Stan,
>Perhaps I am confused about why anyone would bother imagining modes of
>production that never existed.
I guess that those strange people would do it for reasons similar to the ones of
folks like Einstein when they undertook tought experiments.
>Redbaiting is not only unnecessary, it is a distortion in this case.
So I am redbaiting?!? Are you a bit paranoid sometimes?
>The very fact that you say you don't care about capitalism indicates to me
>that you don't get it. ...
Misunderstanding. That's my approximative english. I meant that I do not have any
interest in defending capitalism.
>The problem with capitalism is not that it's evil. It's
>that it's in very essential ways undirected and uncoordinated. There is
>quite simply no chance of gaining the kind of comprehensive control
>necessary to confront the problem being discussed here without social(ist)
>planning.
Maybe we have slightly different ideas of what social planning might mean in
practice, but I agree.
>Then why do you continually discard any reason that can be interpreted as
>systemic? Is the social order imaginary? Last I saw, the police and the
>army were carrying real, not imaginary, guns.
I don't understand where you're getting at. I discard not any systemic reason, but
any systemic reason which is not backed by a good argument. And mere historical
coincidence is not a good argument.
>But who held political power? This is a key point, then and now. It's not
>an abstraction. Who held then and holds now the legal monopoly on deadly
>force? And which class does this political establishment represent?
Yes, this is the key issue.
Before 1450, in some places and times, bourgeois power did exist, but not on a
scale large enough to survive for several centuries. But I don't see how bourgeois
power did exist after 1550 in England. So much for historical hairsplitting.
Now, to the real issue: How does bourgeois power correlate with ecological
problems? I do not see any reason for which only bourgeois power would yield
exploitation of fossil fuels and other problems. Historically, there has been
numerous cases of societies without bourgeois power exploiting fossil fuels. OK,
the techniques are techniques created by a bourgeois-dominated society. But why
couldn't these techniques outlive it? The techniques would be applied in another
social context as they already have been in the past, but the ecological problems
remain whatever the social context.
Also, other environementally damaging and unsustainable techniques than
exploitation of fossil fuels were created by other types of societies than the
bourgeois-dominated ones. Not to mention the demographical problem.
If any kind of society wants to stop to use fossil fuels, it has to find a way to
sustain
itself without it. Even if capitalism was destroyed, there is no way that we can do
that
now. We could concievably enter a long path to that goal, but even without
capitalism this road would not be an easy one but a road that many would refuse to
endure when it is so easy to carry on as if there was no problem.
Julien
_______________________________________________
CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
