Bill,
Thanks for alerting us to this book. I intend to read it and will look at
the archives you mention. As you might know, the environmentalist movement
has a major presence up here in Humboldt County, California (Julia Butterfly
sitting in her tree for two years made something a a national splash) and it
is totally saturated with the "spiritualist" outlook which of course
prevents hooking it up with a politics based on class analysis even though
the environmental activists identify corporations (notably Maxxam and
Charles Horowitiz) with the devil. That hook up goes both ways since the
majority of the population whose families have been involved with the lumber
industry for the last 100 years are both anti-environmentalist and
increasingly the casualties of the the rampant corporate destruction of the
redwood and doug pine forests during the last 100 years. So I'd really
welcome being wrong on this one if it provides some perspective for getting
past that contradiction--as you can see from my posts Phil didn't persuade
me. Simply denying "any absolute distinction between human beings and
animals, seeing human beings " is insufficient. Something more is called
for, some way in which the relation to the environment can be expressed as
an ideal in the same way that value expresses relations between the range of
productive activities. It will be interesting to see if Foster provides
this.
One thing that comes out in the passage you provided, is an apparent
rejection of telos and a negation of an ontological distinction between the
inorganic/organic realm and the historical which of course would present a
challenge to Lukacs' and perhaps also Ilyenkov's theory.
Paul H. Dillon
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