Thursday, April 24, 2014

Part 8 -- How Humanity Saved the Biosphere. 'Ecologism' and 'Pro-Decadence Ideologies'.








To My Readers,



Below is the eighth part of my multi-part re-rendition, in this blog, of a rare, classic hardcopy pamphlet, written by an anonymous collective author, one which -- very early-on, in the 1970s -- '''smelled a rat [smelled the 'Rocke-Nazi' rat -- in my opinion, the biggest, rottenest rat in all of human [pre-]history to-date -- the most rabid, the most massively "ambitious" mass torturers, and mass murderers, in all of human history, who make the bloody Vlad The Impaler pale to an infinitesimal in comparison] in the "Global Warming", "People Are Pollution" rap''', and circulated, in <<samizdat>> fashion, a rather comprehensive warning to humanity about this new "eu"-genocidal ploy, which remained scarcely-known until years later, when an updated version of this text became available on the world wide web.


The internet version of this text is entitled --

Crises by Nature:  How Humanity Saved the Biosphere   



For the Resumption of Humanity's Ascent, and, with it -- and by means of it -- the Regeneration of Our Planetary Biosphere,

M. Milankovitch














Crises by Nature
 How Humanity Saved The Biosphere

by
Capitalist Crisis Studies
[with modifications by M. Milankovitch]
Table of Contents









VIII -  'Ecologism' and 'Pro-Decadence Ideologies'

Certainly the “ecology movement”, as a “grass-roots” mass phenomenon, expresses, and is nourished by, the deep currents of maturation within the human race which are emergent in this time, currents which are also the wellsprings of a non-Leninist, non-Stalinist, non-Trotskyist, Non-Maoist, non-Castroist -- non-state-capitalist -- political-economic-democratic, and thus truly Socialist movement. 


Ecological ideas manifest a sense of organic totality, an awareness of the global consequences of local action or inaction, and of ‘self-reflexive’ responsibility for such action or inaction. 

The Zeitgeist is alive in this movement, wherever it encourages thinking in terms of the biosphere as an [auto-]dynamical organic totality. 

In this respect, ecologistic thinking represents a dawning of a more conscious precursor of dialectical reason among broad layers of the population of humankind.


 
Certainly the concern with the laws of social reproduction, as they relate to Nature; the concern with the proper care and reproduction of the planetary ecosystem, which is the “natural basis” c78 of all human life, our “real body” (Marx) c79, together with the idea that the choice of technology is a matter for public deliberation and social policy, not an affair of private property — all of which animate this ferment as a mass movement — reflect the new consciousness unfolding, in the contemporary social individual, connected to the historical experience unfolding around him/her; a consciousness without which the transition to a democratically self-planning society would be impossible.





The question which must be addressed, once these valid moments are recognized, however, is this --

Does the ecology movement finally go with or against the movement of Capital in its decadent phase? 


The historical continuum forks ahead of us into basically two contrary contours of possibility, with very little in between -- Socialism or Neo-Barbarism. 


Does the ecology movement at last empty out into the whole stream of contemporary capitalist ideology and policy, plunging with them headlong into the rapids of ruin, the runaway social entropy of contracted social reproduction? 

Or does it truly break with that current, veering off toward a new region of social negentropy, a new and higher organization of society? 


Does the ecology movement represent a fruition, or a diversion, in the final analysis, of the critical energies gathering force within the human race as we confront the self-destructive consequences of our present socioeconomic activities and organization, and begin to consciously confront the task of rectifying them? 

Do the conceptions of the "laws" of social and biospheric reproduction prevalent in the ecology movement point the way toward a new state of society, historically conscious, ecologically responsible, spiritually and materially prosperous, or do they augur, if implemented, social (therefore also ecological) catastrophe instead?

 


There is no doubt here that capitalist society — or rather, the human race during the stage in which it incarnates Capital c80 — turns outward against Nature with a previously unprecedented rapacity. 


By “Capital”, I mean that cybernetical organization of social practices and resulting feedbacks and dynamical "laws" produced by any society based upon exchange-value and wage-labor. 

This rapacity is particularly evident during the decadent period of Capital, when capitalism passes from its status as a preponderantly self-organizing system into that of an increasingly self-disorganizing system. 

The period around World War I marked this turning point. 


But it must equally be recognized that this outgoing rapacity turned outward against external Nature is but a reflection of the rapacity which the ‘Capital mentality’ also turns inward against human Nature. 

Capital inherently exploits, loots, and brutalizes both. 


But Capital is an historically specific and inherently self-limited instar in the maturation of the human species. 

It is not tribalism, nor feudalism, nor is it the democratically self-planning society whose original name was “Socialism”. 

Nor can categories like “Technology” or “Urbanism” be meaningful if postulated apart from their “historically-specific”, ‘epochally-specific’, content, a content which changes as the basic state of society and of ‘social-relations-of-production ontology’ changes. 


What we have before us today is not “Technology” in general or as such. 

Neither is it feudal technology, or socialist technology. 


It is specifically capitalist technology, and capitalist urbanism. 



That is, the present, specific manifestations of these historically general categories are forms of capital; the forms which these categories exhibit when filtered through capitalist institutions -- through the "social relation of [social re-]production" that Capital IS. 


They are technology and urbanism as moulded by the inherent system-properties of Capital. 

They are objectifications of that very specific social relation of production which “Capital” is --
“...capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing, and lends this thing a specific social character.”

“Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production.”

“Capital is rather the means of production transformed into capital, which in themselves are no more capital than gold or silver in itself is money.”

“It is the means of production monopolized by a certain section at society, confronting living labour-power as products and working conditions rendered independent of this very labour-power, which are personified in this antithesis in capital.”

“It is not merely the products of labourers turned into independent powers, products as rulers and buyers of their producers, but rather also the social forces and the future... (illegible break in manuscript) form of this labour, which confront the labourers as properties of their products.” c81



What we know today of technology and urbanism is not only technology turned into a capital — technology as a capital and the city as an expression of capital accumulation, concentration, consolidation, and centralization — but moreover, it is capital as a technology c82 and the geographical morphology of humanity turned into the body of capital.




Of course, then, the shape of technology, so too the patterns of human settlement on the land — the patterns of “human geography” — along with all other dimensions of our present social morphology, will have to be transformed into congruence with the new system-"laws" of a new social relation of production, as we make the transition to an economically-democratic as well as politically-democratic self-planning society, the only kind of ecologically sound society which is possible now. 



But it is the quality of ‘capital-congruence’ — not of “bigness” or of any of the other such superficial-empiricistic predicates arbitrarily pried loose and fetishized from superficial, shallow, ‘skin-deep’, ‘surface-only’, i.e. ‘impressionistic’ accounts of contemporary social phenomena — which has to be sublated within contemporary technology, urbanism, etc. in order to arrive at their social[-ist] quality. 

Within that new configuration of society, some things will still be “big”, some that were “big” will become “small”, some that were “small” will become “big”, some social organs will be “decentralized” and some will be “centralized” — not according to some blanket preference for either “bigness” or “smallness”, centralization or decentralization, but rather in accord with the coherence of the new social relation of [human-social self-re-]production -- for the predicates “big”, or “small”, “centralized”, or “decentralized”, in themselves, in the abstract, are simply not the heart of the matter.



