Graphic 1: multi-facet views of the Earths Atmo-Bio-Hydro-Litho-Spher[e][oidal] Cumulum

Crises by Nature
How Humanity Saved The Biosphere

by
Capitalist Crisis Studies







Table of Contents

Introduction
I  -  The Tendency of the Rate of Photosynthesis to Fall
II  - The Necessity of Humanity
III  - The Decadence of the Biosphere
IV  - The Crisis One-Previous
V  - The Laws of the Time Continuum (The Necessity of Evolution)
VI  - The Dialectic of Nature
VII  - The Ideology of Science
VIII -  Ecologism and Pro-Decadence Ideologies
Citations
Annotations
Graphics Credits
Post-Publication Notes
Citations in the Post-Publication Notes
Revision History
Contact Information



Introduction

The whole tenor of the ferment which has come to be called the ecology movement has accustomed many of us to think of ourselves as the scourge of the biosphere; virtual intruders in Nature, whose unwelcome visitation has contributed only disruption and destruction to an otherwise perfectly self-regulated natural harmony, and which visitation can do nothing else. The best we can hope for, we are told, is to minimize the damage by consuming less, and producing less — especially less of ourselves.

Many of us, especially socialists p1, have smelled a rat in this rap right from its first airing. The time has come to confront this ideology squarely with the Marxian theory of social evolution, and with certain salient discoveries of the bourgeois science of ecology itself, discoveries which the
ecology movement has chosen to ignore, or is unable to discern by virtue of ideological blockage.



Graphic 2: Earths atmosphere (1)
I - The Tendency of the Rate of Photosynthesis to Fall

Consider the passage below, extracted from a high school biology textbook, vintage 1963:
Does the amount of carbon dioxide in our present atmosphere limit the rate of photosynthesis? Most authorities agree that it does. The present carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is believed to be very low compared with concentrations of past ages. Some plants, however, will grow much more rapidly and luxuriantly in an atmosphere that contains five to ten times the present carbon dioxide concentration. Florists, in fact, sometimes release carbon dioxide in greenhouses to promote plant growth. Why should the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere of past ages have been higher than it is today? And what evidence do we have that this might be so? Prior to the evolution of large numbers of plants, there would have been few users of carbon dioxide on earth [ed: Earth]. As plants evolved and eventually occupied all the waters and covered most of the land of the earth [ed: Earth], the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could have been gradually lowered by the photosynthetic activity of these plants. Thus over great periods of time the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere could have been gradually reduced. The great coal deposits of the earth [ed: Earth] give testimony to a period of especially rapid and luxuriant plant growth. This period of enormous plant growth is called the Carboniferous Age.... The growth and death rates were so rapid that the luxuriant plant growth often led to the formation of peat bogs which were 200 to 300 feet in depth. These deposits of dead plant life were gradually compressed through movements of the earths [ed: Earths] crust to produce great coal deposits that we mine today. It is reasonable to assume that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere may have been higher at that time to support such rapid and luxuriant plant growth. Evidence of such growth in other periods of the earths [ed: Earths] history has not been found. c1
Now, put this together with the following two phenomena of photosynthesis:
(1) The rate of photosynthesis for the biosphere as a whole is proportional to, is a function of, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, so long as CO2 concentration is the limiting factor on the rate of photosynthesis (i.e., so long as CO2 concentration is less than optimum). c2
(2) The rate of photosynthesis fundamentally determines what ecologists call the productivity” of the whole biosphere, that is, the rate of production of new living matter, which later serves as both the food and the bodily substance of all living organisms, not just plants. Photosynthesis has been the very basis of the biosphere; the process that supplies the free energy [negentropy] for the entire superstructure of animal and microbial life. Thus the rate of photosynthesis of new biomatter fundamentally limits the size and health of the whole planetary bio-system. c3
The pattern that begins to be disclosed via this juxtaposition has the following features: Photosynthesis, the foundation of the production of all biomatter, that is of the reproduction of the entire planetary biosphere (whose substance is biomass) occurs at a rate which is determined by, among other conditions, the parts-per-million of CO2 in the Earths atmosphere. But photosynthesis progressively depletes the atmosphere of carbon in its oxidized gaseous form (CO2) and gradually accumulates much of it in a non-gaseous form, a form unavailable for photosynthesis. That is, this non-gaseous form of carbon is ‘entropy’ for photosynthesis — ‘entropy’ from the standpoint of, or relative to, photosynthesis considered as the leading form of ‘biospheric power’, i.e., of  free energy [negentropy] provision to the biotic processes of this planet. These accumulations eventually transform to coal (land plants), petroleum (sea plants), and natural gas. Thus, photosynthesis itself causes a progressive lowering in the rate of photosynthesis — photosynthesis slows itself down, brakes itself and thereby breaks itself; puts the brakes on itself — by lowering its rate-determining concentration of atmospheric CO2. If this process were to continue unabated, without any innovation in the foundation of life, in the natural means of production of biomass, or in the sources of life-usable energy [biological negentropy], then the totality of the biosphere must eventually pass out of existence, as the rate of photosynthesis, and with it the productivity of the biosphere, decelerated toward zero.

