Mark Jones reply to Sam Pawlett (from Crashlist-talk)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sam Pawlett wrote:

> Fair enough, everything is connected to everything else. But is this
> true for all animals and all habitats?  Should
> biodiversity be preserved at all costs or just some costs? How many
> people went without power in the Tennessee valley to preserve snail
> darters? Is the exticntion of snail darters in the TV a price worth
> paying where poor Tenesseans won't be able to afford electiricity or pay
> a large % of their income to energy bills? These
> are the questions I'm asking. The creation of the great wildlife
> reserves in Africa (Kenya,Botswana) came at considerable cost to the
> indigenous people there who used tham as there hunting grounds and
> resource areas. Check out *The Mountain People* by Colin Turnbull for
> the fate
> of the Ik in Uganda.

The short, catch-all answer to Sam's questions is that growth
under capitalism benefits a minority while  constantly
increasing the immiserated majority; part of capitalist growth
is the constant increase of the so-called reserve army of
labour, what Marx called the 'relative surplus population', i.e. surplus to
capitalism's requirement for a labour force *at that time*. The growth of
surplus population occurs everywhere, in the great economies and in the
neocolonial peripheries. It is most dangerous in the capitalist heartlands
because the resources consumed and pollution created by EuroAmericans is
dozens of times greater than for people in the peripheries. In the end,
this constant assault on the ecosphere imperils the lives of everyone, even
the minority who have been temporarily privileged by the gains of technology
and productivity. The benefits accruing to Tennesseeans are short-term and
illusory by any real historical perspective; the misery which is the lot of
billions of others is permanent and real.

Sustainability self-evidently requires putting an end to capitalist forms of
growth; it entails creating a different social and moral order in which
science, technology and knowledge generally, can deepen and develop at no
net cost to the biosphere, in fact as positive inputs to the health of the
ecological networks which support all life, and by reducing not extending
the environmental impacts of humans. How do we imagine/envisage/prefigure
such a world, such a society? These are the great questions of theory and
practice. It is very clear that no-one has a monopoly of truth, or of error,
from deep ecologists to Gro Harlem Brundtland to Rush Limbaugh and Dubya.
The mission remains one of dissolving the distinction between countryside
and city, of finding ways to transcend the need for large-scale science and
production requiring massively centralised formations of capital, with big
and finally unsustainable accumulations of urban populations. So far the
trends are still all in the wrong direction. Only in the past decade, a
majority of the world's population for the first time lived in cities not
the countryside, and that percentage is bound to grow. That this would one
day happen was one of Marx's central predictions. We do not want to destroy
cities, which are the seedbeds of civilisation. The city as an idea and as a
real construct, are the greatest gains of our species and the origin of the
word 'civilisation'. But to preserve the notion and the reality of 'city'
there must also be its objective correlative: 'wilderness'. You cannot have
one without the other. This is arguably true from simple observation. Cities
which exclude nature become anomic, untenable wildernesses of a different
kind, wildernesses of deadly concrete, sumps through which pour a huge flood
of natural assets and from which pours a tide of waste and pollution.

There are no cities anywhere where this is not the case, and the best
efforts of industrial ecologists [I'll be posting more about them] have not
shown us how to create entirely closed, non-polluting, non-resource
depleting, industrial ecosystems.

We need to reconstruct or re-posit the dualism city/nature and writers like
David Harvey who encourage us to rethink the meaning of urban space and time
are important to this; but so is St Augustine whose concept of the City of
God is a contradictory but glorious prefiguring of civilisations which do
not just dominate nature in a Baconian sense, but which are perfused with
natural forms and processes, cities in which nature finds ultimate
expression, ideal conservation. We need to revisit medieval Persia's concept
of the Garden. Most radically, we need to understand how cities beginning
with Jericho arose as places of trade, as crossing points or way-stations on
long-distance trade routes. The forum, the temple and the market place were
not just physically adjacent, they were functional parts of one dynamic
whole, and the clarification and emergence of commodity-exchange was their
common leitmotif (see Moses Finley, and George Thomson, for the emergence of
coinage, commodity-exchange and of the analysis of space-time as the basic
preoccupation of the philosophy of classical antiquity). Without
commodification of natural objects, there could be no original separation of
*society* from *nature*. Only when lumps of natural material are ripped form
their context and fashioned into objects of utility capable of exchange,
i.e. capable of commensurating not as utilities (all of which are unique
and intrinsically incommensurable) but according to some common
standard (i.e. embodied labour-time) was it theoretically possible to
*think* of the world as *objective*, as an object-world, with attributes,
negative and positive, which could be defined in anthropocentric terms.
This process of course produced a notion of dualism about reified nature,
and of an object world capable of original creation (the prerequisites
for creating religions, i.e., the tasks of the temple).