If the ecology ideology is blind to social form, and insensitive to historical specificity; unconscious of the operation of the social relation of production, which always resides at the heart of socio-morphogenesis, then it cannot help but go wrong in the remedies it proposes. 

Seeing the rapacity of Capital’s technology, and the putrefaction of its contemporary urbanism, but unable to discern the presence of “Capital” in either, it can only turn against “Technology” and “Urbanism” -- and “Science” in general -- and, given that tool-making and settlement-formation and knowledge-accumulation reside close to the essence of humanity, cannot help but finally turn against humanity itself -- with the help of "a little funding", and of other "help" -- from the ruling plutocracy, which has its own reasons for imposing an anti-productive-forces, anti-science, anti-human -- humanocidal -- ideology, world-wide. 


There is an historic name for this misanthropism and nihilism, this human anti-humanism, arisen to ideological hegemony and official social policy:  Fascism. 

 And Fascism will remain the finality of Ecologism so long as its believers fail to learn the lessons of historical specificity, and to come to recognize, in the ecology crisis, just one additional dimension of the general crisis of capitalist civilization in which we live, presently intensifying toward its historical paroxysm and climax, in which we must decide the future of the human race, or rather, whether the human race is to have any future at all.



The looting and polluting of Nature which we are witnessing, and participating in, today must be comprehended as a "lawful" outcome of the nature of Capital; an inevitable tropism of its systemic feedbacks. 


The ecology movement raises a valid demand when it insists that ecological damage by industry be registered in the social accounts as an economic cost, and a human cost. 

In no way can the costs of ecologic reparation be properly conceived as extrinsic to the costs of social reproduction. 

Nature is all that our species has ever had to work with. “Technology” in general is simply humanity, human Nature working with[in] Nature as a whole — both as natural material and as "natural law". 

Technology is the creative “détournement” of Nature, the turning of natural necessity back upon itself to accomplish the novel ends and productions (syntheses) whose possibility and conditional necessity arrived in this universe with the emergence of human nature within, and from out of the womb of, universal Nature. 

All artifacts and instruments are forms of Nature, natural materials as developed further by mankind, expressing the natural tendencies or “natures” of these materials as evoked and actualized via human intervention.


Nature is our means of production whether in the form of the land and the vegetation that we cultivate, the machinery or other implements with which we equip ourselves, or the faculties of our own bodies which we use in production. 

For these bodily faculties are likewise products of Nature, as modified by “the labor of history”, that is, by the action of the species upon itself since its birth out of Nature. 


What I’m getting at is that “Nature” is the only technology we’ve got.  

Human-nature’s “Technology” is just a higher form of Nature.


 
However, capitalist accounting, and capitalist practice in general, inherently excludes recognition of ecological cost “externalities”, and capitalist society systematically “loots” its natural basis — that is, appropriates and consumes Nature’s formations without meeting the costs of continuity which this entails. c83 

Modern society relates to its natural basis in this way for historically specific reasons — reasons which have nothing to do with “technology” per se (unless the mere consumption or depletion aspect is to be fixed upon, and then pre-human natural processes like Fermentation and Photosynthesis would have to be admitted also into this category, as pre-human “natural” technologies, as well). 

The reasons have rather to do with the nature of Capital.  

The “looting of Nature”, the using up of the use-value of an aspect of Nature without restoration, partially compensates technodepreciation. 

Technodepreciation refers to the losses/write-offs on account of fixed capital, debit to the profit account, which result from the growth of the productive forces, or of (use-value) productivity, which Capital itself initially promotes, as this growth takes effect in an environment of new entry competition.


Technodepreciation is the process which epitomizes and focalizes the self-contradiction of Capital. c84  


That is, the looting of Nature is one of the primary ways the capitalist system is enabled to cover-up, for a time, its immanent tendency to lower its own rate of profit, or rate of return on investment; to slow down the rate of capital accumulation, its prime vital sign.




Briefly, development of the “productive forces” — that is, the self-continuing self-development of the social self-force of human species-society’s self-re-production; of self-accelerating ‘human-species socio-mass’, or ‘human negentropy self-productivity’ — as embodied in (a) design-improved/cheaper substitute products, with higher utility and social “re-productivity” than those of the older vintages for which they substitute, (b) improved, higher-productivity/lower-operating-cost equipment, and/or (c) cheaper equipment due to attainment of higher productivity in the production of that equipment itself, all cause losses to the owners of the earlier vintage product inventories and/or equipment producing competing products thus rendered “obsolete” in pricing and/or in utility, earliest vintages which must often be written-off against profits, and scrapped, due to their obsolescence.  

These losses manifest once the improved/cheaper product and/or equipment is brought to bear upon the old profit-and-price structure that prevailed based upon the older product/equipment, say by newly entering competitors employing that improved/cheaper equipment to produce their competing product [commodity] offerings.  

Since these losses, or lower earnings, due to competition-enforced now below-cost pricing, now returned by the past, “sunk” fixed capital investments, embodied in that now obsolete/over-valued equipment and/or product, subtract out in forming the current profit-loss account, this process of ‘technodepreciation’ manifests as a fall in the ratio of profit to original or “historical-cost” investment in every accounting/reporting period during which the occurrence of such ‘technodepreciation’ is recognized. 

Or, such ‘technodepreciation’ impacts may be accounted as a revaluation downward of the capital assets of the enterprise(s) owning the now obsolete/over-valued equipment and/or product inventories, i.e., as a “one-time”, or “special”, charge-off against current period profit or retained earnings.

Since such technological advances in productivity and utility are a continually-incentivized, hence continually re-occurring feature of capitalist competition, these obsolescence losses, if not compensated or covered up in the various ways which also develop as the capital-relation develops/accumulates further, would tend to lead to a periodic, or even to a secular down-valuing of accumulated fixed capital-value society-wide, hence to a decline in the society-wide average rate of return on investments, and would adversely impact the profits and the capital of the ruling plutocracy -- the owners of the most concentrated, most consolidated, most centralized capital assets -- most of all. c85  p5









The classic example of the “looting of Nature” is found in the modern petroleum industry. 

Petroleum is not economically valuable in itself, in general, or in all social epochs of human social evolution.  

It becomes valuable only in relation to a certain level of self-development of the social economy — of the level of human-societal self-reproductivity, or of the social forces of production. 

I.e., petroleum becomes socially valuable only when human society attains to the social-evolutionary stage of ‘molecular power’, appropriating social negentropy at the molecular level of organization of pre-human, ‘Nature-al’ evolution, but not yet, prevalently, at the deeper, earlier-evolved atomic level, or sub-atomic level, of human-social appropriation of pre-/extra-human-Nature [e.g., those levels wherein the possibilities of the technologies of nuclear fission power and of nuclear fusion power reside]. 


The state of social negentropy, the level of the productive forces, or of industrial organization, had, by the late 1800s, rendered mineral oil a valuable material, whereas, at earlier stages, it had been virtually useless, and hence, valueless; unsalable. 

Thenceforth, however, mere legal title to "hold" a piece of ground topping petroleum deposits, under capitalist juridical relationships, enabled the holder to pocket the proceeds of the sale of this material, without any further considerations of meeting any ecological reparations costs, or ‘costs of continuity’, thereby incurred. 

The land holder appropriates the product of Nature, in this case fossil fuel, gratis. 

