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17069
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: As the Earth Dies…
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/11/as-the-earth-dies/
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May 11, 2020 As the Earth Dies… by Eve Ottenberg The Robbery of Nature John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (Monthly Review Press) The earth is dying and capitalism is to blame. Facing this, one can opt for hope, as Marxist ecosocialists do, or one can succumb to pessimism fed by dark thoughts on human nature and the intractable, deadly persistence of our economic system of exploitation. Human nature has a destructive and murderous side, while capitalism, expressing that side with its endless growth, endless greed, blights the planet like cancer. Yet Marxist ecosocialists do not let this drag them down to despair. They talk about fixing what humanity has wrought, about drastically cutting carbon emissions, about mitigating the sixth mass extinction, about decreasing plastics and other environmental toxins and doing so while providing for the necessities of life, including, as John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in their newly published “The Robbery of Nature,” “love, family, community, meaningful work, education, cultural life, access to the natural environment and the free and equal development of every person.” Such ecosocialism differs vastly from the technocratic ecomodernism espoused by, say “Jacobin” magazine. Technocratic approaches to the climate catastrophe are very popular these days, even on the left. To demolish them, Bellamy and Clark cite “Jacobin’s” summer 2017 issue, “Earth Wind Fire.” They argue that the “socialist” magazine did far worse than miss the boat; it steered it in the wrong direction, by touting technological fixes to global warming and pollution, as well as rapid growth in production, population control and the magic of the global free market. This doesn’t sound like any socialism I’m familiar with, and indeed one idiotic “Jacobin” writer opined: “You CAN actually have infinite growth on a finite world.” Uninhabitable earth – here we come! This writer also adds, “our skyscrapers are not separate from nature, they ARE nature.” As Bellamy and Clark argue, by this logic, “so are nuclear weapons.” Another “Jacobin” contributor supports the astonishingly dangerous geoengineering of injecting “sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays.” Many scientists have warned that this could be a calamity. Bellamy and Clark also critique carbon capture and sequestration plans, advocated by Christian Parenti in this “Jacobin” issue. The problem is one of scale. Bellamy and Clark quote one energy analyst: “In order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions, we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry, whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storage took generations to build.” Ecosocialists have a more straightforward approach. They start by pinpointing the problem – capitalism. Bellamy and Clark argue Marx’s ecological bona fides convincingly, by detailing his concern about a “metabolic rift.” They quote Marx that capitalism creates an “irrevocable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Much of “The Robbery of Nature” debunks leftists who have dismissed Marx’s environmentalism; but Marx asserted that capital loots nature as a “free gift.” This, the ecosocialists argue, is the problem of capital’s relation to the earth: plunder and deadly “externalities,” i.e. pollution. According to Bellamy and Clark, Marx “emphasized that capital accumulation, through its rapacious expropriation of nature, inevitably promoted ecological destruction.” He also wrote that capital’s seizures of common people’s property is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” “The Robbery of Nature” also argues that Marx was a proto-feminist and a food theorist. “The unhealthy and even poisonous contents of the Victorian working class diet was thus a key concern of Marx’s food analysis.” The book also documents Marx’s views on alienated speciesism and his horror at capitalist animal abuse; one can only imagine his abhorrence of modern factory farming. But he never lost sight of the human impact of animal abuse: he noted that between 1855 and 1866, “1,032,694 Irishmen [were] displaced by about one million cattle, pigs and sheep.” The core of Marx’s critique of capitalism is that it undermines “the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” That is as true today as it was in the nineteenth century. Leftists, like the “Jacobin” writers that Bellamy and Clark cite, who do not argue for halting endless capitalist growth, who swoon over the magic of the global free market, are not socialists. Leftists who blame impoverished people for humanity’s carbon footprint and advocate population control, instead of targeting the real carbon criminals, namely the affluent West, they are hardly socialists either. We have seen where endless growth leads: a poisoned atmosphere, an overheated planet and billions reduced to destitution. The ecosocialists argue that capitalism is a death cult. They are correct. Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Further Adventures of Feckless Frank. She can be reached at her website. |
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[17084] [17085] [17082] [17079] [17078] [17077] [17076] [17074] [17075] [17080] [17081]
17084
From: Logan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: As the Earth Dies…
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Quoting Marx LOLOLOL! The dirtiest countries in the world guilty of destroying the planet are all Communist and the Big Business creeps that are guilty do so because there pals in gov shield them. Blaming Capitalism for the plight the Earth is in is beyond silly, light years beyond. Blame greed and corruption, nothing else. |
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[17085]
17085
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: As the Earth Dies…
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The Death Ranger capitalizes on gummy bear supplements and you quote him so I guess it is funny in the jokes on you sort of way. |
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17082
From: shatterbrain, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Did Kapitalism END life on Mars ??
