This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Science


Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century
by Mark Dowie
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995)
317pp.

reviewed by MC5

MIM recommends this book to those readers who do not yet perceive MIM's level of frustration with the environmentalist movement as a movement in the United $tates. Although the author is a former editor of a reformist magazine, he spends most of the book criticizing what he calls "reformist" environmentalism for its sell-out and ineffectiveness as a political movement. The result is a book with the most realistic view of the Euro-Amerikan environmentalist movement as a political movement seen so far.

There are really only two movements that MIM supports in the United $tates that achieve widespread popularity. One is to cut military aid to Third World puppet governments. For chauvinist reasons, the Amerikan public supports cutting military and all other aid to the Third World.

Environmentalism is the other movement in the United $tates that MIM stands with the majority on. 7 of 10 people in the United $tates consistently describe themselves as environmentalist.

Environmental lobbying groups have a budget of nearly half a billion dollars a year as of 1994 given by the check-writing masses.(p. 4) The total for all environmental organizations was $3.12 billion in 1992. Between 1987 and 1992 what Dowie describes as "active" environmentalism saw its budget double to $2.5 billion.(p. 40)

If MIM received half a billion a year and its affiliates received another $2 billion and there was not some major revolutionary shaking happening throughout the whole world, MIM would be a failure. Mark Dowie is one of the few people of the reformist environmentalist niche to realize the movement's ineffectiveness.

Republicans in office

It was Republican President Richard Nixon who signed some of the most progressive environmental laws of the United $tates,(p. 33) including the ones most hated by rednecks such as the "Endangered Species Act." In this way, Republicans put the environment above "partisan politics" and succeeded in defusing one of the few political conflicts that neophyte environmental movement activists understood -- Democrats versus Republicans.

The legions of pseudo-environmentalists never understood the political and historical context of their movement and it became a dumping ground for various petty-bourgeois philosophies. When Earth Day first started and the environmentalist movement had success, Nixon faced a grave situation in the international class struggle. His own memoirs show an almost day-by-day knowledge of the strength of China, the throngs of anti-war protesters and the bombings conducted by the revolutionary underground here in the United $tates.

Thus, Earth Day 1970 was the first and it attracted 20 million participants and claimed to be the largest demonstration in U.$. history. Nixon worried that the movement would go socialist. He made concessions and sought to de-politicize the movement with great success.

Hence, when the Maoists no longer dominated the anti-war movement and movements generally as they did in the late 1960s and when the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the ruling class had an easy time of finishing off the successes of the environmentalist movement. They took apart the weak environment bureaucracy that was in place.(p. xiii)

The elite of the Washington DC environmental lobbyists was no less white, male or professional than before. Quite the contrary, they were more established and experienced than ever with greater funding, but their organizations delivered less over time, because as the Maoist revolutionary threat subsided with the demise of SDS, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords etc., the Establishment had less to fear.

Fear is always what motivates ruling class concessions. Contrary to ignorant self-serving dogma, the "reasonableness" of the paid lobbyists plays no role. If all such reasonable pseudo-environmentalist lobbyists disappeared, the ruling class would replace them by coming up with the same drivel itself.

Democrats in office

After eviscerating environmental regulations under Reagan and Bush, the ruling class gave Clinton and Gore a chance and handed over key government posts to the lobbyists. Now there can be no doubt that the core of pseudo-environmentalism is ruling class.

The consternation that the environmentalist elite had joined the government and not accomplished very much is a joke that even Clinton and Gore make on themselves. Gore himself tells audiences he knows they think he sold out and ask him "where was Al Gore?" MIM addresses his fatuous free market "green is black" (as in profitable) ideology elsewhere.

Follow the money

From the very beginning, the contemporary environmentalist movement has had money dumped on it in order to quell it. Organizations like the Ford Foundation funded the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the key white male groups.(p. 35)

Other major players are the Rockefeller, Pew, Stern, W. Alton Jones and Kendall families. 7 percent of pseudo-environmentalist organization money comes from these foundations.(p. 49)

In fact, if the ruling class were afraid of the environmentalist movement in 1970, by 1995 when this book came out, the ruling class owned most of it. The purchase of the movement had gone to such an extent that National Audubon and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has co-signed anti-immigrant statements with FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), which itself is partly funded by neo-Nazi money. A large fraction of the important Sierra Club is also on-board with the FAIR agenda.(p. 163)

Now it is self-evident to Earth Day organizers that every corporation is jumping on the bandwagon and trying to appear to be a sponsor of Earth Day. While corporate polluter money has split the movement at times, it has never been successfully stopped.

Dowie also understands that the corporations pay more to rent Congress than the pseudo-environmentalists do. The Sierra Club spent $680,000 supporting Congressional candidates in 1992, but extraction-based industries alone spent $21.3 million.(p. 86)

MIM counts this as another case of reformist dogma, by which we mean that a fetish is made of working through channels even when the situation is hopeless on a struggle level. Even by their own logic it would make more sense to struggle for campaign finance reform,(p. 194) but the pseudo-environmentalists are unwilling to become even that political.

Hence, movement resources are wasted. In the first place, turnover in Congress is very low, averaging 2 percent per election for decades and only slightly more now. In the second place, MIM would not fight a battle where it is outnumbered 40 to 1 or more. The goal should be nothing less than revolution, but the individual battles must be winnable, not suicidal. This is something the environmental movement has yet to grasp. That $680,000 should have gone elsewhere--toward building a revolutionary movement to put the fear of the proletariat in the ruling class again.

Progress in some areas but not overall

Some struggles did bring about progress. Under socialism, we will ban profit-making entirely. Currently, the system only occasionally musters the political strength to ban economic activities on a case-by-case basis. Bans on lead, DDT, PCBs, mercury and Strontium 90 have worked.(p. 39) Regulations for unleaded gasoline and auto environmental devices reduced sulfur and lead emissions 90 percent.(p. 112)

In all class struggles, the bourgeoisie does not win 100 percent and the proletariat 0 percent, no matter how dire the situation.

Movement politics

The pseudo-environmentalist movement has been such a failure that Dowie looks to the humyn rights movement for inspiration. It is true that the humyn-rights movement lends itself to more moralist absolutist stands. We believe there is a humyn-right to a non-toxic environment.

Whereas the bourgeoisie like Bob Dole has supported the idea that environmental regulations amount to "taking" property from the bourgeoisie without compensation,(p. 101) the truth is exactly the opposite. The corporations Bob Dole supported are "taking" the right of the public to a non-toxic environment.

We Marxists believe it is impossible to "negotiate" or "compensate" someone for their right to life. Hence, we favor the use of organized force against the property-owners and their spokespeople like Dole, who do not have basic political priorities set correctly for the species.

Currently their organized force called government stands against the right to a non-toxic environment and it is a dictatorship of the tiny minority of profit-makers. We seek a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will also benefit the middle classes on environmental questions in particular.

MIM does not agree with the fraction of the book (chapter 8) in which Dowie talks about the solutions for the movement's ills. We rather recommend this book for pointing to the state of the "mainstream" environmentalist movement we call pseudo-environmentalist.

The bottom line

While the pseudo-environmentalist movement wasted the energies of the seven percent of people who described themselves as "active" in the movement,(p. 4) the environment got worse. Even Earth Day founder-activist Denis Hayes admitted it.(p. 26)

More toxins found their way into animal flesh 20 years after the first Earth Day than on the first Earth Day.(p. 20) It is more than 5 billion pounds of 300 toxic compounds a year since the early 1990s.(p. 22) A multi-billion dollar industry has arisen to clean up toxins that should not have been released in the first place, and that is capitalism's idea of progress.

That is not to mention the global situation with rainforest destruction, 5000 species going extinct per year and the persistent shift of land into the unusable category.

Much of the public mislead by the pseudo-environmentalists is already frustrated with the state of the environment. The public has yet to sit down and study scientifically the politics, political economy and history it needs to win.

The weaknesses of our movement in the United $tates also stem from the population's having fewer life-and-death threats from capitalism than the international proletariat found mostly in the Third World. The people here are bought-off in the majority. The middle-class ideology also puts a damper on the scientific understanding of the masses, who frequently reject statistical or group-level generalizations and hence find themselves unable to understand the science of classes or the environment. Since much environmental degradation requires examining a long chain of cause-and-effect sometimes spanning continents, raising the scientific level of the masses is important to our movement's success.

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The Natural Wealth of Nations: Harnessing the Market for the Environment
by David Malin Roodman
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998
303 pp. pb.

reviewed by MC5

This is a book about government subsidies and taxes as they affect the environment. Roodman has succeeded in putting forward a book that simultaneously pleases the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and other liberal and radical sources of grant money that funded the book on the one hand and the environmentalist movement on the other hand. For the bourgeoisie, it was worth the money.

The book starts by attacking subsidies to mining and lumber companies, fisheries and highways. Canadian seal hunters garner a four dollar government subsidy for every seal they club to death.(p. 101) The attack on such subsidies amounting to $650 billion globally will please conservatives and libertarians, both of which support economic Liberalism. Nonetheless, MIM also supports the end to subsidies for mining, lumber and fisheries in the imperialist countries, because the environmental goals supported by Roodman most benefit the proletariat.

We also agree with Roodman that the $111 billion in subsidizing U.$. roads (p. 43) should go toward mass transit and subsidies for renewable energy instead. The subsidies to mining, lumber and fisheries in particular have been called "corporate welfare." The rich receiving the corporate welfare have had the most incentive to allow the degradation of the environment. The proletariat is the class of people with the least interest in the degradation of the environment. Only people making large profits from pollution would consider degrading their own environment.

The end of the book is about existing pollution taxes in the world and tax proposals for the United $tates. Roodman correctly criticizes the bogus arguments raised against environmental taxes. Their regressive nature can be overcome and taxes on other things can be dropped if pollution taxes increase.