Thus, once proprietorship was secured, extracting oil could be likened to “digging money out of the ground”, as opposed to what is required for profitability in “manufacturing” industry, wherein “production”, or the transformative application of machine-assisted human labor, is the key process potentially adding [profit-]value (and social-negentropic, or social-reproductive, use-value) to the final product.

That merely extractive “industries” -- precisely because of the costs, ecological and otherwise, that they can escape, given the atomistic accounting feedbacks of Capital — can be very lucrative, is reflected in the structure of the present global capitalist ruling class: the dominant multinational corporations and banking interests — which today represent the wealthiest and most powerful factions of the world bourgeoisie — arose to hegemony on the basis of the petroleum industry. 


I refer, of course, to that constellation of interests clustered around the Rockefeller family fortune, whose wealth originally centered in the Standard Oil Company, and which constellation recently captured, even more than previously, via the Trilateral Commission (founded by Chase Manhattan Bank President David Rockefeller), and the Rockefeller-"owned" New York Council on Foreign Relations, the Cabinet of the United States Federal government.




That said, a word of caution is in order regarding the concept of ‘ecological costs’ and ‘ecological reparations’. 

The concept as here invoked refers to costs-of-temporal-continuum for the biosphere, or for human society, and, as we have seen above, that continuum is not of a static, but, on the contrary, is of an ever-changing, progressive and cumulative, quality. 


Hence, this concept does not refer to some ‘equilibriumist’ notion of a restoration in the same quality, or of a replacement in kind. 

What must be “restored” is the equipotential for [further self-re-]production of Nature, and this can be achieved generally only as ‘reparation by further evolution’.

 
The cost incurred for econo-ecological self-reproduction by the consumption, or ‘ontological conversion’, of “nonrenewable” aspects of biospheric Nature -- such as coal, oil, aluminum ore, etc. -- is not of a kind which could be met by replacing bauxite with bauxite, by filling up large holes with man-made coal and natural gas, or by pumping petroleum back into the ground. 

Human production-consumption is not a borrowing of some fixed quality of Nature which needs to be repaid in the same quality. 


On the contrary, the evolution of photosynthetic capabilities in “exchange” for the consumption of the products of atmosynthesis; the evolution of an industrial species capable of appropriating and utilizing fossil fuels in “exchange” for the depletion by the photosynthetic biosphere of atmospheric CO2, and the evolution of a science capable of producing fusion/plasma technology in “exchange” for the depletion of fossil fuels, would exemplify the ‘reparations’ process as here conceived.


That is, any given stage of cosmic evolution, since it proceeds by consuming [converting; transforming] the products posited by previous stages, which products are relatively finite in extent, therefore incurs, ipso facto, as a condition of its own [even meta-]continuity, the “cost”, as it were, of self-transcendence; of giving birth to a succeeding stage, of expanding and superseding its original relationship to the rest of Nature, uniting itself to a different and wider aspect of previously-evolved Nature, once it has used up, or, rather, transformed into something else, its original basis. 


This “necessary cost” will not necessarily be “paid” in every locus/instance of its incurrence; its “non-payment” simply means that the process/stage of cosmic evolution in question, locally at least, will come to crisis and abort.


In the case at hand, this concept would mean that part of the “surplus” -- the “profits” in social-reproductive use-value or human social negentropic terms — realized through the productive consumption of petroleum, would be invested in research and development of a replacement for this species of ‘molecular power’, in preparation for its eventual demise through fossil fuel depletion, and in upgrading the quality of life so as to develop a human population capable of realizing and broadly utilizing such an advance. 

For example, part of the proceeds of oil exploitation would have had to have been devoted to fusion research. c86 

The prices charged for oil would have had to be set high enough to cover such R&D costs, reflecting, in that way, the true social costs of using oil and depending upon oil; of developing, mediated through a transient dependence upon them, to a later and enduring status beyond that dependence.

Moreover, the costs thus covered by the prices charged would then have had to have been actually and effectively invested in that fusion power R&D. 

Only then would the ecological costs of, in this case, social reproduction be being met. 


As we know, this has not been the case. 


The unmet, unrecognized costs have appeared as the fanciful, outrageous hyper-profits — “looted” profits — of the Global ‘dictatorship of Petroleum’ instead. 


These costs will eventually be registered in the form of an actual energy crisis in the future, and in the initial strain of a sudden, socialist crash program to develop and deploy fusion devices, or, in the social-reproductive collapse of petroleum-based industrial civilization, due to hyper-escalation/inflation in the price, and the eventual collapse in the supply, of petroleum-power products.

  

We have been dealing with the long-term social costs pertaining to “maintaining the biospheric equipotential for self-reproduction”; with the long-range equipotential maintenance program requisite to a viable society, that is, to a temporally ‘continuable’ process of social evolution. 

The short-term equipotential costs need also to be noted. 

Even from the point of view of social reproduction alone, any productive activities which in any way impair the Earth’s suitability for continued support of productive activities, including its suitability as a habitat for human beings and for the fabric of other organisms upon whose life and integrity human life depends, objectively incurs the cost of healing this damage as a true, direct cost of social reproduction. 

Damage or wear-and-tear to the natural infrastructure should be accounted — e.g., in the societal self-model of a democratically self-planning society (‘socialist accounting’) — as depreciation of the means of production, and acted upon accordingly. 

This means obviating, minimizing, or at least costing such losses, and then meeting the costs thus registered.

 
Capitalist relations -- as we know from the work of the ecology movement, as well as from our direct experience of unabated pollution -- systematically excludes recognition, or at least encourages evasion, of these “external cost” responsibilities. 

The anarchistic, atomistic system wherein the means of producing society are fragmented into competing private properties, and, consequently, wherein accounting of profit (gain) is similarly atomized, creates a situation such that what is a cost or damage for society as a whole does not necessarily feed back to the individual capital owner(s), who  most directly incur(s) that cost or damage, as a system-atically or legally imposed direct cost/damage to that individual capital, which would thus ‘incentivizing’ the owner(s) of that individual capital to curtail and/or economize-upon that social cost/damage which it is causing.

That which would, in the dialectical accounting of a democratically self-planning society [an accounting which would measure the total relationship of that society to its natural environment] appear as a loss — for example, the pollution of lakes and streams — can today behave as if a profit, a gain (via avoiding disposal costs) from the point of view of a particular capital committing that pollution.

What we experience in polluted, carcinogenic waters; in smoggy, eye-stinging and lung-corroding air, in cancer-causing, heart-disease-causing, diabetes-causing capitalist pseudo-foods, and in side-effects-cascade-engineered capitalist pseudo-medicines, not to mention in late, “globalized” capitalism’s global arms-trafficing, global drug trafficing, and global human sexual-slaves trafficing, is anti-[use-]value, actively social negentropy-annihilating social entropy. 

This ever-deepening social entropy is the other side of capitalist [pseudo-]profit — the other side of looting profit; of profit realized through reneging on the socio-econo-ecological costs of human social reproduction, through cannibalizing humanity, and through cannibalizing the "natural basis" [Marx] of human-social nature, i.e., through cannibalizing that prolongation of human society back into pre-human/extra-human Nature which is the foundation upon which human-social Nature rests. 


