Artificial Scarcity or Natural Limits?

[Louis Proyect]

Yoshie:
>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.

Okay, let's discuss food. Industrial fishing techniques have brought us to
the brink of extinction of the bluefin tuna and other large "Class-A"
species. Do Marxists believe that we can simply appropriate these
capitalist means of production and use them for society as a whole? Unless
we understand these questions on a more profound level, we will not have
anything to distinguish us from the bourgeoisie. The problem is that 20th
century socialism has tended to view nature as a faucet and a sink. When
Trotsky developed his critique of Stalin, he paid scant attention to these
aspects of Soviet society which were visible to the naked eye. Instead,
Trotsky was preoccupied with the tendency of capitalism to act as
"straightjacket" on the means of production. It is no accident that both
Frank Furedi and Lyndon Larouche received their training in the Trotskyist
movement. It is no accident that the Spartacist League vigorously promotes
nuclear power and floated the rumor that Earth Day 1970 was cooked up by
Richard Nixon. As far as the Stalinists are concerned, they are no better.
They have held state power, so their ecological abuses are more obvious.

On the question of food, it is important to understand that the "classic"
Marxist position on this was that Malthus was wrong, because he did not
anticipate the revolutions in food-production made possible by chemical
fertilizers, dam irrigation, pesticides, etc. This argument was made in the
pamphlet "Too Many Babies" that the SWP published in the 1950s, a challenge
to Malthusians. The problem is that this analysis does not go deep enough.
Modern agriculture, based on the factory farm model, may deliver sufficient
quantities of wheat, milk and beef in the short run, but in the LONG RUN it
will destroy the possibilities for food production. You can not really find
much discussion of this in Marxist ranks, but have to look elsewhere such
as Francis Ford Lappe's Food First Foundation. The one Marxist who has
grappled with these problems is Michael Perelman, who is on this mailing
list and who was described by Harvey as conceding too much to bourgeois
ideology. His "FARMING FOR PROFIT IN A HUNGRY WORLD CAPITAL AND THE CRISIS
IN AGRICULTURE" is on my to-read queue, as soon as I am finished with the
other manuscripts he has sent me. 

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)