Living Species Disappearing… What Will We Do?
Posted by n3wday on October 14, 2008
Maoists say, “Only Revolution Can Save the Planet.” Mountains of evidence, like the following article, drive home the fact that we live at a historic turning point for the biosphere. It has been called “The Sixth Mass Extinction” — the one caused by humanity itself.
The questions posed most sharply is “What will we do?” How will we accelerate the movement for socialist revolution? How will we integrate a radical new sense of ecological urgency and change right into the most fundamental program of our movement? How will we mobilize the heartfelt anger and frustration of millions over bio-cide into a powerful force for real and extremely radical anti-capitalist change? And what are the practical steps we are going to take (we, here on Kasama) to create a revolution where “socialist sustainability” is not an afterthought or a matter of lipservice, but a front-rank defining concept of the future we are fighting for?
This article was posted from the Washington Post on Marxmail.
Survey Finds ‘Bleak Picture’ for World’s Mammals
By Juliet Eilperin, Oct. 6, 2008
BARCELONA — A quarter of the world’s wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here this morning. The new assessment — which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries a total of five years to complete — paints “a bleak picture,” leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996.
“Mammals are definitely declining, and the driving factors are habitat destruction and over-harvesting,” said Jan Schipper, who is the paper’s lead author and the IUCN’s global mammals assessment coordinator.
The researchers concluded that 25 percent of the mammal species for which they had sufficient data are threatened with extinction, but Schipper added the figure could be as high as 36 percent because information on some species is so scarce.
Land and marine mammals face different threats, the scientists said, and large mammals are more vulnerable than small ones. For land species, habitat loss and hunting represent the greatest danger, while marine mammals are more threatened by accidental killing through fishing bycatch, ship strikes, and pollution.
While large species such as primates (including the Sumatran orangutan and red colobus monkeys) and ungulates (hoofed animals) may seem more physically imposing, the researchers wrote that these animals are more imperiled than small creatures such as rodents or bats because they “tend to have lower population densities, slower life histories, and larger home ranges, and are more likely to be hunted.”
Primates face some of the most intense pressures: according to the survey, 79 percent of primates in South and Southeast Asia — including the Hainan gibbon — are facing extinction.
Conservation International president Russ Mittermeier, one of the paper’s co-authors and a primate specialist, said the animals are experiencing “a triple whammy” in the region.
“It’s not that surprising, given the high population pressures, the level of habitat destruction, and the fairly extreme hunting of primates for food and medicinal purposes,” Mittermeier said in an interview. He added that some areas in Vietnam and Cambodia are facing “an empty forest syndrome,” where even populous species such as the crab-eating macaque, or temple monkey, are “actually getting vacuumed out of some
areas where it was common.”
In some cases the scientists have a precise sense of how imperiled a species has become: There are 19 Hainan gibbons left in the wild now on the large island off China’s southeast coast, Mittermeier said, which
actually counts as progress since there used to be just a dozen. In other instances, such as with the beaked whale and jaguar, researchers have a much vaguer idea of their numbers.
Technological advances — such as satellite and radio tagging, camera tracking and satellite-based GPS (global positioning system) mapping — have helped scientists gauge the status of mammals and their habitat more thoroughly. The authors of the assessment wrote that most land mammals occupy “areas smaller than the United Kingdom,” while “the range of most marine mammals is smaller than one-fifth of the Indian Ocean.”
The findings come as other researchers are documenting new ways that human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases affect marine mammals. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute found that ocean acidification spurred by carbon emissions will cause sounds to travel farther underwater, because increasingly acidic seawater absorbs less low- and mid-frequency sound.
By 2050, the researchers predicted, sounds could travel as much as 70 percent farther in parts of the Atlantic Ocean and other areas, which may improve marine mammals’ ability to communicate but also increase the amount of background noise, which could prove disorienting.
“We understand the chemistry of the ocean is changing. The biological implications of that we really don’t know,” said the lead author, ocean chemist Keith Hester. “The magnitude to which sound absorption will
change, based mainly on human contribution, is really astounding.”
The authors of the IUCN’s mammals assessment said the species declines they have observed are not inevitable. “At least 5 percent of currently threatened species have stable or increasing populations,” they wrote, “which indicates that they are recovering from past threats.”
“It comes down to protecting habitats effectively, through protected areas, and preventing hunting and other forms of exploitation,” Mittermeier said. As one example of how conservation can work, he noted that in areas where scientific researchers work, animals stand a much better chance of surviving. “Where you have a research presence, it’s as good or better than a guard force,” he said.
Schipper offered the model of the U.S. effort to bring back the black-footed ferret, which was essentially extinct on the North American prairie as of 1996. “Now it’s endangered which, in this case, is a huge
improvement,” he said. “When governments and scientists commit resources to a project, many species can be recovered.”
nando said
I’m thinking we should brainstorm what it means to integrate new ecological understandings into the revolutionary project (and into socialism) in unprecendented new ways.
I think there are many people who would embrace the sentiment
“Capitalism must end so that the planet can live.”
And also:
“Only Socialism can be sustainable.”
We want a society of more community not more consumption.
There is something profoundly inadequate about trying to “solve” ecological problems (read: catastrophes) through the mechanisms of capitalism — your mind skips half a step ahead, and you can see that nothing fundamental or real is being undertaken. Just look at the lipservice on green house gasses. No one is even saying that key to the problems is the internal combustion engine and the use of fossil fuel….
Where is there even discussion of systematic overhaul of how people work and live (and how they get form home to work) — mass transport, rational communities, small footprint, walking to work etc.
How can the planet be saved if the suburb survives? Or if “drill baby drill” is an accepted part of the political programs of BOTH contending parties?
n3wday said
I’ve been thinking about stuff that could be done within ‘red bases’, assuming we’re ever to develop any. That is communities composed of large numbers of socialists and how our living spaces could contain the seeds of the future, but do it in a way that opposes the world view of isolationist communes. In other words work towards and promote sustainability as part of a revolutionary program.
The Black Panthers set up things like breakfast programs for kids and discount or free schools and stuff as a response to national oppression and exploitation. Perhaps we could do similar things that address the emerging environmental contradictions.
Take for example the things happening with the economy. People are losing tons of money and food prices creeping up, and people are concerned about climate change. So how do we connect all of them?
So what about setting up community gardens and cooking and giving away the produce? How could we make that a revolutionary act? Something like ‘food not bombs’ that’s actually used as a political weapon.
Is it possible to do something like that to expose the contradictions of capitalism while offering basic solutions under the slogan of “people are suffering and we can do this now, but imagine what we could do with state power.” or something like that? Or something like what Nando said, “Capitalism must end so the planet can live”?
What are others thoughts?
irisbright said
N3wday, I have been thinking about that for some time. CassiusGhost has consistently posed the question on Kasmama–if we are not addressing sustainablity as the Main problem as communists, then what chance do we have? I am inquiring about empty lot land ownership on my street right now, and would be interested in a discussion of how such an experimental Kasama project could take place now, while remaining revolutionary (not being economist, is that what the RCP calls it?). I have a house full of sympathizers here, farming experience, and possibly some empty land, in a close knit municipality of immigrants, black people and union workers!
Detroit is full of empty spaces, poverty, food deserts (areas where the impoverished have access only to secondary food sources such as gas stations) and a huge grassroots movement has sprung up around accessible farmer’s markets, community gardens, sustainable development, and the connected issues of clean transportation, toxic waste sites and affordable housing.
Also, the RCP has called my ideas ‘feed em’ and lead ‘em”, economist, and ‘a chicken in every pot’. How can we have such a project without it having these supposed problems, and how to make it a real political tool that encourages organization and conscious agency?
Maybe this winter break from school we can hash something out, start up in the spring?
n3wday said
Precisely what I was wondering. I once read a document that said something along the lines of “If we provide what the state doesn’t then obviously people will want to join us”. This obviously should not be our approach.
I don’t think everything we do has to directly confront the state in order not to be ‘economist’. We need to involve ourselves in projects that build a name for ourselves and earn the trust of the people we’re trying to reach, but we also need to draw boundaries between what are important struggles and what aren’t, otherwise we’ll wind up supporting every reformist undertaking as long as we have a ‘revolutionary’ pamphlet to go along with it.
So I suppose I understand the contradiction, but I’m just as much in the dark about how to resolve it as you are iris.
BobH said
What N3wday says is very interesting. I’ve been trying to learn about solar and wind power generation, sustainable gardening, etc. in the last year or so, but just doing it for yourself is obviously very limited and not socially useful. It’s made we wonder whether Engel’s analysis of utopianism still holds: as modern capitalism decays and leaves more people at the mercy of the elements or the marketplace, is it practical for socialists to build embryonic forms of semi-sustainable communities that are at least partially energy and food independent? In an era of free software and filesharing, when old models of organizing around the workplace are increasingly obsolete, is utopian community building still really utopian?
Linda D. said
THANK YOU SO MUCH N3WDAY for raising this issue, and also to the commentators thus far. Am sorry to say, but I think our work around this extremely important issue has been lacking, even though we have listed a few blogs that people can tune into. One suggestion I have is, that we seriously check into groups who are already on the move and work with them. Obviously with many we can bring forth our politics and visions for the future, but by ourselves, certainly at this point, I don’t think we will have much effect. And to my very respected comrade Iris, I would add fears of being “economist”–think we gotta break with labeling and really figure out what are the real faultlines and pivotal issues. “Capitalism must end so that the planet can live” is hardly economist–and if we do our work correctly, I imagine us uniting with a wide and broad spectrum of people.
Skwisgaar said
The movement in the Philippines has done a lot of very good work that connects the environment with the struggles of the people. Just a couple examples off the top of my head are The Golf War, a film made some years ago about a struggle against a planned golf resort that the NPA became involved in, and work around the collapse of a garbage mountain in Manila in 2000 that buried hundreds of people. There are lots of others. I think their work represent a very advanced approach toward dealing with environmental issues; revolutionaries in the US should study it and try to figure out how we can do analogous work here.
N3wDay said
Skwisgaar,
Can you point us towards any resources to investigate?
patrickm said
People who think themselves Red while being totally infected with Green politics and philosophy would do well to rethink these type of issues and this book http://brightfuture21c.wordpress.com/ (even if a little dry) is a good place to start.
Here is a snip;
Bright Future offers three reasons for being generally positive about our prospects in the 21st century:
1. Most of the poor world will be rich by the end of the century. This will not require spectacular growth rates and our ingenuity will remove any obstacles. Over this period we can double or triple food production by breeding better plants and livestock, and by more effectively managing land and water. At the same time, we can increase energy and raw material production more than six fold by exploiting a vast array of old and new resources with continually improving technologies.
2. Environmental catastrophes will continue to not happen. Nature is remarkably resilient. Furthermore, as we get richer and smarter we will get better at remedying or adapting to natural adversity.
3. In the highly developed economies, capitalism will lose its historical mandate as the automation of most of the onerous and uninteresting work will remove the need for the profit motive. Collective ownership by those who do the work will then be the obvious way to go. This would accelerate growth by unleashing the creative energies of the individual and freeing the economy from the distorting effects of sectional interests. This would be real free enterprise.
And the following article gets right to the heart of the issues so well worth a read.
RED AND GREEN DON’T MIX [1]
Red and green don’t mix. However, this has not stopped a section of the moribund ‘left’ from hopping on the green bandwagon. In their case it is more a mix of pink and green, which gives you an equally revolting blend.
Red and green don’t mix because they are polar opposites. Reds want to create a better society on the basis of the conditions created by modern industrial capitalism while greens want to retreat from those conditions. For reds, modern industrial society is creating the conditions for a future communist society, with bourgeois relations of production being the obstacle to its achievement. Greens on the other hand see modern industrial society as the problem and consider that the answer lies in retreating to some ‘simpler’ way of life.
According to the greenies, modern industry is too large and produces far too much. They think we need to go back to a way of living that is simpler both in terms of scale and complexity of activity and in terms of the range and quantities of goods that we produce.
Large scale industry is seen as inherently oppressive. The individual is just a small cog in a big machine. He or she can have no control in a large organisation because it requires hierarchical relations between people. With increasing scales of production workers lose all the old skills that made work to some extent fulfilling. In small organisations however the individual can retain control over their actions. Small is beautiful is their catch cry.
Greenies consider that production is excessive both in terms of people consuming goods they do not really need and in terms of environmental sustainability. According to this view we would be happier living more simply and it would be more environmentally viable. People engage in mindless consumerism because of advertising and to compensate for their otherwise empty lives. As for the level of production, resources are so scarce and the environmental impact of many of our production processes is so severe that we cannot sustain our present levels of economic activity.
So large scale modern industry is seen as an obstacle to a better world, and one that we have to dismantle. However, this is the exact opposite of the red position. According to the red view, by creating modern large scale industry, capitalism is laying the basis for a more advanced social system. And it is doing this in a number of ways.
Firstly, the concentration of economic activity into large industries means that ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists while the vast majority are dispossessed of the means of production. As a result the vast majority of people have no material interest in the continuation of the present capitalist system because they do not possess capital. On the other hand if production is small scale and ownership is dispersed there would be a lot more capitalists and small business operators and therefore a lot more people with a stake in the system.
Secondly modern industry is creating a level of material affluence that is absolutely necessary for a more advanced social system. It means freeing people from a life dominated by drudgery. And it means having the leisure time and resources to engage in creative and challenging activities. And this includes activities that have up until now been the exclusive domain of elites or ruling classes, in particular the political, cultural and intellectual life of society.
Another way that modern industry is laying the basis for a new social system is by creating a work force that is better educated and more wide ranging in its capabilities than the ill-educated and narrowly trained workers of the past. This means a work force that has the potential to organise production without bosses and without the narrow traditional division of labour that separates the conceptual and instrumental aspects of work and turns it into something boring and alienating. It also means a work force that is less tolerant of the authoritarian nature of the present-day work environment and therefore more likely to rebel against it.
From a red perspective the problem with the present day economy is not its bigness but rather the power relations between people that stems from the capitalist system of ownership. At the same time small scale production is associated with sweat shops and with slave and feudal societies of the past that were even more oppressive than the present system.
Now let’s look at the green argument that current levels of production are unsustainable. According to this view we are going to run out of resources and we will destroy the ecological systems that we need if we are to survive. The fear of resource scarcity is mainly based on the failure to understand that resources are not just a given stock. They are created by new production methods. For example, the iron ore deposits in Western Australia did not become natural resources until the development of modern open-cut methods of mining in the 1960s. And oil was not a resource until the invention of the internal combustion engine; before that it was considered a nuisance. The example of oil also highlights the role of substitution. Technologies employing either oil or coal developed at the end of the nineteenth century at a time when the main source of energy, fire wood, was being severely depleted. There had been a real concern at that time about the economy grinding to a halt because of a lack of fire wood.
To be gloomy about the future availability of natural resources you would need to show that this process of resource creation through technological change will fail us in the future. There is no sign of this occurring. On the contrary there are lots of new technologies on the horizon. For example, genetic engineering will create new ways of producing food and compensate for soil depletion. There is also the increasing efficiency with which we use resources.
As for industry’s impact on the environment, one would need to be convinced that a shrinking economy would be better able to limit environmental impact than a developing one. However, there is a far more compelling case to be made that a modern developing economy can better manage environmental impact. Firstly there are more resources available to do so and secondly there are new technologies to clean up the environment and new ways of producing goods that have less environmental impact.
If these ideas on the environment and resource scarcity sound like conventional conservative views on the subject it is no coincidence. Reds agree with smug conservatives that there are no physical barriers to social progress; where they differ is whether bourgeois property relations present social ones. Greenies and their browny ‘left’ mates think they are being terribly radical when they claim there are physical barriers. In fact they are being even more conservative than the conservatives.
___________________
1 Originally published as ‘Mix red and green and you get the colour of poo’ in Strange Times No. 13 November 1991.
irisbright said
I have seen several comments a few from Mike Ely, that have said our organizing needs to reflect the society we want: breaking down the atomization, the aloneness, the fear and competition and callousness.
It is true, I think, that being disconnected from our food sources and the outdoors and nature is increasingly damaging to our health and psyche. I don’t mean this in a flaky way, but I am very serious. I think it is disabling to children never to have meaningful contact with nature, not to mention the effects of pollution.
There is a fascinating book called The Last Child In The Woods that explores the consequences of disappearing wilderness and urban isolation on the brain, physical health and learning aptitude. I have worked with several schools–urban poor and suburban middle class-that have made working in community gardens required course work in elementary school. Kids appreciate it, they really do, and the new leaders of movements for sustainability have roots there.
PS nice to hear from you Skwisgaar :)
irisbright said
Also, environmental struggles can become little fault-lines of struggle and great exposure in communities and cities. The racism and class-ism inherent in the placement of heavy industry, toxic dumping (illegal is a big prob in Detroit–lots of empty space), clean transportation, incinerators, clean lakes…the list goes on and on.
In Detroit we have several particular struggles that have had big popular support: The Incinerator (I used to be able to see it from my window until I moved a few miles–ironically, closer–to the damn thing) shutdown was a big struggle, peaking in the local weekly alternative paper having a weekly installment on the thing. Public trans is a huge struggle here with tons of grassroots support.
I think the planned placement of a bio-hazard lab in Harlem was a struggle for a while right?
ryan d said
The ideas of ‘red bases’ is something that needs to be worked out and discussed. And while this is being done, we need to consider the potential found outside of urban areas. All areas, urban, rural, and suburban would need to be part of a revolutionary movement yet most revolutionaries live and organize in urban areas or am I wrong? I think this holds us back and isolates us in our radical urban communities, though we may be surrounded by millions of people.
