---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: marx.laboratory <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 6:24 PM
Subject: Fwd: Fw: The Great Rift: Capitalism and the Metabolism of Nature
and Production
To: Marx Laboratory <[email protected]>
*The Great Rift:* Capitalism and the Metabolism of Nature and Production
*by John Bellamy Foster*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6LbWQylV5zU&t=0
*John Bellamy Foster:* We need a society that is geared, as István Mészáros
always tells us, to substantive
equality<http://monthlyreview.org/2001/12/01/the-challenge-of-sustainable-development-and-the-culture-of-substantive-equality>.
And no compromise on the issue of equality. Bolívar said equality is the
law of
laws<http://books.google.com/books?id=D4La0_vefzgC&pg=PA202&dq=%22la+ley+de+las+leyes+--+la+igualdad%22>.
So we need substantive equality and we need ecological sustainability. And
they have to go together. How do we know they have to go together?
Because what is causing the ecological damage and what is causing the
social damage is the same thing: it's the rift in the production system;
it's the alienation of nature, which is one with the alienation of human
society. In Marx's perspective these things are actually a whole -- it's
an alienated whole, and we have to restore the integrity of it. You can't
have substantive equality without ecological sustainability and vice
versa. In terms of agency we have real problems, but there are things that
are happening -- mostly happening in the global South. I think that we
underestimate how much is happening there. La Via
Campesina<http://viacampesina.org/en/>is an international peasant
movement. It has been developing, and,
incidentally, they have been using the concept of metabolic
rift<http://landfood.ubc.ca/publications/Wittman_2009_JPS_Food_Sovereignty.pdf>to
explain their own situation, which is exciting. Look at Bolivia. Of
course there are all sorts of problems about extraction in Bolivia and so
on, but the People's Agreement <http://pwccc.wordpress.com/support/> in
Bolivia on climate change is the best that we have in the world, and it's
been initiated in the global South. Why is that happening? It's because
actually the ecological and social contradictions are greater in the global
South than they are in the North. And I think that we are likely to see,
we are already seeing, the emergence of the environmental
proletariat<http://monthlyreview.org/2010/01/01/why-ecological-revolution>.
. . . Basically material conditions are coming together. We are
accustomed to think about material conditions as just economic conditions,
but increasingly they are environmental conditions too. More and more the
distinctions between environmental conditions and economic conditions are
going to dissolve. . . . If you look at the Pearl River Delta in
China<http://monthlyreview.org/2013/02/01/james-hansen-and-the-climate-change-exit-strategy>,
you get the sense of what could happen. . . . We have solutions to all
these problems. As
Marx<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm>said,
humanity only raises those questions it can solve. We actually have
the technologies we need, the renewable technologies. The main thing we
have to do is to change our social relations. And we need conservation.
But conservation isn't that tough when you are
wasting<http://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/the-planetary-emergency>99%
of everything you produce.
------------------------------
*John Bellamy Foster* <http://monthlyreview.org/author/johnbellamyfoster>* is
editor of Monthly Review <http://monthlyreview.org/> and professor of
sociology at the University of Oregon. This talk was given at the **Rosa
Luxemburg
Foundation*<http://www.rosalux.de/event/48681/der-oekologische-bruch-oder-was-passiert-wenn-die-natur-zur-ware-wird.html>
*'s salon in Berlin on 28 May 2013. The text above is an edited partial
transcript of the talk (which begins at 0:03:14 in the video).** *
------------------------------
URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/foster070813.html
--
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up
a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on
the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR
http://venukm.blogspot.in
http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur
http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com
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