3310. In Defense of the Green Party

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, January 27, 2020

American liberals, the bulk of the ecological movement, and much of the left voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Although formulated as recommendations to the Greens in general, the Open Letter is actually a polemic against Howie Hawkins’s CounterPunch article “The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem.”

As has been the case in most elections since Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate in 1964, the threat of a “unprecedented danger” has become a talking point of the Communist Party, the Nation Magazine and a broad spectrum of liberal thinking epitomized by the articles of Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin, as well as the spectacle of Michael Moore getting down on his knees to beg Ralph Nader not to run for President on the Bill Maher show in 2004 .

In addition to holding up a second Donald Trump term as a bogeyman, the authors have the gumption to tell Howie Hawkins that even if the Greens run a low-key campaign, they will come out of the elections stronger:

We have no way to assess the claim that Greens would find it dispiriting to remove themselves as a factor that might abet global catastrophe via a Trump re-election. But wouldn’t Trump out of office much less Sanders or Warren in office not only benefit all humanity and a good part of the biosphere to boot, but also the Green Party? For that matter, weren’t more potential Green Party members and voters driven off by the party’s dismissal of the dangers of Trump than were inspired by it? Which grew more in the last four years, DSA or the Greens?

The Open Letter was signed by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters and Michael Albert. Some political background on these high-profile personalities is necessary.

To start with, Chomsky had a conversation that touched on lesser-evilism with Robert Scheer, the editor of Truthdig, where the Open Letter appeared among other places. I ordinarily have zero interest in any of these ubiquitous transcriptions of Chomsky’s profundities, but was curious to see his defense of “lesser evilism”. Scheer, an 83-year old leftist who has made a living since the 1960s publishing magazines like Ramparts and Truthdig, still has enough piss and vinegar inside him to be skeptical of Chomsky’s justifications for voting Democrat. Chomsky, now 91, is an old-fashioned pragmatist despite his anarchist pretensions. Here he is reassuring Scheer that voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020 would be good for us, just like cod liver oil:

There’s another word for lesser evilism. It’s called rationality. Lesser evilism is not an illusion, it’s a rational position. But you don’t stop with lesser evilism. You begin with it, to prevent the worst, and then you go on to deal with the fundamental roots of what’s wrong, even with the lesser evils.

The best you can say about Robert Scheer is that he keeps these meetings of the great minds to a minimum. Over on ZNet, fellow Open Letter signer Michael Albert has inflicted them on his readers dozens of times over the years. Besides putting Chomsky on a pedestal, Albert’s main interest over the years has been to promote PARECON, or participatory economics. Unlike those nasty revolutions in Russia and Cuba, this is a blueprint for a future society that will be like the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where “the sun shines every day on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees.” So, he has no strategy for getting to the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nobody’s perfect.

As for Bill Fletcher Jr. and Barbara Ehrenreich, suffice it to say that they constituted half of the committee that initiated Progressives for Obama in 2008. Meanwhile, Ron Daniels was Deputy Campaign Manager for Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign and urged a vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Leslie Cagan was one of the founders of the Committees of Correspondence in 1991, a Eurocommunist split from the CPUSA that retained its orientation to the Democratic Party. Norman Solomon was a Sanders delegate at the 2016 convention. A most mutually reinforcing coterie.

Unlike those mentioned above, Kathy Kelly has no paper trail identifying her as a Democratic Party supporter; nor does Cynthia Peters. I have to assume that they are like most people on the left today, deathly afraid of Trump and harboring immense illusions in the difference that a Sanders presidency can make.

What unites all of them is a belief in gradual change, as if electing Democrats can serve as a brake on the inexorable decline of the capitalist system. There’s a real cognitive dissonance between the almost daily reports on one catastrophe or another, from the Australian fires to thirty percent of birds in North America dying since 1959, and the plodding, self-serving liberalism of the Democratic Party. This includes not only the regular Democrats from Joe Biden to Amy Klobuchar. It also includes the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, whose idea of socialism is to bring back the New Deal on a silver platter. It was WWII, after all, that broke the back of the Great Depression, not building roads for the WPA.

The Open Letter believes that it would help the Green Party grow if it incorporated a “safe state” strategy. Missing from its calculations is any understanding of its relationship to the two-party system. Whatever its flaws, and they are legion, it is the only party in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century that has functioned as a opponent of a rigged game that serves, first and foremost, to preserve the electoral shell-game.

In Chomsky’s chat with Robert Scheer, he refers to the need for staying in the streets even if a Democrat is elected, even Bernie Sanders. That’s the same advice the Progressives for Obama gave in 2008. Even if Obama was elected, we’d have to put pressure on him to promote progressive legislation. They use the analogy with FDR, who supposedly pushed through New Deal legislation because of trade union militancy.

Our problem, however, is the lack of a genuine radical movement in the USA that can coordinate such forceful actions, let alone a militant trade union movement. In the 1930s, there was a powerful Communist Party that despite tail-ending FDR was in the forefront of social struggles everywhere. Over 20 years ago, I wrote an article that gave them their due:

In an essay “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front”, [Mark] Naison discusses how the CP made the decision to implement the Popular Front in a very aggressive manner. Browder and the American Communists made a big effort to stop speaking in “Marxist-Leninese” and discovered many novel ways to reach the American people.

