Swinburne Research Bank

Swinburne Research Bank http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au Gare, A. (1993). Beyond European civilization: Marxism, process, philosophy, and the environment. Bungendore, N.S.W., Eco-Logical Press. Copyright © 1993 Arran Gare. Swinburne University of Technology has been unable to trace the publisher. The author's final draft of this book has been reproduced here in good faith. We would be pleased to hear from the publisher. Accessed from Swinburne Research Bank: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/42497 Contents Preface Introduction 1 1. Marxism and the Environment 6 Marx, capitalism and the environment. Marxist social theory since Marx. Marxist environmentalism. The environment and the third world. Capitalism, socialism and the environment. The Soviet Union. 2. Marxism and Metaphysics 32 The Neoplatonic background. Neoplatonism and mechanistic materialism in Marx. Marxism and process philosophy. 3. Marxism and the Dynamics of Russian Culture 52 Christianity in medieval Russia. Peter the Great and the well ordered police state. Opposition to the police state. The reception of Marx's ideas. Marxism after the revolution. The rise of Stalin. The cultural revolution. From Khrushchev to Gorbachev. 4. Soviet Environmentalism and the Future of Marxism 84 Environmentalism after the revolution. Environmentalism under attack. The institutionalization of anti-environmentalism. The new environmental movement. Conclusion - what is required. 5. Epistemology, Dialectics and Metaphysics 104 Epistemology, dialectics and process philosophy. Twentieth century epistemology: from logical empiricism to dialectics. Dialectics. Dialectics and metaphysics. The present work as a metaphysical system. 6. Process Philosophy as Metaphysics 134 The categories of process philosophy. Process philosophy as a grand research programme. 7. Process Philosophy and the Natural Sciences 151 Relativity theory. Quantum theory. Thermodynamics. Process philosophy and the life sciences. The emergence of awareness. The becoming of life. 8. Humanity as an Emergent Phenomenon Within Nature 179 The Hegelian concept of humanity. The dialectic of orientation. The dialectic of recognition. The dialectic of power. The inter-relationships between dialectical processes. The Marxist tradation. The existentialist tradition. 9. Ethics, Political Philosophy and the Social Sciences 204 The Fipa of Tanzania. From instrumental to creative rationality. A new ethics. Justice. Duty and corruption. Integrity. Ethics and the environment. Political philosophy. Generativity and decadence. World politics and the problem of representation. The human sciences. Policy and strategy formation. 10. Towards and Ecologically Sustainable Civilization 240 Hegemony and alterantive hegemony. Gramsci today. Revamping Gramsci: The environmental crisis and process philosophy. Nationalism versus globalism. The question of nationalism. Environmental nationalism and process philosophy. Culural inertia and creative rationality. Alternative policies. Conclusion. PREFACE Beyond European Civilization is the sequel to Nihilism Incorporated, a work in which I described how European civilization came to embody a nihilistic world-orientation and to conquer the world, and how, through the expansion of capitalism, it continues to impose its environmentally destructive culture on the rest of humanity. Through a critical analysis of the failure of Marxism to overcome the defects of European culture, Beyond European Civilization elaborates the foundations for a culture to transcend European civilization. This book, along with Nihilism Incorporated, grew out of courses of lectures on environmental philosophy given at the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia in 1981 and 1983. Further research on Russian culture and Soviet Marxism has enabled me to situate the central ideas of Beyond European Civilization within a tradition originating in the work of Aleksandr Bogdanov who not only conceived humans as part of and within nature and recognized the environmental limits to economic activity, but also argued for a central role for culture in the dynamics of history and in the creation of a new social order. The Proletkul't movement inspired and led by him represented and still symbolizes the alternative to both capitalism and the centralized system of State control forged by Lenin and Stalin. The tradition of thought originating in this movement encompasses the pioneering efforts of Joseph Needham to combine Marxism and process philosophy and to transcend European culture in his monumental study of science and civilization in China, and makes it possible to link the more radical aspects of Marxist thought with the achievements philosophers, scientists and environmentalists