You and Doug approach this as if we were talking about life-style. I can
understand this. This is generally how people first react to the CM demand,
as if they were being asked to give up Starbucks or something. It is not
about this primarily. It is about addressing a fundamental problem in
agriculture and ecology. The rise of the modern city was facilitated by the
removal of the agrarian population. Then, the livestock was separated from
the farm where crops were grown. This was made possible by modern
transportation systems, sophisticated financing schemes, chemical
fertilizer, mechanized plowing and reaping, etc. In the meantime, all of
these 'advances' were made possible by the creation of modern urban
industrial centers. With every "success" of the capitalist system, there
was an environmental penalty. Marx wrote about this, as did Bebel,
Bukharin, Kautsky and many other lesser known Marxists. Our problem is that
most of the research into these questions is being done by by mainstream
greens like Lester Brown's Worldwatch, while the militant opposition comes
from fuzzy-minded anarchists or deep ecologists. And where are the
self-declared Marxists? Mostly standing around with their thumbs up their
asses worrying about whether they'll still be able to enjoy their morning
Starbucks.
6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the
wageearner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and
civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually
completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both
quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid
holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and
qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent
to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content
by capitalist commercialization). This genuine extension of needs is
a corollary of the necessary civilizing function of capital. Any
rejection of the so-called 'consumer society' which moves beyond
justified condemnation of the commercialization and dehumanization
of consumption by capitalism to attack the historical extension of
needs and consumption in general (i.e., moves from social criticism
to a critique of civilization), turns back the clock from scientific
to utopian socialism and from historical materialism to idealism.
Marx fully appreciated and stressed the civilizing function of
capital, which he saw as the necessary preparation of the material
basis for a 'rich individuality'. The following passage from the
Grundrisse makes this view very clear: 'Capital's ceaseless striving
towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits
of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements
for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided
in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also
therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development
of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form
has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the
place of the natural one.'
For socialists, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can
therefore never imply rejection of the extension and differentiation
of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural state of
these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich
individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this rational Marxist
sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can only mean:
rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production which
continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and
one-sided. This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship
between the production of goods and human labour, which is
determined by the commodity form under capitalism, so that
henceforth the main goal of economic activity is not the maximum
production of things and the maximum private profit for each
individual unit of production (factory or company), but the optimum
self-activity of the individual person. The production of goods must
be subordinated to this goal, which means the elimination of forms
of production and labour which damage human health and man's natural
environment, even if they are 'profitable' in isolation. At the same
time, it must be remembered that man as a material being with
material needs cannot achieve the full development of a 'rich
individuality' through asceticism, self-castigation and artificial
self-limitation, but only through the rational development of his
consumption, consciously controlled and consciously (i.e.,
democratically) subordinated to his collective interests.
Marx himself deliberately pointed out the need to work out a system
of needs, which has nothing to do with the neo-asceticism peddled in
some circles as Marxist orthodoxy. In the Grundrisse Marx says: 'The
exploration of the earth in all directions, to discover new things
of use as well as new useful qualities of the old; such as new
qualities of them as raw materials; the development, hence, of the
natural sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery,
creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself;
the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being,
production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs,
because rich in qualities and relations - production of this being
as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in
order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable
of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree - is likewise a
condition of production founded on capital. This creation of new
branches of production, i.e., the creation of qualitatively new
surplus time, is not merely the division of labour, but is rather
the creation, separate from a given production, of labour with a new
use-value; the development of a constantly extending and more
comprehensive system of different kinds of labour, different kinds
of production, to which a constantly expanding and enriched system
of needs corresponds. Thus just as production founded on capital
creates universal industriousness on one side - i.e., surplus
labour, value-creating labour - so does it create on the other side
a system of general exploitation of natural and human qualities, a
system of general utility, utilizing science itself just as much as
all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing
higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle
of social production and exchange.'