One of the defining things about Marx was that he was an optimist of technology, which is why Marx thought the British conquest of India was a sign of progress, despite the misery it caused. At the end of Marx's analysis of India, therefore, we get statements such as:The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world-- on the one hand the universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse, on the one hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.-From Marx's "The Future Results of the British Rule in India" (from Karl Marx Political Writings Volume II (David Fernbach, Trans.). pp. 324-325
So Marxists! It appears that one of the defining aspects of the "development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies," today, is ecological damage, whereby society reaps the whirlwind of the capitalist uses of technology. Global warming, holes in the ozone layer, cancers caused by open testing of nuclear weapons, deforestation, species loss, pollution of the air, the land, the water and oceans, overpopulation, the resurgence of diseases that were thought to be conquered by the overuse of antibiotics, etc. So even if the "results of the bourgeois epoch" are to be "subjected to the common control of the most advanced peoples," aren't we still facing disaster? (50 pts.) Isn't this disaster to worsen, if the results of the bourgeois epoch are controlled later rather than sooner? (20 pts.) Is mere popular control of the means of production the whole solution? (25 pts.) What is the solution? (5 pts.)
And what is this "material basis of the new world" that is being created by the "bourgeois period of history"? Will it be characterized by energy shortages and materials shortages? (20 pts. for both questions together) Is the Marxist plotline still to proceed toward the future proclaimed in the purple passage of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where "in a more advanced phase of communist society, when... all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly..."
Are the springs of wealth going to flow more abundantly in the future? (5 pts.) Where will this wealth come from, and how will it be "shared" by an ever-increasing global human population? WILL it be shared? (Please give detailed answers specifying the direction future technologies are to take, considering in these technologies the relationship-to-nature to be expected perhaps fifty years from now.) (70 pts. for both questions together)
How about it, Marxists? I've given you my guesses, now what are your guesses? Answers should be at least 200 words in length (hey, it's a 200 point essay test!) and will be graded on the sincerity of the student's attempt to reconcile historical materialism and global ecological management. Points will be subtracted for Marxist dogmatisms that attempt to sidestep the above problems. Final answers due when McSpotlight erases this message.