The ecology crisis as a whole is but one of the signs of the decadence of Capital, of the increasingly  police-state, state-capitalist, proto-Fascist, pro-totalitarian phase wherein Capital profits and accumulates more and more by vampirism, by looting and parasitism, and less and less by actual production of fresh social-reproductive use-value; less and less by the growth of the productive forces, embodied in an advancing technical composition of accumulating fixed capital, less and less by human social negentropy expanding means. 

On the contrary, wherein paper capital grows more and more by profiting on the “production” of social entropy and social contraction; profiting on its imposition of a catastrophically contracting social reproduction, profiting on cannibalizing, contracting, and reversing the growth of the social forces of production, as epitomized by the non-reproduction -- the starvation and extermination — of the slave-labor populations of the Nazi concentration camps.

 
The rapacity and toxicity of modern society with respect to global, planetary Nature as a whole (including with respect to itself, as a part thereof!) is located not simply in “Bigness”, nor in “Technology”, as universal categories, still less in “man” in general, but rather in the historically specific organism of social feedbacks and tendencies — the specific dynamical properties — of the social relation of production called Capital.   

‘Capital’ — the largely unconscious but “self-organizing” capital-praxis of human agents — evolves quite "lawfully" out of earlier forms of exchange-value — commodities [barter] and, later, money [money-mediated exchange and circulation of money-and-commodities] -- once the ‘density control parameters’ of commodity production and exchange, driven by the growth of their social productive force, or self-productivity, within and among rapidly detribalizing kinship societies, expand beyond certain critical, ‘self-bifurcation’ thresholds. 

The specific kind of “Bigness” we experience today is the kind which inheres in the "laws" of political-economic motion of Capital; in the consolidation, concentration and centralization moments of "the law of Capital accumulation" first discovered by Marx, which describes our semi-conscious unified shaping of our entire social process by the cybernetics of  Capital qua “the Capital-relation”.


Capitalist “Bigness” — concentration, centralization, and increasing ‘oligopolization’, monopolization, and ‘state-ification’ of Capital, hence of political power, together with an accelerating state-power-based “guaranteeing” of private-Capital-[pseudo-]profitability — does not at all necessarily converge with what would be optimal from the point of view of human-social-negentropic use-value, or of self-expanding social self-reproductivity. 



But this doesn’t mean that “Bigness” in the abstract can be seized upon as a scapegoat -- as a cheap, quick and “simple” explanation of all of our problems. 


It doesn’t mean that “Smallness” or “decentralization” is ipso facto optimal from a human-social-negentropic use-value or social-reproductive view-point. 


Part of the folly of this whole tack resides in the relativity of qualities like “Smallness” and “Decentralization”. 

“Small” cannot exist apart from “Big” nor “decentralization” apart from “centralization”. 

All that can exist, all that we can ‘actualistically’ talk about, is certain possible “states” of interconnection of these pairs; certain possible complex unities, or patterns of interpenetration, of these dialectical opposites.



 
No doubt the mania for “Growth” exhibited by some capitalist spokespeople is an expression of, and an ingredient in, the rapacity of modern society. 

But the “Growth” actually being referred to by them is that of Capital: namely, accumulation — of debt instruments, of monetary, and of other money-denominated paper titles to wealth. 

This “Growth” does not necessarily betoken any expansion of social use-value, of social reproduction, at all: Capital growth can indeed correspond to an increase in goods and services beneficial to society, and to a development of the creative powers of human beings through a deployment and consumption of those powers which is appropriate and conducive to their continual self-expansion. 

But Capital growth can also correspond to an increase of “goods” detrimental or wasteful to social reproduction (for example, weapons of mass destruction) or, as with speculative profits, to no goods at all, as well as to the destruction of the producers' creative powers, through reneging on the costs of reproduction of the working population:  the looting of wages and social services (the “social wage”) for profits. 

The mania for growth is thus an expression of the drive to self-accumulation inherent in the Capital-relation.
  

The self-destructiveness, the cannibalism manifest in this mania today is a reflection of the fatal self-contradiction inherent in that Capital accumulation drive: that previous Capital accumulation makes further socially-expansive/negentropic-and-monetarily-profitable accumulation of Capital ever more difficult as the Capital accumulation process proceeds, i.e., as the “Capital-intensity” of production increases. 


This self-contradiction, as a movement, is the famous Marxian “Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”, manifest empirically as the trajectory of growing indebtedness, followed by accelerating inflation, crash, depression and (usually) inter-capitalist war, and which we have attributed, above, in a way which is not explicit in Marx’s extant work, to the dynamic of “technodepreciation” or of the self-destruction of capital-value.

This Capital self-destruction is mediated by the conversion of previously-accumulated capital-value into non-value through its interaction, in the form of competition, with newly-accumulated capital-value, newer capital-value which is of a higher competitive technical composition i.e., of higher all-factors net-productivity, than is the older capital-value. c84

  

The purveyors of the Ecology ideology, owing to their pervasive ideological blindness to the social relations of production, and their blindness to the historically-specific, Capital-relation-related nature of the present world ecology crisis, and owing to an impressionistic empiricism insensitive to the more subtle and intricate textures of social causation, have drawn, for the most part, wrong conclusions about the present predicament of the human species, and of our planetary biosphere; have assigned the wrong causes to the problems, and have proposed social-reproductive disasters as solutions. 


Almost all of their advice comes under the heading of proposals to further enfetter — in fact, to catastrophically reverse — the growth of the productive forces of humanity, that is, to lower the level of negentropy of human society, to disaccumulate the human-species use-value, actual and potential, built up by the labor of centuries; to enforce a suicidal contraction of social reproduction, and a murderous ‘meta-genocidal’ contraction of the global human population. 

This is nothing but the blind, ‘contra-temporal’, anti-historical tendency of decadent Capital, coming lately to consciousness, or, rather, to false consciousness, and even mistaking itself for an opposition to capitalism! 


But Ecologism opposes capitalism only in the way self-contradictory capitalism at last openly opposes itself; the way decadent capitalism attacks and seeks to dismantle all of virtues and values, the structures, psychic and social, of ascendant-phase capitalism:  the idea of progress, of material and spiritual betterment through coherent and experientially-corroborated knowledge (“science”); the institutions of democracy and popular power, of public, all-classes higher education, and so on. 

Ecologism is a species of the ideology of capitalist anticapitalism; it is a pro-Decadence ideology. 

And this pro-Contraction, anti-productive-forces bent in public opinion comes at a time when a new upsurge in the productive forces, a worldwide scientific and cultural Renaissance, a globally planned program of quantitative and qualitative growth; of worldwide economic development and social reconstruction, inherently impelling us beyond the Capital-relation, provides our only chance for survival as a species, as for survival of this planet’s biosphere-noosphere as a whole.
 

This species-suicidal bent is by no means the accomplishment of the Ecology movement on its own. 

It has been helped astray by massive funding and other encouragement from the highest ruling circles of international Capital. 

In particular, the Rockefeller group has systematically selected and nurtured, with regard to population policy especially, the tendencies most convergent with its own plans, which amount to ‘multi-genocidal’ and ‘mega-genocidal’ dismantling of the human race. p6






 
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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Part 7 -- How Humanity Saved the Biosphere. The Ideology of Science.








