Global AT

 

David Schwartzman

Professor, Department of Biology

November 4, 2004 Presentation

 

T = Technology

 

Goal of Global AT:

“From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs”

(her refers to humans and nature (ecosystems)) (revised Marx’s principle for communism)

 

Hence process and goal is red and green, from capitalism to ecosocialism to solar communism

 

Why not just local/regional/national AT?

All these levels are limited by global threats to biosphere/noosphere (Vernadsky)

Noosphere is roughly equivalent to Barry Commoner’s Technosphere, but Vernadsky’s noosphere had global ambitions.

 

These global threats require global social governance/regulation/management of T and the global economy

 

Is there any “natural” world left? Only in deep ocean, life in the crust

 

Are all anthropogenic impacts “natural” ? If we absolutize the concept of natural, subsuming the technosphere, then “anything goes”, including our self-extinction

 

Effective and equitable governance must be global social governance of production/consumption

 

Global threats include (with global regulation, imperfect as it is):

Global warming (Kyoto)

Ozone depletion of the stratosphere (Montreal plus)

POPs (persistent organic pollutants such as chlorinated hydrocarbons), Ocean

 

Equity in environmental policy?

E.g., Global warming: set a sustainable level of C emissions/person/year (Agarwal and Narain)

Then total emissions permitted per year per nation equals this level x national population

Then trade of emission rights with transfer of renewable T.

What/How?

 

Material prerequisites (see Schwartzman, 1996a, 1998)

 

Human needs/nature needs

Energetics: solar

Environmental Policy: containment (includes industrial ecology)

Information T

Dematerialization of T

Green Cities (increase population density, reduce/eliminate sprawl (suburbia):

Seee R. Bullard (2000) Sprawl City

 

End of Growth? (Entropy-limited, hence fossil fuel based, economy)

 

Georghescu-Roegen’s Fallacy: equating Isolated and Closed Systems

The biosphere is closed but not isolated with respect to energy flux

 

Necessary conditions include:

Highly organized workforce (from below)

Unity of exploited and oppressed

Accelerated democratization

Transnational labor/green solidarity

Ecosocialist World Party (see Warren Wagar’s Short History of the Future)

(dialectics of local/national/global identities, political struggle, see Schwartzman, 1996b)

 

Sufficient conditions include:

Local/National/global social governance of production/consumption

Equity, elimination of North/South disparities in Health, Education

Disarmament (demilitarization of Global society)*

Sustainable global economy (solarization)

Social management of communally-owned land (While imperfect see National Parks,

Biosphere Reserves, Ocean, Atmosphere, Antarctica, but expand to all)

(See Burkett (Summer/Fall 2003) Socialism and Democracy)

 

* “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Dwight Eisenhower, 1953)

 

The transition

 

From entropy-limited capitalism thru ecosocialism to

Energy-limited solar communism

What is the limit?: anthropogenic work/heat now = 0.03% of solar flux to land

 

The end of Value? (Jim Davis (2000) after Marx, especially his Grundrisse: see Davis et al., 1997; Dyer-Witheford, 1999)

 

Davis (2000):

“New technologies express the fulfillment of Marx's writings in his "Fragment on Machines" -- a production system without human labor, where the productivity of technology so overwhelms the production process that "labor time ceases to be the measure" of wealth and "production based upon exchange value collapses."  Such a production system is antithetical to a system based on the expropriation of surplus labor, and by definition cancels it. However, production has not collapsed; rather than work disappearing, or at least lightening, more people than ever are engaged in wage labor; and each new high-tech production zone seems to be matched by a new Dickensian production zone. Can these two positions be reconciled?

 

This paper attempts such a reconciliation, towards coming to a better understanding of capitalism in the age of electronics, and what that means for the class struggle. I argue that as a historical category, Value has at least a theoretical end. Qualitatively new technologies are labor-replacing technologies, and lay the basis for Value-less production. This, of course, raises profound issues for Capital. The complex interaction of these new technologies and Capital, expressed in various counter-tendencies explains much about the state of capitalism today. The new technological climate does not in itself destroy the Value system, or capitalism, but it does create the conditions for Capital's destruction and the construction of a communist society. The end of Value is not automatic, but a conscious act by class forces born out of the new conditions.”

 

That is class struggle!

 

Material prerequisite: “free” energy (high efficiency solar, photovoltaics R & D)

 

Each stage is energy-parasitic on the previous:

 

Pre-industrial (low efficiency solar, i.e., photosynthesis) , then industrial (fossil fuels, nuclear fission) then post-industrial (high efficiency solar)

 

When?

 

Contingent on ecocatastrophe, Hubbert Peak, the exhaustion of petroleum reserves (see Smil, 2003) and critically on the lifetime of US hyperpower hegemony (“Empire”) (see e.g., Harvey, 2003) itself contingent on global class struggle, transnational movements from below

Readings:

Solar Communism  (http://www.redandgreen.org/Documents/Solar_Communism.htm)

Another look at the end of the world (http://www.redandgreen.org/Documents/Review%20of%20Kovel.htm)

Comment on Wagar   (http://www.redandgreen.org/Documents/My_paper_on_Wagar.htm)

Or go to

http://www.redandgreen.org/

Scroll down on the left to: Marxism & Ecology,

Open and read:

1) Solar Communism (Schwartzman, 1996a)

2) Another Look at the End of the World (Boucher et al., 2003)

3) Comment on Wagar (Schwartzman, 1996b)

 

References

 

Boucher, D., Schwartzman, D., Zara, J. and P. Caplan, 2003, Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) 14 (3), 123-131, Another look at the end of the world.

 

Davis, J. et al. (editors), 1997, Cutting Edge, Verso.

 

Dyer-Witheford, N., 1999, Cyber-Marx, Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Univ. of Illinois Press.

 

Harvey, D., 2003, The New Imperialism. Oxford

 

Schwartzman, D.,

1998: Reply, Science & Society, Summer, v. 62, No.2, 272-274

1996a: Science & Society, Fall, Special Issue "Marxism and Ecology", v. 60, No.3, Introduction (as guest editor), pp.261-265; Solar Communism, pp.307-331.

1996b: "Comment on Wagar", Journal of World-Systems Research 2, No.2-k.:

 

Smil, V., 2003, Energy at Crossroads. MIT Press