Re: [A-List] Eleventh hour for the biosphere

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 1/12/03 7:44:35 AM Pacific Standard Time, sherrynstan@xxxxxxx writes:

> Hi Melvin,
>
> I strongly identify with your description of "learning curves."  
... I was well into my 40s (and
> back in the Army for a couple of decades) before I started to read Marx, et
> al, and I'm only a spring chicken of 51 now.  I lost all the advantages I
> might have had from an academic trajectory, but my choices seemed to be the
> Army or a riveting job at McDonnel-Douglas when I was 18, so that wasn't
> really in the cards.  But I'm just now discovering that with the
> disavdantages of not having a nice, uninterrupted education from K thru MA
> or whatever, I also avoided the disadvantages of internalizing the whole,
> bourgeois, compartmentalized, dissective, mechanistic world view that comes
> with it, and learned instead to think dialectically - which the military
> trains some people to do.  .... Anyway,
> you get the picture.  In some ways, I believe the Army prepared me for
> Marxism.  Funny, ain't it?  But I, like you, have to work very hard, read a
> lot and repititiously, make notes, and go back again and again to
> understand things.  "Fetishization" was very difficult for me for a long
> time, for example.  Hegel can put me in a coma, which makes that VERY
> tough.  Now it's epistemology I'm on about, and thermodynamics, and it's
> not that I am an expert.  On the contrary, I am a neophyte who understands
> at some gut level that this is incredibly important, so I obsess about it,
> and read and write about it, and correspond about it, and say provocative
> things/argue about it to test the validity of my own thought process.  I
> can only aspire to the depth and erudition of many on this and other lists,
> and I've started late. 


Stan


Reply

There is much light hearted and emotionally satisfying in your reply and I thank you. 

Your reply to my query was most certainly read in detail and I reread what I asked to see what I was talking about. I have just spent the last five hours reading and rereading all the recent posts on Marxline concerning "Oil and Overproduction," including all of Marx stuff and the three part series by Michael Perelman on Marx and agriculture. 

Much of the perhaps 15 posts on "Oil and Overproduction" were interesting but seem to miss the point each speaker is making - to a degree. On the one hand oil - petroleum, is a commodity and like all commodities is subject to the law system that governs commodity exchange. On the other hand oil is a unique ingredient because unlike an automobile, oil sits at the base of the productivity infrastructure creating the world of commodities and is a natural product of mother earth. Unlike fruit trees whose abundance once existed in hands reach to man, oil has to be extracted - in the main, using a certain development in the material power of the productive forces. Given the fact that earth itself is a limited sphere and petroleum formation takes place in increments of time outside species mans generation life span, it - petroleum, is limited, even if we can never agree and define this limited quantity. That is to say petroleum formation probably began with the consolidation, heating and cooling of the earth itself - 4.5 billion years or so ago. 

I do most certainly agree that there is an aspect of the conception of the "search for alternative energy" that is out and out alchemy and that the idea of sustainability is a bourgeois conception of developmental process until that that is being sustained is defined in its material properties and social relations. The alchemist equation consists in ignoring that fact that alternative energy sources or devices, requires greater amounts of petroleum extraction, processing and manufacturing to exist as "alternative energy sources" capable of powering an industrial infrastructure in transition. 

Stated another way the zero sum game is for example witnessed in the push to displace the internal combustion engine with fuel cell technology that requires a greater expenditure of energy extraction to create this "alternative."  


Added to this the impact of man as productivity logic on the earth, its biosphere and man as environment. It goes without saying that if man has radically altered the earth's environment and biosphere then he has altered himself in the same degree and direction. Man is not a hostile entity within the earth even when he is destructive to the earth. 

I believe what we are dealing with is not so much bourgeois ideology as industrial ideology, industrial conceptions of development and yes - industrial man's life modality. Industrial conceptions, ideology and theory  basically means consumption theory. A societal life style cannot be politically destroyed by legislation. Politics and legislation cannot undo a law system governing mass human behavior. Human behavior that appears in its mode of _expression_ as human agency can or only be negated - transformed, and this is a historical process that span generations.   

To make a leap - transition, from barbarism to civilization, requires social revolution if for no other reason than commodity production and capitalist commodity production prevents the education of the worlds people in a strictly materialist manner that strengthens their power of observation. The bureaucratic structures of industrial society are composed of people - as are all bureaucratic structures, compelled to reproduce their life activity on the basis of the "system" - social relations, that sustain their life activity. 

To label a certain side of the quest for alternative energy source alchemy, is to say a philosophic approach that consolidated during the so-called Middle Ages as metaphysics of properties, believing that a "right" combination of base chemicals could transform metal into gold and discover the secret to immortality. His science sits at the base of modern medicine. 

