• "Gangreen" has set in

Cyberman,

You started this by claiming that a quote from Engels (The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man) showed that Engels would support a modern day Green politics outlook

In the first place the last section of the initial quote undermined your assertion, that part being:

... we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws an apply them correctly

Engels is anticipating a future where man can progressively master nature whilst still remaining a part of it. That's an optimistic outlook for the future, not something you read in Green literature which is mainly about gloom and doom, a litany of how humans are destroying the planet and how dangerous the future has become

Then if you read the sections immediately before and after the section you have quoted to us you also find this:

before:

In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.

after:

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity.

Engels is saying that man is part of nature but progressively developing the knowledge to master nature

Then in response to me you completely ignore that I used the word "sustainability" to describe the green position - in fact you replace that word with your word "stagnation" - and focus on my other descriptor "stasis". So, why do you ignore the "sustainability" descriptor.

Then you ignore the other quotes from Engels I provided which shows that he supports a dynamic, change is eternal philosophy, that its normal for old things to disappear and new things to come into existence.

Then you mention alternative energy sources and other tech advances as though that was some refutation of what I said about stasis.

Well, cyberman, by bringing up alternative energy sources you demonstrate once again you don't understand what LS people think about these issues.  Just as you didn't understand what our position was on Iraq in the "Draining the Swamp" thread.

Look at it like a dialectic: stasis and sustainability on the one side; dynamism and change is eternal on the other.

Virginia Postrel (The Future and its Enemies) puts it like this, she is a dynamist who also supports capitalism:

Do we search for stasis - a regulated engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism - a world of constant creation, discovery and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? (xiv)

The stasis, sustainability world view isn't about alternative energy sources - it's about a whole way of looking at the future - do we embrace dynamic change or fear it and try to hold back change (like the Greens do).

You conclude with:

And , yes ,  its all got to be done to sustain human life and civilisation in the longer term.  Or maybe you'd prefer it all to end ?

Yes, I'd prefer it all to end, that we don't sustain human life and civilisation in its present form, that we move onto something more advanced - something like well, what's in a name, your name says it all, cyberman. Imposter! Change your name to greenman!

Natural Born Cyborgs: Mind, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence

Now in this dialectic, where does Engels stand? Where do the Greens stand?

Comrades,

Would Engels would supported a modern day Green politics outlook? To answer that question you'd have to define what you mean by Green politics. There's a whole spread of "Green' opinion and it's no more to be expected that there is a single Green position than there would be a single Red position.

The major environmental issue  that we are facing today is Global warming. I'd like to think that Engels would have been a bit quicker on the uptake on the dangers of this than LS comrades. (Sorry, apart from Youngmarxist). But, that is just an idle thought , he was a product of the 19th century , and its up to his descendents to tackle the problem scientifically. Its all happeneing on our watch , so to speak.

Most sensible left opinion seeks to engage young people, who for the first time may become interested in politics through environmental concerns. That is not to say that we agree with everything on their agenda but at the same time we don't alienate them by allying ourselves with the most right wing elements , such as  the Institute for Pubilc Affairs and, for example,  giving them a long list of reasons why Global warming isn't really such a big problem. And, then we don't go on to tell them that even if it does turn out that what the scientists are saying is correct, all we need to do is let Capitalism rip and someone is sure to come up with solution before too long! I doubt they'd go for that.

Its good that you have a comprehensive theory of what the American strategy is in the middle east. You may be correct in saying that I don't have a complete understanding of it all. But, more to the point, it seems to me that the Americans are having a few learning difficulties with it all as well.

 

 

I think that the best thing we can do is tell everybody we can that the world is in fact not heading for a disaster, that humans are perfectly capable of fixing whatever problems exist without huge reductions in the standard of living, as advocated by even moderate greens (carbon tax anyone?) and that people everywhere are correct to want better living standards, as opposed to what we are told by greens: that we are unworthy for wanting a materially abundant life and that we 'need' to restrict our desires.

The DSP and the Green Party between them have already recruited the doomsayers - why on earth would we want people like that?

We want to atttract the people who are excited by human possibility and progress, not the ones who are revolted by it.

Still can't join in but just thought I should mention that I am greatly enjoying what I see as significantly higher level discussions in this and other recent threads.

If you get bored and have any spare time over the rest of the holiday season you might want to have a look at " Lincity "

http://lincity.sourceforge.net/

Lincity is a city simulation game. You are required to build and maintain a city. You must feed, house, provide jobs and goods for your residents. There are two ways to win:

 

1) You can build a sustainable economy with the help of renewable energy and recycling.

2) you can go for broke and build rockets to escape from a pollution ridden and resource starved planet.

 

I guess LS comrades would have to eschew the first option  That's just for wimps!

Personally, and unlike cyberman, I'd prefer a socialist economy to a sustainable one - and from there something that will free the working people even more.

 

The princes and popes are all for sustainable development. 'Sustainable development' is not the spectre that once haunted them.

 

Barry

Barry,

"Personally, and unlike cyberman, I'd prefer a socialist economy to a sustainable one" 

I thought you guys were all for maximising the productive forces?

I'm sorry to keep banging on about the fishing industry but its as clear as it could possibly be that fish production is now less than it could have been had the issue of sustainability been properly addressed 30 years ago.

The following website:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Fish/2005.htm 

reports  " After decades of growth, the reported global wild fish catch peaked in 2000 at 96 million tons and fell to 90 million tons in 2003, the last year for which worldwide data are available"

The shortfall can to some extent be made up by aquaculture. But , Australians, might have to learn to develop a taste for vegetarian fishes like Carp! Breeding carnivorous fish like tuna or salmon in cages makes the problem worse with 5 or 10 kg of fish feed being required for each kg of production.

Fishing isn't something to be dismissed lightly -  it's a 100 billion dollar plus industry and provides billions of people worldwide with their primary source of protein. And yet because of mismangement, one of the world's most potentially productive fisheries,  the Canadian Grand Banks have had to be closed leading to loss of jobs and the loss of million sof dollars in revenue and potential production. http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/overfishing-

If we hadn't depleted fish stocks quite so much,  fish would be easier to find and catch. This means that fishing boats would require less fuel on their trips. More fish could be caught, the ecosystems in the oceons would be in better shape. Everyone would be a winner! It just goes to show that:
sustainable production = maximum production  and

unsustainable production means falling production

Forestry, will go the same way as fishing if nothing changes. However, the real concern could be agriculture. The increases in production of the 20th century  that were possible when cheap oil was available for fertiliser won't be repeated in the 21st century.  In fact production which was once for food will be diverted to fuel production. The rise in prices, an indicator of insufficient production, has already started and it will probably be just the beginning.

cyberman:

Lincity is a city simulation game. You are required to build and maintain a city. You must feed, house, provide jobs and goods for your residents. There are two ways to win:

 

1) You can build a sustainable economy with the help of renewable energy and recycling.

2) you can go for broke and build rockets to escape from a pollution ridden and resource starved planet.

Cyberman, you do realise that computer games are designed by humans and reflect the values of the designers? Would you promote this game if it had a third option - eg. future development based on nuclear energy with safe disposal of wastes? Or think up some other more interesting scenarios yourself rather than the well established stereotypes of this game.

Why do you choose to uncritically accept the value range of the designers of this game?

I was reminded by your post of alan kay's critique of sim city:

SimCity is similar but more pernicious. It is a black box of "soft somewhat arbitrary knowledge" that the children can't look at, question or change. For example, SC gets the players to discover that the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations. Most anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists would disagree violently. Alternate assumptions can't be tried, etc.

cyberman:

sustainable production = maximum production  and unsustainable production means falling production

Draw a distinction between capitalist excesses to make a fast dollar - which will always be a problem with the capitalist system - and the general principle of sustainability that you are also promoting, which as a general principle makes no sense at all.

To comment on your forestry example. To preserve old growth artificially will lead to fiercer and more destructive bushfires when they eventually and inevitably do occur. Hence, the desire for sustainability leads to its opposite - more destruction.

To promote sustainability as an unqualified good is nonsense. All the oxygen in the atmosphere today has been put there by organisms. We still have bacteria today, such as tetanus, that can only survive in anaerobic environment.

I don't think you would seriously advocate a return to an atmosphere without oxygen. But that would mean you do not support the sustainability of our earlier atmospheric environment.

In the here and now it is desirable to sustain some things but not other things. Human history is one of developing new things and adapting to the new conditions and that process is accelerating.

Genetic engineering for example will offer new opportunities to develop the fishing industry so that past conditions are not sustained, that productivity will increase and a different sort of dynamic equilibrium will be attained. I haven't studied the fishing industry but if I did I know I would find other examples that have already changed the way things are and which are not harmful from a dynamic perspective.

By promoting a general principal of sustainability as an unqualified good you seem to be missing the fact that all of nature including pre human nature has developed in an unsustainable way at all times. It's just the way things are

By promoting sustainability in this unqualified sense you identify yourself as a reactionary in a definitional sense. To be reactionary is just to want things to remain as they are - sustainable.

Bill,

I think you're confusing sustainability with convervatism. Of course things should change, but change in a positive way, and in a way that will benefit future generations as well as the present generation.

Under capitalism, the driving force of which is the quest for short term profits, a fast dollar as you put it,  and  it is not possible  to factor in long term considerations. Long term isn't really that long, maybe just a couple of generations. 60-70 years or so. Most new parents or grandparents would be thinking that the world would still be OK over that timespan, but its quite rare to hear a politician or an industrialist speculate on events so far into the future.

Over the next 60 or 100 years I would say that there is a very good chance that the process of nuclear fusion will be harnessed to generate cheap and clean electricity which will solve a lot of problems. Dalek may not agree with me on this,  the technical difficulty is immense, and  so its far from certain. If it can be done it will be highly sustainable because there are a huge amounts of hydrogen , of the right isotopes, in the sea. What we need to do is avoid fouling up our environment in the meantime.

 

 

 

 

 

hi cyberman,

I looked up some definitions of sustainability on the internet. Here are a couple from wikipedia (sustainability):

development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (Brundtland Commission)

parallel care and respect for the ecosystem and for the people within

The same page also had a definition of unsustainability:

"a practice or process that can't go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends." (Michael Pollan)

The sustainability definitions are based on assumptions that there is a problem in sustaining human progress (not true - see John McCarthy's page) and that we know in advance what human needs in the future will be (we don't - humans now have a need to surf the internet which they didn't have before the internet was invented)

This is a response to your sentence:

Of course things should change, but change in a positive way, and in a way that will benefit future generations as well as the present generation

This is based on the assumption that there will be a problem for future generations, that the test tube is nearly empty - an assumption I don't agree with

The unsustainability definition reflects the state of the world as it is - even though Pollan and wikipedia don't see it that way

Systems operate through continually changing dynamic equilibriums. There is no static fixed desirable or possible equilibrium point whether it comes to fishing, forestry or anything else. Everything changes, stasis is only temporary, it never lasts.

I quite liked John McCarthy. He's not particularly of the left but he's optimistic about the future and much of what he says is quite right.

 

He's not against the idea of sustainability either. Saying " With the development of nuclear energy, it became possible to show that there are no apparent obstacles even to billion year sustainability" . That's a long time! He lumps all forms of nuclear together, fission and fusion; fission being a a much dirtier technology than fusion, though. Its real advantage is that the technology is available here and now and, even though there are many objections to its use,  I'd have to agree that fission based nuclear power stations are preferable to coal fired, highly CO2 emitting, alternatives.

I'm still not sure why you dislike the word sustainable and suspect that your objection is to some on the extreme fringes of the green movement who use the term in a way that you feel implies a return to more backward technologies. But if you are saying that production and progress isn't sustainable, or maintainable, then the your outlook for the future is very pessimistic indeed.

 

No-one has taken me up on my claim that capitalist economic growth isn't necessarily the same as human progress. You don't seem to make any distinction. I'm giving my age away by saying this, but when I was a kid in England we always played football, or other games, running around in the street for hours on end. Wind the clock forward 40 or 50 years, and you'll find  those streets are now clogged with cars;  street football is no longer possible and has largely been replaced with bedroom based video games for today's children. The downside is that typically they are overweight and, on average,   less healthy than we were. So, I do feel that we shouldn't just assume that economic growth is necessarily a good thing per se and that we should always keep asking awkward questions.

 

 

 

 

hi cyberman,

I'm glad you like John McCarthy's page: progress and its sustainability

"Sustainable" has become a contested word. I think originally it meant the ability to maintain a process without qualitatively changing the nature of the process.

eg. a hunter gatherer society can sustain a population of xxx with the implication that it will remain a hunter gatherer society and not adopt agriculture, which can sustain a higher population

But now the word has been reframed by the Greens and is usually used in a different sense.

Still, common themes run through most definitions of sustainability. They usually deal with nature, the economy, society or, perhaps most often, all three together. Most are not about maintaining life precisely as it is today. They are about the rate of change, and about equity between generations
- source

Current use of "sustainability" is often loaded with the implicit meaning that if we progress rapidly now then this will create a problem of resource deficiency for future generations. Also at least some of the definitions admit to the possibility of qualitative change because it would be ridiculous to argue strictly against that in our modern world.

In response some people at LS prefer to think about the future in terms of its discontinuities or unsustainabilities. Since progress is about qualitative as well as quantitative change this seems a reasonable approach and less confusing than trying to rescue the original meaning of the word.

McCarthy talks about the "sustainability of progress". I'm not sure whether he's being deliberately ironic here. But clearly sustainable progress in his sense does mean that current ecologies or environments will be radically transformed, will be unsustainable, in the process.

eg. hunter gatherer society was unsustainable. The killing of large animals was replaced by the killing of smaller animals. Then when agriculture was discovered that created a radical transformation of society. So, yes, progress was sustainable (although Jared Diamond disagrees) but the conditions of human existence was radically transformed by humans and the previous conditions were destroyed, were unsustainable.

See Hunter gatherers: Noble or Savage? for more detail

I've  previously argued that Green and Red aren't as incompatible as the LS comrades have previously suggested. However, that is not to say that there aren't some differences beteween those who argue for progressive politics and modernism and some elements in the Green movement who do seem to be yearning for a return to a  simpler pre-industrial lifestyle. I'm not sure that would ever receive popular support nor would  it be  possible in a world of more than 6 billion people.

 

I would say that the  Red side politics should take into account the best scientific advice whether it is concerning the theory of evolution or the imminent danger of global warming. Green opinion isn't homogenous and it is not correct to portray them all as tree hugging reactionaries. For instance some of them, including James Lovelock of Gaia fame ( notoriety) are actively in favour of nuclear power!

http://www.ecolo.org/media/articles/articles.in.english/love-indep-24-05-04.htm

 

Most people of a leftish opinion have been inclined to be opposed to nuclear power for the last 25 years or so. But, it wasn't always like that; there was universal acceptance of the benefits of the peaceful uses of nuclear power up until at least the mid 60's. I do feel that it is time that the left should ask themselves if it is really such an evil and had another look at the question of nuclear power, particlularly when used  for electricity generation and the replacement of CO2 emitting coal fired power stations.

I would say that the  Red side politics should take into account the best scientific advice whether it is concerning the theory of evolution or the imminent danger of global warming.

On what basis do you posit that the danger of global warming is imminent? Al Gore has stated that the earth will end in 10 years if we don't make a drastic change...(8 years, 12 days remaining).

I've been reading through looking at the arguments on sustainability and think that you guys just seem to be using different definitions of sustainability.

One thing I would add to this argument is that sometimes sustainability isn't necessarily required to keep an economy productive.

For example, during the settling of the US and into the industrial revolution wood was used as the primary means of energy production and heating.  If we had kept up trimming forests at the same rate that we did then undoubtedly we would be nearly without forests in the US, yet here there are still probably a greater preponderance of forests in the US than in most places in Europe.  The reason is that we have moved beyond dependence on wood and can now use oil, wood, gas, or nuclear.

With this in mind we can realize that it was not necessarily required to keep in mind sustainability of use of wood, we could go ahead and use up the reserves and move in a trend that would eventually lead to its depletion and never hit it since we would later discover technologies which made the use of wood unnecessary or less necessary.

I'm sure in the coming years our use of wood and trees will continue to decrease and the trees can make a comeback.  SO we were able to pursue a path of unsustainability without ever completely depleting our resource.

It is not difficult to imagine other situations where this might occur.  There is a finite amount of fissionable material on this planet (it is essentially bottomless for our purposes, but lets pretend it isn't).  Someone advocating sustainability would advocate rationing it or not using much of it for fear of running out.  However keeping in mind the viewpoint above we could realize that by the time we did run out of fissionable material we would have developed the technology to use fusion for power production.

So yes many times sustainability is a desirable goal (as in the case of fish production you presented), but it isn't necessary to demand its incorporation into everything we do.

Quiksilvergh,

I'd go along with what you say. For instance there is a finite supply of all natural resources and once they have been used, you always can't use them a second time. What I would suggest we mean by sustainable is to develop and progress in such a way as to avoid running into foreseeable problems in the future. For instance its just stupid to ignore all the scientific warnings, and I'm not including Al Gore - I do mean scientific,  about AGW. Its like being told by your doctors that you're in such a bad state of ill-health that you need to change your ways radically. Only a fool would get out the medical books and try to prove him wrong.

 

What I'm really arguing against is the title of the thread. The idea that you should sacrifice environmental considerations in favour of capitalist expansion. I would suggest that we can have true progress, which is not the same as a general expansion of capitalist production,  and look after the environment. In fact I don't think there is any alternative if humanity is to survive in the longer term.