were there amerikan plantation owners who were concerned about the sustainability of the enslaved african population?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2020.1837095
The hidden legacy of Samir Amin: delinking’s ecological foundation
L'héritage caché de Samir Amin : les fondements écologiques de la déconnexion
Max AjlORCID Icon
Pages 82-101 | Published online: 25 Nov 2020
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In this article
ABSTRACT
Delinking and the global law of value
Delinking: abstracting from China
Samir Amin’s world-ecology
Egyptian insight into ecologically sustainable farming
Tunisia’s ecological dependency turn
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Disclosure statement
Additional information
Footnotes
References
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ABSTRACT
This paper considers the relationship between Samir Amin’s programme for delinking, smallholder agriculture, his theories of ecology, and the current of ecological dependency that developed out of North African dependency analysis. It argues that ecological forms of agriculture in fact underpinned the original case from which Amin derived delinking – the developmental model of Amin’s China. It goes on to show how collaborators and fellow travellers of Amin like Mohamed Dowidar, Fawzy Mansour and Slaheddine el-Amami advanced the case for smallholder-centred national development, and connects their investigations to Amin’s theoretical framework.
RÉSUMÉ
Cet article examine la relation entre le programme de déconnexion de Samir Amin, les petits exploitants paysans, ses théories de l’écologie et le courant de dépendance écologique qui s’est développé à partir de l’analyse de la dépendance nord-africaine. Il soutient que les formes écologiques de l’agriculture ont en fait sous-tendu le cas original dont Amin a tiré le concept de déconnexion – le modèle de développement de la Chine d’Amin. Il montre ensuite comment des collaborateurs et compagnons de route d’Amin comme Mohamed Dowidar, Fawzy Mansour et Slaheddine el-Amami ont fait valoir l’argument en faveur d’un développement national centré sur les petits exploitants, et relie leurs recherches au cadre théorique d’Amin.
liceo posted:personally only interested in inorganic ecology,
you said you been reading lem, now i believe you
tears posted:ecology more like weakology, amirite? and while were at it, what the deal with wasps?
now, that's ekkk-cology (i'm scared of wasps)
Acdtrux posted:I am wondering, is there any evidence for this: "Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves."
i don't have much data to draw upon, but I imagine the rationale for that is probably something like this:
Paracelsus posted:All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.
e.g., a single plastic object doesn't mean much to the environment; 350 million tons of plastics per year, courtesy of capitalist production frantically and anarchically seeking maxima, leads to a growing oceanic crisis
Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced.
From Zak Cope:
However, there are at least two problems with the idea that US wages have fallen. Firstly, whilst wages in the United States have indeed fallen since 1973 as a proportionate share of GDP, in real terms the poor in that country were better off in 1999 than they were in 1975. For example, Cox and Alm (1999) show that whereas in 1971 31.8% of all US households had air-conditioners, in 1994 49.6% of households below the poverty line had air-conditioners. These authors also demonstrate that the United States poor in 1999 had more refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes dryers, microwaves, televisions, college educations and personal computers than they did in 1971. Wages decidedly did not shrink, then, relative to the purchasing power necessary to consume these items. US economists Meyer and Sullivan (2011) have constructed a measure of consumption which challenges mainstream assessments of declining US living standards. They note that most income-based analyses of economic well-being in the United States do not reflect the full range of available household consumption resources such as, for example, food stamps, or lessened marginal tax rates….
Nor, indeed, did US incomes decline relative to the costs of those items necessary to the reproduction of the worker as such (the ‘value of labour power’, in Marxist terms). Thus, between 1970 and 1997, the real price of a food basket containing one pound of ground beef, one dozen eggs, three pounds of tomatoes, one dozen oranges, one pound of coffee, one pound of beans, half a gallon of milk, five pounds of sugar, one pound of bacon, one pound of lettuce, one pound of onions and one pound of bread fell so that it took 26% less of the workers’ time to buy it (ibid, pp. 40–41). (100-101)
This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world.
