1163. The Epochal Crisis

By John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, October 2013

It is an indication of the sheer enormity of the historical challenge confronting humanity in our time that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, sometimes now called the Second Great Depression, is overshadowed by the larger threat of planetary catastrophe, raising the question of the long-term survival of innumerable species—including our own.1 An urgent necessity for the world today is therefore to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat—itself a by-product of capitalist development.

I shall use the term “epochal crisis” here to refer to the convergence of economic and ecological contradictions in such a way that the material conditions of society as a whole are undermined, posing the question of a historical transition to a new mode of production. This can be distinguished from the ordinary developmental crises that punctuate the history of capitalism. Such an epochal crisis, as Jason Moore has argued, characterized the transition from feudalism to capitalism from the late medieval period to the seventeenth century—a crisis of an entire historical epoch that was equally ecological, economic, and social in its manifestations, stretching from recurrent famine, the Black Death, and soil exhaustion to peasant revolts and the escalation of warfare.2 An even more momentous epochal crisis than the one that produced the transition from feudalism to capitalism, I will argue, is occurring today, arising from the unlimited expansion of a capitalist system geared to a process of abstract wealth creation.

Contrary to economic myth, the system of capitalist production and exchange does not take the form of simple commodity production, or the circuit C-M-C, in which a commodity (C), representing a definite, qualitative use value is exchanged for money (M), which is then exchanged for a another commodity (C), representing a different use value—to be simply consumed in the end. Rather, in line with what Marx termed the “general formula of capital,” or M-C-M′, money (M) is exchanged for labor power and commodities with which to produce a new commodity (C), to be sold for more money (M′ = M + Δm or surplus value). Hence, it is not use value, fulfilling concrete, qualitative needs, that constitutes the aim of capitalist production, but rather exchange value, generating profit for the capitalist. The abstract, purely quantitative nature of this process, moreover, means that there is no end to the incentive of seeking more money or surplus value, since M′ leads in the next circuit of production to a drive to obtain M′′, followed by the drive to obtain M′′′ in the circuit after that, in an unending sequence of accumulation and expansion.

Characteristic of monopoly capitalism is a further warping of this process through the displacement of natural-material use value by specifically capitalist use value—the only real “use” of which is to enhance exchange value for the capitalist. Thus wasteful and destructive commodities increasingly dominate production, from military hardware to superficial car model-changes, to excessive packaging. Here Marx’s general formula for capital, as it pertains to production itself, has metamorphosed into M-CK-M′, where CK stands for specifically capitalist use value.3

At the more stratospheric level represented by contemporary finance, the general formula for capital, or M-C-M′, is being increasingly supplanted by the circuit of speculative capital, M-M′, in which the production of use values disappears altogether and money simply begets more money.4 What economists call “the real economy” or the realm of commodity production associated with GDP is thus being subordinated in the irrational logic of today’s phase of monopoly-finance capital to a process of wealth generation organized around financial-asset appreciation and dependent on an unending series of financial bubbles. Financial capital more and more rules the roost, largely disconnected from the real economy of commodity production and use value.

Behind the worldwide veil of capitalist value relations, hundreds of millions, even billions, of people are poor and destitute, often lacking the most basic prerequisites of material existence—adequate food, water, clothing, housing, employment, healthcare, and a non-toxic environment—due to the failures and contradictions of accumulation. Meanwhile, what ecologists call “real wealth,” i.e., the product of nature itself, is being extracted from the environment on an ever-increasing scale devoid of any concern for either the rationality of production or the sustainability of natural systems, thereby robbing both present and future generations. Since unequal exchange relations with respect to both nature and labor prevail within the international economy this robbery falls disproportionately on poorer nations, a portion of whose natural use values (and economic surplus) is systematically siphoned off to enrich nations at the apex of the global imperialist pyramid.5

Everywhere the narrow rationality of monopoly-finance capital is coming into conflict with real-material relations, undermining real production and real wealth—indeed the entire realm of use value, human well being, and life itself—generating a growing socio-ecological malaise that is spreading in all directions at once. “Capitalist economic rationality,” Samir Amin writes in his Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory (2013), has been transformed in the twenty-first century into “social irrationality on the scale of the human race” and the earth as a whole.6 To understand the full significance of this it is essential to explore in much greater detail both the economic and ecological dimensions of capitalism’s epochal crisis.

The Economic Dimensions

The economic dimensions of the epochal crisis can be described in terms of three mutually reinforcing trends: monopolization, stagnation, and financialization—combined, at the world level, with the global labor arbitrage. The late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the monopoly stage of capitalism, arising out of the concentration and centralization of capital. The typical firm is now a quasi-monopoly or oligopoly with considerable monopoly power with respect to price, output, and investment. Industries within the manufacturing sector of the economy are highly concentrated, dominated by a few giant firms benefitting from substantial monopoly rents. The same is true in the sphere of finance where the big four U.S. banks own almost half the country’s total banking assets. In 2007, at the outset of the Great Financial Crisis, the 200 largest U.S. corporations accounted for over 30 percent of all gross profits in the economy (up from 13 percent in 1950), while the world’s 500 largest firms were taking in about 35–40 percent of all global revenue (up from less than 20 percent in 1960). What is often described as increasing international competition is in reality the intensified global rivalry of monopolistic firms engaged in a mixture of price collusion and various forms of non-price competition.7

These giant, globe-straddling corporations enjoy widening profit margins, generating increasing problems of inequality and surplus capital absorption, and slowing down the overall rate of accumulation, particularly at the core of the capitalist world economy. Stagnation rather than rapid growth is therefore the normal state of the monopoly capitalist economy, partially counteracted at times by specific historical factors (such as wars, epoch-making innovations, the sales effort, and financialization).8

What Paul Sweezy referred to as “the financialization of the capital accumulation process” has been the main means in which monopoly capital in recent decades has adapted to this deepening economic stagnation.9 Faced with the difficulty of profitably absorbing the enormous potential economic surplus at their disposal, big corporations and wealthy investors increasingly poured their surplus capital into the financial sphere in order to secure high speculative returns. Financial institutions responded to this additional demand for their products by supplying an endless array of new, exotic speculative opportunities (junk bonds, derivatives, options, hedge funds, etc.) leading to an explosion of credit/debt. Even commodity producing corporations such as General Electric and General Motors set up financial divisions to try to capture some of the profits to be made in finance. The result was a series of financial bubbles lifting the economy but at the cost of the greater fragility of the entire system. Eventually, this new financial superstructure took on a life of its own, dominating over production, with decision-making migrating more and more from corporate boardrooms to financial markets.10

The whole logic of the system under the current phase of monopoly-finance capital is therefore one in which the accumulation of capital in the traditional sense, i.e., centered on real capital formation, is being subordinated to an increasingly abstract process of wealth generation through the promotion of financial-asset appreciation. M-C-M′ has given way to M-M′—a possibility that Marx raised and Keynes feared.11

At the international level the system is governed by the global labor arbitrage, whereby giant, multinational firms seek out the lowest unit labor costs worldwide, shifting the greater part of industrial production to export zones in the global South and spurring the growth of a handful of export-dependent emerging economies. Imperialist relations are intensified worldwide through an accelerated process of unequal economic exchange (where the difference in the wages is greater than the difference in the productivities) and a general system of imperial rent.12 Not surprisingly under these conditions, the average annual per capita GDP of developing countries (excluding China) was a mere 6.1 percent of that of the G7 countries (the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada) in 1970–1989, dropping to 5.6 percent in 1990–2006 (just prior to the Great Financial Crisis).13

The Ecological Dimensions

The ecological dimensions of the epochal crisis are best understood in terms of Marx’s analysis of the metabolism of nature and society—extended to take into account the relations of monopoly capitalism.14 In Marx’s conception, production existed as a social process within “the universal metabolism of nature.” Material use values were appropriated from “the natural world” and transformed by production into social use values to fit “human needs.” This constituted “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between nature and man, and as such is a natural condition of human life.”