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Chavez says capitalism may have ended life on Mars By Reuters Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 (Reuters) - Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday. "I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day. Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world's problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying up. "Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts," Chavez said, sipping from a glass of water. He added that the West's attacks on Libya were about water and oil reserves. Earlier this month, the U.S. National Research Council recommended that NASA's top priority should be a robot to help determine whether Mars ever supported life and offer insight on its geological and climatic history. It would also be the first step in an effort to get samples from Mars back to Earth. A NASA team recently tested a space suit in a setting with extreme conditions akin to some of those found on Mars -- an Argentine base in Antarctica -- for possible use on a visit to the Red Planet. (Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Daniel Wallis) |
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17079
From: georg, [DNS_Address]
Subject: and since General Electric's Fukushima disaster ocean is dying (NT)
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17078
From: georg, [DNS_Address]
Subject: when Cheney got Halliburton exemption to CleanAir/Water we were doomed(NT)
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17077
From: georg, [DNS_Address]
Subject: but then we are all complicit in killing environment, water especially(NT)
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17076
From: georg, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: As the Earth Dies… (we agree on so much that's relevant) (NT)
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17074
From: Mitra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Marx and the Aral Sea
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If capitalism were our only problem with the degradation of this planet, it would be easy enough to fix. One issue resolved and the forests would return. The roots are deeper, to the birth of agriculture and a tribalism that depends on conquest and the control of resources. Corporate activity is legally sanctioned irresponsible aggression, but they didn't invent the practice, just codified it. |
17075
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Marx and the Aral Sea
| the article was a thought exercise...the roots of all problems on this planet have been a slow diminishing of the contribution of humans to pay their "rent" due basically to laziness and the lingering effects of the creation of the moon...mankind has failed to do the proper work to transform coarser energies into finer energies, and has forgotten how to do so and why it is required...humans, as the bible notes, did in ancient times live to be 8-900 years old...but as the quality of life diminished, life span shortened...and because the quality of the frequencies produced by humankind deteriorated, more humans were needed to produce the required quota of enhanced energy, which is released to the system at death...that is why nature has had to create the crazy overpopulation we have today on this planet...and that is why we have war and other forms of large die-offs...things are dire... |
17080
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Marx and the Aral Sea
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Is that pre Mesolithic when folk were hunter gatherers before they turned to farming and lifestyle based on more processing - effecting crops for grain, making pottery from clay & sand rather than wooden / stone bowls. Taming goats, pigs and sheep rather than hunting wild boar and deer. Funnily enough while most of the hunter gathers lived a rough & ready lifestyle / some in middle east when the climate allowed enjoyed a nice sedantry lifestyle due to nature's larder full to brimming - however in Sweden with climate change and rising sea levels meant their roaming areas shrunk and there are signs of volence in burials as farming folk also encroached and become more dominant in Europe. Hope you're not serious about the moon and life spans of '8-900 years old' At May 13, 2020 at 10:27:57, ryan wrote: the article was a thought exercise...the roots of all problems on this planet have been a slow diminishing of the contribution of humans to pay their "rent" due basically to laziness and the lingering effects of the creation of the moon...mankind has failed to do the proper work to transform coarser energies into finer energies, and has forgotten how to do so and why it is required...humans, as the bible notes, did in ancient times live to be 8-900 years old...but as the quality of life diminished, life span shortened...and because the quality of the frequencies produced by humankind deteriorated, more humans were needed to produce the required quota of enhanced energy, which is released to the system at death...that is why nature has had to create the crazy overpopulation we have today on this planet...and that is why we have war and other forms of large die-offs...things are dire... |
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[17081]
17081
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Marx and the Aral Sea
| totally serious... |
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