[Xmca-l] Re: Rio Tinto Zinc

Tue Sep 15 08:58:27 PDT 2020

> capitalism, and hence the idea of nature as capital, is no universal stage (contrary to what Stalin taught).

This happens to be something I’ve been thinking about recently — the ‘evitability’ (avoidability, as opposed to inevitability) of capitalism. I’ve been reading some of the work of Douglass North, who won a Nobel prize in economics in 1993 for his analysis of the role that institutions have played in economic ‘development,’ He thought  he was describing how the West achieved ‘progress’ and has been able to ‘evolve’ further than other regions, but one can read his work as describing alternative pathways in the formation of economic systems, which in the West has led to an imbalance in which profit and growth have become the only measures of societal and individual achievement.

A neat illustration: the NY Times has been publishing reflections upon an article written 50 years ago by Milton Friedman titled "The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." Friedman wrote:

WHEN I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free‐enterprise system,” I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at, the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or any one else took them seriously— preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

It will be hard to find a better statement of the ideology that has got us all into the current mess.

On the left, was it with Lenin that capitalism became viewed as a necessary prerequisite to socialism? For example, as I understand it after the revolution in Mexico, 1910-1920, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) worked hard to turn the indigenous peoples into a proletariat. This was the only way they could imagine societal progress: quickly moving the country into capitalism so as to achieve socialism. I conclude that it was not only Stalin who taught this. 

