>>CB: Is population outrunning the capacity of the earth to sustain us with bourgeois social relations ? If we don't change the social relations, what do you predict will happen? Also, do you say Mark Jones' approach did not include changing social relations ? Reply: No. The capacity of the productive forces under bourgeois property always tend to greatly outrun the consuming power of the masses because their ability to consume is based on money possession, which can only be attained by selling their labor power for an exchange that is below the value they create. What is called "the carrying capacity of the earth" or "the capacity of the earth to sustain us with bourgeois social relations" formulates the issue as social organization - with the property relations within. The former states we have run into the physical laws or the earths metabolic process, while the latter - your formulation, states we have run into the social organization and property. The social organization impacts, shapes and manifest human agency but does not govern the metabolic process of the earth - "capacity," although capacity of the earth is only realized through social organization. That is why social revolution is on the agenda. This is the dispute. At a certain point in the development of the material power of production (mode of production), the previously existing social organization of society, with the property relations within, come into conflict with the new technological regime and its new forms of social organization and then a period of revolution unfolds. Either society leaps to a new political form of society that allows the new technological regime to operate unfettered and establish its universality as new law system of social organization or society destroys itself. We either destroy ourselves or society leaps to a new political basis that allows for a different social organization of the productive forces and species activity. Social revolution is an inevitable social consequence. The concept of "the carrying capacity of the earth" and "sustainability" and then "overpopulation" is articulated differently by various people. The common thread is that most of these writings make the specific bourgeois social organization of society a secondary factor. There are not to many people on earth. "To many people" is not an abstraction but the heart of the issue. "To many people" means a mass that exceeds the metabolic process of the earth regenerating itself and this limit has been exceeded and we face depletion as a fundamental crisis of human existence. The moment the concept of carrying capacity of the earth is put forth, what is being stated is the metabolic capacity of the earth to carry people. The population IS NOT outrunning the capacity of the earth . . . to sustain us! . . . period. ****** >>CB: How do you see the way to get away from eating wrong food ? How can that changes be made ? What is your position on what will happen if we don't get away from producing and eating wrong food ? Reply: Perhaps as much as half - or more, of the advertisement bill of roughly $50 billion a year is spent on eating wrong food. Still, there is an incredible mass spontaneous movement in America to break with wrong food consumption and over eating. This spontaneous movement lacks consciousness. This is an areas of work for political activists. This lack of consciousness has many sides and not just political or class consciousness. The masses are already drifting away from wrong food, over consumption and the bourgeoisie by reason of their class rule restricts consumption across the board. There have always been various sects and religious sects founded on the basis of "right eating" and "clean and sober (sane) living." What will happen if we do not get away from wrong consumption is what has already been happening for several thousand years. The widening of the metabolic breach within man and environment. However, there is already a mass movement against wrong food that is already in motion. >>CB: How did you come to know the correct understanding of the body's metabolic process ? Have you studied physiology ? What is the scientific source of your assertions on this? << Reply: On the same basis that anyone know "the correct" understanding of anything. By experiment on first my own body and then as a practitioner of the art. One really does not have to read a book to know and understand that eating sweets and sugar disrupt the body. Study is not required to understand that virtually everything we eat in our society is harmful to us and make us sick. That is why the spontaneous movement against obesity is spontaneous because people intuitively know their experience. My primary source books: Professor Arnold Ehert . . . all of his writings and especially "Thus Speaketh the Stomach." Acid and Alkaline, which is available at amazon. The writings, lectures and work of Alfredo Bowman (Dr. Sebi) and a two video set of tapes that circulated in Detroit for several years. Some of this material is still available at Channel 62 in Highland Park Michigan (on Woodward Ave across from Highland Park High School.) In respect to Dr. Sebi his Institute of Healing in Honduras is world renown and can be located at the official government web sit of the government of Honduras. My official teaching and learning was a course in chemistry and biology at Highland Park Community College in which I learnt nothing about the authentic metabolic process of the human body. Much of the problem is bourgeois philosophy and industrial ideology, which distorts our intuitive power of observation. Anyone that walks into a meat processing factory will have their senses tell them that something is profoundly wrong. That is why we have a nose. The tongue has a specific function and the coating on it in the morning will tells anyone that something is wrong in their eating. One can look into their own eyes and the discoloration give clues about an internal metabolic disruption, which is why there is the old historical saying that, "the eyes are the mirror of the soul." The real food and healing substances for the human body have always been located in the forest, with much of the potent cures for man growing along the equator or in the hotter climates. This is our common sense historical knowledge and heritage. The reason we stink and smell awful is primarily from wrong consumption. When most folks in my generation got sick mothers would ask, "what have you been eating and when is the last time you had a bowl movement?" There are