They concentrated in two important areas: building the CIO and fighting racism. There is an abundance of information about its union activities, but new research is bringing out important facts about its links to the Black community.

A “Saturday Evening Post” writer observed in 1938 that CP headquarters “is a place where every Negro with a grievance can be sure of prompt action. If he has been fired, the Communists can be counted on to picket his employer. If he has been evicted, the Communists will guard his furniture and take his case to court. If his gas has been cut off, the Communists will take his complaint, but not his unpaid bill to the nearest office… There is never a labor parade, nor a mass meeting of any significance in the colored community in which Communists do not get their banner in the front row and their speakers on the platform.”

After WWII, the Cold War kicked in and reduced the CPUSA to a ghost of its once domineering past. However, there was a new upsurge in radical energy as the Maoists and Trotskyists provided the backbone of militant activism in the 1960s and 70s, even making an impact on the trade union movement. Sectarian mistakes and a steep decline of industrial jobs once again led to a decline in radical activism that only began to reappear during the Occupy movement.

Our problem today is we have a renewed interest in using the Democratic Party as an instrument of reform but with a blunt instrument like the DSA leading the charge. Unlike the highly disciplined CPUSA, the DSA seems incapable of using its 60,000 strong membership in a coordinated assault on capitalist power. I try to imagine what things would look like today if the 10,000 or so Maoists and Trotskyists of the mid-70s had not gone off their rocker thinking the revolution was around the corner. If they had dropped their sectarian pretensions and learned to work together, they would have been able to better confront the nativism, racism, and environmentally destructive policies of the Trump administration.

As a DSA member, I get regular communications from Maria Svart, the group’s chairperson. Almost all of it is consumed with electoral projects like going to New Hampshire to go door to door for Bernie Sanders. When Trump authorized the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, there was a genuine fear that this might have led to a new, major war in the region. What was Jacobin’s reaction to this threat? It urged people to work for Sanders’s election to prevent such a war. Talk about electoral cretinism.

There’s some real confusion about leftist parties today, even—I’m afraid to admit—in the Green Party. It runs candidates not exactly in the same way as the Democrats but mostly in the hope of getting elected to local offices that don’t require the kind of money that you need to run for Governor, Congress or the Presidency. The purpose of Howie Hawkins would not be to get elected but to raise awareness of the uncompromising stance of the Green Party on all the important issues of the day.

My idea of the Greens is strongly influenced by the example of the Peace and Freedom Party of the 1960s that was mostly a vehicle for radical activism. It never amounted to much outside of California but for much of the 60s and 70s, it was a key part of the left that drew in many leftists wary of the lunacy of the “Leninist” left, as well they should have been.

When I went to the Madison Square Garden rally for Ralph Nader in 2000, I was stunned to see the sold-out audience of mostly young people filled with energy. It dawned on me that the Greens could draw upon this energy and become the badly needed, nationally coordinated backbone of the left. Unfortunately, the people who believed in a “safe state” strategy, like the Open Letter advocated, maneuvered themselves into a leadership position that was strong enough to deny Ralph Nader the candidacy in 2004. Instead, the Greens ended up with David Cobb as the candidate who was very good at making sure it kept a low profile.

Jill Stein ran a much more energetic campaign in 2012 and 2016 but she doesn’t really have a vision of what the Greens can become. Additionally, she relies on the advice of David Cobb, her campaign manager, who is still bent on preventing the party from exploiting the possibilities that lie ahead of it in a period of deepening crisis.

Howie Hawkins has that vision and that is why I am supporting his candidacy. If he is the Presidential candidate in 2020, I will do everything in my power to back his campaign even if he draws votes away from Bernie Sanders in safe states. The way to build a party is to go full-bore. Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. The Republicans are very good at it even if the goal is to turn back the clock to 1895. In politics, you have to have a killer instinct. Lenin had it. So did Fidel Castro. While the USA is nothing at all like Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1957, the conditions are ripening for immense class battles within a few years.

It will take a revolutionary party to change this country from top to bottom and the time to begin moving toward its formation is now. I do not think that the Green Party can become that party but its growth will create the fertile soil that can determine the outcome, just like the abolitionist parties that gave rise to the Republican Party of Abe Lincoln. The USA had a revolution that put an end to chattel slavery in the 1860s. It is high time to make a new revolution that destroys wage slavery.

3309. How Britain Helped Islamic Republic of Iran to Destroy the Pro-Soviet Union Tudeh Party

By Mark Curtis and Phil Miller, Maverick Insider, January 21, 2020

Nouraldin Kianouri, Secretary-General of Tudeh Party "confessed" on television to a plot against the Islamic Republic.  Many Tudeh leaders and rank-and-filers, as well as Fedayeen Majority leaders and rank-and-filers, were arrested tortured and executed in the 1983 wave of repression. 

The UK’s secret intelligence service, MI6, worked with the CIA to provide a list of alleged Soviet agents in Iran to Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic regime, which took power after the overthrow of the UK-backed Shah in 1979. The information was used by the regime to execute leading members of the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh.

The British files also highlight how at least one Foreign Office official considered how the UK might benefit from the forced confessions given by Tudeh members at the time, which were believed to be extracted under torture.

