Re: [Marxism] Marx and the natural environment

[brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)]

[Robert quotes Marx (?):]

> "Nature is man's inorganic body  that is to say, nature insofar as
> it is not the human body. Man lives from nature  i.e., nature is
> his body  and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he
> is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked
> to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a
> part of nature." (from Estranged Labour, Early Writings)

The idea here is that with communism, we not only overcome our
alienation from society and from the products of our labor, but from
nature as well. But what exactly does this mean? Allow me to speculate
idly. 

If we assume the idea of our social being is analogous, just what do
we mean by that concept? Instead of assuming that the individual is
ontologically independent (is defined by its empirical traits) and
that society arises from individual interactions and is manifest in
individual behavior, individual and society instead come to refer to
the social and individualized manifestations of one process that does
not reduce to either a social whole or to individuals. In this
process, individuation is an emergent effect of social development,
while society emerges because of individuations (kind of like being in
love). By representing the whole as a process, the part and the whole
are reconciled, and the result is well understood in terms of
general systems theory. Finally, the bootstrap operation that is
present here is only possible because society is able to export its
entropy to the natural environment through economic production. This
also is well understood in terms of thermodynamics. So there's nothing
about "social being" that is at all strange in relation to post World
War II science.

Can we use this to grasp the relation of society and our natural
environment? Let me try. To some extent we (I refer here to scientific
culture in general) have already done that. That is, today (arguably
this perhaps means post-positivist) our ontological monism (a
definition of "materialism") means that society and, in principle at
least, human consciousness, are emergent qualities of matter. To this
extent, there is one material process that has as one of its
manifestations the emergence of human society.

However, while we can say without difficulty that society is an effect
of material development, what does it mean to say that the physical
environment develops because of mankind? Technically, this would imply
that mankind's effect on nature is such that as a result nature
acquires lower entropy, a less probable state, greater order, and
greater potentials. This, I suppose, is conceivable as long as entropy
is exported beyond that part of nature we call home (at this point, I
suppose, that means earth). Fundamentally, this means dissipating the
energy available to us by radiating heat out into space.

While the last is largely (but not entirely) science fiction, it
remains that in principle we might become one with nature at some
future time by making it artificial, changing it in a way that
increases its own potentials (entopy) and yet is a world supportive of
our needs. We don't go back to nature, but construct an artificial
nature that is both natural in some sense and a human artifice. It
seems we are extraordinarily far from being able to do that without
inviting disaster, but much of our incompetence may simply be due to
capitalism.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM
         Dialectical Materialist        
         
        

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