Commodity production and commodity exchange reified not
only nature (and society) but also created a radical disjunction
within human psychology, in which spirit and spirituality too were enabled
to become extrinsic attributes of the object-world, and in which the human
subject too could become an object for both diminution and glorification, an
object of subjection to 'natural' pressures and a subject of godlike powers,
something which reached its apotheosis under industrial capitalism when
humans are indeed with exosomatic energy, [seen Note below for more on
exosomatic energy], through machines and technologies,
which reduce time and space and enable the complete subjection of the
natural world: except that, as is said, Nature always gets the final word,
and she ain't said it yet.

As Sam and many have pointed out, the notion of 'conservation' itself is
contradictory. To conserve what exists is also to break a fundamental law,
since everything that exists is in the process of coming to be and passing
away. It is to invite still more unforeseen change, since in the absence of
complete knowledge we cannot truly conserve, we can only alter the flow and
shape of processes in the same way dams only serve to alter the flow of
water, with the certainty that there will be many unintended consequences,
consequences which may entirely defeat our objectives.

This does not mean we should adopt a very characteristic kind of right-wing
fatalism, which says that it doesn't matter what we do because outcomes are
intrinsically unpredictable, because we are all doomed anyway (the next ice
age is irrevocably at hand), or because we are just part of nature
ourselves, so in reality it is just Nature trashing Nature and in the larger
context, no-one except the Almighty is responsible for anything. You can
find this argument all the time, it is pure Julian Simon/Rush Limbaugh: a
kind of robust denial that anything is wrong: 'So what if there is global
warming?

So what if the ice caps melt or even if the whole planet is destroyed? These
things are just meant to be, we are just unwitting agents of inscrutable
forces, so why not get on with maximising our profits here and now and devil
take the hindmost'. This kind of nihilism is, politically speaking, a result
of the fact that the defenders of industrial capitalism (post-modern
capitalism for that matter) have lost the argument. The science is against
them. They cannot pretend that global warming or mass extinctions are not
happening; the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. This indicates
the ideological impasse the apologists of globalism find themselves in; it
is the fatal weakness which has suddenly made great international
institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and WTO, vulnerable to a few
rather localised and small-scale street demonstrations. This political
paralysis (a result of growing ideological despair and nihilism) indicates
the deep-seated anxieties of the panjandrums themselves.

Civilisation is an achievement of the human species during the present
interglacial, i.e. the past 8 000 years. It is characterised by the
emergence, consolidation, clarification and finally, absolute hegemony
and emergent hypertrophy of the commodity-form.

The isolation of space and time as residual 'underground' categories
providing the framework for objective reality, enabled the emergence of all
science and the spiritual fixation of the city qua civilisation as an
abstract,
defining quality of humankind's species-life.

As Alfed Sohn-Rethel showed, this analysis and mental fixation
of space-time were the achievements of classical antiquity at the moment
when coinage emerged and the money-form became stabilised. Both in logic and
in history, the emergence of money as a spatiotemporally abstract entity
(money does not decay, is not subject to the vicissitudes of time, has no
physical properties since a coin is only the 'bearer' of abstract, non-real,
non-natural value) and the emergence of philosophy are identical.

The commodity is a uniquely human thing. Money is literally the defining
characteristic of our species, more even than language or the opposed thumb
which made tool-use and labour, hence emergence of society, possible.

Nevertheless we have confidence that the sciences it produced, embodied in
the asset-base of universal human civilisation, yield results and knowledges
which are universally true, or at least, universally disprovable in the
Popperian sense. There is no absolute knowledge and no absolute truth,
not just because of the anthropological limitations encumbering the human
species but also  because the universe itself is stochastic and its laws
may themselves be mutable and subject to universal evolution.
Nevertheless the findings of science are conditionally true, that
is, within their own relative domain they have the force of truth, and this
is absolute. The laws of classical mechanics are true for all times and in
all circumstances where the object field to which they apply exists, and as
far as we know this object field is the universe itself. Thus we can have
absolute confidence in the results of science even while acknowledging that
these results are relative to their objects and are the products of the
completely arbitrary, contingent and chaotic processes of human evolution
and of the emergence and evolution of society.

