*In a mad rush for the front door, Phil elbows his way past the xmca
bouncer to point out several other blatant Dillonesque fallacies*
At 09:30 PM 4/24/01 -0700, PD wrote:
>Now perhaps a socialist economics could develop on the basis of socialist
>relations of production in which these elements were incorporated but Marx
>himself didn't provide the elementsfor such an economic theory. The
>experience of all socialist countries shows that they have the same (or
>worse) environmental record as the capitalist ones.
Socialist countries??? Don't try to tell me the USSR etc were *socialist*
in any sense. You've been watching too much tv.
>Since the laws of marxist economics (the theory of human production in
>capitalist society, where production constitutes the determinant element
>of all social formations) are incapable of reflecting the relationship of
>the economy to the environment it is very difficult to see how it can form
>the basis for an economics that reflects the relationship between the
>human species (as a species whose species nature is labor) and the
>environment. Quite simply, the environment/nature has no place in marxist
>economic theory except as the source of the means and material of labor.
following is from
Engels --- Dialectics of Nature -- prog press pp. 178-180
Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by their
activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does,
and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who
made them. In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects
and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this
manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists
are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things. We
have seen how goats have prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece;
on the island of St. Helena, goats and pigs brought by the first arrivals
have succeeded in exterminating its old vegetation almost completely, and
so have prepared the ground for the spreading of plants brought by later
sailors and colonists.
But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally
and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The
further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on
nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed
towards definite preconceived ends. The animal destroys the vegetation of a
locality without realising what it is doing. Man destroys it in order to
sow field crops on the soil thus released, or to plant trees or vines which
he knows will yield many times the amount planted. He transfers useful
plants and domestic animals from one country to another and thus changes
the flora and fauna of whole continents. More than this. Through artificial
breeding both plants and animals are so changed by the hand of man that
they become unrecognisable.
[---]
In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes
in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends,
masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other
animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on
us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results
we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who,
in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to
obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the
forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying
the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the
Italians of the
Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully
cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they
were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had
still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs
of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them
to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.
Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these
farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at
every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a
conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature --
but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in
its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have
the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and
apply them correctly.
[---]
Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in the
main examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of
production and exchange that are actually intended. This fully corresponds
to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical expression. As
individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake
of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must
first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or
merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted
profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards
becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the
natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in
Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained
from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly
profitable coffee trees-what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall
afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving
behind only bare rock!
>How then do we get an ecological economics out of Marx's theory as it stands?
Like that.
You talk like Marx was a one-theory writer. Engels too. That is also *very*
incorrect (whether you are "convinced" or not, you are still incorrect).
As for:
>> he never mentions "outhouses, toilets, privies, loos" or any other
suitable metaphor for the disposal of these waste products. This is >> very
significant for evaluating the presence (or absence) of ecological
consideration.
Well evaluate *this* --- from the work which formed the basis of Marx and
Engels' association.
Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded
together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces
of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it,
where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along
as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns
of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually
one- or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as
dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four
rooms and a kitchens form, throughout England, some parts of London
excepted, the general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are
generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse,
without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead.
Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of
the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a
small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men's quarters
may readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in
fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with
wet clothing.
Let us investigate some of the slums in their order. London comes first,
and in London the famous rookery of St. Giles which is now, at last, about
to be penetrated by a couple of broad streets. St. Giles is in the midst of
the most populous part of the town, surrounded by broad, splendid avenues
in which the gay world of London idles about, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Oxford Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar Square and the
Strand. It is a disorderly collection of tall, three- or four-storied
houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there is quite as
much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that, here,
people of the working-class only are to be seen. A vegetable market is held
in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and
hardly fit to use obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as
well as from the fish-dealers' stalls, arises a horrible smell. The houses
are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their
appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them.
But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow
courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between
the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description.
Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling,
door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed
together, or altogether wanting in this thieves' quarter, where no doors
are needed, there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in
all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in
stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers
with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled
together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have
not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking
daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the
demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.
[--------- fini ---------]
NEXT from Capital 1
We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose
occupation is in great part industrial. They are the light infantry
of capital, thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now
to that. When they are not on the march, they "camp." Nomad labour is used
for various operations of building and draining, brick-making,
lime-burning, railway-making, &c. A flying column of pestilence, it carries
into the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp, small-pox,
typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, &c. In undertakings that involve much
capital outlay, such as railways, &c., the contractor himself generally
provides his army with wooden huts and the like, thus improvising villages
without any sanitary provisions, outside the control of the local boards,
very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the labourers in two-fold
fashion — as soldiers of industry and as tenants. According as the wooden
hut contains 1, 2, or 3 holes, its inhabitant, navvy, or whatever he may
be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4 shillings weekly. [68] One example will suffice.
In September, 1864, Dr. Simon reports that the Chairman of the Nuisances
Removal Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following
denunciation to Sir George Grey, Home Secretary: — "Small-pox cases were
rarely heard of in this parish until about twelve months ago. Shortly
before that time, the works for a railway from Lewisham to Tunbridge were
commenced here, and, in addition to the principal works being in the
immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was also established the depot
for the whole of the works, so that a large number of persons was of
necessity employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for
them all, huts were built in several places along the line of the works by
the contractor, Mr. Jay, for their especial occupation. These huts
possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and, besides, were necessarily
over-crowded, because each occupant had to accommodate lodgers, whatever
the number in his own family might be, although there were only two rooms
to each tenement. The consequences were, according to the medical report we
received, that in the night-time these poor people were compelled to endure
all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous smells arising from
the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close under their windows.
Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal Committee by a
medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he spoke of
their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed his
fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some sanitary
measures were adopted.
[----fini ---]
In other words, the disgusting conditions and environmental degradation
were so prevalent and pervasive throughout the 19C, they hardly require
mention (cf also Leo Marx's _The Machine in the Garden_).
You're "batting 1000", as they say in the United Steaks, on your fallacious
comments score this week.
Well done!
regards,
Phil
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