is, then we are talking about the people of America having exceeded a "certain limit," even if our present society is not conscious of what this "certain limit" consists.
 
Gluttony and obesity is not simply wrong diet or more accurately wrong consumption, but embodies the society process called production, consumption and distribution. Each aspect of production, consumption and distibution presupposes each other. In real life this social process is sustained on the basis of an energy infrastructure. The energy infrastructure took shape on the basis of the bourgeois property relations as it creates "needs" including the need that is the energy infrastructure.
 
The only possible cure for gluttony and obesity is to stop eating - consuming that, which is causing the mass deaths. The question presents itself in its appearance form as a lack of exercise, fatty foods and lazy Americans with too many cars. The appearance form are in fact created "needs."
 
 Marx "Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844" actually discuss these questions in their theoretical dimensions under the concept of alienation, or the externalization and objectification of social activity - laboring and the evolution of property relations.
 
Marx does not directly speak to eating and obesity because consumption did not exits as a social question in this form. The form of the social question - consumption in the general sense, was scarcity, which the bourgeoisie controls, or the control of scarcity (the class impulse of bourgeois production) as opposed to the abolition of scarcity.
 
The question deepens because scarcity is not an abstraction and has for thousands of years been understood on the basis of the "needs" created by a given mode of production. We have entered an era of communist revolution, but not as an abstraction. What faces us in the imperial centers is the contradiction between the mode of production and the social relations that - unbelievably, manifest the control of scarcity as gluttony and "to much of everything" called obesity.
 
From this point of view the barrier to sustainability (a bad concept in the first place) is the property relations and not the laws of thermodynamics, which operates outside the subjective will of man. Sustainability is a bad concept because it embody the property relations that created much of the needs one is to sustain. A projection based on the needs created on the basis of property means one is within bourgeois ideology and consumption theory.
 
Not a refusal to acknowledge the inherently finite dimensions of earth or the computations of the geologists, but rather a more sober positioning of all questions in their property form.
 
The manner in which we think things out embodies the property relations and its various ideological forms, as well as tradition, cultural specificity and force of habit, which in turn embodies property relations.
 
The issue of the environment is not a question of abstract survival of the species but a property question. The destruction of vast tracts of forest and plant life is not a question of science gone mad, but science under the direction of property - the bourgeoisie as a class.
 
It seems reasonable to charge various environmentalists with Malthus concepts, in as much as they position the question outside the bounds of property. Henry Ford as personified capital and the automobile in the flesh, is to be charged with criminal concept for humanity and an environmental degradation unprecedented in human history. Our entire transportation infrastructure embodies property relations and not abstract road, streets and highways.
 
Comrade Mark Jones mentions the environmental destruction within the Soviet Union and states that no one is immune to the laws of thermodynamics. "Socialism is not the answer to sustainability as it is expressed on the basis of thermodynamics" is the basic assertion. What is needed is a different kind of socialism more conscious of nature or more understanding of the law of unknown result.
 
Absent from Mark Jones assessment is acknowledgment that socialism is a value producing society and a property relations with all its consequences. Further, public property relations in the industrial infrastructure, as it evolves as a transition from agricultural society to industry proper, recreates many of the same needs as an industrial bourgeois society. Industrial society no matter what its property relations is a historically specific mode of production with the property relations within.  
 
That is to say what was wrong with Soviet socialism in relationship to the laws of thermodynamics is not the socialism but the industrial. In other words "socialism cannot escape the laws of thermodynamics" positions the question incorrectly because man cannot live in greater harmony with our environment on the basis of industrial logic and industrial prinicples. What is required is a revolution in thinking that matches the revolution unfolding in the technological regime.
 
That is to say man cannot be understood as an industrial like machine made of flesh. Man is electric and organic, not mechanical. Wrong consumption or wrong eating is the irreducible factor of our entire history. Only science can unravel and resolve the question. The problem is that wrong consumption appears as over consumption and the demand to consume less or hit the thermodynamic barrier.
 
The real question is what are our species nutritional requirements and this question is difficult to answer because science proceeds from industrial logic or the metaphysics of properties. Most people in America considers a person a fool to miss a meal. Much of our most fundamental conceptions of life are being called into question as the result of the crisis of bourgeois property. This bourgeois property reproduces a historic distortion in a widening scope and industrial socialism inherited this same material.  
 
Peace
 
Melvin P.
 

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