Re: Ecology and value free Marxism
Dear friends, Those who have been following Louis' posts on ecology will be interested in knowing that the 1998 Socialist Scholars Conference will feature a panel on "Marxist Contributions to Ecological Theory" with John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University Joan Roelofs, Hampshire College It has been tentatively scheduled for Saturday morning March 21. The Conference will be held at the usual place, Borough of Manhattan Community College, 199 Chambers Street in New York City from March 20 to 22. For more information about the Socialist Scholars Conference, check out our web page at www.soc.qc.edu/ssc or email the Conference at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hope to see you (and many young people) there, Robert Saute On Sat, 21 Feb 1998, Louis Proyect wrote: Any young person who was becoming politicized around ecological issues would find Boucher's argument deeply repellent. As it turns out, tens of thousands of young people have developed inchoate anticapitalist ideas because of what corporations have been doing to dolphins and other endangered species. If you gave that young person a sample of Boucher's prose, they'd retreat in horror. There is empirical evidence for the sort of disjunction between Marxism and the young generation I am describing. Next month many of us will attend the annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York, where we will see about a thousand middle-aged white people. Inevitably we will turn to an old friend and say something like, "God, everybody is so OLD." Meanwhile, at a conference on globalization held at the Riverside Church 2 years ago, there were twice as many participants and the average age was probably in the mid-20s. I have no doubt that if you asked the average attendee what the official Marxist position on ecology was, they'd say it was something like the position that Boucher puts forward. Louis Proyect
Re: Ecology and value free Marxism
On Sat, February 21, 1998 at 21:47:46 (-0500) Louis Proyect writes:
The Fall 1996 Science and Society, edited by PEN-L'er David Laibman,
contains an article by Douglas Boucher called "Not With a Bang, but a
Whimper." It includes a paragraph that I find highly disturbing:
As ecosystems are transformed, species are eliminated -- but
opportunities are created for new ones. The natural world is changed, but
never totally destroyed. Levins and Lewontin put it well: "The warning not
to destroy the environment is empty: environment, like matter, cannot be
created or destroyed. What we can do is replace environments we value by
those we do not like". Indeed, from a human point of view the most
impressive feature of recorded history is that human societies have
continued to grow and develop, despite all the terrible things they have
done to the earth. Examples of the collapse of civilizations due to their
over-exploitation of nature are few and far between. Most tend to be well
in the past and poorly documented, and further investigation often shows
that the reasons for collapse were fundamentally political.
The reference is to an article that Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin's
published in Jim O'Connor's 1994 Vol.5-4 Capitalism Nature Socialism titled
"Holism and Reductionism in Ecology." Apparently this article has had a big
influence not only on Boucher, but on David Harvey, who draws upon it
extensively in his new book "Justice, Nature, and the Geography of
Difference." Levins, Lewontin, Boucher and Harvey are all aggravated by the
claim that some make that the planet is being destroyed by capitalism. On
their hit-list are the usual suspects like Kirkpatrick Sale. They are also
miffed at Marxists like John Bellamy Foster who has the temerity to think
of the planet as "vulnerable."
My reaction to Boucher and company is that their counter-arguments
undermine whatever moral legitimacy Marxism has left.
It leaves you with the impression that as long as humanity survives, it is
not catastrophic if every last living species except homo sapiens becomes
extinct. If our planet ends up containing nothing but us, the rats and the
cockroaches, then our "survival" seems moot.
As I have not read the cited articles myself, and just reading what
you have posted, I think that Boucher's paragraph is also disturbing,
but I draw slightly different conclusions.
First, I disagree with your conclusions about the impressions that *I*
might draw from it (not surprising, I guess, given that I have read
only a sliver of what you have read in the whole). The scenario of
every last species except homo sapiens becoming extinct would indeed
be catastrophic, but I also see this as quite consistent with LL's
comment about replacing one environment we like (this one, though we
would like it better if we would stop "all the terrible things" we do
to it) with one we dislike ("rats and the cockroaches").