To My Readers,



Below is the seventh part of my multi-part re-rendition, in this blog, of a rare, classic hardcopy pamphlet, written by an anonymous collective author, one which -- very early-on, in the 1970s -- '''smelled a rat [smelled the 'Rocke-Nazi' rat -- in my opinion, the biggest, rottenest rat in all of human [pre-]history to-date -- the most rabid, the most massively "ambitious" mass torturers, and mass murderers, in all of human history, who make the bloody Vlad The Impaler pale to an infinitesimal in comparison] in the "Global Warming", "People Are Pollution" rap''', and circulated, in <<samizdat>> fashion, a rather comprehensive warning to humanity about this new "eu"-genocidal ploy, which remained scarcely-known until years later, when an updated version of this text became available on the world wide web.


The internet version of this text is entitled --

Crises by Nature:  How Humanity Saved the Biosphere   



For the Resumption of Humanity's Ascent, and, with it -- and by means of it -- the Regeneration of Our Planetary Biosphere,

M. Milankovitch













Crises by Nature
 How Humanity Saved The Biosphere

by
Capitalist Crisis Studies
[with modifications by M. Milankovitch]
Table of Contents
















VII  - The Ideology of Science


It should be noted that the realm of “linearity” is the only domain of mathematics — and, hence, of conceptualization itself — which has been largely conquered by modern science.


The much vaster realm of nonlinearity remains not only untamed, but virtually unexplored by it --

“In another volume the author has developed a theory of linear operators, which contains within its scope a considerable domain of analysis.”

“That such a work should include within its limits a large area of mathematics is readily understood from the fact that the assumption of linearity in operational processes underlies most applications of analysis to the problems of the natural world.”

“It is for this reason that a theory of linear operators, in contrast to a theory of nonlinear operators, is comparatively easy to develop.”

“The latter is beset by many difficulties....”

“But in spite of the difficulties of the general problem, there exists need for a systematic treatment of nonlinear equations.”

“Nature, with scant regard for the desires of the mathematician, often seems to delight in formulating her mysteries in terms of nonlinear systems of equations....”

“In the domain of linear equations, an essentially complete theory exists for differential equations....”

“But in the category of nonlinear differential equations, the situation is very different.”

“Satisfactory information exists in general only for certain restricted types of equations and for a limited number of special cases.” c58


In other words, the science of the last 250 years has scarcely begun to explore the realm of dialectics, i.e., of self-reflexive processes, which characterize the nature of Nature in general, including the nature of human Nature as human social evolution.

 
Contemporary science is biased in favor of what I will call ‘externalism’. 



It always expects and seeks out external causes, “external forces” --
“If no external forces act on a body, it moves uniformly” c59
-- is the founding principle of Mechanics — going back before Newton to Galileo — and of all of the modern sciences which have sprouted in its penumbra, for mechanics is the founding branch of modern science.


 Stated another way,  modern science is biased in favor of models of the following shape:

x (operates on) y.

where it is never the case that x = y.



That is, this science is predisposed to find, in the natural process, ‘flexion’ but not ‘[self-]re-flexion’. 



This bias is also seen in the case of its theories of Earth history and of the biosphere. 



What does Opik say, just after dismissing out of hand the Carbon Dioxide hypothesis?

“Practically all other theories of the ice ages and palaeoclimatic changes, which are based on purely terrestrial causes, are of a similar value, and thus unfounded.” c33



A rather sweeping rejection, this would seem, without having bothered to consider even one more from among “all other theories”!

Such across-the-board declarations usually signal the involvement of deep-seated underlying assumptions, or unconscious attitudes, about the world, and, in this case we suspect, to a pre-empirical, ideological premise.


  
A yet more explicit specimen of this attitude occurs in a passage, highly convergent with respect to the themes developed here (as we shall see more fully a little further on), in a recent book by Kenneth Boulding, a polemical book written explicitly to discredit the notion of dialectical processes in Nature and society in response to the author’s experiences with the Japanese Marxist student Left, and the versions of dialectical theory prevalent in that milieu --

“Dialectical philosophers may argue that the role of catastrophes in the evolutionary process has a dialectical or at least a revolutionary element in it....”

“It may well be, for instance, that the unknown catastrophe which destroyed the dinosaurs and led to the extinction of a very large number of species was an essential ingredient in the development of the mammals and the next stage of the evolutionary process...”

“it has been suggested that the Ice Ages played an important part in the development of man....”
 
“However, the catastrophes which have punctuated the evolutionary process are not in themselves dialectical, that is, they do not arise by necessity out of the contradictions of previous systems but are usually imposed from without.”

“This is particularly true of climatic changes, which do not in any way depend on the inner workings of the system of biological evolution, but are completely extraneous to it, even though they may have a great impact on it.” c60


Modern science is predisposed against perceiving ‘immanent causes’. or ‘self-forces’.

This ‘externalist’ bias is an aspect of the bias toward linearity noted already. 

The [self-]reflexive sentences formulated above, which gave rise to nonlinear terms ([self-]reflexive functions) in mathematical translation, express precisely ‘self-causation’; change due to forces arising immanently, or self-change” (Marx). a8  



In marked contrast to the modern scientific tradition’s neglect of ‘autocausation’, Hegel, for one, locates such concepts as residing at the heart of adequate thinking about, especially, the biotic world --
 
“...life is essentially a living being; and this is merely excited by the outer world.”

“Here, therefore, the causal relation falls away, and generally in the sphere of Life, all the categories of the Understanding cease to be valid.”

“If, however, these categories are still to be employed, then their nature must be transformed; and then it can be said that life is its own cause.” c61



The dialectical tradition includes as one of its “moments”, an attitude we might call ‘internalism’.  



Not that it emphasizes immanent causation one-sidedly; on the contrary, knowledge of the whole picture of a phenomenon is its goal.

  
It takes into account the total interplay of an “[it-][her-][him-]self” agent and its otherness — and all known other agents — the interplay of the ‘internity’ and ‘externity’ of such a “self”, of causes both immanent and remote.

The total[ity] view includes an emphasis upon those strange ‘conspiracies of events’ through which an entity and its environment express a unity; through which apparently “exogenous” circumstances trigger, pace, or provide occasion for, the revelation of some moment of the “endogenous” nature of that entity; of the inner essence of that entity. 

  
This view includes emphasis upon the ways in which apparently remote processes mediate the ‘self-reflexion’ of an entity — as, e.g., the apparent exteriority of the Milankovich orbital cycles, and the glacieral ice of the Pleistocene Ice Age, mediated the self-reflexion of the activity of the Photosynthetic Biosphere upon itself, through atmospheric CO2 depletion and consequent climatic cooling -- the feeding-back of action to its origin.

  
“Self-Re-Flex-ive” Action is Action which bends [Flex] back [Re] upon — returns to, or flows back to — its source [Self]. 

  
Discovery and explication of this unity of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is indeed a primary aim of the dialectical exposition of any phenomenology.  

‘Dialectic’ is the complete relationship, or interaction, between a determinate being and the totality, a totality which includes that being itself. 

Therefore, self-interaction (‘intra-action’) is a moment of the total interaction defining such a being.  

But ‘other-interaction’ — its relationship with the rest of the universe, other than itself — remains as well, unless the being in question is the entire Cosmos, the totality itself. 

Only that being is fully self-reflexive, although all the relative totalities or sub-totalities which it brings forth within itself seem to be modeled after it, and to exhibit partial self-reflexiveness, and a drive toward its total self-reflexiveness, in ascending degrees.



The pre- and contra-empirical, ideological syndrome we have identified, calling it ‘externalism’, is but one symptom of a deep-seated conceptual disposition of modern science, which I will call ‘atomism’. 

