[PEN-L:7203] Re: jim o'connor on harvey review

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>For newcomers to PEN-L, it should be understood that Doug Henwood agrees
>with David Harvey. I am not sure on what basis, since Doug by his own
>admission has been moving away from Marxism while Harvey represents himself
>as trying to put it on new foundations. I myself think that any attempt to
>wed Marx to Whitehead and Leibniz is nonsense, but one person's meat is
>another person's poison. Marxism has been opposed to metaphysics from its
>very beginning. The reason, of course, why Harvey wants to re-introduce
>philosophical idealism through the back door is that the radical
>materialism of Marx and Engels is not fashionable. Every one of these
>post-Marxist enterprises is wedded to one form of philosophical idealism or
>another, from Kant (Habermas) to Hegel (too numerous to mention).

Here is what David Harvey wrote that got our correspondent so upset.

Doug

----

[from David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, pp.
188-191]

....that they were and continue to be somehow "closer to nature" than we are
(even Guha, it seem to me, falls into this trap). Faced with the ecological
vulnerability often associated with such "proximity to nature," indigenous
groups can transform both their practices and their views of nature with
startling rapidity. Furthermore, even when armed with all kinds of cultural
traditions and symbolic gestures that indicate deep respect for the
spirituality in nature, they can engage in extensive ecosystemic
transformations that undermine their ability to continue with a given mode
of production. The Chinese may have ecologically sensitive traditions of
Tao, Buddhism, and Confucianism (traditions of thought which have played an
important role in promoting an 11 ecological consciousness" in the west)
but the historical geography of deforestation, land degradation, river
erosion, and flooding in China contains not a few environmental events
which would be regarded as catastrophes by modern-day standards.
Archeological evidence likewise suggests that late iceage hunting groups
hunted many of their prey to extinction while fire must surely rate as one
of the most far-reaching agents of ecological transformation ever acquired,
allowing very small groups to exercise immense ecosystemic influence
(Sauer, 1956).

The point here is not to argue that there is nothing new under the sun
about the ecological disturbance generated by human activities, but to
assess what exactly is new and unduly stressful, given the unprecedented
rapidity and scale of contemporary socio-ecological transformations. But
historical-geographical enquiries of this sort also put in perspective
those claims typically advanced by some ecologists that once upon a time
"people everywhere knew how to live in harmony with the natural world"
(Goldsmith 1992: xvii) and to view with skepticism Bookchin's (1990a: 97)
equally dubious claim that "a relatively self-sufficient community, visibly
dependent on its environment for the means of life, would gain a new
respect for the organic interrelationships that sustain it." Much
contemporary "ecologically conscious" rhetoric pays far too much attention
to what indigenous groups say without looking at what they do. We cannot
conclude, for example, that native-American practices are ecologically
superior to ours from statements such as those of Luther Standing Bear that:

We are of the soil and the soil is of us. We love the birds and the beasts
that grew with us on this soil. They drank the same water as we did and
breathed the same air. We are all one in nature. Believing so, there was in
our hearts a great peace and a welling kindness for all living, growing
things. (Cited in Booth and Jacobs, 1990: 27)

The inference of "better and more harmonious ecological practices" from
statements of this sort would require belief in either some external
spiritual guidance to ensure ecologically "right" outcomes, or an
extraordinary omniscience in indigenous or pre-capitalistic judgments and
practices in a dynamic field of action that is usually plagued by all
manner of unintended consequences. "The possibility of over-exploitation of
a resource is perfectly compatible with our notion of peoples living close
to nature, observing and acting accordingly" (Haila and Levins, 1992: 195).
Furthermore, "comparative studies have suggested that all high
civilizations that incorporated intensification strategies were metastable
and that their growth trajectories can be interpreted as those of
accelerating energy extraction, to the point that both the ecosystem and
the socioeconomic structures were stretched to capacity; with steady or
declining absolute caloric productivity and input-output ratios" (Butzer,
1982: 320). All societies have had their share of ecologically based
difficulties and, as Butzer goes on to assert, we have much to learn from
studying them.

Indigenous or pre-capitalist practices are not, therefore, necessarily
superior or inferior to our own just because such groups possess discourses
that avow respect for nature rather than the modem "Promethean~' attitude
of domination or mastery (see Leiss, 1974). Grundmann (1991a) is surely
correct in his argument contra Benton (1989; 1992) that the thesis of
"mastery over nature" (laying aside its gendered overtones for the moment)
does not necessarily entail destructiveness; it can just as easily lead to
loving, caring, and nurturing practices. It was, as we have already noted,
precisely the intent of the esthetic tradition to assert "mastery without
tyranny" with respect to the natural world. Uncritical acceptance of
"ecologically conscious" sounding statements can, furthermore, be
politically misleading. Luther Standing Bear prefaced the thoughts cited
above with the very political argument that "this land of the great plains
is claimed by the Lakota as their very own." Native-Americans may well have
strong claims to land rights, to the use of the landscape as a mnemonic
upon which to hand their sense of historical identity, but the creation of
an "ecologically conscious" rhetoric about a privileged relation to the
land to support them is, as we have already argued, an all-too-familiar and
dangerous practice.