I think they (Boucher/LL) are making a very different claim than that
which you seem to attribute to them. I don't see that they are
claiming that it would make no difference (quality-wise) if we
continue to rape and pillage. I think that they are claiming that our
civilization (capitalism) itself may be able to sustain a great deal
of raping and pillaging of the environment without itself collapsing.
Here, if I am correct, I find their argument much more scary than that
which you put forth. If capitalism can survive the disfigurement of
the world's ecosystems, if the political structures remain intact,
then we are in for a very scary ride into a hellish future.
The disappearance of bald
eagles as a result of DDT was noted by Rachel Carson in the legendary New
Yorker "Silent Spring" articles of the 1950s. Bill McKibben, who gets
bashed by Boucher and company, followed in Carson's footsteps when he wrote
a series of articles in the same magazine titled "End of Nature." The point
of these articles is to remind us, as Engels said in Dialectics of Nature,
that we "are part of nature." Boucher and company place us above it.
I see this two ways: yes, it is trivially true that we are "part of
nature", and this is very important, but we are above it in the sense
that it is us alone, as a particularly destructive part of nature,
that is able to alter the balance of life on the entire planet, while
at the same time that this horrible destruction is going on,
maintaining the social machinery (capitalism) responsible in large
part for this destruction.
At the heart of Boucher's neutrality is the "value free" stance of
bourgeois social science: Cockroaches or Eagles--its all the same--so what.
Well, from what you have excerpted, I don't see it in what Boucher
wrote. Again though, perhaps having read only part of what they
wrote, I am not understanding something.
I can however fault LL for taking needless time and effort to
critically "deconstruct" the perfectly reasonable common usage
"destroy
Re: Ecology and value free Marxism
Bill Lear:
The scenario of
every last species except homo sapiens becoming extinct would indeed
be catastrophic, but I also see this as quite consistent with LL's
comment about replacing one environment we like (this one, though we
would like it better if we would stop "all the terrible things" we do
to it) with one we dislike ("rats and the cockroaches").
Now that everybody should have had the chance to review Boucher's article,
I'd like to respond to Bill's interesting reply. The ecological crisis may
be overblown in the literature of people like Bill McKibben or the deep
ecologists, but my problem with Boucher's "correction" is that bends the
stick in the other direction. It tends toward a Panglossian vision that
"nature" can not be destroyed. If you stop and think about it, the only
correct use of the word catastrophe in ecological terms according to them
would be one that is on a par with nuclear holocaust. It is "unscientific"
in their eyes to analyze phenomena such as global warming in the
apocalyptic terms that someone like George Wald or Helen Caldicott used to
describe the threat of nuclear war. This leaves us as Marxists in a rather
odd position when the overwhelming majority of scientists *are* viewing it
in exactly those terms. The proliferation of automobiles, destruction of
rainforests, etc. are adding up to a doomsday scenario. This is not
conjecture. It is a matter of chemistry, biology and physics.
For my money, one of the most creative Marxist thinkers in the United
States today is Mike Davis. Here's what he says in the Dec. '97 CNS.
Whatever you want to make of it, it certainly is coming from a different
place than Harvey, Boucher and company. There are real political
differences *within* Marxism over these questions and it is regrettable
that Boucher et al lump people like Jim O'Connor with anti-Marxists like
Kirkpatrick Sale into the same category.
"At a recent exhibition of radical memorabilia from 1968, I was captivated
by a poster from German SDS, the socialist student movement led by Rudi
Deutschke. The stern busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin are set in dramatic
profile against a fiery background of crimson. The droll caption
translates: 'Some folks worry about the weather. They don't.'
"But perhaps they should have. Thirty years after that incomparable
springtime of barricades and general strikes, the left has a new agenda
that includes the geopolitical impacts of ozone depletion and global
warming. World poverty and catastrophic climate change are no longer
separate issues. Weather should worry us all.