This is asserted without evidence and then forgotten. The only reason to pay attention to the PSL is their advocacy for Cuba and North Korea. Without that this piece could have just as easily come out of Jacobin or even The Nation. The PSL piece on China is pretty bad too, letting this guy
Hammond was appointed director of the Confucius Institute, a cultural initiative funded in part by Hanban on the NMSU campus that is dedicated to studying and publicizing China and Chinese culture. He is the editor of the journal Ming Studies.
Present his opinion as the party line. Though that one would have come out of Qaio collective. In general it seems like the PSL, trying to keep up with the latest trends, is being absorbed by them. That's a cheap form of popularity. It's hard to imagine it surviving when these trends lose their vitality at the first sign of trouble.
I understand we're using the PSL piece to talk about the issues but watching Marcyism in action bothers me too much to move on, I see a vision of the future when Marxism-Leninism "can't simply be mapped" onto the American political landscape. Obviously they act that way in practice but to theorize it is the death of the party.
Acdtrux posted:I am looking for evidence that ecological production without pollution is possible.
i didn't read that as asserted in the bit you quoted, but just at a guess i doubt we'll see an economy characterized by byproductless production until we crack femtotechnology or something. maybe not even then; bound to be some spare subatomic particles left over
Acdtrux posted:https://liberationschool.org/degrowth-a-politics-for-which-class/
this article lacks vision and imagination, lacks understanding, lacks explanatory power, approaches things backwards - like really backwards - why is this the best angle to tackle an interesting topic, seems to fail to even discuss the theory that growth is essential for capitalism and thus ignores that imo all discussion about growth and degrowth should be considered from the starting point of its material necessity for the current organization of production, cherry-picks a bunch of random crap, has the obligatory "malthus bit" the babys first ecological-writing equivalent of MCU cameo fanservice, indulges in scientific writing without clarity of terms and thus implicitly fails to grasp the need for a shared precise language for understanding and discussing scientific concepts, is firmly rooted in a first-worldist mindset, and basically i hate everything about it, not because it is necessarily all wrong, because I have no idea, its too unclear to make a judgement, anyway, whatever who cares
this on the other hand is a really good question:
Acdtrux posted:I am wondering, is there any evidence for this: "Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves."
Acdtrux posted:Right, production in capitalism is detrimental to the environment and overproduction is a characteristic of capitalist production. But I am looking for evidence that ecological production without pollution is possible.
i would say that it is a question of metabolic waste and thermodynamics. sidestepping the issue of "pollution", production without excretion of waste products is impossible - like thermodynamically impossible, like a perpetual motion machine - frictionless machines and 1-1 energy transfers pie in the sky thinking. however, cycling in the presence of "unlimited" free energy from the sun is the natural solution to this. every tree pollutes its environment with a deadly toxin, yet trillions of living things are capable of using that waste for their own needs, including the trees themselves in a different process; and so the cycle turns - the whole things works like an impossibly complex dynamic equilibrium in chemistry. "pollution" as we see it is unidirectional flow of waste without any meaningful form of cycling and ultimately either the existing equilibrium will be restored via novel cycling, or a new equilibrium will be reached
Edited by tears ()
never forget
Acdtrux posted:degrowth is impossible imo but they didn't argue against it very skillfully in this article. I am wondering, is there any evidence for this: "Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves."
think about how all of these ostensibly polluting technologies work, and what it means for "pollution" to be produced. a small enough amount of any substance is more or less by definition not pollution, we note something as being a pollutant when it appears in excess of some nominal level whose definition derives from a specific context. lighting a single match is quite different from burning a mountain of coal. the reason pollutants appear as the results of industrial processes is, in marxist terms, a result of there being excess products of production that aren't brought into the social circulation of the product of production. its a byproduct, not part of the product that gets sold and not brought back into the reproduction of that same product.
sometimes there are byproducts that you can just cycle back in at a factory, maybe its producting crayons and its possible to collect the wax or whatever thats left over from shaping the crayons and melt it back down and put it back in with the other wax you're taking in. but often this isnt easily possible: even in the early british linen factories that marx studied so much there were always lots of leftover particles of the raw material that was being spun into fabric that was left to pile up to the extent that it was a health hazard to the factory workers. it couldnt be brought directly back into the productive process and was left to sit until it became a pollutant.
