jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk 06/28/00 10:39AM >>>
> >> Yes, please do.
Gordon Fitch:
> >I was thinking of various agricultural disasters like the
> >Dust Bowl and the Irish potato famine, which followed
> >particular agricultural practices and led to situations in
> >which the inhabitants of formerly productive territories had
> >to disperse (or, in the case of the Irish, die _en_masse_).
Jim heartfield:
> I think it is a step backwards from the sociological analysis of these
> events to reduce them to a singular 'exhaustion of important resources'.
> As Marx pointed out, Ireland post-famine produced a greater surplus for
> the landlords than it did before. His point was that there was nothing
> natural about the limitations that landlords set upon the Irish
> peasantry's consumption. Far from exhausting resources, Ireland
> continued to export livestock and grain throughout. Describing the
> famine as a 'potato famine' was the most pernicious mystification of the
> real causes of the hunger. The blight just tipped the scale that the
> English landlords had already set.
>
> Similarly the description of the dustbowl as an exhaustion of natural
> resources does not fit. The AAA systematically impoverished American
> small farmers, reorganising agriculture in favour of bigger agri-
> business. It was only in conditions of extreme deprivation that farmers
> failed to irrigate the land. The scarcity was engineered. There was no
> absolute exhaustion of resources.
>
> In both instances the ecological interpretation tends to shore up the
> capitalist prejudice that too many people were consuming too few
> resources. That fits the capitalist world view in that its own
> restricted monopoly over resources is asserted to be part of nature's
> law. Of course, that is in no way the case. To the capitalist the land
> is overpopulated, because he is concerned with profit, not basic needs.
> To fantastically reinterpret that as an 'exhaustion of resources' neatly
> sidesteps the fact that these limits are not absolute limitations, but
> simply the limits that capital sets on consumption.
This is why I mentioned later that humanity was in nature and nature was in humanity. The resources of Ireland and the Dust Bowl were relative to a certain political configuration of the human beings who lived in them at the time. One can say that the resources would have been adequate to a different political configuration, but that is just begging the question -- humanity being finite, for every political configuration there will be a level below which some resources will not be adequate. 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.
Gordon Fitch:
> >However, there are also some instances of non-humans
> >exhausting environments. A few years ago I read about an
> >island in, I think, the Great Lakes, with deer and wolves;
> >the populations regularly go out of balance and crash
> >because the island can't easily export and import deer or
> >wolves.
Jim heartfield:
> You are projecting. You discover balances and crashes on your Great Lake
> island as if it were populated by Bulls and Bears not deer and wolves.
> Who is to say that balance is preferable to crash? Such values are human
> and simply do not exist in the animal world.
"Balances" and "crashes" are common ecological lingo; they don't seem obscure enough to make a big deal about. I hope an explanation is not required.
I doubt if the animals in question enjoyed starving. Perhaps some humans would -- they could imagine they were caught up in a higher order of things, like God's Will, the glory of the State, or the workings of the Invisible Hand. But my guess is that most people would rather do other things.
Gordon:
> > My assertion is: if you keep doing bigger and bigger
> >stuff, then when accidents happen and things go wrong they
> >will be bigger and bigger accidents and wronger and wronger
> >things.
Jim heartfield:
> Strangely on almost every scale you care to mention, human life on the
> average improves the more 'bigger and bigger' stuff you do (I mean life
> expectancy, infant mortality etc). That was where we started with the
> 1900 House. Your proposed law of bigger = worse, is I take it
> susceptible to empirical disproof. Last year accidents on Britain's
> roads fell once again. Less people die there today than they did in
> 1926. The law disproved.
>
> Bigger and bigger stuff includes vaccinations for whooping cough,
> diphtheria and so on. Do these things lead to 'wronger and wronger
> things'. Increased food yields sustain some six billion people on the
> planet. Who is surplus to requirements among them?
Gordon:
> > Yours, I take it, is that nothing serious can
> >possibly go wrong.
Jim heartfield:
> On the contrary, it is you that puts the absurd demand that nothing
> should ever go wrong. My view is that the greater the resources at hand
> the greater the possibility of fixing things that do go wrong.
You have rewritten my argument (incorrectly), not confronted my proposition.
Gordon:
> >The destruction of the environment is a way of maintaining
> >scarcity. "They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree
> >museum, then they charge you five dollars just to go and
> >see'em."
Jim heartfield:
> Surreal. There are more trees planted in Europe and America than ever
> before. Thanks to increased yields, farmed land is being retired to
> forestation.
I suppose I should have known better than to quote a metaphorical utterance. Hey -- there aren't any tree museums, either. Well, there are a few, but you know what I mean. I hope. (Sorry, Joni!)
Gordon:
> >no amount of purely technical progress will bring about an
> >end to scarcity as long as the bourgeoisie or some similar
> >ruling class remain in control of the economic system.
Jim heartfield:
> On its own, of course not. But as we saw with the Soviet Union,
> overthrowing the bourgeoisie without the technological basis for
> liberating humanity only led to a vicious police state, rationing
> inadequate resources.
The Soviet Union replaced one bourgeoisie with another, with the same need to preserve scarcity. 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.
I think it's possible that the accelerating progress of technology _will_ cause the bourgeoisie to lose control, but one shouldn't expect the result to be an automatic socialist tea party.