The files suggest British policy was motivated by the desire to curry favour with Iran’s new rulers, rather than concerns over Cold War geopolitics or Soviet influence in Iran, which was recognised to be minimal.

The hit list

The list of Iranians allegedly working for the Soviet Union in Iran was provided to Britain by Vladimir Kuzichkin, a major in the KGB who defected to the UK in June 1982, as reported by the New York Times and London Times in 1986. The information gleaned by MI6 from Kuzichkin – who was responsible for maintaining contacts with the Tudeh party, the main leftist organisation in Iran established in the 1940s – was also shared with the CIA, and passed on to Tehran.

The Iranian regime proceeded to round up over 1,000 members of the Tudeh party and eventually executed as many as 200. The party was banned and forced underground.

Britain’s senior official in Iran at that time, Nicholas Barrington, states in his memoir that Kuzichkin’s information simply “found its way” to the Iranian authorities after the Russian’s defection, without specifying the British role.

Files from the time – when Barrington was head of the British Interests Section in Tehran since Iran and the UK had cut full diplomatic relations – suggest that British officials supported Iran’s repression of the Tudeh.

Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 9 May 1983. (National Archives)

‘A significant step’

As Iran’s crackdown was under way, Barrington met a senior Iranian official on 5 May 1983 seeking British views “on his government’s action against the Tudeh”, which, he said, was evidence of “Iranian independence of the big powers”.

Barrington replied, according to his memorandum on the meeting: “I said I had never doubted this independence. The latest Iranian [actions] seemed to me a significant step.”

The Iranian official then mentioned to Barrington a “confession” forced by the new regime which had aired the previous night on Iranian television by a Tudeh member who had previously been jailed for 24 years under the Shah. The activist was said by the Iranian official to have previously revealed nothing “despite all the Savak’s tortures” – referring to the former regime’s brutal security service.

Barrington commented: “I said, half in jest, that perhaps the Islamic Republic’s torture was more effective than that of the Shah.”

By this time, Barrington and other British officials were well aware of Iranian repression. On the same day he met the Iranian official, Barrington had informed the Foreign Office in London of the “destruction of the Tudeh”.

He noted that “it is widely believed that some [Tudeh members] have already suffered the death penalty and the rest will do so soon”. He added that “the public have been taking the law into their own hands” in dealing with Tudeh members and “no doubt scores will be settled and some comparatively innocent will suffer with the guilty”.

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

Earlier, in February 1983, when Iran arrested a number of Tudeh members, Barrington commented that “it looks as if the regime are making a determined effort to root out the Tudeh”. By April, Barrington was informed by a Hungarian diplomat that “several hundred” Tudeh members were in prison, who were expected to be dealt with by a military court.

Barrington did not lament the Iranian regime’s actions, but rather saw them as an opportunity. He wrote that fellow European heads of mission “felt that it was time for Western European and like-minded countries to keep their lines open to Iran”.

No evidence could be found in the 1983 files that UK officials did anything other than approve of this severe repression.

Barrington later wrote in his memoir that “there was money to be made” in Iran where “an important part of our work was maintaining British commercial links with Iran and promoting exports”.

By July 1983, another British official in Tehran, Chris Rundle, told the Foreign Office that “some rank-and-file members are being executed and there are rumours of large-scale executions”. He added that the “best estimates here are that about 80% of the Tudeh members in Iran have been arrested, the rest having gone into hiding or escaped”.

Extracted confessions

The Iranian regime’s aim to destroy the Tudeh party was made easier by the forced “confessions” it extracted from two key figures – Noureddin Kianouri, the party’s secretary-general, and Mahmoud Etemadzadeh, editor of the party newspaper.

On 30 April 1983, after nearly two months in jail, Kianouri and Etemadzadeh appeared on television, saying that the Tudeh had worked against Iran and spied for the Soviet Union. Barrington noted that, “The pressures, or threats, in detention must have been great judging by the appearance of the two men.”

A British file from its embassy in Moscow noted a report from Pravda – the official newspaper of the Soviet regime – claiming that the confessions “had been extracted by Gestapo-like methods inherited from the Savak”.

Despite this, the head of the Middle East and North Africa department in the Foreign Office, Oliver Miles, suggested that the “admissions” on television might be useful to Britain. He noted that “there could well be references to friendly parties in other countries which we might be able to make use of”, such as the Tudeh’s relations with the Syrian Communist Party.

Miles also noted: “Libya and Algeria also have tolerable relations with Iran, and it is just possible that something interesting might crop up in that connexion [sic] too”, before adding, “I should be grateful if whoever is principally concerned with studying the material could bear this point in mind”.

Memorandum by Oliver Miles, head of the Middle East and North Africa Department, Foreign Office, 6 May 1983. (National Archives)

Three days later, Barrington reported: “Tudeh cadres are being rounded up in the provinces.”

On 4 May 1983, when Iran expelled 18 Soviet diplomats, Barrington noted: “The action against the Tudeh has received the seal of Khomeini’s approval…he praises the revolutionary guards, the other security forces and the judiciary for ridding Iran of the Tudeh, which he referred to as a mottled snake which had been working to overthrow Islam”.

‘A major landmark’

Barrington told the Foreign Office in May 1983 that due to the destruction of the Tudeh “a major landmark has been reached in Soviet/Iranian relations and perhaps also in the history of Communist parties overseas”.