Martin

> On Sep 14, 2020, at 9:57 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If you click on the link that Henry, and before him John, offered, you get the pro-natural-capital side of a debate in the pages of the Guardian on whether or not "nature" can be valued as capital and whether it is good or bad for nature for humans to do this. I think that in CHAT, we are indebted to Marx for many things, but surely one debt we would do well not to disavow is Marx's insistence (in Critique of the Gotha programme and elsewhere) that nature is NOT capital: on the contrary, humans and all of their various property forms from communism to capitalism must be considered peculiar forms of nature. This is a discussion that CHAT needs to have if we are going to retain the AT in CHAT. I disagree with Peter Jones on many many things, but one thing I heartily agree with him on is the idea that Leontiev brings an intensely anti-naturalistic view of activity into activity theory--humans acting as subjects on passive environments to produce beneficial outcomes. 
> 
> Marx had a better idea: in the Ethnological Notebooks, he shows us that capitalism, and hence the idea of nature as capital, is no universal stage (contrary to what Stalin taught). Western capitalism, with its idea of nature as capital, is really  just one extreme variant. In Marx's columns on the Sepoy rebellion and the Taiping rebellion, he even posits an "Asiantic mode of production" that had virtually nothing to do with feudalism. So to say that South Korea and Japan are equally capitalist societies is really a little like saying that China and the USSR were equally non-capitalist. Deus Sive Natura: and neither one is capital. 
> 
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
> 
> New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
> Realizations: non-causal but real relationships in and between Halliday, Hasan, and Vygotsky
> 
> Some free e-prints today available at: 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!XcuQOyOqMxTd153TtrwylO5Y4zRrspjvlGqhS0EmHS-bM1cU84MXl31zfD7qRun3CF4-Mg$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!W-RPX1ECIuKav0e-i1es3roVHR0WUtjgmoG2iARQqbybBsxElYTIACu53v3cWm487oUiBw$>
> 
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!XcuQOyOqMxTd153TtrwylO5Y4zRrspjvlGqhS0EmHS-bM1cU84MXl31zfD7qRukwoAsVGg$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!W-RPX1ECIuKav0e-i1es3roVHR0WUtjgmoG2iARQqbybBsxElYTIACu53v3cWm7NjX5sJQ$>
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 3:43 AM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com <mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Martin, John and Andy
> Thanks to Martin for kicking off this topic and John and Andy for following up. I has amazed me to find, for me, how the RTZ narrative resonates with both Navajo and Pueblo narratives here in New Mexico. How evil RTZ  is, but how wonderful the courage of our native peoples!
> 
> Chaco Canyon IS a tourist destination here in New Mexico. Though there has been no destruction of the site that, based on Native American narratives and the efforts of archeologists, is architecturally spectacular evidence of the pre-Colombian culture from which the present-day Pueblos come. What parallels RTZ activities on aboriginal lands in Australia is the drilling for gas and oil on Navajo lands surrounding Chaco and a rush to buy more rights while Trump is in power. There have been protests, though nothing as intense and effective as the Standing Rock protests to protect water on native lands to our north and east from gas and oil predation (the pipeline). Standing Rock was LED by Native Americans, many from the Navajo, Apache and Pueblo near me.
> 
> I just saw yesterday a 30-year-old film that is one of the offerings of the Vision Maker Film Festival: Clear Cut. I recommend it, or at least a look at the wiki article about it. It couldn’t be more timely. It’s messy, where contention between environmental and logging interests and division WITHIN the native community (traditon vs. jobs) leave one stunned. What redeems a messy struggle is exactly what Andy says: The aboriginal people of the world do it for us! In the same way, when “our” Pueblos put on feasts and invite us in to witness their dances, they do it for us. Perhaps you recall the movie “Koyaniskaatsi”, la Hopi word that has been translated as "life out of balance". (The Hopis are a Puebloan people, descendants of the Chacoan culture. The Navajos and Apaches arrived here about the same time as the European colonizers, based on linguistic and genetic evidence.) If you live in New Mexico, you are around Pueblo people. If you are really lucky, and many of us are, you become friends with them and they invite you to share their food at the feasts! How generous is this? They do it for us. 
> 
> The RTZ narrative is not only destructive to cultural capital, it is implicated in natural capital (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/nov/23/monbiot-natural-capital-wrong-conservation__;!!Mih3wA!XcuQOyOqMxTd153TtrwylO5Y4zRrspjvlGqhS0EmHS-bM1cU84MXl31zfD7qRunxNKomhQ$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/nov/23/monbiot-natural-capital-wrong-conservation__;!!Mih3wA!SBdL369rv5LA2eUVglK7x1RO_gnzeKTtEL3aixjV1TAMOI-HkqMNbHUWvJAN5h7atm8Krw$>) via climate change. (The link here, to a Guardian article is available through the first link in John’s post). Here again we should look to our native peoples. There is credible research that concludes the climate change lengthens fire seasons but wrong-headed environmental policies make the fires more intense, hence less controllable. Add to this the incursion of housing into forested areas and the destruction is a doubly self-inflicted wound. And hold on for this one for the best CHAT connection: Native peoples of this continent used to set controlled burns to remove the kind of unburnt fuel to avoid such conflagrations. Today some of  the best-trained and most effective firefighters in this country are Native Americans. Cultural capital. They do it for us, and their example from the past can serve us now. Cultural capital. 
> 
> I believe I have crowed before about New Mexico and our Native Americans. Australia has crowing rights as well. And, for standing proud, there’s nothing like an anthem. The best anthem music I have EVER heard comes from Australia: Yothu Yindi What a great project that brings together white people and people of color. What great creative collaboration. Andy, I am telling you again, project is a great unit of analysis, precisely because it brings together cognition and affect, because it embodies active orientation. In my country, it is pretty well agreed that the natives got screwed, across the political divide. Black Lives Matter is more complex, but there is hope that the question of race is now where LGBTQ issues were at the time of the AIDS crisis, in the last century. Back then we could never have guessed we would be where we are with non-gender-conforming acceptance now. Just saying, as much for myself as for anybody else listening. 
> 
> La Era Está Pariendo Un Corazón
> Henry
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
>> On Sep 13, 2020, at 8:09 PM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> Er. " NO physical markers"
>> 
>> Andy Blunden
>> Hegel for Social Movements <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://brill.com/view/title/54574__;!!Mih3wA!S5K6-3pAdjVKLQOipHOtp4mkhFhXR1sxkXKZDQnO0A7C1xQKXN0SUjkqI9KbXmCMTCf0iQ$>
>> Home Page <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm__;!!Mih3wA!S5K6-3pAdjVKLQOipHOtp4mkhFhXR1sxkXKZDQnO0A7C1xQKXN0SUjkqI9KbXmDbUUpHdA$>
>> On 14/09/2020 11:43 am, Andy Blunden wrote:
>>> Firstly, an apology. I replied on the list before noticing that John had already responded, and John is much better informed than me about these matters, and yet I spoke as if he didn't exist. My apologies.
>>> 
