> You should have been on L-I, for example (perhaps you
> were) when the the tremendous chorus of dogmatically affirmed male supremacy,
> semitism, racism, homophobia, etc. (which the posters of course denied) flooded
> the list and made discourse impossible.
No, Henry is not a subscriber of L-I.
Actually I had to expel 14 people before finally reducing L-I to its present Carthaginian quietude. Few left of their own accord, tho' (Doug Henwood was one). There are still 150 subscribers.
I planned to relaunch the List by posting materials I've accumulated on the red/green synthesis, starting with a bunch of stuff on the political economy of energy. In the past week I've also been reading a lot of environmental stuff. There is a mass of material to digest on the Buenos Aires meeting. One of the most interesting things I found concerned Ice Station SHEBA. A Canadian icebreaker, the Des Groseilliers, was deliberately stuck in the ice pack last fall for a $20 million, year-long study of the Arctic climate and its effect on the rest of the globe. It's the US National Science Foundation's largest, most complex Arctic research project. The acronym SHEBA means Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean. The project is crucially important in analysing the energy fluxes which drive the ocean conveyors and stabilise the planet's climate-system in its present equilibrium, which has now lasted for around 10k years, since the last ice age. One of the first things the SHEBA people found was that the polar ice cap is one-third thinner than it's supposed to be; indeed the ice is now so thin that the crew of the Des Groseilliers had difficulty finding any ice thick enough to freeze the ship in and to provide a secure platform for the many experiments they planned. The ice cap has thinned out during the past 3 decades but the thaw has recently accelerated. The consensus of the SHEBA team seems to be that the polar ice cap will disappear or become a purely seasonal phenomenon within 50 years.
This thinking jibes with all the more recent evidence of warming, coupled with the intense and unusual weather events of the past year. These have been El Nino driven, but the last El Nino, the most intense on record, was itself largely influenced by anthropogenic warming. Thus, in the short time since Louis Proyect and I began chasing these issues on these lists, a preponderance of new evidence has shown that if anything the situation is even more serious than most of us are brave enough to contemplate or imagined it could be. And the risk of runaway climate change is obviously greater than has generally been acknowledged.
Louis is manfully (is one allowed to say that?) still trying to raise the matter on these lists. As for me, on the principle of reculer pour mieux sauter, I am rethinking everything. What is the point of the Left, its discourses, theoretical maps and organisational efforts? The Left we have, impotent and miserable thing that it is, anyway ignores or is unable to do justice to, the things which really matter. So I am probably washing my hands of it. Like the inhabitants of Easter Island, we live among monumentalia the meaning of which now eludes us. From Marx to Keynes, to Galbraith to Judith Butler, our iconostasis is merely an obstacle and we need to junk it and move resolutely on. My sense of looming multiform crisis -- of a general social and historical impasse which is really the terminal crisis of enlightenment civilisation and indeed of urban human culture generally as it has evolved during the present Interglacial - is conditioned by a sense of the impregnable reciprocities confronting us (by us, I mean our species, and more than just that, so this is already no 'class' politics at stake): leaving aside the obvious fact the Wall Street is now a madhouse in the grip of a generalised delusional system (has Henwood really announced 'the end of the financial crisis'? How curious!)and that the bubble is sure to burst with still more devastating consequences after its latest re-inflation - there is the really compelling argument that unlike the great depressions of the end of the last century, and the 1930s (which ended in wars and revolutions) - now scope now remains for resumed Kondratievian upswings. Total Material Requirement (TMR) of industrial economies continues to grow, despite so-called dematerialisation and virtualisation. No technologies seem to exist or be hidden deep in labs which can fundamentally reduces TMR's, or for that matter launch the world economy on a radically new, non-carbon, non-fossil energy path. This means that capitalism cannot offer much beyond subsistence in increasingly adverse environments, to a population which will still practically double in fifty years. And the price we shall pay even for this will be the Earth. As the WRI has just reported in a new book on the subject, the TMRs of even very modern industrial economies are enormous. Their report documents that such countries now require an annual TMR of 45 to 85 metric tons of natural resources per person--and Direct Material Inputs (DMI) of 17 to 38 metric tons per person--to produce their flow of goods and services. This total does not include use of air and water. This report also analyzes TMR figures over 20 years and finds both a general convergence among the countries studied and, in most, a gradual rise in per capita natural resources use.
As the WRI says: 'The implication is that meaningful dematerialization, in the sense of an absolute reduction in natural resources use, is not yet taking place.' This decisive combined set of constraints on human activity (economic, ecologic and material), which together ensures the coexistence of falling profits, accumulation crises and depressions, together with environmental degradation and perhaps irreversible, calamitous breakdown, resulting today in the kinds of social implosion now visible across vast territories from Africa to Asia to Russia, and tomorrow in unspeakably worse conjunctures, ought to condition all our common activity (I am speaking of the Left again). Of course, with a few honourable exceptions, it does not. Instead, investment bankers, who admittedly write extremely well and interestingly on Chinese culture and history, can comfortably parade as marxists and conspire with Brad deLong and his ilk in imagining 'socialist' futures for countries like China which consist of market-driven economic growth -- a vision which ought to be certifiable *at least here on the Left* but is not of course.
I have to say and declare that attempts to forge a red/green synthesis have everywhere failed: from CNS to the new German government, to Earth First! to Louis Proyect and my own humble efforts. I am curious why, since I still see no alternative to effect the salvation of humankind and life on earth generally.
Mark Jones (moderator, Leninist-International)