Gary said
I disagree that “red and green don’t mix”; they HAVE to mix. But it’s worth studying why the environmental records of the USSR and PRC (during what most of us would acknowledge were periods of socialist construction) were so bad. The USSR didn’t outlaw hunting of the Siberian tiger until 1947; the PRC imported African ivory etc. It’s not like, historically, capitalism has equalled environmental devastation and socialism has been eco-conscious.
If we say (adding to the many reasons we need socialism) that there must be socialism to save the environment, we need to acknowledge that environmentalism doesn’t emerge naturally and inevitably out of Marxism-Leninism. It has to be integrated into it.
N3wDay said
For a lesson in bourgeois economy refer to Patrick M’s post. There’s no need to discuss environmental problems because 1, there is no problem, and 2 if there is a problem it will be solved without difficulty and without the necessity for any concern.
This is complete idealism. Capitalism doesn’t respond to anything there isn’t a market for, and competing firms seek to cover up and hide environmental problems to protect whatever niche they are invested in. They do this with powerful lobby’s, subsidiary companies, SAP’s, etc. For example, dealing with the climate change problem will require RADICAL restructuring of production as we know it. That doesn’t mean we cannot do it. It doesn’t mean we have to be primitivists. But it needs to be included as a bold part of our program in opposition to the laws of capital.
After the revolution is a slightly different story. But I’m afraid everyone simply will not be driving BMW’s. No doubt we will be able to raise the standard of living in many sections of the world (in the US the standard of living for the middle class is ridiculous, there is no need to reach beyond that level). We’re trying to create a liberated society, not better consumerism.
I’m going to have to reverse the burden of proof and put it on that article. There’s nothing that leads me to believe that we can genetically engineer plants to utilize food in such an effective manner that we won’t have to worry about population (you think cell growth really works that way?). Genuinely sustainable farming is expensive but doable, but will not happen in the way that article envisions.
Sure we learn to utilize resources better, maybe in some far off distant future we will we know how to use them much better. But technology generally doesn’t improve at the same level as constantly increasing production. That article is shaky at best.
nando said
We have a number of people posting from the Australian site “last superpower” –
they claim to be communists, but the core of their theory is that the U.S. is no longer a major focus of the struggle of the oppressed, that the U.S. war in Iraq should be supported, and the U.S. attack on Muslim countries is progressive because it represents a democratic revolution over semi-feudal Islam etc.
And as an auxilary view, these forces think that “green” politics are reactionary (they support nuclear power, and take a republican view of global warming.)
PatrickM above is one of those people. (Arthur, posting on the South Asia site, is another).
I think we should discuss whether to exclude them from this site…
On one level, their views are common in society and DO have to be confronted.
But really, they are reactionary views — and drag our discussion (among revolutionaries and communists) in a direction that is not particularly productive.
I want to debate HOW to promote and describe socialist sustainability — I am not that interested in a arguing with a rightwing-in-communist-clothing argument that green and red don’t mix. Am I alone?
I think we need to decide whether they fall outside the bounds of what we want in our discussions. Should we exclude them? Or debate them?
N3wDay said
Personally I don’t think it’s worth while on questions such as this. It just drags the discussion down to arguing over whether global warming is real or not which is totally fucking worthless at this pointless.
irisbright said
Patrick, the assertions in that article are ridiculous, and don’t jive with, like, science.
I have been told by both you and Arthur that having a sense of serious, if not dire urgency around climate change–based on science–is a useless, leftist end-days fetish; a non-materialist preoccupation with things forever ‘getting worse’.
What about the consequences of genetic engineering of food? We still do not know how eating genetically modified food alters our own DNA, or causes cancers. There are serious dangers of disappearing biodiversity in the name of heightened production, of GM corn contaminating wild grasses and spreading super-weeds. As we speak, a beetle outbreak is occurring in Yellowstone national park because of warming–long summers, short winters–that is devastating an unprecedented acreage of pine. this will cause a massive ‘carbon sink’ that will contribte to warming and worsen air quality. The risk of pandemic diseases increase as the world warms and antibiotics are over used. Do you think this is a hoax, that it will solve itself without work or study or sacrifice?
Modern pharmaceuticals, pesticides and herbicides–all part of the ‘green revolution’ in food production have wreaked unforeseen (or capitalist-suppressed) consequences. These things are facts that communists need to grapple with like everyone else. That article sounds like a fucking article from the 50′s–pushing magical progress with no facts to back it up.
I would be interested in a discussion of the horrific record on environment that communists have had, because its the truth! Its one thing that held me back from communism for some time–I think it holds left activists back in the damaging way that the RCP’s line on homosexuality did (does), or the anti-red propaganda we’re assaulted with. And also, I am interested in hearing about the necessity of a ‘capitalist stage’. Some of the arguments in that article on the supposed incompatibility of greens and reds–I used to think that exact same thing, and haven’t honestly done much to disprove it to myself.
irisbright said
Honestly, I think Arthur has been generally polite and his comments on south asian rev have been lengthy and engaged.
patrickm gives me a migraine though. debating global warming? are you joking?
nando said
It’s really not a matter of whether or not these folks are polite or even whether they are engaged. It is their purpose for being here — and the impact it has on our discussions.
Arthur (like Patrick) is a supporter of U.S. imperialism. His comments are engaged, but he has been (tactfully) hiding what his agenda is: arguing to leftists that they should support U.S. imperialism, and the spread of western-style democracy.
The moment we seriously engage Arthur on the other site — that will be what tumbles out (and against drags us into some tiresome distraction).
My question is simple: where do we draw the line? Is it (as you suggest, iris) if people are civil and interesting? Or are we going to say that arguments over supporting U.S. imperialism is a waste of our time?
patrickm said
‘…environmentalism doesn’t emerge naturally and inevitably out of Marxism-Leninism.’
That’s correct it comes from the right-wing and has nothing to do with communists. Now-days people confuse this quasi-religious doom and gloom right-wing carry-on as something that has emerged from the left. How is that possible? Because of the existence of the left in form, right in essence pseudo-left, and it is important to review the history of these opposing world views. They don’t mix because they are opposing.
Here we have to define what is left, and I accept for the purpose of this discussion a world view that is for the oppressed against the oppressor and enthusiastic about development.
In order that a genuine left re-emerge the green opponents of development, of industrialism must be exposed and broken away from rather than taken on board. Take the carbon panic mongering. We now have ads on the TV telling us to go vegetarian ‘to save the planet’. I don’t buy it and am far more interested in why some ‘communists’ are not complaining about the appalling lack of development but are rather siding with this scaremongering!
The one clear issue that has jumped front and centre, now that world wide recession is in progress is that the green attack on our standards of living (carbon taxing) is dead in the water. It was one thing when the ploy was to stop working people’s standards rising as quickly as they would have, but it’s quite another when standards are falling and the enemy green philosophy attempts to add another attack on real wages, ‘to save the planet’.
Take this article; ask yourself what is the last mammal that became extinct and when did it happen? Then ask yourself when the next mammal will become extinct and where this will happen. If that’s too hard to contemplate, (for the very good reason that none of the most rare creatures [the closest to extinction] are anything other than increasing) ask when the one before the last happened, and then contemplate the time that has gone past. Why is there not a speed up if it is all such a great worry?
Then after you have stopped worrying about that non-existent problem, ask yourself what industrialized country has suffered environmental degradation lately, as measured by the people that live there? If your environment is improving where you live and you are in an industrialized country stop worrying about places where you are not. If you’re not in an industrialized country then (overwhelmingly among working people) you will just want the industrial development just as the comrades in Nepal are pushing for development.
Nando is avoiding issues and attacking the messenger because of what that messenger believes about other issues and that’s quite predictable but hardly productive.
Quorri said
PatrickM has been successful in derailing this conversation away from essential questions raised, such as asking how we can reach out into our local communities and actually create change…
I think the question of whether or not to exclude PatrickM from posting at Kasama should be responded to with a resounding yes.
gangbox said
I always get very uncomfortable when I hear the word “sustainability”.
As used by “the New York Times” and the corporate grant-financed envirinmentalists, it usually transates as a green cover for a reduced standard of living for the working class
Speaking as and old school “workerist” Trotskyist, I have to say that I always thought the goal of socialism and revolution was a better life for the working class.
After work market gardening, lower consumption and the whole green program are essentially anti working class.
This is especially true for that great majority of the world’s 1 billion workers who live in near starvation in the slums of the Third World.
If you’re living in a cardboard and plastic shack in Mexico or Nairobi, you’re already living a “sustainable” life – with a small carbon footprint too!!!
Even for workers in the imperialist countries, who have things considerably better than our Third World sisters and brothers, we have noting to gain from this whole “sustainability” regime.
I’m sorry, but after a long hard day instaling desks, I’m really not interested in working another half day at the “community garden”! Sorry, but I’d much rather stop by Pathmark and just BUY my cabbage and potatoes!
Beyond that, “sustainability” means that workers in temorate cities like New York would not be allowed to eat oranges, bananas, kiwi fruit or anything else that can’t grow here.
Can you spell “scurvy”????
Sorry, but there is not a damned thing revolutionary about “community gardens”!
In fact, if you look at the actual living history of “community gardens” in New York City, the Rockefeller interests created them back in the 1970′s – for pro corporate reasons.
New York real estate speculators had burned down huge areas of the city (despite the fact that this was flat out illegal, nobody other than few low level arsonists went to jail for it, and the slumlords were actually able to collect on their insurance!)
To keep land prices and rents high, Rockefeller-funded community groups came up with the idea of setting up gardens on the sites of the burned out buildings (rather than doing what the working class actually needed to be done – that is, building new affordable housing to replace the destroyed units)
Of course, the community groups were not that brazenly honest about their purpose – there was a lot of lame green rhetoric about urbanites needing to get close to nature and being better off with more open space.
And I’m sure a lot of the volunteers at those agencies actually believed all of that nonsense!
But, in the real world, keeping valuable land for housing off the market by tying it up as inefficient and underutilized “farmland” jacked up rents, and led to the wave of gentrification that forced hundreds of thousands of workers (mostly Black and Latino) out of their neighborhoods.
Bottom line, the highest and best use of urban vacant lots in major cities are homes for workers not wasteful “community gardens” – if we want to spend time communing with nature or whatever, we can wait til Sunday and then get on the train and go up to Bear Mountain!
I became a communist 26 years ago because I wanted the working class to have a better life – not so we’d be battered down to penury and want!
And a better life for workers – in America and around the world – calls for MORE consumer goods, not less!
More eyeglasses, more school whiteboards, more computers, more textbooks, more printing presses, more cell phones, more busses, more trucks, more cars, more forklifts, more tractors, more dialisis machines ect ect ect.
So called “sustainable socialism” is not going to bring us to that place – we really need “smokestack socialism”!
I know this view is contraversial on the ecologized left – but whoever said that truth was a popularity contest?
lunita said
Nando:
You say,
“Or are we going to say that arguments over supporting U.S. imperialism is a waste of our time?”
Couldn’t we say the same thing about progressives who are committed to Obama?
Just curious. This Aussie is giving me a headache, too, but that he has added an intriguing frame to the discussion about the environment in terms of Green/Red, even if his analysis is ultimately wrong.
lunita said
anyway, i think while there may be room for creating certain types of environmental collectives among some kindred spirits, there is no possible way for sustainability w/out revolution.
the idea that such collectives could be a way to create and maintain ties among the masses is, indeed, intriguing.
nando said
I actually think that the debate over Obama is very different. And that it exactly one of the discussions we should be having and deepening.
I think we need to refine that discussion, and critically examine our own views. And even there, I think we should spend less time on the cruder liberal arguments of Keith and Carl — and more on actually articulating more fully and clearly (as Keith demands) our own views on what needs to be done — on how revolutionary work should be done.
And by contrast, I really am not interesting in engaging this group’s rather uninteresting arguments in support of the iraq war or their republican scepticism about tree-huggers.
We do need to be able to answer these reactionary ideas (as part of our larger work)… but I just don’t think a site like this can both have a high level revolutionary discussion (of line and regroupment) and ALSO allow rightwing trolls to drag the conversation to their level.
It is inevitable that if people post these kind of reactionary views on a site like this that people can’t “let that pass” — and our larger purpose gets lost in a debate with the pro-imperialist arguments.
RW Harvey said
The idea of “feed ‘em and lead ‘em” is not necessariy economist; I could see this evolving from real liberated zones in both rural area and urban centers. At this time, though, I don’t see revolutionaries initiating, say, community gardens (nor opposing their establishment). More importantly at this time is exposing the fact that everywhere capital touches — people and the environment — the life gets squeezed out in the rapacious quest for increased profit and rate of profit. One need only look at Haiti, most places in Africa, Iraq, AMerica’s inner cites and reservations to see the ecological imapct of imperialism. The enviroment — because it is inseparable from the behavior of capitalism — is clearly a primary faultline in separating revolution from reaction.
lunita said
exactly, rw harvey. no matter what progressive type of collectives folks create, there’s just no sustainability in the current system. but iris points out that such collectives are intrinsically grassroots organizing… i don’t think forming such ties is therefore economist.
however, my gut feeling is that reds shouldn’t go out of their way to create public opinion in this way necessarily, but those who are in a position to do so could. the environment is one of the major fault lines that could galvanize major sections of progressives…and connecting and revolutionizing on that basis is honest and necessary.
Ka Frank said
I agree that Patrick M and anyone arguing for an overtly pro-US imperialist and bourgeois position on this and other topics should be excluded, because it is does drag down and divert the discussions we need to have here. Arthur hasn’t jumped out in that way at this point on Nepal, though his tone is certainly irritating. If what Nando is saying about Arthur’s real agenda is correct, I would just encourage Arthur to go ahead with his own nepalstudies website and work to strengthen ties between the US and the new government in Nepal.
cassiusghost said
It is as important to understand how to dig deeply into the soil, as it is to learn to investigate and learn from the people who are doing the digging.
China’s early communist struggles did not benefit from the Comintern’s orders to center their work and forces in the urban centered metropoles or the trade unions. In certain respects, the Comintern’s legacy lay in the piles of dead comrades in Shanghai and other cities as the purges began during the long Civil War.
How can a peoples’ red army feed itself without stealing from the people? By paying for the food with expropriated money from local big shots? At what point does it become theft from the people?
Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from our Nepal comrades. I do not know enough about their wonderful history (so far), but am open to learning and doing.
How can one even think that building a “commune” is “isolationist” if it is to be an operating hub, an organizing center, a school of learning and one point on a wheel of networks turning the soil and the peoples’ minds toward revolution.
I fear the lessons many proletarian revolutionaries have in this barren polluted fortress of world imperialism are based on some wrong judgements, scarred by the incorrect verdicts of the international communist movement.
If there is no food, it can be grown for both the people and the animals. If there are few animals, they can be re-introduced into the new growing environment. If there is no jungle to hide and fight the imperialists, then the jungle can be grown again and let real species diversity protect the revolutionary impetus.
Perhaps there is still some traction from not only “hiding in the crowds” but also resisting the atomised existence of many comrades in the urban cores, by creating the crowds, the gardens and the cooperatives, the collectives, the “isolationist communes” – yes even there great advances toward building the important base areas can be made.
I have repeatedly asked for more environmental issues to be placed on this important Kasama Project and am happy to see this article and others. I feel that matters like peak oil should be investigated here (BTW I do not agree with all that is being said about peak oil, but do see world energy scarcity as a pivotal issue in understanding and changing the world around us).
I do not agree with all anarchists, but I know this … that without a certain degree of personal and social autonomy the people cannot have the freedom to get together to learn how to analyze and decide how to fight against and defeat US imperialism. They cannot do that with empty stomachs and without knowing the profound lessons of our class history and that requires time and patience.
There is much to be done and building real base areas that can sustain revolutionary forces is directly linked to how we treat our oppressed brothers and sisters and how we treat the land and the animals. Revolutionaries must be socialist in the cities and the farm lands – and find the ways to teach others to grow into a mighty flood to wash the class divisions away.
Let that be our communist legacy to the people for all ages.
cassiusghost said
The “last superpower” site participants are most likely operatives for some kind of intelligence network, reactionary or revolutionary – who knows, but it would be foolish to think that intelligence networks aren’t watching.
I know mine is, lol!
Who could support mass killings with aerial bombs? They have no souls and have shit for brains – “the last superpower” people should work and write so much for another brain dead killer from the air, John McCain. They are all timebombs to be used against the people.
Iris said
Ah, Cassius, I knew I would see you on this thread! Hey, brother! you know, the scary thing is, when forests disappear, it isn’t just the regrowing–it creates a carbon sink. That is when all the living trees who produced oxygen die, and the living wood where they locked the carbon decays, releasing it. It hurts the balance, and destroys breathable air for us animals.
What do people think about building community gardens with free food, or community centers, with a specifically rev communist edge? Can anyone tell me how the Panthers did free breakfast, and how such a thing would develop with ties to the community, not just a reciprocity deal (come and eat, listen to teacher…)?
Many places in the inner city and in poor rural areas where people can get what they need are churches, some even require you to pray or attend service to eat or sleep. It is painful to see the support network that is there to catch people is Christian. I know that our primary task is to regroup–hold some conferences, etc.–because the ability to host such programs and mass educate arises from the situation in society. I don’t just want another info shop here–I want to have a garden and organizing hub that doesn’t blend into the noise too much.
Also, Patrick, I did argue with some of your ‘facts’ about the urgency of climate change. You chose to ignore them. Let’s not worry about the pollution in other countries right? Because air and water don’t move? And pollution magically disappears over time.
