[Marxism] RE: Stan Goff article

["Tony Abdo" <gojack10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This article by Stan Goff was great, though by concentrating on the current
issue of the Kerry campaign it really side tracks some  from the central
issue in the article of the necessity of building energy conservation into a
post capitalist world economy.

That concept is truly revolutionary thinking for traditional marxism.  Why?
Simply because it underlines so well, that the sun (via nature) produces
more energy product than man alone can ever appear to be able to create
using sheer human labor.  It has been a historic error of great dimensions
that Marx concentrated so much on human labor as being the principle element
involved in producing value, when the truth of the matter is much broader
than that.  Now society must soon come to grips that capitalist economy has
used human labor principally to dissipate into garbage, nature's principle
stored values.  Human labor has been used over the last several centuries to
essentially destroy nature's stored assets, and not to expand upon them.

<<The fossil fuel that underwrites this growth, we must remember, took
hundreds of millions of years to form as biomass (like the green algae that
turned into oil). In fact, the predominant form of that fossil energy, oil,
is a good marker to see into our energy future. We have used approximately
half of all the extractible oil in the earth.>>

Goff lists a portion of what this means for the future in the US, still
addicted to highway building and surburban expanisonism.  He concentrates on
the fact that the world's cities have been expanded into areas of hostile
climates. In Texas, being a climatically hostile environment that has grown
immensely due to stupid growth, it is hard to imagine a happy population
without cheap energy.  Goff uses two other examples.

<<Fossil fuel has permitted us to build huge cities in climates that
bordered on hostile to human habitation, whether that involves the air
conditioning required in Riyadh or the heating required in Helsinki.>>

So is marxism capable of evolving economic theories that can deal with the
new world environment?  What proposals can we come up with that conserve
limited energy reserves, and that provide an accurate accouting system of
what civilization needs to conserve and reproduce?  Because the only
accouting system now is the capitalist world market.  It seems that the key
is to make an econmy that doesn't turn everything into junk, as capitalism
has done so thoroughly.  Too bad that Marx and Engels didn't approach the
crisis in quite this manner.  Their major fault was that they respected the
'production' under capitalism much more than it should have been respected.
Goff's article shows that some in the Left are trying to come to grips with
this Achilles Heel of Left theory.

Marxism in power would literally have to contract the living space in areas
like the US.  It would be necessary to squeeze the surburbia back into the
cities, so to speak.  Problem in having to do this, is that to clean up the
trash, yet more energy must then be produced to do the work with.  But to
leave all the junk in place would be to not have a conservation model for
economic activity in place still, which in turn would leave energy
consumption high.  Capitalism has led us into a double bind situation, where
nothing seems to be a method of short term energy conservation that would
work and keep people alive.  No matter who is running the show.

This is obviously an article that tackled lots of difficult questions all in
the same breath.  It is nice to see this sort of commentary and analysis at
CounterPunch online.  How the heck can we get people out of places like
Phoenix, Mexicali, and Bangladesh?  Not to mention Las Vegas?  These are
energy guzzling locales to sustain large quatities of life in the future.
It looks like a future of migrating hordes of utterly destitute and
miserable people are soon ahead.  And so far, the only programs to deal with
this are Ridge's Homeland Security agency, and the United Nations!  'Mad Max
beyond ThunderDome' is not such an entertaining movie to the world public
anymore.

Tony

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