"It should also force us to rethink historical models where culture is
promethean but nature is passive. Classical Marxism, in particular, lacks a
conceptual niche for dynamic environmental change as a fundamental variable
affecting the productivity of labor, rates of surplus extraction, and,
thereby, the intensity of social conflict. Ecology, for Marx and Engels,
was a backdrop, not an engine of history.
"In the Dialectics of Nature, for example, Engels offers this extraordinary
evaluation of the relative roles of human and natural agency in shaping the
German landscape: 'The topsoil, the climate, the vegetation, the fauna and
the men themselves have infinitely changed, and all this because of human
activity, whereas the transformations which occurred during this time in
the German environment, without any human involvement, are insignificant.'
Stalin, citing Engels, would later enshrine the 'orthodoxy' that the
environment changes too slowly to influence the direction of history.)"
I think that they are claiming that our
civilization (capitalism) itself may be able to sustain a great deal
of raping and pillaging of the environment without itself collapsing.
This is correct, but that's the problem. What sort of position is that for
socialists to be adopting? It turns us into observers, rather than tribunes
of the masses. The sad fact of the matter is that the only wing of the
Marxist movement that has embraced ecological issues are those grouped
around Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, the very people whom Boucher and
company accuse of "catastrophism." Harvey's position is rather interesting
and I plan to discuss it at length when I get the chance. He works with
black activists in the Baltimore area--to his credit--and he has absorbed
their hostility to middle-class environmentalism of the Sierra Club
variety. Harvey bitterly comments that such people cared more about chicken
exrement run-off in poultry plants in the south than the horrible working
conditions of the black employees. This is classic sectarianism. Socialists
do not belittle one form of oppression against another. Sneering at the
concerns that some people have over polluted water is not what builds a
socialist movement. Socialists have to figure out ways to tie these
struggles together and not apply such litmus tests.
Louis Proyect
Re: Ecology and value free Marxism
I have not read either the Boucher article or the
Levins and Lewontin piece in O'Connor's journal. But I
think that they are being misinterpreted and unfairly
castigated here. They are the authors of _The Dialectical
Biologist_ and are both extremely capable ecologists.
Levins is one of the developers (along with Eugene Odum) of
the concept of an ecological community and looking at an
ecosystem as a matrix of interacting species, much like an
input-output matrix in economics. Lewontin has done very
high quality work on a variety of ecological topics.
Neither of these people think that people are "above" the
ecosystem in any sense, rather that we are deeply and
dialectically involved in the ecosytem. Their quoted remark
is quite reasonable. The biosphere as a whole has enormous
resiliency. If we do horrible things to it, we will not
destroy it, it will destroy us, just as the asteroid that
smacked the earth wiped out all the dinosaurs but did not
end life on earth. Probably even humans having a
full-scale nuclear war would not wipe out life on earth.
It would more likely just wipe us out (and a bunch of other
less resilient species). Yep, rats and cockroaches, or
mutants thereof, would be the likely "victors" of such a
war...
Barkley Rosser
Barkley Rosser
On Sun, 22 Feb 1998 10:36:10 -0600 (CST) "William S. Lear"
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Sat, February 21, 1998 at 21:47:46 (-0500) Louis Proyect writes:
The Fall 1996 Science and Society, edited by PEN-L'er David Laibman,
contains an article by Douglas Boucher called "Not With a Bang, but a
Whimper." It includes a paragraph that I find highly disturbing:
As ecosystems are transformed, species are eliminated -- but
opportunities are created for new ones. The natural world is changed, but
never totally destroyed. Levins and Lewontin put it well: "The warning not
to destroy the environment is empty: environment, like matter, cannot be
created or destroyed. What we can do is replace environments we value by
those we do not like". Indeed, from a human point of view the most
impressive feature of recorded history is that human societies have
continued to grow and develop, despite all the terrible things they have
done to the earth. Examples of the collapse of civilizations due to their
over-exploitation of nature are few and far between. Most tend to be well
in the past and poorly documented, and further investigation often shows
that the reasons for collapse were fundamentally political.
