Patrick Bond wrote:
>Mark wrote:
> > 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
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