Wojtek is just demotic
"James, what Marx had to say about environment (and "ism") was based on the 19th century science that, inter alia, did have the tools to study the subject area (e.g. the estimation of non-linear equations are possible only with computers) and was biased toward the expansionist "white-man-burden" philosophy. Suffice it to say that the same science produced eugenics and IQ testing."
It is Marcusian rubbish to say that there was something in the scientific method that leads to racism or eugenics. It was the social organisation that had those tendencies. Of course elites sought to give a 'scientific' rationale to their prejudices - scientific reasoning was understandably popular, since it gave so much in terms of technological progress.
It is a wicked sleight of hand to identify mankind's utilisation of natural processes with the enslavement of human beings. Nature has no preferences, nor personhood to suffer from being put to a better (read human) use. To say otherwise is mawkish sentimentality whose underlying meaning is that one hold's human life cheap.
Wojtek continues:
"Maintaining that capitalism impoverishes the working class seems untenable nowadays, especially in Western Europe. However, demanding that the environment (or the so-called externalities) are included in the cost-benefit calculus of the capitalist enterprise strikes at the center of the capitalist legitimating myth of efficiency."
If I can tease out your meaning, you are saying that there is no class struggle question left, so the question is how can we de-legitimate capitalism. I'm not sure that the question of the distribution of the social product is solved, in Western Europe or anywhere else (I guess that the real question is more one of control than the availability of resources, but let's leave that aside).
But it seems to me that you are not *de*legitimating capitalism, by adding in the 'externalities'. Rather all you are doing is legitimating the coercive state that 'stands above' individual capitalists.
Years ago the 'state-derivation' school of Marxists in Germany explained that the appearance of independence assumed by the external regulator of the state was no such thing. Rather it was the form that public authority would be bound to take in a social order marked by mutual alienation, i.e. that the state, too, should be alienated from society. This, they said, was the perfection of the capitalist system, not its delegitimation.
For a less Germanic and theory-laden approach, you could look at the way that the furore raised by Upton Sinclair's exposure of the meat market led to regulation, which led to the consolidation of the big monopolies over the industry, at the expense of small producers. Regulation perfects capitalism, it is not the counter to it. -- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'