Marx viewed what he called “extractive industry”—“the fish caught in water…or the wood felled in the primeval forest, or the ore brought up out of the pit”—in terms of natural use values (real wealth) provided by nature independent of human labor. He wrote in Capital: “The earth, on the one hand, labour on the other…are material elements of any process of production,” related to the universal metabolic process of nature, and thus not reducible to “social forms.”15 This conception of elemental natural conditions to which society must conform led him to develop his critique of the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” associated with capitalism’s transgression of “the natural laws of life itself.”16 So universal was this rift in the metabolism between nature and society under industrial capitalism—reflected in the robbing of the soil of its nutrients shipped to the city in the form of food and fiber with the resulting pollution of urban centers—that it extended to international trade, with some countries in effect robbing others of their soil within a general process of ecological imperialism.17

How is this analysis of the metabolism of nature and society developed by Marx to be applied to today’s epochal crisis? There is now an extensive body of work utilizing Marx’s concept of metabolic rift to analyze today’s ecological problems.18 However, the other, more commodity-related, part of the analysis of the nature-society metabolism, concerned specifically with the role of use-value production, has barely been addressed in an ecological context. A crucial question is how the changing use-value structure of the economy has contributed to planetary ecological degradation. Marx himself provided us with few direct clues in this area. Although he pointed to the existence of specifically capitalist use values (such as the lock designed by the locksmith who thus benefitted from the criminality promoted by the system) as well as to what he referred to as “use values” that occupy “a higher rank in the system of needs” (hence a hierarchy of social needs), he did not systematically analyze such phenomena related to the historical development of use values, since they were relatively unimportant in the competitive capitalism of his day.19

The answer to the question of the ecological implications of the changing use-value structure of the capitalist economy must therefore be sought in the historical shift from competitive to monopoly capitalism—extending beyond Marx’s time. Thorstein Veblen provided the main outlines of such an analysis at the outset of the twentieth century in his 1923 book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. Veblen argued that the production of waste—which he had defined in The Theory of the Leisure Class as expenditure that “does not serve human life or human-well being as a whole”—had become integral to the new corporate economy as a means of enhancing sales and profits in face of limited demand. Such unproductive expenditures had penetrated so deeply into the entire structure of production, he suggested, that “the distinction between workmanship and salesmanship has progressively been blurred…until it will doubtless hold true now that the shop-cost of many articles produced for the market is mainly chargeable to the production of saleable appearances, ordinarily meretricious.”20

Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy expanded upon this argument in 1966 in Monopoly Capital. Building on both Marx and Veblen, they dealt extensively with the growth of economic waste as a means of surplus absorption—in such varied forms as military spending, the sales effort, and FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate). The sales effort, they insisted, had grown so prodigiously under monopoly capitalism that the use-value structure of the economy could no longer be viewed as a rational expression of production costs. What they called “the interpenetration effect” thus stood for this intermixing of sales costs and production costs with the result that an ever-larger proportion of what were considered costs of production were in fact forms of waste imposed by the system, i.e., specifically capitalist use values (CK). Product obsolescence was intentionally built into consumer durables, while consumer goods were structurally designed overall at enormous expense to promote extreme, acquisitive forms of buying behavior. With waste associated with marketing penetrating into the deep structure of production under the regime of the giant corporation, the buyer had no choice but to pay for such unproductive costs—included in the price of even the most necessary wage goods as a condition of their availability. All of this was deemed “rational” and “efficient” by a monopoly-capitalist economy continually beset by problems of saturated markets, slow growth, and unemployment/underemployment.21

The essential problem, then, in the critique of monopoly capitalism, as Baran explained in a letter to Sweezy on December 19, 1961, was to account for the economic “output imputable to misused input—and by ‘misused’ I mean here exploited in the Marxian sense, wasted in our sense [i.e., “not conducive to and not required for the health, happiness and development of man”], unemployed in the Keynesian sense.” Viewed “critically and negatively,” this meant: “no air conditioned nightmares like Chase Manhattan buildings, no motorized monsters to the tune of 60 million, no rape of the country by superhighways and billboards.” There was no feasible way, of course, of calculating all of the misused input and the resulting economic (and ecological) waste. But the enormity, even predominance, of this general phenomenon was not to be denied. The sheer magnitude of such unproductive expenditures stood in a negative way for the potential of a more rational, more sustainable society to satisfy real human needs. What Peter Custers, building on Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital in his Questioning Globalized Militarism (2006), has termed “negative use values” are clearly visible today in the U.S. trillion-dollar-a-year war machine, but also in the products—all too often toxic—that are the basis of everyday consumption.22

All of this relates to what Juliet Schor has called “the materiality paradox.”23 This is the notion that what we produce and what we consume is, at present, determined less by the product’s material use value than by the symbolic worth that is placed on it in terms of social status and the fulfillment of psychological needs—as inculcated by modern marketing. From this standpoint, as Raymond Williams declared, the problem is not that we are “too materialist” but that we are “not materialist enough.” A high-consumption, throwaway society in which the world of commodities has been transformed by advertising into a “magic kingdom” devoted to the pursuit of symbolic needs will inevitably be destructive of its environmental surroundings.24

The wider ecological irrationality of modern production includes the extraordinary misuse of natural inputs, notably energy resources. As Barry Commoner argued in 1976, in a talk entitled “Oil, Energy, and Capitalism,” the “social use values” of the modern capitalist economy were produced in an energy-intensive and thermodynamically inefficient manner, merely in order to save on labor cost—since capitalism, as Marx had rightly pointed out, was geared to the displacement of labor in order to hold down wages. For example, handbags, Commoner explained, were increasingly made out of plastic instead of leather, despite the far greater energy input required in the case of the former, merely because this served to reduce labor cost (due to the substitution of fossil-fuel energy for labor input), providing wider profit margins. The socially irrational nature of this structure of production was evident in the generation of a larger reserve army of the unemployed side-by-side with enormously enhanced ecological degradation.25

From a global perspective it is important to recognize that the periphery of the world capitalist system is subject to most (if not all) of the economic and ecological contradictions of monopoly capitalism described above, while also being subject to those specific inequities imposed by imperialism. The pillage of the global South has never depended simply on unequal economic exchange but has also relied throughout on unequal ecological exchange. Here it is significant that Howard T. Odum, one of the foremost systems ecologists of the twentieth century, was also the leading analyst of the process of unequal ecological exchange. Crucial to Odum’s approach, which was derived partly from Marx, was the conception of what he called “real wealth” in the form of embodied energy (emergy) incorporated in a natural or social product.26 On this basis Odum was able to demonstrate that exchanges of goods produced in the periphery of the world economy typically encompassed more embodied energy taken from the free environment (outside of monetary relations) than the goods of countries producing in the center of the world economy, creating a net loss of embodied energy or real wealth for the peripheral countries in any international market exchange of goods.

