Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Mark Jones wrote: > Yoshie Furuhashi > > 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?" > > Yoshie, please don't put words in my mouth. I haven't said this or > anything like this. Mea culpa, Mark. Er, so what have you been saying? Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Re: Current implications for South Africa
At 02:58 PM 6/25/01 -0400, you wrote: >>At Foundry on April 14, Nader spoke out, rightly, for vaccination, but >>attacked Viagra and Prozac, apparently seen as only life-style >>frivolities. From the audience, Joanne Landy (a Nader supporter) cried >>out -- as is her custom in such situations, particularly in large domed >>spaces -- "Whatsamatta with Viagra!!?" and Whatsamatta with Prozac? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Current implications for South Africa
>Lou, if I could do it with a wave of my hand, I would wipe MacDonalds >off the face of the earth. The institution of fast food is undoubtedly >vicious. But attacking _people_ rather than the institutions that >exploit them is just politically stupid. I don't really remember very >well the specific thread -- but I have very consistently on LBO attacked >generic attacks on people. This is not about attacking "people". It is about educating yourself and educating others on the nature of ecological imperialism. In the entire discussion about Macdonalds french fries on Doug's list which seemed to have gone on longer than the thread on Andrew Sullivan's sex life, nobody--including you and Yoshie--ever seemed interested in where the stuff came from. It appeared to be a debate with two contrary but inadequate positions. People who read Utne Reader, wore Birkenstocks and took vacations in Costa Rica versus people who concluded from an undialectical reading of Karl Marx that the inexorable process of capitalist industrialization paves the way for socialism. In fact the inexorable process of capitalist industrialization paves the way to ruin and nothing else. "All criticism of small-scale landownership is ultimately reducible to criticism of private property as a barrier and obstacle to agriculture. So too is all counter-criticism of large landed property. Secondary political considerations are of course left aside here in both cases. It is simply that this barrier and obstacle which all private property in land places to agricultural production and the rational treatment, maintenance and improvement of the land itself, develops in various forms, and in quarreling over these specific forms of the evil its ultimate root is forgotten. "Small-scale landownership presupposes that the overwhelming majority of the population is agricultural and that isolated labour predominates over social; wealth and the development of reproduction, therefore, both in its material and intellectual aspects, is ruled out under these circumstances, and with this also the conditions for a rational agriculture. On the other hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an every growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. "If small-scale landownership creates a class of barbarians standing half outside society, combining all the crudity of primitive social forms with all the torments and misery of civilized countries, large landed property undermines labor-power in the final sphere to which its indigenous energy flees, and where it is stored up as a reserve fund for renewing the vital power of the nation, on the land itself. Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil." V. 3 of Capital, "The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent" Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Louis Proyect wrote: > > Yoshie: > >Let's forget about fast food as it is merely red herring in this > >thread. > > Then why the heck did you and Carrol tell practically argue that opposition > to MacDonalds is anti-working class? Surely you are aware that I read > lbo-talk just as Doug reads the Marxism list archives. I found your > performance around this question deeply troubling. Lou, if I could do it with a wave of my hand, I would wipe MacDonalds off the face of the earth. The institution of fast food is undoubtedly vicious. But attacking _people_ rather than the institutions that exploit them is just politically stupid. I don't really remember very well the specific thread -- but I have very consistently on LBO attacked generic attacks on people. Your misunderstanding here is characteristic, I think, of the way in which a focus on truth in the abstract can divorce people from political reality. It leads to Plato's solution: Philosopher Kings. Carrol
Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Mark Jones wrote: > > > > And yes, the answer to this is revolutionary communism, and what we need for > that is first off, for starters, to get our heads out of the sand and *look > at* the world as it really as and not as we would wish it to be. I agree. I also think that your description of the present world is probably more accurate than (say) Doug's. I also think that politically that description is worthless -- that focusing on it will not bring us one step closer to _doing_ anything about it. On the contrary, emphasizing it will interfere with doing anything about it. Even when it is obvious to everyone that you are correct, when the bulk of the population of the "first world" is directly experiencing what you describe, energy will _still_ not be an issue around which mass mobilization will be possible. You have your head in the sands in respect to social-political reality. Disaster on the whole does not contribute to popular anti-capitalist mobilization. Carrol
