#fred magdoff

[milkboydotnet]

Mao’s purpose for initiating the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was to mobilize and engage millions and millions from all sectors of society—workers and peasants as well as students and intellectuals— in a struggle against the forces within the Party that favored the restoration of capitalism. Among most intellectuals in China and the United States, the Cultural Revolution has been viewed as an era of inhumane chaos. And it is true that the Cultural Revolution was chaotic, with various Red Guard factions (some were even sham Red Guards, possibly organized by those under attack to confuse the masses) and many instances of exaggerated and inhumane treatment of people, including some killings. Most of the writings about the Cultural Revolution have emphasized the problems, especially of intellectuals. However, in the rural areas of the country this period is still viewed in a much more positive light—an era when much infrastructure was built, agriculture advanced markedly, and attention was paid to problems of the people living in the countryside. Thus the lives of the rural population—in other words, the great mass of the people—during this period has received little attention. Few people are aware of the visit to China in the summer of 1974, during the Cultural Revolution, by a delegation of U.S. agronomists. They traveled widely and were amazed by what they observed, as described in an article in the New York Times (September 24, 1974). The delegation was composed of ten scientists who were “experienced crop observers with wide experience in Asia.” As Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug put it, “You had to look hard to find a bad field. Everything was green and nice everywhere we traveled. I felt the progress had been much more remarkable than what I expected.” The head of the delegation, Sterling Wortman, a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation described the rice crop as “. . . really first rate. There was just field after field that was as good as anything you can see.” They were also impressed with the increased skill levels of the farmers on the communes. Wortman said “They’re all being brought up to the level of skills of the best people. They all share the available inputs.” A detailed description of their observations on agriculture in China was published in prestigious journal Science in 1975 (vol. 188:549-555) by Dr. Sprague. Much of the progress in China’s agriculture after the Cultural Revolution was made possible by the advances during that period. Even the increase in fertilizer use that occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s was made possible by factories that were contracted for by China in 1973.

Fred Magdoff, in the preface to Dongping Han’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village

[earthv02]

Monthly Review | Repairing the Soil Carbon Rift

To create and preserve a permanent thriving agriculture for untold generations to come, it is essential to manage and care for soils using p

...

Organic material in soil is a prominent reservoir of terrestrial carbon and participates in the global cycling of carbon. A portion of atmospheric carbon dioxide removed by plants is deposited in soil as roots and aboveground residues that become incorporated by the action of earthworms or other larger organisms. Some of this organic material (carbon) remains in the soil and a portion is used as food by soil organisms, such as bacteria and fungi, emitting carbon dioxide that diffuses back into the atmosphere. In healthy soil, there is a large turnover of carbon as a portion of the residues added provide the food source for “a main repository of terrestrial biodiversity, harboring roughly one-quarter of all species on Earth.”2 As the multitude of organisms go about their activities, soils breathe as if a single organism, with oxygen diffusing downward and carbon dioxide diffusing back into the atmosphere, completing a cycle.

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[bsahely]

Why Ecosocialism: For a Red-Green Future | Michael Löwy & Roundtable debate on ecosocialism: Do Red and Green Mix? | THE GREAT TRANSITION INITIATIVE

Why Ecosocialism: For a Red-Green Future | Michael Löwy & Roundtable debate on ecosocialism: Do Red and Green Mix? | THE GREAT TRANSITION INITIATIVE

Reproduced from: https://www.greattransition.org/publication/why-ecosocialism-red-green-future

Why Ecosocialism: For a Red-Green Future

Michael Löwy

December 2018

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He serves as Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and is the co-author, with Joel Kovel, of An Ecosocialist…

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[gospelofthekingdom]

Just finished "What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism” a phenomenal book by Fred Magdoff, Professor Emeritus of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont.

As a student of regenerative agriculture and a soil science enthusiast, it’s great to see folks like Wes Jackson and Fred Magdoff speaking the uncomfortable truth. Read this book. Watch this video. And then let’s get to work.

<3

[gospelofthekingdom]

“The capitalist system, since it worships what Rachel Carson called “the gods of profit and production” rather than real needs, is unable to supply all people with the essential requirements of a decent life, or, in some cases, life itself. This derives from the fact that capitalism is inherently an alienated system, in which those on the receiving end of the system measure themselves by their distance not only from the rest of the world’s population but also from nature itself, glorying in the “conquest of nature.” It is a world turned upside down: one that places abstract value above human beings, making it, and not the living, creative forces of nature and humanity, the measure of what is material and productive.

It follows that the various ways of “reforming” capitalism that are promoted by often well-meaning, practical people, who are trying to change things within the parameters of what is allowed by the system, are little more than intellectual contortions: people trying to get around or smooth over basic features of the system because in their eyes a real alternative is unthinkable. In what Derick Jensen and Aric McBay call the “inversion of what is real,” capitalism is seen as more real than the environment; and hence it is capitalism that needs to be saved in the context of the environmental crisis, as opposed to the earth’s environment itself.