Inspection of the historical-geographical record reveals much about why
words like "nature" and "environment" contain "Such an extraordinary amount
of human history' (Williams, 1980: 67). The intertwinings of social and
ecological projects in daily practices as well as in the realms of
ideology, representations, esthetics, and the like are such as to make
every social (including literary or artistic) project a project about
nature, environment, and ecosystem, and vice versa. Such a proposition
should not, surely, be too hard for those working in the historical
materialist tradition to swallow. Marx argued, after all, that we can
discover who and what we are (our species potential, even) only through
transforming the world around us and in so doing put the dialectics of
social and ecological change at the center of all human history. But is
there some way to create a general enough language to capture that
dialectical evolutionary movement?

III. Towards an Evolutionary View

We badly need a much more unified language than we currently possess for
exercising the joint responsibility towards nature that resides with the
social and biological/physical sciences. The question of the unity of
science has, of course, been broached many times - not least by Marx
(1964). But serious problems have arisen on the social theory side whenever
a biological basis has been invoked (familiar examples include the way
social Darwinism founded Nazism, the profound social antagonisms generated
in the debate over sociobiology and the dismal history of the eugenics
movement particularly as applied to racial categories). The response on the
social science side has often been to retreat from any examination of the
ecological side of social projects and act as if these either did not
matter or as if they had to be construed as something "external" to
enquiry. I want to argue that this is not satisfactory and that ways have
to be found to create if not a common language, then means to translate
across discursive domains. This is, however, dangerous territory - an open
field for organicist or holistic rather than dialectical modes of thinking
- and it may require deep shifts in ontological and epistemological stances
on both the social and natural scientific sides, if it is to succeed.

But the territory cannot be left empty of all thought about how to approach
the problem. With this in mind let me propose a dialectical and relational
schema for thinking through how to understand the dialectics of
socialenvironmental change. The simplest schema is to break down the
evolutionary process into four distinctive facets:

1. Competition and the struggle for existence (the production of hierarchy
	and homogeneity).

2. Adaptation and diversification into environmental niches (the production
of diversity).

3. Collaboration, cooperation, and mutual aid (the production of social
	forms).

4. Environmental transformations (the production of nature).

I want to treat these as relational categories rather than mutually
exclusive processes and thereby to insist that each internalizes effects of
the others. Thus socio-biologists are correct when they argue that
cooperation ("reciprocal altruism" is their preferred term) is in some
sense an adaptive form of competition. The difficulty is that they make the
competitive moment the shaping moment of all else (always a convenient
gesture given the ideological struggle to "naturalize" capitalism) and use
adaptation to absorb collaboration within the competitive framework. This
is an excellent example of that habit analyzed in chapter 4, of converting
internal relations among moments into hierarchical causal structures almost
without noticing it. But from a relational point of view competition can
just as easily be seen as a form of cooperation. The example of
territoriality examined in chapter 7, is an interesting case in point. But
is it not also a fundamental tenet of the liberal theory of capitalism that
rampant competition between individuals produces a collaborative social
effect called "society?" Adaptation and diversification of species and
activities into special niches is also a form of both competition and
collaboration and the effect is to transform environments in ways that may
make the latter more rather than less diverse. Species may diversify
further creating more diversified niches. The production of a more
diversified nature in turn produces greater diversity of species.

The example of the liberal theory of capitalism, however weakly implanted
it is in practice and however ideological its content, can be pressed
further into service here to alert us to something else important. For
within that theory it is not simply competition that matters, but the
particular mode of competition, the rules and regulations that ensure that
only one sort of competition - that within freely functioning markets
respecting property rights and freedom of contract - will prevail. From
this perspective it seems as if the normal causal ordering implied in
socio-biology gets reversed because it is only through the collaborative
and cooperative structures of society (however coerced) that competition
and the struggle for existence can be orchestrated to do its work. But the
point here is not to change the causal ordering and thereby to make it seem
as if society (the mode of cooperation) has in some way contained nature
(competition, adaptation, and environmental change). It is much more
appropriate to suggest that competition is always regulated in important
ways by the effects internalized within it of cooperation, adaptation, and
environmental transformations. Thinking in these terms allows us better to
see how a particular kind of environmental transformation (such as the
great water projects of the US west) affects both the mode of competition
(within society as well as between species) and the mode of
collaboration/adaptation. Capitalistic competition consequently means
something quite different in the agribusiness sector in California compared
to, say, dairy producers in Wisconsin, because the forms of environmental
transformation have been so radically different in the two places.

I will not elaborate much further on this idea, but it should be apparent
that there are different modes of competition, adaptation, cooperation, and
environmental transformation. Given the relational/dialectical theory
advanced in chapters 2-4, it should also be plain that each facet of the
overall process internalizes a great deal of heterogeneity within itself
Such heterogeneity is a source of contradiction, tension, and conflict,
sparking intense struggles for stability, hegemony, and control. A mode of
production, in Marx's sense, can then be construed as a particular
regulated unity of these different modalities. The transition from one mode
of production entails transformations in all modalities in relation to each
other, including, of course, the nature of the nature produced.

