> Marx didn’t use the word “ecology” — it was coined in 1866 — but metabolism. He argued that capitalist accumulation shatters basic processes of ecological sustainability “by destroying the circumstances surrounding [natural] metabolism”. Marx called this “metabolic rift”. So, he said, what is needed is the “systematic restoration [of natural metabolism] as a regulating law of social reproduction”. In other words: farming and other productive activities have to restore the ecological balance, and this can only really be achieved under a system where people and the environment come before profits — socialism. < Comment Communist Heretic: side notes “(S)ystematic restoration (of natural metabolism) as a regulating law of social reproduction.” Where does one begin? “(A) system where people and the environment come before profits — socialism.” I of course agree, which is why I am communist. “Marx didn’t use the word ecology” but rather “metabolism.” Why? Because he begins - presupposes the physical body of man and then “leaps“ to the laboring process or “alienated forms of labor,” and the driving economic impulses - motivation, of the bourgeois mode of reproduction. What is "natural metabolism." - the metabolic process? The spontaneous operation of nature. What is the spontaneous operation of nature? At its base photosynthesis. Photosynthesis, for our purpose simply means “nature’s act of rendering the inorganic into organic” or the act of plant life, soil, water and the sun in unison: “the secret life of plants.” Nature’s act of rendering the inorganic into organic is the base meaning of “the spontaneous metabolic process.” While each individual form of plant life contains its own uniqueness, specific quality that distinguish it from others and a general law motion can never replace the need for individual study of specific properties, the metabolic process is spontaneous and the general operation of nature. Man is not a plant, but “plant like” in the sense we require water, sun light, nutrients and air. My contention is that bourgeois mode of production did not create the metabolic breach - rift, in the life of humanity, but inherits all the basic aspects of the rift and widens the breach. How does man come to know the metabolic process? Or rather, on what basis or how does mans bodily experience, as a living developing being, come to give rise to a broadening and deeper understanding of the metabolic process? It is generally conceded that through the effort to secure food, water and shelter, our species come to acknowledge - is humbled, and then slowly understand basic logic movement in nature, on the basis of spontaneous operations of the body. Just as all machines, no matter what their configuration or energy source, have there ultimate (historical) developmental origin in conceptualized extensions of the human body, our first spontaneous understanding is of the body’ s metabolic process and this begins with what we eat, what to eat and what not to eat; what is eaten in a natural environment and what a population group is compelled to eat as sustenance. We come to understand the impact of nature on the organism through contact, our spontaneous senses. In regard to the living human organism - not the laboring process, efficiency is realized as vitality. Vitality as a concrete energy index of the human organism cannot be proven to anyone that has never experienced a radical cleansing of the body. Because our society evolved on the basis of wrong and overeating, and indeed much of our entire history, the concept of “strength” and “size” functions in the place of vitality. It is actually and ultimately wrong eating that has given history it’s most destructive impulses and fueled a passionate greed that made capitalism a historically inevitable consequence in the long struggle to overcome scarcity in society. The theory problem is that scarcity has been defined as the lack of things rather than “scarcity of nutrition.” There is no abstract historical inevitability that drove the emergence and ascendancy to universality of the bourgeois mode of production. The bourgeois mode of production does not arise as a harmonious development of barter, trade or the manufacturing process. More complex forms of alienated labor - tools, instruments, machinery, irrigation, housing structures, and agriculture and so on, are of course the inevitable result of human intercourse and having brain power. Scarcity of nutrition or more accurately “the tragedy of nutrition,“ is primarily a matter of historical ignorance; a profound issue of the corruption of man and the distinct problem that science and scientific socialism can solve for all time. II. The human body does not burn up food and convert it into energy like an internal combustion engine or a coal furnace. The human body is a rubber like organism driven by water, air, air pressure - gravity, electricity - cells and nutrient. Efficiency - in these notes, is defined in two directions: first as the unimpeded metabolic process. Specifically, efficiency is realized through removing impediments blocking or causing obstructions, breach - rift, in the spontaneous metabolic process. Second, as an expression of reproduction, the laboring process should ideally and abstractly be an “alienated mirror reflection” of the metabolic process or cause the least amount of “rift“ in the earth. This is called putting people and the state of the environment before profit motive. However, I understand the problem of metabolic breach - rift, to be more dynamic and requires beginning with wo/man himself, and examining and questioning everything produced, beginning with food stuff and the manner in which society is organized to sustain ritual eating. I have written that milk, other than mother’s breast milk, should be a regulated and controlled substance, despite the fact we have been taught that it is a “perfect food.” In fact human consumption of animal milk is not even a food source, but rather a “ substitute food source.” If in fact human beings cannot metabolize animal milk, without it creating enormous obstructions to our metabolic process, then it stands to reason that the entire infrastructure of milk production is called into question rather than simply the bourgeois basis on which milk production takes place. Milk is not a theory question. All any adult has to do is drink it and discover the truth for yourself. Nor is the broader issue making the milk infrastructure more efficient, although I categorically support virtually every effort to decrease the burden of labor, provided production is geared to socially necessary means of life. Animal milk production is not socially necessary to human life. As reproduction in its technical feature, efficiency has been spoken of as the shortening of design, without regard to cost. From the standpoint of an existing magnitude of labor, efficiency is defined as increasing the yield of a given magnitude of labor. A lever increases the yield of labor as does a wheel, gears, simple and complex machines and so on. The environmentalist argument and part of socialism approach is that increasing the yield of a magnitude of labor on one end and widening the metabolic breach on the other end, is in fact not efficient at all because another quantity of labor is ultimate needed to repair the destruction to the earth. This is not my approach.
************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