Anyway, I am actually interested in arguments about green and red not mixing, as layed out by the block-headed article pm posted. I have heard arguments from anti-capitalist greens–that development is inherently anti-sustainability, and communists want capitalist development to have revolutions. Is that at all true? Any recommended reading?
n3wday said
The discussion about Obama is of interest because it includes much more forces who are genuinely left, not just crypto rightists like Patrick (although the Obama discussion does in fact include some of them as well).
My immediate reaction after his last post is to say ban the reactionary, but that could be because I feel so strongly about this particular issue. Perhaps those who are more objective in this case should decide.
****
When I mentioned communes being isolationist I was referring to the communes that get established in the woods and essentially operate in a way that’s disconnected from society. The philosophy is based on a sort of ‘if we do our best as individuals to carve out a sustainable area then we have no responsibility after that except to live as we do’.
Reevaluating my comment on community gardens. They may be valuable as a way to incorporate commie principles into daily activities but food distribution and stuff like that is no way to promote revolution. Someone mentioned recently to me that we don’t want to be the ‘people that talk while others just eat and listen’. However I do think it may be an interesting way to create am attractive communist culture. Having a central place to meet and eat for communists or other people in a given area, serving an overtly political purpose. It couldn’t however, be run like ‘food not bombs’ where it functions simply as a distribution center for poor people. That’s nice an everything but it would wind up becoming the divide between ‘talking and listening’, and ultimately economist and unprincipled if it was used to try and attract people for political recruitment.
n3wday said
lol i was writing my comment while you posted iris.
Iris said
Right-o, N3wday. I think how one would carry out community garden/environmental work in a city would depend on your own area.
Detroit for example: we have a well establish network of gardens and it is really blowing up here. Tons of empty space, resources, classes. It links locally into a growing environmental movement around local and sustainable food production (big deal in MI) that badly needs to be radicalized, and yanked back from the jaws of ‘consumer environmentalism’. Our local struggle to shut down the incinerator became, for several months, a weekly paper piece exposing environmental racism. An angry grassroots meeting is taking place somewhere here, about each week, in several different organizations, on how to finally get clean public transit.
Community gardening and fnb style organizing aside (i agree with you n3w) how could communists get into environmental struggles and effectively bring in the idea: end capitalism to save the planet? What about accusations that all communists want is more more more development? Especially in the third world? What do communists say when people contrast our supposed desire for super centralized government, and their own investigation into sustainability (small local ecosystems are more sustainable than massive national economies)?
Iris said
Better yet: how do we START environmental battles, and blow the minds of the entire Left? Not just make it some sideline lip service: ah, we support that, but this is more important read this Ardea Skybreak (RCP style)? Lets develop a battle plan that pushes real revolution–a lot of environmentalists say we need abrupt change to stop this, right?! Because on many levels, this is the most important thing.
lunita said
interesting, iris, to consider what is the most important thing, since everything is so interrelated! but in thinking ahead to those ‘scenarios’ possibly in the not-too-distant future, in which food and water will be scarce, creating and supporting sustainable garden/farming initiatives … not as something isolationist or utopian … but as a living site of revolutionary struggle could have potential.
certainly many leftist forces are involved w/urban green movements. and, believe it or not, there are farmers who yearn to break away from the destructive cycle of chemical dependency and the backward societal relations that keep them enslaved to capital. given the environmental realities, this is a major fault line because it concentrates so much of the interrelatedness of capital’s demise.
so, since we’re on the subject, i’d be curious to know what others think of a potential revolutionary scenario, in which we are faced w/food and water shortages (as a logical result of all the other contradictions capital is responsible for). what would that look like? how can we best prepare for such a scenario now?
BobH said
This is slightly off-topic, but on other Marxist discussion lists I read about what might be called the “communist class” thesis. This was put out by an ex-autoworker from Detroit who had been in the old League of Rev. Black Workers. Anyway, the basic idea is that modern capitalism, as it grows increasingly automated, has created a permanent decline in the proportion of actual surplus-value creating workers, and that we are seeing the emergence of a new class of partially-employed people who are increasingly outside the value creation cycle. The idea is that this class of people have a direct contradiction with capitalism because they are essentially viewed as expendible; capitalism no longer cares if they are fit to be workers, etc.
I bring this up because if there’s any truth to this thesis, it suggests to me that organized social movements that begin to take on the work to feed, clothe, etc. the masses that capitalism can’t have a potentially revolutionary role to play especially if such movements increasingly are able to exist outside the money economy.
I know this is very vague, but I wonder if there is a possible convergence between environmental issues, food/energy questions, and the emergence of a “post-proletarian” class? Or put another way, is there a class approach to environmentalism that rejects “green-washed” capitalism, and “boutique” organic food that can tie in with the peoples’ growing struggle for survival in a truly radical way?
Given the kind of crypto-fascist response to Katrina, I sometimes wonder whether the development of semi-sufficient communities increasingly outside the money economy (and corresponding culture) might not be the “soviets” of the future?
Eddy said
what about this:
The essence of the problem is stated toward the end of the essay: “It comes down to protecting habitats”. More to the point, it requires the recognition of ecological relationships as central to the biological life on the planet and not simply as instrumental to some socio-economic result.
As a species, and in increasing numbers, agriculture allows humans to live outside ‘our habitat’, a process that has been underway for at least 10,000 years. That we are only recently beginning to recognize and act on that understanding is an historical fact. But importantly, as historical materialists, we need to ‘deal with it’; examine the social process of development and create new social practices accordingly.
Unfortunately, so far with socialism, especially with the Soviet Union and Stalin, we’ve seen primarily a mechanical and instrumental approach to science and the natural world. This was less so in China in the 50s and 60s, but much of the ‘conservation’ discussion there turned on nature as ‘productive forces’ rather than as biosphere.
Of course, ‘nature’ and ‘people’ are both productive elements in every society. But that historical fact does not come close to describing the potential or agency of either human societies or of our surrounding environments.
Quorri said
I really want to challenge a couple of ideas brought up by Gangbox.
As pertains to using land for “community gardens” as opposed to using it to build housing for workers Gangbox shares:
“But, in the real world, keeping valuable land for housing off the market by tying it up as inefficient and underutilized “farmland” jacked up rents, and led to the wave of gentrification that forced hundreds of thousands of workers (mostly Black and Latino) out of their neighborhoods.”
I think most, if not all of us, deplore that situation’s specifics and the subjective contradictions brought up there.
However, the concept that, “Bottom line, the highest and best use of urban vacant lots in major cities are homes for workers not wasteful “community gardens”,” ignores that both affordable homes AND sustainable agriculture are beneficial things that we should seek, as people who profess a desire to radically change all aspects of relations, both human and materialist.
Additionally, the following comment worries me: “a better life for workers – in America and around the world – calls for MORE consumer goods, not less! More eyeglasses, more school whiteboards, more computers, more textbooks, more printing presses, more cell phones, more busses, more trucks, more cars, more forklifts, more tractors, more dialisis machines ect ect ect.”
I can see that there are material needs that are not met for a majority of people on the planet. I can see that there are goods that need to be produced for and consumed by these people. That is a given. However, I hesitate toward any general push for more goods for more goods’ sake. It is probably more apt to point out that there are plenty of goods around, they just aren’t shared and distributed in an equitable way. People lack access to them. It has been historically true in many instances such as famine that the food is there, it is just hoarded for a profit. By radically changing society, we can offer these goods to people more readily and so it may not be a need to produce always more and more and more…. but simply to produce enough and to distribute it equitably.
In teaching, everyone thinks that if we can get more money for more computers and more interactive whiteboards, somehow students will become more educated. This is simply not so. If, however, education were approached differently altogether and the system weren’t focused on paying out as little possible (overstocking classroooms until you have 40+ students in one room at one time) to get the supposedly highest standards possible (the ever detestable Standardized Testing included), perhaps it would work a little better, no interactive whiteboard required. (though the technology is useful, it’s not necessary.)
Thoughts?
n3wday said
Socialism is about the relations of production, not more more more for me. We need a decent standard of living for everyone, but not blind consumerism. These anti ecological outlooks ignore future generations of WORKERS, people, masses, whatever you want to call them in favor of economic gains now. This is a deeply rightist view.
Gangbox mocks community gardens but doesn’t consider the importance of sustainable farming and localized food production. No shit you won’t be able to eat strawberries during the winter. What’s more important, eating strawberries when it’s cold outside, or the MILLIONS of people across the world living on the coasts whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by climate change? Already oceans are rising and destroying islands that have been inhabited for many generations, this will only continue.
Ignoring this is profoundly short sighted and selfish.
BobH said
Gangbox’s comments about urban land use (gardens vs. housing) betray an extreme poverty of imagination. Has he never heard of the concept of making buildings structurally sound enough to support topsoil on the roofs? You get both uses of the land that way, as well as a built-in way to reduce rain runoff, improve air quality, grey water recycling, reduce noise and heating costs, etc. Of course, when you see sustainability as a plot by the real estate developers you have to make everything either/or.
gangbox said
Quorri,
We really are going to need more things to make a better life for everybody on Earth.
If everybody is going to have a decent home, we’re going to need more sheetrock, more concrete, more floor tiles, more sinks, more toilets, more stoves, more electrical wiring.
And for all of those folks to get educated, we will need more classrooms (and more of the above building materials) along with more school supplies – more whiteboards, more textbooks, more pencils, more paper, ect.
And they’ll need more hospitals and doctors offices – with more MRI machines, and more CAT scanners, and more tounge depressors, and more hypodermic needles, and more latex examination gloves, and more scalpels, and more speculums, and more forecips ect ect ect.
And this will require more factories, and more machines to produce the goods within those factories.
And those folks employed in those factories (and in the hospitals, and schools, and stores ect) will need more busses and more commuter trains to get to work.
And those folks will have to eat – and we’ll be in a world where everybody gets to eat – so that requires more tractors, and more combine harvesters, and more trucks, and more pesticides.
Yes, we will still be using tractors and cropdusters, because we don’t want to leave the world’s farmworkers tied down in dawn to dusk stooplabor with hoes and machetes.
[Just ask a farmer from a Third World country what it’s like cutting cane or harvesting corn by hand – and just look at the machete cuts on their hands and faces from a lifetime of hard work – trust me, communists want to help liberate these brothers and sisters from the tyranny of the plough sooner rather than later).
On to the sustainability of urban farming – honestly, in the Greater New York Area, where we have lots of great farmland in New Jersey, Upstate New York, Eastern Long Island, Eastern Connecticut and the Delaware Water Gap of Pennsylvania – land that’s open and unimproved, land that’s already used for farming and has been for hundreds of years, land that’s just a half day’s truckride away from the City, why on earth would we want to waste time turning urban vacant lots into inefficient minifarms?
Why have 20 people with no agricultural training and a few hand tools busting their butts harvesting a tiny 100 foot by 20 foot miniplot, when a half dozen experienced farmers with tractors could get far more of a yeild from several hundred acres of open farmland in the outer suburbs?
That just does not make any sense to me, Quorri.
=============================
n3wday,
I’m sorry that you think that fighting for better conditions for the workers is “rightist”.
If you’re correct in that assumption, then I’m very proud to be a “rigtist”.
I’d love to be able to debate online with diamond miners in Botswana, bartenders in Bankok and rice farmers in North Borneo just like I’m debating with you.
That (and all the other wonders of 21st century industrialism) are only possilble if we fight for a higher standard of living for workers on a worldwide basis.
I’m not interested in giving up the conquests of modern science to return to medievalism.
Until modern times, having fresh fruit and fresh milk in temporate cities was a luxury for the few – which meant the working class did without, and death from scurvy and malnutrition were the lot of working class infants.
Here in New York City, every summer from the 1700′s up until the 20th century, upwards of 20,000 babies would die for want of adequate vitamin intake.
The advent of modern pasturized milk and the refigerated motor truck that could haul that milk from the Upstate dairies to the grocery stores of Manhattan saved those babies – and I would hope you wouldn’t want to go back to the day when those kids would have just died.
Especially since the whole back to nature trip will NOT save the world.
Modern science, and nothing else, will be able to come up with engineering solutions to the problems of global warming.
Yes, n3wday, that’s “smokestack socialism” and I’m proud to be an advocate for that line (even if it makes me a ‘rightest’)
gangbox said
BobH,
Why would you waste the load bearing capacity of a structure by putting a dead load of topsoil, and a live load of plants and irrigation water, on top of it?
It would be far more efficient use that same weight bearing capacity to support more floors, or a greater load of people and furniture in the existing floors.
Besides, how the hell are you going to efficiently harvest crops if all your produce has to be carried downstairs?
And why would you go to all that trouble when there’s perfectly good natural farmland, at road level, just 30 miles away in the outer suburbs?
For that matter, why would you want to dig up perfectly good topsoil, haul it to a city and put it on top of a building in the first place?
Wouldn’t it make more sense just to leave the topsoil where it is an farm it on site?
That rooftop topsoil idea, from an engineering perspective, just makes no sense at all – unless you want to waste resources.
In fact, that idea sounds a lot like Mao Zedong’s disasterous “Backyard Steelmills”, which took perfectly good coal, limestone and iron ore, and instead of shipping it to the steel mills in Manchuria (where those inputs could have reached their highest and best use) instead wasted the raw material in tiny backyard iron furnaces.
Again, a very “imaginitive” idea – but “imagination” is not always a good thing!
n3wday said
Note to Gangbox,
My sincerest apologies. My previous post was very disrespectful and stems from a certain set of assumptions. Those being that the environmental problems we face such as global warming are in fact real.
I know that you are a sincere revolutionary and would not consciously advocate something that would be incredibly detrimental to the people of the world.
That being said, I believe that ignoring these very real problems is a great threat and is a big step back from where we need to go.
If you do not believe these problems are real (which I believe is what you think), I really urge you to look into them with an open mind…
cassiusghost said
A short comment to Gangbox, who I mightily admire for his “can do” spirit of writing and skill in dissecting some of the engineering problems of green buildings in the urban landscape. I also share the dubious distinction with him of being perhaps the first to be put on a delayed censured status with the moderators. We’ve clashed before and there is some joy in the shared pain.
First, Gangbox, I recently attended a series of lectures pertaining to some of the efforts by early post-revolutionary Bolshevik architects and engineers from 1917 – 1927 in the Soviet Union. They successfully challenged some of the problems you outlined in load-bearing constructions for buildings, not so much in holding gardens enough to feed the people who lived in the buildings, but in the ability to house and comfortably maintain the maximum number of people in dynamic living spaces where they could function on a communal basis.
I am surprised you haven’t remarked on this truely revolutionary aspect of Soviet architecture immediately after the revolution. True, some were later exiled or shot, but the constructed models still exist to this day – and function, without air conditioning and small boilers circulating heated water through gravity flow radiators during the bleak winters of Moscow.
Gardens in the war starved Soviets were rather summarily forced upon the population, clumsy at best, but over 80 years later the same methodology was used by the people, without government coercion, to survive as the new “Russia” emerged after the financial and governmental collapse of the late eighties and early nineties of neoliberal “rescues.” Clinton’s Secretary of the Economy Rubin did that, currently Obama’s chief financial adviser, and he’ll be the one taking over the neoliberal “rescue” after the elections, if Obama is allowed to win.
Dr. Michael Hudson, unlike Raymond Lotta (RCP “Maoist”) has correctly predicted in a recent lecture that the US imperialist collapse of empire will most likely be similar to that what became of the Soviet Union (and Cuba, BTW). We will be dominated in the urban cores by oligarchs, even down to the food and energy people will be allowed to consume during energy scarcities. Something I strongly wish you would take into account as a very distinct result of today’s outrageous series of “bail-outs” for the billionaires, try to help us make the intermediate steps of getting to the highly mechanized petroleum based construction methods, after we, I guess “sieze power” of the bulldozers, tower cranes and etc. I don’t think it’s going to be that easy, or feasible, unless urban finances keep construction going on in a post-bailout period.
Better to use all that skilled workmanship to figure out how we may be forced to feed large numbers of people with just a few gallons of gas to run the big machines necessary to “get her done” when it comes to building gardens and livestock pens to feed folks in the urban cores. A daunting task, given the social turmoil.
BTW the buildings those early Soviets built were quite impressive with almost art deco lines and big windows for the sunlight (radiant heating) and drive thru subway stops for the winter.
Of course I heard tell, our Chinese comrades in the early revolution days, found a way to heat their electric trolley cars with shit-bag balloons burning methane. Now that’s a “get her done” attitude.
In any event, it’s good to see your comments on this thread.
Irisbright, I will find a way to relay a reading list, available at any public library (without getting on a DHS watch list) about some of the great literature out there about these subjects.
cassiusghost said
Alright comrades here is a very pertinent link and it will burn up your bandwidth, so do it when you have Fair Access Time.
I DO NOT AGREE with everything in it, but it is stimulating and will make us think about what kind of world might be possible after a revolution.
Perhaps many of you have already seen this, but I must say it pre-supposes limitless energy and human potential.
As I said, I don’t agree, but it is worth watching.
Here is the link (watch out it starts playing immediately):
Click http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ click the eyeball.
Enjoy the trip (not to date myself)!
patrickm said
The term ‘Global warming’ has been replaced by‘climate change’ in order that bankrupt green philosphy can scare people (again)about any weather event that happens. It is a slippery; mealy-mouthed; fear-mongering expression that communists ought to call-out when they see it. ‘Climate’ change – is exactly what humans will always deal with as we roam from the Equator to the Poles. A hundred years ago no human being had ever been to the Poles, the climates there were just too extreme to deal with. Now it is common-place and will become even more so.
