Pill Pod 168 - EcoMarxism (Exclusive)
Added 2024-05-18 21:00:04 +0000 UTCYou asked, we answered! Here is your homework: https://monthlyreview.org/2024/01/01/the-dialectics-of-ecology-an-introduction/
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Will capitalism not just naturally reach and equilibrium? Many complex systems initially go through a growth period before leveling out and oscillating around some central value or declining until new perturbations cause change.
ChatGPT
2024-12-28 15:48:15 +0000 UTCStewed on it over my shift. Guy said he was doing materialist analysis but then talked about ideas. Makes sense. A question I still have is when is it ok to collaborate with “bad” ideologies in order to make material change?
Jack
2024-05-23 04:35:03 +0000 UTCI’ll join Eric’s movement. I’d rather have material change than use the idea of materialism to shut down ideas about material change or whatever. But I’m just a pizza delivery guy.
Jack
2024-05-22 22:19:39 +0000 UTCMaterial prescriptions & help processing the situation are both needed. With its proven record in both radical action & reforms, there is some hope in using Marxism to look at climate change through theory. But it's also interesting to filter theory through climate change. Eg. Monism & romanticism seem legitimated, & are perhaps even model ideals, while I wonder if posthumans can ever have a stable enough existence to long-term autopoesis. And does transhumanism have the potential to locate swathes of human activity/existence away from using material resources (and would that even be preferable), or can it only increase energy consumption?
Alex B
2024-05-21 09:16:19 +0000 UTCI’d recommend Kohei Saito’s "Marx’s Ecosocialism". This book is pretty short and engaging, and I’d recommend it - it has a brief historical review of theory, but is mostly dedicated to Marx’s grappling with different ecological problems in the 1860s and 1870s, and IMO stays mostly out of the muck that bothers Victor and Pills. This is gonna be a very "internet Marxist" comment, text wall and everything :) Aside nuances of "rate of falling profit", there aren’t many apparent bounds on how much profit can be made, or how much abstract value can be accumulated. It’s abstract, after all. But the other side of the coin is that this value is the congealed product of labor-time - particular types of work (and perhaps, in an un-ideal capitalism, over-work), and particular resource harvesting. To grow corn, perhaps our friend has cut down a forest for the land, and over-fertilized it. Now its going bad, but our friend has enough capital to buy more land, and continue "biggering and biggering and biggering", to quote the Lorax - taking a hatchet to a very complex ecosystem. And if our friend didn’t do it - someone else would. On this point, I recall an article in Wall Street Journal a year or two ago - that regulation pushed big oil out of Canada tar sands oil, only for local opportunists to fill the breach. The solution here isn’t of mere regulation, but that such resources must be rendered completely inaccessible to the market. In short, in capitalism, where there is profit to be had - more "biggering" in the world of abstract value - there will be investment and exploitation, regardless of the material damage and our awareness of it. A political/legislative solution within the capitalist order might seem the solution (ie "carbon tax") - and sometimes was. In Capital Volume I (the "Work Day" chapter), Marx identifies how labor militancy and bourgeois democracy combined to deal with another contradiction of abstract accumulation and the material world: overwork. Without the resulting legislation, as Erik points out, one business will get outcompeted and die if it truly "goes worker friendly" (or more specifically for us, "goes green"). Then we are back to square one. Yet today, there is no "parliament" which can impose binding, shared laws on the bourgeoisie, because they are so transnational - "green limits" in one country (or a handful) alone would be similar to imposing "good labor laws" in one county (or a handful) of England in the 1850s alone. And there is no transnational legislative arena capable of regulating capitalism - the UN just isn’t up for the task, as it is at least. If it seems self-evident that "profit valorization --> climate change", then a Marxist critique should likewise appear so. The point isnt that Marxism can merely *explain* climate change, but that the wider theory of political economy can be used to reckon with how to address it, as well as other problems. A very very good example is in northern Mozambique, a poor region with hundreds of thousands of displaced people - big Oil (especially Total) set up a big gas rig, and then Islamists took it over, allegedly linked (erroneously) with IS. Macron then apologized for the Rwandan genocide, gave Rwanda $0.5bn in FDI, and Rwanda pushed the islamists out - this is framed as part of the "War on Terror". A Marxist viewpoint would have us ask: who got expropriated - lost out - by the gas rig development? Local fishers. Who was fighting in this Islamist outfit? Those pauperized fishers. And, not even leftist outlets but even Financial Times speculated on Total Oil pressuring Macron to get Rwanda to intervene (direct French interventions have become less popular recently, as seen in northern Africa). So, while portrayed as "War on Terror", this appears more a mercenary effort to recover a pauperizing gas rig from those very paupers - that they joined with *some* organization, *any* organization - in this case, Islamist - isn’t that surprising. Especially considering that the only "leftists" in the area, the ruling FRELIMO party, formerly ML, was entirely bought and neutered in the post-Soviet era (the country was bankrupted in an apartheid South Africa funded civil war). Further, the locals didn’t damage the gas rig - their hope was to share the profit, as they lost their livelihood to it. Total wasn’t down with that. We get a sense that many problems in the region can be traced back historically, as well as specifically to the process of neoliberalizing expropriation salient since the 1990s; in the case of Mozambique, the beginning of this is specifically after the USSR dissolved, so the West didn’t need to terrorize Mozambique anymore (which also still has a mark today) - it could just force a peace on their own terms (and apartheid South Africa could stop being apartheid, similarly IMF’d). The suggested solution then isn’t merely a grab bag of {"land back", "stop oil", "stop war", "stop harvesting resources in Africa", "help clean up such and such environmental problem"}, but to identify the root that makes sense of it all - as well as to identify potential questions to ask or investigate. It’s this larger unified explanatory power of Marxist political economy that IMO makes it compelling. Any fact or phenomena can be explained with any framework - what makes something *scientifically* compelling however is how that framework illuminates problems not just within one scope, but in apparently unrelated scopes as well, in ways that illuminate each other holistically. I wanted to touch on other stuff, but ya know :) always enjoy the pod, and also hope Matt is doing good.
