[PEN-L:7332] Re: Harvey, Leibniz & Marx

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

Lou,
      Hmmm.
      Well, there is a serious question about when
capitalism really began.  As near as I can tell, this
problem of the separation of the city from the countryside
(and the ecological destruction arising therefrom) dates
back to the initial emergence of true cities about
5,000 years ago.  Although most of these cities arose
in centralized states ruled by god-kings (like pharoahs)
they also involved a critical dependence on long distance
trade, the agents of which were certainly doing it to make
money and profit, nascent capitalism if you will, arguably
peripheral but crucial nevertheless.
      Among the crucial items in such long distance trade
were copper and tin used to make bronze, as these were
bronze age cities and the use of bronze lay at the base of
their military and economic domination of their neighbors
and rural hinterlands.  In the Med, some of that tin was coming
from as far away as southern Britain, with Stonehenge apparently
having been originally built by the exporters of such tin.
      A good, if dated, account of all this from a Marxist perspective
can be found in V. Gordon Childe, _ What Happened in History_,
1942, Hammondsworth: Penguin.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, May 27, 1999 2:06 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:7322] Harvey, Leibniz & Marx


>Doug Henwood:
>>There's a very interesting article by J. Donald Hughes on the Mayan
>>collapse in the March 1999 issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism. (For a
>>journal edited by a "confused old man," CNS is pretty damn sharp.) Well
>>before the arrival of the Europeans, the Mayans were living in cities and
>>massively altering the landscape  with irrigation, quarrying, and the
>>manufacture of ceramics.
>
>J. Donald Hughes is the author of "Pan's Travails: Environmental Problems
>of the Ancient Greeks and Romans." He argues that past civilizations may
>have had a pantheistic love of  nature, but polluted and exploited the
>environment much like modern societies do. He discovered that the
>city-building Greeks and Romans cut down surrounding forests and fouled the
>air by smelting lead. Hunter-gatherer groups did not deplete their
>resources because the land had to sustain them from year to year. But
>migrating societies often overhunted and let their herds overgraze.
>
>None of this is particularly new, nor unique. Simon Schama, the right-wing
>professor here at Columbia University wrote a book titled "Landscape and
>Memory" that makes many of the same points, while also making some that
>Cronon has made.
>
>What Hughes, Schama and Cronon all lack is an understanding of the
>particular nature of the capitalist system, whose logic dictates a
>completely different set of environmental consequences. As Marxist such as
>Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster--and Marx himself--have taken great
>pains to point out, commodity production requires a totally different
>relationship to nature.
>
>By effacing the all-important question of M-C-M, Hughes and company create
>universals out of "mankind", "nature" and "progress" that effectively
>militate against socialist politics. Perhaps CNS provides a space for
>Hughes to publish his sort of scholarship for the very reason that it
>rejects mine.
>As far as O'Connor's confusion is concerned, I want to retract what I said.
>He appears very clear about his goals.
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
>