Capitalism and the environment

Roodman makes crucial admissions throughout the book only to soften them and argue for social-democratic reforms of capitalism. "Though the market is a powerful tool for economic progress, where its edges meet the planet it is mainly as a saw, shovel, or smokestack--as an instrument of destruction rather than protection."(p. 19) Moreover, the "market system today threatens environmental, thus economic, disaster."(p. 27)

Like many other market-believing environmentalists, Roodman says there should be a market for the right to pollute. In a back assward argument, he says "that people have a right to breathe air and drink water not contaminated by other people's wastes" and then he decries moralists for upholding that argument!(p. 157) To translate what Roodman is saying: capitalism cannot be overturned; hence, second-class environmental citizenship for the poor and middle-classes is the only choice. He calls that "pragmatism" and he is right to call it that. Since Roodman knows that by his own (conservative) estimate 300,000 to 700,000 a year die from air pollution and another 50 million children cough chronically because of it,(p. 156) his market for pollution rights is nothing less than a market for murder and disease licenses.

In contrast, MIM maintains that the right to food, clothing, shelter and a non-toxic and non-militarist environment is non-negotiable. By themselves, these rights imply the use of organized force to protect them against would-be profiteers. Such organized force is called dictatorship of the proletariat, which will be necessary until that day all humyns find it unthinkable to force others to negotiate their non-negotiable rights.

Politics and blame

Like other defenders of capitalism, Roodman blames the lack of progress on the environmental front on the environmentalists or the masses. He admits that the idea of environmental taxes have been around for 80 years, but not used. The blame goes to environmentalists for preferring regulation he says.(p. 22)

Yet elsewhere he does admit that businesses affected overturned tepid environmental reform in Louisiana in 1992.(p. 182) Conventional fossil fuel businesses also shut down a measly tax proposed by Clinton to favor renewable energy sources.(p. 131) Moreover, Roodman recognizes that federal research priorities are skewed toward spending money in the most polluting energy industries, which is also where the most corporate clout lies.(p. 138)

When it comes to the famed market for sulfur emissions rights, Roodman makes further admissions about the reality of capitalist political economy. In the first place, he admits that the law written grants existing polluters the right to pollute based on their previous pollution levels. The idea is that if they cut their pollution below their quota, they can sell the right to making that pollution they cut back to someone else for a profit.

He and other die-hard marketeers do not admit it, but based on this principle, it is possible for companies to invent new sources of pollution and then go to the government to set up a pollution market and then profit from the pollution rights sold! For MIM this is the ultimate proof why patchwork policy can never reform capitalism and why scientific socialist planning has to be used throughout. Profit is an indiscriminate motivator. In the current system it encourages companies to "innovate" by creating new forms of pollution that the government has to regulate and sell rights to.

In fact, to even pass the law to begin with, some companies gained the right to pollute at 1985 levels and hence were guaranteed a profit in selling their rights to pollute from day one of the law, which came into effect in 1990 under President Bush. The five years of progress in reducing emissions between 1985 and 1990 were automatic profits for companies so exempted.(p. 238)

Another reason that socialist scientific planning needs to be used is that one result of the famed U.$. market for sulfur dioxide emissions is that production shifted toward cleaner coal that can only be obtained by more abusive coal-mining techniques!(p. 154) Environmental gains are offset by environmental losses in another area, because Anglo-Saxon individualists refuse to plan production from start to finish and instead place mystical faith in the market.

We credit Roodman for recognizing the negative influence of big money on democracy. "It is politics, not sound policy, that best explains the remarkable resilience of outmoded resource regimes in the United States, for instance. In the 1995-96 election cycle, oil and gas companies gave $11.8 million to congressional candidates to protect tax breaks worth at least $3 billion over the period. Timber lobbies donated $3.6 million, mainly to members of committees that set the Forest Service's budget and logging quotas. Mining firms handed out $1.9 million in order to fend off royalty charges on public hardrock minerals, something they have succeeded in doing for more than 120 years. Ranching interests contributed $2.2 million in order to keep federal grazing fees low, as they have been since 1906."(p. 228) Total environmental lobbyist donations to Congress members was $1.1 million in 1995-6.(p. 229)

While Roodman recognizes the influence of big money in politics, he gives in to shallow and casual anti-communism. He is of the opinion that communism failed to protect the environment,(p. 234) but he gives no detailed treatment and so we won't grant him the benefit of a rebuttal.

Labor aristocracy

Roodman informs MIM of further reasons to oppose the demands of oppressor nation "workers." Although the image of the coal-miner is central to Marxism, in Germany the subsidy to inefficient coal is over $7 billion.(p. 24) Thus coal-mining jobs are saved through a government paper-shuffle, at the cost of over $85,000 per coal-mining job per year.

Likewise, England had a source of fuel open to it--the natural gas of the North Sea--but labor aristocrats and labor bureaucrats opposed closing the coal mines despite their higher levels of pollution. MIM would point out that under socialism, everyone is guaranteed a job, so resistance to environmental progress of this sort should be lower. The way it happened in England, imperialist Thatcher rammed change down the throats of the labor aristocracy and England is one of the few countries in the world experiencing declining carbon emissions in the midst of economic growth as a result.(p. 104)

The environment is often a reason we must refocus our Marxism into Leninism, which includes a theory of imperialism as the decadent stage of capitalism. As Lenin pointed out, whole countries become parasitic and attain decadent lifestyles at the expense of the Third World masses.

Environmentalists should be Leninists of the MIM sort, because we oppose the consumption demands of the oppressor nation workers and because we recognize decadence and conservatism not just in the imperialists, but the oppressor nation workers.

MIM favors having the imperialist countries pay the Third World for the right to emit greenhouse gasses. If there is a global market for pollution rights created under global capitalism, then the Third World should receive 80 percent of the pollution rights as the UN has pointed out.(p. 195) Since the imperialist countries create 80 percent of greenhouse gas pollution, they will have to pay the Third World tremendous sums of money to emit greenhouse gasses. Roodman correctly points out that the rich countries have it in their self-interest to pay for an end to global pollution, because they cannot afford to wait until the poor are rich enough to do so themselves.(p. 196)

Unlike the Titoites or anarchists favoring "local control," MIM never favors local interests over those of the international proletariat. If a small group of workers or petty-bourgeoisie benefits from pollution at the expense of the international proletariat MIM, like Marx before it, stands with the international proletariat against the local interests of the workers backing pollution. It is the duty of the communist to apply Marxist science and support the interests of the class overall and not just any one of its sections. The unions opposing greenhouse gas emissions standards discussed at the 1997 Kyoto conference are wrong.(p. 230)

Only 1 in 300 German workers are coal-miners and 1 in 25 workers in the Pacific Northwest of North America make their living in mining or lumber.(p. 53) As Mr. Spock would say in Star Trek, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The few will not be allowed to override the many under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
by Stephen Jay Gould
(NY: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999), 241pp. hb

reviewed by MC5, October 16, 1999

Stephen Jay Gould is a hero of ours for flaying creationism, eugenics and pseudo-scientific theories of race and gender. Nonetheless, this book is an accommodation, a political sell-out from our point of view. From Gould's point of view the book is a political necessity to show that the majority of religious practitioners already have their own reasons for leaving creationism out of the schools. He proposes a false peace between science and religion, religion being defined almost exclusively as Christianity when it comes to examples in the book.

We agree with Gould that his thesis in the book is "nothing original" and "follows a strong consensus accepted for decades by leading scientific and religious thinkers alike"(p. 3)--especially if we restrict that consensus to the consensus of the religious power-elite including the Pope who now endorses evolution.

The thesis is that there are two rocks, one science and one religion. Science has the turf of the natural world and religion has the turf of the spiritual. According to Gould their separation can be called NOMO (Non- Overlapping Magisteria). The word "magisterium" has some application in Catholicism as meaning "turf."

Stephen Jay Gould admits to being an agnostic(p. 8) and also admits to not being an expert in religion. He says he does not understand it, but at the same time he assures the religious community that science can do it no damage, that it's all a matter of how religious thinkers interpret their own scriptures. However, we hard-core atheists believe Gould is wrong, because there is no way to identify "dogmatic theology"(p. 105) as the enemy instead of all religion. Gould is not an expert like he says, but there are also no religious experts who are able to show a reasoned approach to their followers on how to uphold the NOMO. In other words, Gould settled for an unscientific determination of "dogmatic theology" and has surrendered the boundaries of science into the foggy mists.

No science of science

After speculating that people who think in terms of "yes/no" instead of means or probabilities may be throwbacks to an atavistic past when our brains were less developed, (p. 51) and after publishing previous work flaying others for lacking stochastic thought, Gould takes up a case-by-case method to show that religious people understand science well enough to leave it alone. His most noted example is Newton who he says spent more time in religion than physics,(p. 84) and there are of course many cases in history of monks or priests advancing science.

Such a case-by-case approach abandons Stephen Jay Gould's usual preference for accounting for chance. A serious study of the advance of science would find that disproportionately it is carried out by atheists. Of course, the number of atheists in the world has been small relatively-speaking, and not all scientists have been atheists; yet there is no doubt that there is a statistical regularity there, not least of all because a large portion of religious people do not accept Stephen Jay Gould's NOMO and cannot by the precepts of their religion--Christian Scientists being one classic example.

Unfortunately it has been left to Marxism to be the entirety of the science of science or the science of the advance of science. By now there should be many non-Marxists taking the object of study known as the "history of science" and generating scientific theories. It is political reality of the sort dealt with by Stephen Jay Gould that has undercut this possibility. The result of scientific practice regarding the history of science would confirm harsh atheist conclusions and is not supported by the academy.

No science of religion: leaving social science high and dry

Gould restricts himself to speaking of biology and some physics. Left out in his definition of the "natural world" is humyn behavior in most of its aspects. He only notes in passing that his fundamentalist opponents do not have many counterparts in Europe; they are Southern, poor and rural.(p. 132)

There is in fact a whole geography in the middle section of the United $tates known as the Bible Belt. It extends from southern Illinois into the South and ranges from the East Coast through the mid-West and parts of the West.

When Gould points to geography, rural areas and poverty he is talking about causes of fundamentalism that are part of the natural world. We at MIM believe that the science of science points to the eradication of the causes of religion in the long run. For example, as the world progresses, rural life and poverty should become less common and fundamentalism might then disappear.