Ocean levels can be measured, and so can measuring the two sites of ice that could produce substantial rises. The evidence is that ice is increasing in the Antartic (only the Peninsular is thinning), and Greenland is thinning in some areas but thickening in others, with the overall balance still not known. There is a detailed study underway, so we will all just have to wait for the results for a couple more years. But there is no sea level crisis and AL Gore is a self obsessed right-wing turd and not any savior of the f…ing planet.
The current ‘crisis’ is manufactured scare-mongering when the real problems are world-wide human poverty and oppression. Progressives ought to advocate the rapid industrialisation of every country on the planet.
The short answer from a communist perspective (due to our faith in the masses) is that humans will cope with everything that we have to. Proletarians work on the issues that we really discover in the process of lifting our standard of living. Maoists in the late 60s and early 70s when Mao was still alive and we all shared the one Maoist verdict on WW2, (and the three worlds theory) and we all used to expose the scare-mongering from Rachael Carson and Paul Ehrlich etc. Obviously quite a few on this site have not even read people like Brorn Lomborg or Julian Simon, let alone a communist critique of evironmentalism in a book like ‘Bright future’.
For example ‘… the concept of making buildings structurally sound enough to support topsoil on the roofs’ is uneconomic to the point of being a transparent absurdity. The next time you see a massive tractor or header working, appreciate just what productive capacity you are witnessing, then translate precisly that thinking, into every field of agricultural drudgery.
Get hold of an old photo of someone from your grand-father or great grand-father’s generation struggling behind a horse and plough and stick it up above your computer, then get a photo dated 2008 of a human being dressed in rags trying to hold off hunger and disease weilding a lousy hand hoe and feel some shame that this is the world that we still live in.
The proletariat builds those liberating headers and tractors thus releasing the productivity of the farming lands. The city transforms the country in this developmental process and the peasant eventually becomes urbanised and gets to use a computer and to live a longer healthier life, just as you do compared to that great grand-dad.
This is what the class struggle of the proletariat is all about. We seek to transform the world in our image. We do not accept nature dominating us and living within the confines of current understanding. We view people as the ultimate resource (just as the progressive right-winger Julian Simon argued, get hold of his book ‘The Ultimate Resource 2’)
The vanishingly small gains you list ‘both uses of the land…reduce rain runoff, improve air quality, grey water recycling, reduce noise and heating costs, etc.’ in no way represent anything to prioritize when that person in rags is before you. The one crystal clear issue people that are at all interested in communist thinking realize is that communists are internationalists.
Enthusiasm for organics is a great example of the junk communists are currently up against. The cost of this food is greater than the conventionally (modern industrialised agribuisness etc) farmed product, and also has a greater footprint on the land. It is a nature worship religion and has nothing to do with saving the planet, or feeding the masses. Experienced communists stand in unity with, heroes like Norman Borlaug, clearly one of the greatest human beings to have ever lived, if measured by his contributions to humanity. Ask yourself whether you have ever heard of him?
Sustainability, sustains only poverty and ignorance. Even ‘blind consumerism’ is better than the mush that passes for enviromental leftism. Take the way that the word imperialism is slipped in during an attack on advocates of industrialisation. The pseudo-leftist will mush the two terms together and claim that an open communist that opposes green philosophy and is unambiguously for development and measurable liberation is a supporter of imperialism!?
Rapid industrial development has always been advocated by the revolutionary left; if these green views are so common among the youth at the moment it is because of the absence of any recognizable left. This debate is a good place to turn that around at Kasama. At all times this green thinking is a repudiation of red politics, philosophy, and economics and the experienced among us have an obligation to speak out.
There is also a very important point being raised by Iris as to how and where to organise as a leftist – as connected communists ie where there is no University or no industrial workplace where to organise?
There is nothing wrong with gardening for more than just grardening’s sake if that is where you find yourself but also the period calls out for an increase in our efforts to grasp and develop communist theory.
Theory is currently primary and practice secondary, and this has literally been the case for decades but that is another issue so I’ll leave it there for now.
cassiusghost said
PatrickM,
There are too many humans. PERIOD.
No matter how many verbose arguments you write, designed to ultimately apologize and further secure class society, will be made to convince most scientists that the planet has a very reasonable amount of “weight bearing capacity” (to borrow the engineering phrase from Gangbox, sorry Gangbox) and it is being exceeded RIGHT NOW!
Why do you wish this burden on women of the earth? Yes you are, don’t deny it … goddamn it … ultimately the burden you are encouraging upon the earth is upon the women and just like other species, a kudzah vine in the wrong temperate climate a corruption happens, killing off by it’s invasive nature to kill off all other species.
Planet Earth is in rebellion, right now, humans are inclined toward fascism … watch the link I left above, maybe we can discuss some dreams together and how to get there through revolution against class societies. You must stop supporting imperialism of any kind, in any manner and the mass destruction of humans in other countries.
Communists have committed these same atrocities.
No one one step from The Enlightenment, even my buddy Mark Twain, have supported imperialism.
Let’s dream a little bit and criticise, but lay off the limitless growth of humans on the planet … it’s not working and it will be decades, if ever … before unlimited human population growth can be held by Earth.
Here is the link: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ click the eyeball.
cassiusghost said
Today and for the foreseeable future:
Women should be allowed to kill their own fetus, on their own volition, without any interference by other humans, at any time during gestation. They alone decide, we together may help them.
No Masters, No Gods!
N3wDay said
Patrick M,
Scare mongering of Rachel Carson? Are you fucking joking? Do you have any idea about the immense suffering the pesticides she wrote against caused people? Just google DDT and you’ll have all the evidence you need.
Your post is completely devoid of any actual content. Pure right ideology.
Advance scientific claims as to why climate change isn’t happening. Don’t just say “it’s not”. You’re wasting our time.
mike ely said
Patrick writes:
There are two problems with this:
First: The same mechanisms that oppress human beings (discard them, suck their life away, create unsafe factories and mines, disregard consequences of profitmaking ec.) have a huge impact on the larger biosphere. The destruction of bio diversity, the dumping of toxic wastes (in ground, water and air), the ruination of unique habitats, the final destruction of old growth forests, the rapid squandering of irreplacable non-renewable resources, and the danger of tipping points in climate change — all arise from the anarchy of class society, i.e. the fact that economic decisions are made for the profit of a small fraction of society that is inherently indifferent to the larger picture.
Capitalism “externalizes” the environmental cost, and so envirnomental damage counts as zero in the basic decisionmaking processes. It is no different from mines or meat processing plants just firing crippled workers, and hiring healthy ones. Problem solved!
The second problem is that the very term “rapid industrialisation” is used in a classless way. As has become increasingly clear (and as became especially clear thanks to the work of Maoists in China) there are different roads to industrialization — producting profoundly different production processes. Capitalist production processes effect where factories are situated, their size, their structure, their use of wastes, their relationship to the surrounding communities, how the conditions of the workers are considered, how the safety of products is considered etc.
The idea that there is a single “industrialization” (or a single “modernization”) is a road that accepts the dominant capitalist forms of production as the assumed model — it is the capitalist road.
It has been remarkable to follow the leaps of science over the past decades — especially the understanding of the history and impact of global climate change (and the role of certain atmospheric chemicals in that process). to dismiss that, to cling to old paradymns and assumptions (about the infinite resources of nature or the inevitability of “progress”) is simply religious — and is antiscientific.
Marx wrote of us being “usufructuaries” of our natural world — a concept very closely to sustainable use of renewable resources. We now need to refine and systematize a whole new level of understanding — so that our revolutionary work now incorporates these key concerns, and so the actual revolution produces the changes in thinking and practice that are needed.
In fact, we need to very sharply deliniate that “our” concept of the production process (our model of how humans will socially produce the increidible diversity of products we use) is profoundly different from anything the capitalists created (and from what is generally understood by the term “industrialization.”)
Yes we need highly socialised production. We stand on the shoulders of the explosion of technology and production forces over the last two centuries. Yes, we do not intend to “return” to earlier, less socialized, forms of production (which themselves here often highly destructive of both human beings and also the environment).
But while we “stand on the shoulders” of past industrial development: We need to radically reconeive of human social organization so that our footprint is greatly diminished while the quality of life for people is greatly enhanced.
I think we need to implant “socialist sustainability” deeply in our very conception and discussion of the future society.
This means many things (some of which are obvious, some of which are not yet articulated but need to be):
a) We should call for the abolition of suburban sprawl and the car culture created at the height of U.S. imperialism. Socialist society needs an approach of many smaller, highly concentrated cities, surrounded by greenbelts, farming and wilderness. The very structure of cities should encourage social interaction (with public spaces, publicly available sports facilities, access to farm land, auditoriums, bike paths etc. integrated into urban planning).
Mao’s view of transformingradically the urban-rural contradiction should be embraced and developed for our current conditions and problems.
b) We need to transform rural conditions to encourage people to live outside a few major megacities: encouraging middle-sized rural hub towns with all the conditions now associated with city life (work, cultural events, educational oppoturnities, social diversity, etc.) — ending the ghost town phenomona of former farming areas.
c) We need to develop and encourage travel that is sustainable — no commuting to work, close proximity of home and job, cars for special occasions not general usage, highly developed mass transportation using sustainable energy.
d) We need to develop bio-regioinalism for many forms of consumption: eliminating as much transportation for foods as possible. That means breaking imperialist patterns of food production (not longer having: foods available independent of local growing times, standardization of single plant species of potato or banana or apple etc.)
e) Systematic adoption of renewable energy resources, and reduction of the incredible energy waste — jealously preserving the remaining fossil resources as part of humanity’s common heritage.
f) Ending the simple dictum that “the rich get more” — more energy, more goods, more of the worlds food, etc. Breaking the whole global North-South structure built by colonialism and after — encouraging local and national self-reliance, preventing the lopsided distortions turning some countries into resource producers for imperialist parasite economies.
g) Radical alteration of reactionary waste creation (plastic packaging, dumping of clorine bleach into the environment during paper production, massive excrement accumulation from industrial farming, disposable products etc.) Products should be made to easily open and repair. packaging should be eliminated. Non-degradable non-recyclable materials should be removed from production.
h) We need to bring back the local diversity and variation, and overthrow the ugly and bland homogenization that happened with the mallification and franchisification of the society and culture. Developing local autonomy for oppressed peoples (native people, chicanos, african americans) is an important part of that. But also the rise of bioregionalism in food will be part of encouraging local cuisines and styles.
i) We need to grasp the value of wilderness and old growth areas — both in the preservation of biodiversity and also in its aesthetic value. Significant stretches of land need to be set aside for wilderness. Great care need to be taken to prevent a continuation of the “alien species” invasions created by colonialism and imperialism — that have had such a devastating impact on complex ecosystems.
j) we need to take advantage of ways that new technology allows extended production circuits — to prevent the concentration of production facilities in a few old “transportation hubs.” Mao’s approach of dispersing production facilities throughout society and geography, going for smaller facilities not Soviet and American-style mega-plants, is in keeping with our communist goals for human beings and the environment.
k) I also think we need a long-term cultural revolution in human thinking — to break with dog-eat-dog thinking and an elevation of mindless consumption. All of previous human experience has been fixated on scarcity, and so thousands of years of culture have focused human activity singlemindedly on accumulation. The huge productive capacity of human society means that we can potentially create healthy, well-fed, comfortable comfortable conditions for all of humanity. Socialist revolution can eliminate the desperations of poverty, insecurity, hunger and gross inequality. And with that revolutionary change needs to come a parallel revolutionary transformation: finally turning human attention aways from that desperate race to survive and eat. In many ways, we need a human society that is not about “getting things” — and is about living, experiencing, creating, transforming and learning.
more to come.
Patrick writes:
That is a terrible (and rather religious) “short answer.”
No, we should not have any “faith” that humans will (somehow? automatically?) “cope with everything we have to”?
That (like the capitalist belief in the “invisible hand”) assumes an inevitable positive outcome from largely unconscious factors. that is exactly where the current disasters have arisen from.
On the contrary: Humans will not spontaneously “cope” with these matters correctly — unless we develop conscious efforts toward transforming both thinking and human activity in radical ways. And this requires ruptures. and it requires being seriously scientific about it.
I have a scientific belief that the people can (potentially) solve these problems, but no faith that a positive outcome is pre-determined.
As the internationale says (in affirming the importance of the “subjective factor”):
We must ourselves decide our duty, we must decide and do it well.”
gangbox said
Mike,
Thanks for sharing your lengthy utopian vision of your type of back to nature socialism.
I don’t think I’d want to actually live in your world of course – “bioregionalism” is just a fancy way of saying “no fresh fruit for folks in cold countries” and that leads directly to scurvy and all sorts of other nasty epidemics.
In other words, in practice, your utopia might end up being rather distopian – more like “Blade Runner” than “Walden Pond”.
Just read any social history of pre 20th century New York to see what it was like living in a “bioregional” world where you could only eat what was grown locally – for instance, it was normal for 20,000 babies to die every spring from nutritional deficiency related diseases!
To that world I say a big “NO THANKS” – I’ll have my railhauled Florida oranges and seafreighted Costa Rican bananas instead, thank you very much!
Beyond that, on the decentralization of industry, three words Economy Of Scale.
Mao Zedong ran up against that iron reality with his horribly wasteful and deeply …Unsustainable… Backyard Steelmill program.
But in his case, breaking up the efficient big factories of Manchuria and scattering their tooling and eqipment to the four winds of small backwards farming communes had less to do with a communist vision of industry than it did with a middle class led Communist Party trying to weaken the influence of China’s industrial workers.
The reality of industry is that the most efficient way to manufacture is in centralized facilities.
For insance, China under Mao had a very limited need for passenger cars – so one factory in Shanghai could produce all the sedans needed in the country.
Chinese industry and the PLA only needed one truck factory to supply all of their needs (the PLA also needed a jeep factory as well).
Would it have made any kind of rational sense at all for 2,000 farmers with jacks and wrenches to try and build those vehicles one at a time????
Of course not!
The same goes with the production of steel, and portland cement, and sulfuric acid and all of the other industrial products that we need to make our moder civilization.
There is a reason why the modern factory drove the handcraftsperson out of business!
And that reason applies everywhere, not just in the USA or the USSR – it also applies in Belgium, Argentina, South Africa, Korea (both North and South), Sweden, Iran, Mexico ect ect ect.
There are only a half dozen factories in the United States today that produce semiconductors (the magical industral product that is right now enabling us to have this conversation) – it would be stupid and wasteful to have 10,000 people with microscopes and improvised vacuum chambers in their garages to try that task.
In the entire world, there are only 10 factories that produce railroad locomotives – again, that’s because it would be absurd and wasteful for every railroad in the world to try and make their own. Economies of scale long ago drove that industry to extreme centralization.
You see, in a real way, modern centralized industry is the ultimate sustainable development.
And – extra special bonus for revolutionary communists – centralized monopolized industry creates those (potential) gravediggers of the capitalist system, the Industrial Proletariat, without whom no real revolution is possible.
Beyond that, on the whole anti suburbia piece, that’s old news, because there is a whole section of liberal America and the American left that, for some reason, has a problem with the suburbs.
I for the life of me can’t understand their beef – after all, what is a suburb but human scale development, a mix of urban and rural?
My only beef with American suburbia is the whole segregation deal – let Blacks and Latinos into the suburbs on the same terms with Whites, and problem solved.
There is something to be said for letting people with kids live in an area where there is no industry, just homes, schools and stores, and for the economically active adults from those towns to take a train or a bus (or a private car, for those with more irreglar communting patterns) into the nearest major city for work.
Apartment living, frankly, has it’s drawbacks – it’s one thing for grown adults to have to confine their lives to 1,000 square feet of sheetrock and tile with folks on top of you, below you, to your left, to your right and across the hall, but kids need room to play and make noise (without disturbing the neighbors).
Also, frankly, humans need a certain amount of space to live sanely – just ask anybody who’s ever had to live doubled up or tripled up due to poverty, it’s not a good way to live (lots of fights, abuse, and human tension… and, for women, lots of domestic violence and sexual assault too).
I can’t get with the whole break major cities up into smaller towns, either – after all, countries do need a cultural, economic, educational, political and social center – America’s New York and Los Angeles, France’s Paris, China’s Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, Egypt’s Cairo and Alexandria ect.
The best of human culture and innovation comes out of those cities – without them, civilization slows down and stagnates.
An even bigger point – I have a problem with this whole social engineer’s blueprint vision of the world, especially coming from a sincere revolutionary like yourself.
Revolutions are made by people (in particular, by the people of the productive classes), they are mass social events in times of great crisis and they are messy as hell.
And that’s a good thing.
They draw wallpaperhangers and taxi drivers, waitresses and drill press operators into history, so their opinions actually matter (they sweep away the world where only what the Czars, CEO’s and Presidents want are important).
As an aside, that was the one deeply toxic aspect of the RCP (that tended to negate all the very real good that group has done in it’s 40 years on the American left), this vision of a revolution were we exchange the bosses and exploiters of today for The Big Bob as superboss and grand high exalted mystic ruler of tomorrow.
That’s not a revolution, that’s a Gary Gilmore choice (“firing squad? or gas chamber? your choice!”) and there’s nothing good for the workers and farmers of the world down that road.
So, when I see detailed social engineer blueprints about how we would want to remake the world of billions, I have to say NO.
How about asking those billions how they want to live?
And giving them the power (think Petrograd Soviet in it’s glory years, 1918 to 1920) to remake the world in their own image, rather than meekly following a new Red Czar.
Sorry, in my utopian vision of a post revolutionary world, there are no social engineers, handing down diktat from above – just social draftspeople, hearing what the majority of workers and farmers want, and helping them draw up their own plan for how to make that real.
arthur said
A closely deeply toxic aspect of the RCP is the practice of “debating” by letting only one side speak.