Yet the files suggest that Britain’s support for Iranian repression of the Tudeh cannot be principally explained as a Cold War episode to counter Soviet influence. Officials did not fear the Iranian regime would turn to the Soviet Union since it was implacably opposed to its communism.

There were various sources of friction between Iran and the Soviet Union at this time, notably Moscow’s arming of Iraq, with whom Iran had been at war since 1980. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had also resulted in millions of Afghans fleeing into Iran.

Neither were the Soviets prepared to go to great lengths to support the Tudeh. Barrington stated in a July 1982 letter to London – by which time Kuzichkin was in the UK passing on information – that while the Islamic regime was in power in Iran, the Russians were “prepared to play it cool and ditch the Tudeh Party, if necessary”.

Barrington went on to receive a knighthood and became Britain’s High Commissioner to Pakistan.

Formal approval for working with the CIA to pass Kuzichkin’s information to the Iranian regime was probably made by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, foreign secretary Francis Pym and head of MI6, Colin Figures.

An unsuccessful attempt was made to contact Sir Nicholas Barrington for a comment. DM

Mark Curtis is editor and Phil Miller is staff reporter, for Declassified UK, a journalism organisation investigating UK foreign, security and intelligence policies. They tweet at @DeclassifiedUK, @markcurtis30 and @pmillerinfo

3308. Food at Risk as Third of Plants Face Extinction

By Tim Radford, Climate News Network, December 17, 2019

More than a third of the world’s plants are so rare they face extinction. In a warmer world, that would leave supplies of food at risk.

Botanists have made a new census of terrestrial plants – only to find that with nearly 40% of them rare, or extremely rare, this may put food at risk.

And a second team of researchers, in a separate study, has established that some of these rare or vanishing species could include the wild relatives of some of the planet’s most popular vegetables.

The two studies matter. The first underlines yet another reason for new and determined conservation strategies to preserve the extraordinary natural variety and richness of life – the shorthand word that scientists use is biodiversity – already under pressure from the explosion in human numbers, the destruction of natural habitats and the looming catastrophe of climate change driven by rapidly rising global temperatures.

And the second study is simply a matter of the next lunch or dinner: many rare plants are survivors with the resources to adapt to change. In a fast-changing world, crop breeders may need to go back to the wild relatives to look for the genes that will keep the commercial carrots, courgettes, pumpkins and chilli peppers on the grocery shelves.

US scientists and international colleagues report in the journal Science Advances that they worked for 10 years and compiled 20 million observational records to establish a simple plant census: the forests, grasslands, scrublands, tundra and swamps of the wild world are home to about 435,000 unique plant species.

“According to ecological and evolutionary theory, we’d expect many species to be rare, but the actual observed number we found was pretty startling,” said Brian Enquist of the University of Arizona, who led the consortium. “There are many more rare species than we expected.”

The rare species were most likely to be clustered in what ecologists call hotspots: the northern Andes in South America, Costa Rica, South Africa, Madagascar and south-east Asia.

What these places have in common is that, over millions of years, they have maintained stable climates, and as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, these tropical mountains and valleys provided refuge for life’s variety.

But these survivors may not enjoy a stable future, as ever higher levels of greenhouse gases are spilled into the atmosphere from human use of fossil fuels, and global temperatures continue to rise, and as human communities expand into what was once wilderness.

Significant loss ahead

“In many of these regions, there’s increasing human activity such as agriculture, cities and towns, land use and clearing,” said Professor Enquist.

“So that’s not exactly the best of news. If nothing is done, this all indicates that there will be a significant reduction in biodiversity – mainly in rare species – because their low numbers makes them more prone to extinction.”

Humans depend on the natural world for survival: biodiversity – plants, fungi, mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and so on – provides all human nourishment, most of the medicines, fuels, fabrics and textiles that warm and shelter 7.7bn people, and at the same time maintains supplies of water, air, crop pollinators and so on.

But new research in the journal Plants, People, Planet confirms once again that many of the wild ancestors and cousins of the crops that nourish billions could be at risk.

And these wild relatives – which have survived climate shifts over millions of years – represent a vital resource for plant breeders anxious to cope with rapid global heating.

Unpreserved

The latest study confirms that 65% of wild pumpkins and more than 95% of wild chilli peppers are not formally preserved in any gene banks protected by conservation scientists.

“The wild relatives of crops are one of the key tools used to breed crops adapted to hotter, colder, drier, wetter, saltier and other difficult conditions,” said Colin Khoury of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture.

“But they are impacted by habitat destruction, over-harvesting, climate change, pollution, invasive species and more. Some of them are sure to disappear from their natural habitats without urgent action.”

Dr Khoury and his colleagues have prepared a series of detailed maps of the range and distribution of the wild relatives of a range of important food species: the aim is to focus on the most effective kinds of protection for what, literally, could become tomorrow’s lunch in a world of rapid change.

“If they disappear, they are gone,” said Dr Khoury. “Extinction is forever, which is a loss not only in terms of their evolution and persistence on the planet, but also a loss to the future of our food.” – Climate News Network

3307. There's Literally a Million Times More Microplastics in Oceans Than We Realized

By George Dvorsky, Gizmodo, December 3, 2019

If you pulled 1,000 liters (264 gallons) of water out of the ocean, how many small bits of plastic would you expect to find? Ten pieces? One hundred pieces? How about 8.3 million pieces of what researchers call “mini-microplastic.” Such is the finding of an alarming new study.

