And now for Gore?

[Carl Remick]

I would welcome any Marxist comments, as Chris Burford suggests below,
on the "green" rebuttal I offered to Brad De Long's point.  To expand on
what I said before, the prerequisites for responsible global economic
development that I advocate would be:  (1) economic models and
accounting conventions that assess the full consequences of currently
ignored "negative externalities" (Third World environmental degradation,
etc.), and (2) "sustainable" economic development -- i.e., LDC
development that favors localized, small-scale enterprise and is not
driven by the creation of export-oriented, capital-intensive,
high-pollution industries.

Carl Remick

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Burford [mailto:cburford at gn.apc.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 1998 6:59 PM
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Subject: RE: And now for Gore?

At 10:41 AM 9/8/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Re Brad De Long's:  "So now the left tries to keep the developing
>economies of the world as poor
>as possible--lest they pollute?"
>
>So, now the left says let's:   (a) develop a language of economics that
>takes a more accurate accounting, in all nations, of social costs that
>are now merely "negative externalities," and (b) pursue economic
>development along sustainable lines, as recommended, e.g., by E. F.
>Schumacher.
>
>Carl Remick

As I broadly understand it, this is progressive green-type cost-based
economics. 

What I think is needed to evaluate it and have some theoretical
underpinning, is to relate it to the system of exchange value and Value
that lies behind it. 

Economic costing that takes into account renewing raw materials and the
environment, could be related to the socially necessary labour time for
doing so, i.e. remaining from a Marxist point of view linked to human
social labour power. I would be interested to know whether a marxist
perspective on this would produce rather different models than an
arbitary
green idealist perspective....