Progress concerning the orbit of the earth around the sun has eradicated some religion in the past. Just as an example is Galileo's advocacy of the heliocentric view of the solar system accepted by everyone today. Gould goes to some length to make apologies for the Pope for persecuting Galileo in 1633 and thereafter, who he says was asking for trouble. (Yet Gould does not say that the Pope simply dropped Galileo and let some other scientist who hadn't "miffed" the Pope put forward the theory.)(pp. 71-4)

An even bigger blow to religion would be if humyns attained immortality. All the discussions in religion of the after-life would seem rather strange. All the many people taking up religion for its comforting aspects regarding death would no longer have their reason for taking up religion. Yet, immortality is a question of the natural world. It is not a question of the spiritual one that is alleged to exist. Right now there is no way NOMO could convince religious people that immortality is a question of the natural world, because there is no rational thought in religion per se, only people with religious convictions who also have scientific background. There are shades of atheism between the Branch Davidians on the one side and atheists on the other.

Like many people in the "harder" sciences, Gould believes there is no science of politics or religious behavior. That is why he surrendered science to a NOMO with no scientific definition of "dogmatic theology." In contrast, we Marxists believe there will be a day as in the movie "The Matrix" in which all the various thoughts and illusions of the brain can be created through scientifically created biological and neuro-physical stimulations. Rather than divisive religions making references to irrational proofs that cannot be comprehended by all humyns, religion will die and choices will be made by a secular morality, a secular morality which in turn will die with the creation of a full scientific understanding now lacking and held back by religion. What will unite secular morality out of the rubble of all the various fallen relgions is science. As scientific thought advances even further secular morality will also pass, because it will no longer be able to spur controversy in the distant communist-anarchist future of humyn unity.

Professional self-interest

As Gould might himself suspect, seeking to rely on neat compartments between something that exists and something that cannot even be defined is an impossible endeavor: "If this battle [over creationism--MC5] has played a major role in the twentieth century cultural history of America, and has consumed the unwelcome time of many scientists (including yours truly) in successful political campaigns to preserve the First Amendment and reject the legislatively mandated teaching of palpable nonsense, then how can NOMA be defended as more than a pipe dream in a utopian world?"(p. 124)

All this time, MIM thought it was distributing Gould's books since the early 1980s, because he did an energetic job of criticizing eugenics and other pseudo-sciences spurred by oppressor ideologies. We thought he was a model, but now Gould is saying that scientists should not want to spend their time in such work.

He is undertaking to set up neat boundaries for class reasons, reasons of professional self-interest in science production. "Careers are short, and while I won't deny some good moments of comedy, and even of prideful achievement, I'd sure rather be studying the evolution and paleontology of West Indian land snails than fighting creationists. 'Nuff said."(p. 210)

The above quote reeks of class interests, aside from the vulgar aspect in which such a career can pay for exotic travels. Capitalist science production encourages specialization and obscurity. As a class, intellectuals producing science need to demonstrate a monopoly in some area to be good commodities. These scientists feel a constant pressure to become such commodities and enjoy their lives, even if it would be more useful to teaching and advancing science to spend more time on eugenics, religion and such subjects where the overall picture of science emerges.

Gould does admit that science had to expand its turf against Christianity.(p. 64) It wasn't always in the condition that it is today of having the prestige and class power behind it to be separate from religion. Science had to fight to its current position, but now Gould says it can afford to make peace with religion.

Of course, as a group, scientists will not give up their turf and way of making a career. Yet they maintain the NOMO kind of illusion fostered by capitalism that science is highly compartmentalized and in no need of an atheist philosophy such as dialectic materialism to integrate it, not just within a theory of evolution, but across-the-board. Physicists, biologists and political economists are encouraged to think they have nothing in common in their underlying methods.

Ironically, when Gould should be calling on all people of scientific understanding to defend high school textbooks from fundamentalists trying to insert their agendas, he takes up agnosticism and denies the underlying basis of scientific thought. His strategy will end up leaving biologists fighting this fight by themselves.

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Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality
by John Gribbin
New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1995
reviewed by HC88

Schrödinger's Kittens is the most recent book by John Gribbin about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is the sequel to In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, which was published in 1984. In his newer book, Gribbin claims to have "solved the quantum mysteries", and presents a relatively recent interpretation of quantum mechanics, the "transactional interpretation", which he argues is the best available interpretation. MIM disagrees with Gribbin. We prefer the interpretation known as Bohmian Mechanics (BM).

Science for the People

When reading books about science, it is important for revolutionaries to keep in mind the difference between the science of the bourgeoisie and that of the people. The bourgeoisie needs science that produces results, so it can produce sophisticated killing machines to use against the people, and luxuries for its amusement. The proletariat needs its science to agree with reality as well, but for different reasons. Proletarian science is used to serve the people, rather than to oppress and kill them.(1) Philosophically, the bourgeoisie needs its science to be presented in a way that obscures reality, because the future is not bright for the bourgeoisie: facing reality would be too depressing. The people, however, need not be reluctant to face the truth, because the future is ours.

Materialism or Idealism?

As Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, we at MIM are materialists. All this means is that we believe that we exist in the world and not that the world exists in us. Lenin put it this way in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:

"The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind."(2)

The nonrecognition of the property to which Lenin refers is called solipsism, or subjective idealism. When it comes to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, many physicists come very close to solipsism. Physicist John Wheeler, for example, believes that human beings created the universe by looking at it, and he supports this "theory" with arguments based on the prevailing interpretation of quantum mechanics. Gribbin is not nearly as bad as Wheeler.

In Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels said this about the difference between materialism and it's arch-nemesis, idealism:

"The answers which the philosophers gave to [the question of the relation of thinking to being, and which is primary] split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature--and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation of some form or another... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regard nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism."(3)

Nearly all physicists advocate interpretations of quantum mechanics which implicitly side with the idealists according to this criterion of Engels. This is the camp Gribbin is in, and he is actually one of the less idealist physicists in this camp.

Isn't Science Objective?

We Maoists believe science is science, and anyone who wants to know what it means for something to be a science should read On Practice, by Mao Tse-Tung, or Lectures on Physics, by Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (both great scientists).(4) By definition science applies the Marxist theory of knowledge that truth is determined by practice. Practice can take the form of class struggle in the case of Maoism (the science of revolution), or scientific experiment, in the case of physics. The issue dealt with in Gribbin's book is one of interpretation of current scientific knowledge, and so the controversy is really a result of the bourgeoisie paying people to legitimize bourgeois philosophy by calling it science. The entire field of psychology is also an example of this.(5) The interpretation of quantum mechanics that MIM advocates and the interpretation most physicists advocate are diametrically opposed philosophically, but make the same predictions about every conceivable experiment, so the science underlying them is the same: it's the philosophy that's different. The reason MIM thinks this matters, rather than just being idle speculation, is that the prevailing interpretation affects the way physics is taught, so that today when people learn quantum mechanics they are also learning to think of subjectivity as fundamental to the way the universe works; they are learning to be idealists. This disarms the masses ideologically, and clears the road for all sorts of unscientific mystical and religious ideas to take root.

Gribbin's Approach

Throughout the book Gribbin promises to offer his choice of the "Best Buy" for an interpretation of quantum mechanics. His approach in deciding on this best buy is an unscientific one, and he even explicitly says as much; the best interpretation for him means the one that gives the results he wants.(6) Philosophically, Gribbin, like most scientists, presents a muddled mixture of materialist and idealist arguments and positions. At his best, Gribbin presents a very good materialist exposition of the relation between absolute and relative truth in the context of scientific discovery.(7) More often, however, he comes across as a solipsist or, at best, a very muddled materialist. He confuses reality with theories about it, by saying the atom is a model!(8) He makes many analogous statements, all of which tend to blur the distinction between absolute and relative truth. Gribbin's point in saying that the atom is a model, and that humans invented quarks, is that the experiments that scientists perform and the way the results are interpreted are influenced by the theoretical models in the heads of the scientists. However, this goes both ways, and the results of experiments change the theoretical models. The model of an atom is a model, but the atom is an atom, and it's objective existence is proved by voluminous experimental data, irrespective of the likelihood that it will eventually turn out that the current theoretical model of the atom is less than 100% correct. Gribbin makes this point, and then immediately ignores it. This muddleheadedness leads him to call the final chapter of his book "A Myth for Our Times". Gribbin is looking for a myth about quantum mechanics because he doesn't think there can be any truth about quantum mechanics: for him theories are reality.

The Quantum World

In order to understand the problem addressed in this book, one first has to have some idea of the ways in which quantum physics differs from the so-called classical physics which describes the way the everyday world works. It is just a fact of nature, demonstrated by countless experiements, that small-scale physics is nothing like what can be extrapolated from what is known about the large-scale, and all interpretations of quantum mechanics agree about this. Two of the main ways in which quantum physics differs from classical physics are wave-particle duality and nonlocality.

The classic demonstration of wave-particle duality occurs in the two-slit experiment. If you take a piece of opaque material and cut two tiny slits in it very close together, put a detection apparatus on one side and then shoot at the material a succession of particles from the other side (any particles you want: electrons, protons, photons, muons, ...), you'll find that the detector detects a pattern called an "interference pattern" that is typical of wave behavior. If the particles all behaved classically, like baseballs, you would expect almost all the detections to occur in a small region behind each slit, mostly towards the center of the region, but instead experiments show that if everything is set up right, there are almost no detections at that location. This wavelike behavior lead physicists to posit that instead of evolving according to the old physics of Newton, particle behavior is actually described by a wave equation, the Schrödinger equation. This turned out to be a remarkably successful theory. Schrödinger himself consistently opposed the subsequent idealist direction quantum physics went in. The Schrödinger equation remains a fundamental part of most interpretations of quantum mechanics, including the interpretation we favour, BM.

Nonlocality is much more controversial than wave-particle duality. Many physicists still don't accept it, although it has been demonstrated conclusively in a series of experiments. Nonlocality refers to the instantaneous influence of macroscopically seperated entities on one another. The classic demonstration of nonlocality is the Aspect experiment, which wasn't performed until the early 1980's, and was based on a thought experiment, called the EPR (for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox, which was developed in the 1930's. The EPR paradox was designed to make the prevailing interpretation of quantum mechanics look absurd, so to understand it one has to know something of that interpretation. The experiment, when performed, showed that something called Bell's inequality was violated. Bell's inequality is an equation worked out by physicist John Bell relating the probabilities of various measurement results given the assumption of locality.