“Free trade,’” Odum wrote, “is an ideal based on the assumption of equitable exchange…. But free trade made developed countries rich, with high standards of living, leaving less developed countries devastated.” The underlying reason for this is that goods produced in the periphery generally contained more “free gifts” of nature (not included in the labor-based value accounting of the capitalist economy) than was the case for goods produced in center countries. For example, Odum calculated that in the 1980s and ‘90s Ecuador was exporting as much as ten times more embodied energy than it was importing through the normal mechanism of “free trade.” In contrast the United States under the same system of free trade exported only half as much embodied energy as it imported (and countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan only a quarter as much). Trade between the global North and the global South, he argued, thus took the form of “imperial capitalism,” in which rich nations gained at the expense of poor.27 This inequality is further exacerbated by the migration of polluting industries from the global North to the global South—so as to concentrate the toxic effects of production in the latter and the benefits, in the form of economic surplus monopolized by multinational corporations, in the former.

An Epochal Revolution

In the foregoing analysis I have argued that the epochal crisis of our time emanates from a dangerous and disruptive intersection of economic and ecological contradictions traceable to the growing distortion, displacement, and degradation of natural-material use values. This is tied not only to the accumulation process directly, but also to the acceleration of environmental throughput that it entails, and the accompanying rift in the biogeochemical processes of the planet.

In Marx’s hopeful vision, “mankind…inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” Today the material potential exists—both economically and ecologically—to overcome the epochal crisis of our times. This potential is manifested in the exploitation, waste, idle capacity, displacement of use values, and rapacious destruction of real wealth that characterizes the present system. The gigantic misuse of human and natural resources that constitutes the modern capitalist economy means that we already have the potential many times over to redirect production and consumption to meet human needs and to practice conservation on a global level, creating a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.

Accomplishing this though means breaking with capitalism’s expansionist drive, which is now destroying the earth as a “safe operating space for humanity,” through the crossing of critical planetary boundaries. This is manifested in such planetary rifts as: climate change, ocean acidification, destruction of the ozone layer, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of freshwater, loss of land cover, aerosol loading, and chemical pollution.28

For capitalism time is money and the future of humanity and the earth is therefore systematically discounted within the cash nexus. Monopoly capital alters the use-value structure of the economy itself, generating specifically capitalist use values that are frequently negative in character, in order to accelerate commodity circulation, the level of environmental throughput, and overall production—with the sole object of generating more wealth for the wealthy in the present.29 Après moi, le déluge! is thus the spirit of capitalism, particularly in its present phase of monopoly-finance capital.30 It follows that the current epochal crisis requires a no less epochal transition from one mode of production to another, reminiscent of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but on a far bigger scale. Indeed, what is needed, to quote István Mészáros, is the kind of “global epochal…structural change advocated by Marx.”31

How will the necessary revolutionary transition come about? I am convinced that objective forces today are progressively erasing previous distinctions between workplace exploitation and environmental degradation—as capitalism universally undermines all real-material conditions of production. This dramatic change is occurring more rapidly in the global South than the global North. As a result we are seeing in places as diverse as China, India, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and even parts of North America (for example in the larger movement growing up around Canada’s indigenous-led Idle No More) the emergence of what could be called an “environmental working class” arising out of wider alliances of oppressed groups around degraded material conditions. This broadening of working-class struggles into environmental struggles and the forging of diverse community alliances should not surprise us, since the early struggles of the working class in Europe were directed as much at the toxicity of the industrial centers in which workers were compelled to live as at the exploitation within the factories.32 The extensive privatization engineered by what Naomi Klein has aptly designated as “disaster capitalism” is producing in response a new ecological sociability, embracing a vision of human production in its most fundamental sense as the metabolism of nature and society.33

Central to the epochal crisis, as we have seen, is the misuse of natural-material use values, both within production narrowly conceived, and also within what Marx called “the metabolic interaction of nature and society,” or human production in its widest, most dialectical sense. All material relations, whether economic, cultural-communal, or environmental, are affected. We are therefore approaching a historical moment—a product of the vast creative destructiveness of capitalism in our age—when these various material conditions will no longer be as disconnected as they have been for most of the past century. Although all sorts of conflicts remain within working communities around labor, environmental, and cultural issues—with the powers that be doing their best to disunite workers in line with the age-old principle of divide and conquer—the objective conditions are nonetheless emerging that are creating the potential for a larger material alliance against the system. This will likely take the form of a co-revolutionary struggle, in the sense suggested by David Harvey, embodying an alliance of gender, race, class, indigenous, and environmental movements.34

All of this depends of course on the rise to prominence of an environmental working class (and ecological peasantry) capable of initiating a broad, counter-hegemonic struggle for the fulfillment of human needs in line with the fundamental biogeochemical processes of the planet—a world of substantive equality and ecological sustainability. There is no doubt that this is an objective necessity and that it will increasingly become a subjective one as well. Yet, there is no certainty as to the future of humanity. The very continuation of the human species along with most of the other “higher” forms of life is now in doubt. The future and even survival of humanity thus rests as never before on the revolutionary struggle of humanity itself.

