Lou
At 06:55 PM 12/1/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Since we have two of the authors Harvey is talking about here - Michael
>Perelman and Jim O'Connor - how do you plead? Guilty of "a sad capitulation
>to capitalistic arguments"?
>
>Doug
>
>----
>
>[David Harvey, Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference, pp. 146-147]
>
>As Grundmann complains, Marx, at times, seems to assume that growth of
>productive forces implies an increasing power to dominate nature, when
>"there may be productive forces which do not lead" in that direction "but,
>rather, to an increasing uncertainty, risk, and uncontrollability as well
>as to unnecessary oppression in the production process." This does not
>imply that concern for the natural environment is incompatible with a
>Promethean view. Indeed, "anthropocentrism and mastery over nature, far
>from causing ecological problems, are the starting-points from which to
>address them." Nevertheless, Manes expectation that "science and technology
>would create an intelligible and controllable world as well as the
>expectation that only capitalist relations stand in the way" of a rational
>regulation of our metabolism with nature, have to be questioned. And this
>implies a challenge to some of the presumptions of historical-geographical
>materialism.
>
>It is in this context that some Marxists have returned to the ecoscarcity
>and natural limits argument as being in some sense far more fundamental
>than Marx (or more importantly Marxists) have been prepared to concede.
>Unfortunately, the manner of that return by Benton (1989, 1992), Perelman
>(1993), and O'Connor (1988) often appears as a sad capitulation to
>capitalistic arguments. Not, of course, that any of them would in any way
>support the class distinctions that Malthus used (and latterday
>neo-Malthusians continue to use) to such vicious effect. But the
>universality of "natural limits" and the deeper appeal to "natural law" as
>inherently limiting to the capacity to meet human desires, is now
>increasingly treated as an axiomatic limiting condition of human existence.
>So what, then, would a dialectical-relational formulation of the problem
>look like?
>
>Consider, to begin with, a key term like "natural resources." In what sense
>can we talk about them as being "limited" and in what ways might we
>reasonably say they are "scarce?" The definition of these key terms is
>evidently crucial, if only for the whole science of economics which usually
>defines itself as "the science of the allocation of scarce resources." So
>let me offer a relational definition of the term "natural resource" as a
>"cultural, technical and economic appraisal of elements and processes in
>nature that can be applied to fulfill social objectives and goals through
>specific material practices." We can unpack the terms in this definition
>one by one. "Appraisal" refers to a state of knowledge and a capacity to
>understand and communicate discursively that varies historically and
>geographically. The long history of capitalism itself shows that technical
>and economic appraisals can change rapidly and the addition of the cultural
>dimension makes for even greater fluidity and variability in the
>definition. Social objectives and goals can vary greatly depending upon who
>is doing the desiring about what and how human desires get
>institutionalized, discursively expressed, and politically organized. And
>the elements and processes in nature change also, not only because change
>is always occurring (independent of anything human beings do), but because
>material practices are always transformative activities engaged in by human
>beings operating in a variety of modes with all sorts of intended and
>unintended consequences. What exists "in nature" is in a constant state of
>transformation. To declare a state of ecoscarcity is in effect to say that
>we have not the will, wit, or capacity to change our state of knowledge,
>our social goals, cultural modes, and technological mixes, or our form of
>economy, and that we are powerless to modify either our material practices
>or "nature" according to human requirements. To say that scarcity resides
>in nature and that natural limits exist is to ignore how scarcity is
>socially produced and how "limits" are a social relation within nature
>(including human society) rather than some externally imposed necessity.
>
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)