This is why we can be sure of ourselves enough to be able to apply
rational-choice logics to what science tells us about the world. We do not
have to answer the great ontic questions about the nature of the universe,
in order to be sure for instance that anthropological climate-forcing
challenges the custodial function which results from our own development and
even overgrowth as one species among others. We are now custodians of the
natural processes we impact the most. It is in our own interests as part of
the biodiversity on which we depend, to respect the custodial role and
implement it properly. We do not have to be fatalistic about our own
actions, which we clearly can influence and even control even if we can
control little else. There is no longer any serious opposition (i.e.,
scientifically-grounded opposition) to the fact of global-warming. We know
it is happening. However, the fallback libertarian-fatalist argument is that
we should not prevent global warming anyway, because it may have beneficial
as well as baleful results, and since these are unknowable this is another
reason to avoid allegedly 'arbitrary' interventions by 'political'
processes, i.e. the state, in the 'natural' process of social evolution. The
only safeguard that is needed, according to this view, is the unimpeded
rights of private property. Thus it is said that crops may increase in the
temperate zones. Equally, we know that (to judge from the geological record)
we are at or near the end of the present Interglacial; the onset of the next
Ice Age may already have been delayed by humankind's release of greenhouse
gases.  An Ice Age could begin with great rapidity, in the space of a single
lifetime or even a few years. Its effects would be cataclysmic. We are not
capable of controlling large climatic processes or of mitigating their
effects (even localised events like volcanoes and earthquakes stretch our
capabilities for useful intervention). If global warming acts to stabilise
the climate and avoid such outcomes, we should not prevent it.

The libertarian argument from the rights of property is not new of course.
As Rousseau (1714-1778) said: "The first man who, having fenced off a plot
of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough
to believe him was the real founder of civil society." [note on Rousseau
below]

Nevertheless, this libertarian-fatalist argument does not hold. It is
actually only an argument for investing more in science, and for more
determined attempts to understand the processes involved so that we can
model them better and predict outcomes more certainly, and also to integrate
the models not only of climate change but also of human-induced changes in
biodiversity and human impacts on large-scale evolutionary processes. We
have to look at the effects of unrestrained capitalist accumulation on the
ecosphere as a whole, and integrate the sciences so that we can understand
the synergetic effects, the positively-reinforcing feedback loops, which for
example make climate change interact with ecological damage through
pollution or other human impacts on the ecosphere. To a surprising degree,
this research is not being done even when it is clear that there are
positive interactions between for example global warming due to greenhouse
gas emission, and the collapse of marine life, coral reefs etc for other
reasons. Similarly, little research is being done on the interactions
between energy-use and resource-depletion on the one hand, and ecological
carrying-capacities on the other. Ecological economists do not discuss net
energy issues much, even though this topic is intuitively obviously highly
related to any meaningful assay of different strategies for sustainability.

Since we understand so little about the effects on climate and on
biodiversity of human activity, the need for more, and better-focussed
science is clear. Capitalist states cannot devote resources necessary to
understand the effects and impacts of the world economy, let alone mitigate
them. Given the dangers which capitalist industry poses to life on earth,
this is sufficient argument for ending industrial society and capitalist
accumulation. We do not need commodity production any more. Its historical
task is complete. What we need is a huge extension and deepening of
scientific and technological networks, a huge and transforming
'virtualising' of the city in all senses: dematerialising cities while
deepening and universalising the virtue (_virtu_, strength, moral capacity)
of civilisation. If the task of commodity-production was to birth the City
and to objectify Nature, that task was finished by the time of Kant. The
first socialists from the time of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Robert Owen
(1771-1858) and the comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) were right: industry
could have better developed _in the absence of capitalism_.

In reality, we have not depended on the so-called stochastic magic of the
markets for a century or more, since the sum effect of all the positive
innovations leading to industrial growth has clearly been the same, has
therefore been highly predictable, and could have been realised better
through planning rather than through blind market processes, i.e. the
uncontrolled logic of capital accumulation. Crucially: All innovation which
has served to increase social productivity has served only one purpose: the
extension of exosomatic capabilities, by the purposive release and
application of more energy, and by better and more readily available
information. Contrary to the assumption every "educated" person is
indoctrinated with from birth, markets are not only not necessary to the
pursuit of higher productivity, but, for well-known reasons, classic perfect
markets act as a *brake* on productivity increases, while
monopoly-capitalism, which overcomes this inherent drawback of laisser-faire
capitalism, is by definition *the limitation of markets* and the
*substitution of planning for competition*. The only market which is
indispensable to capitalism is, of course, the labour-market. It is no
paradox that this is also the only market which globalism does not seek to
free: unlike capital, whose 'mobility' is guaranteed by international treaty
law and by a whole panoply of agencies like the WTO, IMF etc, labour is
almost literally 'everywhere in chains'. Everywhere the workers of the world
are corralled off into nation-states, and nowhere is migration freely
permitted. Labour-markets are the most dysfunctional and controlled of all.
Capitalism is in its essence both the highest stage of commodity-exchange
and production, and its negation.