Only an ecological innovation which could turn that
photosynthetic entropy back into energy for life; which developed other new basic sources of life-energy for the ecosystem, partially or wholly supplanting photosynthesis, or which developed some new ecological pathway which could return that carbon to the atmosphere in oxidized (CO2) form, could provide a new continuum for this otherwise terminal biosphere.

II - The Necessity of Humanity

Need I say more? We are that innovation! The human species was and is the ecological invention’, the new natural technology, by which the biosphere saved itself! Those accumulations of photosynthetically useless carbon — initially the woody bodies of trees, and the corpses of other plants and animals, terrestrial and aquatic, as well as, later, coal, oil, and gas — entropy, waste, for photosynthesis — represent free energy for human praxis, that is, for that new form of synthetic econo-ecological activity, biomass yielding and biomass sustaining, which is human industry and industrialized agriculture. This same human praxis is capable, at length, of forging new basic pathways of energy entry into the [humanly-expanded] noo-bio-sphere, such as solar-electric and nuclear fusion power.

Human industry, social practice, increasingly supplants unaided photosynthesis as the vitalizing foundation of the biosphere. The planetary ecosystem becomes a humanly supported and humanly shaped econo-ecology — humanized nature (Marx). Though unconsciously so, at first, the world-wide social economy becomes the throbbing heart of the global ecology. And human industry is the means by which a new channel was opened for return of the vast Carbonic accumulations to the atmosphere to rekindle those scattered, waning embers of global photosynthesis that survived the Great Ice Age. This new channel was the burning, first, of dead but not yet
fossil-fuel-ized, and of living vegetation by primitive hunting tribes c4 then by early agriculturalists, and second, later, of fossilized vegetation, by industrializing societies.



Graphic 3: harnessing fire and human muscle for the age of steel


Humanity was, and, is still to be, the solution to the latest problem of Natures self-reproduction and self-continuation! — Humanity the solution to the ‘self-breakdown-crisis of the photosynthetic mode of ecological, biospheric [self-re-]production — of the temporal self-extension, temporal self-continuation, or temporal self-prolongation of that self-formation of Nature!

How would we go about verifying such an hypothesis? By looking for signs of dire trouble in the biosphere just prior to the emergence of homo sapiens. By looking for evidence of a severe
depression in the self-productivity of biomass, or rate of reproduction of the biosphere (i.e., the totality of biomass), leading up to the appearance of the social formation, and more particularly, just prior to the recent period during which hunting-tribe fire-setting, slash-and-burn agriculture, and finally fossil-fueled manufacturing could make a photosynthetically significant contribution to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

III - The Decadence of the Biosphere

What we are trying to do, is to uncover the hidden history of the biosphere — hidden, blocked from view, at least, for the pervasive ideology of Nature which characterizes modern science; an ideology of ‘equilibriumism which unspokenly assumes only stasis, balance, and pre-established harmony in Nature, and is blinded to dialectical patterns by that pre- and contra-empirical presumption. What we are trying to determine is: What has really been underway in the last 280 million years — what has been the summary content, the dominant theme, the major trend, of the history of Nature on this planet in that time?