Notes

1. ↩ J. Bradford DeLong, “The Second Great Depression,” Foreign Affairs, July-August 2013, http://foreignaffairs.com.
2. ↩ Jason W. Moore, “Transforming the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World Ecology,” Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 11. See also Jason W. Moore, “The Crisis of Feudalism: An Environmental History,” Organization and Environment 15, no. 3 (September 2002): 301–22.
3. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,” Monthly Review 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 12.
4. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 247–57. The “total movement” of capital, implicit in the general formula, is that of M-C…P…C′-M′, showing the transformation that takes place in the commodity as a result of production. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1978), 131–32. On interest-bearing or speculative capital see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 515–24.
5. ↩ See Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 273–78; John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman, “The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange: A Marx-Odum Dialectic,” forthcoming, Journal of Peasant Studies (2014).
6. ↩ Samir Amin, Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 55.
7. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 67–72; Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect (New York: The New Press, 2013), 36–41; Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 39–47.
8. ↩ This central thesis was advanced in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
9. ↩ Paul M. Sweezy, “More (or Less) on Globalization,” Monthly Review 49, no. 4 (September 1997): 3.
10. ↩ On the history of financialization see especially Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). For an extension of the analysis over the years 2006–2008 see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
11. ↩ Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 51–55; John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1973), 159; Jan Toporowski, Why the World Economy Needs a Financial Crash and Other Critical Essays (London: Anthem Press, 2010). Keynes himself made use of Marx’s M-C-M′ in developing his ideas that led to the General Theory. See John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. 29 (London: Macmillan, 1979), 81–82.
12. ↩ See Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 125–54; Amin, Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory, 79–90; Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
13. ↩ For a more complete discussion and data sources see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 64–65, 168.
14. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 141–77.
15. ↩ Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 56, 62–65; Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 754, 955.
16. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949.
17. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 860.
18. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, “The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production,” Organization & Environment 18, no. 4 (2005): 422–44; Ryan Gunderson, “The Metabolic Rifts of Livestock Agribusiness,” Organization and Environment 24, no. 4 (2011): 404–22; Stefano Longo, “Mediterranean Rift: Socio-Ecological Transformations in the Sicilian Bluefin Tuna Fishery,” Critical Sociology 38, no. 3 (2012): 417–36; Matthew Clement, “A Basic Accounting of Variation in Municipal Solid-Waste Generation at the County Level in Texas, 2006: Groundwork for Applying Metabolic-Rift Theory to Waste Generation,” Rural Sociology 74, no. 3 (2009): 412–29; Philip Mancus, “Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency and Its Contradictions: A Theoretical Explanation of Socio-Ecological Metabolism,” Rural Sociology 272, no. 2 (2007): 269–28; Rebecca Clauson, “Healing the Rift: Metabolic Restoration in Cuban Agriculture,” Monthly Review 59, no. 1 (2007): 40–52.
19. ↩ Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 58; Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, part 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 387–88. In the above passage, cited from The Economic Manuscript of 1861-1863 (in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30), Marx distinguished between: (a) “higher use values” in the sense of farther down the line in the social transformation of use values, and (b) use values that were “morally” higher up in “the system of needs.” According to the first criterion (level of productive transformation of use values) schnapps, he said, was higher than grain, while according to the second criterion (needs) grain was higher.

1. ↩ Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New American Library), 78–80; Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and the Case of Business Enterprise in Recent Times (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), 300–301.

1. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 112–41; “Last Letters: Correspondence on ‘Some Theoretical Implications,” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012): 68, 73; “Some Theoretical Implications,” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012): 45–58. For a critique of the expansion of marketing under monopoly capitalism see Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
2. ↩ Peter Custers, Questioning Globalized Militarism (London: Merlin Press, 2006), 11–12, 36–38; John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,” Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 1–19.
3. ↩ Juliet Schor, True Wealth (London: Penguin, 2011), 41.

1. ↩ Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 185.

1. ↩ Barry Commoner, “Oil, Energy and Capitalism,” a talk at the Community Church of Boston, February 22, 1976, http://climateandcapitalism.com. See also Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976),194–95, 236–37.
2. ↩ Howard T. Odum, “Interview of Howard T. Odum,” conducted by Cynthia Barnett, August 16, 2001, http://ufdc.ufl.edu, 40; Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum, A Prosperous Way Down (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2001), 139; David M. Scienceman, “Emvalue and Lavalue,” paper presented to the annual meeting of the International Society for Systems Sciences, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, July 12–17, 1992; Foster and Holleman, “The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange.” “Embodied energy” is more accurately, referred to in Odum’s system, as “emergy” spelled with an “m,” which emphasizes that it is the historical energy input and not the actual energy presently embodied in the product. Odum himself had originally used the term “embodied energy” which is employed in the present article for simplicity’s sake. On Odum’s relation to Marx see especially Howard T. Odum and David Scienceman, “An Energy Systems View of Karl Marx’s Concepts of Production and Labor Value,” in Emergy Synthesis 3: Theory and Applications of the Emergy Methodology, Proceedings from the Third Biennial Emergy Conference, Gainesville, Florida, January 2004 (Gainesville, FL: Center for Environmental Policy, 2005): 17–43.
3. ↩ Odum, Environment, Power, and Society in the Twenty-First Century, 273–77; Odum and Odum, A Prosperous Way Down, 139; Howard T. Odum, Environmental Accounting (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 217; Howard T. Odum and J.E. Arding, Emergy Analysis of Shrimp Mariculture in Ecuador (Narrangansett, RI: Coastal Research Center, University of Rhode Island, 1991), 33–39; Foster and Holleman, “The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange.” Odum’s data showed that a few resource-rich economies in the developed world, such as Australia, New Zealand, and (presumably) Canada, also exported more embodied energy than they imported.
4. ↩ Johan Rockström, et. al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 24 (September 2009): 472–75.
5. ↩ For an environmental critique of the role of discounting in a capitalist economy see Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 95–97.
6. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 381.
7. ↩ István Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, vol. 2 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 15, 24.
8. ↩ The clearest indication of this is Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1969). See also Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974), and Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness (New York: Free Press, 1983).
9. ↩ Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), and “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” Nation, November 28, 2011, http://thenation.com.
10. ↩ David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228–35.

1162. Buddhists Tackle Climate Change

By  James Baraz, Huffington Post, October 2, 2013

James Baraz

As a Buddhist teacher I've been interested in finding true happiness through directly opening to suffering. A major interest and focus of my teaching has been awakening the natural joy that is within us. But two years ago after reading Bill McKibben's brilliant, sobering book, Eaarth, I had to face the harsh realities of climate change. My optimism was shaken as I came to terms with the fact that the future looks pretty bleak.

Although the current picture can seem pretty depressing, it's also been heartening to see that more and more people are starting to become aware of the dangers connected with the most crucial issue facing us today. As a wise friend of mine says, "We're in a race between ignorance and consciousness."

This past June fifty senior teachers met at an International Vipassana Teachers Conference at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, Calif., where I teach. On the agenda was Climate Change: specifically the role Buddhism might play and the responsibility of those who share the teachings.

As the teachers attending energetically discussed the issue, across the floor was a scroll of 2000+ names of meditation students who had signed a request for teachings and guidance on wise response to Climate Change. Leading the discussion was Bob Doppelt, a longtime practitioner who coordinates the National Partnership for Climate Solutions, a non-partisan group of organizations that has worked with the White House to encourage and support their efforts in dealing with Climate Change.

Bob's very moving and provocative presentation was based on a book he wrote From Me to We which outlines five principles needed to shift the consciousness of the population in a meaningful response to the imminent danger. How would we respond to this challenge?

As a result of that gathering this week, October 1-7, Buddhists around the U.S. and abroad are participating in the first annual Earth Care Week. Communities are gathering to share teachings and participate in activities exploring climate change as ground for our awakening. The website One Earth Sangha has been established to be a repository for these teachings and exchange of ideas with regard to the Dharma and Climate Change. You can get a sense of some activities planned for this week here. Perhaps you'll be motivated to organize something in your own community. You don't have to be a Buddhist; your care and support of the Earth is enough.

