On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, DR. PHUA KAI LIT wrote:
> Is it just capitalism or is it the ideology that continuous economic
> growth is a good thing?
The ideology of growth is the emergent and true consciousness of the laws
of capitalist development. The heart of capitalism is accumulation. To
accumulate, capital must expand.
> From all accounts, the environmental problem is much worse in the East
> European nations after years of Communist rule and reckless disregard
> for the environment.
Putting to one side the point that the position that things were worse on
a comparative basis under Communist rule isn't defensible (which is not to
say that there was not environmental destruction under state socialism,
for certainly there was), there are two arguments that obviate the more
important premise of this argument. If you hold that any part of a
world system is determined by the same overall structural logic of the
world system, and then note that the structure of the world system for (at
least) the past couple of hundred years has been capitalist, then the real
premise of the argument--that the elimination of capitalism and the
formation of state socialism makes things worse (or doesn't make things
any better)--is vacuous because those parts of the world system were part
of a single capitalist division of labor. If, on the other hand, you
believe that state socialism in this century constituted a socialist world
system, you still must understand the behavior of the socialist world
system--the drive for industrialization, militarization (involving the
development of nuclear capability), etc.--in relation to the capitalist
world system. The Soviet Union was in a fight for its life, encircled by
hostile imperialist nations dedicated to bringing about the demise of the
global revolutionary workers movement. In any case, the destruction of the
environment in this century has been determined by the development of
capitalism, not by its elimination.
Andy