Artificial Scarcity or Natural Limits?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

The limits and scarcities that marxists should be primarily concerned about
are artificial--not natural--ones. This is not to say that nature places no
constraint upon social activities, be they labor or anything else. It does,
in that the social world is embedded in the natural world. However,
marxism, both in theory and practice, primarily addresses itself to what is
_social_, both in terms of constraints _and_ possibilities. Marxists should
pay attention to the natural world, but we are _not_ naturalists.

Let's think about the politics of food, for instance. Is it because we do
not produce enough food that there are millions of the working class people
who suffer from hunger and malnutrition now? No, it's not, even though the
ruling class and their media want us to believe that. As of now, we have
enough food production capacity to feed people all over the world
comfortably, don't we? It is because of social relations of capitalism--the
contradiction between labor and capital--that masses of people are hungry,
and how to rid ourselves of those social relations that exploit and oppress
people because of their class, gender, race, nationality, and so on is the
main object and objective of marxist theory and practice. I am in favor of
Red-Green synthesis, but the Green theory and practice that does not
foreground questions of social relations and chooses to lead us to dwell
upon the Earth's 'carrying capacity' can't be and shouldn't be synthesized
with marxism.

Yoshie