The reference is to an article that Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin's
published in Jim O'Connor's 1994 Vol.5-4 Capitalism Nature Socialism titled
"Holism and Reductionism in Ecology." Apparently this article has had a big
influence not only on Boucher, but on David Harvey, who draws upon it
extensively in his new book "Justice, Nature, and the Geography of
Difference." Levins, Lewontin, Boucher and Harvey are all aggravated by the
claim that some make that the planet is being destroyed by capitalism. On
their hit-list are the usual suspects like Kirkpatrick Sale. They are also
miffed at Marxists like John Bellamy Foster who has the temerity to think
of the planet as "vulnerable."
My reaction to Boucher and company is that their counter-arguments
undermine whatever moral legitimacy Marxism has left.
It leaves you with the impression that as long as humanity survives, it is
not catastrophic if every last living species except homo sapiens becomes
extinct. If our planet ends up containing nothing but us, the rats and the
cockroaches, then our "survival" seems moot.
As I have not read the cited articles myself, and just reading what
you have posted, I think that Boucher's paragraph is also disturbing,
but I draw slightly different conclusions.
First, I disagree with your conclusions about the impressions that *I*
might draw from it (not surprising, I guess, given that I have read
only a sliver of what you have read in the whole). The scenario of
every last species except homo sapiens becoming extinct would indeed
be catastrophic, but I also see this as quite consistent with LL's
comment about replacing one environment we like (this one, though we
would like it better if we would stop "all the terrible things" we do
to it) with one we dislike ("rats and the cockroaches").
I think they (Boucher/LL) are making a very different claim than that
which you seem to attribute to them. I don't see that they are
claiming that it would make no difference (quality-wise) if we
continue to rape and pillage. I think that they are claiming that our
civilization (capitalism) itself may be able to sustain a great deal
of raping and pillaging of the environment without itself collapsing.
Here, if I am correct, I find their argument much more scary than that
which you put forth. If capitalism can survive the disfigurement of
the world's ecosystems, if the political structures remain
Re: Ecology and value free Marxism
On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: I have not read either the Boucher article or the Levins and Lewontin piece in O'Connor's journal. But I think that they are being misinterpreted and unfairly castigated here. They are the authors of _The Dialectical The focus *has not* been on Lewontin and Levins, but on Boucher whose article you have had the chance to read. Tomorrow I will get a hold of LL's article and scan it in. BTW, these flatbed scanners are amazing values. I find that not only are they ridiculously cheap, but are quite accurate. 99% of the text I scan is error-free. Louis P.
Re: Ecology and value free Marxism
Louis, My mail comes in in a funny order. I actually keep track of SS but somehow did not bother reading the Boucher piece in its original site. It isn't all that impressive I must say, especially in its political analysis which is somehwere between medieval and pathetic. I should have added with regard to my remarks on Levins and Lewontin that in the quote cited they clearly say that we can replace an environment we like with one we don't. That seems about right. Certainly we prefer a biosphere with Pandas and dolphins to one without. Interesting that Boucher brought up the Mayan collapse issue that we were discussing in a related but slightly different context on this list earlier. I think he goes too far to emphasize that social/political aspects, but it would seem likely that what happened was a combination social/political/economic/ecological catastrophe there. That is not at all irrelevant to our current situation. Barkley Rosser On Sun, 22 Feb 1998 16:13:43 -0500 (EST) Louis N Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: I have not read either the Boucher article or the Levins and Lewontin piece in O'Connor's journal. But I think that they are being misinterpreted and unfairly castigated here. They are the authors of _The Dialectical The focus *has not* been on Lewontin and Levins, but on Boucher whose article you have had the chance to read. Tomorrow I will get a hold of LL's article and scan it in. BTW, these flatbed scanners are amazing values. I find that not only are they ridiculously cheap, but are quite accurate. 99% of the text I scan is error-free. Louis P. -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ecology and value free Marxism
