[ My first attempt at reply -yesterday- crashed when one of my dogs decided to settle down for a nap on my surge protector and hit the off switch. Hopefully, this one makes it...]
----- Original Message ----- From: "Todd Archer" <todda39 at hotmail.com>
The article never mentioned how or why those chemicals get into the food-chain, only that they're "byproducts of the industrial age". Would a class-analysis a la Marx help figure that out and what might be done? Or would it just be completely erroneous and a waste of time?
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Well it's not necessarily the place of daily news journalism to get involved in articulating the causal dynamics of the capital/technology/science/environment nexus, so criticizing the piece for what it doesn't talk about does not seem to help.
One of the reasons I posted the piece is that the problems it describes are going to be with us even if capitalism ended today. In that sense, what are the theories we need to know to solve those *types* of problems, irrespective of whether we've gotten rid of capitalism or not. Yeah, we can engage in all kinds of hand waiving about which is the one true analysis that will enable us to solve the problem[s] [or is it to mitigate and adapt to them?]. In that sense, while it would definitely help that lost of us had M, B & F on our shelves, not all the challenges, such as the ones the article mentioned, we face can be squeezed within their frames.
>
I'm terribly sorry I can't match your erudition, Ian, with some quote or
paraphrase of a main idea from Marx about chemicals entering the food
chain.
I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but I'm just not a smart enough guy to find it.
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Don't apologize, you're as smart as anyone else on the list [a fine collection of knuckleheads, actually; even if we're grumpy quite a bit of the time].
"The same holds good for every kind of refuse resulting from a labour-process, so far at least as such refuse cannot be further employed as a means in the production of new and independent use-values. Such an employment of refuse may be seen in the large machine works at Manchester, where mountains of iron turnings are carted away to the foundry in the evening, in order the next morning to re-appear in the workshops as solid masses of iron...
"Every advance in Chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful materials and the useful applications of those already known, thus extending with the growth of capital its sphere of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the excrements of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates new matter for capital."
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Let's say capitalism collapses tomorrow. How much of the above helps us deal with cleaning up the various toxicities we have produced? I can hear Carrol now, saying we don't use quantum mechanic to calculate how to build a bridge and that's precisely my point. In that sense critically studying the works of Robert Ayres: http://www.insead.edu/CMER/team/profiles/ayres.htm and the industrial ecology paradigm, say, is every bit as important for us as studying Smith, Ricardo and Carey were for Marx--in order to be more effective in dealing with just one category of problems.
I have a friend who would be more than capable of understanding M, B &F if he had the time to read them, but he'd tell us all in no time flat "how would they help me deal with stopping the trade/production of toxic wastes associated with current technologies and motivating others to see the importance of that struggle while avoiding the use of terminologies and attitudes that turn people off?" That is to say, there's a division of labor amongst activists and theoreticians that is not working for lefties and anti-intellectualism is only one piece of that problem. Indeed, it may be the case that communicating with each other more effectively about our dol is a possible big step in overcoming the challenges posed by the latter.
"Under conditions of scarcity, so traditional Marxism maintains, class society is inescapable, its property structures settle questions of distribution, and discussion of justice is therefore futile, for a political movement whose task must be to overturn class society, *rather than to decide which of the many criteria by which it comes out unjust is the right one to use to condemn it*....We can no longer believe the factual premisses of those conclusions about the practical [ir]relevance of the study of norms...We can no longer rely on technology to fix things for us: if they can be fixed, then we have to fix them, through hard theoretical and political labor." [G.A. Cohen]
What Cohen just misses mentioning is that it is precisely theorizing the consequences of science/technology, as much as theorizing class, race, gender, law etc. that must be part and parcel of the division of labor by activists and if, in the process of dialogue with activists who speak in/from idioms/theories that aren't reducible to or translatable by the idioms of nineteenth century theorists we shouldn't be too quick to reach for the charge of anti-intellectualism. There are a plethora of idioms in Big Science that we have to deal with if we're to dismantle "the larger society's division between mental and physical labor?" Not all of those idioms and heuristics are going to be consistent with or reducible to the analytical frames created by M, B & F, nor should we insist that they should be.
>
Yes, these authors wrote in a very different time; one could say a
"simpler"
time. And human society keeps growing and growing more complex too,
right?
So does that mean constantly, and earlier and earlier as society keeps
changing, throwing out what's been observed and theorized? There are no
"basic observations" that are valid any more? Marx wrote about class
society, primarily the one with which he was most familiar; has class
disappeared then? How about capitalism? It's changed, certainly, but
aren't the basics (private ownership, appropriation of surplus labour,
etc.)
still there?
BTW, don't try to sell this line of obsolesence to the Christians about their "Old Man" . . . .
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All I'm asserting is that we need to substantially enlarge what constitutes our "basic observations" without getting into zero-sum debates as to which observations should take a greater priority when engaging in organizing. It is self-defeating to insist that every activist be fluent in M, B & F as a criteria for being an activist-cum-intellectual. I'm not suggesting by any means that that is what Doug is implying. As Doug will be the first to tell you, there are very radical ways of criticizing our current epoch without have to rely on the vocabulary found in Capital Vols. I-III. Deepening that communicative competence is part and parcel of navigating the various idioms used to deal with the staggering variety of observations we're capable of making about contemporary societies.
>Do we shut down the machines,
>complexify our technologies to the point where only Einstein's can
>understand how they work no matter how much we democratize big science
and
>access to 'higher' education, what?
M (and I'm guessing), B, and F didn't talk about these particular questions, but about "bigger" matters that, I'm assuming, lie behind them.
These questions you ask, for all the good of talking about them, how can we even hope to do anything about them when we can't even get the tiniest say in such basic stuff as how to make sure people can be fed, clothed, and housed with a fair degree of human dignity?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be demanding a Theory of Everything to Fix Everything. The radical analyses I've read come closest to that (closer than liberal moralising anyway), but that doesn't make them perfect weapons to take on absolutely any problem.
Todd
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Just the opposite; I'm asserting that there is no socio-political-econo-ecological-techno Theory of Everything under which all the struggles to build a better world for ourselves and those who come after us can be subsumed. Understanding various vocabularies/theories/analyses is necessary in order to sustain creative dialogue rather than the cacophony we have now which, to some extent, is a product of the very attempt theorize the one true Theory of Everything which would then serve as the catalyst for *the* collective action that would solve The One Big Problem.
'It's important to encourage better thinking, says Jiramanus, "so hippie-to-yuppie doesn't happen again." As she points out, without an analysis of what's really wrong with the world - or a vision of the better world you're trying to create - people have no reason to continue being activists once a particular campaign is over. In this way, activist-ism plus single-issue politics can end up defeating itself. Activistism is tedious, and its foot soldiers suffer constant burnout. Thinking, after all, is engaging; were it encouraged, Jiramanus pleads, "We'd all be enjoying ourselves a bit more."' http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html
To which I would juxtapose:
"We cannot believe that, even if the proletariat were the last class and Marxism its authentic representative, its vision of history is *the* vision that will definitely bring an end to all discussion. The relativity of historical knowledge is not only related to its production by a class, it is also related to its production in a culture, at a given epoch, and the latter cannot simply be reduced to the former." [Cornelius Castoriadis]
The "hippie-to-yuppie" dynamic occurred largely due to what happened in May 1968 and it's aftermath. Castoradius wrote the above between 1964 and 1965. One can only hope that those whose inauguration into radical politics then do not repeat the mistakes made by the French CP when trying to understand and participate in the activism of those who were born well after such events transpired.
Htbw,
Ian