Industrial society - not simply capitalism or what has incorrectly been called the capitalist mode of production since the Stalin era of industrialization, can now be qualitatively defined and quantified. Commodity production - not simply capitalist commodity production, can now be qualitatively defined and quantified today. The basic features (properties) of earth and man's life process can be understood by anyone with the power of observation and it is left to science to unravel the law systems that governs process, i.e. thermo-dynamic principles in the concrete. 

I believe that Mark - and you to a degree, get ahead of yourself in attempting to quantity the carrying capacity of the earth based on population density, starvation and destitution. I am hardly the one to point a finger at "getting" ahead of oneself when I have been "gone for years on end." Yes population density and starvation are serious matters that predate industrial society and are accelerated with the growth of the material power of production during the industrial phase, but I believe a deeper question involving observable human agency is at work. 

Marx concept of social relations (of production) between people appearing as material relations between things or as it is called - the fetish that attaches itself to commodity production, becomes the more than less official ideology of industrial society and underlie the industrial concept of "sustainability" or what I have in the past and in private writings called "consumption theory."  Consumption theory basically says, "We need more of something to create more of something else," or as it appears in the context of this discussion "the conversion of low-entropy potential energy into high-entropy commodities (and wastes)."  

>There IS a "deeper _material_ relationship between the conversion of
low-entropy potential energy into high-entropy commodities (and wastes) and
social chaos", I believe.  What I mean by social chaos (did I use that
word, or "disorder? I don't remember)... is disorder in the sense Ilya
Prigogene uses it, though I think its transference to the social realm
from the physical is very material... and the obstacle - to my mind - to
even describing this relationship is being held hostage by the language of
a Cartesian (?)/bourgeois episteme.  That's my excuse, for now, for this
elliptical explanation.<

There is a "deeper (Social) relationship expressed in the environment called man, between the conversion of low-entropy potential energy into high-entropy commodities (and wastes) and social chaos," I believe.  

One of the must elementary acts in all of human existence is the urge to eat. Eating emerges with mans emergence and is not dependent upon means of production or more accurately, the material power of the productive forces. What we eat is called food. What we call "food" - 99% of everything we eat, is not really food. In my query I asked about the impact of feces - shit, on earth in respects to this matter of "general entropy."   

What man discharges from his body - which is mirrored in the acknowledge obesity of American society and the imperial centers on earth, exactly mirrors what industrial society discharges unto the earth and into the biosphere. What drives this matter of "general entropy" in a destructive manner - and there is a certain amount of dislocation that is an inherent feature of the process itself, is bound up with human behavior that only appears to be human agency. 

To suggest that peoples in the imperial centers consume less is to say, "You must eat less."  No significant groups of people can be won over to such a position because of the entropic mechanism as biology that feeds upon itself and reproduces itself within the flesh. Several days ago Lou Proyect ran an article on Obesity that hit at this process from the standpoint of the material relations that hide the social relations of production. Why does man eat too much? No amount of propaganda can make a society that is not hungry and not toxic and not suffering from a radical breach in thinking, "over-consume" or "eat too much." 

Another process is at work - law system, that drives "over-consumption," or what is called greed. It is understood that greed predates industrial society by thousands of years. From the materialist standpoint, what is the genesis of greed? What law system drives greed? Everyone locates the answer to this question in the ideological sphere and says, "Greed comes from the thinking of man."  

The "Marxists," are more clever and say, "greed emerges on the basis of the mode of production and expresses the ability of man or social groups to produce more than they can consume and this process is reflected in the ideological sphere as greed."  The "Marxists" are just as wrong as the alchemist because there must be a compelling logic within biological man for him to over consume. The mere existence of abundance is not the internal compelling reason for over consumption or greed. 

Although I do not believe that this battle can be won in this frame of time the following articles will describe the emergence of the "general entropy" process in the hands of man, from the standpoint of the most elementary act in human society - eating. That is to say my intent is to accurately describe the biological process that takes place within man driving the entire process of "general entropy" as rampant destruction. What drives greed as a societal force? Thinking - ideological forms, or something else? 

Earlier I had wrote or rather rewrote some of your article and stated: 

"The growth of the world population takes place in the context of the expansion of production or rather the world market - more houses, food, items of consumption, making ever-greater areas of the earth livable, and this has led to a population expansion beyond the carrying capacity of the earth." 

The above is very hard to disagree with, but it is only the appearance form of another process at work. 

This "other process at work" is manifest as the simply act of eating and what man eats. Here is the genesis of greed and over consumption. This conclusion is so simple and elementary that it has taken thousands of years to get behind it and unravel the logic behind what we eat. 

Damn, I was hoping to stay away from this subject for at least an era. 

Melvin P.