The amount of microplastic in our ocean—that is, pieces of plastic measuring smaller than 5 millimeters—is a million times greater than previously estimated, according to new research published in the science journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters

“For years we’ve been doing microplastics studies the same way (by) using a net to collect samples,” said Brandon in a press release. “But anything smaller than that net mesh has been escaping.”

Indeed, as independent research from 2015 pointed out, thousands of trawls done between 1971 and 2013—all with the same kind of net—were only able to capture plastics larger than 333 micrometers in size, or one-third of a millimeter. So while these nets were small enough to filter plankton, they were subsequently too big to capture the smallest plastic particles, known as mini-microplastics.

“I saw these published size ranges and thought, we are under-sampling this smaller range. There’s a big knowledge gap,” said Brandon.

With this deficiency in mind, Brandon and her colleagues developed a new technique to detect and measure the volume of mini-microplastics in seawater. Salps—tiny, gelatinous filter-feeding invertebrates— were key to the updated approach were. These barrel-shaped creatures swim at depths above 2,000 meters (6,500 feet) and they often link together to form long chains that, through their combined efforts, helps them to swim faster. To swim and filter-feed on plankton, salp pump water through their bodies with pulsed contractions.

The Scripps researchers figured the stomachs of salps might be a place where mini-microplastics accumulate. To that end, samples of both surface seawater and salp specimens were pulled from the California Current, the North Pacific subtropical gyre (also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), and an in-between ocean zone.

Back at the lab, the scientists used a special fluorescent microscope to illuminate—both literally and figuratively—microplastic particles found in the samples. As the Scripps press release points out, “plastic self-illuminates when exposed to multiple wavelengths of light.” This method allowed them to document pieces as small as 10 micrometers, which is thinner than the width of human hair. The researchers also analyzed seawater collected from 2009 to 2017 for their analysis.

Disturbingly, every salp studied had mini-microplastics in their stomach, a finding that even surprised the researchers. Given the quick turnaround time of the salps’ digestive system—between 2 to 7 hours—the scientists expected their stomachs to be relatively clean. Such was not the case.

“The thing that truly surprised me the most was that every salp, regardless of year collected, species, life stage, or part of the ocean collected, had plastic in its stomach,” Brandon wrote in an email to Earther. “A species having 100 percent ingestion rates is quite extraordinary, and devastating for the foodweb that eats salps.”

Translating these findings into an estimate, the researchers concluded that, on average, 8.3 million pieces of mini-microplastics can be found in a typical cubic meter (35 cubic feet or the aforementioned 1,000 liters) of ocean water. That runs in stark contrast to the previous estimate of 10 fragments per cubic meter.

“This study may be one of the first to estimate the abundance of the smallest mini‐microplastics in surface seawater, which are consistently under‐sampled,” wrote the authors in the study. The findings show plastic concentrations were up to seven orders of magnitude higher than earlier studies, highlighting the “previously unquantified significance of mini‐microplastics in marine debris counts.”

Of course, quantity is different than total volume.

“The quantity is one million times more numerically, but when you multiply the quantity times volume, the volume of the larger pieces is still much higher,” said Brandon. This distinction matters, she said, depending on what kind of animal you are. Smaller creatures like salps and small plankton will tend to eat more of the tiny bits of plastic while larger plankton and small fish are more likely to be impacted by bigger pieces of plastic.

That salps are accumulating so much plastic is a serious concern. The tiny creatures are likely providing a transportation mechanism for microplastics to reach the bottom of the deep ocean through their digestive processes and sinking feces, and by virtue of this, into the food chain down below. And because salps are regularly consumed by marine animals such as sea turtles, rockfish, and king crab—of which the latter two are regularly consumed by humans—these mini-microplastics might eventually find their way to our dinner plates, and ultimately our bodies.

Microplastics are harmful to marine organisms and ecosystems, but their effect on human health remains unclear. That said, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) says we should probably be worried, though:

“There is scientific uncertainty about the hazards of microplastic issues. There is concern that microplastics could have adverse health effects on humans as they move through the marine food web. Microplastics both absorb and give off chemicals and harmful pollutants. Plastic’s ingredients or toxic chemicals absorbed by plastics may build up over time and stay in the environment. It is not known if you can be exposed to these pollutants by eating contaminated seafood.”

Most of the microplastics observed in the new study were collected from regions close to shore, which suggests the source is runoff pollution from land. Microplastic waste comes from a variety of sources, including synthetic microfibers found in clothing and tiny spherules in toothpaste and skincare products. Over time, much of this plastic, whether big or small, breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, but they linger in the environment for extended periods of time. They cannot be removed by wastewater treatment, and much of this waste ends up in our oceans.

“The results were very surprising in terms of how high our numbers were, but also not that surprising, when you think about how plastic breaks down,” said Brandon. “Every large piece breaks down into thousands, maybe millions of tiny pieces, so there should be millions more [of the] tiniest pieces. It actually makes sense compared to some modeled degradation simulations.”