The reintegration of nature and society is an inevitable and necessary task
of history. Since we are capable of producing real knowledge about the
world, and are capable of large-scale social prediction and planning, and
since we are also capable of creating a sustainable human lifeworld which is
not governed by the blind logics of runaway accumulation, we have neither
right nor reason to be passive but on the contrary we have an obligation to
seize control of history, not least since recognition of that obligation is
itself the product of our history.

Mark Jones

------------------------------------------------
Note on 'exosomatic' energy

Humans transform energy inputs found in their environment into a flow of
useful energy used to sustain their social and economic needs.
This conversion can be obtained in two ways. First, by transforming
food energy into muscular power within the human body; this is
called endosomatic or metabolic energy. Second, by transforming
energy outside the human body, such as burning gasoline in a tractor;
this is called exosomatic energy. In order to have either endosomatic or
exosomaticenergy conversions, society must have access to adequate
energy inputs.

The two major sources of energy used by humans are solar energy and fossil
energy resources. Solar driven or renewable energy sources represent almost
100 percent of the endosomatic and exosomatic energy flows in pre-industrial
societies; they sustained human development f or more than 99 percent of
human existence.

Fossil or non-renewable energy represents more than 90 percent of the
exosomatic energy used in the United States and other developed countries;
however, this growing reliance of modern societies on fossil energy started
only 150 years ago, or much less than 1 percent of human existence.

Solar and fossil energy sources have different characters. The solar energy
captured by photosynthesis is renewable or unlimited in its time dimension,
but its exploitation is limited in its rate of flow. This means that if we
want to
double the quantity of biomass harvested (such as crops for food or
cornstalks, fast growing trees, etc. for energy), at a fixed technological
level,
we need to double the land exploited. To double animal power we need
more animals and double the land devoted to fodder.

On the other hand, fossil energy is a stock-type resource, that is
limited in its time dimension?sooner or later it will be exhausted?but,
while the stock lasts, it can be exploited at a virtually unlimited rate.

The access to fossil energy removed the limitation on the density at which
exosomatic energy can be utilized, and societies experienced a dramatic
increase in the rate of energy consumption. The exo/endo energy
ratio has jumped from about 4 to 1, a value typical of solar powered
societies, to more than 40 to 1 in developed
countries (in the U.S. it is more than 90 to 1). Clearly, this brought about
a dramatic change in the role of the endosomatic energy flow. Endosomatic
energy, that is food and human labor, no longer delivers power for direct
economic processes. Humans generate the flow of information needed
to direct huge flows of exosomatic power produced by machines and
powered primarily by fossil energy.

To provide an example of the advantage achieved: a small gasoline engine
will convert 20% of the energy input of one gallon of fuel into power. That
is,
the 38,000 kcal in one gallon of gasoline can be transformed into 8.8 KWh,
which is about 3 weeks of human work equivalent. (Human work output in
agriculture = 0.1 HP, or 0.074 KW, times 120 hours.)


Fossil energy and the food system.

More than 10 kcalories (kilogram-calories or "large calories") of exosomatic
energy are spent in the U.S. food system per kcalorie of food delivered to
the
consumer.

Put another way, the food system consumes ten times more energy than it
provides to society in food energy. However, since in the U.S. the exo/endo
energy ratio is 90/1, each endosomatic kcalorie (each kcalorie of food
metabolized to sustain human activity) induces the circulation of 90
kcalorie
of exosomatic energy, basically fossil. This explains why the energy cost of
food of 10 exosomatic kcalories per endosomatic kcalorie is not perceived
as high when measured in economic terms. Actually, despite a net
increase in the energy and monetary cost per kcalorie of food in
the U.S. over the last decades, the percentage of disposable
income spent by U. S. citizens on food has steadily decreased and is now
only about 15 percent of disposable income.

Based on a 10/1 ratio, the total direct cost of the daily diet in the U.S.
is approximately 35,000 kcalories of exosomatic energy per capita
(assuming 3,500 k/ capita of food available per day for consumption).
However, since the average return of one hour of labor in the U.S.
is about 100,000 kcalories of exosomatic
energy, the flow of exosomatic energy required to supply the daily diet is
made accessible by about 20 minutes of labor.