What I am proposing here is a way of depicting the fundamental physical and
biological conditions and processes that work through all social, cultural,
economic projects to create a tangible historical geography and to do it in
such a way as not to render those physical and biological elements as a
banal and passive background to human historical geography. But my purpose
is also to specify these conditions and processes in such a way as to
understand the possibilities for collective human activity in negotiating
through these fundamental elements to generate significantly diverse
outcomes of the sort that a Marxist theory of historical-geographical
development envisages. Given, for example, the four "moments" in the
biological evolutionary process, then organisms of any sort (most
particularly the human species) can work with the moments of competition,
adaptation, cooperation, and environmental modification in a variety of
ways to produce radically different outcomes (such as quite different modes
of production). "No natural laws can be done away with," Marx wrote in a
letter to Kugelman in 1868, but "what can change, in historically different
circumstances, is only the form in which these laws operate." What we have
to pay attention to, therefore, is the particular way in which organisms
(again, of any sort) work with these quite different possibilities in
dynamic and interactive ways. And to do that requires that somehow the
artificial break between "society' and "nature" must be eroded, rendered
porous, and eventually dissolved.

While my language here is highly abstract and general, I do not find it
hard to set this style of thinking into motion, to differentiate it
further, to capture some of the ways in which the natural and social flow
into each other without falling back into the typical reductionism of
socio-biology. And there are plenty of hints that this is not necessarily
an isolated way of looking at the problem. When, for example, Callon (1986)
analyzes the difficulties of developing the domestication of scallop
fishing in St Brieuc Bay, he treats the scallop as an active agent in the
whole process, thereby breaching the common protocol that says the question
of agency is confined within the social sphere. And in so doing he opens up
the fluid way in which competition, collaboration (alliance formation),
adaptation, and environmental transformation all run into each other as
part of a more general process of socio-environmental change. Bateson
(1988) likewise points out the different ways in which all species
(including human beings) can affect subsequent evolution through their
behavior. Animals make active choices and by their behavior change the
physical and social conditions with which their descendants have to cope.
They also modify their behavior in response to changed conditions and by
moving expose themselves to new conditions that open up different
possibilities for evolutionary change. Lewontin (1982) likewise argues for
understanding a whole set of processes in which organisms "are not simply
objects of the laws of nature, altering themselves to bend to the
inevitable, but active subjects transforming nature according to its laws."
Through efforts such as these, the uneasy boundary between the social and
the natural worlds will surely be dissolved, as indeed it must, and
analysis brought to the point where we might lose our fears of "biological
determination" by recognizing, as Fuss (1989) so powerfully argues in her
discussion of essentialism in feminism, that the distinction between
biological essentialism and social construction is in is itself a false
construction that thoroughly deserves to be dissolved. Haraway (1995) has
produced some exemplary work on the practical and material dissolution of
this boundary in social and scientific practices. But she also pays careful
attention to how strictly that boundary gets policed in our thoughts, in
our disciplines, and in our courses and provides food for thought as to
what configurations of corporate and state power have most to gain from
that policing. And it is through a critical understanding of how such power
relations play out in politicalecological debates that we can arrive at a
deeper conception of what ecosocialist politics might be all about.

IV. Towards an Ecosocialist Politics

Defining a proper ground for a socialist approach to
environmental-ecological politics has proven a peculiarly difficult
problem. In part this has to do with the way in which the socialist-Marxist
movement took over from capitalism a strongly productivist ethic and a
broadly instrumental approach to a supposedly distinct natural world and
sought a transformation of social relations on the basis of a further
liberation of the productive forces. It has subsequently proven hard to
wean Marxism away from a rather hubristic view of the domination of nature
thesis. In addition, Marxism has shared with much of bourgeois social
science a general abhorrence of the idea that "nature" can control
determine, or even limit any kind of human endeavor. In so doing it has
either avoided a definition of any foundational view of nature altogether,
or resorted to a rather too simplistic rhetoric about "the humanization of
nature" backed by a dialectical and historical materialism that somehow
absorbed the problem by appeal to a set of epistemological/ontological
principles. And in those rare cases when Marxists have taken the material
biological and physical conditions of existence as foundational to their
materialism, they have either lapsed into some form of environmental
determinism (as in the case of Wittfogel, 1953) or into a damaging
materialist pessimism (Timpanaro, 1970; Benton, 1989). The effect has been
to create a polarity within Marxism between "materialist triumphalism and
materialist pessimism" (Williams, 1978: 9) that uncomfortably reflects the
bourgeois habit of taking the triumphalist path when all goes right and
invoking Malthusian limits when things go wrong.

So while there have been numerous principled writings in the Marxist
tradition on the question of nature, beginning with Engels' The Dialectics
of...