now generally these fibers were organic etc but they were clearly a health hazard. this had to do with how they were managed: by default, because they werent part of the process of production the factory owners had even less interest in them than their workers, and were certainly not independently disposed to do anything about them. but importantly that doesn't mean that its not possible to do anything about them, there are lots of potential uses for them and many ways to mitigate their negative impact on their local environment but each of these is considered an expenditure of money that could otherwise seek to grow itself as capital. our situation today is very similar in important ways but quite a bit more complex in detail: the complexity of the industrial processes that are in use today is dramatically greater but this is a result of decades and centuries of expertise in these matters, and i think its very possible to use that expertise to rearrange our productive processes to manage the production and processing of the byproducts of human life.
its certainly not as simple as stopping what we're doing and doing a different thing instead, not only are the industrial processes in use tied to fixed capital in the form in factory infrastructure, which requires labor to replace, but also a great deal of new expertise will be necessary, although of course a great deal of expertise in managing these processes differently already exists in some form but is ignored since it is less profitable than poisoning people. on the other hand this puts a new idea into focus: if industrial production is not pursued for the sole sake of turning a profit on a specific desired commodity or set of commodities, its possible to imagine a method of engineering industrial processes such that their many various outputs can be purposefully returned to the process of social reproduction than is possible today. i think a lot of this gets lost in "degrowth vs developmentalism" arguments but it seems to me to be important for understanding a properly marxist, socialist vision of industrial production.
Edit: something i meant to note but forgot to was that due to the necessity of reproducing the means of production on an expanded scale under capitalist production means that all of these industrial byproducts that arent being managed are also being produced on a continually larger and larger scale, so that almost any industrial byproduct will almost necessarily become a pollutant. In addition to the engineering of new industrial processes, socialist industrial planning is also much better set to manage the scope and scale of these processes due to not requiring runaway growth as an existential condition.
Edited by c_man ()
tears posted:has the obligatory "malthus bit" the babys first ecological-writing equivalent of MCU cameo fanservice
it's like how every discussion of game theory has to have the obligatory description of the prisoner's dilemma
this, in turn, points to a prisoner's dilemma dilemma
this highlights a disjuncture between individual actors' outcomes and broader social consequences, and therefore it can go in the ecology thread thread
Edited by Constantignoble ()
Constantignoble posted:
fucking lmao
but even that is not quite correct, because it comes down the the angle of argument and the prioritization of certain things above others in a way that is only superficially marxist - "growth" is taken to be some neutral thing and to oppose it is apparently anti-communist, but any communist's idea of growth in some abstract and theoretica sense under a communist system has to differ from their material understanding of "growth" in the concrete sense under capitalism. i mean what the fuck is capitalist growth? Expansion of capitalist reproduction into new markets, violently. Forcing peasants into the cities. Driving down wages. Theft of raw resources. Taking ever single fish in the ocean - every one until there are none left - and feeding it to a cow. Destruction on a global scale. Exploitation. Oppression. Imperialism. War. Genocide. This is growth. It's not an abstract nebulous term for "more stuff for everyone" or "advancement in windmill technology" it's capitalist growth, an actual thing, that works in an actual way, and can be looked at.
The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less.
the article is so rooted in the primacy of distribution of "means of consumption" rather than control of "means of production" that i don't think they understand marxist theory at all.
it's also, i think, unhelpful to associate the development of productive forces exclusively with wasteful technologies that dominate capitalist production, characterized by a porous, anarchic marketplace giving rise to externalities. making production less harmful to the world is a process of the development of productive forces. to assume otherwise means you're only looking at development in capitalist terms. if you're viewing socialism as just capitalism but without homelessness or unemployment, well... that's socdem shit, which also lends credence to the charges of ecofascism. aim higher!
full disclosure: i only read like a quarter of what you shared, though i bet i could be persuaded to read the rest if you were to repost it summarized as a socratic dialogue [𝖘𝖎𝖉𝖊 𝖖𝖚𝖊𝖘𝖙]