Re: [Marxism] The Prophet Misarmed: Trotsky, Ecology and Sustainability

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 3/13/2009 12:17:22 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, 
_sartesian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:sartesian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)  writes:
 
Here I go, arguing with anyone.
 
What's wrong with eugenics?  In a word, everything.  It is  without 
scientific basis.  For one.  It is historically an  ideological weapon, a 
pseudo-science, used against poor, working class, and  people of colonized 
areas.  It has no scientific basis.   


Comment


Social engineering as a  modern concept and concern arose as by product of 
the industrial revolution and  the growth of science. Social engineering as it 
arose cannot be confused with  biological engineering in the era of the science 
of genome. At its base social  engineering meant for Marxist the relationship 
between town and country; over  coming the antagonism that had characterized 
this strife and restoring the  balance between both and nature. For Marx, all 
of this meant overcoming  bourgeois need. 

Eugenics is an extension of the reactionary  ideology of overpopulation and 
the desire to make the "right kind of  people."

Anyone that begins their analysis with the basics of  Marxism - materialism, 
is going to arrive at the same general conclusions, all  the time, which is to 
say both of your installments on this issue are spot on.  Production and 
reproduction on the basis of bourgeois private property is the  enemy and 
focus; 
the question and the answer. Bourgeois property as it inherits,  subsume and 
sublate existing forms of human social/intercourse, is the point of  departure 
for Marxism.   
 
Period. 

Specifically, bourgeois production - the property  relations, is the 
condition and precondition of its self reproduction. That is  to say, bourgeois 
reproduction is the impulse creating an impulse for a unique  platform and 
array of 
artificial needs that Marx counterpoised to authentic  human needs in his 
Manuscript of 1844.  These artificial needs appear in  the market as 
commodities, 
alongside authentic human "must have to survive" -  needs.  Anyone, right now 
today, can go to a large supermarket, look at all  the commodities for sale, 
and with thoughtfulness, conclude that 80% of  everything in the store is 
fundamentally useless and destructive to human life.  These commodities do not 
spring from authentic human needs and desires, but  rather come into existence 
as 
expression of the commodity form - (what Marx  called "bourgeois need" to be 
exact) and the quest for an expanded value.  
 
Not one items is produced in our society for its use. Rather, the only way  
to produce for the exchange value property, is to create commodities that have 
a  utilization because no one will purchase a thing that has no use.  

Humanity has no spontaneous craving for mayonnaise, coffee, ice  cream  or 
90% of the commodity form of foodstuff. We are not offered food  as an 
abstraction but rather "the commodity form of foodstuff."  Coffee  does not 
just "come 
into existence" as an abstract product, but rather as a  commodity to 
intensify the exploitation of labor. Maybe six years ago, perhaps  seven Lou 
did a 
piece on the history of coffee. Even something as innocent as  "lip stick" has 
a 
history and comes into existence as an artificial means to  mimic the nature 
color of healthy lips. The long history of "makeup" is  fascinating. Someone 
invented mouth wash, but the need arises from wrong  consumption that makes the 
"mouth stink," or causes bad breath. Then an industry  servicing "bad breath" 
arises.  

II 

The  bourgeoisie is forever screaming about population growth, because its 
laws of  reproduction cannot sustain wage labor. We fall into the trap and 
detach  population growth from its own law system. We tend to think that the  
genetic manipulation of foodstuff is innocent and a neutral science.  

What determines and drives population growth, "the law of  population," is a 
biological event/act, or specifically the quantity and quality  of food stuff 
a society consumes or what our species literally eat from nature.  Here one 
presupposes sex. The law of population as a law, reveals itself on the  basis 
of 
what is consumed - eaten. 

There is a reason why ancient  knowledge instructs us not to eat fish without 
gills and hoofed animals, but the  knowledge has been lost. The correctness 
of the ancient science can be  scientifically proven on the basis of botany, 
but all one is required to be is a  consistent materialist and start where Marx 
and Engels started: eating and the  reproduction of the species. Over and over 
Marx and Engels write the root of man  is man himself, and this "man himself" 
is to be understood as a product/part of  nature. Thus, militant materialism 
begins with presupposing the existence of  people and then what they do to eat 
and secure their immediate means of  existence.  
 