There is mounting evidence — evidence discernible, at any rate, to the dialectical eye, expecting not equilibrium, stasis, permanence, but dynamism, self-contradiction, self-change, evolution — that the biosphere, the photosynthetically-centered stage of it, had already reached its peak in the Carboniferous period, long before the advent of man, and has been in decline ever since; that the human species as we know it, whose first tracks, those of scattered stragglers staggering out of the blizzard, we can pick out against the opaque white background of the great Pleistocene Ice (see
Graphics 5, 8, 9, 10, 11), was born into a dying world.

The remaking of that world, the restoration of ecological prosperity to that planet, then depends, evidently, on what that species will do. If ecological prosperity is ever to be restored on Earth, if the biosphere is to halt its self-destruction, and attain to a state of vigorous health again, it evidently must be through the agency of that species in Nature; through its redesigning of the Natural World, through its solving the contradictions of that world (including its own).

Plants grow faster, healthier, fuller in an atmosphere many times as rich in CO2 as the present one c5, suggesting a long adaptation to a climate much different from that which prevails today, for an atmosphere richer in CO2 would be a warmer one. Of late c6, great bald patches have begun to appear in the forestrial living fur coat of the planet — the deserts — which, like the Sahara, are continuing a geologically rapid growth. Before this balding set in, successive walls of ice had invaded the lower latitudes from both poles, lacerating the great rain forests and beating them back to a narrow equatorial band; melting back again but leaving great desolations of desert in their wake. For some reason — CO2 deficiency and cooling global climate? — the great forests lacked the vitality to spread out once again from their equatorial respite and reconquer lost ground, so the ice was replaced instead by arid waste, grassland, or temperate forest, all much less prosperous ecosystems in rate-of-photosynthesis terms. In the long view, and in terms of the prime vital sign of this form of the biosphere, which is the rate of photosynthesis, controlling the rate of reproduction or self-accumulation of living mass, this is a picture of a world in decline, of a life-bearing planet committing suicide.



Graphic 4: global distribution of continental glaciers


We can readily envision the final scenario: The climate continues to deteriorate as the CO2 level continues to fall. Glaciations grow more frequent and more severe. The ice retreats for a time after each onslaught, thrown back by the saturation nonlinearities, the negative feedbacks or inhibitory self-effects which a vast glacier system develops against itself once it grows beyond a certain extent. c7 But each time it gathers greater force, laying siege anew to the tropics and cutting deeper into the last fastness of the once great forest. Finally, the twin equator-ward pincers of the two polar caps meet, clanging shut like frigid, icicle-fanged jaws over the world of life they have just devoured. Having broken through the last defenses of the plant world, marine and continental alike, and, with that, of the life-world, of the biosphere, as a whole, all that would remain would be the mopping up of isolated pockets of biology — spores, seeds, micro-organisms — which could not long hold out beyond this, the biospheres mediated self-destruction of its own photosynthetic basis. In the end: a sterilized planet, alternately frozen or arid, but shaved clean, by an ice-edged razor, of that mantle of life which once adorned it with such luxuriance and promise!

That is the scenario, unless we stop it!