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Carrol Cox: >My understanding of capitalism is that it _must_ grow, regardless of >consequences, and that it simply is not worth considering possibilities >for constraining growth under capitalism, however desirable or even >absolutely necessary that may be. Right now I am reading "The Last Ranch" by the late Sam Bingham, which deals with the disastrous ecological effects of cattle ranching in Colorado, including desertification. This is the reality that Marxists have to identify to the masses. Saying that MacDonalds fast food is some kind of "conquest" of the working class because it makes meat cheap and eliminates the need to prepare meals is just the kind of thing that we have no business saying. The fact that so many young people associate Marxism with this kind of vulgar "modernization" explains why the anti-globalization protesters often call themselves anarchists. While anarchism attracts the young, we are ending up with a movement that revolves around bizarre sects or annual conferences attracting the enlarged prostate brigade. At the last Socialist Scholars Conference, the last I'll ever go to, young people got up during the discussion period of a talk given by Bogdan Denitch on the "future of the left" and told him that he was completely out of touch. Denitch's social democratic business-as-usual left-Gompers trade unionism is based on the notion that working people in the USA should have a bigger slice of the pie, the rest of the world be damned. As long as Marxism is perceived in this manner, we are in bad shape. As Marxists, our message is not just about "more". It is about equity. Most people in the imperialist countries have to understand that the life-style we "enjoy" is unsustainable. In exchange for a more modest life-style, we will live in world that enjoys peace and respect for the individual. If people in the imperialist countries can not rally to this message, then they (we) deserve the fate that awaits us: war, urban violence, cancer epidemics, drug addiction, alcoholism, FOX TV, and prozac. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Mark Jones wrote: > > > > It would be more useful to address the issue I am raising, rather than going > into denial, Mark, If I were chained to a tree, it would do me no good to give my attention to the fact that a flood was approaching. My main concern would be to unchain myself, and then and only then would it be worthwhile to consider whether or not a flood was approaching. My understanding of capitalism is that it _must_ grow, regardless of consequences, and that it simply is not worth considering possibilities for constraining growth under capitalism, however desirable or even absolutely necessary that may be. Capitalism's only redeeming feature is that it offers the possibility (however remote) -- not certainty, not even probability, simply the _possibility_ -- of socialism. And socialism, and only socialism, would create the _possibility_ -- not certainty, not even probability -- of addressing, _in practice_, the issues you raise. Until you can link those issues to concrete possibilities of political organization for socialism, addressing those issues constitutes a naive utopianism, a refusal to face the very facts that you wish us to address. To focus on them now would be as absurd as it would have been in (say) 1750, to devote all physical research to the development of petrochemicals. You want to deflect us from doing anything about the concerns that you incessantly raise. YOu want us, instead, to wring our hands and scream. Carrol
Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
> From: "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 18:28:35 +0100 > Do you even acknowledge as a problem, the global endemic energy > scarcity which has seen per capita energy consumption stagnant since 1973 > and which is a very real problem precisely in those newly neoliberalised > zones (S America, E Europe, S Africa) which now suffer chronic energy > shortages (gasoline famines, brownouts etc) and which cannot hope to find > the capital to invest in new infrastructure? Minor correction from sooty Jo'burg, comrade, where there's still a quarter excess electricity generating capacity, even on a cold winter day like today... (Sunday Independent, 27 July 1999) Power to the powerful: Ideology of apartheid energy still distorts electricity sector by Patrick Bond South Africa's surreal energy problems reflect the kinds of contradictions you would expect during a transition from apartheid economic history to a contemporary electricity pricing system all too often based on (`neoliberal') market-policy for households, complicated by massive subsidies for big corporations, in one of the world's most unequal societies. There are at least three world-class development disasters here: our economy's skewed over-reliance on (and oversupply of) pollution-causing, coal-generated electricity; the lack of equitable access amongst households along class/race lines (with serious adverse gender implications); and periodic township rioting associated with power cuts resulting from nonpayment. Plenty of other challenges for a revitalised energy policy could be mentioned. But assuming Minister Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka wants justice to be done during the ANC's second term (and is less distracted by shady Liberian consultants or groundless attacks on the auditor general than her predecessor), merely addressing electricity distribution would require a serious challenge to corporate power and neoliberal ideology. Instead of praising the filthy rich (who can forget?), the minister would have to subsidise filthy impoverished townships currently suffocating under winter coal fumes. An outstanding recent book, The Political Economy of South Africa by Ben Fine and Zav Rustomjee, puts this sector into economic perspective. Here we locate electricity at the heart of the economy's `Minerals- Energy Complex,' a `system of accumulation' unique to this country. Mining, petro-chemicals, metals and related activities which historically accounted for around a quarter of economic activity typically consumed 40 percent of all electricity. Thus Eskom was centrally responsible for South Africa's economic growth, but, Fine and Rustomjee show, at the same time fostered a debilitating dependence on the (declining) mining industry. Economists refer to this as a `Dutch disease,' in memory of the damage done to Holland's economic balance by its cheap North Sea oil. South African electricity consumption (per capita) soared to a level similar to Britain, even though black--`African'--South Africans were denied domestic electricity for decades. To accomplish this feat, Eskom had to generate emissions of greenhouse gasses twice as high per capita as the rest of the world, alongside enormous surface water pollution, bucketing acid rain and dreadfully low safety/health standards for coal miners. To what end? Today, most low-income South Africans still rely for a large part of their lighting, cooking and heating energy needs upon paraffin (with its burn-related health risks), coal (with high levels of domestic and township-wide air pollution) and wood (with dire consequences for deforestation). Women, traditionally responsible for managing the home, are more affected by the high cost of electricity and spend