Atomism is the view that reality at the ultimate level is a mere collection or “set”, as opposed to an organic totality; a mere ensemble of mutually indifferent, absolutely individual, indivisble, radically separable, self-existent or independently self-subsistent “elementary particles”. 

That is, the universe is thought to be composed of irreducible discretenesses which, unlike the living “organs” of a biological ‘organ-ism’, are capable of existing as such apart from one another and from any given state of mutual organization of themselves; discretenesses which are thus mutually external, essentially uninvolved in one another’s being, not internally connected, but only externally related, coming into association only in exteriority, contingently, accidentally as it were. 

All complexity, all phenomena of life and consciousness are, in this view, mere epiphenomena of the aggregations and dis-aggregations of these unchanging, isolatedly self-subsistent particles, and reducible to such — totally explainable exclusively in terms of such -- atomistic particles.


Atomism is the core of the ideology that vitiates much of modern science, and that is reflected in the linearism of modern science, including of modern mathematics. 


For this attitude, the parts — linearly, additively, without synergy — compose the whole. c62 

For dialectics, a whole also composes its parts; it inheres in each of its parts as the internal premise and support of each part. 

A part-icle is what happens when a whole, locally, swallows itself.


With regard to social science, this dialectical axiom shows up as a critique of the Lockian-Hobbesian model of society as a “gas” of individuals. 

The dialectical theory of society recognizes the sociality of the human being, which, as the immanent truth of human being, must finally be materialized in human history if the human species is to remain viable much beyond its infancy.


The possibility of my specific personality is a social product; the product of a long, deep filament of the evolutionary continuum, a product of the human labor of human history. 


My existence rests upon the ramified texture of a world-wide division of labor, on the global effort and cooperation of virtually the whole human race, presently accomplished rather blindly through the mediation of cash payment, of capital, i.e., of the world market. 


We — my personality and this social totality — appear and disappear together. 

Damage this global network, curtail its scale, diminish its productivity, interrupt its flow, and my life is curtailed, diminished, interrupted in proportion. 

The “cost” of my existence increases; the impaired metabolism of the network can no longer support the existing population, myself included, in the former quality of health, prosperity, vitality. 

Mortally wound that network, and my life rapidly evaporates; my personality becomes impossible.


On the other hand, every contribution I make to the welfare and advancement of that network — my real body, from which I live — redounds to my benefit as well. 


Social reproduction is the process of the interproduction of human selves, of social individuals. 

 Or, as Marx put it: in social reproduction, the other person is “a necessary part of your self.” c63



The deeply-held premise of atomism is a symptom of the capitalist envelopment — both internal and external — of modern science, of modern knowledge. 


This premise arises in the living of the social relations of production, in the experience of the self, of the social individuals living in, and as, modern society. 


In the terms of a human-historical socio-psychology -- of an actualized '''psychohistory'''  -- atomism could be defined as the projection of the bourgeois ego-structure into all experience, onto all of Nature. 


Its secret is the atomism of privatized life, the one-sidedly “individualistic” life of modern society. 


The fundamental gestalt of the self, the internalized model of self-identity, reproduced by any society, cannot help but become the universal model for all perception and conception for the personalities formed by that society -- the (usually, to date, unconscious) paradigm for judging all experience.

Comprehension of Nature is attempted, however consciously or, most often, unconsciously, ‘sympathetically’, that is, by imaginatively putting ourselves in the place of what we are trying to know, i.e., by projecting ourselves into the object of our inquiry. 

The basic structure of self-identity against which we interpret all experience will reflect, in turn, our social constitution and social environment, the dominant social relations [“of [our] production” — that produced and that continue to reproduce us — i.e., the ‘social self-relations of human societal self-re-production’ of our society].  


These relations express the attained level of relationship of humanity to itself, the attained development of the social pre-]productive forces, i.e., of the self-powers, of the social individual, within which our personalities had to form themselves. 


The environment of Capital, the form human personality manifests in the all-pervading field of the market-nexus, forms the conceptual atmosphere of modern science. 


The two have developed for the last 300 years and more, hand in hand. 


As Marx puts it --
“In the form of society now under consideration, the behavior of men in the social process of production is purely atomic. Hence their relations to each other in production assume a material character independent of their control and conscious individual action.” c64


Under these social conditions, the connections between individual action and the movement of the totality — as in such phenomena as depressions, wars, and chronic impoverishment — are easily obscured.


Bourgeois perception wants to see mere “sets” — mere collections of mutually-estranged, alienated individuals — everywhere it looks. 


It expects the “elements”, the parts, of such sets, to be ‘existable’ prior to, and, at any time, apart from, the whole they thus, supposedly, merely externally and contingently compose, and to belong to an order of reality more real, more concrete, than the totalities that they constitute. 


However, a part, an “organ” of an “organ-ism” — say, a human heart — will rapidly shrivel and decay if it becomes separated — alienated — from the whole in which it inheres; the organism/sub-totality of which it had formed an essential constituent.  

An organ, an organic part, cannot “be” apart; cannot be parted from, or ‘withouted from’, its unity/totality, without soon ceasing to be itself — without ceasing to be what it was when it was embedded in, and un-separated from, its native context.  


In the course of its historical development, atomism or mechanism has had to leave behind the simple “gas” models, and to increasingly admit relations, structure-formations, among its “elements”. 

But it wants to admit these relations only after the fact, after the fact of the existence of its “elementary particles” — that is, it admits the relational structures or “systems” only as derivative from the prior and deeper reality of its elements. c65 


Dialectics, on the contrary, sees the particular as an ‘invagination’ of the global, a ‘self-re-entry’ or ‘underturning’ of the manifold of the whole, of the ‘world-field’. 


Graphically represented, using a kind of ‘hyper-Venn diagram’, this conception might take shape as below --


Graphic 23: the whole containing the parts which contain the whole


In this conception, the particular arises by local ‘self-internalizations’ of the continuum (here denoted U = ‘Universe’); by ‘self-involution’ of the unitary field. 


The part ‘contains’ the whole; the particular ‘contains’ the totality, itself included. 

The [present] part-icular is thus conceived as simultaneously [past-]self-containing and [past-]other-containing, and thus as [past-]totality-containing. c66 



Such self-nested morphologies are, of course, outside the scope of any Euclidean, or flat-space, [‘un-curved’]geometry.







‘Externalism’, child of atomism, is closely related to the blind-spot which leads mainstream scientists and ecology activists away from so much as considering a hypothesis of biospheric dynamics such as that proposed herein, even when they verge repeatedly upon its evidence, and its conceptual thresholds, sifting its clues and key evidences before their apparently open eyes.


Associated with the externalist bias are two other prevalent tendencies of ‘Ecologism’:  a tendency toward misanthropy and a bias in favor of equilibrium models of Nature, i.e., in favor of linear “dynamical” models -- which are therefore really pseudo-dynamical models -- of the biosphere.


Current ecologism tends to treat man as an alien ‘external cause’ in Nature, Nature as external to “Man”, and “Man” as external to Nature. 


Its ideologues likes to talk, implicitly — and nonsensically — as if humanity were an invader in the biosphere, arrived here from outside of Nature — from ‘outside of the universe’ — rather than admitting that humanity is a [locally] new part of Nature; a natural outgrowth of prior Nature; a new kind of part of the universe, one that the universe has recently added to itself.  