Its really pathetic that long AFTER Mike Ely decided to exclude me from this web site Nando opened a “discussion” in this thread “proposing” that I should be excluded and “explaining” what ideas I was supposed to be excluded for advocating.
This isn’t the thread for discussing the vital connection that requires being a revolutionary democrat as a pre-condition for even claiming to be a communist and for sharply fighting, people who pretend that the elementary democratic rights to challenge each others ideas with ease of mind and liveliness is merely “Western” style democracy.
But there is a connection with the argument between Gangbox and Mike Ely worth mentioning in response to Nando’s apparently unsuccessful attempt to divert the actual topic of the thread by shutting down opponents of his own views.
The connection is simply this. There is no way the people of any modern society will ever voluntarily adopt Nando’s ideas about how they should live. Maintaining the pretence that they might REQUIRES only “debating” with people who are willing to politely accept being preached at. It therefore requires a repudiation of democracy as being “Western” and “capitalistic”. It requires pretending that “democracy is a bourgeois fraud” – the common viewpoint of open fascists and pseudo-leftists has the same meaning as “bourgeois democracy” is a fraud – the viewpoint of revolutionary democrats and communists.
Now back to the topic. I don’t have anything against preserving mammals or against community gardens. There are people for whom either or both are far more important than they are to me. Many of them are young and idealistic, hostile to capitalism and determined to change the world for the better. It is important for communists to work among them just as it is important for communists to work among every other section. It is especially important because of the widespread perniciously misanthropic and anti-working ideas that are being spread in those areas by quite open reactionaries blaming the people and modern industry for all the world’s problems instead of capitalism and advocating regression instead of progress.
People in those circles often have quite absurd ideas that demonstrate complete ignorance of obvious facts about the world (wanting to shift agriculture to rooftops is an extreme example, though not necessarily the most extreme). It is important not to pander to the ideas while also not treating people influenced by enemy ideas as the enemy.
When “Cassiusghost” writes “There are too many people. PERIOD” he is expressing an enemy idea which has to be fought sharply. When he does that in the course of trying to shut down people who disagree with him and claiming they work for intelligence agencies he is also acting like an enemy so the fight becomes sharper still. But both thinking and acting like an enemy does not necessarily prove that he IS an enemy. The historical experience of the communist movement in the 21st century makes it very clear that quick judgments don’t prevent enemies gaining power and that open political debate over a long period is required for clarifying where people really stand.
The current situation is one in which most of the “left” panders to essentially “green” ideas. Claiming that historically communists or the left in general have not understood the importance of environmental issues does not win respect for an open-mindedness that is not otherwise evident but rather reflects the obvious pandering typical of the legacy of opportunist politics. Overcoming that legacy will not be easy for people only recently emerging from sectarian cult groups so they are entitled to some leeway. But it would be sheer liberalism not to shake them up occasionally reminding them that “you’re sick”.
ryan d said
Mike,
I found your ‘Utopian vision’ interesting yet somewhat familiar. I was wondering if you had every read any Murray Bookchin and/or his ideas of Libertarian Municipalism?
I ask this because many of Bookchin’s ideas (not all) are quite similar as to a ‘sustainable socialism’. I found some fault with his proposals of how to get there and also his style of writing is unnecessarily bombastic, yet his ideas might be worth critically analyzing.
n3wday said
“I don’t think I’d want to actually live in your world of course – “bioregionalism” is just a fancy way of saying “no fresh fruit for folks in cold countries” and that leads directly to scurvy and all sorts of other nasty epidemics.”
This is not true GB. One of the benefits of planned production is you can plan the global economy to meet the needs of those facing adverse conditions. So for example while I will not be able to eat cheap tofu at all times of the year at the price of destroying the rain forest and ruining millions of the people living in the global south (or for you cattle, and monocultures of various fruits). We can plan to use resources that could be harmful to ensure that people who absolutely need them get them.
When you actually have a socialist planned economy you can set aside a certain amount of oranges and use them to supplement vitamin c during the winter. This is not something you can do in a market based economy.
But of course this isn’t important if all you really want is fruit for yourself whenever you want it, no matter the problems it will cause.
“I for the life of me can’t understand their beef – after all, what is a suburb but human scale development, a mix of urban and rural?”
It takes up unnecessary space weakening ecosystems in the process. Suburbs use massive amounts of energy. Their not things we can replicate over and over and expect to have a world left to live on.
“Apartment living, frankly, has it’s drawbacks – it’s one thing for grown adults to have to confine their lives to 1,000 square feet of sheetrock and tile with folks on top of you, below you, to your left, to your right and across the hall, but kids need room to play and make noise (without disturbing the neighbors).”
Ok I agree to a certain extent. Living in small spaces is difficult sometimes, but it’s better to do that then cause the unimaginable suffering to people that will come with environmental catastrophe.
Also you’re being kinda unimaginative. In any socialist society I want to actually live in life won’t be so atomized. My hope is children will have public places to spend their time that will be free for all ages.
“I can’t get with the whole break major cities up into smaller towns, either – after all, countries do need a cultural, economic, educational, political and social center – America’s New York and Los Angeles, France’s Paris, China’s Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, Egypt’s Cairo and Alexandria ect.”
I’m not so sure you understand what’s being argued for. I think you’re responding to your idea of what sustainable society is and not paying that close attention to what’s actually being proposed.
“So, when I see detailed social engineer blueprints about how we would want to remake the world of billions, I have to say NO.”
Lol, so the only visions for the future allowed are your own?
****
Arthur,
the problem with simply allowing anyone to post anytime is that is drags down the discussion. for example we have open racists periodically post on this website.
should we really have to take the time to refute them point by point and allow what could be a high level of discussion to be destroyed by catering to these people and hearing them out? no, not on this forum because it’s not here for that. this forum is meant as a gathering place for mainly communists who want to discuss where to go from here. we don’t have to pander to racists every time they want to post an inflammatory remark.
in larger society yes things would have to be different. ideas cannot simply be banned, but guess what this isn’t larger society. this is a blog meant for a particular purpose.
when someone claims to be a leftist things get a little tougher. but none-the-less, if we feel that the majority hold a specific view that we want to develop and flesh out, we don’t have to pander to every person or group who wants to disagree.
we don’t have to hear out people arguing that US imperialism in Iraq is a good thing if we want to discuss how we should oppose the war. it prevents us from having the discussions we need to have to develop our views. it’s actually quite annoying.
if this was not the internet we would simply not invite those people to the discussion, but this is the internet so unfortunately we have to ban them.
if this was meant as a public forum then yes, we would have to address all those views in their totality, but it’s not. this is a communist group with a fairly narrow purpose.
arthur said
N3wday, what you choose to debate and with whom is entirely your business. Lying about it is another matter.
If you don’t want a debate about the Iraq war in a thread about the extinction of mammals then don’t “propose” or permit “proposals” to exclude people on the basis of their rejection of your (plural) views about the Iraq war in a thread about the extinction of mammals – especially after having already excluded them.
It happened. For now its stopped happening. So let’s leave it there for now. The lessons can be summed up later in threads about democracy etc which are inevitably going to be a recurring theme.
Meanwhile, you’ve responded to Gangbox with another attempt to convince by reasoned argument on relevant issues. Keep doing that and eventually you may come to understand why your arguments are not succeeding. (Hint, think it possible that you might be mistaken).
Iris said
(Ahem) you don’t need citrus to prevent scurvy. Lethal scurvy was a problem for soldiers, prisoners and sailors before the appropriation of citruses from warmer countries because they had extended lack of access to ANY perishable fruits and veg. Also for any farming/hunting gathering peoples who had bad year. Citrus rind can be dried and your liver stores some access C, so yay for citrus. Native peoples in Michigan ate pine needles to satisfy cravings for C in bad winters, and to get through winter when it was longer (because it is certainly shortening).
You only need 20–40mg of vitamin C a day to prevent scurvy. Your liver holds enough for three months to prevent scurvy. Vegetables like cabbage, potatoes and bell peppers have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy, no problem. Eating local and seasonal fruit is better for you anyway, as the plants are already locally adaptable and require less soil nutrients and pesticides to grow, and are more nutritious. Surely you are not arguing that it makes sense to use fuel to transport a highly perishable item like a genetically modified strawberry in a climate controlled, ethylene filled truck from California to Detroit in February, which has lost its nutritional value from shipping, because, like, people want it? Do they ‘deserve’ such things because…why? Our grocery-store offerings are not only bad for the planet, but bad for the humans who consume it. You need to investigate the energy that goes into food production in urban centers, it is fucking nuts, and unsustainable.
In the Detroit, the ‘food desert’ problem needs to be solve by killing the energy that goes into stupid Cheetos and Coke and hotdogs–which is what you have access to in a ‘food desert’–and into rehabbing and cultivating abundant empty lots in this city into healthy food, locally adaptable species. Squash and collards have lots of Vitamin C, I assure you.
My worry with sustainable socialism is how are going to deal with pandemic disease. This shit is real, and its on the horizon–an inevitable aspect of global warming. Dealing with STD’s, severe asthma and allergies from pollution, addiction, AIDS, epidemic treatment-resistant strains of…everything–these are serious problems we will have to deal with. I’m interested in how much energy and technology is required to produce even basic pharmaceuticals…
David Jackmanson said
Sorry about previous comment, please delete. I fail at comment thread markup, clearly.
On this issue, I like the attitudes of Gangbox (who I don’t know) and Arthur and PatrickM (who I do know – more on that side issue briefly at the bottom of this comment).
I think the most important question around environmental issues is this:
“Do you think that environmental damage is a cost, or a sin?”
I think there is a clear dividing line between these two attitudes.
The first a scientific viewpoint which attempts to measure the costs of any actions so that people can decide if the costs are worth the benefits. The second is basically religious – it is linked, IMO to the idea that humans have no right to muck around with the natural order of things, and need to be learn to be satisfied with, and greatful for, what they have. I think that’s what doesn’t mix with a red attitude.
We can debate what significance a certain environmental cost has. I’d be interested in discussing what costs to humans, if any, would be incurred in greatly slowing down the rate of extinction of mammals. Then we could discuss whether that cost, if any, is worth paying.
Since Mark Ely at post 52 has posted a number of specific proposals, I’ll discuss them and my reactions to them:
a) We should call for the abolition of suburban sprawl and the car culture created at the height of U.S. imperialism. Socialist society needs an approach of many smaller, highly concentrated cities, surrounded by greenbelts, farming and wilderness. The very structure of cities should encourage social interaction (with public spaces, publicly available sports facilities, access to farm land, auditoriums, bike paths etc. integrated into urban planning).
Why? This is being put forward as self-evident, but apart from the last sentence I think it’s all debatable among Marxists.
In particular car culture is often condemned by those opposed to the modern world, but I think Marxists would do well to focus on the freedom and opportunity offered to millions by the car. I think that Marxists need to be talking about a society that offers more and not less freedom to people.
b) We need to transform rural conditions to encourage people to live outside a few major megacities: encouraging middle-sized rural hub towns with all the conditions now associated with city life (work, cultural events, educational opportunities, social diversity, etc.) — ending the ghost town phenomena of former farming areas.
I’m not sure I agree with the motive, but I agree with the idea anyway.
c) We need to develop and encourage travel that is sustainable — no commuting to work, close proximity of home and job, cars for special occasions not general usage, highly developed mass transportation using sustainable energy.
I reckon the best way to abolish commuting to work is to set up a society that is trying to abolish work.
d) We need to develop bio-regioinalism for many forms of consumption: eliminating as much transportation for foods as possible. That means breaking imperialist patterns of food production (not longer having: foods available independent of local growing times, standardization of single plant species of potato or banana or apple etc.)
I agree with Gangbox re scurvy. Going deeper, I think we have to seriously discuss the difference between a type of production used by imperialists, and production that is inherently imperialist in itself. Surely a one of the problems that a socialist economy might be able to solve is the distribution of desired goods around the world even though they are only produced in certain parts of the world. I think that socialists should be talking about what the world will be like when profit is taken out of the equation, and we can ship what is needed to where it is needed.
e) Systematic adoption of renewable energy resources, and reduction of the incredible energy waste — jealously preserving the remaining fossil resources as part of humanity’s common heritage.
Why should the remaining fossil resources be be so preserved? For what purpose?
f) Ending the simple dictum that “the rich get more” — more energy, more goods, more of the worlds food, etc. Breaking the whole global North-South structure built by colonialism and after — encouraging local and national self-reliance, preventing the lopsided distortions turning some countries into resource producers for imperialist parasite economies.
I don’t think you can break down the unfairness of an imperialist system of trade by promoting local and national self-reliance. I think we should, rather, be talking about how a socialist world, freed from worrying about profit, will be able to develop the world faster and better than a capitalist one. This means that people who live in areas where agriculture is the best use of land (for instance), will be able to enjoy a lifestyle similar in cultural richness and opportunity, to people in large cities, as discussed in point b).
g) Radical alteration of reactionary waste creation (plastic packaging, dumping of clorine bleach into the environment during paper production, massive excrement accumulation from industrial farming, disposable products etc.) Products should be made to easily open and repair. Packaging should be eliminated. Non-degradable non-recyclable materials should be removed from production.
Packaging should be eliminated when unnecessary or harmful. If I buy flour will I be expected to bring my own container, even if it doesn’t fit properly and I might spill it all over my bag? How will cheap laptop computers be transported without breaking the screens?
The other issues here seem to be relatively simple engineering issues.
h) We need to bring back the local diversity and variation, and overthrow the ugly and bland homogenization that happened with the mallification and franchisification of the society and culture. Developing local autonomy for oppressed peoples (native people, chicanos, african americans) is an important part of that. But also the rise of bioregionalism in food will be part of encouraging local cuisines and styles.
So, if a socialist enterprise finds an efficient way to serve cheap, hot meals to people, and becomes very popular, it won’t be able to spread?
Pity if you live in, say, Hawaii or another Pacific Island. Your diet will be dominated by pig, fish, and starchy vegetables.
i) We need to grasp the value of wilderness and old growth areas — both in the preservation of biodiversity and also in its aesthetic value. Significant stretches of land need to be set aside for wilderness. Great care need to be taken to prevent a continuation of the “alien species” invasions created by colonialism and imperialism — that have had such a devastating impact on complex ecosystems.
How much land?
If human needs are in competition with the desire to preserve such land, on what grounds should that competition be resolved?
How much biodiversity is required?
j) we need to take advantage of ways that new technology allows extended production circuits — to prevent the concentration of production facilities in a few old “transportation hubs.” Mao’s approach of dispersing production facilities throughout society and geography, going for smaller facilities not Soviet and American-style mega-plants, is in keeping with our communist goals for human beings and the environment.
What is the optimum size of a plant that builds:
1) solar panels?
2) Laptop computers?
3) Sewer pipes?
4) Consumer-grade cookware?
5) Books about how we won the revolution and beat the bad guys?
Of course I don’t seriously expect you to have these facts at your fingertips, but I raise the question to point out that it’s a fairly complex question, and just saying that plants need to be smaller and more dispersed isn’t a good enough base to start thinking about this problem, IMO.
k) I also think we need a long-term cultural revolution in human thinking — to break with dog-eat-dog thinking and an elevation of mindless consumption. All of previous human experience has been fixated on scarcity, and so thousands of years of culture have focused human activity singlemindedly on accumulation. The huge productive capacity of human society means that we can potentially create healthy, well-fed, comfortable comfortable conditions for all of humanity. Socialist revolution can eliminate the desperations of poverty, insecurity, hunger and gross inequality. And with that revolutionary change needs to come a parallel revolutionary transformation: finally turning human attention away from that desperate race to survive and eat. In many ways, we need a human society that is not about “getting things” — and is about living, experiencing, creating, transforming and learning.
an elevation of mindless consumption
What consumption in the modern world do you classify as “mindless”? What consumption would you classify as “mindful”? How do you decide the difference?
A society that is about “living, experiencing, creating, transforming and learning” will have, I think, a high level of consumption indeed. We’ll need tools to do all those things: computers, phone lines, microscopes, telescopes, cameras – these are just a few of the things that leap to mind.
And I hope we get toys as well – I’ll want a jetski and a quality bicycle (not one that will crumple under me if I go offroad).
I just don’t see how a socialist society could ever function without a lot of production and consumption. While there will be environmental costs that need to be balanced, I don’t think increasing the wealth of humankind, and spreading it around without regard to profit, is the real mission of a Marxist revolution.
Now briefly, re Nando’s comment at 15 re excluding members of the Last Superpower site (I am a member there) from discussion here:
They claim to be communists, but the core of their theory is that the U.S. is no longer a major focus of the struggle of the oppressed
Not really.
that the U.S. war in Iraq should be supported, and the U.S. attack on Muslim countries is progressive because it represents a democratic revolution over semi-feudal Islam etc.
Broadly speaking correct, although “Muslim countries” is a bit too broad.
And as an auxilary view, these forces think that “green” politics are reactionary (they support nuclear power, and take a republican view of global warming.)
“republican view”? Not really, although think that much reactionary fearmongering is done in the name of stopping global warming.
1) I think all these views are arguable within a Marxist discussion and none of them exclude people from being left-wing.
2) Disagreement on the Iraq War does not mean, in itself, that we have nothing useful to say on environmental issues.
3) The points I’ve made in this post are central to the issue of working out a Marxist attitude to environmental issues, and are not a distraction to anyone trying to work out that attitude.
Iris said
Yuck, as a once enthusiastic canoer and fisher, I admit I have a personal vendetta against noisy, smelly jet skis and their ugly cousin the snowmobile.
