[P2P-F] Fwd: another EM from Ian Angus

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rasigan Maharajh <rasigan at ieri.org.za>
Date: Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 3:54 PM


Ernest Mandel on productivism, limits to growth, and socialist human
development
<http://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/06/07/ernest-mandel-on-productivism-limits-to-growth-and-socialism/>


*A forgotten comment by a noted Marxist, on our collective responsibility
to preserve natural wealth so that future generations can survive and
flower.*
------------------------------

*It’s often said that socialists are latecomers to environmentalism, that
until the 1990s, Marxists ignored or rejected the concerns raised by
environmentalists. There’s some justice to that criticism, but there were
important exceptions.*

*I recently came across a the following passage in *Long Waves of
Capitalist Development*, a 1980 book based on lectures that the noted
Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel gave at the University of Cambridge in 1978.
I haven’t seen it quoted anywhere else.*

*Whatever weaknesses there may have been in the response of the organized
left at the time, it is clear that Mandel was giving careful thought to
environmental issues: this remarkable passage could easily be included in a
21st century statement of ecosocialist views and aims, without change. *
------------------------------
[image: Ernest Mandel]
<http://climateandcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/06/Ernest-Mandel.jpg>

Ernest Mandel

We socialists and Marxists do not share the irresponsible “productivist”
credo of the 1950s and 1960s. Many social criticisms of that credo are
amply justified.

One has not necessarily to accept the predictions of unavoidable absolute
scarcity of energy and raw materials of the Club of Rome type in order to
understand that there is a collective responsibility for the present
generation of humanity to transmit to future generations an environment and
a stock of natural wealth that constitute the necessary precondition for
the survival and flowering of human civilization.

Neither has one to accept the impoverishing implications of permanent
asceticism and austerity, so alien to the basic spirit of Marxism, which is
one of enjoyment of life and infinite enrichment of human potentialities,
in order to understand that the endlessly growing output of an endless
variety of more and more useless commodities (increasingly, outright
harmful commodities, harmful both to the environment and to the healthy
development of the individual) does not correspond to a socialist ideal.

Such an output simply expresses the needs and greeds of capital to realize
bigger and bigger amounts of surplus value, embodied in an endlessly
growing mountain of commodities.

But the rejection of the capitalist consumption pattern, combined with a no
less resolute rejection of capitalist technology, should base itself from a
socialist point of view on a vigorous struggle for alternative technologies
that will extend, not restrict, the emancipatory potential of machinery
(i.e., the possibility of freeing all human beings from the burden of
mechanical, mutilating, non-creative labor, of facilitating rich
development of the human personality for all individuals on the basis of
satisfaction of all their basic material needs).

We are convinced that once that satisfaction is assured in a society where
the incentives for personal enrichment, greed, and competitive behavior are
withering away, further “growth” will be centered around needs of
“nonmaterial” production, (i.e., the development of richer social
relations). Moral and psychological needs will supersede the tendency to
acquire and accumulate more material goods.

However “impopular” these beliefs may appear in the light of present-day
fashions, we believe in the growing capacities of human intelligence, human
science, human progress, human self-realization (including self-control),
and human freedom, without in any way subordinating the defense of such
freedoms (in the first place, freedom from want, but also freedom of
thought, of creation, of political and social action) to any paternalistic
instance supposedly capable of securing them for mankind.

From: Ernest Mandel. *Long Waves of Capitalist Development: The Marxist
Interpretation*. Cambridge University Press, London, 1980. pp
103-5. Paragraph breaks added for onscreen readability. An expanded
edition was published by Verso in 1995.

-- 
*Rasigan Maharajh, PhD.*
Chief Director: *Institute for Economic Research on Innovation*, Tshwane
University of Technology, RSA.
Nodal Head: Department of Science and Technology and National Research
Foundation *Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology
and Innovation Policy*, RSA.
Associate Research Fellow: *Tellus Institute*, Boston, USA.
Chairperson: Southern Africa Node of the *Millennium Project*,  RSA.

Postal Address: 159 Nana Sita Street, Pretoria CBD, 0002, Tshwane, Gauteng,
South Africa
Phone: +27 12 3823073
www.ieri.org.za
www.tellus.org
www.sampnode.org.za





-- 
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