Ecologism likes to abstract “man” from Nature, to imagine Nature as already completed without humanity, as peacefully self-regulated and serene but for humanity’s presence — a perfected cyclic equilibrium, deviating from this crypto-Parmenidean stasis only episodically and accidentally — i.e., when disturbed “from without”. 


As we have seen, this is far from an accurate picture of the nature of Nature --



In the language of Ecologism, “man” always only “upsets” the “balance of Nature”. c67 


But, if our hypothesis is correct, the balance of Nature is no static, timeless fixity, but a self-upsetting process, one which disturbs itself internally. 


It is not primarily “outside agitators”, but ‘inside agitators’ which foment the self-revolutions of Nature.   


Nature is a dialectical process-object, a dialectical “subject” or agent of action and of “self-activity”; a process of self-creation, in which ‘human Nature’ — the noösphere; the self-expanding patch on the biosphere occupied by the human social formation — is the latest product, or dialectical “synthesis”, of Nature itself. 


The notion that “man”, the socialized arm of Nature, can set Nature right as well as wrong, that biospheric Nature is in trouble without us; that humanity is an outgrowth of Nature lacking which Nature would be unbalanced, incomplete — an outgrowth which Nature “needs” to restore its moving balance for the next interval ahead, is foreign to Ecologism. 


It is a conception virtually inaccessible for the psychological structure and premises from which Ecologism , a massively plutocracy Foundations+ funded outgrowth of Rockefeller "Eu"-genics, grew. 


The misanthropy of Ecologism has its roots also, we must add, in the dark mood which has overtaken ruling class ideology since the zenith and turning point of capitalist civilization in the period around World War I; in the whole historical atmosphere of the decadent phase of capitalist society. 


We will consider this aspect more closely in the next section.



In the meantime, here are a few clues as to what the ruling class has had, in stealth, underway ever since --







Underlying empirically-falsified equilibrium model is a perception of time as a[other] kind of empty space, a container of events that can be filled up in arbitrary order, and which can hold either change or non-change. 


Time is not grasped as the very continuum of change — as the continuing self-prolongation of ‘universe-al’ existence, due to the continuing ‘culmination’ of both self-induced change-in-‘self’ [‘self-activity’], and other-induced change-in‘self’, for all extant cosmological entities taken as ‘selves’/subjects/agents in some degree. 


The dialectical view, by contrast, is anchored in this conception-awakened-perception of the cumulative ever-new-ness of time, such that no two moments can ever be identical. 


For dialectical perception, change is continuous. 


Time is just the continuity of change, and apart from change, Time is not. 


Or, as Herakleitos expressed, it so long ago --

“Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice in the same river.... It is in changing that things find repose.... Homer was wrong in saying ‘Would that strife might perish from amongst gods and men’. For if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist.... The sun is new each day.” c68



If Time is grasped as an irreversible cumulative continuum, a never-repeating texture of events in which later and earlier can never quite coincide in their ‘evental’ content; if duration is grasped as a texture of unique states-of-the-world in which similitude but not identity of events is possible, then the kind of radically dynamical model of Nature proposed here is the first thing one is disposed to look for; is only to be expected. 


We are not talking about “cycles” here:  in an evolutionary continuum the photosynthesis-respiration biosphere will not turn back into the atmosynthesis-fermentation biosphere; the present biosphere will not revert to the photosynthetic-respiratory one, but -- if the Rocke-Nazis humanocidal plans are successfully defeated --  will move on to something new, to a new, higher stage, based on fusion power. 


Consensus modern science, on the other hand, seems to expect true “cycles”. 


It has not, for the most part, explicitly arisen to the paradigm of the spiral or the helix — that is, to the image which synthesizes the moments of endless ‘self-oscillatory’ circular recurrence and of self-continuing, ever-chaning rectilinear self-extension. c69 


Thus, ecologists speak of the CO2 “cycle”, and tend to expect a “set-point” fixed for all time for atmospheric CO2 concentration, upon which all the feedback channels of the Earth converge and continue to converge through all the ages since the Earth’s formation. 


The idea that Nature does have a history, that the biosphere as a whole, the planet as a whole, and the universe as a whole self-evolve continuously, irreversibly, and cumulatively, is still dawning, and is resisted, even if the Darwinian “evolution” of particular biological species has long been granted.  


If evidence for these higher modes of evolution is lacking, this lack is due at least in part to the contra-empirical, ideological biases that make the prisoners of this ideology miss such evidence even when it is staring them in the face. 





Thermodynamic equilibrium is essentially a linear phenomenon, and through it linearity is linked to a tendency toward maximal entropy of systems, maximal disorder, codified in the Second Law of Thermodynamics --
“...linear systems, in particular, systems close to equilibrium, always evolve to a disordered regime corresponding to a steady state which is asymptotically stable with respect to all disturbances...” c70


‘Lerner’s Theorem’ spotlights the connection among linearity, atomism, and equilibria --
“There are two basic, interrelated axioms in the reductionist conception of the universe.”


“The first is that the universe consists of independent elementary particles....”


“The second is that these particles are organized according to a set of fixed relations, or laws....”


“Essentially every branch of existing science is reductionist in that it is based on these same axioms — discrete particles and fixed laws....”


“The fundamental axioms of reductionism necessarily imply a certain conception of the dynamics and development of physical processes and the universe in general.”


“This conception is known variously as the law of increase of entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics.”


“It states that the universe as a whole, or any system in particular, always tends towards a stable or unchanging state, a state of equilibrium.”


“An equivalent statement is that the rate of change of the universe or any system tends to zero: the universe is running down.”


“This dynamic law is a necessary consequence of the fundamental axioms.”


“Any system defined by fixed laws must have some state from which no further change is possible....”


“The tendency of the universe towards equilibrium is at the same time a tendency towards increasing disorder and randomness, since disorder is more probable than order — that is, there are more possible states of random arrangement than ordered arrangement.”


“This tendency towards increasing disorder is also called the increase of entropy.” c71



Nonlinear systems, on the contrary, may exhibit a taxis towards states of increasing order, heightening their internal negentropy by exporting entropy to their environments.  

That is, they “evolve”, through a succession of relatively or temporarily stable states located on a continuum leading ever farther from thermodynamic equilibrium --


“Our qualitative argument leads us to inquire about the feasibility of extending the concept of order to nonequilibrium situations, to systems in which the appearance of ordered structures, in thermodynamic equilibrium, would be highly unlikely.”


“One of the main conclusions of our theory will be that there exists a class of systems showing two kinds of behavior: a tendency to a state of maximum disorder for one type of situation, and coherent behavior for a second type.”


“The destruction of order always prevails in the neighborhood of thermodynamic equilibrium.”


“In contrast, creation of order may occur far from equilibrium and with specific nonlinear kinetic laws, beyond the domain of stability of the states that have the usual thermodynamic behavior.”


“Traditionally, thermodynamics has dealt with the first type of behavior, but an extension of irreversible thermodynamics that permits treating the other aspects as well as this one has been developed recently....”


“One of our main points here will be that an increase in dissipation is possible for nonlinear systems driven far from equilibrium.”


“Such systems may be subject to a succession of unstable transitions that lead to spatial order and to increasing entropy production...”