I remember hiking a sled of gear in to winter camp up north when i was a teenager. It was three degrees F all weekend. I bent down to eat some snow because I was mad dehydrated and it tasted like fucking exhaust. I was disgusted. That’s not my morals talking…
David Jackmanson said
Iris, your comment has helped me to focus on where I think this discussion should be going. You’re discussing the conflicting rights, needs and pleasures of different groups of people, and a socialist government would need to work out how to balance that out. People having a quiet, relaxing day out using cheap, quality fishing gear and canoes deserve their relaxation, and people who like jet-skis deserve their excitement and fun too.
I think it’s important to focus on how things affect people, rather than “the planet” or some other reified ideal.
gangbox said
n3wday,
Actually Existing Central Planning never functioned anything like what you describe.
In the countries that even had a plan (remember, Cuba didn’t – and still doesn’t – have a planned economy) it basically boiled down to the local version of Gosplan [the old Soviet state planning entity] bargaining with the various economic ministries and those ministries in turn negotiating with the local enterprise managers.
It was far from efficient, and in many ways was inferior to western style capitalism (a major reason for the collapse of the old Soviet Block and the rise of “Four Modernizations” open capitalism in China).
It was also flat out nationalist, from COMECON [the grotesquely misnamed "Council for Mutual Economic Assistance"] on top plundering the East for the enrichment of European Russia to the national mini Gosplans all duplicating each other country’s economic efforts with truly colossal waste.
That’s why Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia all had national auto industries side by side with the Soviet Lada, Zughili and Zil automotive works, in a market that could’t even really support one auto manufacturer, let alone seven.
[and, of course folks who could afford in the East Block - that is to say, the party bosses - always went with Volkswagens - or better yet Benzes, rather than the locally made FIAT knockoff garbage!]
That was real world “central planning” – inneficiency, waste, breadlines and shortages for the many and capitalit made goods for the few on top.
And the only decently run industries were aerospace and defense (the only two industries which were still run basically along capitalist lines).
That was the real world of “central planning” n3wday, not the fantasy you speak of.
Also, I get quite enough of the hand wringing “turn out that 100 watt lightbulb or the villages of Bangadesh will flood!” unscientific moraliasm from the Al Gores of the world – don’t need to hear it from a fellow revolutionay communist!
Besides – if “saving the world” means making life even harder for most of the world’s population, is the biosphere even worth saving?
Iris,
You asked a fair question:
Surely you are not arguing that it makes sense to use fuel to transport a highly perishable item like a genetically modified strawberry in a climate controlled, ethylene filled truck from California to Detroit in February, which has lost its nutritional value from shipping, because, like, people want it?
Short answer – YES
Longer answer – remember what I said about Economies of Scale a few posts up?
That is, it makes more sense for the most efficient producer of an item to make it, rather than many inneficient producers.
And that’s as true of strawberries as it is of iPods.
Not to mention, what’s so bad about having a worldwide logistics supply chain (that is, the interconnected network of sea freighters, barges, cargo planes, freight trains, pipelines and, above all, the humble motor truck, arguably the 20th century’s greatest invention).
We are very lucky we live in an age when the products of the world’s most efficient producers can be shipped across the earth.
Not to mention that that legion of teamsters, longshoremen/women, merchant sailors and airline workers are among the most combative segments of the working class around the world (just look at the May Day strikes at the Port of Los Angeles, or the worldwide wave of truck driver strikes against fuel price gouging for an immediate example).
After the revolution, things would even be better – because the Third World would finally get to join North America, Western Europe the Persian Gulf States, East Asia and Australia in benefiting from that global supply chain.
So, yes, Iris, I do support shipping California strawberries around the world – what’s so terrible about that?
Besides, on your specific example of your town, Detroit, does it really make sense for a once great manufacturing center to have it’s workers growing vegitables in vacant lots (at great expense, with great amounts of labor, with a very short growing season)when if you were to fight for those workers to have good paying UAW jobs, they could BUY far cheaper from far more efficient producers just a couple of days away by truck?
Beyond that, have you actually asked the workers of Detroit if they want to adapt to the kind of impoverished prison yard diet that only eating locally grown produce would entail?
Or is that just something that you want to impose on them?
I’m sorry, but all this back to nature stuff is not in the working class’ interest at all.
David Jackmanson,
Thanks for joining me (and Arthur, and PatrickM) in viewing the environmental question as an economic question, rather than a moral issue.
You actualy summarized the issues quite nicely.
But I would specifically like to cosign your point about the freedom that can come from an element of car culture.
To give one little known but very powerful example, the rise of private car ownership in 190′s America was a major factor in the breakup of single employer “company towns” in this country – because now workers could drive to alternative employment opportunities.
There is a downside to the auto – but there’s a very real upside as well (not to mention the 1 million + American industrial proletarians who’s job it is to build those cars)
I also have to agree with you about the absurdity of “abolishing packaging” – besides the sanitary and product sabotage issues, that will basically force working class consumers (for the most part, working class women) to have to walk around with empty containers just to go shopping – a major imposition on our class (and one of those “guilt trip environmental” things that it’s bad enough we have to hear them from the yuppies who shop at Whole Foods, we really don’t need that from comrades.)
And, finally, you’re right, this discussion is about how environmental change concretely affects people rather than “saving the planet” in the abstract.
After all, the biosphere is only about 3 miles thick – even if you eliminate it entirely, the Planet Earth as such will do fine – it was there before us, and will be hear until Sol supernovas, it will just be a problem for us humans.
question said
That is monumental, philistine stupidity.
Literally every word of it is ugly american crap. It’s the methodological equivalent of heart disease.
n3wday said
Question,
“That is monumental, philistine stupidity.
Literally every word of it is ugly american crap. It’s the methodological equivalent of heart disease.”
Perhaps you would care to advance an argument? Although I am sympathetic to the essence of you position, the methodology of your statement is equivalent to itself.
I’m tired right now, and don’t feel like writing a long response so I’ll only address one part of GB’s post.
“Also, I get quite enough of the hand wringing “turn out that 100 watt lightbulb or the villages of Bangadesh will flood!” unscientific moraliasm from the Al Gores of the world – don’t need to hear it from a fellow revolutionay communist!”
Can you advance a scientific argument refuting global warming? If in fact the theory is true (and the science behind is solid enough to win over the vast majority of climate scientists in world), then what you’re proposing will result in the suffering of large sections of the global working class. Crop failures, desertification, yes, flooding, etc.
Comments ago you say you want what’s best for the working class of the world, but when it’s pointed out the ignoring environmental concerns will actually result in their suffering you call it “hand wringing” and “moralism”. If it’s “unscientific” advance a scientific argument (since you’ve obviously studied the science behind global warming and other environmental concerns), don’t try and lump me and other environmentalists into the same heap as bourgeois liberals like Al-Gore in order to try and discredit our arguments.
Iris said
Gangbox, how is local food a prison yard diet? Most Americans eat pretty much whatever they want at any time of the year they want. This is problematic because of:
a)the energy expended in shipping polluting the atmosphere,
b)lesser nutritional value due to shipping and unseasonal growth
c)unknown health risks due to genetically modifying food to make it ‘tougher’ for transport
d)mono-culture farming devastating biodiversity of edible foods; putting the crops harvested at risk of devastating disease, which produces famine
When you grow food locally you are not on some starvation diet, and I am not moralizing. The COST–to human and animal health, to pesticide laced waters, to biodiversity–is high. It is fucking stupid to transport nutritionally bankrupt strawberries cross country because some american accustomed to it wants it. The COST of it’s ‘efficient’ production is an army of oppressed illegal immigrants (and contracted prison/slave labor), who labor in dangerous pesticides here and south of the border to grow, pick, wash and package this food.
Local food is suited to the climate (yes, gasp, food grows in Michigan! And we have greenhouses to lengthen the season and everything!) and soil, meaning the food is more nutritious, requires less chemicals, and less work. Do you know how many fruits and vegetables we grow locally in Michigan? Are you seriously suggesting this would be a prison diet?
You know what a fucking prison diet is? The shit you buy at the gas station. Prison food is better than the crap you get at a corner store, or even government food in a public school with no funding. I was speaking not of the proletariat putting flowers into their collective ears and Tilling The Earth As One, but people breaking up the phenomenon of a food desert here in Detroit. Creating some autonomy and bringing fruits and vegetables to areas where people have access only to a secondary food source (such as a gas station or corner store) because their neighborhood is so devastated and empty, because they do not have access to transportation.
I am being accused of moralizing the discussion of the environment. I hear someone having a knee jerk disgust with Tree Huggers trying to mess with the industrial proletariat. I agree that this should not be an issue of purity, or spirtuality. No shit. But the material reality is the biosphere and regional ecology is connected in ways we still don’t totally understand. Having jetskis and snowmobiles and yes, cheap fishing tackle (note I said ‘back when’–I don’t fish anymore, and I don’t own a canoe) HAS A PRICE–economic and ecological. How can we pretend as though no scientific advancement has occurred since Lenin? That we should reify industrialization, and Progress, and all technology, no matter what, like its still 1917?!
n3wday said
Gawd, thank you Iris, well said.
Carl Davidson said
I think I’m with MikeE in this discussion, but some of the stuff here is rather bizarre, like FEAR of the term ‘sustainable.’ Or the notion that nature will become the slave of humanity.
In a way, it all gets back, not to ideology, Green or Red, but how one relates to modern science, 21st Century style.
We start by considering the situation as a whole.
In the widest terms, that means acknowledging that all economies and political orders are subsets of the ecosystem, which itself is a local affair, from the perspective of the Universe. The ecosystem doesn’t care what we do, but we damned well better care what its rules are, and, if we want to be free, act in accordance with them, and try to understand them better.
Barry Commoner, who was an admirer of Marx, asserted three laws of the universe.
1. There is no free lunch.
2. Everything goes somewhere.
3. Everything is connected to everything else.
[All this means, in real life, contrary to what you learn in economics class, there are no 'externalities.' When you hear that term, you're being robbed or bamboozled, and most likely both.]
To which I would add one more point to Commoner’s three, seeing what we’ve learned from chaos and complexity:
4. Shit happens, meaning the future is open.
Yes, people can cease to be the slaves of nature. BUT NOT JUST AS THEY PLEASE; they have to understand it and in that way, learn how to live most harmoniously with it in a way that still allows them to unleash their greatest potential and freedom.
Marx, in the Manifesto, if memory serves me, says opportunism and the road to strategic defeat is in defending the partial interest over the whole interest, the present interest over the future interest.
Any ‘Marxism’ that is not ecological does just that, and its past time to set it aside for a fresh and scientific approach.
Iris said
Ah Carl, your comment is appreciated. :)
Iris said
Also, Gangbox, to speak to something specific: small scale community gardens–or even larger scale ones–are not labor intensive when well organized. They have many benefits as well. Their existence requires cleanup of garbage and toxicity and children get to learn about food production and get their hands dirty. They are becoming a major source of fresh food for soup kitchens and some elementary schools in Detroit. Gardens and trees clean up the air and cool the temperature of urban centers. They have a positive psychological effect (which is material, not hippy bs). They cut shipping. They give a little autonomy on some products (but not freedom). Community gardening is supplemental. No one with a kitchen garden is ‘getting scurvy’ as you say.
They are not meant to provide ALL the food one needs; for example wheat, corn or potatoes would would not be grown in city limits. They replace useless plots of ‘lawn’. But squash, beans, greens, some fruits, tomatoes, kitchen and medicinal herbs…a lot of people do that in their back yard in my neighborhood already. A lot of them are old Polish autoworkers or new Bangladeshi immigrants who garden intensively in their little yards, or vacant lots. It is easier and cheaper and less energy consumptive if I let some peppermint run wild in some area of my choosing, pick it and make tea than to buy a plastic wrapped cardboard box of little paper bags of dried mint from Oregon. It is just stupid imperialist bullshit to insist on the latter.
Now I don’t pretend that ‘green’ consumerism is the answer, or little kitchen gardens provide ‘autonomy’ in some anarchist sense. I talk here about community gardens because I don’t like dismissal when people don’t know what they,re talking about. Detroit is particular in that it has SO MUCH vacant space, and so many ‘food deserts’. I mean that if we want to build a better world, where we don’t drink poison water and breath poison air, and till poison soil–well we have to deal with reality, as Carl said. You think once the bourgeoisie is overthrown things like water toxicity, food production, fuel usage and pollution will suddenly be easier, be free of the constraints of ecology? Of reality (jet skis?!)? How will you improve the lives of workers if the quality of their air, and drinking water gives their children cancer? When there are food shortages due to diseases wiping out vast monoculture farms (think corn, bananas), which cause famines in places where there is no imperialist cushion to stabilize and mute the ripples of such a thing? This isn’t ‘fear mongering’ it is real. It is happening right now all over the world.
We were talking earlier in this thread on how environmental issues–like environmental racism, food shortages, illness from toxic dumping–can become fault lines in the working class. Not just because it appeals to their sense of ethics or makes them feel ‘sinful’, but because it makes them sick, or kills them. Industry dumps its runoff on the poor and gives profit to the rich. And pollution is cumulative, it doesn’t go away. That is key. When peoples children begin getting leukemia from poison water (or nuclear waste on reservations!) and realize they have little recourse, they become enraged. There is sharp, ugly potential to understand how capitalism is life and death. Death to the many, profit to the few.
Iris said
correction: I meant to say kitchen gardens replace useless lawn, not grain crops.
Maz said
A quick note: in contemporary microeconomics, externalities are not considered a ‘free lunch’ or anything like that. The concept is used by economists to denote a problem (like pollution) that has an external negative effect outside of the enterprise producing it. The whole point of calculating these externalities is precisely to make sure the cost of dealing with them is borne by whoever produces them – not by society as a whole.
gangbox said
Iris,
Wouldn’t it be better to fight for:
1) proper suburban-style supermarkets in Detroit, so folks would have higher quality groceries at lower prices than the gas stations and your local equivilent of bodegas
and
2) higher wages, so workers could afford to go to those supermarket and buy what they need?
As far as the alleged “positive effect” of amateur urban vacant lot farming on the psyches of inner city workers and their kids, I beg to differ.
Remember, I’m here in New York City, where the community garden was invented by the Rockefeller foundation and their “community based organiztion” hirelilngs 30 years ago.
The main experience we have of these so called community gardens here is to see a vacant lot in one’s neighborhood, fenced off and locked, to which only a handfull of CBO vetted “community residents” are allowed access.
There may be community gardens that are different than that, but all of the community gardens here in West Harlem look like that, and every community garden that I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the city (and that includes a community garden I used to manage when I was a vocational training coordinator at a South Bronx CBO.
Basically, they’re public land gone private – and that is not a good thing, Iris.
Especially in cities like yours and mine that desperately need affordable housing for workers.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t your city used to have 2 million people, as opposed to today’s million or so folks?
And didn’t that “vacant space” in your city used to be the home of that one million displaced Detroiters?
Generations of Detroiters busted their ass on the assembly line to buy a little house, with a little lawn and a Chrysler Imperial or a Chevy Impala in the driveway (corporate America suffocated that little American dream, of course)
Wouldn’t it be better to put houses back on those lots, instead of wasting them as inneficient mini farms?
Especially since Southeastern Michigan, Northwestern Ohio and Northeastern Indiana have lots of farms in them – if you want fresh produce, why not just invite those folks to drive up in their trucks and set up weekend farmers markets?
That’s what we have here – there’s the big farmers market in Union Square in downtown Manhattan, and a smaller one up here in Harlem that is only open one day a week, and another one over by Columbia University and dozens of others around the city.
Those folks are actual professional farmers, and they’d have a chance to make more money by directly selling retail.
Beyond that, if you look at places like the Castro brothers dictatorship in Cuba, where folks have been forced to rely on community gardens to survive, that has transated into an addition to the “double day” for women – that is, after 8 hours on the job and a long commute, another couple of hours doing amateur farming, and then home to do chores deep into the night.
Any serious culture of community gardens here would probably look a lot like that.
Like any sincere communist, I’m against the double day for women, and anything that makes that double day longer – including community gardens.
As far as the learning aspects of gardening for working class kids, why can’t they learn about farming the same way I did when I was in elemtary school – classroom discussion, a filmstrip (or I guess today it would be a DVD) and a field trip to a farm in the suburbs?
You don’t teach kids about industry by having them run their own auto assembly line – you don’t teach them about health by having them take each other’s appendixes out, so why do they have to be little unpaid farmers to learn about farming.
These are urban kids, Iris – like me, they will never do farmwork in life
Hell, the reason my parents fled rural North Carolina and the backwoods of Maine was so none of their kids would EVER have ANYTHING to do with agricultural stoop labor!
I’m quite sure that a lot of Detroit’s grandchildren of Southern Black migrants and Mexican and Iraqi immigrants had grandparents who were also fleeing the plough for the assembly line.
If the real issue is quality food, then the answer is higher wages and better foodstores, not amateur agriculture!
You yourself admit that green consumerism is not the answer – so why are you pushing this community garden thing so hard, when the real issue is poverty and inadequate stores in your city?
I’m sorry, Iris, but a better life for workers – both in my city and yours – is not coming from medieval holdovers like community gardens, but from working class revolution.
And after the revolution, we’ll have automated tractors and combines harvesting the food out in the country, and then truckdrivers hauling those goods to the supermarkets of the cities.
For that matter, we can fight even now for better stores in our neighborhoods – which seems a lot more productive to me than this whole gardening deal.
Oh, final question – what’s your beef with lawns?
Can’t workers have something nice to look at around their houses, or does every square inch of their land have to be tied up in medieval handicrafts?
gangbox said
Sorry for the HTML error – I did not intend for that post to be all boldface!
David Jackmanson said
Carl Davidson at 65:
Yes, people can cease to be the slaves of nature. BUT NOT JUST AS THEY PLEASE; they have to understand it and in that way, learn how to live most harmoniously with it in a way that still allows them to unleash their greatest potential and freedom.