In terms of how scientists could further validate these results, Brandon offered a few suggestions. She told Earther researchers could “sample more samples of water in other ocean basins and more salps and similar filter-feeding plankton,” and adopt her team’s fluorescence microscopy method and start hunting for small microplastics. In addition, scientists could “fine-tune this microscopy method with more specialized fluorescence filters for specific plastics so we know abundances of plastic types as well.”

Governments and other top officials need to enact legislation to limit the use of products that contribute to microplastic pollution, but there are things you can do as well, such as not using products that contain microplastics, avoiding single-use plastics, using paper bags, recycling, and, of course, not throwing plastic waste into any body of water. After all, it may just end up back in your body anyways.

3306. Misrepresenting Marx’s Ecology: A Response to Daniel Tanuro’s “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?

By John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, January 14, 2020

Daniel Tanuro is an agricultural engineer and leading socialist activist who has made numerous contributions to ecosocialist thought and practice, most notably, in his book Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work.(1) Yet, this has been coupled with persistent claims that there are “fundamental flaws” in Karl Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism.(2) Tanuro has previously charged that Marx failed to recognize the centrality of fossil fuels to capitalist industrialization, and that Marx discounted peasant/indigenous knowledge by rejecting French agronomist Léonce Lavergne’s notion that forage crops were capable of obtaining all the nutrients they needed directly or indirectly (through manure) from the atmosphere.(3) These and other criticisms of Marx by Tanuro were refuted by Paul Burkett and myself in our book Marx and the Earth (2016).(4)

Tanuro has now shifted his argument in a number of ways, requiring a further response. In his recent review “Was Marx an Ecosocialist: A Reply to Kohei Saito,” on Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Tanuro has dropped his accusation that Marx and Engels ignored the role of fossil fuels—something that did not hold up in the face of the mass of evidence to the contrary. Instead, he now faults Marx for being unaware even in the context of his time of the global energy imbalance caused by the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.(5) He follows this up with the charge that Marx incorrectly denied that some plants could obtain nitrogen from the atmosphere, while coupling this with the observation that Marx also neglected the role of earthworms and soil organic matter in soil fertility.(6) Tanuro asserts that both of these were parts of traditional peasant knowledge, which Marx “disdained.” Additionally, the role of earthworms, he notes, was emphasized in Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881).(7) Finally, Tanuro claims that Marx and Engels’s well-known failure to develop a full critical analysis of the expropriation of women’s unpaid domestic labor is related to these general ecological failures.

Marx’s ecological conceptions were naturally limited by the nineteenth-century material conditions and knowledge. Marxian ecology does not rest simply on what Marx and Engels knew or didn’t know about concrete ecological problems, relative to our own time, but rather on their overall critical method. Nevertheless, it is important to scrutinize the “orrery of errors” that Tanuro himself manufactures in his misrepresentation of Marx’s ecological views.(8)

Marx and Nineteenth-Century Ecological Knowledge

In “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?” Tanuro deftly underscores the importance of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift as explored most recently in Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Yet, he criticizes Saito for “exaggerating” the importance of Marx’s ecological critique. This is followed by an attempt to single out certain ecological shortcomings in Marx’s argument. Tanuro’s initial criticism of Marx is to say, “As far as I know, the possibility of a global energy imbalance in the Earth due to the burning of fossil fuels did not catch his [Marx’s] attention. It could have been otherwise—John Tyndall discovered the radiative power of CO2  and other atmospheric gases in 1859. But Marx’s interest in science was mostly focused on other areas of research. (Let’s add that [Carl] Fraas [whom Marx studied] was talking about local climate change caused by deforestation, not global warming.)”(9)

In saying that “it could have been otherwise,” and that Marx could have recognized both the earth’s energy imbalance and global warming if his interests in science had not been “mostly focused on other areas of research,” Tanuro is in effect suggesting that Marx is to be judged not by his understanding of the science of his day, but rather by his failure to supersede it. Here a few facts are in order. Although Tyndall had empirically demonstrated that carbon dioxide played a role in producing a greenhouse effect, neither he nor anyone else in Marx’s lifetime put forward the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. This had to await the Swedish scientists Svante Arrhenius in 1896.(10) Marx, it is worth noting, attended some of Tyndall’s lectures at the time that the latter was presenting his experiments in relation to solar energy and carbon dioxide. Marx was also aware of general speculations with respect to the role of human production in earth warming—though lacking any clear scientific basis—from his studies of the work of the early Marxist ecological economist Sergei Podolinsky.(11)

There was in fact no such thing in Marx’s day as a developed theory of the energy balance of the Earth System. The concept of energy itself (as distinct from force, motion) was still fairly new in the mid-nineteenth century—having been introduced in the context of the scientific revolution associated with the development of thermodynamics, to which Marx and Engels paid close attention.(12) It was not until the 1958, that Mikhail I. Budyko in the Soviet Union published the first estimates of global energy balance in his Heat Balance of the Earth System.(13) The concept of the Earth System itself was thus a late twentieth-century creation.(14)

As Tanuro partly acknowledges, Marx was influenced by the work of the German scientists Carl Fraas and Matthias Schleiden, who documented climate changes in ancient societies. Marx and Engels were also aware of the environmental effects of colonialism on islands like St. Helena (and even in parts of India). Thus, they referred a number of times to local climate change associated with deforestation. Marx carefully took notes from the work of geologist Joseph Beete Jukes on the movement of isotherms due to paleoclimatic change and their effects on species extinctions in geological time over tens of millions of years.(15)