In the last few months since the June gathering teachers have been responding. Jack Kornfield, one of the leading Buddhist voices recently did a video for www.demandcleanpower.org. And a core group of Buddhist and mindfulness community leaders have signed a letter urging President Obama to reject the Keystone Pipeline.

A group of teachers have also been holding conference calls with Bob sharing ideas and activities drawn from Buddhist philosophy to help inspire practitioners. These conversations have been very lively and productive including some of the most respected leaders in Theravada Buddhism such as Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi and Tara Brach. They largely focus on the central teaching of Buddhism, The Four Noble Truths, as applied to climate change: 1) There is suffering, 2) There is a cause of suffering, 3) There is an end to suffering, 4) There is a path leading to the end of suffering.

I personally have been inspired by Andrew Harvey's vision of a new wave of "sacred activists" who combine the mystic's love of peace with the activist's love of justice. Harvey, in his book The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, likens the crisis we're facing to the "Dark Night of the Soul" which precedes spiritual awakening. In the same way, he sees our situation as a "Dark Night of the Species" which has the potential to usher in a new Awakening for humanity. Certainly, in classical spiritual cultivation, suffering is often the catalyst that shakes one out of complacency to a genuine possibility of liberation.

Yes, the reality is that there will likely be immense suffering in the coming years for all species human and non-human. And, unfortunately, those in the poorest circumstances who have less to do with causing climate change will be hit hardest.

But as we go through this crisis together in the coming years, humanity will be presented with a huge opportunity. We just might wake up and realize how precious life is and how much we love this planet and all the life on it. We can discover a new way of living together where greed is not the main principle driving success, oil is not king and huge corporations run by a small group of the rich and powerful aren't the ones who makes the rules for the rest of us.

Going through the consequences of climate change will likely be the greatest test mankind has ever faced. As more and more people realize what lies ahead, the earlier we change our thinking and behavior as a species, the less suffering there will be. Although it might seem futile to some, consciousness on issues can change very quickly. We've seen this with women's rights, an African-American as president and gay marriage. I remember many years ago coming across a study that said what is needed to change public opinion and conventional wisdom on an issue is a 7 percent shift in viewpoint.

It's not too late to make a meaningful difference. As Angeles Arrien says, "Action absorbs anxiety." And wise action coming out of love is contagious. Minimizing the disasters through wise action will take tremendous courage, perseverance and commitment on the part of everyone who deeply cares about the future of our civilization. But when we look at the alternative, the price of staying asleep will be filled with unimaginable suffering.

Margaret Klein wrote in a recent, powerful article: "Our society is living a massive lie about the threat of climate change. It's time to wake up." We can all be part of this waking up. As Buddhists around the world participate in Earth Care Week, I hope you will be inspired to express your caring in ways that contribute to the well-being of us all. Perhaps an annual Earth Care Week or Earth Day won't be something that we mark on a calendar but rather our natural way of being as a species and as responsible stewards on this amazing planet that is our home.

1161. Vietnam Legendary Independence Fighter Vo Nguyen Giap Dies

By Margie Mason and Chris Brummitt, The Associated Press, October 4, 2013 

Giap (standing) with Ho Chi Minh, 1950

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant and ruthless self-taught general who drove the French out of Vietnam to free it from colonial rule and later forced the Americans to abandon their grueling effort to save the country from communism, has died. At age 102, he was the last of Vietnam's old-guard revolutionaries.

Giap died Friday evening in a military hospital in the capital of Hanoi where he had spent close to four years growing weaker and suffering from long illnesses, a government official and a person close to Giap said. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because his death had not been formally announced.

The news spread first on Facebook, but after a few hours state-controlled media also began reporting the death.

Giap was a national hero whose legacy was second only to that of his mentor, founding President Ho Chi Minh, who led the country to independence.

The so-called "red Napoleon" stood out as the leader of a ragtag army of guerrillas who wore sandals made of car tires and lugged their artillery piece by piece over mountains to encircle and crush the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The unlikely victory, which is still studied at military schools, led not only to Vietnam's independence but hastened the collapse of colonialism across Indochina and beyond.

Giap went on to defeat the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government in April 1975, reuniting a country that had been split into communist and noncommunist states. He regularly accepted heavy combat losses to achieve his goals.

"No other wars for national liberation were as fierce or caused as many losses as this war," Giap told The Associated Press in 2005 in one of his last known interviews with foreign media on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the former South Vietnamese capital.

"But we still fought because for Vietnam, nothing is more precious than independence and freedom," he said, repeating a famous quote by Ho Chi Minh.

Giap remained sharp and well-versed in politics and current events until he was hospitalized. Well into his 90s, he entertained world leaders, who posed for photographs and received autographed copies of his books while visiting the general's shady colonial-style home in Hanoi.

Although he was widely revered in Vietnam, Giap was the nemesis of millions of South Vietnamese who fought alongside U.S. troops and fled their homeland after the war, including the many staunchly anti-communist refugees who settled in the United States.

Born Aug. 25, 1911, in central Vietnam's Quang Binh province, Giap became active in politics in the 1920s and worked as a journalist before joining the Indochinese Communist Party. He was jailed briefly in 1930 for leading anti-French protests and later earned a law degree from Hanoi University.

He fled French police in 1940 and met Ho Chi Minh in southwestern China before returning to rural northern Vietnam to recruit guerrillas for the Viet Minh, a forerunner to the southern insurgency later known as the Viet Cong.

During his time abroad, his wife was arrested by the French and died in prison. He later remarried and had five children.

In 1944, Ho Chi Minh called on Giap to organize and lead guerrilla forces against Japanese invaders during World War II. After Japan surrendered to Allied forces the following year, the Viet Minh continued their fight for independence from France.

Giap was known for his fiery temper and as a merciless strategist, but also for being a bit of a dandy: Old photos show him reviewing his troops in a white suit and snappy tie, in sharp contrast to Ho Chi Minh, clad in shorts and sandals.

Giap never received any formal military training, joking that he attended the military academy "of the bush."

At Dien Bien Phu, his Viet Minh army surprised elite French forces by surrounding them. Digging miles (kilometers) of trenches, the Vietnamese dragged heavy artillery over steep mountains and slowly closed in during the bloody, 56-day battle that ended with French surrender on May 7, 1954.

"If a nation is determined to stand up, it is very strong," Giap told foreign journalists in 2004 prior to the battle's 50th anniversary. "We are very proud that Vietnam was the first colony that could stand up and gain independence on its own."

It was the final act that led to French withdrawal and the Geneva Accords that partitioned Vietnam into north and south in 1956. It paved the way for war against Saigon and its U.S. sponsors less than a decade later.

The general drew on his Dien Bien Phu experience to create the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a clandestine jungle network that snaked through neighboring — and ostensibly neutral — Laos and Cambodia, to supply his troops fighting on southern battlefields.

Against American forces with their sophisticated weapons and B-52 bombers, Giap's forces again prevailed. But more than a million of his troops perished in what is known in Vietnam as the "American War."