Now let us examine the evidence behind it. According to available information, the last 3 million years of Earth
s history, called the Quaternary period (refer to Graphics 5, 8, 9, 10, 11), has been a time of unusually harsh climate. c8  In fact, through most of Earths history as a biotic or life-bearing planet, tropical conditions prevailed over most of its surface:
... one conclusion seems inescapable. This is that the present restriction of tropical climates to a relatively narrow belt (and in periods of glaciation to an even narrower belt) of the Earths surface is an unusual situation. The evidence of the Cretaceous and Tertiary indicates that for most of the time prior to the Pliocene the tropical zone was more widespread than now and that during certain intervals at least the boundary of the tropics was at some point between 50o and 60o N latitude in the northern hemisphere and occupied a similar position in the southern hemisphere... the conclusions of various workers, such as...«long list follows» indicate that a more widespread tropical or warm” climate prevailed over much of the Paleozoic,  Mesozoic, and Tertiary «i.e., for most of the last 500+ million years since the dawn of photosynthetic life before the Cambrian Period — see Graphics 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, reproduced here from the text». c9
And temperate forests extended deep into both polar regions:
The luxuriant growth of broad-leaf hardwood forests in high Arctic latitudes persisted from the Cretaceous into the Eocene and probably the Oligocene, indicating a prolonged continuation of humid warm temperate, or at least temperate forest climate in the polar regions. Evidence for this may be found in both Arctic and Antarctic regions. During the early Cenozoic the northern mid-latitudes were covered by vegetation, the botanical equivalent of which is now confined to sub-tropical and even tropical climates. c10




Graphic 5: ice ages across geologic time


The polar regions at that time being iceless:
From all we know, the Quaternary represents an exceptional period in the history of our globe. The repeated advance and retreat of glaciation is a phenomenon specifically restricted to this period: before that, for a time interval of about 200 million years, there was almost no permanent ice on the earths [ed: Earths] surface: even the poles were free and enjoyed a temperate or cold-temperate climate.... In any case it is now clear that the ice ages represent cases of a general deterioration of the climate of our globe. c11
During this long warm period of the last 130 million years and more, two successive intercontinental forests clothed the globe, of which today we know only tattered remnants. The earlier of these two was tropical:
At the beginning of the Tertiary, the continent was relatively low and relatively uncut by the many mountain ranges of today. There were only three main ranges: two in the Rocky mountains, and one in the Appalachian region. Everything west of the present Utah-Nevada line was relatively low country with relatively even and mild climates. Tropical forests extended as far north as the state of Washington, and Alaska was covered with temperate forests of redwood and other species. These warm and uniform conditions across the continent eventually came to a gradual close with volcanic activity and a cooling of the climate in Miocene times and ended in another great period of mountain-building during the very late Pliocene and Pleistocene within the last million years or so.c12
In the wake of the great cooling, a temperate forest succeeded this inter-continental jungle, but a temperate forest whose grandeur surpassed by far that of any seen on this planet since, let alone that of the — comparatively speaking — mere pockets of forest we know today:
Taking the place of the tropical forests in the North, the transcontinental temperate forest moved down from Alaska and northern Canada. This northern Miocene forest was the most magnificent temperate forest of all time. It not only was essentially transcontinental from the Southern Appalachians to Washington and Oregon but, with variations, extended clear around the Northern Hemisphere so that it was well developed also in Europe and Asia. Dr. Chaney has called it the Arcto-Tertiary forest. In middle Miocene times, it extended down the west coast as far as central California and south central Nevada, where it bordered on the Madro-Tertiary woodland.