The Fall 1996 Science and Society, edited by PEN-L'er David Laibman, contains an article by Douglas Boucher called "Not With a Bang, but a Whimper." It includes a paragraph that I find highly disturbing: As ecosystems are transformed, species are eliminated -- but opportunities are created for new ones. The natural world is changed, but never totally destroyed. Levins and Lewontin put it well: "The warning not to destroy the environment is empty: environment, like matter, cannot be created or destroyed. What we can do is replace environments we value by those we do not like". Indeed, from a human point of view the most impressive feature of recorded history is that human societies have continued to grow and develop, despite all the terrible things they have done to the earth. Examples of the collapse of civilizations due to their over-exploitation of nature are few and far between. Most tend to be well in the past and poorly documented, and further investigation often shows that the reasons for collapse were fundamentally political. The reference is to an article that Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin's published in Jim O'Connor's 1994 Vol.5-4 Capitalism Nature Socialism titled "Holism and Reductionism in Ecology." Apparently this article has had a big influence not only on Boucher, but on David Harvey, who draws upon it extensively in his new book "Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference." Levins, Lewontin, Boucher and Harvey are all aggravated by the claim that some make that the planet is being destroyed by capitalism. On their hit-list are the usual suspects like Kirkpatrick Sale. They are also miffed at Marxists like John Bellamy Foster who has the temerity to think of the planet as "vulnerable." My reaction to Boucher and company is that their counter-arguments undermine whatever moral legitimacy Marxism has left. It leaves you with the impression that as long as humanity survives, it is not catastrophic if every last living species except homo sapiens becomes extinct. If our planet ends up containing nothing but us, the rats and the cockroaches, then our "survival" seems moot. The disappearance of bald eagles as a result of DDT was noted by Rachel Carson in the legendary New Yorker "Silent Spring" articles of the 1950s. Bill McKibben, who gets bashed by Boucher and company, followed in Carson's footsteps when he wrote a series of articles in the same magazine titled "End of Nature." The point of these articles is to remind us, as Engels said in Dialectics of Nature, that we "are part of nature." Boucher and company place us above it. Any young person who was becoming politicized around ecological issues would find Boucher's argument deeply repellent. As it turns out, tens of thousands of young people have developed inchoate anticapitalist ideas because of what corporations have been doing to dolphins and other endangered species. If you gave that young person a sample of Boucher's prose, they'd retreat in horror. There is empirical evidence for the sort of disjunction between Marxism and the young generation I am describing. Next month many of us will attend the annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York, where we will see about a thousand middle-aged white people. Inevitably we will turn to an old friend and say something like, "God, everybody is so OLD." Meanwhile, at a conference on globalization held at the Riverside Church 2 years ago, there were twice as many participants and the average age was probably in the mid-20s. I have no doubt that if you asked the average attendee what the official Marxist position on ecology was, they'd say it was something like the position that Boucher puts forward. Suffice it to say that Russian Marxism did not hold this view at all. The government set aside huge portions of Soviet territory in nature conservancies in 1921. It was so important to Lenin that this be done correctly that he took time away from high-level military meetings during the civil war just so he could guide the efforts of ecologists. Key to the Bolshevik nature conservancy program was the notion that "natural monuments" like trees and rivers had to be preserved just like paintings or buildings. They were part of our civilization. Meanwhile, Marxism's irrelevancy deepens. It clings to schemas that were appropriate to the mid-19th century. When the subject of ecological catastrophe comes up, people like Boucher blather on about Malthus as if nothing has changed since the 1840s. The Worldwatch Institute tells us that there are twice the capacity of fishing trawlers as there are fish stocks in the world's oceans. Extinction of so-called class 1 species like swordfish and tuna is a distinct possibility. What does it matter to Boucher. We can eat sardines, after all. And when the sardines are gone, we can eat genetically engineered cockroaches. The bloodlessness of Boucher's response has an ancient history in Marxism. It is no doubt what led to the creation of the
