G'day all,
Crashlist has been arguing, often unproductively, over Marx and Malthus since
its inception. I have found - in notes I use for lectures on Innis, McLuhan
and Mumford - some terrific stuff that combines the logic Marx used to get at
capitalism's guts (of which the dimension of time is at the root) with a sorta
Malthusian natural-limits approach. Alienation from time and big-T Time in a
dialectical dance of death! The Gods and Hubris! Mark's doom-laden big
picture meets Tom's bioregional vignettes! Anyway, enough sales-pitching.
Hope you find these excerpts as temptingly intriguing as I do. And apologies
if this ain't new to you.
The author is Andri Stahel and the piece is called 'Time Contradictions of
Capitalism'. Hope the consequence is a list full of Malthusian Marxists
getting it on with Marxist Malthusians.
_________________________________________________________________
At this point, I will argue that the idea of a second contradiction can be
identified more easily in the works of Polanyi than those of Marx. We can see
this in Polanyi�s major book where he discusses the utopian character of the
idea of a self-adjusting market: �Such an institution could not exist for any
length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of
society.�[22] Marx, on the other hand, by following the path of classical
political economy in his economic writings, distanced himself from a deeper
understanding of the human/ nature contradiction inherent to the capitalistic
system.[23]
James O�Connor explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to Polanyi�s work,
�who remains a shining light in a heaven filled with dying stars
and black holes��[24] I believe that Polanyi�s analysis of three fictitious
commodities is particularly revealing in relation to the contradictions I am
discussing, especially when he shows that:
labor, land and money are essential elements of industry; they also must
be organized in markets; in fact these markets form an
absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land and money are
obviously not commodities.�Labor is only another name for a human activity
which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but
for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the
rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature,
which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of
purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into
being through the mechanism of banking or state finance.�[25]
Here Polanyi implicitly throws an important light on our discussion.
Discussing three fictitious commodities that are not produced
capitalistically, he says that they belong to another temporal domain than
that of capital; and that they are not (nor can they be) produced and
controlled according to capital�s own temporal logic and needs. We can hear
his words echoed by O�Connor when he states that:
the point of departure of �ecological Marxism� is the contradiction
between capitalist production relations and productive forces and conditions
of production. Neither human laborpower nor external nature nor infrastructure
including their space/time dimensions are produced capitalistically, although
capital treats these conditions of production as if they are commodities or
commodity capital.[26]
...
Therefore, compared to �dead� planets, which are more or less close to a
thermodynamic equilibrium state, the Earth is characterized by the
high improbability of the constitution of its atmosphere, oceans and
terrestrial ecosystems, where highly reactive chemical elements and living
forms (as prey and predators) co-exist in a dynamic �far from equilibrium�
balance.
The constitution of modern economics has as its focus human mechanical
production time, ignoring the more general systemic one. The very example of
the beaver and the deer, by which Smith introduced his labor value theory and
constituted the British political economy tradition in opposition to the
French Physiocrats, could, according to our discussion here, be read the other
way around to contradict what Smith wanted to prove. Whilst the Physiocrats
saw in the working of nature the only true source of a surplus value (produit
net), Smith argued that value had to be necessarily given by the labor
required to hunt the animals and bring them to the market. We can see that
Smith considered only the market value (exchange value) of a commodity, and
ignored the fact that the animals had to be �produced� by the systemic time
dialectics of the ecosystem in which they evolved and, ultimately, by an
evolutionary history which goes back to the origins of our universe, a process
which, as Prigogine showed, is neither repeatable nor predetermined.[36] Once
extinct, there is no human production process which can produce new value in
terms of beavers. Thus, value had to be produced by nature initially, whether
we consider it as God�s gift, as the Physiocrats did, or whether we consider
it in terms of the unique and irreversible history of the evolution of
dissipative structures in terms of �far from equilibrium� thermodynamics.
