Re: [Marxism] Carl Davidson report on Left Forum

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>> Needless to say, I became an immediate fan of Wolf, but  decided to 
cross swords with Candeais on his opposition to "infinite growth." I  argued we 
needed infinite growth, especially in high design technologies and the  
growth of knowledge, and that these were critical to both a green and socialist 
 
future. In this way, economies could grow in sustainable ways, however 
large  they became. He simply wouldn't accept my framework, and clung to a 
vision of  growth as accumulating garbage heaps. We had to agree to disagree.<<
 
Above is Carl Davidson remarks in question. 
 

Comment

Infinite growth in the above context means  continuous evolution and 
development or permanent revolution in the mode of  production and the human 
sciences, i.e. in "high design technologies and the  growth of knowledge." 
 
Revolution in the productive machinery in society evolved along two  lines: 
extensive and intensive development, with one interpenetrating the other.  
Intensive development on an extensive basis- (internally revolutionizing  
productive machinery), to carry out a widening array of functions  is 
desirable. The bourgeois mode of production is founded on the extensive  
development 
of the productive forces and limiting its intensive qualities to  single 
task functions to maximum the production of surplus value by the  
individual/collective worker(s). 
 
Why would one want to limit or set a boundary on intensive development and  
revolution in the mode of production?  During the epoch of the bourgeoisie  
the internal intensive properties of machinery and machine systems are  
suppressed in favor of extensive configuration. That is to say industrial  
cooperation is actually industrial bourgeois cooperation, of which Marx speaks  
about in Capital 1. 
 
It seems to me that a mistaken notion operates within the "limited growth  
ideology" that does not distinguish between extensive and intensive  
development and growth of the productive forces. Growth and infinite 
development  
appears as the problem rather than the law system peculiar to the 
bourgeoisie. 
 
To speak of property - capital, and machinery is not just the concept of  
"the bourgeoisie owns the machinery." The bourgeois property relations is  
embedded in the functional utility of the sum total of machinery and systems 
of  production. This is the reason the physical machinery of a Chrysler plant 
 cannot also produce bicycles and bicycle parts. Chrysler produces vehicles 
in  opposition to everything else. The factory system from floor plan to 
machinery  and the placement of the worker within this process is conceived 
and  designed extensively because the goal is single task production, on a 
widening  scale, and technical design is to squeeze out the greatest amount  of 
labor - surplus value, from the individual worker; within a universal 
system  of single task machinery designed to product a specific commodity. 
 
In this sense the Soviet system was more advanced in its intensive  
properties. 
 
The objection to growth should be against the bourgeois notion and  
practical approach to growth: the growth of surplus value  production. 
Intensive 
(communist) development and infinitive growth of  machinery means a different 
system founded on increasing the complex task  individual and collective 
machinery as a system perform. Production systems and  plants should be able to 
produce many different things. 
 
The bourgeoisie opposes intensive reorganization of machinery - the  
productive forces, because it runs against the laws of capitalist  production. 
Intensive growth and development creates and contains the  specific law that 
says, "the more functions I perform as machinery the less  surplus value 
squeeze out of the individual worker" because "more functions"  violates the 
time 
standards of bourgeois production. In the eyes of capital,  intensively 
development machinery requires down time for its reconfiguration to  do 
different things and demands capital investment in the production of  different 
commodities.  
 
(Here is what the Soviet workers were arguing when some of the political  
leaders in 1920/21 were opposing the introduction of the Taylor system, 
although  they could not formulate the question on the basis of extensive and 
intensive  development until a decade later. Lenin opted for the Taylor system 
because it  was an advance over what existed. However, this historical 
argument has been  passed to us as the anarcho syndicalist deviation. Inasmuch 
as 
the industrial  system has passed through all its boundaries of 
development, at the front of the  curve of developed countries and is in 
further 
transition to a new  mode of production, it becomes easier to see the entire 
logic 
of the issue  of "how to organize the industrial configuration of machinery 
under the  socialist order.")  
 
There is more to all these issues than meets the eye. 

I am  skeptical concerning framing any question as infinite growth because 
it is an  ahistorical and totally bourgeois concept meant to obscure the 
property  relations which continuously drives capital into antagonism with the 
laws of  nature. 
 
II
 
Metabolic rift versus metabolic breach 

Human nature as  spontaneous biological striving creates things - 
products/use values, and these  products appear as forms of so much alienated 
labor. 
Forms of alienated labor  meaning products created by wo/man, existing 
outside our biological body,  confronting us as things. In my estimate this is 
the source of the metabolic  rift of which Marx write. Alienated labor also 
imply we have torn something  from nature and shaped it by our human. The 
metabolic rift that appears as  wo/man and/as nature (us) in our unity with but 
also opposed to nature only  reaches and passes over to antagonism at a 
certain stage in the development of  production and the property form. The 
metabolic rift cannot be sealed. Nor is  their a desire or theoretical 
justification to seek such sealing. 
 
The metabolic rift emerges from our biological humanness as we stand in  
unity and conflict with nature. The metabolic rift enters human history as an  
expression of alienated labor and this alienated labor defines who we are 
as a  species. Alienated labor distinguishes us from bees and other life 
forms on  earth. 

The metabolic breach (not metabolic rift) speaks of a  breach in the 
biosphere, which hopefully can be healed - hopefully, or at least  arrested. 

The point is that the theorists of sustainability and  limited growth, in 
all its variations, view production and technology outside  the field of 
property and value production corresponding with a historically  specific stage 
in the growth of human knowledge; state of development of the  productive 
forces; property relations and value production, and then merge the  profound 
difference between metabolic rift and metabolic breach into an  anti-growth 
thesis. 
 
The metabolic rift (Not Breach) is compounded by human ignorance of the  
laws of nature and ignorance of long term social consequences. For instance,  
human beings can deplete the life sustenance in a limited area but such 
limiting  and destruction cannot produce a breach in the metabolic unity of 
nature, i.e. a  breach in the biosphere. 

I am not aware of any literature that  indicates that pre-capital ignorance 
and pre-industrial capitalist society was  capable of producing a metabolic 
breach in the environment - biosphere.  

The metabolic rift (contradiction) evolves into a breach  (antagonism) only 
with the advent of industrial capitalist society. Primitive  forms of 
industrial state socialism may have added to the breach but did not  create it 
as 
such. The metabolic breach is driven by capital's indifference to  the laws 
of nature, as it reproduces the value relations and all its social  
consequences.  

The human capacity for knowing and growth in  understanding (accumulated 
knowledge) is infinite but conditioned and  limited by all the factors that 
constitute history. That is to say that  "infinite" - as a concept, is 
abstract and without material life and as a  concept arises expressing our 
finite 
generation life span. We are in fact finite  and this finiteness shapes the 
boundary of the infinite. 

Then  again, I do not know enough about the earth capacity to heal itself 
on the scale  of tens of thousands of years and cannot give a quantitative 
measure of the  metabolic breach. I do accept the assumption of breach rather 
than simply  rift.  


WL.  
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