The Arcto-Tertiary forest was so big geographically that it was bound to vary in composition from one place and time to another. No temperate forest in the world today is exactly like the Arcto-Tertiary forest. However, if one walks through the cove hardwood forests of the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western Carolina, he [ed: one] will get some idea of what the Arcto-Tertiary forest was like. Another forest quite like parts of the Arcto-Tertiary forest is the coastal redwood forest of northern California...”. c13
The latter history of this forests life unfolds as a vast story of Nature at war with itself, of a planet-spanning battle between Green and White, a war of the forest versus the desert and the great Ice for predominance in the occupation of the surface of the Earth:
Within the last million years or so, the climates of Western North America began to turn much colder and drier.... Not only did the climate become colder and drier but the rainfall pattern changed. Instead of rainfall being evenly distributed throughout the year with plenty of summer rainfall, there was a shift toward winter precipitation and very little rain during the summer. This pattern persists today.... These climatic changes had pronounced effects on the vegetation. The Arcto-Tertiary forest disappeared over much of its range.... Great grasslands, with herds of hoofed mammals such as the horse and camel, replaced the forest east of the Sierra and extended far into the interior of the continent.... c14
About this time, the troubles begin to show, and the first rumblings of the coming war are sounded:
In late Pliocene and Peistocene times, some 1 or 2 million years ago, with the Sierra rising rapidly, the climates became even more arid. From the retreating subtropical Madro-Tertiary flora, from the Arcto-Tertiary flora, and from the high mountains, new kinds of plants evolved that fitted the extremely dry conditions. Up to this time, there had been no real desert climate or desert vegetation in North America The present deserts of the American Southwest owe their origin to increasing aridity in late Pliocene and Pleistocene times, and thus, compared to the forests, are a recent phenomena The species, and often the genera in them, are new....” c15
Then, monstrous creatures of ice begin to gather on the edges of the forests:
Soon, however, things began to change rapidly. For some reason (there are many theories), the snow that fell in winter in the north and in the mountains did not all melt the following summer. Every year there was more carry-over of old snow to the new winter, when even more snow fell. The winter snowfall increased, and permanent snowbanks in the mountains got larger and became more abundant. These snowbanks gradually turned to ice and because of their weight began to move down and away from the zone of accumulation. These events were the beginning of the Ice Age of the Pleistocene Epoch.

Four times the continental glaciers moved down past the middle of the Rocky Mountains.... Heavy precipitation built up great lakes in what had been the deserts and grasslands of Utah and Nevada. The western glaciers carved the mountains into new forms; the Tetons, the Beartooth, the Lewis Range, and many others emerged sharp, polished and devoid of much vegetation. In the eastern half of the continent, the ice stood a mile deep over Michigan and New York, and the Arcto-Tertiary forest was wiped out except in its Southern Appalachian and Mexican refuges.

...The climatic changes of the late Tertiary eradicated or restricted the Arcto-Tertiary and Madro-Tertiary vegetations of the West and aided the evolution of the floras of the present deserts, chaparral, and pine forests. However, the eastern part of the forest probably escaped serious disruption until the Pleistocene ice. Nothing was more destructive than the physical mass of ice and the severe climate to the south of the ice front. The land of the northeastern quarter of the United States and all of eastern Canada was either scoured away or covered with glacial debris; the vegetation was destroyed. On a major scale, this destruction has occurred four times in the last million years. After each advance of the ice, warmer periods have followed, the ice has receded into the Arctic and the higher mountains, and the flora has migrated species by species both northward and upward.... All evidence appears to indicate that we are in another interglacial period. c16

Indeed, it is our hypothesis that it has been the human contribution of CO2 return to Earths atmosphere that has forestalled the — now long overdue — ending of the current interglacial, an ending that would be heralded by renewed, gargantuan global drought and desertification, followed by the return of Ice Age conditions, at the timing appointed by the insolation-based and now-coinciding cooling effects of the three types of Earth orbital variations which constitute the Milankovitch mechanism of Ice Age pace-making. We believe, that is, that it has been the human CO2 contribution that averted the progression of the ~400 year so-called Little Ice Age, from ~1450 through ~1850, into the next Big Ice Age, so far. However, our hypothesis also holds that this so far inadvertent, unconscious, undeliberate, and undesigned intervention of humanitys global Warming Effect will prove insufficient, over time, to hold back the growing, glaciation-forcing momentum of the Milankovitch drivers, all three of which now mutually-reinforce to impend Earths climate in the direction of the termination of the present ~10,000+ year interglacial, and the return of another ~100,000+ years of The Great Ice. A conscious, deliberate, and designed human intervention will be necessary, to pace humanitys counter-action — to avoid either under-warming or over-warming in the short-term — if humanitys salvation of the biosphere is to continue much longer in a geologic sense, and if that salvatory contribution is to finally succeed in ending Ice Age eco-suicide for planet Earth p2. Failing such deliberative intervention by humanity, the blind-running destiny of our planet, biosphere and noosphere alike, is the global graveyard of a Snowball Earth. p3


