Ted:
>As I mentioned earlier, criticisms of scientific materialism that offer in
>its place what amounts to a "dialectics of nature" can be found in Whitehead
>(as an explicit criticism of Darwin's ontological premises, in *The Function
>of Reason*).
It's interesting to compare David Harvey's "Justice, Nature and the
Geography of Difference" with Foster's "Marx's Ecology", both of which aim
at a philosophical foundation for ecosocialism. Leibniz and Whitehead are
key to Harvey (while obviously having nothing to do with Marx), while
Foster tries to re-establish the philosophical traditions that Marx
consciously identified with. Those traditions are the opposite of the kind
of idealism that Leibniz and Whitehead exemplify. While Harvey is smitten
by all of the "dialectics" at play in Leibniz and Whitehead, he seems to
have lost track of the materialism that attracted Marx to figures like
Epicurus and Bacon. I would also explain Harvey's brand of "brown Marxism"
as related to the kind of placid "holism" of Leibniz and Whitehead. It is
no accident that Leibniz was lampooned by Voltaire in Candide as Dr.
Pangloss who believed that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. Not
that different from Harvey's objection to Foster titleing a book "The
Vulnerable Planet." Harvey puffed, "The planet can not be destroyed." Of
course, with nothing left but rats, pigeons and "ecosystems" like Chicago
and NYC (Harvey is a big fan of William Cronon), then I'll leave what's
left over to the capitalist system and its hapless victims.
Louis Proyect
(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
