Nate,
1) My position is simply that Marx did not take ecological factors into
consideration when he developed his analysis of Capital. One "ethical"
consequence of this being that an environmental political agenda is
necessarily secondary from a marxist perspective. Whether or not his
philosophy as a whole can be interpreted as consistent with an ecological
understanding is -- obviously -- open to discussion
> One question I have for Paul is, do you think the
> dialectical approach formulated by Marx is
> inconsistent or incapable of grasping an ethical
> enviromental approach?
>
Yes, but this needs to be developed, it isn't at all explicit and there are
problems (e.g., when bio-ethics of greenhouse gases effectively cut off the
possibility of effecting the transition to industrial society which Marx
envisioned as a necessary element of capitalism's world historical destiny.
He was no Jeffersonian or proponent of a Schumacher style "Small is
Beautiful", in fact he was pretty hostile to peasant society in general.
>
> 2) "treats her as belonging to him"
>
> This does not seem inconsistent with the Native
> American view it was contrasted with in my view -
> that of course depends on how one understands
> ownership
In the passage in question Marx was talking about ownership as in "the right
to do whatever you want", bear in mind that "zoning" wasn't even common in
Marx's day, let alone environmental regulations. He's not talking about
stewardship. This is an interesting point since stewardship with an eye to
ensuring that a resource remains useful to humans is not a fully ecological
perspective -- it still sees the earth/nature/environment as an object which
doesn't have rights.
> 3). Labor still seems important though because as
> Foster points out other aspects of nature cannot
> change whole continents like humans can.
Sure they can, Nate, just at a slower pace, as in continental drift, or very
suddenly as when a comet smacks into the planet and destroys countless
species in the space of a few years, even some volcano eruptions have
totally disruptive effects on global climate.
>
> I guess my point is that theorizing nature outside
> the labor process would miss an essential link on
> how we as humans relate to nature. Situating it in
> labor rather than outside acknowedges our ethical
> position in relation to the environment.
Isn't how "we as humans relate to nature" itself a culturally and
historically relative pattern. This is the issue of the paleolithic
adaptation v. neolithic/agriculltural issue that lies buried somewhere in
the dim past of this thread. When we preserve the Alaska wilderness area or
any wilderness area we are essentially cutting it off from the relation of
treating it as an possible object of human productive exploitation. When
cars can't drive to certain areas because they would endanger species that
have absolutely no economic value (I'm thinking of the horny toad in the
Sespe Creek Wilderness area outside Ojai, CA), then we are recognizing that
species as something with a right to be here just as much as ourselves and
denying our right to enjoyments that would threaten their existence. This
is to theorize our relationship to nature OUTSIDE the labor process.
> I would however concur that Marx and others of that
> time were very much influenced by the notion of via
> science controlling "nature". The question for me
> then is, is his method of understanding the world DM
> inconsistent with an enviromental or ecological
> view?
That is the question. My point is that I haven't seen how it can be
developed directly out of Marx's theory of human relation to the environment
since he doesn't explicitly theorize that relation and I had not seen
anything he had written about ecological processes (who would expect this
given the time he wrote?) But we'll see what Foster has to say, not to
mention the 250 pages of e-discussion that Bill made available.
Paul H. Dillon
>
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