Graphic 6: glacier


In the foregoing record, we have before us a vast pattern of devastation and decline of the biomass of the biosphere, proceeding with accelerating ferocity over a protracted duration of geologic time: at least the last 22 million years. What was the cause of this decline? A little further on, we will present evidence that all this devastation was, in fact, a self-devastation of the biosphere, a manifestation of what Marx might have called the
internally self-ravaged ground of the evolving planetary ecosystem; that this colossal violence, geologic in scale, was the explosion of the self-contradiction inherent in a photosynthetically-grounded biosphere.

Prior to that, however, let us put in place a few observations regarding the foregoing material. We see within and leading up to this pattern of devastation a prolonged trajectory of decay, a movement of dense jungle giving way to temperate forest, thence to grassland, and finally to desert, barren tundra, and ice; a movement, thus, toward the denudation of the continental land surfaces -- toward the scraping clean of the film of biotic matter from the underlying lithosphere upon which it had grown up. It is important to notice the implications of this trend in terms of the pulse-beat of the photosynthetic biosphere, the rate of photosynthesis. Even today, under conditions of extreme CO2 rarefaction, and a world climate unusually cool and dry, the tropical rainforests are much lusher, denser biomes, much more ecologically prosperous regions of the biosphere, more productive in biomass terms, than the temperate forests, not to mention grasslands and deserts (including under this concept tundras and ice deserts). Current estimates indicate that tropical forests exceed other forests by a factor ranging from about 2 to 3 times in Net Primary Productivity (NPP), and exceed the NPP of temperate grasslands by a factor of 4 or greater. c17 Thus, this movement of succession represents the decadence of the photosynthetic regime; a prolonged secular fall in the rate of reproduction of the biosphere — what might be called contracted nature-al reproduction [or self-contracting ecological self-reproduction].



Graphic 7:
earthquakes - global distribution/concentration and zonation

Much about Nature that we today accept without question as ineluctable facts of life unchangeable as the weather, as the saying goes, had its origin in the protracted catastrophe of global cooling narrated above. The descent into cold has profoundly reshaped the climatic morphology of our planet, generating a new global differentiation in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Before this climatic cataclysm, neither latitudinal zonation nor seasonal variation were so pronounced as today. Instead, a unified global climate prevailed, with a single season year round and a single, tropical zone, virtually from pole to pole. The three-way geographical mitosis into tropical, temperate, and polar bands c18; the two-way (in tropics and poles) or four-way (in the two temperate zones) temporal mitosis into dry and rainy seasons, or Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer seasons c19, are, respectively, both products of the geologically recent period of cooling — of drought, desertification and glaciation. We can at present only speculate about the possible effects of the fantastic loads impressed upon the Earths crust by up to mile-thick jackets of ice, and the resulting depressions and compressions, beginning in the two polar circles, in stimulating associated periods of vulcanism, earthquake, and orogeny (mountain-building) elsewhere on the surface of the planet. c20 (For example, perhaps the pressure of mounting ice-packs literally squeezes magma up out through the volcanic pores of the Earth).



Graphic 7b: volcanism
s pancake stack as seen at sunrise on Mt. St. Helens (in Washington, U.S.A.)