>>> These caves are nothing for tourism. They are too remote and there are others more accessible. I believe the caves have been under Native Title as a result of a bitter struggle to protect them by the local people in the 1990s. This means that RTZ had to get permission from the PKK people. The lawyers swindled them.
>>> 
>>> In my view, all these sites which are not only part of Aboriginal heritage (there are places which have NO physical markers of their status but are sacred to the local people) but self-evidently of world heritage. But I don't think these caves were registered as World Heritage. I have not heard the discussion about this (John?). No-one wants to say this, I think, because it implies that Indigenous values are somehow less important than human values. For example, under the law as it stands the PKK Land Council would have a right to let RTZ destroy the caves and maybe a million dollars or two in the bank or a new school, would be enough. This is not a hypothetical. One of the reasons that the Indigenous people remain impoverished even where they have Native Title over large areas of land, is that they live, after all, in a capitalist country and Native title cannot be sold. It is not a commodity. Therefore it is not a form of wealth. You can't get a mortgage to build a house on land you own by Native title.  You can't sell a block to a farmer so you can buy agricultural equipment to farm another block. In short, by blocking the Indigenous people from monetising their land rights we trap them in poverty. In general, the indigenous people are happy to forgo tourist income to protect their sacred sites (e.g. Uluru) and I don't doubt for an instant, that if they'd been properly consulted they never would have agreed to the destruction of the caves. Obviously. But they do have to have rights to trade with their land. But also the world needs to keep absolutely unique archaeological sites pristine and the local people should be supported by governments to do the work of protecting them on our behalf. Recognising the great cost entailed.
>>> 
>>> Andy
>>> Andy Blunden
>>> Hegel for Social Movements <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://brill.com/view/title/54574__;!!Mih3wA!XARa5o_f0_F8FwoOvEi2G83w7OupjEw0Qs4sAopd9iMJNxF19MT9A4BOkNVcEAAZnw4ahQ$>
>>> Home Page <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm__;!!Mih3wA!XARa5o_f0_F8FwoOvEi2G83w7OupjEw0Qs4sAopd9iMJNxF19MT9A4BOkNVcEABlTgxfKw$>
>>> On 14/09/2020 4:53 am, Martin Packer wrote:
>>>> Thanks, John and Andy,
>>>> 
>>>> I suppose that I am naive, for this event astonishes me in so many different ways. I would have assumed that the land title or native title granted to indigenous peoples over some territory in Australia would have included the Juuken Gorge caves. I would have assumed that these caves were a national cultural heritage site, or even a world cultural heritage site. I would have assumed that indigenous rights would have more importance to the Australian government, and indeed to the Australian people. I would have assumed that, while mining is apparently of great economic importance to the country, the government would have considered the economic value of this site for tourism, or simply the impact that destroying the caves would have on Australia’s reputation. And while I suppose that unbridled rapaciousness on the part of an international mining company is hardly a surprise, I would have thought that Rio Tinto would also have considered the negative publicity that their actions would create.
>>>> 
>>>> How can we express our displeasure to the various parties involved? Are there petitions that one can sign? Or Twitter accounts to which one can tweet?
>>>> 
>>>> I wonder how much the salary is of (ex) CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques, if his bonus this year would have been A$4.9 million. Perhaps he could donate a few years of his salary to establish a foundation that could work for indigenous peoples’ rights.
>>>> 
>>>> sadly 
>>>> 
>>>> Martin
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sep 12, 2020, at 8:59 PM, John Cripps Clark <john.crippsclark@deakin.edu.au <mailto:john.crippsclark@deakin.edu.au>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> The destruction of the Juunken Gorge caves (which I assume you are referring to) is a much more villainous act than was originally portrayed and reflects the venal racism not only of the company but also of the State Government. For those not familiar with this shocking crime, the $80b Anglo Australian mining company which on Sunday 24th of May blew up a site sacred to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) traditional owners and occupied for 46,000 years at least, to extend iron ore mining. "“It’s one of the most sacred sites in the Pilbara region … we wanted to have that area protected,” PKKP director Burchell Hayes. The traditional owners tried desperately to stop the blast once they became aware it was impending.
>>>>> 
>>>>> At the time Rio Tinto claimed "Clearly there was a misunderstanding" but and, after much outrage, the three members of the executive had their multi million dollar bonuses reduced. It has subsequently emerged that Rio Tinto had contracted lawyers to oppose any injunctions before the crime was committed. The chief executive and two of his underlings have resigned.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The crime was legal and was made possible by State Government laws which are stacked in favour of miners. Assessments of the cultural and environmental significance are made with little investigation and remain in place for decades and have rarely been successfully be challenged. No permission to destroy heritage sites in WA has been refused (and there have been 463 applications). https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-31/wa-heritage-destroyed-by-rio-tinto-example-of-national-trend/12305298__;!!Mih3wA!Q80d_k7DkHBzzs0yi4W5IfiSTlRupZ8XOxiOsNcARSHE8ZZrLW7G-oWoAnKstsuUT5a7UQ$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-31/wa-heritage-destroyed-by-rio-tinto-example-of-national-trend/12305298__;!!Mih3wA!Q80d_k7DkHBzzs0yi4W5IfiSTlRupZ8XOxiOsNcARSHE8ZZrLW7G-oWoAnKstsuUT5a7UQ$> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> It is not as if we didn’t know that this would happen. Norway's pension fund divested their holdings in Rio Tinto in 2008: "Exclusion of a company from the Fund reflects our unwillingness to run an unacceptable risk of contributing to grossly unethical conduct. The Council on Ethics has concluded that Rio Tinto is directly involved, through its participation in the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, in the severe environmental damage caused by that mining operation."
>>>>>    — Kristin Halvorsen, Norwegian Minister of Finance
>>>>> 
>>>>> A useful background briefing of indigenous rights in Australia: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/features/in-the-shadow-of-terra-nullius/__;!!Mih3wA!Q80d_k7DkHBzzs0yi4W5IfiSTlRupZ8XOxiOsNcARSHE8ZZrLW7G-oWoAnKstssDCtcsSw$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/features/in-the-shadow-of-terra-nullius/__;!!Mih3wA!Q80d_k7DkHBzzs0yi4W5IfiSTlRupZ8XOxiOsNcARSHE8ZZrLW7G-oWoAnKstssDCtcsSw$> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 13/9/20, 12:26 am, "xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Martin Packer" <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of mpacker@cantab.net <mailto:mpacker@cantab.net>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>    Andy, what on earth has Rio Tinto Zinc been up to??
>>>>> 
>>>>>    Martin
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Important Notice: The contents of this email are intended solely for the named addressee and are confidential; any unauthorised use, reproduction or storage of the contents is expressly prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please delete it and any attachments immediately and advise the sender by return email or telephone.
>>>>> 
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>>>>> 
>>>> 
> 

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