Philosophically, we Maoists aren't just materialists, we're dialectical materialists. A major part of dialectics is expecting the unexpected: we expect the phenomenology of the world will always be far more rich than what is explained by our theories, and thus we expect that it will always be possible to find an experiment to perform whose results disagree with the prevailing theories, making possible and in fact necessitating the further development of science. Unlike the proletariat which has time on its side, the bourgeoisie is doomed, so it retreats into idealism to avoid having to face this reality. Part of this idealism is the metaphysics of theorizing a static, unchanging, undialectical universe. So the paid ideologists of the bourgeoisie in the physics community always expect their theories to be good for all time, no matter how often these expectations are shattered by reality, as in the double-slit and Aspect experiments. Physicists who know dialectics welcome unexpected experimental results, but most bourgeois physicists just try to cover them up, which explains why most physicists are still trying to cover up nonlocality after more than a decade of experiments proving it.

Quantum Orthodoxy

The orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics is called the Copenhagen interpretation (CI), because it was created by Niels Bohr and his collaborators in Copenhagen. Recently it has been falling somewhat out of favour, so that today, of those physicists who have a position, not many more than half prefer CI. This is the interpretation underlying all the problem-solving formalism taught in most college courses on quantum mechanics, although the way these courses are taught, most students are probably barely aware that there is any way of interpreting quantum mechanics as anything other than a mathematical formalism.

CI is usually formulated as a collection of postulates. One postulate is quantization, which gives a purely formal way of taking a classical analysis of a physical system and generating a quantum one. Part of this says that a quantum system is described by a "state vector" which generates a probability distribution for the possible configurations of the system. Another postulate is that the state vector evolves according to the Schrödinger equation. And finally, there is the postulate of the "collapse of the state vector" which says that a measurement of the state of a quantum system has the effect of changing the state to accord with the result of the measurement. It is from this last postulate that much of the difficulty with the interpretation of quantum mechanics arises.

For example, consider the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment: take a cat and put it in a box. Also put in the box some amount of radioactive material which you know has a 50% chance of emitting radiation within the next hour, and a radiation detector which is wired to indicate the presence of radiation by cracking open a vial of cyanide. An hour later there are two possibilities: either radiation was emitted, and the cat is dead, or not, and it is alive. CI says that until someone opens the box and looks inside, collapsing the state vector, the quantum system in the box is actually in a combination of the two states (cat dead and cat alive).

This thought experiment highlights some of the difficulties with CI: it is formulated in terms which aren't given any precise meaning. What is a measurement? Can the cat perform a measurement on itself to determine whether it's dead? Gribbin describes other thought experiments in which it seems as though a measurement cannot be said to have been made unless an observer is present who knows how to perform computations in quantum mechanics!(9) This makes it easy to understand how such an extremely prominent physicist as John Wheeler can argue that "it is only the presence of conscious observers, in the form of ourselves, that has collapsed the wave function and made the universe exist."(10) This is the ultimate in solipsism.

It should be pointed out that not all physicists who advocate CI agree with Wheeler. In fact, it is misleading to refer to CI as an interpretation at all; the CI formalism still has to be interpreted. Gribbin presents some of the less idealist ways of interpreting it, among which are the "transactional interpretation" that he advocates, and the ensemble interpretation, which says that CI formalism is just a calculational tool for predicting the distributions of results of large numbers of measurements of similar systems.(11)

However, MIM does not just have a problem with the extremely solipsistic interpretations of CI a la Wheeler. MIM, along with the advocates of the interpretation which we favour, BM, believe that all versions of CI are implicitly idealist. We agree with the criticisms of CI given by advocates of BM, so we will reproduce them here: CI is a theory of epistemology. It doesn't talk about what actually happens in a quantum system, just about what can be known about it. So there is a state vector which tells the possible outcomes of measurements we might make, and their probabilities, and a state space representing the conceivable states of the system, and observables which act on the state space representing things we might measure, and then the state vector collapse which expresses the change in the information we have about the system after measuring an observable. All of these elements of the CI formalism have to do with our knowledge of the system. This built-in subjectivity is the reason why so many of the terms are ill-defined and so much of the resulting physics is observer-dependent, and leads to all the solipsism.

Alternatives

There are an extremely large number of alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics. Gribbin deals with most of the more popular ones, without doing any of them justice in the small amount of space he devotes to them. Most of the alternative interpretations Gribbin deals with retain part of the CI formalism, altering other parts.

The most popular alternative to CI is the Many Worlds interpretation (MW). As with CI, this is not really one interpretation but a collection of interpretations built on a common mathematical formalism. Most versions of MW would interpret the Schrödinger's cat puzzle by saying that rather than the cat existing in a combination of states (dead and alive) there were rather two universes, one where the cat died and one where it lived, that the one universe split into at the beginning of the experiment. Performing the experiment just amounts to deciding which universe you're in. Gribbin reports that materialist physicist John Bell developed an interpretation of MW that didn't involve any actual universe splitting, but went on to criticize MW as extreme solipsism: one of the fundamental elements of the theory is the description of "observers" by "quantum memory states", which are required to describe "coherent histories".(12) These sort of ideas are also the basis of the Decohering Histories interpretations (DH).

Gribbin correctly ridicules the Many Minds interpretation (MM), which says, for example, that the mind of the observer in the Schrödinger's cat experiment splits into two minds, one perceiving a dead cat, the other a live one.(13)

The best of the interpretations which retain parts of CI are the "corrections" interpretations. In these interpretations the Schrödinger equation is modified in such a way as to make the problem of state vector collapse disappear. Most such approaches propose that this happens via some mechanism, such as heat or the gravitational field. Gribbin's favoured interpretation, the "transactional" interpretation, is similar to these in that it gets around the problem of state vector collapse via a trick that allows it to view the state vector as always collapsed, leaving the rest of the CI formalism unaltered.

Gribbin also mentions an interpretation called Quantum Logic (QL). This sounds like it might completely do away with the CI formalism, but Gribbin says so little about it, and MIM is so unfamiliar with it, that we can't say for sure.

An interesting thing about all these interpretations is that many of them make actual testable predictions that differ from CI predictions, via which it may be possible to test them. This means that there are experiments where they predict results different from what CI predicts. Thus it may be possible to definitively prove that some versions of these interpretations are wrong, or that CI is wrong (by doing the experiments and seeing whose predictions are wrong). Gribbin mentions only a few such tests, for versions of MW and MM, but MIM knows of such experimental tests that have been proposed for other versions of MW, several versions of "corrections", versions of DH, and a version of BM that incorporates Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The criticisms of CI given above apply to all the alternatives discussed here as well, with the possible exception of QL. Is there a way of getting around the subjectivity implicit in all these interpretations? The answer is yes.

The "Best Buy"

MIM disagrees with Gribbin about which interpretation of quantum mechanics is the "Best Buy". We prefer the Causal interpretation, or Bohmian Mechanics (BM), which is also called a "hidden variables" or "pilot-wave" interpretation. Bohmian mechanics is an interpretation of quantum mechanics from which the entire CI formalism can be derived in the context of describing the physics of specific experiments, but where state vector collapse in such situations is automatic because in BM all particles have completely well-defined positions at all times. It is completely deterministic and observer-independent.(14) And it is extremely simple to develop: there are two postulates in BM. The first postulate is: all particles have well-defined positions at all times, and the description of the state of any system consists of the positions of the particles in that system together with a wave function that evolves according to Schrödinger's equation. Second: the velocities are determined by a function which depends on the wave function. This function is determined by being the simplest function that satisfies certain natural symmetry properties. From these two postulates follow an interpretation of quantum mechanics which explains all the phenomenology that CI explains, most of it much more naturally than CI, and which doesn't require us to scrap materialism. This is why MIM recommends BM as the quantum "best buy". MIM will be publishing more information on BM in the future, in the form of a review of books by it's inventor, David Bohm.

Unfortunately, MIM cannot recommend this book as a first book to read about quantum mechanics, because all the experiments described in the book are described from the point of view of CI. This is unfortunately the way quantum mechanics is actually taught, but MIM recommends learning materialist quantum mechanics first and then reading this book to compare it to the idealist formulations.(15) It is important when reading the descriptions of experiments in this book to keep in mind that there is a perfectly good interpretation of quantum mechanics in which all particles follow perfectly well-defined paths. There are also a few chapters on the history of science that it could be useful for people to read, which describe how European scientists discovered the scientific method, or equivalently, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, and which describe some of the advances made through application of this method.

Notes:
1. To learn more about how science can be used to serve the people, read Science for the People, available from MIM for $5, or Away With All Pests, available from MIM for $7.
2. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1976, pg. 311.
3. Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels, International Publishers, New York, 1996, pgs. 20-21.
4. "On Practice" is available from MIM as part of the Four Articles on Philosophy, available from MIM for $4. Lectures on Physics (all 3 volumes) are available from the MIM Supporters Group online bookstore at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/8411/books/.
5. See MIM Theory 9: Psychology and Imperialism, available from MIM for $5.
6. Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, John Gribbin, (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1995), pg. 219.
7. Ibid. some of 184-6.
8. Ibid pg. 185.
9. Ibid. pgs. 143-4.
10. Ibid., pg. 16.
11. Ibid. 172-3. Also see ibid. pg. 148 for some not so idealist speculation as to the meaning of CI by CI advocates.
12. Ibid. pgs. 173-4.
13. Ibid. pg. 171.
14. It can actually be made indeterministic by adding randomness (Stochastic BM), but it isn't fundamentally so.
15. Sheldon Goldstein, a mathematical physicist at Rutgers, has written some very good introductory papers on BM. A good place to go to start learning materialist quantum mechanics would be his home page at http://math.rutgers.edu/~oldstein/

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Pseudo-Environmentalist Grab-Bag Pales in Contrast to Maoist Science

Sustainable America: America's Environment, Economy and Society in the 21st Century
Daniel Sitarz ed., foreword by Al Gore
Carbondale, IL: Earthpress, 1998.
312 pp. pb.

review by MC5

Government and corporate officials on the "President's Council on Sustainable Development" put together several reports that found their way into this book edited by an attorney, teacher and Director of the Global Research Institute, Daniel Sitarz. The co- leaders responsible for the effort are Jonathan Lash from the World Resources Institute and David Buzzelli, Vice-President of Dow Chemical.(p. 5)

Vice-President of the United States Al Gore introduces the book and staunch liberal ex-Senator Paul Simon has endorsed the book on the back cover. Officers from Chevron, GM, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, Georgia- Pacific and other corporations contributed and hence, this is the semi-official book of the ruling class on the environment. Its ideas are not necessarily Clinton administration policy, but the Clinton administration sought to put this group of people together and start the process of putting together a program for the environment.