healers that do diagnosis by examining feces. As a general rule disease does not magically leap through the air into the human body. Such thinking is no more than a medieval philosophy of demon spirits or as it is called, the metaphysics of proprieties. Arnold Ehert give a stunning materialist presentation of the issue back in the early 1920's. Today in the large old industrial cities it is very difficult to look outside and have ones power of observation shaped and informed by nature. I very well remember when we were taught "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" and apple trees were plentiful and much food was free. I remember when the bourgeoisie destroyed all the fruit trees in the city of my youth . . . Highland Park, whose official title was the "City of Trees." Much food was free . . . and everywhere. One does not have to read a book to observe and feel - directly experience the metabolic process an apple excites in the body. Rather, one has to study to discover why people no longer eat fruits and to understand the inner compulsion to continue consuming whatever one consumes, including wrong food. Much of our "modern food infrastructure" and its specific shape is in the main a post Second Imperial World War development. People do not spontaneously crave Coke and perhaps 90% of what we currently eat in American society. My beef is not really with Mark Jones writings, although we proceed from different assumption within Marxism. This is pretty normal given our differences in experience and history. >>CB: So there is a possibility that even after man is brought into harmony with the spontaneous metabolic process of the earth, the ascertainment that is made at that time will still find that carry capacity of the earth is approaching since the ascertainment has not been made yet, we don't know yet, correct?<< Reply: This reminds me of the question about the end of the solar system or the dying out of the sun which is said to be a part of the logic of life cycles as we currently understand life. The concept of the carrying capacity of the earth is raised as an issue facing humanity today or in the near future, as an issue of depletion crisis, as in the issue of oil depletion and food production and supplies. On the issue of oil depletion I long ago sided with "Sartesian idiocy" and in his statement below, I still think he is correct in the presentation of the facts of the issue. <<<<In summary, there is no shortage of oil or natural gas; production has not reached a peak; supplies have not been depleted; and capitalism is not being driven into war and destruction due to resource scarcity. The predicament of oil production is the predicament of capital, namely overproduction and declining rates of return. To argue as Mark Jones and his followers do, that this is the manifestation of absolute geological scarcity is to set the stage for an ideological alignment along lines of overpopulation, i.e. Malthus. And if you read the followers of Hubbert, Campbell, Deffeyes, etc. they are most certainly Malthusian. >>> Several months before war against Iraq was launched by the Bush W. administration a heated exchange on Marxmail erupted. "Sartesian idiocy" proclaimed that we faced a crisis in falling prices not the impact of reaching the top of the bell curve in oil production. I agreed based on what I understood the facts to be (living through the $10 a barrel oil period) and the impact of the law of value. In fact he has presented a mass of substantial data concerning the changes in the organic composition of capital and the squeezing out of living labor across the board is pretty hard to ignore. Has oil production peaked? Those who claim that overpopulation is currently a problem or emerging as a problem - crisis, to the carrying capacity of the earth are in fact arguing against the thesis that says the bourgeois social organization is the problem. This is in fact a premise based on Malthus as the issue is argued within Marxism. Some folks insist that the "new problem" of the carrying capacity of the earth supercede the old contradiction latent in property and its last historical form as bourgeois property. There are not to many people on earth or the amount of people on earth does not threaten the ability of the earth to regenerate itself. The threat to the earth is the social organization of property and labor and the historically specific shape of the market pattern. It is not the physical mass of people that pose the problem, but obesity in America that express the essence of the real issue. Yes, if the human population grows by say a magnitude of 50 . . . 300 billion people (a scenario posed by one writer), the physical mass of people would probably threaten the carrying capacity of the earth. I dislike such fantasy scenario's because they disregard the entire basis of the dispute. In this sense defining how the law of population acquires its shape on the basis of the social organization of species activity. I believe comrades slip into the neo-neo-Malthus thing by not even posing the issue of population properly and from the "Marxist standpoint." If as everyone screams from the hill top, "the law of population is the most important law" then at least lets try and examine how this law manifest itself at various stages of development of the productive forces as the social organization of species activity. Family size and the industrial form of the family has/is dissolving in front of our eyes. Even Mark writes about the changing curve of population growth outside the imperial centers. The further emancipation of women and their liberation is playing and will continue to play a critical role in population growth and not simply from the standpoint of "birth control," but from the stand point of her social position in society as no longer an appendage to the labor of the man. Further, woman are redefining the shape of sexual bonding. Without question curing humanity from wrong consumption changes the shape of reproduction along with the intuitive understanding of ones own body and reproduction/fertility cycles. Overthrowing the last form of property - bourgeois property relations and then winning the thousand year war to reclaim the earth for "man" is on the agenda. We assume that we are normal when in fact industrial man and women exist as a pathological condition. We have not left the final epoch of barbarism. Communism opens the door of history and closes the door to the prehistory of our species. 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