Malthus/Thanksgiving

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Melvin wrote:
> Everything is involved and in this sense Mark Jones suggestion to proceed
> backwards from communism has not been understood as a profound militant
> materialism, although he inadvertently slips into Neo-Malthusianism.

Melvin, neither I nor Mark Jones when was alive were "Malthusian", neo or
otherwise. Karl Marx was keenly aware of ecological limits. In his age the
crisis revolved around soil fertility. Soil exhaustion had become so
generalized in Europe that scavengers would go out into the battlefields
during the Napoleonic wars and gather up the bones of dead soldiers to turn
into fertilizer. Great Britain became involved in "guano wars" in Peru and
Ecuador in order to guarantee a supply of fertilizer.

Marx believed that this crisis was related to a "metabolic rift" that had
been identified by soil chemist Justus von Liebig. Liebig identified
growing contradictions in agriculture that were directly related to the
industrial revolution and the growth of modern cities. Marx and Engels
regarded London as an ecological catastrophe, even though they did not use
that word. They observed the ships coming into harbor loaded up with guano
whose noxious smell could be detected for miles, while at the same time
noting that the streets were open sewers at the very same time. There was
only solution for this crisis in their eyes was the reintegration of human
and animals as suppliers of organic fertilizers with the farms.

In the Communist Manifesto, they include the demand: "Combination of
agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the
distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the
populace over the country."

In the strict technical sense, this demand is integrated with what can be
called a *critique of civilization* that permeates their work. It is
important to understand what this means. This does not mean a call for
cannibalism, Pol Pot-ism, howling at the moon or worshiping corn goddesses.
Rather it refers to an understanding that urban life (civitas means city,
which gives rise to the word 'civilization') is not environmentally
sustainable.

This is difficult for some leftists and Marxists to come to terms with. In
some circles, urban life is considered some kind of advance over "rural
idiocy", a term that crops up in the Communist Manifesto. A recent MR
editorial pointed out that this term does not do justice to Marx's
intention, which was to describe "isolation" rather than something out of
the move "Deliverance". So if the rural area was isolated, Marx's intention
was never to drag the peasants into the city and become maquila employees,
where they could enjoy the benefits of X-rated videos and Coca-Cola.
Instead he sought to break down these divisions entirely.

I would recommend Thomas Patterson's "Inventing Western Civilization",
which I reviewed for Science and Society in a previous lifetime. Patterson
shows how the term came into being during the late 19th century as part of
the efforts of French and Scottish intelligentsia to explain the
superiority of the capitalist system, especially vis-a-vis the peoples they
were in the process of raping and pillaging. Starting with Rousseau, you
find critics of civilization. Marx and Engels were the first to incorporate
that critique with historical materialism:

Origins of the Family:
"With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which
gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by
setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing
them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this,
sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth
and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy
individual - here was its one and final aim."


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org