We expected this book to be a consensus position with much watered-down phraseology and no substance. Instead we were shocked to read an ambitious grab-bag of various ideas that could go into an imperialist political program for the environment.

Politics and environmentalism

The study group behind this book decided that it would be best not to "confront" (p. 6) industry with environmental demands and instead to "work with" industry. In any political situation, those supporting education as if in contrast to confrontation are usually the ones saying mealy-mouthed things that add up to nothing.

Since most environmentalists are not worked out in their economic or political thinking, many ideas presented in the book are in contradiction with each other. In a sense, the book is a catalogue of existing private and government efforts on the environment with little disciplined weighing or evaluation of the varied efforts.

Some ideas are clearly socialist ideas, but the word "socialist" is never used. Among other things, the book proposes environmental guidance of production and not just in the consumption stage. Several national goals are proposed, including in relationship to planning of energy production. The use of scientific planning in production for the benefit of the environment of all people is a socialist idea. The very fact that the government sells sulfur emissions rights took an act of scientific planning, not something that spontaneously arose in the free market. The "invisible hand" did not even know what sulfur emissions were not long ago. The sort of half-measures discussed in the book to correct the free market economy are known as "social-democracy." The authors probably do not consider themselves social-democrats, but whether they know it or not, they are.

The Council put forward a number of new policy ideas for the ruling class:

1. An income tax cut to offset new "Green" taxes based on the "polluter pays" principle--e.g. higher volume or weight-based garbage disposal fees, more tolls on highways to penalize driving.

2. Abolition of pollution subsidies such as expansion of highway construction spending: "Below-cost timber sales and timber road building, below-market grazing fees, the treatment of hard-rock mining under the 1872 Mining Law, below-market charges for irrigation water, below-market charges for federal power, below- costs charges for recreational uses, agricultural commodity subsidies, many subsidies for highway construction and water projects, certain energy research and development programs, and federally underwritten flood, crop, and disaster insurance are among the programs that distort the cost of doing resource-related business from the resource-developer or user to the taxpayer."(p. 36)

3. Tighter regulations and standards for green claims in advertising and labeling.(p. 43)

4. A shorter work-week and working from home to save commuting.(p. 44)

5. Placing responsibility for packaging on manufacturers, not consumers.(p. 60) (A clearly socialist idea ruined in implementation under capitalism.)

There are two ways in which we cannot take the book seriously; although overall it is a useful book. One problem is its lack of policy coherence. The other is the impossibility of implementing ideas suggested within capitalism. Many policies will end up creating paper-shuffling bureaucracy without accomplishing anything, because capitalism is in contradiction with the environment.

Our biggest complaint is that yet again we find another advocate of slicing and dicing the environment for sale, in the name of preventing pollution. The argument goes that if the environment had a price it would not be spoiled by capitalists. Hence, to these die-hard defenders of free markets and Anglo-Saxon individualism, the right to pollute should be bought and sold.

While we agree that taxing pollution is better than doing nothing under capitalism and we support it as a reform possible within capitalism, the bottom line is there is no real Green that is not Red. Creating a free market for pollution rights only proves that some people have second-class environmental rights based on their money. The creation of this market for pollution rights which started under the Bush administration is proof that under the free market the environment is either ignored and destroyed or at best, parceled out and destroyed by a minority able to afford it. The market for pollution rights also proves the anti-people nature of the government, which does not rush forward to buy and retire all the pollution rights.

We at MIM do not believe the environment can be sliced and diced as if for packaging on the grocery store shelf. Either the air is clean and safely breathable or it is not. It is not possible to individualize the environment. Centuries of class training of the bourgeois sort will have to be thrown aside, because no one has the so-called right to create a toxic environment for someone else.

When it is possible to farm vegetables, grains and livestock on an individual parcel of land, it might be argued that individualism makes sense despite its many sickening side-effects. Such is the frontier history of Amerika for instance, in which Euro-Amerikans killed indigenous populations and rewarded themselves with land that they worked on individually.

Overall though, the environment is not something that can be treated in an individual way. Since everyone lives on the same planet, Anglo-Saxon individualism simply does not apply to the environment. Pseudo-environmentalism seeks to protect private property, the right of profit above the rights of others to be in a non-toxic environment.

An example of how individualism results in pseudo-environmentalism is the focus on the recycling movement as an individual lifestyle. Few pseudo-environmentalists are willing to admit that their efforts in convincing individuals to recycle usually end up for naught, because people individually recycle and then the city government picks up the newly sorted material to be brought to the garbage dump.

It is easier to blame individuals and their lifestyles when uncomfortable political reality is that there is usually no profit to be made in purchasing, transporting and using recycled materials. The reason there is not enough attention to where allegedly recycled material goes is that reporters and environmentalists are loath to admit that there is concentrated power in this society, not just an agglomeration of individuals. It would be impossible to avoid figuring out who the main producers and government units are in relation to the environment if reporters and environmentalists really did their jobs. Even in this rather thorough grab-bag of a book, there is a mention of the need for purchasing policies by the government ($400 billion, p. 69) and academia($120 billion in purchases a year, p. 210), but no tracing of where most allegedly recycled material ends up.

Some other political objections MIM has include the book's call to cut immigration. MIM supports opening Amerikan borders. Apparently the authors believe that the United $tates is the world's leading environmental problem and they do not believe that will end any time soon, so they call for a cutback in the number of people living the Amerikan lifestyle. To their credit, the authors do not shirk U.$. responsibility for being the number one world polluter and they also recognize that there is "gender and race-based discrimination" including in toxics distribution. (p. 8)

Useful facts

-- "The average annual rate of deforestation worldwide is equivalent to an area the size of the state of Georgia. Worldwide, the ocean's fisheries are in a state of collapse. In the United States, citizens consume 25 percent of the Earth's resources although they constitute only five percent of the planet's population. In the last 20 years, per capita consumption in the United States has increased by 45 percent."(p. 4)

-- "In the 130 years between 1850 and 1980, about 15 percent of the world's forests disappeared. During the next 10 years, another 6 percent--an area larger than California, Texas, New York, and Montana combined --was cut and not replanted."(p. 11) -- "Approximately 20 percent of the world's population in the late 1980s lived in industrialized countries. These countries consumed 85 percent of the aluminum and synthetic chemicals used in the world; 80 percent of paper, iron, and steel; 75 percent of timber and energy; 60 percent of meat, fertilizer, and cement; half the world's fish and grain; and 40 percent of the fresh water. This scale of consumption ranges from three to 19 times the consumption levels of developing countries."(p. 26)

-- "About two billion tons of materials such as pesticides and fuels are dissipated into the environment during use. After consumers use a final product, it joins the 200 million tons of post-consumer waste produced in the United States annually. Americans produce the most municipal waste per capita of any country on earth. The United States is also the leading producer of greenhouse gas emissions (contributing 19 percent of total world emissions in 1991) and is the world's largest producer of toxic wastes."(p. 27)

-- "Between 1960 and 1988, the volume of U.S. municipal solid waste more than doubled, while population multiplied 1.4 times. Today the average American produces 4.5 pounds of trash a day, by far the highest per capita production of municipal waste in the world. Americans could recycle or compost half this volume--yard waste, newspapers, corrugated cardboard, and beverage containers. Americans actually recycle or compost only 13 percent currently."(p. 62)

-- "In the last two centuries, the country has lost 90 percent of its northwestern old-growth forests, 99 percent of its tallgrass prairie, and hundreds of species of native plants and animals."(p. 117)

-- "Economic benefits from wild species make up an estimated 4.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Fisheries contribute about 100 million tons of food worldwide. One-fourth of all prescriptions dispensed in the United States contain active ingredients extracted from plants, and more than 3,000 antibiotics are derived from microorganisms. Further, nature tourism generates an increasing percentage of tourism revenues worldwide. . . . Tropical forests house between 50 and 90 percent of all species on Earth, but because of forest clearing, 5 to 10 percent of the tropical forest species may be faced with extinction within the next 30 years. As with climate change, one nation cannot solve the problem alone, and the potential for economic harm is huge."(p. 264)

Conclusion

The ruling class lives in fear of a communist environmentalist movement. This book is the proof. The Clinton-organized "President's Council on Sustainable Development" is stealing our thunder by talking about the right to clear air, clean water and overall healthy environment.(p. 17) The last page of the book even mentions the right to food, shelter, education and employment.(p. 274)

The last paragraph of the book is a rebuttal of communism: "Ultimately, however, it is individuals who will determine whether the nations of the world will embark on a sustainable path. It is individuals who will decide to whether to act sustainably in their own lives. It is individuals who will influence corporate behavior."(p. 274)

As with most things, the ruling class seeks to blame individual behavior for environmental degradation. By placing the blame at the individual level, the people who make the largest decisions with concentrated economic power get let off the hook. Thanks to pseudo-environmentalists setting up government programs to sell pollution rights, the rich buy and sell the right to kill the rest of us with pollution -- all in the name of Green reform.

MIM supports many of the short-term measures mentioned in this book for reform within capitalism. However, our environmental program goes much further:

-- An end to production for profit to be replaced with fully scientifically planned production that prioritizes humyn needs including the non-negotiable rights to food, shelter, clothing, medicine and a non-toxic environment

-- U.S. reparations to Third World countries making environmentally friendly socialist development more easy

-- Opposition to industrialized country "working-class" economic demands for more consumption under capitalism.

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Understanding Forests
by John J. Berger
(San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1998)
188 pp. pb.

reviewed by MC5

We recommend this book as a brief understanding of forestry and the forest-related environment in the United $tates. The author demonstrates some command of details and also less political naivete than most environmentalists.

Facts we need

Rebutting idealism

On the last page of the book, Berger talks about tree-huggers. Across the world, some people chain themselves to trees to resist lumber company exploitation of resources. The redneck reactionaries ridicule these tree-huggers and make them seem mystical.