Graphic 8: temporal acceleration (1)


At any rate, it seems clear that the cooling, and subsequent desertifications and ice invasions, as well as the prior warm eras, were not mere local events, but reflected a global process with presumably a global causation:
At present there is little doubt that all the phenomena of the Quaternary glaciation happened simultaneously all over the surface of the globe.... The ice ages reflected a general decrease of the average temperature of the earth [ed: Earth]... the climate changes took place simultaneously all over the surface of the earth [ed: Earth] and were not produced by local conditions.c21
Moreover, this epoch of the great global cooling and dying, in which we find ourselves still situated today, represents not a sudden change, but a longterm trend in the climatic evolution (or dis-evolution) of the planet, characterizing not just the Pleistocene Epoch or even the whole Quaternary Period, but at least the entire Cenozoic Era to date:
The most significant feature of the Cenozoic migration of vegetation is the steady retreat of the temperate forest flora from the Arctic regions and the concomitant retraction of the early Tertiary tropical elements of mid-latitude floras into the present marginal tropics. The curve of floristic change may therefore be translated into a curve of climatic change. If this interpretation is accepted, it appears that the great trend of Cenozoic climate which culminated in Pleistocene glaciation began in the mid-Tertiary, probably more than 20 million years ago. Pleistocene glaciation itself, of which present climate is in many respects an extension, may then be regarded as a geologic and climatologic event the antecedents of which extend over a fair segment of recent geologic time and is not to be viewed as a sudden change in the history of the earths [ed: Earths] climate.c22
We must also avoid, therefore, the empiricist error of assuming the normality of presently prevailing climatic and ecological conditions:
...it is apparent that the present climate of earth [ed: Earth] is not a logical point of departure for interpreting past ecologic conditions of the present land surfaces.c23
Post-Pleistocene humanity, it appears, was born, not into an idyllic, harmonious, balanced, cyclically self-maintaining state of Nature, but into the ruins of a mediately self-ravaged biosphere; into the desolation wrought by a state of internecine ecological warfare within Nature!



Graphic 9:
temporal acceleration (2)

What was the source of these vast ecological and climatic movements? Strange as it may sound, we are going to argue that the vast forests themselves, together with their marine counterparts, caused their own demise; that their own nature-al’ doing was also their own undoing. The glacieral juggernaut which mowed down the ranks of trees; the flood-tide of white which overwhelmed the once-dominant intercontinental carpets of forest green, was a self-reflexion of the forest itself, the other side of its ascendancy, the rebound of its pre-eminence, the mirror image of its burgeoning growth. The real domination of photosynthesis is the harbinger of the end of that photosynthesis-dominance.



Graphic 10:
temporal acceleration (3)

We propose that the well-known hypothesis of the atmospheric greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is the key to understanding this whole dynamic of the biosphere since the Carboniferous:
“... the carbon dioxide theory is not new; the basic idea was first precisely stated in 1861 by the noted British physicist John Tyndall. He attributed climatic temperature changes to variations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. According to the theory, carbon dioxide controls temperature because the carbon dioxide molecules in air absorb infrared radiation. The carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere are virtually transparent to the visible radiation that delivers the suns energy to earth [ed: Earth]. But the earth [ed: Earth], in turn, re-radiates much of the energy in the invisible infrared region of the spectrum. This radiation is most intense at wavelengths very close to the principal absorption band (13 to 17 microns) of the carbon dioxide spectrum. When the carbon dioxide concentration is sufficiently high, even its weaker absorption bands become effective, and a greater amount of infrared radiation is absorbed «see Graphics 12a, 12b, 12c reproduced here from this article». Because the carbon dioxide blanket prevents its escape into space, the trapped radiation warms up the atmosphere.... Water vapor and ozone, as well as carbon dioxide, have this effect because they too absorb energy in the infrared region. But the climatic effects due to carbon dioxide are almost entirely independent of the amount of these other two gases. For the most part their absorption bands occur in different regions of the spectrum. In addition, nearly all water vapor remains close to the ground, while carbon dioxide diffuses more evenly through the atmosphere. Thus throughout most of the atmosphere carbon dioxide is the main factor determining changes in radiation flux. The 2.3 × 1012 (2,300 billion) tons of carbon dioxide in the earths [ed: Earths] atmosphere constitute some 0.03 per cent of its total mass.c24


Graphic 11:
temporal acceleration (4)