Smith clearly reasoned in terms of a mechanical time and by doing so he
changed the focus of economic theory from natural time to human
production time. It is this same reasoning that is behind the modern prejudice
that sees pre-industrial societies as deprived and their economies as
subsistence economies, in sharp contrast with, for example, the first
impressions gained by the Europeans who described the exuberance and natural
richness of pre-colonial America and Africa, as well as modern anthropological
research which shows the relatively little time spent by those societies in
order to assure their subsistence.[37] With their social and cultural
structure inserted in the overall systemic time dialectics (although, as
Ponting�s analysis shows, not without contradictions), these societies based
their economic structure on �mining� the wealth created by the free (or
directed)[38] systemic time of the natural processes, as Smith�s hunters did.
As a result of the colonization of these areas, the
systemic dynamics were disrupted and replaced by the mechanical time logic of
capital. It is this process of capitalization of nature and
capitalization of society brought by the colonization process and later on by
economic development, and not the contrary (a lack of sufficient
economic development) that really deprived these societies and regions,
opening the door to modern manifestations of famine and misery which can be
found in contemporary Africa, Asia and the Americas.
As Vandana Shiva showed, the very idea of development placed those
societies within the hegemonic temporal framework of capitalist
societies, by representing them as immature and incomplete, therefore
requiring a process of development, seen as a series of linear steps, in order
to attain maturity. This development, centered on the pursuit of economic
growth and an accelerated process of modernization, meant the displacement of
the previous spatio-temporal order in favor of a market-oriented and
mechanical time-based organization and appropriation of natural and
socio-cultural space. We can see this process happening with the introduction
of modern agricultural techniques, the �green revolution,� displacing
local-based, subsistence-oriented multiple and diversified traditional
farming; or in the rapid industrialization process of these countries, with
the constitution of a growing labor market, rapid urbanization, professional
and technical schools (to provide skilled labor), and so on. The first thing
immigrants who have been displaced by the export-oriented �green revolution�
in the countryside learn in the growing urban centers, in technical schools or
in their new job (if they get one), is to organize their life according to the
clock-time discipline, leaving behind the communal and natural cycles-based
time practice they were used to.[39]
...
The essential openness, novelty and autonomy of systemic time dialectics means
that nature cannot be reduced to scientific forecasting or to technological
control. Nor can human beings be reduced to skinnerian behaviorism and thereby
fully controlled and molded by technocracy and centralized powers. Human
essential systemic autonomy will always manifest itself as resistance, whether
in more �rational� or �irrational� forms, frustrating the centralized social
control projects. Ignoring this reality may result, as Martin O�Connor argued,
in the controlled order ending up in catastrophe.[66] This tragic result of
the enlightenment control project should make us aware, more than ever, of
Jung�s warning about the unconscious and unwilling results of conscious
projects. As he argued:
Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature and has
settled it with monstrous machines. These machines are so unquestionably
useful that we cannot even imagine the possibility to getting rid of them or
escaping from the subservience to which they have lead us. Man cannot resist
the adventurous cry of his scientific and inventive mind, or cease he to
congratulate himself for his conquests. But at the same time, his genius
displays a mysterious tendency to create more and more dangerous things, which
increasingly represent more efficient instruments for his collective suicide.[67]
Based on a mechanical time concept and practice, which is at the heart of a
society centered on the commodity form, in modern industrial
market society humankind forgot that it belongs to and is dependent on the
more general systemic time dialectics, of which the economic
sub-system is but a part. We have lost our sense of proportion, of quality and
of relatedness, which, as Illich pointed out, also means the loss of our sense
of ethics and beauty.[68] Nevertheless as a result of our hubris, such a loss
of proportion may, as traditional myths always warned, end up in tragedy.
________________________________________________________________
If you've read this far, you get this special prize: The entire essay can be
found at http://www.cruzio.com/~cns/Occasional/paper10.html
_______________________________________________
CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
