Louis Proyect wrote:
>You and Doug approach this as if we were talking about life-style. I can
>understand this. This is generally how people first react to the CM demand,
>as if they were being asked to give up Starbucks or something. It is not
>about this primarily. It is about addressing a fundamental problem in
>agriculture and ecology. The rise of the modern city was facilitated by the
>removal of the agrarian population. Then, the livestock was separated from
>the farm where crops were grown. This was made possible by modern
>transportation systems, sophisticated financing schemes, chemical
>fertilizer, mechanized plowing and reaping, etc. In the meantime, all of
>these 'advances' were made possible by the creation of modern urban
>industrial centers. With every "success" of the capitalist system, there
>was an environmental penalty. Marx wrote about this, as did Bebel,
>Bukharin, Kautsky and many other lesser known Marxists. Our problem is that
>most of the research into these questions is being done by by mainstream
>greens like Lester Brown's Worldwatch, while the militant opposition comes
>from fuzzy-minded anarchists or deep ecologists. And where are the
>self-declared Marxists? Mostly standing around with their thumbs up their
>asses worrying about whether they'll still be able to enjoy their morning
>Starbucks.
Ok, so now we know there won't be Starbucks after the revolution.
Finally a bit of detail.
Does the revo also mean there won't be modern transportation,
chemical fertilizers, mechnized plowing and reaping, etc.? Then
there's truly no way to sustain a world population of more than, say,
a billion people, maybe fewer - meaning that at least 80% of us have
to go.
Where are the Marxists? This neo-primitivist vision is quite
anti-Marxist, and it's quite reasonable that Marxists are not
participating in your vision. It comports perfectly with the politics
and preferences of Brown and the fuzzies, though.
On this sort of thing I'm with thumb-up-the-ass Ernest Mandel, who
had this to say in Late Capitalism:
>6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the
>wageearner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and
>civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually
>completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both
>quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid
>holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and
>qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent
>to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content
>by capitalist commercialization). This genuine extension of needs is
>a corollary of the necessary civilizing function of capital. Any
>rejection of the so-called 'consumer society' which moves beyond
>justified condemnation of the commercialization and dehumanization
>of consumption by capitalism to attack the historical extension of
>needs and consumption in general (i.e., moves from social criticism
>to a critique of civilization), turns back the clock from scientific
>to utopian socialism and from historical materialism to idealism.
>Marx fully appreciated and stressed the civilizing function of
>capital, which he saw as the necessary preparation of the material
>basis for a 'rich individuality'. The following passage from the
>Grundrisse makes this view very clear: 'Capital's ceaseless striving
>towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits
>of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements
>for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided
>in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also
>therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development
>of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form
>has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the
>place of the natural one.'
>
>For socialists, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can
>therefore never imply rejection of the extension and differentiation
>of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural state of
>these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich
>individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this rational Marxist
>sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can only mean:
>rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production which
>continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and
>one-sided. This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship
>between the production of goods and human labour, which is
>determined by the commodity form under capitalism, so that
>henceforth the main goal of economic activity is not the maximum
>production of things and the maximum private profit for each
>individual unit of production (factory or company), but the optimum
>self-activity of the individual person. The production of goods must
>be subordinated to this goal, which means the elimination of forms
>of production and labour which damage human health and man's natural
>environment, even if they are 'profitable' in isolation. At the same
>time, it must be remembered that man as a material being with
>material needs cannot achieve the full development of a 'rich
>individuality' through asceticism, self-castigation and artificial
>self-limitation, but only through the rational development of his
>consumption, consciously controlled and consciously (i.e.,
>democratically) subordinated to his collective interests.
>
>Marx himself deliberately pointed out the need to work out a system
>of needs, which has nothing to do with the neo-asceticism peddled in
>some circles as Marxist orthodoxy. In the Grundrisse Marx says: 'The
>exploration of the earth in all directions, to discover new things
>of use as well as new useful qualities of the old; such as new
>qualities of them as raw materials; the development, hence, of the
>natural sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery,
>creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself;
>the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being,
>production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs,
>because rich in qualities and relations - production of this being
>as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in
>order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable
>of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree - is likewise a
>condition of production founded on capital. This creation of new
>branches of production, i.e., the creation of qualitatively new
>surplus time, is not merely the division of labour, but is rather
>the creation, separate from a given production, of labour with a new
>use-value; the development of a constantly extending and more
>comprehensive system of different kinds of labour, different kinds
>of production, to which a constantly expanding and enriched system
>of needs corresponds. Thus just as production founded on capital
>creates universal industriousness on one side - i.e., surplus
>labour, value-creating labour - so does it create on the other side
>a system of general exploitation of natural and human qualities, a
>system of general utility, utilizing science itself just as much as
>all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing
>higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle
>of social production and exchange.'