The answer to the law of population CANNOT NOT, begin with eating.  

Eating is the platform for existence and our society has yet to  unravel the 
enigma of Adam "eating the forbidden fruit" and as the result of  this wrong 
eating, being hurled unto the earth as a farmer - tiller of the land.  Did the 
biblical Adam deplete the store of food in a closed environment? Or did  
something else happen that expanded his power of self reproduction? Something  
happened connected to eating and population growth that made it necessary for  
him 
to labor - till the land. 
 
Here is the ancient story of the seed of property and its emergence in  human 
history. Eating, the quantity and quality of ones food, determines and  
creates the law of population. Knowing this as a stating point does not in and  
of 
itself discloses how these laws operate in a specific environment, with a  
specific store of food in the context of a given state of development of the  
productive forces. 

What conditions population growth and the  reproduction of people is bound up 
with the availability of food stuff in a  given area, the mode of production 
and the configuration of society machinery.  These conditioning agents should 
not be confused with the biological agent and  eating. 

The tendency for large families in agrarian society  answers a need for 
labor; express the subjection of women as women, her  regulation to the house, 
and 
the human response as class, to the landed property  relation as exploitation. 
The historic desirability for male offspring answers  the call of property as 
inheritance of wealth and the need for a large agrarian  labor force. The 
need for thick and beefy human beings answers the call of the  military and 
reproduces the impulse for "strong" arms and limbs, rather than  durable bodies 
with long life spans. 

However, what determines and  shapes species reproduction rates, natural 
longevity and health is the quality  of what is eaten.  

Machine society - industrial society,  tears the species from its agrarian 
life rituals and agrarian sensibility.  Pastoral sounds, forms and textures 
give 
way to industrial forms and nature  appears and life now increasingly appears 
as a supra-natural relationship. Cows  appear as hamburger, rather than 
thousands of years of husbandry history and  development.

Our society - men and women, have been torn from our  agrarian,  ritualized 
biological clock and behavior; cast into the world of  machines; a world 
conceived and shaped by the  bourgeois; and then stuffed  with the commodities 
of 
bourgeois reproduction. Each evolution in the  development of the productive 
forces and society transformation, subtly alters  nature and creates for the 
new 
generation the appearance of a supra nature  relationship with nature. There 
is much to be leant from ancient cultures, once  the seemingly mystical codes 
are decoded. 

Spoon fed bourgeois  commodities for generations, the result is the blunting 
of our natural human  senses. Pollution has decrease the nitrates in the air 
and distorted the purpose  of our nose. The nose no longer knows. It has been 
rendered stupid at the hands  of the bourgeoisie. Communism will restore the 
nose ability to knows. The tongue  no longer tell us what not to eat. For 
thousands of years one was asked to stick  out their tongue to make a diagnosis 
of 
aliment because all disease begins and  is incubated in the stomach.  The 
species itself is the foundation of  Marxist ecology or more accurately, the 
Marxist approach to ecology.  

Here is the real ecology the bourgeois ecology movement ignore.  The 
bourgeoisie intellectually abstract man from nature and cast him as a  villain 
to 
prevent attack and assault on the property relations. Then the  bourgeoisie 
screams "sustainability." 

Marxism unlocks all codes of  life because of its materialism and quest for 
the meaning of interactivity in  all processes. This issue is extremely broad. 

The consequence of  bourgeois property is the loss of knowledge of birth 
control as knowing ones  specific "moon," and unique biological rhythm; women's 
relationship to the moon  as water and when one is most likely to become 
pregnant. This knowing has been  commodified. Commodities - not simply 
products, are 
sold to instruct one when  they are most fertile. 

Abortions. 

Modern abortions  express the loss of natural and spontaneous birth control, 
and the final  overthrow of the science represented in the thousands of year 
old body of  knowledge of the midwives. First the bourgeois power continued the 
assault on  women led by the Church and burnt authentic science at the stake, 
labeling this  body of science witchcraft. Then the male metaphysicians of 
science were crowned  doctor. The unity of Church with the social power of the 
bourgeoisie, went about  the careful project of creating an ideological index - 
philosophy, that  separates women from man and then both from nature, which 
could not be done  until the midwives were wiped from history. 

