Jay Hanson wrote:
> From: Barry Brooks <durable@earthlink.net>
>
> >The left has allways agreed with the capitalists. They both want full
> >employment. They both want to exploit the planet. They both assume we have
> a
> >labor shortage and a resource surplus. To merely question that is radical.
>
> You are right Barry.
Well, no, actually. You are both quite wrong. The left has always had two
contradictory outlooks. Some socialist movements and parties, including both
the Bolsheviks in Russia and the anticommunist social democratic parties of the
West, have tended to emphasise economic growth as a priority, altho even there
they often do so in ways which reflect other, contradictory priorities such as
environmental conservation. But Marx certainly did not believe in endless
economic growth as a panacea for human ills and was extremely aware of the
dangers to the environment of unbridled growth and despoliation of natural
resources. Marx was one of the earliest writers on the connection between
capitalist agriculture and desertification and soil fertility loss, and as
Michael Perelman, Jim O'Connor, John Bellamy Foster and many others have
shown, Marxism is not only compatible with radical enviornmentalism; it
is a political philosophy which offers the hope of practical programmes.
I notice that Jay recently declared on this List that he is quite sure
that humankind is a class of detritovores which is doomed to inevitable
extinction, and that it is already too late to save the planet. That
kind of fatalism is quite foreign to Marxism.
-- Mark Jones http://www.geocities.com/~comparty