> On Feb 16, 2025, at 10:09 AM, Charlie via groups.io
> <charles1848=sbcglobal....@groups.io> wrote:
>
> What is this "rift in the global left on ecology"? A review of two books does
> not qualify as documentation of one.
There's always a rift on the left, Charlie. Here's JBF's take on the ecological
rift between various flavors of academic Marxism:
https://johnbellamyfoster.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016_Marxism_in_the_Anthropocene.pdf.
Paul Burkett's Marx and Nature taught me a Marx that I did not know. At lot of
our understanding of Marx and Engles came via the USSR, a country that set out
to out-produce the west before discovering that it could not. There is a notion
of a "Promethium" or "Productivist" Marx that wrote that the
"... country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less
developed, the image of its own future."
Many believe today that this is not the case since we cannot export the 21st
century lifestyle of the west to the rest of the world. Our ecosystems will not
support that. What's more, authors such as Burkett, JBF, and Saito argue that
this would not be a surprise to Marx. They analyzed what Marx and Engels wrote
in published works and unpublished manuscripts to argue that Marx's
appreciation for metabolic rift (e.g. separation and town and country) would
temper his enthusiasm for destructive productive forces.
And this calls into question another quotation from Marx's 1859 Critique of
Political Economy:
"At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society
come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely
expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the
framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of
the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an
era of social revolution."
To Kohei Saito, the takeaway from this quote is not that Marx's believes that
capitalism's production forces are always historically progressive,
particularly when it comes to ecosystems that they destroy.
> The big rift is in the ecological movement, between reform under capitalism
> and socialist revolution as the only way out.
In the review that I originally posted
(https://spectrejournal.com/class-struggle-against-growth/), which side is
which in your estimation?
> One side says we cannot "wait" for socialism. The other side says we join you
> in struggle for any sane measures, and at the same time we do all we can to
> overthrow capitalism.
Sane people can disagree about "sane measures." Matt Huber thinks it's sane to
mobilize electrical workers in an effort to build centralized electrical
systems based on nuclear reactors. This thread began with a post referencing
Simon Pirani's article advocating rooftop solar distributed energy systems.
Pirani has a different opinion of what a socialist state might do for energy:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2024.2384789?utm_source=chatgpt.com#abstract.
> But what will a socialist state do, you will ask.
Maybe a socialist state, while it's busy dyin', will turn to a variety of
approaches that we cannot anticipate once the fetters of capital are removed;
hopefully the problems have been debated; solutions decided and then
implemented by a highly-organized and conscious working class. We don't want
any more Aral Seas drying up, do we?
But why is the policy of a socialist state our problem now? I think our
immediate task is build a movement that is massive enough to confront the
rapacious, murderous, and most powerful sector of world capital, fossil
capital, in order to stop their corporate and political control of the US
energy market. There are more pressing questions, I think, about how we
organize ourselves to appropriate fossil capital, counter the reactionary
assault if we ever achieve some success, and how we would implement and govern
the process of meeting immediate needs while reducing them and transitioning to
less destructive alternatives.
Mark
> It can immediately implement many of those sane measures. Then what? You can
> talk about long-term fundamental reorientations, but contention between this
> idea and that one inevitably remains in the teapot for now. (But don't heat
> the teapot too much; not only does it consume energy, it generates a lot of
> hot air. 😉)
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