"We had to use the small against the big; backward weapons to defeat modern weapons," Giap said. "At the end, it was the human factor that determined the victory."

Historian Stanley Karnow, who interviewed Giap in Hanoi in 1990, quoted him as saying: "We were not strong enough to drive out a half million American troops, but that wasn't our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war."

Giap had been largely credited with devising the 1968 Tet Offensive, a series of surprise attacks on American strongholds in the south by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces that came during lunar new year celebrations. Newer research, however, suggests that Giap had been against the attacks, and his family has confirmed that he was out of the country when they began.

The Tet Offensive shook America's confidence, fueled anti-war sentiment and prompted U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to announce that he would not seek re-election. But it took another seven years for the war to be won.

On April 30, 1975, communist forces marched through Saigon with tanks, bulldozing the gates of what was then known as Independence Palace.

"With the victory of April 30, slaves became free men," Giap said. "It was an unbelievable story."

It came at a price for all sides: the deaths of as many as 3 million communists and civilians, an estimated 250,000 South Vietnamese troops and 58,000 Americans.

Throughout most of the war years, Giap served as defense minister, armed forces commander and a senior member of Vietnam's ruling Communist Party, but he was slowly elbowed from the center of power after Ho Chi Minh's death in 1969. The glory for victory in 1975 went not to Giap, but to Gen. Van Tien Dung, chief of the general staff.

Giap lost the defense portfolio in 1979 and was dropped from the all-powerful Politburo three years later. He stepped down from his last post, as deputy prime minister, in 1991.

But despite losing favor with the government, the thin, white-haired man became even more beloved by the Vietnamese people as he continued to speak out in his old age. He retired in Hanoi as a national treasure, writing his memoirs and attending national events — always wearing green or eggshell-colored military uniforms with gold stars across the shoulders.

He held press conferences, reading from handwritten notes and sometimes answering questions in French, to commemorate war anniversaries. He invited foreign journalists to his home for meetings with high-profile visitors and often greeted a longtime American female AP correspondent in Hanoi with kisses on both cheeks.

He kept up with world news and offered a piece of advice in 2004 for Americans fighting in Iraq.

"Any forces that wish to impose their will on other nations will certainly face failure," he told reporters.

Giap received a parade of foreign dignitaries, including friend and fellow communist revolutionary Fidel Castro of Cuba. In 2003, the pair sat in Giap's home chatting and laughing beneath a portrait of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.

The general's former nemesis, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, came to visit in 1995. He asked about a disputed chapter of the Vietnam War, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in which two U.S. Navy destroyers were purportedly fired upon by North Vietnamese boats. It's the event that gave the U.S. Congress justification for escalating the war.

Later, many questioned whether the attack actually occurred. During his visit, McNamara asked Giap what happened that night.

"Absolutely nothing," Giap said.

At age 97, Giap took a high-profile role in a debate over the proposed expansion of a bauxite mine that he said posed environmental and security risks, in part because it was to be operated by a Chinese company in the restive Central Highlands. He also protested the demolition of Hanoi's historic parliament house, Ba Dinh Hall. Both projects, however, went ahead as planned.

Giap celebrated his 100th birthday in 2011. He was too weak and ill to speak, but he signed a card thanking his "comrades" for their outpouring of well wishes. And even then, he continued to be briefed every few days about international and national events.

Late in life, Giap encouraged warmer relations between Vietnam and the United States, which re-established ties in 1995 and have become close trading partners. Vietnam has also recently looked to the U.S. military as a way to balance China's growing power in the disputed South China Sea.

"We can put the past behind," Giap said in 2000. "But we cannot completely forget it."

1160. Lynne Stewart's Fight for Compassionate Release Continues

By Lynne Stewart, September 29, 2013 

From Deep in the Belly of the Beast ... that is, Texas.

Now another month has passed and I am getting increasingly irritable that these jokers are so cavalier with my life and what time I have left. (I also am getting weaker.)

My application for compassionate release is moving but glacially (Are there any glaciers left? Only in the bureaucracy...). We learned that the request has left the General Counsel's office of the Bureau of Prisons in Washington and is now being considered by an "Independent Committee" (whatever that means). From there it will ostensibly go to the Director, Mr. Samuels, for the final recommendation and request for a motion to the Judge.

As you can appreciate there is still plenty of room for slips between cup and lip. I truly understand that I, with the strong and consistent support of all 30,000+ of you, do constitute a "threat" in their small universe. That is to say that, the will of the People cannot be ignored forever. With that in mind, I want to urge everyone to come on out on

OCTOBER 8, TUESDAY, MY 74th BIRTHDAY
FOR A LOCAL SHOW OF OUR COLLECTIVE WILL
IN OPPOSITION TO THE '"DEATH PENALTY "

ORGANIZE • ORGANIZE • ORGANIZE • ORGANIZE • ORGANIZE

YOU AND YOUR COMRADES, FRIENDS, ACQUAINTANCES CAN GATHER AT YOUR LOCAL FEDERAL (U.S.) COURTHOUSE OR POST OFFICE TO REMIND THEM THAT WE WILL NOT LET ME DIE IN A JAIL CELL!!!

If you can do this please notify Ralph of your location by sending an email to my web site or to this site. We hope this will be nationwide and we can spread the word of the senseless cruelty in the way the Bureau of Prisons administers a program that is supposed to be compassionate. I may be the "poster child" but this is done on behalf of all the prisoners who are languishing, in pain or worse, trying to go home.

Be out there on October 8. It is already an historic day. Let's make it More So!!! Let's Win.

Lynne Stewart

-----

Please sign the NEW petition for Lynne Stewart . Your signature will send a letter to Bureau of Prisons Director Samuels and to Attorney General Holder requesting that they expedite Lynne Stewart’s current application for compassionate release. The NEW petition is at https://www.change.org/petitions/new-petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release (Please follow the link on the first petition site in case the link is stripped from this message.)

1159. Report on the September 21 Ecosocialist Conference in Los Angeles

By Michael Whitehead, socialistworker.org, September 30, 2013

A presentation at the LA conference; Photo: Socialist Worker

THE U.S. Occupy movement has waned from view, but there is increasing evidence of a new wave of American activism and energy building in response to the accelerating climate emergency--under the slogan "System Change, Not Climate Change."

Evolving from this year's historic February 11, 350.org-led protest in Washington, D.C., the latest manifestation of these activities was the Ecosocialist Conference 2013 in Los Angeles, held on September 21, followed by a sister conference in Vancouver on September 23--both emerged in the wake of the highly successful April conference in New York City.

In the face of the climate crisis, a coalition is developing between a traditionally fractious American Left, the Green Party USA and other left groups in a Green-Red "ecology solidarity" that bears watching in the coming months.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE SEPTEMBER 21 event in Los Angeles was held, quite appropriately, in a repurposed (one could say recycled) former courthouse and police station, now a library and African American history museum. In fact, I thought I had awakened in an alternate reality, seeing former police station walls now celebrated with the likes of Malcolm X and other liberation figures (not to mention showcases of not-so-liberating Obama campaign memorabilia).