I would counter with the assertion that humans should unleash their greatest potential and freedom, but with the minimum damage possible to the natural environment. We don’t need to live in “harmony” with the earth, IMO, we just need to avoid laying costs upon the natural environment that are too much for it to bear.
Marx, in the Manifesto, if memory serves me, says opportunism and the road to strategic defeat is in defending the partial interest over the whole interest, the present interest over the future interest.
Any ‘Marxism’ that is not ecological does just that, and it’s past time to set it aside for a fresh and scientific approach.
What is an “ecological worldview”? Is it a worldview that seeks to minimise the environmental cost of human progress, or is it one that believes that human progress should defer to the needs of “the environment”?
Iris at 63:
But the material reality is the biosphere and regional ecology is connected in ways we still don’t totally understand. Having jetskis and snowmobiles and yes, cheap fishing tackle (note I said ‘back when’–I don’t fish anymore, and I don’t own a canoe) HAS A PRICE–economic and ecological. How can we pretend as though no scientific advancement has occurred since Lenin? That we should reify industrialization, and Progress, and all technology, no matter what, like its still 1917?!
The point that everything has a price is exactly the hub of this discussion, IMO. While you might not own a canoe and fish anymore, some people will want to. Some people will want to use jetskis and snowmobiles. And presumably you have your own preferred recreations. If you got involved in a comunity garden, would you expect people to make their own gardening tools, or would it be more useful to buy them?
Are you suggesting that a socialist society should ban jetskis and snowmobiles? Or is it possible that you could agree to some plan that allows them to operate while also making sure they don’t muck other people’s fun around too much?
(I’m not talking about an immediate post-revolutionary society where war etc would quite likely put enormous restrictions on all sorts of fun, but about a time when a secure socialist regime might be in charge).
Iris at 67:
Now I don’t pretend that ‘green’ consumerism is the answer, or little kitchen gardens provide ‘autonomy’ in some anarchist sense. I talk here about community gardens because I don’t like dismissal when people don’t know what they,re talking about. Detroit is particular in that it has SO MUCH vacant space, and so many ‘food deserts’.
I don’t think the important issue is whether community gardens are a good thing or not. I think that these gardens are becoming a stand-in for a much broader issue:
Should a socialist economy should enforce localism and regionalism, or should it encourage the broadest possible spread of goods and services throughout the world?
People won’t get scurvy just because community gardens exist. But people will have a smaller range of food to choose from if the free movement of food throughout the world is banned or discouraged as the deliberate act of a socialist government. That may have an impact on the relative health levels of different parts of the world.
I mean that if we want to build a better world, where we don’t drink poison water and breathe poison air, and till poison soil–well we have to deal with reality, as Carl said.
I suspect that a socialist economy that doesn’t poison water, air and soil is possible while still encouraging the cheap production and wide distribution of needed, useful and fun goods (yes, even jetskis – why not?).
You think once the bourgeoisie is overthrown things like water toxicity, food production, fuel usage and pollution will suddenly be easier, be free of the constraints of ecology?
No. But I don’t yet accept that these problems can only be solved by the broad policy line you are advocating.
How will you improve the lives of workers if the quality of their air, and drinking water gives their children cancer?
You fix the air and water in those areas where this is a problem. I’m sure we can agree on this, as a minimum.
When there are food shortages due to diseases wiping out vast monoculture farms (think corn, bananas), which cause famines in places where there is no imperialist cushion to stabilize and mute the ripples of such a thing?
In the short term, we’d be moving food quickly to places where there are shortages, without regard to profit. In the long term we’d be asking scientists to let us know how many different species of each type of food crop would be needed to give us a good buffer against the dangers of pure monoculturism.
Gangbox, thanks for your response to my previous post. That’s an interesting point about cars destroying the fetid old company towns. While I’m sure that you (and I) will have to look anew at some of our beliefs as we debate here, I appreciate the sense of excitement at human potential that I’m getting from your comments.
n3wday said
Just as a side question, David, have you read “The Golden Rule” by Stephen Jay Gould? He has some interesting things to say in it that I think we could find a lot of common ground on.
Quorri said
Randomly, I think part of why people have a hard time realizing the science behind our environmental perils is NOT up for debate is because people insist on continuing to use the label “Global Warming” when it is much more aptly described as “Global Climate Change”….. Just a thought. Plus people are consistently listening to the capitalist’s media instead of joining in any scientific discussions and inquiry.
n3wday said
“People won’t get scurvy just because community gardens exist. But people will have a smaller range of food to choose from if the free movement of food throughout the world is banned or discouraged as the deliberate act of a socialist government. That may have an impact on the relative health levels of different parts of the world.”
I don’t see any reason why it has to be global transportation of all food or global transportation of none. Is there something wrong with determining where people are experiencing nutrient deficiencies because what they need cannot be grown in their area and shipping it there while at the same time deciding that someones personal taste does not outweigh the cost benefit analysis of carbon emissions?
Obviously this couldn’t simply be decided by some small clique operating high in the government, but would have to be determined through debate and struggle within society. but i really don’t believe that most people are so selfish that they would believe their personal taste outweighs future generations ability to live in a comfortable world.
n3wday said
lol, true global warming isn’t totally accurate, but i use both terms interchangibly (and am still familiar with the scientific concepts behind the phenomena).
i think it’s more of the latter part of your argument that matters though. it could be called crazyemissionmonster theory and people would still take it seriously if they actually read about it.
David Jackmanson said
N3wday no, I have not read “The Golden Rule”, thanks for the heads-up. Prompted by your suggestion, I just found this long quote from it (the site says it’s about half of the article).
There’s a fair bit I could argue with in the article, but I am definitely interested in what he seems to be saying about making an environmental ethic out of a human-centred world-view:
“We have a legitimately parochial interest in our own lives, the happiness and prosperity of our children, the suffering of our fellows.” (My emphasis).
Since Gould is talking about extinction of species in “The Golden Rule”, I suppose that brings us back to the specific topic of your post. The Washington Post article quoted in the original post says:
For land species, habitat loss and hunting represent the greatest danger, while marine mammals are more threatened by accidental killing through fishing bycatch, ship strikes, and pollution.
My first impression here is that the problems for marine animals could be solved by limiting catch sizes, enforcing breeding reserves and other no-go areas for boats and so on, without seriously limiting the benefits that humans get out from them. But land animals appear to be in more direct competition with humans. That means that all humans, including poor people, might stand to lose something if animal habitats were protected without regard to human amenity.
Do you know of any policies or programmes that are being suggested to get around this contradiction?
I’ll see if one of the university libraries here are willing to drag the issue of “The Journal of Natural History” out of their stacks for a member of the public so I can read all of “The Golden Rule”.
David Jackmanson said
I don’t see any reason why it has to be global transportation of all food or global transportation of none. Is there something wrong with determining where people are experiencing nutrient deficiencies because what they need cannot be grown in their area and shipping it there while at the same time deciding that someone’s personal taste does not outweigh the cost benefit analysis of carbon emissions?
Obviously this couldn’t simply be decided by some small clique operating high in the government, but would have to be determined through debate and struggle within society. But I really don’t believe that most people are so selfish that they would believe their personal taste outweighs future generations ability to live in a comfortable world.
I’d suggest you’re making the choices appear starker than they really may be. If I were taking part in such a widespread public debate, I would reframe the question and ask people to ask themselves “What is the maximum indulgence of personal taste that we can accommodate while still guaranteeing a comfortable, prosperous world for our children?”
I’d also ask people to think about a longer-term strategy: speeding up research on hydrogen fuel or any other power solution that offers a chance of massively reducing the environmental and financial costs of transport.
David Jackmanson said
First two paras in my comment at 78 are quoting N3wday at 75.
patrickm said
Mike makes the usual green arguments about resources and calls it as the greens do ‘science’. He declares there are limited resources (say oil as petrol) that require careful husbanding from those of us who would (in his view) squander them by say aimlessly driving around. ‘…cars for special occasions not general usage’ and by logical extension of his argument advocates governments dictating this as part of his ‘e) Systematic adoption of renewable energy resources, and reduction of the incredible energy waste — jealously preserving the remaining fossil resources as part of humanity’s common heritage.’
‘Environmental leftists’ make this argument while being themselves free to use whatever amount of petrol they choose in the current system. They thus advocate a retreat from this freedom. This attack on freedom of choice is no doubt deemed regrettable but is necessary for ‘…jealously preserving’ and would no doubt take place after a proper debate among the workers.
No moral ‘armed guard’ is currently at the petrol pump demanding justification for the use of the petrol; no WW2 style rationing is in place; and no one is proposing to put a guard there and conduct ‘the debate’ with the single authority figure, or to impose the rationing.
The debate is to actually be conducted by workers representatives at a governmental level. Indeed the planet is in peril according to this world view, so the debate will have to eventually distill even further and the final decision from this debate have to be adopted globally as presumably befits stuff that is ‘humanity’s common heritage.’
Actually everyone knows this debate is currently taking place at ruling-class levels and has been for several years. The issue of carbon-taxing is a red hot issue and now that the bourgeois world system has dropped into a recession it will become even hotter and workers will take a keener interest.
The argument is that the planet is in peril so we have to lower the amount of petrol workers can buy. The argument is best displayed by converting a single workers entire wage to petrol. ‘Environmental leftists’ effectively want that worker’s wage lowered! At the end of their mooted debate they want less petrol used! They want the price lifted against the actual trend of industrialization to lower the price. Thereby they oppose that worker increasing their standard of living, as measured by the amount of petrol they can buy with their wage because the future workers, or people in Bangladesh etc would otherwise suffer.
The outcome of this debate over the last century produced a negative result for the ‘environmentalists’. One hundred years ago the average worker’s wage bought x amount of petrol. A century later (as a result of the further industrialization undertaken by workers at the direction of the owning class), the amount is x+ petrol. More petrol is now available to the worker. No surprise that an increase in standard of living has been achieved (and this can be converted into a yearly average increase) The worry, that was once the worry of the open Malthusians, is covered by the word sustainable. Is this progress sustainable?
Many greens argue that the level reached right now in western countries is not sustainable and then refuse to nominate the level that was reached at some point in that hundred years that is. I just don’t think it’s worth debating those that would nominate the standard lower than 100 years ago. The claims, to only be reluctantly following science starts to fall apart fairly quickly at this point. The belief that this level is unsustainable was the same belief that was around forty years ago when the standard was half of what it is now.
Julian Simon and then more popularly Bjorn Lomborg have dealt with the claims to science (translated into economic actions) convincingly and I see no reason for communists to redo the work. Lomborg demonstrates via cost benefit analysis, that when it comes to global warming we should ‘Cool It’ – and any red infected with green thinking would do well to read his book the Skeptical Environmentalist. One-sided ‘reading list’ lifestyles is inevitably producing idiots susceptible to Al Gore fabrications, obfuscation, and blatant scare-mongering. Before going further with this debate get some balance into your own reading. The MSM is full of this global warming scare-mongering and the constant assertions that it is only what the scientists are objectively discovering. It is not. It is the same junk they have produced for years about the death of Marxism etc
The current science does not support the proposed actions and there are quite simply vastly more important real issues to do something about instead of spending vast sums doing virtually nothing about the carbon (That is but the latest scare in a long list of scares since Henny Penny, or was that Chicken Little was convinced the sky was falling that have never panned out.)
To avoid this stark reality (the desire to lower standards of living) some garden variety conservatives who are open greenies contort and twist the debate to attempt to fool the masses. Communists who advocate this reduction would never stoop to deceiving the masses and instead would proudly argue for offsetting the externality of the petrol use. They explain that carbon dioxide is a ‘greenhouse gas’ and there has to be a user pays cost recovery to keep the atmosphere in balance. (Actually, as Mike has formulated the issue it is quite a bit worse because humanity does not just have to keep the atmosphere from getting warmer but has to preserve this finite fossil fuel for future generations.)
Now the problem with all this, leaving aside the claims that science forces the green cuts upon us, is that the attack will not politically fly with the masses who will rightly maintain a skeptical approach to the prophets of doom. More workers will take an interest and refute the declaration that the debate is over and the science settled. Political forces will emerge in any system of proportional representation that will eventually have to replace the exhausted two party dictatorships that run the western Anglo countries. Many new political forces will have to emerge and want years more evidence of real science (measurements). I’m betting these years will continue to stretch into decades as the catastrophes continue to fail to arrive while the masses deal with the real issues that are here now.
Carbon hysteria is simply irrelevant in most of the world where development will continue, as best our capitalist system’s can manage. Indians, Chinese, Africans, Indonesians etc., are going to use more carbon so we will have to cope despite the usual concerns of rich westerners and those that follow them. The only course open for any legitimate areas of concern are to advocate vast increases in research and DEVELPOMENT.
Just contemplate DDT. Millions have hideously lost their lives from Malaria and still we have so-called materialists ignorantly scare-mongering by telling others to Google DDT?!
Google it yourself and then Google United Nations. The greens were disastrously wrong as usual.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=19855&Cr=malaria&Cr1
I predict Al Gore will become the discredited Paul Ehrlich of twenty years time. But as for environmental leftist’s that worry about DDT in 2008? – We dare not even hope for the extinction of these mamals as (like the rest) they will still be around in abundance.
N3wDay said
Moderators note:
Patrickm,
i understand you’re passionate about this issue but if you insist on calling people “idiots” or use other baiting and disrespectful comments your posts will be removed. I slip up at this as well, so i understand, but it will not be allowed to continue for extended periods.
Eddy said
David Jackmanson wrote:
and Patrickm wrote:
As Marx and Engels both pointed out, separately and together, on more than one occasion, “freedom is the recognition of necessity.”
The libertarian arguments being made in this thread (e.g. above), based on the premise that ‘human potential’ equates with driving an automobile or jet skis or a snowmobile, or air-freighting fruit from Guatemala to New York, are (to paraphrase Marx) the libertarian dreams of the small shopkeeper. They do not correspond with the necessity of the planet we live on.
If you read the pages of Science or Nature (two widely read peer-reviewed journals that publish on the biological and environmental sciences), you will know that PhD bench and field scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change and global warming are happening and supported by the data, that habitat destruction is a major catastrophe and supported by the data, that habitat loss reciprocally influences climate change and that habitat destruction is causing significant extirpations and extinctions of plants and animals, including human beings.
The Larsen B (Antarctic) ice shelf collapsed five years ago (!), that most of the Arctic ice cap has melted in the past five years as well, and so on.
All of this environmental damage is compelled by global capitalism in a cascade of intentional as well as unintentional events.
The imperialist (finance capitalist) response to the melting of the Arctic ice shield is to claim mineral rights to the continental shelf and to plan new transit routes through the Arctic ocean.
What could be ‘vastly more important’ of human potential than correcting the damage that anarchic capitalist production has visited on people and our environment?
David Jackmanson said
The libertarian arguments being made in this thread (e.g. above), based on the premise that ‘human potential’ equates with driving an automobile or jet skis or a snowmobile, or air-freighting fruit from Guatemala to New York, are (to paraphrase Marx) the libertarian dreams of the small shopkeeper. They do not correspond with the necessity of the planet we live on.
If you read the pages of Science or Nature (two widely read peer-reviewed journals that publish on the biological and environmental sciences), you will know that PhD bench and field scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change and global warming are happening and supported by the data, that habitat destruction is a major catastrophe and supported by the data, that habitat loss reciprocally influences climate change and that habitat destruction is causing significant extirpations and extinctions of plants and animals, including human beings.
The second paragraph in this quote does nothing to refute the idea that massive trade and cheap consumer goods are, in themselves, achieveable without destroying the planet.
I’d restate my question:
“What is the maximum indulgence of personal taste that we can accommodate while still guaranteeing a comfortable, prosperous world for our children?”
Answering that question is a lot harder than denouncing the current system of capitalism, but if it’s not done sometime by someone, a socialist economy can’t exist, IMO.
N3wDay said
“What is the maximum indulgence of personal taste that we can accommodate while still guaranteeing a comfortable, prosperous world for our children?”
I don’t think that it’s impossible to maintain a relatively high standard of living (probably not as high as that of the middle/upper middle class in the US)and at the same time be sustainable. But I do think certain preconditions need to be met first. In other words when we actually start putting money toward massive research in the realm of green technology consumption can be justified, but until we have the technology certain wants should be moderated (we also have to get the popualtion problem under control).
Just as a quick example Iceland is taking some pretty impressive steps towards creating an entirely hydrogen based economy. This sort of thing isn’t possible for every country but it shows what the future could look like. Despite my worries I am actually an optimist, just a realistic one.
The main problem with environemntal questions is that production has reached the point where we can destroy the environment more quickly than we can come up with technology to repair it (climate change is a prime example of this). So in the first periods of socialism we’ll have to take some hits to the standard of living in order to come up with the technology to deal with the excesses of capitalism.
btw: david. i’ll write something about measures being taken to prevent extinction soon.
arthur said
So there we have it folks, this explains precisely how:
I got put into “awaiting moderation” again immediately after N3day’s explanation. So presumably only moderators who understand how to “reconceptualize” communism will see this.
They will understand and agree that a line of reducing the living standards of the large majority of the American people REQUIRES a “rupture” with democracy. There simply isn’t any other way.
It can be presented slickly so people can assume that when you denounce capitalism and imperialism you are on the side of the people against their oppressors. But unless you quickly and quietly silence opposition and explain that opposition is pro-imperialist the debate will end up with some less slick advocate blurting out where you actually stand in the class struggle.