In truth, some tree-huggers are mystical; they have the equivalent of a religion holding trees as sacred. In contrast, MIM is materialist. MIM's defense of the environment is humyn-centered. We side with the tree- huggers in general, but not always for the reasons they have.

Forests are important to humyns very concretely:

  1. Forests account for 40 percent of all pharmaceutical preparations.(p. 3) The study of substances and their uses in nature is far from complete.
  2. "Through photosynthesis, forests both contribute oxygen to the atmosphere and remove carbon dioxide from it by storing carbon in the form of plant tissue. Forests thus tend to counterbalance global warming, which is intensified by increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide."(p. 4)
  3. The job losses to the labor aristocracy for practicing sustainable forestry have been exaggerated, including by some calling themselves Maoist. Most job losses in the lumber industry are the result of automation, not environmentalism.(p. 103) "'Their jobs ... are no more a reason to continue deforestation than jobs in weapons plants are a reason to go to war.'"(p. 104)

Berger himself pays some attention to combating environmental idealism. In addition to recognizing that humyns too are part of the environment (p. 23) and have always had some role as in lighting forest fires, Berger goes much further. "Forest ecology teaches that nature at times brusquely disrupts and even destroys forests by hurricane, tornado, earthquake, avalanche, volcanic eruption, fire, flood, disease, insect infestations, and combinations of these events and processes."(p. 91)

People seeking to preserve a snapshot of Nature for all time are actually conservative idealists. They do not understand the process of change in Nature and they introduce unrealistic politics into our movement.

Economic theory

Environmentalists publishing in 1998 reviewed thus far by MIM have come out on the offensive against academic economists, and with good reason. Most economists either in academia or the World Bank are dogmatic and unable to incorporate new information or developments into their views. The handful able to compare theories outside a very narrow range are disdained within the field.

Both in the President's Advisory Council on the environment and in Berger's book, some of the environmentalists have come to the realization that the "free market" does not have any accurate scientific information in resource development or exploitation. The cost of cutting down a forest is not just the public's loss of wood, but also the many other species and work they do for the economy for things like production of honey or pollination of vegetable and fruit crops.

The lumber companies do not care about honey or pollination of crops. The lumber company is only in one business and makes profit only in that business. The society and the proletariat in particular has the most to lose from the loss of pollination caused by destroying bee environments for example.

The lumber companies also do not think long-term. When they replace trees, they do so without regard to many issues. Perhaps most frightening is the rush to destroy genetic variation in forests that may be useful to humyns. In addition to the species made extinct each year, the trees replanted tend to be cloned and thus less varied in their genetic stock.(p. 17) Should the climate change, the existing trees may not be able to reproduce for lack of genetic variation appropriate for the new climate.

Politics

Berger realizes that Republicans are bad for the environment. In 1995 the Republican Congress stopped anymore species from being added to the Endangered Species list created by law in 1973.(p. 9) The redneck reactionaries do not understand that most often in recent years the extinction of a species means something about the environment that also has negative consequences for humyns.

Berger also realizes that the Democrats have compromised repeatedly with the timber interests. In 1995, Clinton signed a "salvage logging" loophole into law for logging on federal lands.(p. 83)

In 1996, the Sierra Club also started to oppose any commercial logging of federal lands, because the government's Forest Service was proving itself unable to resist the logging companies' lobbying efforts in any effective way.(pp. 151-2) There are 190 million acres in National Forests that the government has set up.(p. 49)

Although Berger does not develop this point or his fight against idealism sufficiently, he does say: "Some multinationals wield financial resources comparable to those of entire states and nations.... They exert overwhelming political and economic power on local elected officials, resource agencies, rural communities, and even on national governments, especially in developing nations.

"The protection of the world's forests is likewise intertwined with the problems of inequitable distribution of wealth and with the global poverty in which a billion people exist."(p. 134) Furthermore, Berger says the "root causes are the unjust and exploitative social, political, and economic conditions that produce and perpetuate concentrated control over land and other resources by elites and multinational corporations. Forest land ownership patterns must be changed in many parts of the world to promote public-interest forest stewardship by well-trained ecologically qualified forest managers and local traditional forest users."(p. 138)

Above all, Berger seems to realize concretely that the solution of the globe's environmental problems is connected to what we Maoists call the "principal contradiction." MIM sees reparations to the Third World as essential to any environmental program. Berger gives more details phrased in the interests of the petty- bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries:

"Recognizing that economic incentives have to be altered so that it becomes more profitable for governments and people to save forests, rather than to destroy them, a steady stream of payments should be made by nations that can afford to pay--and that benefit from the forests' global services--to forest guardian nations that still have important forests. Payments to developing tropical nations certainly are appropriate in recognition of the tens of billions of dollars (or more) worth of pharmaceuticals that the developed nations have created from compounds that originated in tropical forest plants. Payments to developing nations could also be made to recognize the climate-stabilizing benefits of the forests saved and could represent a form of climate 'insurance premium.'"(p. 149)

MIM also has 100 percent agreement with the following caveat to indigenous nations: "But no group, indigenous or other, should be allowed to take actions that destroy the resource base, a common heritage of all peoples."(p. 150) Hence, if there is a massive restructuring in favor of the environment and the indigenous nations allow capitalism to arise and exploit the forests again, then the other peoples have no obligation to respect their right to destroy the environment. By the same token, no country needs to respect the imperialist countries for destroying the environment, in this case through their lumber companies and excessive and wasteful consumption of their products. Whether the imperialist countries accept an environmentalist reparations program or not the international dictatorship of the proletariat and allied oppressed nations will impose it. The "right" to a sustainable non-toxic environment is non-negotiable.

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World War III: Population and the Biosphere at the End of the Millenium
by Michael Tobias
New York: Continuum, 1998
296pp. pb.

reviewed by MC5

A long list of reviewers gave this book the thumbs up--William Shatner a.k.a. "Captain Kirk" of Star Trek fame and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)'s director and founder for example. There is no doubt that it will make a stir in the intellectual world, and MIM would like to recommend this book as well.

This is a book of many strengths and weaknesses, because it is highly opinionated in a petty-bourgeois way. MIM has some reservations about it as a political work; even though it is very progressive when compared with other works in the field of population. Our main objections to this book are its lack of understanding of politics in general and Chinese politics in particular.

MIM has been saying from its beginning in the 1980s that the current World War III is between the oppressor nations of imperialism and the oppressed nations. In contrast, Tobias sees World War III between the humyn species and the environment, other species in particular.

Malthusian crying wolf

There is more intellectual substance to this book than most written work by environmentalists. Tobias mentions Thomas Malthus, the famous Western economist who thought that population growth would outstrip food supply and lead to cyclical starvation, because Malthus is the progenitor of Tobias's own thinking.

Tobias starts the book talking about the sexual passions of the populace with some tough rhetoric. He seems to believe as MIM does that rhetoric should match the substance of reality in tone, and he believes we are in World War III and facing possible self-extinction.

The whole book is about population projections and statistics on how many children the average family has in each country, with a focus on the largest Third World countries. The heroes in the book are the family planners, often funded with imperialist money.

Tobias admits that he does not know what the limit is, but says there must be some limit to the consumption of the earth's biomass by humyns--a "biotic ceiling."(p. 20) In addition, he stands for "biodiversity," which is the notion that species should not be going extinct at the hands of humyns.

Tobias is wise not to say what the limit is. All previous such projections talking about limits to humyn population have proved wrong starting from Malthus hundreds of years ago.

"Small is beautiful"

The model for Tobias is the country of Bhutan where even ecological tourism is limited so as not to disturb the environment. It has a city of 20,000 at its largest and a total population of 1.3 million Buddhists.(p. 90) Sixty percent of Bhutan is still covered with primary forest.

Others that Tobias admires include the religion of the vegetarian Jains of India and a sect of Hindu called the Bishnoi.(p. 113) Another concrete favorite of his is a national park in Madagascar which also provides some employment and other benefits to villages.(p. 194) He also notes the ecological and non-violent sanity of the Todas of India, "the Lepcha of Sikkim, the Karen of the Thai-Myanmar border area, and the Tasaday of the Southern Philippines."(p. 246)

His experience with these cultures and pre-industrial "primitive communist" societies that dominated most of humyn history should have proved to Tobias that humyns' relationships amongst themselves is what determines their relationship to the environment. For most of humyn history, the humyn has lived without wholesale destruction of the environment. It is only the recent minority of societies that is destroying the environment on a wholesale basis.

To his credit, Tobias accepts the Marxist argument against "back-to-nature" anarchism shared by many environmentalists consciously and unconsciously. Those who have industrialized will not go back, and so we must look forward to new solutions, not backward.(p. 249)

The "Club of Rome" and a book called Small Is Beautiful have been influential amongst the petty-bourgeoisie and imperialists. Each talks about limits to growth. The "Club of Rome" study is an updated version of Malthus.

MIM's approach to "small is beautiful" divides into two. While MIM criticizes the decadent lifestyles of the imperialist countries, and supports the politics of sustainability and appropriate technology, we differ with the many who believe it is possible to live in small isolated communities.

The environment is actually the best reason for "big government" until classes are abolished. Until classes are abolished there will be those seeking to profit at the expense of others' environmental rights. Someone living in the United $tates can and does pollute the environment of people living in Mauritius, Brazil and China. Until this becomes impossible there will have to be "big government"--a dictatorship of the international proletariat allied with oppressed nations over imperialism.

Karl Marx on the environment

Karl Marx believed that the profit motive or more accurately, the appropriation of labor by a minority of capitalists results in the estrangement of the species from Nature as a by-product of the humyn's estrangement from other humyns that occurs in class society. Contrary to the bourgeois media and some ignorant environmentalists, Marx was an environmentalist and humyn-rights activist as a young man of his mid-20s before he detailed all the scientific work on classes that showed how his environmentalist and humyn liberation goals would be achieved. The result was so thorough that we now speak of Marxism and not vague ideas of humyn liberation.

In other words, what a worker would never do to his or her own environment if the matter were left to him or her happens because the worker does not control production: "It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. . . In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. . . Estranged labour turns thus: Man's species being both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man's own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being." (Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader 2nd ed., (NY: WW Norton & Company, 1978), pp. 76-77)

MIM will accept the label of "anthrocentric" from some pseudo-environmentalist critics. Marx believed that humyns are different than other species, which is not in itself to say superior or capable of living outside the laws of Nature. Other animals have their unique characteristics. Marx believed something about production and science to be unique to humyns. The unique character of the humyn is taken away by capitalism according to Marx. Hence, Marx would object to saying that all animals are the same. In contrast with purely moral or religious ideas, Marx induces his ideas from examining animals concretely to figure out what is unique about humyns.

