> -----Original Message----- > From: Patrick Bond: > > Thanks, also, Pat for putting Bunker & Ciccantell my way. > Interestingly, their 'new > > historical materialism' ends up sounding a lot like old-old nc theory, > with their > > talk about 'fungibility' which sounds an awful lot like substitutability to me. > > Samuelson would feel right at home. Good stuff, apart from that,but > they are wrong > > about oil, coal and energy generally. Is this a general problem with Marxist > > geographers? Harvey seems to have the same blind spot. > > Ah Mark, you tease, you. No, Bunker is a sociologist, but hey, > discipline boundaries go out the door when we move into histomat, > right?! Yesterday, David Harvey began his new teaching career as an > anthropologist at City University of NY, by the way. Geographers, a > motley crew under the best of conditions, regularly morph into > whatever they want (e.g., public policy-wonks at Wits), whenever > conditions dictate. I've only managed to get hold of one essay which I'm forwarding to debate for convenience. Can't see much cogent notion of an 'energy theory of value' here but perhaps I'm missing something. There is an ongoing debate, as you know, marked by the usual circular reasoning, about society v. nature etc. It doesn't seem to advance much. On the CrashList there has been much discussion between value-lovers and Arne Naess supporters. There was a recent issue of Capital & Class (a journal of which I, with Robin Murray, Sol Picciotto, John Holloway, Diane Elson and others, were founding editors of, all of 25 years ago) which looked at the issue. Can't remember much of interest in it, either, altho some folks here might have a different view. There is a journal most people here are no doubt familiar with, set up by the O'Connors, called Capital-Nature-Society, which also seems to go round in circles a lot (sorry for the sweeping judgments). Probably the only people who avoided circularity was the LM crowd, but only because once they embraced Julian Simon/Wise Use they smartly disappeared up their own backsides anyway (sorry, Russell, old lad). Pen-L, as you rightly point out, is one of the home places of discussions about value, and there too they have discussed ad infinitum the relative contributions of Labour and Energy to Value, in the context of windmills, absolute and differential rent, Ricardo etc. My elderly, simple-minded approach, based on insights of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, not to speak of K Marx, is to understand the social realm as a logico-historical construct of the commodity-form. One of the things we are not very good at doing, when thinking about commodity-production, is to udnerstand that process as a disruption or dislocation within the real. Cf the Early Marx. This rent or tear in the uniform surface of the real produces what one can only call black holes, where the laws of nature become suddenly inverted, an Alice in Wonderland world where black is white, and where further disruptions of natural process, deepening plunder and exploitation of ecosystems, appears to the human brain in the phantasmagoric form of 'resources', 'gifts of nature', 'appropriation of natural resources', 'raw materials' etc. In this longrun outcome of commodity production, ecocide appears and is celebrated as aform of wealth creation. A close existential connection is established between private need (which is, of course, always and inescapably, actual a social product, and the *principal* social product, ie the existence of classes, of large masses of needy individuals etc) and the rationalisation/legitimation of the total social process of reproduction. Ie, people get a stake in the system and want more of its material 'benefits'. Needs are, as Marx said, produced. Marx himself (not to speak of Engels) was torn between seeing capitalist commodity production as a spreading plague, and seeing bourgoies civilisation as a high point and a necessary preparation for a reconciliation of man/nature under the rubric of the assimilation/sublation of nature to the human project. This fairly obvious intellectual tensions and conflict within Marx's work is indicative of how hard it is to think ourselves out of the trap of commodity production and the thought-forms peeled historically out of the commodity form. Lenin, too, was divided, the same caesure lurks in all hsi theoretical and philosophical work and is present also in his politics, which were riven between a meliorist social project, and a highly contradictory apocalyptic rejection of capitalist society. Ending capitalist commodity production does seem to entail a radical transfiguration of our species life and our anthropocentric imperatives, but such a transformation is no doubt inevitable and necessary for survival. It is not just a matter of putting politics in command, and of substituting planning for market stochasm. There will nbeed to be what the great Soviet physicist, mathematician and environmentalist Nikita Moiseev (discoovere of the nuclear winter scenario), called, basing himself on Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky, the need for new "Institutes of Accord" not only to found a new ethical basis for social life, but a new basis for society to live within nature, to reseal the rupture within the real out of which tumbled all the historical societies of commodity production including our own. Mark _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