This was surrounded with a crew of hundreds of socialists of differing stripes, Green Party members, Occupy LA-ers, unionists, aging and teenage ecosocialists, and even more than a few former Democrats, all in numbers and with an energy and earnestness that one veteran activist with personal experience going back to the 1960s told me he had not seen in LA in years.

In the old courtrooms-turned-political workshops, instead of 1960's-era petty misdemeanor and traffic trials, conference attendees weighed topics of the utmost seriousness: How can we save humanity from the seemingly inexorable suicide train of looming climate catastrophe?

David Klein, director of Climate Science Studies at California State-Northridge, led the first plenary, with a sobering summary of the latest scientific climate model findings and a conclusion that cogently and glaringly expressed an opinion shared by most attendees about the futility of traditional reformist "green" activism in solving the global emergency:

Global climate models predict a worldwide range of average temperature increase of between 2 and 6 or more degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The upper end is potentially a mass extinction event.

Keeping temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees Celsius is a generally agreed-upon goal worldwide. It has been estimated that carbon dioxide emissions between now and the end of the century need to remain below approximately 600 billion tons to achieve this goal. However, there is a carbon dioxide equivalent of 2.8 trillion tons in known reserves of carbon in the form of petroleum, natural gas and coal underground, valued at roughly $27 trillion to Wall Street firms, and this is included in stock values.

To meet the 2 degree Celsius goal, the vast majority of the carbon reserves must remain underground, unburned, meaning that Wall Street would have to lose approximately $20 trillion to protect the planet from a devastating future.

Humanity is thus faced with the ultimate Darwinian IQ test. It is a multiple-choice question. Choose: A) capitalism or B) the planet. We can only have one or the other, not both.

Lisa Lubow, a historian, activist and professor at Glendale College, made a similar point in her presentation, stating:

Radical changes are needed to save humanity and the planet: to leave fossil fuels in the ground; initiate an emergency program to convert fossil fuel systems to renewables; and radically reorganize our production systems overall for sustainability. The system itself is in direct conflict with the solution to the emergency. The capitalist imperative for unlimited growth through market-driven resource extraction, production and consumption is leading us on a suicide mission. But the system is unwilling and unable to "power down."

In his talk, author and Pace University professor Chris Williams observed that:

It is increasingly clear to a growing number of people that the ecological crisis is a direct outgrowth of the operation of our economic system; namely, capitalism. The crisis has many facets: environmental racism, energy production, pollution, gender oppression, biodiversity loss, agribusiness and climate change to name only a few. But they can all be traced back to a singular cause: the relentless pursuit of profit and the accumulation of capital.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CLEARLY, ECOLOGY and economy are intertwined and inseparable, "two dimensions of one reality" in the words of writer, Green and socialist Scott Tucker in his presentation. In fact, as Tucker observed, the prefix "eco" common to both words, derives from the same Greek root: oikos, meaning "home" or "household."

"Ecology" therefore implies the greater household of nature. The word economics contains in addition the Greek root word nomos, meaning "law" or "custom". Using the root word meanings, one might therefore say that economics encompasses the customs and processes we use to regulate and operate our home (the Earth).

Ben Manski, Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein's 2012 campaign manager and president of the Liberty Tree Foundation, eloquently took this idea further in his discussion, arguing, "The exploitation of human nature and the exploitation of nature are part of the same process. An injury to one is an injury to all--that injuries to oppressed people are borne by the Earth, and injuries to our Earth are suffered first by oppressed people."

Continuing on the interconnection of economics and ecology, Manski argued, "Both practically and theoretically, in the long run there are no boundaries between jobs and environment. There are also no boundaries between class struggle and ecological resistance, and no boundaries between red and green."

The ecosocialism concept clearly has its roots in the Marxian tradition that calls for a re-organization of society to unleash all human potential. As Manski pointed out:

'Ecology solidarity' requires a struggle for democracy--what Marx called the 'species being,' the natural essence, of humanity--so that working people can finally 'become the human race,' and self-organize to make the most of our species' capacity to do good, to do right by the Earth, and to respect the rights of nature, so that we may all live in the prosperity that this living planet gives us."

Green Party presidential candidate and physician Jill Stein, in her rousing closing plenary, proposed a concrete program of "next steps" for the System Change Not Climate Change ecosocialist coalition, outlining a proposal for an "emergency green economic transformation," based, in her words, on "on the notion that the accelerating climate collapse intensifies all our struggles--for economic, racial and environmental justice, human rights, civil liberties, peace and democracy."

"While the climate crisis makes all of these struggles more difficult, it also provides unprecedented urgency and momentum for collaboration," she stated.

She called for an "Emergency Green Economic Transformation" program--a "Green New Deal" for full employment, 100 percent clean renewable energy by 2030, demilitarization, and an economic bill of rights (including Medicare for all, free pre K-through-college education as a human right, labor and immigrant rights, affordable housing, and abolishing student debt).

The project is intended to have two phases with organization and planning starting immediately for a series of gatherings/conferences (Earth Day to May Day 2014) to expand the identities of our individual movements beyond our silos, build solidarity for an emergency green economic transformation in our communities and beyond, and lay the groundwork for a series of rallies and direct actions (Fall 2014) to push for a "Green New Deal" program. More announcements on the plan will be released in the coming weeks.

1158. China's One-Child Population Policy Faces Hurdles

Edward Wong, The New York Times, September 26, 2013

BEIJING — Nineteen province-level governments in China collected a total of $2.7 billion in fines last year from parents who had violated family planning laws, which usually limit couples to one child, a lawyer who had requested the data said Thursday.

The lawyer, Wu Youshui of Zhejiang Province, sent letters in July to 31 provincial governments asking officials to disclose how much they had collected in 2012 in family planning fines, referred to as “social support fees.” He said he suspected that the fines were a substantial source of revenue for governments in poor parts of China.

“We want to shed light on how the current family planning policy works,” Mr. Wu said via telephone. “Many are debating reform of the family planning policy. Learning how it works may help with that debate.”

Mr. Wu’s findings were first published Thursday by Beijing News. Mr. Wu opposes China’s one-child policy and has written on his microblog he is a Christian.

Last year, some prominent scholars and policy advisers started a major effort to push central officials to fundamentally change or repeal a law that generally punishes families for having more than one child. That push comes as economists point out that China’s economic growth rate is likely to slow because its pool of cheap, young workers is dwindling as the population ages.

The 2010 national census showed that the average birthrate for a Chinese household was 1.181; it was lower in cities and higher in rural areas. Some scholars say that number is extraordinarily low, and the real figure is probably a bit higher.

The family planning regulations are prone to abuse because local officials are often evaluated by their superiors based on how well they keep down the populations of their areas. There have been well-known cases of forced abortions or sterilizations across China. Last year, Chinese Internet users sympathized with the plight of Pan Chunyan, who said she had been abducted by officials in Daji Township when she was eight months pregnant with her third child. The officials forced her to have an abortion at a hospital. In June 2012, another woman, Feng Jianmei, was forced to abort a 7-month-old fetus in Shaanxi Province, in a case that also ignited national outrage.