What I still don’t get is how you hope to find a niche that isn’t already fully occupied by greens. What’s the marketing angle that makes your approach to keeping workers down competitive with others that don’t burden themselves with the absurdity of pretending that position is “communist”?
Simply branding opponents as pro-imperialist won’t sell it. The greens already do that.
patrickm said
N3wday:
Given that the green stance has been so catastrophically wrong over DDT and that this has cost the lives of millions and that you appeared to know nothing about this aren’t your priorities totally distorted?
For some reason you did not know what the real issues were at all. How did that come about? Why were you so sure that you knew important things about DDT and could just say Google it? How come people know nothing about the UN etc change?
When third world people have needed this cheap and effective product, greens with their misguided direction and priorities have prevented them accessing it, and it has taken decades to begin to undo the madness. I repeat; the cost in lives is in the millions. How can you possibly gloss over this?
How about facing up to your extremely serious error on DDT? Please revisit the issue and get some sense of perspective.
How come Carson still has credibility in this circle? And Lomborg’s and all the others systematic decimation of her work appears not to have penetrated into the thinking at all? What is going wrong here?
Also, for anyone going on about sea level rise please do the required research. Antarctica is increasing its ice pack, and the Greenland ice levels are still not known for sure (it could be either way but is not anything ‘rapid’). Currently sea level rise is a non-issue, and proposals to prevent it with carbon taxing, is the real looming disaster for the poor and working peoples of the world.
When people get their head around DDT as an issue, it gives a great foundation for being skeptical about other green certainties.
N3wDay said
Patrickm,
What are we talking about here? In the US (which after all is our revolution) or the rest of the world? Used as pesticide for crops or as malaria control (in countries where that’s actually a problem like Africa)? Permanent use, or with the intention of phasing it out?
What Rachel Carson argued was not wrong. It’s a carcinogen, it’s bad for animals. IPM for agriculture is better, safer, doesn’t cost much more.
Whether it was wrong for the UN to place a universal ban or not is a different question. Whether it’s correct for a first world country to dictate to the rest of the world what should be done without helping them solve their problems in a meaningful way, is also a different conversation.
patrickm said
‘What are we talking about here?’
This is what we are talking about.
‘Scare mongering of Rachel Carson? Are you fucking joking? Do you have any idea about the immense suffering the pesticides she wrote against caused people? Just google DDT and you’ll have all the evidence you need.
Your post is completely devoid of any actual content. Pure right ideology.
Advance scientific claims as to why climate change isn’t happening. Don’t just say “it’s not”. You’re wasting our time.’
Chemical scaremongering is the issue not DDT. Rachel Carson was 100% wrong. Cancer rates were actually falling when the figures were properly adjusted. People were not dying from their food supply. Virtually any statistician can tell you that. Lomborg explained it very well. Carson thought that there was a cancer epidemic but had not adjusted the figures to account for an aging population, and the former increase in smoking rates that was feeding through at that point.
DDT, whatever it’s shortcomings and overuse etc, was not the terrible culprit that you have believed it was. Those that knew that it was vital in saving millions of peoples lives have had the devil’s own time even being heard while the green myths and exaggerations continued to do such unimaginable damage for literally decades. Greens had caused people to be looking the wrong way when Reds were praising the wonderful gains being made from conventional farming.
Why are people on this site so utterly out of touch with this that you can just tell me to Google DDT and think that you are saying something worthwhile? What has gone wrong with your background reading?
You could do some real corrective work on this issue so that you can stand firmly on the side of the poor and the oppressed or you can sweep your mistake under the carpet and it will just pop up in another form later. What is your attitude to organic food?
In my view your method of research (obviously common at Kasama as the DDT mistake slipped on by without comment) is somehow at fault and I think this is a good chance to have a real good re-think about what is going so wrong. I think that for a start you must be somewhat one-sided in your reading.
Do you still think my posting ‘Pure right ideology’ or have I changed your mind on something?
If I have had any positive effect try reading Lomborgs book ‘Cool it’ to start understanding a very different way of looking at global warming. You will be richly rewarded for that effort as well.
Eddy said
It’s clear from your passion that the book(s) you’ve read about DDT was very compelling. Or perhaps it reaffirmed your thinking.
However, if you review any of the hundreds of studies (1414 papers published in Science alone since the last 60s, I just checked) reported on DDT, how it is metabolized by various animals (birds, fish, various marine and terrestrial invertebrates, mammals) and phytoplankton, as well as how it disperses in the biosphere – especially how it is ‘stored’ in oceans – you might understand why so many people don’t think it’s as wonderful as you imagine. DDT ‘bio-accumulates’ in various metabolic forms and does damage as it moves up the food chain. The birds eggs study was one of many. This information is quite empirically grounded, not fear-induced.
It is true that DDT-laced netting can control the Anopheles mosquito and thus transmission of plasmodium and malaria. We do not yet know if there are adverse effects from this, but the trade-off is obvious.
However, netting does not preclude that there are more efficacious ways to combat malaria. The attraction has been that netting is quick and cheaper.
Some 40 million people die every year from preventable infectious disease, including malaria. The vast majority of these deaths occur in the most impoverished areas of the planet, devastated by imperialist economy. These areas lack potable water, sanitation systems, adequate shelter, energy systems (apart from fire wood), and of course food. Any discussion of sustainability ought to ground itself in these conditions and factors.
Reconstructing societies that solve these essential problems will go much farther in eliminating infectious disease than DDT-laced netting. Until that time, the nets are a good thing.
But that doesn’t make DDT harmless or helpful in broader applications.
patrickm said
Eddy: netting is not what this is about!
“We must take a position based on the science and the data,” said Dr Arata Kochi, Director of WHO’s Global Malaria Programme. “One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT.”
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=19855&Cr=malaria&Cr1
just have a look at the link and if you want to go on from there and do a bit of work on this fine but you are not doing the work at the moment by telling people this is about netting. I had provided this link at 81.
Are you in agreement that Carson was wrong in the promotion of a chemical scare about conventionally farmed food?
BTW Larsen B is totally irrelevant to sea level rises because it was in the sea already (iceburgs are always being produced) I repeat the continent of Antarctica is experiencing an increase in ice and the science is still waiting on Greenland.
However the specifics are not the issue here the big question is are people like Lomborg in his ‘Cool It’ and ‘The skeptical Environmentalist’ on more of the correct path or is Al Gore closer to the correct path?
Carl Davidson said
Response to David Jackmanson:
On your first point: There’s nothing that’s ‘too much for the natural environment to bear.’ It doesn’t care what we do to it, or what happens to us as a result. It will simply change, and keep chugging along, whether various species, ours included, are wiped out, harmed or not. The question is whether we want to make these changes that are too much for us to bear. I can take you to quite a few towns and rural communities in West Virgina, suffering from the runoff ‘slurry’ poisoning their drinking water from blowing the tops off mountains to strip mine coal. The natural environment doesn’t care one way or another, but the people sure do. It’s not like there are no choices. There’s more than one way to mine coal, or for that matter, to provide electricity even without burning coal. My point remains.
On point two, an ecological point of view can mean many things to many people, but here’s two. 1) We are part of nature and subject to its rules, and ignore them at our peril 2) In political economy, all ‘externalities’ are paid for, sooner or later. The questions are when, how, by whom, and what is for the common good?
N3wDay said
Also Eddy, from what I’ve read netting is not cheaper. But the question is does the extra cost outweigh the long term risks of DDT use. My question is can the UN really justify using DDT because it doesn’t want to spend more on Africa?
The US empire spends 650 billion dollars on weapons a year and that number is rising. seriously, is our problem a finite amount of money of a misappropriation of funds?
n3wday said
They’ve done recent studies on people exposed to DDT showing high probability that is does in fact cause cancers (particularly breast cancer), birth problems, etc. Banning DDT has in fact saved many lives. I simply have no reason to believe Rachel Carson was at fault in any way. Using DDT in Africa for Malaria in the short term while phasing it out for different types of malaria control could be justified, but DDT as an end in itself is a ridiculous idea. The reason people are dying from malaria isn’t because we banned DDT. It’s because we restricted it’s use without providing any other options that poorer countries could afford, so the job of malaria control is left up to rich celebrities donating mosquito nets.
It’s not that I’m not listening, it’s that I don’t find your arguments that persuasive.
lomborg is not that impressive either. He’s a right economist not a scientist posing as an environmentalist. Guess what, writing an ideological book and donating some money to green peace when you were younger doesn’t make you a scientist or an environmentalist. I haven’t read his book but what I’ve noticed in his articles are partial statistics. He takes data from the IPCC and only presents their lowest conclusions (rather than the range of possibilties they present) and he doesn’t seriously consider the possibility of ‘tipping’ points such as the melting of ice in russia causing the release of large deposits of methane gas.
Bjorn accepts that warming is real, but really only seriously considers the most optimistic possibility, which guess what, isn’t really science. So people who read his work think it’s not that bad but don’t get a fair presentation of the range possibilities. The all the possible outcomes aren’t factored into his economic equations, so that’s not even accurate.
If his book is different from the stuff online I’ve read by him, please correct me, but i seriously doubt it is. That seems to be his job.
Eddy said
Undoubtedly, you are right. My mistake.
Based on your response, it seems that ‘what this is about’ is your insistence that humans are not part of larger ecologies, that greenhouse gas emissions have no measurable effect, that ‘better living through chemistry’ is not just the tag-line from one of DuPont’s marketing campaigns, but the road to the future.
If you can’t get your head around the quite dramatic warming impacts at either pole, what’s to argue?
[If I could post the satellite photo sequence here everyone else would be able to see the matter clearly; an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island which had been stable for approx. 12,000 yr. disintegrated over the course of a few seasons.]
If you can’t recognize the work that’s been done studying the ecological impacts of chlorinated hydrocarbons including DDT and PCB, what’s to argue?
As I said, literally hundreds of investigators (in-the-field PhD biologists and ecologists) have reported on the ecological and organismic effects of DDT and that class of chemicals on a diverse range of animal, plant and other life (algae, phytoplankton, zooplankton).
The significance of this, as I wrote, is bio-accumulation. Among other things, DDT is a neruotoxin. As with mercury, by the times it gets to keystone species, it is very concentrated.
Obviously, specifics are at issue and no, the ‘big question’ is not answered with one of those two choices.
———-
N3Wday wrote:
Of course, you are right to ask that question.
Let me clarify my remark. I was only citing DDT-laced mosquito nets as an immediate ‘fix’ to a malaria outbreak, in the same way that Medicine san Frontiers provides an immediate response in certain parts of the world.
Clean water, clean air, sanitation and nutrition are the key factors that support or deny the spread of most infectious disease (malaria, typhus, typhoid, dengue, diphtheria, dysentery, tuberculosis).
The objective should be to solve those ‘habitat’ problems, and the chief reason they are problems at all is that the ‘under developed’ regions (UN-speak now refers to these areas as ‘low income countries’) have been devastated by global capitalism; first by ‘modern’ chattel slavery and then by being reduced to supplies of extractives and cash crops. (Walter Rodney provided a good overview of the process in Africa.)
patrickm said
As a late contribution to this debate: My 10 yr old picked up on this theme just yesterday from another direction. (a very popular Australian children’s DVD). So we started talking about what was happening and how environmental issues such as the mammal extinction rate were portrayed as getting worse and then had a very quick look on the net.
Now remember the following is the essential scare that is being promoted by the MSM and echoed at Kasama.
‘Survey Finds ‘Bleak Picture’ for World’s Mammals
By Juliet Eilperin, Oct. 6, 2008
BARCELONA — A quarter of the world’s wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here this morning. The new assessment — which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries a total of five years to complete — paints “a bleak picture,” leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996.’
Anyway instead of googling theories of future mammal extinction we googled extinct mammals and here is one site we got 1st page;
roboconsumer.wordpress.com/2007/09/23/extinct-mammals/ – 31k –
Even I was shocked at what passes for a scientific approach to the issue of the history of what mamals have become extinct since 1500. That is, since the massive and mostly unavaoidable transmission shake-up let loose with the ‘Age of discovery’.
The major purpose of this site becomes clear when one scrolls down and checks out the pie graph presented. The trend of this pie chart is quite clear and very dramatic. Something is evidently happening and also quite evidently it’s rapidly getting worse!!
Now remember these are the historical numbers we are dealing with world wide.
Mammals Extinct after 1500 AD 76
Mammal subspecies extinctions 7
Extinct in the Wild 2
The vast majority of them come from the new New World (the previously isolated countries) particularly Australia and islands such as Cuba etc.
Regrettably we must account for 85 extinctions and we seek to detect a trend.
Under certain peramaters the data does present as the green scare-monger has it;
1500-1800 15%
1800-1900 25%
1900-2000 60%
But this presentation is an entirely false way of asessing the underlying data. Deliberate, meaningless timefame distortions occur and effectively break up and conceal the year by year reality of a declining trend line.
The way for reds to further the investigation is to plot the 20C figures. We must break the figures down on a year by year basis (That is make use of the longest time line series that we can if we are to establish whether industrialized humanity and the classes that industry creates have been making the issue worse than our forebears, or better) In particular what has been happening in the years post WW2 when industrialization can be said to have taken a major leap.
Having already, as relatively primitive humans, colonised the globe and thus caused rats, cats, mice, foxes, pigs and so on to arrive in regions where they were previously unknown; (and started clearing for massive crop and grazing activities not to mention bringing untold disease life forms directly to the people and animals of the new world) we are obliged to recognise that a delayed outcome to those initial un-doable events was inevitable.
Like watching that brave Russian die in London after Putin’s lot poisoned him. The problem was the un-stoppable consequences from the initial event. Thus the cause of the extinctions ought to be sheeted home to that earlier period if anything, and in no way tied in to an arbitray collection of years starting at the year 1900 and finishing at the year 2000. (as ‘explained’ on their site) There was nothing those medicos could do for the poor man at least at this time when he needed the help.
We reds are interested in the trends and how our proletarian modernity is working out. (Even if the planet is still owned and run by an owning class that we still have to get around to ridding ourselves of) Reds as proletarians have no wish at all to distort the trend we just want to discover them.
Furthur; progressives and leftists assert our desire to see no mammal (the issue we are discussing) made extinct where it is at all possible to avoid. Even the former background extinction rates in the natural environment we take into consideration and try where possible to preserve all the mammalian life forms we come across and thus defeat nature’s background work where we can. This is just not the case for other life forms such as the ebola virus and the like but that is quite another question.
The picture is a stark reversal when the data is in effect placed right side up.
What is happening with the abused data set here is typical and explained very well in Lomborg’s ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’. The reason for the distorting selection of data points is either a blatant fraud or breathtaking incompetence or a bit of both; take your pick. I favor a combination.
If you were to take the trouble to do graphs of the 20C the period where we have the best data collection you would see a radical REDUCTION in extinction events. The trend is very good and has been for very many decades, and the events that are happening have issues that stem from poverty or feudal/tribal usage and or/ignorance, such that produces for example poaching of rhino’s in Africa for superstitious and pseudo-scientific Chinese medicine.
Any way go through the 85 case histories and be prepared to be shocked at the ‘verbaling’ that 20C industrialised humanity is getting from greens.
First find one mammal extinction after 1980, try to find ten after 1960 or to find 20 after 1950 etc. My daughter had good fun curing herself of another green scare. The trend is downward!
Some animals like this http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/136452
you will have difficulty allocating. I think the green scare-monger behind the graph has allocated this to the 20C (1910?)when there is no indication this skeletal remain was not many decades past extinct.
The few extinctions is actually quite remarkable, and when set against a background extinction rate is dramatic proof of just how wrong the green scare is.
Now this is not to say that perhaps a ‘tipping point’ won’t be met in the future etc and the trend start a massive reversal. That is the real charge that this thread is making and the evidence being put forward by those that follow a green philosophy requires testing. But we ought to start with an exposure of their science of the past, their interpretations of the historical record.
People will also find this wikipedia list is more helpful for dates (they are right up front) but even then the distortion is sometimes quite incredible.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_mammals – 41k -
for example the one animal nominated as extincted in the year 2000 had not been seen for a hundred years!
As reds we argue for rapid industrial development and expose scare-mongering about the past, present or future. The problem remains for us is too little development and I can’t recommend more strongly that people read what a self declared communist has to say in ‘Bright Future Abundance and progress in the 21st Century’. It is fully available on line.
http://brightfuture21c.wordpress.com/
N3wDay said
Patrickm,
The reason extinction has been prevented in recent years is because of the conservation efforts of the very green “scare mongers” you seek to condemn.
If you look at the number of species that have become endangered in the past 100 years and are just barely hanging on to existence you’ll see why there is such an uproar in the scientific community (and I’m sure you’ll find it’s an increasing trend). Yes extinction rates have not increased dramatically, but endagered rates have, the only reason extinction has not is because of green watchdog groups.
Of the 5,487 known existing mammals on the entire planet, 1,141 of them are on the brink of extinction, half of them are threatened. Endangered means that their numbers have been lowered so drastically due to things like habitat loss, pollution, etc, that they are close to complete extinction. (To use the red wolf as an example, there are only 50 left in the wild, that’s what endangered means). That statistic (1,141, of 5,487) was taken from the IUCN Red List, which is the most comprehensive list of threatened and endangered plant and animal species in existence. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that this organization has only been in existence for forty years (green organizations like this coming into existence are the reason many of the currently endangered species have been able to stay alive in such tiny numbers).
Your historical analysis of extinction fails to hold up if you pay attention to the number of species whose numbers have become endangered and threatened. If you included that in your considerations the equation would change greatly.
The number in that article has been endorsed by the scientific journals, Science and Nature, which are very reputable. Your analysis however is endorsed by Bjorn Lomborg, a right economist ideologue.
I still am not persuaded.