Jim heartfield wrote:
> it is capital, a social relation, that throws up limits
> to growth. In abolishing that form of social relation, we free ourselves
> from that specific limitation.
James, you constantly talk about capitalism as creating limits to growth. This was not what Marx talked of. What kind of growth do you hope for if capitalism were to be abolished? More factories, highways, cars, consumer goods, and more people -- that seems to be your notion, and it is simply an insane one.
> Who ever said that he was a 'fan of capitalist agriculture'? I'm not a
> fan of capitalist agriculture. Capitalism in agriculture - as elsewhere
> - is premissed upon exploitation. As elswhere, the narrow profit motive
> is a limitation upon growth, such that human needs are not met.
Again, then, you are idea of 'socialist agriculture' is one of unbounded production, in fact the Stalinist visions of the 1930s, ilustrated by endless panaoramos of combine harvesters and buxom rosy cheeked peasant girls bearing fruit platters, yes?
> >and its supposed ability to endlessly increase output, productivity and soil
> >fertility.
> This is a confusion. Does Mark mean that increased output is a bad
> thing? I trust not, if world hunger is to be addressed.
Yes, I mean increased output by the techniques of modern capitalist agriculture are UNQUESTIONABLY A BAD THING. So what is your alternative, except to redcue all limits of every kind on that type of production?
> Increases in US
> agricultural production do indicate that some lessons were learned from
> the 'dust-bowl' period.
Well, what lessons? The lessons of Monsanto Round-up Ready seeds and no-till ploughing? Actually if you look at feedlot production methods, the fate of the Ogallala aquifer, the recent declines in grain production and the side effects of fertiliser and pseticide use, to take only a few examples, then it is ahrd to see just what positive lessons were learnt.
> >When Marx wrote Engels that
> >the agronomist Liebig was ‘more important than all the economists
> >ut together’, (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866) it was because
> >Liebig's Law postulates limits to growth not in Physiocratic terms
> >but in terms of an ecolate view of holistic systems which have
> >determining-last-instances.
>
> This, I suggest, is a bit fanciful on your part. You should listen to
> your own strictures and try to understand it in terms of Marx's method.
> Marx saw the barrier to capital accumulation, not in terms of 'holistic
> systems' (which strike me as just a re-invention of that dead dog
> equilibrium theory, only now rediscovered in nature), but in capital
> itself - that is in the social relation of capital, that makes labour
> the determinate of value, and so undermines the tendency to abbreviate
> the labour process.
>
There was nothing fanciful at all about Marx's interest in Liebig. Liebig was a pre-eminent agronomist whose work paved the way for modern capitalist agriculture; but his own conclusionw as that agricultural growth on this basis was unsustainable. That was also what Marx thought. So what do you think? Given that your argument is 'more of the same, without any restrictions of any kind on production', the answer is already clear. But such polciies iff apllied would have catatsrophic results. They were applied in Soviet Russia, and they resulted in catatsrophes everywhere, from the Aral Sea (unrestricted cotton irrigation and chemical use) to the Volga (dams which destroyed the ecosystem of the world's most important freshwater systems and enclosed seas), the Black Earth region (new dustbowls), the Virgin Lands (steppes ploughed for corn, now reverting to primitive scrub, devoid of their earlier biodiversity) etc etc.
> No. Marx uses different terminology because his account is different.
> You want to change the terminology because you want to change the
> meaning. The Malthusian myth of 'carrying capacities' was no part of
> Marx's thinking.
What is intersting about you James, is that you are never able to substantiate your own arguments. In what ways was Marx's account different from the way I tell it? Did Marx say that capitalist agriculture, and the whole urban-rural schism which it engendered and reproduced, would result in desertification and the destruction of nature, or not?
> Capitalism is a social relation and does not enlarge itself within
> physical space,
Dream on, James.
> What stands in the way
> of its growth is its own tendency to undermine the basis of its profits,
> the labour content of products.
What is the cause of that tendency to undermine its own profits, in youropinion?
> This is a curious statement. You hold the quantifiable increases in
> health (and I guess life expectancy, literacy and so on) over the last
> fifty years in low esteem.
No, I don't; I say that the figures are far less rosy than is generally assumed, and I am going to give chapter and verse on this in a future posting. I also say that since the increases in well-being which HAVE been achieved, are the result of unsustainable production methods, then they obviosuly won't be sustained; ie, the wel-being of future unborn generations is being sacrificed.
> Rather your own intuition that 'life is
> getting worse' you take as good coin.
It isn't my own intuition, and I have never said 'life is getting worse'. As usual when you're stuck, you begin putting words in my mouth.
> >Nature WILL send us
> >a bill.
> You add triumphantly, relishing the prospect that all those foolish
> people building the tower of babel will be struck down by God's
> thunderbolt. It all seems a bit morbid to me.
Here we are again. Whatever pain or pleasure it gives me or you or anyone else, is simply besides the point, if it happens -- don't you think?
Mark