Re Hans's [72l6]: > I guess in the light of this I must explain why can the > limitation of the resources of our planet not be > internalized, like for instance the limited length of the > working-day? I would argue along two lines: > (1) when capital tries to lengthen the working day, it > pinches the working class and the working class fights back, > they have the power and the political institutions to fight > back. Rain forests and the ozone layer of the antarctic ice > shield cannot fight back in the same way. > (2) In the working day there was one parameter that had > to be fixed and defended against capital's expansionary > drive: the number of hours workers were required to work. > Regarding the ecological limits there are millions of > parameters and tradeoffs. Even if the political power > were there to regulate all this, whatever regulation > you impose, there would always be new ways to abuse > nature which are not covered by existing regulations. > The simple one-dimensional expansionary drive of capital > cannot be reconciled with our ecological limits. I have no problem with the above. Re "limited resources": I think that many Marxists have resisted the idea of "limited resources" on this planet. The resistance to that is probably based on Marx's critique of Malthus which puts forward the proposition that Malthusian theory underestimates the rate and implications of technological change in its formula that the growth of productivity in agriculture grows at a arithmetic rate (and the other part of the formula that population grows at a geometric rate is false as well.) When that critique has been applied to the current issue, many Marxists have just assumed that future technological change will make the solutions to limited resources possible. As part of a critique of some overly dire Green projections, this observation has _some_ validity. That is, some environmentalists may not fully take into consideration the possibility of technological change making possible the more efficient use of existing resources and the expansion of resources. For instance, with hydroelectric and wind electrical generation, there are not the same limits as there are on oil and coal. Or, consider all of the unused potential of solar energy. In addition, it is important to recall that technological change is determined by capital and the state where the capitalist mode of production dominates and the unlimited drive for surplus value determines _what type_ of technologies are developed rather than other more "environmentally friendly" criteria determining what and how commodities are produced. Despite (or because) of the above many Marxists have not recognized the enormous implications of non-renewable resources. Until such time -- if ever -- that we are able to benefit from the resources on other planets and solar systems (which itself is a _very_ scary thought in terms of how the resources of other worlds could be depleted), we have to recognize what the Greens take to be (and is) a scientific fact: namely, that there are limited non-renewable resources. While it is true that environmentalists sometimes tend to underestimate the quantity of those resources that remain on the planet (e.g. the amount of oil reserves) and overestimate the pace of the depletion of those non-renewable resources, it is nonetheless true that there *are* non-renewable resources. And when we consider that the expansion of capital has proceeded with indifference to the fact that there are non-renewable resources (unless and until it is presented with the _fact_ of non-renewable resources as a 'external' limit to production) and that we can not depend on the capitalist state to take action (note, e.g. the US government's role in sabotaging international environmental agreements on acid rain, global warming, etc..), this physical limit is tied to a social limit. Here I am not only thinking about the implications of depleting the supplies of oil (e.g. in terms of oil-derivatives like plastics, rubber, many synthetic fibers, etc.) and coal (e.g. in terms of iron and steel), but of other 'non- renewable' resources as well. One could consider, e.g. a rain forest and the millions of species that live in that biosphere to be a *self-renewing resources* (although, it like all life is dependent on 'outside' forces, e.g. rainfall and sunlight), but once destroyed then it *can't* be renewed. Like Humpty-Dumpty a rain forest and extinct species can't be put back together again. And no amount of technological change in the future (except in this case possibly developments in genetic research) can reverse history. It is also the case that some future technological developments (e.g. cures for different diseases) may be foregone when a rain forest and the species endemic to that forest dies and becomes extinct. We just don't know, do we? Indeed, we have no knowledge of the exact extent to which environmental destruction has impacted human life today or in the future. Even capital and the state (and scientists and environmentalists) don't know that extent. Thus, when you write that there are *millions of parameters and trade-offs* you may be *under*estimating that quantity. In solidarity, Jerry
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