Not surprisingly, then, the dominant strategies with respect to global warming to be found in environmental circles are concerned not with preserving the planet but with preserving capitalism, the very system that is destroying the earth as we know it.  In a speech calling for “urgent action to fight global warming,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said: “We must be actively engaged in confronting the global challenge of climate change, which is a serious threat to development everywhere.” In this view, it is not capitalist development, that, by promoting global warming, constitutes a threat to the earth’s environment and its inhabitants, but rather global warming that constitutes a threat to capitalist development. What nearly all mainstream solutions to the global environmental problem have in common, as Jensen and McBay write, is that:

they all take industrial capital as a given, as that which must be saved, as that which must be maintained at all costs (including the murder of the planet, the murder of all that is real), as the independent variable, as primary; and they take the real, physical world—filled with real physical beings who live, die, make the world more diverse—as secondary, as a dependent variable, as something (never someone, of course) that (never who) must conform to industrial capitalism or die. . . . Within this culture, the world is consistently less important that industrial cpaitalism, the end of the world is less to be feared than the end of industrial capitalism.

As cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has said, for many people in this society, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

-Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, p. 101-102

[gospelofthekingdom]

Today, rather than a true democracy, we have a plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) in which some of the former elements of democracy nonetheless remain. Needless to say a real democracy, as this was classically understood in egalitarian terms, is impossible where income, wealth, and power are concentrated and where inequality is growing, that is, in the normal way of things under capitalism.” 

“Hence, ever since the publication in 1942 of Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, socialism, and Democracy, in which the neoliberal concept of democracy as a market relationship was first introduced attempts have been made by defenders of the system to redefine “democracy” in economic terms, transforming it into something nearly opposite its original meaning.  In ancient Greece democracy was associated with the rule of the demos, i.e., the common people. In contrast, democracy has now been redefined in the United States and some other countries as a system in which individuals simply vote periodically for political entrepreneurs, who seek out their votes much like commercial interests seek out dollars in the marketplace. The essential content of democracy has therefore been eviscerated. So politically corrupted is the U.S. political system that instead of one person, one vote being the rule, an individual’s political influence is weighted according to his/her wealth, which determines how responsive politicians are to the individual’s interests. Big money, as is well known, provides access to politicians and opens doors. At the same time, corporations themselves “vote” with their dollar, feeding the financial campaign chests of politicians and hiring a phalanx of lobbyists to forward their interests. Politicians frequently end up paying their financial donors back “with interest” for what they receive. As in any business transaction, corporations provide political campaign financing and naturally expect “value added” in return.”

Fred MagDoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism -p. 101

[gospelofthekingdom]

“The story of centuries of European and U.S. plunder and expansion is well documented. Sometimes economic penetration of the poorer nations of the global South occurred peacefully while in many cases warfare was needed in order to gain domination. The U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan follow the same general historical pattern of colonial and imperial powers exerting their influence, and are clearly related to U.S. attempts to control the main world sources of oil and gas, as well as show the world the extent of U.S. military might and its willingness to use it.

China, a rapidly growing economic power, increasingly integrated into the world capitals economy, is searching the world for investment opportunities to protect shipping lanes, especially for oil from the Persian Gulf. China is in effect simply attempting to survive like any other major economy in the global capitalist system, but its outward expansion is being treated as aggression by the established imperial powers and being used as a justification of their own renewed scramble for resources in the Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and West Africa. The result is growing intensification of world geopolitical struggles.

In his great work The Power Elite sociologist C. Wright Mills spoke of a “military metaphysics,” whereby all world problems are turned into military problems, requiring military solutions. There is no doubt that the growing economic demands of capitalist economies in an age of “generalized monopoly capital” increasingly transform issues of economic globalization into issues of geopolitics in which the military becomes more and more prominent, threatening world stability and even survival.

If society doesn’t change, we can only look forward to enhanced strife among the wealthy nations for the resources of the South, more direct conflict between China and the already wealthy countries (especially the United States), as well as more civil wars in the poor but resource-rich countries where the income from the exports goes to the powerful and already wealthy.

Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, p. 65-66

[gospelofthekingdom]

“We are told all the time that only economic growth can make life better. But as Gus Speth tells us in the environmental journal Solutions:

“Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines communities and the environment. It fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply ins event decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression has increased substantially.”

The failing god of growth that Speth describes for the United States is nothing more than the way capitalism operates at its most basic levels. No-growth capitalism is an oxymoron: when accumulation ceases, the system is in a state of crisis, with considerable suffering of the working class. Capitalism’s motive force is the competitive amassing of profits and accumulation, ad infinitum.

-Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, p. 42