Biodiversity: idealism versus science

While Tobias correctly trashes Catholicism and Islam on reproductive "choice" questions, it is hard to avoid that most conceptions of "biodiversity" like Tobias's are rooted in some kind of religion. The bottom line is that catastrophic species extinctions happened in "Nature" before there were ever humyns. Hence, to say that humyn destruction of other species, even at a rapid pace is "unnatural" is a religious fib. Tobias claims there are only 300 species extinctions every million years.(p. 36) It is a dangerous fib, because it tempts the potential converts into thinking that the nature of Nature is stagnation when change and struggle are evident.

Later in the book Tobias admits that there have been at least five mass extinctions in natural history before, but he claims they were not the fault of a single species. To level "fault" like this in a moralistic way when Nature found ways to wipe out 99.9 percent of species seen on this planet thus far is an example of religious thinking. Today the humyn species is Nature's way of eliminating other species. Thus, an argument in favor of biodiversity resting on Nature's character is false. An argument for biodiversity needs to be based in the needs of the humyn species.

Many take to biodiversity religion in order to defend other species with firm principles, and not with a calculus of what is good for the humyn species. Like Amnesty International activists who don't concern themselves with the humyn right to clothing, shelter, food and non-toxic and non-militarist environments, because they are already middle-class themselves, most biodiversity activists are already well-off themselves and they scorn MIM for being humyn-centered or "anthrocentric." It's easy to be concerned about non-humyn species when you believe you yourself are going to survive.

As an example of where biodiversity religions lead, Tobias says that Kenyan elephants are endangered, but they have "only" killed 60 or 80 people in twenty years.(p. 186) Earth First! activists are the quintessence of this idea. MIM would never make a statement like that about elephants. We seek ways to keep humyns out of harm's way--whether by sharks or elephants, no matter how rare the problem.

MIM only supports biodiversity for its value to humyns. When other species are going extinct, the reason is usually that we are chopping down our forests and otherwise pillaging the land, water and air. These all have consequences for humyns including causing cancer and other public health problems.

Dialectical science in Marxism has always stressed the interconnected nature of reality. Cause and effect works in many wondrous ways. It is the ignorance of science and narrow concern for profit that has caused the imperialist country rulers to focus on those aspects of science utilization that destroy the environment, contrary to the needs of the people. It is not science or industry in themselves that are wrong.

Tobias predicts the humyns will destroy half of existing species and it will be possible to save the other half with an environmental movement.(p. 22) Of potential benefit to biodiversity is abolition of the profit motive. Just as pornography, drug-trading and arms-dealing get their impetus from the profit motive, poaching is also driven by indiscriminate motivator of profit. There are only 2,000 Indian musk deer left, but its pod of musk sells for 15,000 rupees or five years' salary for many Indians.(p. 104)

Beside the question of profit motive, MIM believes any biodiversity movement that does not rely on the spread of scientific thinking and application will fail. Tobias himself is a proven scientific thinker. He recognizes the interconnectedness of reality and has a sharp eye for cause and effect. He has a warped political sensibility common in environmental political circles, but he clearly gives credit to a variety of social causes for reducing the population growth rate. To his credit, he recognizes that in 45 countries becoming economically better off has resulted in slower population growth rates.(p. 26) He complains throughout the book that becoming well-off does not always work to reduce the birth rate. The way he complains on this score is in a sense not being satisfied with loaded dice. Over time, playing with loaded dice has certain results, but not in every instance. Likewise, the petty-bourgeois fanaticism of Tobias and most of the best non-proletarian environmentalists does not settle for playing with loaded dice. The petty-bourgeois fanatics want instant individual results, often by focussing on individual lifestyle in a counterproductive way.

Tobias also recognizes that the item that makes the public feel secure enough to cut back on the number of children planned varies from culture to culture. In Tamil Nadu province in India, the school lunch program assured parents that their children would survive, and hence they gave birth to fewer children.(p. 131) The case of Tamil Nadu would seem contrary to Malthusian logic, but Tobias wisely accepted the truth.

Aside from guaranteeing economic security for children and their parents faster than capitalism, socialism is able to spread science better than capitalism, because capitalism views science as an object of profits and the prerogative of elites. We Maoists in particular see science as carried out by the people and to be distributed as fast as possible without regard for property rights.

One area where there is now an historical problem for environmental science is the fact that the world's unproductive labor has been done in the imperialist countries. Hence, while Third World people work to support the lifestyles of the imperialist countries, only relatively small portions of Third World people could afford scientific educations commonly seen in the imperialist countries. After centuries of militarily imposing a global economic order and division of labor, ingrates from the imperialist countries now go the Third World and tell them that their environmental science is no good.

Third World trust

Although Tobias seems to be treating a different subject than MIM, actually he is not. He realizes that there is not much trust by Third World peoples of imperialist country attempts to limit population growth.

The World Bank is also criticizing environmentalists for wishing poverty on the Third World. However, we do not agree that the truth about imperialist country environmentalists is a justification for World Bank capitalism.

We believe that the sooner imperialism is eliminated, the sooner the world's people can share their scientific advances without concern for profit and thereby speed up the use of environmentally sound technologies. As long as technology is a matter of patents and profits, technology's application will be held back.

The West has tried to have it both ways. While the West robbed India into poverty it now complains that India will be adding over 70 million refrigerators by 2010 that are not state-of-the-art and use chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) just as Amerikans once did.(p. 42) CFCs are implicated in the 90 percent depletion of the ozone over Antartica and 20 percent in portions over Canada and Europe. MIM believes that environmentalists should get on board with the program of socialist dictatorship and reparations to the Third World. The health of the environment relies on the success of our establishing these reparations before the rest of the world copies the imperialist countries' mistakes.

This is how one Indonesian put it: "We are told, 'Look, Indonesia, you are a treasure for the world, maintain your forests. . .' If the tropical forest plays an important role, what do we get for not exploiting it? Everybody shouts, 'Save the forest.' But when you ask how do we meet the needs of the poor people, there is silence. 'I won't give you technology, I won't give you gene patents, you remain poor, you go to hell.' That is how your people (the Americans) look at us."(pp. 163-4) MIM agrees. It is gross hypocrisy for First Worlders to demand ecological purity of the Third World masses when those masses are not eating and have no health care. That is why the MIM program for reparations from imperialist countries to the Third World and indigenous peoples is the only true environmentalist program.

On the one hand the United $tates often funds sterilization programs. On the other hand, in the case of China, the U.$. reactionaries have managed to criticize the "one-child" policy of the state-capitalists.

Tobias criticizes the United $tates for criticizing China(p. 64) and in fact says that China did not go far enough with its one-child policy. We agree with him on its contemporary downfall caused by the return to private farming in China. With private farming and a decrease in economic security, Chinese are returning to their traditional security blanket--having kids to take care of them in old age.

On the other hand, we do not agree with Tobias that China should limit the populations of its "minority" nationalities. Likewise, it is hard to argue that Africa is truly overpopulated; although it certainly could be headed there, again thanks to the economic insecurity of parents caused by imperialist plunder.

Tobias acknowledges the dialogue with Third World people who he and other imperialist country people are asking to forgo economic development so as not to destroy the environment the way the United $tates and Europe already has. From the beginning of the book he also admits it is the Western consumer driving other countries to destroy their environments to support the Western style of life.

For that matter, when Indian government officials argue with environmentalists like Tobias, they point out that India has allowed its forests to be destroyed for energy uses. If India did not use forest wood for fuel, then India's demand for oil would push the price of oil over 100 dollars a barrel.(p. 100) Many believe such would make past oil crises look like tea-parties and global depression could result if socialism did not come into play.

Amerikkkan consumption

This book presents much information that backs MIM's opposition to economic demands of the imperialist country "working" class which is actually a bought-off petty-bourgeoisie. At the current time, our species does not know how to sustain the consumption of the Amerikan middle classes and middle classes of other imperialist countries without destroying the environment. To seek ever greater consumption is thus contrary to the interests of the international proletariat, especially via the reformist strategy Lenin derided as "economism." The success of "economism" is killing the environment and turning the imperialist country masses against the international proletariat.

By the year 2000 imperialist countries "will account for roughly 20 percent of the world's population, about 1.5 billion people, who will be responsible for some 80 percent of all global consumption, not necessarily individual consumption, but mass consumption."(p. 200)

"I'm not sure how I manage it, but in the space of about twenty-four hours I figure that I have conspicuously contributed to global greenhouse gases, to the rape of both temperate and tropical forests, to the death of countless animals (in spite of my being a vegan), to long-term ocean pollution, acid precipitation, ozone depletion, scandalously inefficient mobilization of energy, the purchase of a stealth bomber or two, yet another unneeded freeway, the government-subsidized butchering of cattle kept on public lands, and any number of other ecologically insane expenditures. By simply being an American, I have conspired with the tax collector, and the textile, computer solvents, plastics, and weapons manufacturers. My clothes, electricity, gasoline, phone calls, mail, travel, and packaged foods all contradict my deepest convictions. I seem to have lost touch with the most basic cause and effect, with the web of life's delicate connections. . . And I am told that in my own virtual backyard, five endemic California plant species are going extinct, because of people like myself."(p. 200) Tobias is having no children with his wife.

To MIM, this is the perfect testimony of the limits of petty-bourgeois thinking on the verge of revolutionary proletarian thinking. It really is enormously overwhelming and the solutions can only be at the system level, not the individual behavior level. To understand how the Amerikan child is born to do 280 times as much destruction to the environment as the child born in Nepal according to Paul and Anne Ehrlich,(p. 206) we must understand the system of imperialism.

No one has the right to make the choice to destroy everyone else's environment. Hence, the solution is not convincing individuals to change their lifestyles, because that implies those who do not change their lifestyles have the right to continue. A non-toxic environment is a non-negotiable humyn right which must be backed by force until pollution for private gain is unthinkable. Moreover, it is much easier to change production at the source before goods reach the consumer than to individually convince billions of individuals frustrated with pseudo-environmentalism's impotence.

