Louis Proyect wrote:
> About a month ago I went down to Monthly Review for a brown bag and the
> discussion revolved around the financial crisis in Japan. Paul Sweezy and
> Harry Magdoff sat at the head of the table as they usually do. Harry had
> plenty to say on the subject. For his part, Paul was as silent as usual. He
> slouched back in his chair, eating his Ensure. Occasionally he would gaze
> at a speaker with penetrating blue eyes and then return to his high-protein
> lunch. As the discussion was winding down, Harry turned to him and said,
> "Paul, don't you have something to say about this. The world economy is
> your specialty." He replied, "Oh, I'm just listening and trying to learn
> something."
>
> This is the understatement of the century. Paul Sweezy turned 85 last year
> and the latest Monthly Review is evidence that he is as sharp as ever. I
> recommend this issue for his short but very profound commentary on the
> Communist Manifesto. Also valuable are Harry's and Ellen Meiksins Woods'
> comments. The three pieces were presentations made originally at the latest
> Socialist Scholars Conference.
>
> On the occasion of Sweezy's most recent reading of the CM, he was struck by
> the following famous paragraph:
>
> "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
> struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
> guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in
> constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now
> hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
> reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
> classes."
>
> What could Marx be referring to when he speaks of the "common ruin of the
> contending classes?" In Sweezy's view, this eventuality could be the
> ecological ruin of the world if capitalism is not overthrown. Such a
> catastrophic ending--with the looming threat of global warming, species
> extinction, etc.--would not only make life unlivable for the workers, but
> the rulers as well. His proposal is that the Marxist movement orient toward
> the scientific community in order to join forces against this danger. This
> sage's call for a red-green synthesis should be heeded by all of us who are
> committed to Marxism:
>
> "Already, a very large section of the world’s scientific community is fully
> aware of the seriousness of the ecological threat facing the planet, but
> what is not widely recognized is that the cause of the threat is capitalism
> itself. Bourgeois economics seeks to hide or deny this fact. No wonder. If
> it were generally understood, capitalism would soon be identified for what
> it is, the mortal enemy of human kind and many other forms of life on the
> planet. In these circumstances, our responsibility is not only to help the
> ecologists to get their message across, important as it is, but to convince
> the ecologists themselves as well as the public at large of the truth about
> capitalism, that it must be replaced by a social system that puts the life
> giving capacity of the earth as its first and highest priority. As the
> unfolding of capitalism's deadly consequences proceeds, more and more
> people, including 'bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the
> level of understanding the historical movement as a whole,' will come to
> see what has to be done if our species is to have any future at all. Our
> job is to help bring this about in the shortest possible time."
>
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu