Science catches up with Marxism (NASA-funded study)

Bit of discussion from the Goodbye to the Future thread

NASA = proletarian science

I do remember that Bush declared that NASA would only be concerned with extraterrestrial observation, quite a clear reference to NASA's investigations into climate change. I think Obama changed that.

I don't think Marx critiqued much the lack of the biophysical underpinnings of capitalism, but I never read more than two of his books... I don't see how you could see this report as Marxian as Marxist types even today tend to ignore that resources are not limitless. Remember Marx mostly studied economics and he did in many instances give very valid critiques of standard economics of his time, but he kept alot of the same assumptions. Peak resources is something that is only is being popularized in the last few decades. Can anyone point to me where in his writings he critiques the ignoring of the natural basis in the air, soil, water, plants and animals of any living eco-system that capitalism conveniently papers over to be replaced with financial models and artificial rules created by economists to increase "growth" and "progress"?

John Bellamy Foster and others have worked up Marx's studies of degradation of soil nutrients under capitalist agriculture into a theory of metabolic/ecological rift. But yeah, there's been mainstream 'limits to growth' stuff since at least the Club of Rome report of that name in the 1970s.

Has the NASA research actually been published yet, or is this just the guardian columnist's take? His book seems a bit sensationalist...

Thrasymachus, Marx actually criticizes capitalist agriculture on ecological grounds in one of the books you may have read, Capital. The first hint at this is, if I remember correctly, at the end of the chapter on machinery.

The study cited in the Guardian article can be found here. It's a pdf from one of the author's university home pages. Whilst the mathematics in the paper are beyond me it does seem that the conclusions reached aren't that far removed from the article.

From Section 7: Summary and Future Work

Ecosocialist Ian Angus isn't too impressed with the paper, or at least the media spin on it: http://climateandcapitalism.com/2014/03/31/nasa-collapse-study/

tl;dr version: it's not an empirical paper but a highly stylised mathematical model showing how under a given set of assumptions the model can produce a sustainable equilibrium. Nor is it a 'NASA study'.

It is absolutely correct to point out that industrialism and capitalism will cause a collapse, but I would hesitate to put marxism up on a pedestal of ecological coherence. I mean, marxists have historically been incredibly anthropocentric and industrialist just like the bourgeoisie. Although there are a few ecological tidbits to be cherry picked from Marx, the major tennets of Marxism are naively in support of capital's development of industrialism as a means for communism. Marxist communism in praxis is dependent on global industrialisation beyond earth's capacity. The consistent marxist looks upon industrial development as a step toward communism; such development is the seed of the new communist society. In this sense, Marxism is more in line with bourgeois thinking of economic development being good in itself and a well defined fetishization of industrialization.

Marxists claim to be scientific, but their pseudo-materialism is most often completely detached from any coherent ecological understanding (to be fair though, we are talking about a theory of society developed during the industrial boom). I mean, basing your entire claim that communism will come because of the technological development of capitalism fails to account for that development being unsustainable.

While it is obvious that a more equitable distribution of resources would slow collapse, I think NASA(and any marxist) is wrong if they say that is all that is necessary to avoid collapse. To avoid collapse we need an immediate reorganization of society along anti-industrialist grounds. Importantly, to a marxist using the framework of historical materialism, this is a reactionary policy that would generate a feudal political economy- or they would say it is a petty bourgeois desire ("real" communists praise historical materialism and necessarily support industrialist modes of production) I think marxism's unidirectional understanding of the relationship between economic productivity and which social relations such productivity it is linked to is an inaccurate and dogmatic, but it is what it is.

In a pure irony, our material ecological circumstances will make marxist theory on how to reach communism (develop the means of production) look infantile and unscientific, if not downright suicidal. Or maybe marx was right about historical materialism and there will never be communism. Or we could be decent materialists and realize we need to ditch marxism to get to communism.

@especifista I think that you're making the mistake of conflating Marx with Marxism.

I don't see why this would be necessarily the case if production is not organized under the imperative of growth/capital accumulation. There is, I believe, more than enough resources to go around if they are distributed equitably. Moreover, a new, egalitarian social formation in which production is organized under the imperative of equitable distribution, that is, to increase the quality of living everybody, I believe would result in technological advancement geared toward sustainability. Technology is not neutral, it advances based on social formation. Advancement in technology is currently constituted by the market, that is, the market is the decider of where to allocate resources and focus on certain areas of technological research and development for the purpose of profits maximization. In a libertarian communist economy, research and development would be constituted by the imperatives of sustainability and social benefit. That's my take on it, anyhow.

especifista that is basically vulgar Marxism you're describing, not Marx's theory of the capitalist mode of production in which he cleafly writes that capital will devoure people and planet if followed to its logical end. Indeed, environmental collapse because of capitalism would be a vindication of Marx. But lots of Marxist have read Das Kapital like the devil reads the Bible with the result that the official workers movement has tied politics to productivity above all else.

Well, looks like House Republicans are trying to extend that even further:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/02/3421941/house-passes-bridenstine-bill/

Two days after a U.N. report warned of increased famine, war, and poverty from unmitigated carbon emissions, the Republican-led House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to focus less on studying climate change, and more on predicting storms...

The quotation Jura referenced occurs just before Part V in Capital I. "All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility."

Or, from German Ideology: "The 'essence' of the freshwater fish is the water of the river. But the latter ceases to be the 'essence' of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence."

Engels, Dialectics of Nature, "We have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn [nature's] laws and apply them correctly."

But we haven't been using our ability to learn nature's laws and organize our communities in opposition to capitalism. Marx and Engels were quite aware that humans are natural beings living very unnaturally, and they eagerly engaged scientific developments as they appeared, unlike today's effete "Marxists."

There is no science in modern "scientific socialism." Mr. Natural