“A Terrible Omission,” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review, vol. 45, no. 7 (December 1993), pp.61-64. DOI: 10.14452/MR-045-07-1993-11_8
Review of Marx’s Capital: A Student Edition, By C.J. Arthur.
Category: Articles
Articles
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The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest
“The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest,” [PDF], Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 1993), pp. 11-41. DOI: 10.1080/10455759309358529.
Many prominent environmentalists today have adopted a political stance that sets them and the movement that they profess to represent above and beyond the class struggle. For example, Jonathon Porritt, the British Green leader, has declared that the rise of the German Greens marks the demise of “the redundant polemic of class warfare and the mythical immutability of a left/right divide.” According to this outlook, both the working class and capitalist class are to blame for the global environmental crisis (insofar as it can be traced to capitalist rather than socialist modes of production), while the Greens represent a “new paradigm” derived from nature’s own values, one that transcends the historic class problem. By removing themselves in this way from the classic social debate, these Green thinkers implicitly em race the dominant “we have seen the enemy, and it is us” view that traces most environmental problems to the buying habits of consumers, the number of babies born, and the characteristics of industrialization, as if there were no class or other divisions in society.
Reprints
- Published in 1993 as a pamphlet issued jointly by Monthly Review Press and the Center for Ecological Socialism.
- Expanded and updated version published in Daniel Faber, ed. The Movement for Environmental Justice in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 188-217.
Translations
- Italian translation of original, “I Limiti Dellámbientalismo Senza Classi. Un Esempio Che Viene Dalle Foreste,” Capitalismo, Natura, Socialismo, no. 9 (October 1993) pp. 32-53.
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‘Let Them Eat Pollution’
“‘Let Them Eat Pollution’: Capitalist Economics and the World Environment” [PDF] (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 44, no. 8 (January 1993), pp.10-20. DOI: 10.14452/MR-044-08-1993-01_2
On December 12, 1991, Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, sent a memorandum to some of his colleagues presenting views on the environment that are doubtless widespread among orthodox economists, reflecting as they do the logic of capital accumulation, but which are seldom offered up for public scrutiny, and then almost never by an economist of Summers’ rank. This memo was later leaked to the British publication, The Economist, which published part of it on February 8, 1992, under the title “Let Them Eat Pollution.”
Reprints:
- Third World Resurgence, no. 34 (January 1993), pp. 7-10.
- Johnathon Petrikin, ed., Environmental Justice (San Diego, California: Greenhaven, 1995), pp. 100-07.
- George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana and Herbert Schiller, ed., Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Control of the Media Means for America and the World (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 221-28;
- Amanda Konradi and Marta Schmidt, Reading Between the Lines: Toward an Understanding of Current Social Problems (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 491-95.
Translations:
- Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).
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Dock Strike
“Dock Strike,” [PDF], The Northern Mariner, vol. III, no. 1 (January 1993), p. 78. (Review of Peter Turnbull, Charles Woolfson and John Kelly, Dock Strike: Conflict and Restructuring in Britain’s Ports.)
In the 1989 national dock strike, British dockworkers, falling into a pattern already evident in the fate of coalminers, printers and seafarers, suffered an historic defeat. The National Dock Labour Scheme of 1947, which had enabled the Transport and General Workers Union (T&GWU) to exercise considerable control not only over the labour process but more importantly over the process of hiring and firing, was abolished; thousands of workers became redundant.
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Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910-
“Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–” in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992, pp. 562-70. [PDF]
Editions
- Revised and expanded for 2000 edition.
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The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism
“The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism,” [PDF] Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 3, no. 3 (September 1992), pp. 77-82. DOI:10.1080/10455759209358504
James O’Connor has asked us to consider the relationship between what he has termed the “first and second contradictions” of capitalism. I would like to refer to the first contradiction, following Marx, as ‘the absolute cereal law of capitalist accumulation.” The second contradiction may then be designated as “the absolute general law of environmental degradation under capitalism.” It is characteristic of capitalism that the second of these “absolute general laws” derives its momentum from the first; hence it is impossible to overthrow the second without overthrowing the first. Nevertheless, it is the second contradiction rather than the first that increasingly constitutes the most obvious threat not only to capitalism existence but to the life of the planet as a whole.
Translations:
- Translated and published in Spanish as “La Ley General Absoluta de la Degradacion Ambiental en el Capitalismo,” Ecología Politica (September 1992), pp. 167-73.
- Spanish translation later reprinted in Economía Politica, no. 11, Jan.-Feb. 1997.
- Translated and published in Italian as “La Legge Assoluta, Generale del Degrado Ambientale nel Capitalismo,” Capitalismo, Natura, Socialismo, no. 6 (November 1992).
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Paul Alexander Baran 1910-1964
“Paul Alexander Baran 1910-1964,” [PDF] in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992), pp. 22-29.
Paul Baran, the internationally acclaimed Marxist economist, was born on 8 December 1910 into a Jewish family in Nikolaev, Russia, on the Black Sea. His father was a medical doctor with ties to the Menshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic party. The chaos rustling from the First World War and the Russian Revolution made it impossible to find a suitable school for Baran to attend and his education up to age 11 was entirely under his father’s tutelage. Dismayed by the continuing social disruption following the October Revolution, Baran’s family left the USSR in 1921, stopping briefly at his father’s ancestral home in Vilna, formerly part of Tsarist Russia and by that time part of Poland. Her his parents assumed Polish citizenship; as a minor entered on his mother’s passport, Baran received automatic Polish nationality which he was to retain until naturalized as an American citizen during the Second World War. The family then proceeded to Germany where Baran’s formal education began.
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Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–
“Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–” in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992, pp. 562-70.
Revised and expanded for 2000 edition.
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Capitalism and the Ancient Forest
“Capitalism and the Ancient Forest,” Monthly Review, vol. 43, no. 5 (October 1991), pp. 1-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-043-05-1991-09_1
The battle for the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest, which gained widespread national attention with the designation of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species in June 1990, can be thought of as a complex set of social and ecological problems traceable to a single cause: the continuing failure on the part of timber capital and the federal government to see either the forest for the trees or the trees for billions of board feet of standing timber. By the late 1980s this environmental failure had reached such tragic proportions that the Pacific Northwest forest ecosystem, one of the most important natural environments on the face of the earth—encompassing many of the world’s oldest and largest trees, storing more carbon per unit area than any other terrestrial ecosystem, and supporting the largest or second largest accumulations of living matter per unit area to be found anywhere, including numerous rare and endangered species—was increasingly being threatened with annihilation.
Translations:
- Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).
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Two Ages of Waterfront Labor
“Two Ages of Waterfront Labor,” [PDF] Labour/Le Travail, no. 26 (Fall 1990), pp. 1-9. (Review of Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront and William Finlay, Work on the Waterfront.)
There are two crucial watersheds in the modem history of waterfront labour (1) the successful struggle, beginning with the Pacific Coast revolts of the 1930s, to set-up union-dominated hiring halls; and (2) the technological revolution in cargo handling and ship design associated with the introduction of containers in the 1960s and 70s. Bruce Nelson’s historical treatment of waterfront labour focuses on the first of these watersheds, with particular emphasis on the interactions between seamen and longshoremen during the “syndicalist renaissance” of the late 1930s. William Finlay’s sociological study is concerned with the effects of the second watershed — the technological revolution in cargo handling—on skill levels, job control and status hierarchies within the longshore labour express.