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Perhaps Nate Hagens is familiar to many of you, but I just discovered him by watching this: http://www.postcarbon.org/energy-money-and-technology-from-the-lens-of-the-superorganism/ This 1-hour lecture with 20 minutes Q&A shows the big picture humanity is facing regarding the economy and natural resources. It is a summary of his one-semester course "Reality 101" at the University of Minnesota. It is realistic without exuding disaster-porn. It has better advice than most books or lectures about this subject regarding what to do about it (starting at minute 51:50). It is the kind of class I tried to teach in my last semesters before retirement, but much better in terms of putting the info together with slides. I think it is the best one can expect from a non-Marxist. It has many implicitly Marxist ideas. He calls human society a superorganism, echoing Marx's insight that the forces driving capitalism are forces emanating from our social structure rather than individual choices. He has a theory of surplus-value based on the fact the the price of energy is much lower than the value created by energy, just as Marx says that the price of labor-power exceeds than the value created by it. Where Marx talks about rate of exploitation he talks about the ratio of energy retrieved versus energy expended. He even shares Marx's assessment that mainstream economics has an ideological function, when he says that the economic analyses in the IPCC reports are unreliable. The circumstance of this lecture is amazing and exciting: it was given at a univesity in Saudi-Arabia! And in the Q&A, one of the Saudi Students posed the most profound critical question: "Do you think capitalism and its focus on growth, profit, and moving all human activity to the market is responsible for the kind of super-organism we are today, and that we could have had a different reality if we had a different social system?" The lecturer's reaction shows that the student has hit a raw nerve. Hagens is trying to reverse the causality: in contrast to Marx's thesis that capitalism forces humans to act as if they were greedy, Hagens says that humans created capitalism because they are greedy. With such a strong basis of capitalism in human nature, revolution of of course an unrealistic dream. The thought that our social relations are beyond our control but imposed on us by our psychology is in Marx's eyes a form of commodity fetishism. Hans G Ehrbar _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