[MM:  for example] “...generation of coherent light by a laser may be interpreted as a nonequilibrium phase transition.”


“Below instability is the incoherent regime; beyond the transition threshold, corresponding to a critical value of the radiation field, the system switches spontaneously to the coherent state....”


“The amplitude and period of the oscillations are determined by the system itself [MM:  rather than by the external stimulus of the “flash” that triggers the lasing].”

“Moreover, the periodic solution is stable in the sense that all perturbations introducing an initial deviation from this state are damped.”


“This type of solution is well known in mathematics and analytical mechanics as a “limit cycle”.”

“Note that the existence of localized states and wave-like solutions... raises a number of fascinating mathematical problems related to the existence and stability of periodic solutions for nonlinear parabolic differential systems....” c72



As a result of these ideological ‘attitudes’ — ‘externalism’, misanthropism, ‘equilibriumism’ — most commentaries on the ecological organism of our planet overlook, or repress, any noticings of the kind of ecological dynamics we have been exploring herein. 

Typically, where such commentaries do verge on these considerations, signs of reluctance and anxiety are in evidence. 

These include several modes of abrupt truncation of discourse; abrupt changing of the subject — for instance, hasty consignment of such speculations, barely broached, to the nether realm of the “still unknown”, thence quickly passing on to a remote topic. 

Let us watch the thought-processes in a number of recorded such instances, in order to get a feel for the psycho-ideological, psychohistorical phenomenon involved.


The Club of Rome study, Limits To Growth, manifests very sharply the tacit presumption — the ‘pre-evidential’ and evidence-overriding, dogmatic, ‘supra-evidential’, and therefore ideological ‘pre-assumption’ that any man-made alterations in the biospheric process must be, ipso facto, to its detriment [emphases added by MM] --

“At present 97 percent of mankind’s industrial energy production comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). When these fuels are burned, they release, among other substances, carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Currently about 20 billion tons of CO2 are being released from fossil fuel combustion each year... the measured amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing exponentially, apparently at a rate of 0.2 percent per year.... If man’s energy needs are someday supplied by nuclear power, instead of fossil fuels, this increase in atmospheric CO2 will eventually cease, one hopes before it has had a measurable ecological or climatological effect.” c73


The following passage represents an example of  contra-empirical“equilibrium thinking” or “cycle-thinking”, which, while insightful in this case, errs in tending — via a thought-process which might be characterized as one of ‘ontological reductionism’ — to assimilate human agency entirely to the humanity-preceding supposedly “cyclical”/non-cumulative/non-self-transcending processes of Nature [emphases added by MM] --

“The burning of fossil fuels is an element of another cycle that affects atmospheric carbon dioxide; this is the cycle of photosynthesis and respiration.... The rate at which respiration and decay occur is very nearly equal to the rate of photosynthesis.... Nevertheless, there is, on average, a small imbalance, which is important... the rate of photosynthesis is slightly faster than the rate of respiration and decay, and there is a continual addition of carbon, of organic origin, to the sediments at the bottom of the sea. In time, these sediments are converted to rocks, and the carbon is incorporated therein, but the process does not stop there. The layer of sedimentary rocks on Earth is not getting thicker all the time. Instead, the rocks are lifted up above the surface of the sea, where they are subjected to weathering and erosion. The carbon in the rocks is oxidized in the process and returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In this respect, the burning of fossil fuels may be thought of as a greatly accelerated form of weathering.  At the present time, the burning of fossil fuel is producing carbon dioxide about thirty times as fast as rock weathering.” c74


In the next citation, part of the hypothesis we have explored in this text is virtually broached, and the author admirably and succinctly “gives the lie” to the now-prevalent, hysterical and Hitlerian/Goebbelsian “Big Lie” mantric and ad nauseam assertions, by the growing, and 'growingly Plutocracy-funded', chorus of Rockefeller “hired liars” — ‘Zeroists’ [Zero-Growthers], ‘Negativists’ [‘Negative-Growthers’], ‘Smallists’, ‘Animalists’, ‘People are Pollution’ genocidal maniacs, ‘neo-Primitivists’, ‘neo-Luddites’, and ‘Global-Warmists’ — that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant”, rather than what it actually is, a primary, vital ‘nutrient’/resource, for our photosynthetic biosphere, but the line of inquiry is abruptly diverted [emphases added by MM] --
“...carbon dioxide is a relatively rare gas in the atmosphere and its carbon is necessary as a component for all food.  If the respiration of all organisms, particularly that of the decomposer micro-organisms, were to stop, much of the available carbon would be tied up in dead material, and photosynthesis rates would slow down. However, man is inadvertently increasing the carbon dioxide content of the air by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil in which the carbon was fixed by photosynthesis millions of years ago. Thus, where carbon dioxide may have been a limiting factor in ecosystem productivity, such productivity may eventually increase.” c75



In the following passage, it is nearly recognized that the ecological consequences of human praxis, far from being necessarily uni-directional, can even oppose one another and balance out. 

Yet, once again, only the possible negative consequences of human agency are envisioned, revealing an underlying assumption that Nature is already finished, perfectly balanced, fixed at perfect values for all of its parameters, and “ok as is”, so that any man-made changes — whether they raise or lower the Earth’s temperature, or any other natural parameter; whether they shift a given natural parameter in one direction or in the other, opposite direction -- can, at best, mean only “disturbances” -- movements away from the prevailing, quasi-static perfection — if, hopefully, tolerable ones [emphases added by MM] --
“...the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide... [MM:  could] raise the earth’s temperature, presumably melting the ice caps and flooding the coastal plains of the world. This much-discussed possibility is only one of the changes in flow that may be expected if further power injections change the world ecosystem’s composition.  Now, increasing turbidity in the air from pollution is reflecting light in many areas, lowering temperature and agricultural production.  Somehow we have to prevent major disturbances of the coefficients of the mineral cycles.” c76



Finally, we note what is probably the closest approach to the overall hypothesis stated here from orthodox circles, ironically (and by no means accidentally) occurring in a passage explicitly devoted to refuting dialectical concepts — the passage in Boulding’s book immediately succeeding the one cited previously [emphases added by MM] --
“One possible exception to this proposition is the climatic change which may result from the absorption of carbon dioxide from the air by plants and other living organisms and its present restoration to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.”

“It has been suggested that an increase of carbon dioxide in the air will have a “greenhouse effect” and will upset the heat balance of the earth by letting more heat in through the atmosphere from the sun than it lets out at present temperatures.”


“This would be expected to raise the temperature of the earth which would, of course, have profound consequences such as the melting of the ice caps and a change in the whole ecological structure of the biosphere.”


“There may be long cycles of this kind in the evolutionary process which have something of a dialectical character to them, in the sense that it is the contradictions within one phase that produce the next.”


“There is no agreement among natural scientists, however, about the reality of these phenomena — thus the “greenhouse effect” may be literally overshadowed by increasing cloud cover and again they must be put in the category of interesting speculation.” c77



In concluding this section, it should be emphasized that no special sagacity is required to discern the patterns which anchor the hypothesis of biospheric evolution and dialectical continuum put forward herein. 


Required only is the living sense of the involvement of the totality in the particular and of the internal interconnectedness of events, that is, the sense of the unitary fabric of reality alive in one’s own identity which is none other than the Socialist sense, a perception of selfhood which is emergent in our times.






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