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The World Watch Reader: On Global Environmental Issues
Lester R. Brown & Ed Ayres, eds.
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)
358 pp., pb.

reviewed by MC5

Books on environmental subjects tend to be progressive by the nature of their topic. The collection of essays in the World Watch Reader drift somewhat more into academic agendas of the writers' fancies than some other essays and books in the field. For that reason, this book is not our favorite of books on the environment that came out in 1998.

Idealism and academic agendas

The peoples of the imperialist countries desperately need to use some of their vast quantities of leisure time to learn speed-reading. Then they need to study foreign cultures. When it comes to the environment, the typical Amerikan ends up reaching consciously and unconsciously for mystic ideas to justify a break with bourgeois economics and non-green thinking. Alan Thein Durning talks about that and unlike other authors admits that what the environmentalists want is impossible through their pseudo-environmentalist strategies.(p. 248)

It will be useful to contrast idealism in the book through two essays--"Dying Seas" by Anne Platt McGinn and "Bio-Invasions" by Chris Bright. Anne Platt describes how the Black Sea has become overloaded with humyn wastes that have contributed to algae and bacteria growth. The result is "eutrophication." Then as the algae consume all the oxygen, the sea becomes "anoxic."(pp. 96-7) The algae also block all the sunlight from reaching deep into the water. All this is supposedly the result of an unnatural "human assault."

To her credit, Platt turns around and says that the pollution of the Black Sea is a loss of fish to eat and tourism. Thus, she returns to a humyn focus. She ends the essay talking about economic losses.

The result of not taking a humyn focus is siding with one species over another for no reason. The evil species in the Black Sea according to Platt is the "Mnemiopis leidyi," which is jelly-fish like and becomes 95 percent of the biomass in the Black Sea at times. (p. 97) Without a humyn focus, there is no reason to side with oxygen breathers or non-oxygen-using species. To say the Black Sea is dead only has meaning to fishers.

In contrast, Chris Bright is clearly mired in conservative idealism. The first evil species to appear in the essay is the "melaleuca," because it manages to displace "virtually all other vegetation."(p. 115)

Can we help ourselves when we snicker at "Perhaps the most insidious form of damage occurs when exotic and native merge. Interbreeding can swamp a native gene pool in foreign genes, thereby eliminating its distinctiveness and eroding the species' genetic diversity."(p. 119) In the first place, we doubt this point factually speaking. Yet it is consistent with the whole approach of seeing the status quo and native as good.

Next we learn that ragweeds, rats and starling are all "weeds." Other invaders called "fire ants" have wiped out many other ants in the United $tates.

Along the same lines, Bright paints European diseases as "invaders" that killed millions of indigenous people in North America.

He paints a picture of ships or other humyn traveling devices as carrying new species to far off lands and then conquering. As a remedy he suggests that people who import new species should pay the price of the impact of those species.(p. 131)

Some species are more useful to humyns than others; although at this time, our scientific knowledge limited by capitalism is far from complete, so we are not able to say with certainty what the consequences of favoring one species over another will be. Bright favors some species over others, but the underlying reasons appear to be religious or unconscious religious reverence for the status quo. He resists change of all sorts, including those that would happen in Nature.

Global warning

Molly O'Meara in "The Risks of Disrupting Climate" describes the risks of global climate change caused by humyn activities. She correctly points out that even if the percentage chance that what the environmentalists are saying is true is low, the cost is simply too great to ignore. A one percent chance to lose $100 quadrillion is worth $1 quadrillion after all.

The United $tates disrupted the Kyoto summit on the question in 1997. The U.S. Senate required that the developing countries take action or it would not ratify the treaty.

The Kyoto problem was a sharp expression of the "principal contradiction." The U.S. Government essentially failed to recognize that one imperialist country citizen pollutes as much as 20 oppressed nations citizens. Furthermore, the imperialist countries are more easily able to afford cleanup efforts.

With a dictatorship of the international proletariat allied with the oppressed nations over imperialism, such problems as Kyoto will be easily resolved. Without such a dictatorship, narrow-minded imperialists will risk destroying the environment for their short-term luxury.

The article on the subject is highly informative, but contains nothing of the real political problems connected and mentioned above.

Food supply

The most famous essay in the collection is one that forced the Chinese social-fascist regime into responding. "Who Will Feed China?" by Lester Brown is about population growth and shrinking arable land in China.

In the Cultural Revolution, the Maoists stressed "grain as the key link" in agriculture. In the midst of capitalist restoration after 1976, Maoists in China continued to focus on this question and pointed out that arable land in China is decreasing. Peasants under "reform" we call capitalist counterrevolution started to build houses, cemeteries and roads on farming land. The Maoists pointed out that we cannot just bow to religious mysticism (cemeteries) and the free market if the result is starvation.

The Chinese government knew all this going back to the 1970s and 1980s, and wrote about it extensively. However, just as Christopher Colombus "discovered" North America, Lester R. Brown "discovered" the food supply problem in China. The Associated Press, Reuters and 6,000 radio and TV broadcasts picked up on the Brown article.(p. 196)

Unlike others, Brown notes with approval China's attempts to limit population both during and after Mao. We will only add that China under Mao had just seen the Soviet Union lose the most economically and politically able 10 percent of its population to the Nazi invaders as casualties. The U.$.A. dropped the A-Bomb on Japan and threatened China with it too. In the Korean War, China suffered heavy losses and U.$. generals spoke in public of invading China. Then in Vietnam, the United States killed 2 million Vietnamese at the very minimum.

If the environmentalists had iced imperialism instead of whining about being apolitical, would China have ended up with over one billion people? Ending economic insecurity and the insecurity caused by imperialist militarism are essential to environmental well-being.

Attack on bourgeois economics

Perhaps the best article is one that also attacks the nub of the problem in environmentalist thinking. Janet M. Abromovitz wrote "Nature's 'Free' Services."

"Ironically, by undervaluing natural services, economies unwittingly provide incentives to misuse and destroy the very systems that produce those services; rather than protecting their assets, they squander them. Nature, in turn becomes increasingly less able to supply the prolific range [of] services that the earth's expanding population and economy demand."(p. 153)

An example would be the following: "Eighty percent of the world's 1,330 cultivated crop species (including fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes, coffee and tea, coca, and spices) are pollinated by wild and semi-wild pollinators. One-third of U.S. agricultural output is from insect-pollinated plants (the remainder is from wind-pollinated grain plants such as wheat, rice, and corn). In dollars, honeybee pollination services are 60 to 100 times more valuable than the honey they produce. The value of wild blueberry bees is so great, with each bee pollinating 15 to 19 liters (about 40 pints) of blueberries in its life, that they are viewed by farmers as 'flying $50 bills.' . . . In Europe, the contribution of honey bee pollination to agriculture was estimated to be worth $100 billion in 1989."(p. 161)

Prices in the "free market" do not account for damage done to Nature's "free services" like pollination. Abromovitz is undertaking a scientific effort to figure out what those prices should be to reflect an environmentally sustainable economy. Her effort whether she knows it or not is part of socialist economic planning and represents a sharp criticism of bourgeois economic thought.

Recycling: admissions of a pseudo-environmentalist

Because of anti-communist individualism rooted in the extent of the middle-classes in the U$A, the U.$. environmental movement shies away from political discussion. As a result many of the actions undertaken by the movement are ineffective or outright detours created by the ruling class.

As MIM has argued for over a decade now, recycling under capitalism may be more harm than good for environmentalist goals. Recycling was a pseudo-environmentalist invention to distract attention from real environmental problems and solutions.

The pseudo-environmentalist approach lays the blame for environmental problems at the feet of the individual and recommends individual lifestyle changes instead of confronting concentrated economic and political power head-on. By blaming all individuals, the pseudo-environmentalist movement bailed out the ruling class. Now there is proof in "The Sudden New Strength of Recycling" by John Young.

The article is about the rise in prices for recycled material collected by municipalities in the mid-1990s. The rise in corporate demand in the mid-1990s finally made municipal efforts at collecting recyclable newspapers, cans and bottles a reasonable enterprise. Leading the way was a fluke increase in paper prices for non-recycled paper that also increased demand for recycled paper as a substitute.

Only now do we learn from the pseudo-environmentalists that for decades when individuals were making recycling efforts part of their daily chores their efforts were for naught. Many cities collected recycled goods separately, but ended up taking them to the same dumps with the garbage. Fortunately, other cities paid to have their goods recycled in what amounted to a subsidy to corporate Amerika paid for by taxpayers.

"The number of U.S. curbside pickup programs for recyclables grew from 1,042 in 1988 to 6,678 in 1993. This growth, and similar growth in drop-off and commercial-waste recycling programs, led to an extraordinary increase in the overall tonnage of recycled materials collected, from some 16 million tons in the United States in 1985 to 45 million tons in 1993. . . . growth created a glut of materials."(p. 260)

Young does not anywhere deal with the implications of what he is saying, but we read his work as an admission of sorts: "Cities were offering a few dollars per ton to anyone who would haul away their newsprint."(p. 262)

Young even admits that prices are likely to fall again!(p. 258) Hence, there will be no demand for recycled goods and they will end up in the dump again. In fact, by using more paper and materials more wastefully, people will boost the prices of paper and other materials and that will increase the demand for recycled materials. Also increasing the price of recycled goods under capitalism is the effort of those of us who throw away our recycled goods. That is the nature of capitalism, an irrational economic system from the proletariat's point of view.

MIM does not oppose recycling under capitalism. We do it just as we do many other things with the masses, so that the masses can see for themselves that it does not work.

In contrast, with socialist economic planning, it is in the interest of the proletariat to recycle. Formerly privately owned corporations will be required by the dictatorship of the proletariat to use recycled materials. Currently, environmentalists are only now pushing the government to require purchases of recycled paper. Some of the thoughts along those lines are inklings of scientific socialist planning.

Under socialism, recycling will be required across-the-board, not just in government agencies. The demand problem will be solved and the environment will be protected, not just when prices dictated by the "Invisible Hand" of the "free market" happen to say so, as in after 1994 in the United $tates. The "right" to a non-toxic environment is non-negotiable, so socialist industry will have to use recycled goods as extensively and efficiently as humynly possible.

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