On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 08:32 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote: > > Coase helps explain how environmental governance operates under > capitalism, while Foster explains why it necessarily fails.
>From Jim's paper: "Ecological planning therefore requires criteria of >rationality that are irreducible to cost minimization or profit maximization." Before addressing those criteria, I would like to remind subscribers of Lenin's aphorism: "it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital , and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!" I haven't read Hegel's Logic , let alone "thoroughly studied and understood the whole of it." But Lenin's point is valid. You can't really understand a cake unless you know its ingredients and how they are put together. The metabolic rift John Bellamy Foster writes about is one aspect of the biological analogy that "plays a considerable part in [Marx's] analysis of circulation and the labour process." As Foster wrote, Marx's "discussion of the destruction of the soil and the worker... was not at all an incidental observation but rather a logical result of his whole critique of political economy up to that point." Riffing on Lenin's aphorism, I would claim it is imposible to understand Marx's mature critique of political economy without at least some familiarity with his favorite "Ricardian socialist" pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. Like Hegel's Logic, the pamphlet's argument was a key ingredient of Marx's Grundrisse , the "first draft" of Capital. Marx was enchanted with the way the pamphlet articulated the distinction between wealth and value. Wealth is that which is "irreducible to cost minimization or profit maximization." The "fine statement" Marx brooded over in Theories of Surplus Value and paraphrased in the Grundrisse should be as well known as Lenin's aphorism: > > After all their idle sophistry, there is, thank God! no means of adding to > the wealth of a nation but by adding to the facilities of living: so that > wealth is liberty – liberty to seek recreation – liberty to enjoy life – > liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more. > Once you have heard that "fine statement," you cannot unhear its echo in the passage toward the end of volume three of capital about "the realm of freedom." > > Freedom [in the sphere of material production] can consist only in this, > that socialised man, the associated producers, govern their metabolic > interaction with nature rationally, bringing it under their collective > control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing > this metabolism with the smallest expenditure of energy and in conditions > most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always > remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development > of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only > flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the > working day is the basic prerequisite. > Minimizing cost (necessary labour time) and maximizing profits (surplus labour time) are the raison d'être of the capitalist firm. This to say, "criteria of rationality that are irreducible to cost minimization or profit maximization" are, by definition , antagonistic to the capitalist firm but not to the associated producers rationally governing their metobolic interaction with nature. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40211): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40211 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117300453/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