In addition to questioning Marx’s understanding of Earth System changes, Tanuro goes on to challenge Marx for his criticisms of Lavergne’s Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland (1853). Marx derided what he called Lavergne’s “fairy story” with respect to forage plants and soil fertility. Tanuro contends that this amounted to a denial of nitrogen fixation in the soil on Marx’s part. Thus, Tanuro points to what he takes to be: the fact that Marx considered the notion that certain plants could fix nitrogen from the air in soils as a fable…. I think there is little doubt that Marx…expresses a disdain [for this reason] for what he sees as the superstitions of peasants (and those of indigenous peoples). We find a trace of this scientism in Marx’s admiration for Liebig’s theory that chemical nutrients are the main explanation for soil fertility: it is certain that peasants knew the role of earthworms and other organisms of soil fauna—a role confirmed by Darwin in 1881—but peasant knowledge did not hold the attention of Marx.(16)

Tanuro is alluding here to Marx’s objection to Lavergne’s extraordinary claim that “Forage plants derive from the atmosphere the principal elements of their growth, while they give to the soil more than they take from it.”(17) In fact, Marx was entirely correct in treating this as a bourgeois nursery tale, indicating that both parts of Lavergne’s statement were fallacious. It is not true that forage plants, even in the case of legumes, derive from the atmosphere all the principal elements of their growth. Like all other plants they depend largely on nutrients from the soil. For most plants only carbon dioxide plus atmospheric oxygen (which plays a secondary role in removing the waste electrons in the respiratory process and does not enter directly into plant growth) are obtained from the atmosphere. The remainder of the sixteen essential chemical elements have to be obtained by most plants from the soil, including nitrogen. However, legumes (such as clover, peas, and beans) can utilize atmospheric nitrogen and fix it in the soil (with the help of bacteria at their roots). But even legumes are dependent on the soil in order to obtain all the other essential chemical elements in plant growth (aside from carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen). And all plants exhaust the soil, requiring soil chemicals to be recycled. Lavergne’s contention that legumes give to the soil more than they take from it is therefore wrong—as Marx contended.(18)

Nowhere in all of this does Marx go so far as to deny that some plants (legumes) are capable of drawing nitrogen from the atmosphere and fixing it in the soil (a fact that had been demonstrated by Jean-Baptiste Boussingault in 1836, though the exact mechanism by which it occurred was not known until 1880). Moreover, Marx makes no reference at all to nitrogen in this context, so there is no basis for Tanuro’s charge that he denied the existence of nitrogen fixation. Logically, to challenge, as Marx did, the “fairy story” that forage plants get from the atmosphere all of the “principal elements of their growth” is not the same as to adopt the fallacious notion that they get none of these chemicals from the atmosphere. Nor does this say anything about nitrogen specifically. Liebig, who was Marx’s principal source on soil chemistry, had concluded by the third edition of his Agricultural Chemistry in 1843 that the nitrogen that plants obtained from the atmosphere was “quite sufficient” (a position, however, that did not distinguish legumes from plants in general) so that additional nitrogenous fertilizer was unnecessary. Although this conclusion was rightly questioned at the time by farmers and scientists, Marx, would have had little reason on this score to doubt the reality of nitrogen fixation.(19)

Marx’s wider opposition to Lavergne was based on the latter’s advocacy of English high farming with its emphasis on meat-based agricultural system geared to the consumption of the rich, as opposed to a cereal- or grain-based agricultural system geared to the consumption of workers. Far from denying peasant knowledge in this sphere, Marx, as one would expect, was questioning the new, meat-based system of English industrialized agriculture and generally siding with the common people (the people of the commons) and their traditional agricultural practices.(20)

But what of Marx’s neglect of earthworms and other soil fauna in his treatment of the soil? Here Tanuro is undoubtedly correct that this received no attention from Marx,  mainly because major advances in science in this area required the study of soil microorganisms, which had not yet occurred in Marx’s day. It is true, as Tanuro points out, that Darwin published his book on earthworms in 1881, but this was a mere two years before Marx died (one year before Darwin’s own death). Still, it is hardly possible to argue on this meager basis, as Tanuro does, that Marx had “a disdain for what he sees as the superstitions of peasants (and those of indigenous peoples),” or that he was guilty of “scientism.”(21) One has only to look at Marx’s very detailed treatment of the forms of spade cultivation practiced by the Irish peasantry, including their management of the subsoil, to disprove the allegation of his disdain for peasant cultivation.(22) Moreover, Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and writings on the indigenous more generally contain numerous detailed investigations into indigenous agricultural methods.(23)

With respect to gender, Tanuro throws out logic altogether, contending that Marx’s famous statements in Capital and in the Critique of the Gotha Program that nature and labor are the two sources of wealth constitutes a direct indication that Marx took “into account neither the reproductive work mainly performed by women, nor the specific exploitation of female employees.”(24) This seems to be based on two presumptions strangely attributed to Marx: (1) women’s reproduction in the household does not belong to the categories of either corporeal nature or social labor, and cannot be seen as producing real wealth in the form of use values; (2) labor in industry is mainly to be identified with men and excludes women. In contrast, Marx recognized the importance of the reproduction of labor power within the family (while failing to investigate this sufficiently) and could not even have conceived of the idea of reducing all of social labor to capitalist commodity production, which would have undermined the entire basis of historical materialism. Moreover, he indicated in Capital that women were the bulk of the laborers in the main value-generating sector, particularly textiles, in the Industrial Revolution. He carefully examined the specific conditions of women’s labor, as in the chapter on “Modern Domestic Industry” in volume 1 of Capital.(25)