Revoloisier
2024-05-21 06:41:30 +0000 UTCI imagined the Derridian trace of number 9 haunting “Pill Pod 168” when ideas became matter.
James Merrigan
2024-05-20 13:15:26 +0000 UTCPills, re: your question about reading recommendations at the end, about "having this much natural gas, these many source and these many sinks, from a systems perspective," the first thing that came to mind was "Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update." Been a long time since I read it, but I'm pretty sure they entered all possible data and create world eco-economic models, training it on historical data and then using to forecast what say an average familys metabolic rate would have to be to be sustainable. If not this particular book, then those in the same categorization. It's *a thing* for sure. Agree with Pills on the author focusing on ideas (and yeah, a bit boring historical account, although I learned of a few new OG Soviet Union papers/books, here are the names, here are the dates), but id also say I'm over truth claims, and I'm over the over analyzation of the contradictions of a writer to their labeling or identification. All I care about is "is this a new concept or praxis, is it a useful concept or praxis, can it be applied on a mass, either from local to global and/or global to local?". Here I do see practical, present day, here and now material analysis and recommendations coming from the Degrowth wing of this stuff. Redirecting capital flows, reducing energy consumption, having a plan A of reduction before the plan B of technology/free market. "This is depressing, what can you do, go recycle your beer can." Agreed. Having to educate everyone about marx, then learning history, philosophy, joining in a climate marches, throwing soup on a painting, what is the probability of the sum total of all these discordant activities vs a global "stay at home strike," where you pick a general "gripe" that you know has mass polling, and a significant amount of the population simply stays home one day at a time. No need for pedagogy, no infrastructural requirementd except *the internet,* sure capital loss by the home strikers, possibly leading to a supply chain or insufficient individual capital or just voluntary hunger strike, but really the absolute bare minimum effort with absolute maximum possible payoff? What is the bigger media event? What is the bigger jolt to the inertia of capital flows? Idk, I'm hung up on this idea that *simply doing absolutely nothing (i.e. staying at home, not going to work, not driving your car, not shopping, readin a book, spending time with your kids and neighbors as protest)* could be the greatest vulnerability to the current inetia of capitalism.
ageOfBumFires
2024-05-19 16:55:19 +0000 UTCNot to be the guy who just recommends books (especially since the main reason I come here is for book recommendations), but if you guys have not done an episode on The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I think that pills would get a lot of value out of it. If you are looking for a materialist analysis of the educational model, then look no further. This book may become relevant to the way you view yourself as an online-educator.
Daniel Stoltzfus
2024-05-19 15:15:51 +0000 UTCHarking back to Schopenhauer, how would this conversation change with the lens of Will as thing-in-itself? Capitalism aligns better. Will does not care if it makes itself extinct, for if all is wiped out and somehow life starts again, the one thing we can count on is Will. Look at communities who practice negating the Will (e.g., monasteries), and here, I would argue, communism would have an equal footing in the debate. Our common denominator is Will and this would be the challenge to degrowth. This lens helps but....but, I'm not sure what happened to it.
David Osborn
2024-05-19 09:34:34 +0000 UTCFor Pills' last question, I'd recommend looking into Julia Steinberger's Living Well Within Limits project, as well as Jason Hickel's work (e.g. the discussion of universal public services on his blog).
Zadine Lenin
2024-05-19 08:30:28 +0000 UTCI think what's missing from the discussion about idealism vs. materialism is that historically Marxism has focused on the social component of the economy and ignored the ecological, hence the charge of productvism/Prometheanism. Foster's project is an attempt to show that there is an ecological aspect built into Marx's original critique of capitalism. That's still a materialist analysis. But in this essay he is just laying out the history of the idea of Marxism, which will of couse come across as idealist, since you're discussing the history of an idea. I do agree that this does feel a bit like 12/13th century religious debates, but I do think there is value in combining the social critique of capitalism with an ecological critique, and Marxism is a useful framework within which to situate this. But the continuous discussion of "what Marx really meant" does feel very idealist to me.
Zadine Lenin
2024-05-19 08:18:16 +0000 UTCI think Foster and the Monthly Review have become much more sympathetic to degrowth in the last year or so, publishing articles from people like Jason Hickel. Also, degrowth doesn't mean degrowing literally every sector of the economy, it means moving away from the focus on growth and shifting priorities to satisfying people's needs. It means providing universal basic services, abolishing the advertising industry, downscaling extractive sectors (e.g. mining), etc. Some parts of the economy will still grow (e.g. green energy), especially in the Global South. The ultimate goal of degrowth is to provide private sufficiency and public luxury, while operating within ecological limits.
Zadine Lenin
2024-05-19 07:21:28 +0000 UTC