far more time and energy searching for alternative energy. Ecologically-sensitive energy sources--such as solar, wind and tidal--have barely begun to be explored, while the few hydropower plants (especially in neighbouring Mozambique) are based on controversial large dams that, experts argue, do more harm than developmental good. Some inherited electricity dilemmas stem from a racist, irrational and socially-unjust history. Conventional wisdom even before 1948, we must never forget, was that `temporary sojourners' were in cities merely to work; they would not consume much-- certainly not household appliances--since their wages were pitiably low. As Jubilee 2000 South Africa observes with justifiable bitterness, more than half of the World Bank's $200+ million in apartheid credits from 1951-66 were for Eskom's expansion, including coal-powered stations. But none of the benefits found their way to the homes of the majority of citizens. Even by 1994, fewer than four in ten African households had electricity. Meanwhile, corporate South Africa suffered the opposite problem--an embarrassment of energy riches-- especially when terribly po
RE: Re: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Doug Henwood wrote: > > In my role as PEN-L's Dr Pangloss, may I point out one thing you > didn't include - human ingenuity, This sounds more Julian Simon than Dr Pangloss, and as for what Marx wrote in Grundrisse, he also said therein: ''To the degree that labour-time -- the mere quantity of labour -- is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production -- of the creation of use-values -- and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to the general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination in total production on the other side -- a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historical product). Capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the force dominating production". (Grundrisse, p.700) And: "On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high." (Grundrisse p 703-706) Mark Jones
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Doug Henwood earlier wrote [PEN-L:13799]: > >it's more of a 19th century slowdown than a post-WW II one, > with a financial hangover from the burst Nasdaq/tech bubble, and a > real sector one from overinvestment in gadgets. It's probably going > to take some time to work through it. Maybe Doug is right, and there is nothing wrong with the 'energy fundamentals' and the present 'slowdown' is similar to what happened in the 19th century. I don't believe this; some people are clearly in denial here. But Doug is right that there is a parallel with the 19th century. As Alan Freeman puts it: >>(e) History has seen two quite distinct patterns of recovery from generalised crisis. The industrial revolution, and the post-war boom, yielded high global profit rates under a single hegemonic power (the UK in 1845, the US in 1945) which fuelled a general expansion even of its rivals, yielding rising (if unequal) prosperity, relative peace, and political stability. 1890-1914 was different. The profit rate did not recover to previous levels, there was no clear hegemon, growing misery and barbarity over the immiserated parts of the world, and intense great power rivalry leading to the wars and revolutions that bestrode the twentieth century. I will argue that the evidence suggests the only possible basis of a new wave of economic expansion is a recovery of this second type, more comparable with 1890-1914 than 1945-1965. I call this a return to classical imperialism.<< [from HAS THE EMPIRE STRUCK BACK? NEW PARADIGM GLOBALISATION OR RETURN TO CLASSICAL IMPERIALISM?] Elsewhere, Freeman has argued that: >> General crisis is not final breakdown. Capitalism can recover from it and has done so. But the recovery requires an external, political intervention in the cases so far seen (the industrial revolution itself, 1848-1872, 1893-1914, and 1947-62), a complete re-organisation of the worlds markets and territories through extended war and barbarity to provide privileged spheres of operation for rival great capitals. So-called globalisation is not an automatic process but the outcome of a conscious political attempt to recreate these conditions for recovery. The Reagan-Thatcher restructuring of 1980 led to the dissolution of the USSR, the formation of the WTO, and the opening of world financial markets to US capital, opening a period whose closest historical analogy is 1893-1914, best described as classical imperialism. Unlike the 1945 re-organisation, this liberal imperialist re-organisation is unstable because there is no sufficiently productive hegemon; the advance of each great power is bought at the expense of the others. It leads to competition between the great powers which grows without limit, and it is by no means guaranteed that it can unleash a new expansion. This competition is, however, not the cause of the crisis but an effect of it. The growing polarisation of nations is likewise intrinsic to the capitalist market and, unlike general crisis, continues without limit. This, too, is a product of the market. It cannot be explained by specific cultural or historical conditions such as late or insufficient integration into the capitalist market; to the contrary, it only ever slowed down when nations partially withdrew from the world market in capital, and has accelerated more rapidly than ever now that the market has reached is greatest ever extent. The partial restoration of US profitability is not the result of a fundamental revival of the productive dominance which the US enjoyed in 1945, and far less the onset of a New Paradigm wave of expansion, as Greenspan maintains; it has been achieved by directly appropriating the surplus value of the third world, and of the USAs rivals, to finance US debt and compensate for its own competitive failure. << [from CRISIS AND THE POVERTY OF NATIONS] On the whole, whether or not you believe in Freeman's version of value theory, there is no doubt that the 19th century ended up in 1914. Mark Jones
Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Mark Jones wrote: > The truth is that if Pat Bond is unrealistic, >your scheme is much more so, since it requires not only the willing consent >of the global elites to their own elimination, but also the presence three >additional planet earths plus zero population growth on this one. So the 6 billion people of the earth - what's going to happen to them? Should they consent to dying off in vast numbers? Doug