Ecology does not begin  with nature as trees, water and animals, but the 
nature - authentic human needs,  in/of our species and our self reproduction. 
This 
self reproduction cannot  spontaneously create an imbalance in nature on its 
own. Something is  missing. 

Pardon my rambling but everything exists on the same  continuum. 

Specifically, the bourgeois power offers a commodity  solution to birth 
control. First the mass produced coat hanger, then the medical  abortion and 
finally a pill. 

Eugenics is of course reactionary  period. On what basis does the quest for 
"better people" arise - "more human  than human," other than the most 
reactionary of philosophy?   

The truly human is to be discovered in restoring our species  relations in 
the spontaneous and harmonious movement of the biosphere. Bourgeois  property 
and the value relations blocks us. The bourgeoisie screams to the high  heaven 
that the goal is to restore nature apart from species being,  reproduction and 
property. In opposition to this bourgeois approach arises  another bourgeois 
approach which is to save species facing extinction.  

"Free Willie!" 

"Free Willie?"

Free my  uncle Willie!  

Sure communist support all movements to  save the planet, no matter what 
their temporal class character, but the problem  and its solution resides in 
the 
property relations. Our job is to win the  ecology movement to side of science 
- the proletariat. 

Bourgeois  property inherit an already existing metabolic breach and widens 
it.   Bourgeois production cannot be reconciled with ecology. It converts the 
earth  itself into a commodity form.  
 
III

I grow weary of  the charges of charlatans who  pretend that Marxist and Marx 
himself ignored man/woman as a metabolic being. I  object to the idea that 
somehow Marxists must become more ecology minded, when  it fact the ecology 
minded are to be won over to revolutionary Marxist approach  and the science of 
society. Marx wrote poems to his wife and became  revolutionary precisely 
because of his love for the truly human and hatred of  the wretchedness and 
decay of 
bourgeois society.  Every single one of us,  over 50 at least, was won to 
Marxism as the result of our morality and  passionate hate of human debasement. 
We answered the call of beauty. Human  debasement and exploitation is the 
annihilation of everything of beauty.  

The quest for beauty, in all its dimensions is what drove Marx and  Engels 
and this quest is the subtext in everything they wrote.  

Beauty and its quest in the human form - symmetry of the body,  springs from 
biology and not science. Eugenics and genetic manipulation is not  the answer, 
because the question is not one of science but property relations  and the 
basis of reproduction in society. 

The simple reason that  capital, as a property relations, cannot be 
reconciled with nature is because at  its essence it is production for exchange 
value, 
rather than use and this  reproduction runs counter to the spontaneous cycles 
of the earth itself. This  form of reproduction runs counter to beauty. 

The last two hundred  years stand as witness and testimony to the broken 
back, the disfigured human  body; deformed body symmetry, swollen organs, arms 
and 
legs; coated tongues  suffering under the degeneracy of bourgeois need.  
Today, right now, this  very moment . . . American society suffers from a 
crisis 
of obesity - over  accumulation of capital in the body of man himself. This is 
a biological crisis,  but a crisis in biology   . . . a horrific widening of 
the metabolic  breach in the species body and it "did not just happen" because 
people eat to  much. Here is the end game of the crisis of overcapacity, 
overproduction and  consumption of commodities. Here is the end game of the 
commodity form.  

Eugenics arise as a bourgeois form of science in response to  bourgeois 
degeneracy. I guess the next goal of bourgeois science is to create  people who 
can 
eat 6 times a day, work 12 hour and never get fat or tired. 
 
Science can most certainly solve the metabolic crisis in the earth but not  
from the standpoint of trying to reconstitute and manipulate the human genome - 
 (so that we can consume more commodities and then die), but rather from the  
standpoint of the law systems governing earth and our authentic human needs. 
 
Here is where the Marxist lead the charge  . . . again.  

WL. 


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