inspired by process philosophy such as Ivor Leclerc, C.H. Waddington, Ilya Prigogine, David Bohm, Charles Birch and John Cobb Jr. For their encouragement of and support for my work I am grateful to my Perth colleagues Ruth Barton, Michael Booth, Robert Flower, Barry Maund, Graham Priest, Ian Rowe, Leigh Smith and Peter Vintilla; and beyond Perth to Charles Birch, Robert Cohen, Val Plumwood, Valeria Russo, and Richard Sylvan. I am particularly thankful to Douglas Weiner for sharing his vast knowledge of Russian environmentalism and for his guidance of my research on Russian and Soviet culture. I am also indebted to a number of institutions. These include the Western Australian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and Curtin University for granting me a research fellowship in 1984, the Australian-American Educational Foundation for granting me a Fulbright Post-doctoral Fellowship in 1985, the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University for hosting my stay in U.S.A., Curtin University again for a further research fellowship in 1988, and the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry at Swinburne University for their financial backing of this project. Finally I am obliged to Richard Sylvan for his help in publishing this book. I dedicate this book to my parents, Nene and Frank Gare. INTRODUCTION Let there be no illusions. Taking effective action to halt massive injury to the earth's environment will require a mobilization of political will, international cooperation and sacrifice unknown except in wartime. Yet humanity is in a war right now, and it is not too draconian to call it a war for survival. It is a war in which all nations must be allies.1 So proclaimed Thomas A. Sancton in the first issue of Time magazine of 1989. In Nihilism Incorporated: European Civilization and Environmental Destruction I examined the nature and extent of this environmental crisis. It was shown to present the greatest complex of problems humans have ever had to confront. Most of the world's species are under threat of extinction, vast areas of forest and agricultural land are being destroyed, the oceans are being polluted and over-fished, reserves of minerals are being consumed at ever faster rates, and pollution is not only destroying vegetation, dissolving the ozone layer and undermining people's health, it is undermining the self-regulatory processes by which the optimum conditions for life on earth are maintained. The shortage of resources underlies most of the world's political oppression, particularly of and within poorer countries. The impoverishment of people associated with this oppression is the primary cause of the population explosion in the poor countires. At the same time humans are enclosing themselves within built-up environments which are fragmenting society and isolating people, reducing them to replaceable cogs of the economic system and rendering them politically powerless in the face of such problems. The environmental crisis is the ultimate crisis, and surmounting it is the ultimate challenge. The civilization which engendered these problems has also produced a culture so nihilistic that people have barely begun to face up to their predicament. This culture of nihilism, the end product of the evolution of Western European civilization, permeates the thinking, practices and modes of being of almost everyone in modern Western societies - irrespective of the views which they might espouse; and this culture has come to dominate the world. People are no longer able to imagine there being more to life than survival, the daily satisfaction of their appetites, social climbing and entertaining distractions. The sole end of human endeavour has come to be the imposition of a mechanical order on the world, reducing everything, including humans, to predictable instruments of the economic machine; an end so taken for granted that it has been argued that computers, as more efficient calculating machines than humans, are the next stage of evolution. Everything that environmentalists have been concerned to oppose is legitimated by this culture, with the silent majority and most of those in positions of power indifferent to the plight of 1. Thomas A. Sancton, 'Planet of the Year', Time, Jan.2, 1989, p.14. 2 Beyond European Civilization others, fascinated with violence, absorbed in petty vanities and unconcerned about the future of the world. The nihilism of European culture has manifested itself this century in two world wars, the outbreaks of which were greeted with obscene enthusiasm, and with the greatest arms race in history. People have supported massive expenditures by governments on weapons of mass destruction, but for the most part have been unwilling to support government efforts to alleviate the poverty of

Load more