Parents in other parts of China have accused local family planning officials of abducting babies who are considered “extra” children in a household and selling them to orphanages, sometimes for $3,000 per baby.

The Beijing News report said Mr. Wu, the lawyer, obtained data showing that Jiangxi Province had collected the most in fines of the 19 provinces that replied to him; it amassed $554 million in 2012. Sichuan was second with $400 million, and Fujian was third with $340 million. The provinces that collected the least were Qinghai, with $572,000, and Ningxia, with about $2 million. Both have low populations compared with most other provinces, and they are also home to many rural residents and ethnic minorities, who have more leeway in the number of children they can have without incurring fines.

The 12 province-level governments that did not provide data told Mr. Wu that the fines were collected at the county level and used there, so the provincial governments had no information.

On Sept. 18, the National Audit Office published a report on the collection and spending of the “social support fee” after it reviewed nine provinces. The office looked at five counties in each of those provinces. It found that “extra” children were not properly counted, that there were no uniform standards for collecting the fees and that management of the fees was poor.

Mr. Wu said that he suspected that the fines had been “managed in a chaotic way,” and that it appeared that county-level officials overseeing the punishments had been unsupervised.

He said the fee should be abolished altogether, and “it should be the family’s decision how many children to have.”

1157. IPCC Climate Report: Human Impact Is 'Unequivocal'

By Flona Harvey, The Guardian, September 27, 2013

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that the authors are now 95 percent to 100 percent confident that human activity is the primary influence on planetary warming.

World leaders must now respond to an "unequivocal" message from climate scientists and act with policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations secretary-general urged on Friday.

Introducing a major report from a high level UN panel of climate scientists, Ban Ki-moon said, "The heat is on. We must act."

The world's leading climate scientists, who have been meeting in all-night sessions this week in the Swedish capital, said there was no longer room for doubt that climate change was occurring, and the dominant cause has been human actions in pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In their starkest warning yet, following nearly seven years of new research on the climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it was "unequivocal" and that even if the world begins to moderate greenhouse gas emissions, warming is likely to cross the critical threshold of 2C by the end of this century. That would have serious consequences, including sea level rises, heatwaves and changes to rainfall meaning dry regions get less and already wet areas receive more.

In response to the report, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said in a statement: "This is yet another wakeup call: those who deny the science or choose excuses over action are playing with fire."

"Once again, the science grows clearer, the case grows more compelling, and the costs of inaction grow beyond anything that anyone with conscience or commonsense should be willing to even contemplate," he said.

He said that livelihoods around the world would be impacted. "With those stakes, the response must be all hands on deck. It's not about one country making a demand of another. It's the science itself, demanding action from all of us. The United States is deeply committed to leading on climate change."

In a crucial reinforcement of their message – included starkly in this report for the first time – the IPCC warned that the world cannot afford to keep emitting carbon dioxide as it has been doing in recent years. To avoid dangerous levels of climate change, beyond 2C, the world can only emit a total of between 800 and 880 gigatonnes of carbon. Of this, about 530 gigatonnes had already been emitted by 2011.

That has a clear implication for our fossil fuel consumption, meaning that humans cannot burn all of the coal, oil and gas reserves that countries and companies possess. As the former UN commissioner Mary Robinson told the Guardian last week, that will have "huge implications for social and economic development." It will also be difficult for business interests to accept.

The central estimate is that warming is likely to exceed 2C, the threshold beyond which scientists think global warming will start to wreak serious changes to the planet. That threshold is likely to be reached even if we begin to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, which so far has not happened, according to the report.

Other key points from the report are:

• Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are now at levels "unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years."

• Since the 1950's it's "extremely likely" that human activities have been the dominant cause of the temperature rise.

• Concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased to levels that are unprecedented in at least 800,000 years. The burning of fossil fuels is the main reason behind a 40% increase in C02 concentrations since the industrial revolution.

• Global temperatures are likely to rise by 0.3C to 4.8C, by the end of the century depending on how much governments control carbon emissions.

• Sea levels are expected to rise a further 26-82cm by the end of the century.

• The oceans have acidified as they have absorbed about a third of the carbon dioxide emitted.

Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the working group on physical science, said the message that greenhouse gases must be reduced was clear. "We give very relevant guidance on the total amount of carbon that can't be emitted to stay to 1.5 or 2C. We are not on the path that would lead us to respect that warming target [which has been agreed by world governments]."

He said: "Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions."

Though governments around the world have agreed to curb emissions, and at numerous international meetings have reaffirmed their commitment to holding warming to below 2C by the end of the century, greenhouse gas concentrations are still rising at record rates.

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said it was for governments to take action based on the science produced by the panel, consisting of thousands of pages of detail, drawing on the work of more than 800 scientists and hundreds of scientific papers.

The scientists also put paid to claims that global warming has "stopped" because global temperatures in the past 15 years have not continued the strong upward march of the preceding years, which is a key argument put forward by sceptics to cast doubt on climate science. But the IPCC said the longer term trends were clear: "Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850 in the northern hemisphere [the earliest date for reliable temperature records for the whole hemisphere]."

The past 15 years were not such an unusual case, said Stocker. "People always pick 1998 but [that was] a very special year, because a strong El Niño made it unusually hot, and since then there have been some medium-sized volcanic eruptions that have cooled the climate."

But he said that further research was needed on the role of the oceans, which are thought to have absorbed more than 90% of the warming so far.

The scientists have faced sustained attacks from so-called sceptics, often funded by "vested interests" according to the UN, who try to pick holes in each item of evidence for climate change. The experts have always known they must make their work watertight against such an onslaught, and every conclusion made by the IPCC must pass scrutiny by all of the world's governments before it can be published.

Their warning on Friday was sent out to governments around the globe, who convene and fund the IPCC.

It was 1988 when scientists were first convened for this task, and in the five landmark reports since then the research has become ever clearer. Now, scientists say they are certain that "warming in the climate system is unequivocal and since 1950 many changes have been observed throughout the climate system that are unprecedented over decades to millennia." That warning, from such a sober body, hemmed in by the need to submit every statement to extraordinary levels of scrutiny, is the starkest yet.

"Heatwaves are very likely to occur more frequently and last longer. As the earth warms, we expect to see currently wet regions receiving more rainfall, and dry regions receiving less, although there will be exceptions," Stocker said.

Qin Dahe, also co-chair of the working group, said: "As the ocean warm, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years."

Prof David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said: "The far-reaching consequences of this warming are becoming understood, although some uncertainties remain. The most significant uncertainty, however, is how much carbon humanity will choose to put into the atmosphere in the future. It is the total sum of all our carbon emissions that will determine the impacts. We need to take action now, to maximise our chances of being faced with impacts that we, and our children, can deal with. Waiting a decade or two before taking climate change action will certainly lead to greater harm than acting now."