In subsistence societies, about 4 kcalories of exosomatic energy (basically
in the form of biomass) are required per kcalorie of food consumed.
Thus, the total direct cost of the daily diet is much lower in absolute
terms, approximately 10,000 kcalories of exosomatic energy per capita
(assuming a food supply of 2, 500 kcal/day per capita). On the other
hand, because of the limited access to fossil energy, the average
return of human labor in subsistence societies is low. In such a
system up to 5 hours of labor are required to supply the daily diet. In
terms of human labor, in subsistence societies the daily diet costs
16 times more than in the U.S. food system.

In countries with a high exo/endo energy ratio, food production no longer
provides a direct energy or power supply to society. Food production,
however, is
still essential to the economy of all nations. Because of the high
opportunity
cost of human time, there is a strong incentive to lower the human
time allocated to the management of the food system. Therefore,
technological development in food systems of developed societies
is principally aimed at (i) reducing the requirement of labor in
food production, (ii) increasing the safety of food, and (iii) reducing the
time required for food preparation. Although this strategy of technological
development causes an increase in the direct costs of food security, both in
production and processing of food, it allows humans to switch a large
fraction of  their time to other, more productive economic sectors.


[from Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel, THE TIGHTENING CONFLICT:
POPULATION, ENERGY USE,
AND THE ECOLOGY OF AGRICULTURE]


----------------------------------------------
Note on Rousseau and property

[from Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism, a lecture
given by David North, national
secretary of the Socialist Equality Party, at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor on 24 October 1996.]

[I]t would be simplistic and superficial to see in the work of the
Enlightenment nothing more than the narrow expression of the
class interests of the bourgeoisie in its struggle against a
decaying feudal order. The advanced thinkers who prepared the
bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century spoke and wrote
in the name of all of suffering humanity, and in doing so evoked
universal themes of human solidarity and emancipation that
reached beyond the more limited and prosaic aims of the
capitalist class.

The critique of property

This universalism finds extraordinary expression in the writings of
Rousseau (1714-1778). In contrast to the other great figures of
the Enlightenment, Rousseau does not participate in the
glorification of reason. He bitterly calls into question the value of
science and art, arguing that they are themselves instruments of
man's corruption, debasement and oppression.

It is by no means necessary to accept this element of Rousseau's
argument to acknowledge the genius of the underlying insight:
that society as it has developed and exists is profoundly inhuman,
antagonistic to the natural instincts of man, and the source of his
misery and suffering.

The profoundly revolutionary implications of this insight found
striking expression in his brilliant Discourse on the Origin and
Foundation of Inequality Among Men, published in 1755.
Property, he explained, was not a natural attribute of human
existence. In his natural state, man did not have property. It is the
product of the growth of civilization which, once having come into
existence, destroys man's humanity and enslaves him.

"The first man," writes Rousseau, "who, having fenced off a plot of
land, thought of saying, 'This is mine,' and found people simple
enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How
many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors
might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon
pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his
fellow men, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost, if
you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth
belongs to no one.'"

As there was once no property, so was there once no inequality.
Like property out of which it develops, inequality is a product of
civilization. The poor are oppressed by the power of property.
Those who possess property are morally and intellectually
disfigured by the struggle to obtain, keep and augment it.

The emergence of property and the destruction of equality led
inexorably to "the most frightful disorder." Having acquired wealth,
the rich "thought of nothing but subjugating and enslaving their
neighbors, like those hungry wolves which, having once tasted
human flesh, reject all other food, and no longer want anything but
men to devour."

In his later Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau offered a
portrait of social inequality that speaks as powerfully to an
audience on the eve of the twenty-first century as it did to readers
in the mid-eighteenth century.

"Are not all the advantages of society for the powerful
and rich?" he asked. "Are not all lucrative positions
filled by them alone? Are not all privileges and
exemptions reserved for them? And is not public
authority completely in their favor? When a man of
high standing robs his creditors or cheats in other
ways, is he not always certain of impunity? Are not the
beatings he administers and the acts of violence he
commits, even the murders and assassinations he is
guilty of, hushed up and no longer even mentioned
after months? If this same man is robbed, the entire
police force is immediately on the move, and woe to
the innocent persons he suspects.... How different is
the picture of the poor man! The more humanity owes
him, the more society refuses him. All doors are
closed to him, even when he has the right to open
them; and if sometimes he obtains justice, it is with
greater difficulty than another would have in obtaining
a pardon.

"Another less important consideration is that the
losses of poor men are much less easy to offset that
those of the rich, and that the difficulty of acquiring
wealth always increases in proportion to need.
Nothing is created from nothing; that is true in
business as in physics; money is the seed of money,
and the first ten francs are sometimes more difficult to
earn than the second million. But there is still more.
Everything that the poor man spends is forever lost to
him, and remains in or returns to the hands of the
rich...."



Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/