Jim heartfield:
> I think you miss the point. In both Ireland's potato famine and the
> dustbowl collapse there was a surplus of food over population needs, but
> for the fact that the surplus was denied to those who needed it.
> Environmental exhaustion simply was not the issue, and until now, only
> those who sought to excuse the exploiters have said that it was.
I understand that. There is always a political configuration. The political configuration of Ireland in 1840 was not much different than that of 1860, but in 1860 the land supported far fewer people -- about half as many. The remainder went to the New World, the next world, or the bottom of the sea. For some other political configuration, the figures might be different, but this doesn't matter -- my point was to give an example of catastrophic resource depletion. The politics remained roughly constant, the resource was the variable, and as a result of its variation a million people starved to death. As you note, to some extent the catastrophe was a _result_ of the politics. That is part of _my_ point -- human politics exists in nature, is part of it.
Gordon:
> >I suppose you
> >could argue that humans are infinitely clever and thus will
> >always be able to reconfigure themselves politically so as
> >to thrive on any level of resources, including zero, but
> >history doesn't appear to be your witness.
Jim heartfield:
> On the contrary, history bears witness to the fact that available
> resources increase over time, and in tempo with the growth of
> productivity. (take the resource, electricity, for example)
Certainly, because resources are constructed. But they are constructed not against or in the absence of "nature", but _with_ it. In some cases the stuff out of which resources are constructed cooperates with human desires, and in others it doesn't. We have just now been discussing an example of the latter.
> ...
Gordon:
> >The Soviet Union replaced one bourgeoisie with another, with
> >the same need to preserve scarcity.
Jim heartfield:
> 'Bourgeoisie' - hardly. The ruling elite in the Soviet Union rose on the
> basis of abolishing the market mechanism, and the bureaucratic
> organisation of production. (Soviet news media were very pro-
> environmentalist.)
I don't see any necessary linking of the private, elite control of capital with markets, even restricted ones. I've just been reading "The Tax In Kind, Free Trade, and Concessions" by Lenin (1921) in which he carries on at length about how wonderful "state capitalism" is (the kind which is closely complicit with, if not actually operated by the government, and is in any case highly centralized under government power) and how awful the _petty_ bourgeoisie, those who are, in fact, actors in free markets. I think Lenin understood well the central feature of capitalism, the supremacy of an elite class who rule through their command of industrial capital. In his vision, his party would become this elite (with good intentions, of course). His genius was not to reject capitalism but meld it with existing feudal despotism, thus providing a machine for Stalin to operate and an inspiration for modern tyrants everywhere. Call it "socialism" if you want -- I myself don't see any ownership or control of the means of production by any working class. I suppose the socialism was supposed to come along later.
Gordon:
> >It is in the West where
> >we observe that (thus far) no amount of technological advance
> >can overcome scarcity, because one effort of technology is
> >precisely to preserve and enhance scarcity.
Jim heartfield:
> Now you are missing the point. Technology does not create scarcity (to
> the contrary, it creates abundance). It is capitalist social relations
> that artificially sustain scarcity as a form of coercion.
There are all kinds of technologies. Some technologies create abundance, others scarcities. The latter are quite important in a capitalist regime. Excess production must be used up in war, imperialism, waste, and consumerism, and technology plays a role in all of these, sometimes a very sophisticated role. Technology is merely power; it can be used in all kinds of ways.
Gordon:
> >I think it's possible that the accelerating progress of
> >technology _will_ cause the bourgeoisie to lose control,
Jim heartfield:
> Interesting viewpoint, but it is not one that I ever considered.
> Technology will not do anything to the bourgeoisie. But technological
> advance is the precondition for socialism.
Here's the theory:
In order for the bourgeoisie to maintain control without using overt force, they and their role have to seem necessary and inevitable to the life of the community. That can be only if there is a scarcity of capital and other goods, because if there is enough for everyone, no one has to be employed very much (that is, submit to bourgeois discipline) and there is no means by which the ruling class can rule, within liberalism, that is. As a class, it will cease to exist. (Of course, its personnel will persist, and are likely to seek other forms of power.)
Each increase of productive power, then, is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, it confers short-term advantage to those who own and control the particular form of production which has been improved, but on the other hand it reduces the general scarcity which makes all production critical, and thus it threatens the class system as a whole. Scarcity must be restored, but in a politically feasible way, that is, the restoration must be masked. Hence the aforesaid methods of war and threats of war, imperialism, waste, and consumerism, which express themselves in the direct destruction of value (including environmental destruction) as well as indirect seizure of wealth from the people in the form of taxes, interest, fees, insurance and other forced payments.
Suppose, however, that the powers of production increase at so rapid a rate that the technology of scarcity is unable to keep up. A situation develops in which people begin to fall out of the bourgeois order, because they can live well enough without being employed in regular production / consumption and their time is more valuable to them than the additional wealth which could be acquired by trading it away. Another technology which may fail is the technology of control: the productive tasks become so complex and evolve so rapidly the managerial class can't understand them (see _Dilbert_). Then people fall out while still apparently employed.
>From the point of view of their masters, all these people are
_out_of_control_. If the situation cannot be rectified (from
the bourgeois point of view) a serious crisis of authority
must develop. Possibly the crisis could be resolved by war
or depression, but if enough productive capacity passes into
non-bourgeois hands these won't work. You then have a kind
of _singularity_, a situation where the former mechanism of
social order has disappeared and nothing can replace it, and
subsequent developments are not predictable as extensions
of previous historical trends.