There is no question that Marx and Engels only tangentially dealt with the problem of domestic labor and the fact that women’s contributions to social reproduction in the household were not compensated within the capitalist system. This then is a clear shortcoming in their political-economic analysis. True, there were historical reasons for this in their time, since proletarian women were not stay-at-home housewives in this period—even if they still carried on their backs the main household tasks—but spent the majority of their hours slaving in factories (together with men and older children). The result was that the working-class family was in a state of dissolution, giving rise to the protectionist movement that subsequently relegated women increasingly to the home. Nevertheless the theoretical gap in the analysis of the social reproduction of labor power constituted a crucial weakness in Marx’s critique of capitalism.(26) Marx’s fundamental methodology, together with the recognition of the shortcomings of his analysis in this area, however, has opened the way to the revolutionary development of social reproduction theory over the last half-century, and particularly in the last decade or so.(27) One of the results of this analysis is the growing recognition that capitalism has to be understood in terms of a dialectic of exploitation and expropriation, with the latter including the robbery of both domestic/subsistence labor and nature.(28)

The Centrality of Marx’s Ecological Critique

Tanuro concludes that Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism though important is “exaggerated and counterproductive” in its contention that the thrust of Marx’s critique was to put ecological contradictions increasingly at the center of the analysis. Yet, in understandably asserting that the exploitation of labor power was more important to Marx than the expropriation of nature, Tanuro artificially divides what Marx thought was a dialectical unity, the robbing of both “the soil and the worker,” failing to understand that, as a materialist, Marx invariably went to the root of the problem: the metabolic rift generated by capitalist production, which was at the same time the ultimate manifestation of the alienation of human species-being.(29) “The irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself” was not to be viewed as a separate reality, but rather as the deepest material consequence of the alienation of human labor.(30) It is this unified critical outlook that makes Marx’s work an indispensable starting point for understanding capitalism’s creative destruction of the earth as a place of human habitation.

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Notes

1. Daniel Tanuro, Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work (London: Merlin, 2003).
2. Tanuro, Green Capitalism. Tanuro’s views reflect what has often been called “first-stage ecosocialism,” see John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword,” in Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), vii-xiii.
3. Léonce de Lavergne, The Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1855).
4. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 15-33.
5. Daniel Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?: A Reply to Kohei Saito, International Viewpoint, January 12, 2020, internationalviewpoint.org.
6. Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
7. Charles Darwin, The Formation of the Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (London: John Murray, 1881).
8. E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
9. Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
10. Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5-8.
11. Sergei Podolinsky, “Human Labour and the Unity of Force,” Appendix 2 in Foster and Burkett, Marx and the Earth, 262-87. Marx may have seen this, more developed version of Podolinsky’s argument. He was certainly acquainted with (and took notes on) earlier versions. Here see Sergei Podolinsky, “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces,” Appendix 1 in Foster and Burkett, Marx and the Earth, 243-61.
12. See J.B.S Haldane, “Introduction,” in Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York: International Publishers, 1940), ix-x.
13. John Bellamy Foster “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,” Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 7.
14. Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 29-32.
15. John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1-17, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” Monthly Review 65, no. 7 (December 2013): 9-10.
16. Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
17. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 769; Lavergne, Rural Economy, 50-51.
18. Foster and Burkett, Marx and the Earth, 28-29. On the soil nutrient cycle see Fred Magdoff and Harold Can Es, Building Soils for Better Crops (Waldorf, Maryland: Sustainable Agricultural Publications, 2009), 69-76, 213-30.
19. William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166-67; James N. Galloway, Allison M. Leach, […], and Jan Willem Erisman, “A Chronology of Human Understanding of the Nitrogen Cycle,” Philosophical Transactions B (July 5, 2013), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
20. See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx as a Food Theorist,” Monthly Review 68, no 7 (December 2016): 13-17.
21. Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
22. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 69-70: Eamonn Slater, “Marx on the Colonization of Irish Soil,” MUSSI Working Paper Series 3 (January 2018).
23. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 1-19; Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1974).
24. Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 134. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 3.
25. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution,” Monthly Review 69, no. 8 (January 2018): 3-4.
26. Foster and Clark, “Women, Nature, and Capital, in the Industrial Revolution,” 1-13.
27. On social reproduction theory see the following: Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), Tithi Bhattacharya, “Liberating Women from ‘Political Economy,’” Monthly Review 71, no. 8 (January 2020): 1-13. See also the special September 2019 issue of Monthly Review on social reproduction theory celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Margaret Benston’s “The Political Economy  of Women’s Liberation” with contributions by Benston, Silvia Federici, Martha E. Gimenez, Selma James, Leith Mullings, Marge Piercy, and Vogel.
28. See Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” New Left Review 86 (2014): 60.
29. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 636-39.
30. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949.