Thus, the geologically rapid depletion of CO2 -- atmospheric carbon — by the fabulous rates of photosynthesis of the global forest and its associated oceanic plant forms in the heyday of photosynthesis; the fixation of this carbon in atmospherically inaccessible forms, encased in the corpses of these plants and the animals supported by them, shielded from normal decay by the very rapidity of their accumulation, and therefore later transformed into hydrocarbonaceous forms, such as coal (on land) and petroleum (in the sea) c25, would have led to a gradual cooling of the global climate which, coupled with the slow suffocation of photosynthesis owing to the progressive CO2 rarefaction of the air, would have paved the way for desertification and the icing of the poles, followed by the extension equator-ward of the polar ice caps, the process known as an Ice Age.

Infrared Absorbers
 


Graphic 12: infrared absorption
Infrared absorbers in the Earths atmosphere include carbon dioxide, water vapor, and ozone. Spectral charts of their absorption in the infrared region show that these gases warm the Earth by preventing its infrared radiation from escaping into space. Carbon dioxide influences climate because it has a broad absorption band at wavelengths (13-17 microns) near the wavelengths at which the Earths infrared radiation is most intense. Water vapor and ozone can also influence climate.



Graphic 12b:

Atmospheric Parts per Million (280-335)



Graphic 13a: rising  atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration



Rising temperatures recorded at various points on the Earth during the past 100 years parallel the increase in atmosphere carbon dioxide plotted in this chart. The yearly mean temperatures shown were averaged over previous 30 years to remove short-term fluctuations.
The causation of the Ice Ages is one of the great unsolved problems of modern science, and an intensely active area of current scientific speculation and research, as a glance at the contents-page of virtually any recent number of any prominent scientific journal will attest. Most of this activity is focused on possible astronomical explanations for the Ice Age phenomenon, i.e.,  on a causation external to even the geological, let alone the biological, processes of the planet itself. Theories of such ‘internal’ causation are neglected or disparaged.

Another of the great unsolved problems of the Earth sciences and of paleoecology is that of the extinction of the dinosaurs, the rather sudden and thorough killing off of the whole spectrum of plant and animal forms which constituted the Era of the Great Reptiles. Here too, we find a very active current literature in the journals, and here also
externalist, astronomical explanations, which project the causation of this ecological catastrophe wholly outside the ecosystem itself, are in vogue.

However, declining temperatures climaxing the Cretaceous have long been recognized as a possible cause of, or contributor to, this
Great Dying:
Why did the great dinosaurs die? It had long been thought that the 150 million year reign of these reptiles on earth [ed: Earth] was brought to an end by cooling of the earths [ed: Earths] climate about 65 million years ago. This idea was supported by geology, but the evidence was incomplete. At Ureys suggestion, Epstein and Heinz Lowenstam set out to survey the climate of the latter portion of the Age of Reptiles, formally designated as the Upper Cretaceous «using a new technique developed by Urey in 1950»... their results showed that temperatures rose during the first half of the period and declined during the second half «see Graphics 14a and 14b below, reproduced here from the text». Unfortunately they could not measure temperatures at the very end of the period, because they could not obtain suitable fossils. The study nonetheless supports the conclusion that a decline in temperature might well have played an important part in the extinction of the dinosaurs. c26
The Dinosaurs, mostly lacking any equivalent of the homeostatic, cybernetic systems of internal temperature and general metabolic regulation characterizing the mammals which succeeded them, and dependent on climate-sensitive plant life for their subsistence, are thought to have been highly vulnerable to the stresses of falling temperatures and changing vegetation patterns.



Graphic 14a: fluctuating temperatures


Temperatures fluctuated toward the end of the Age of Reptiles. A maximum was reached about 80 million years ago; the subsequent decline may have brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Above the graph are two dinosaurs and a primitive mammal.

Temperatures declined during the Age of mammals. Oxygen isotope temperatures (dots) show that Pacific bottom water originating around Anarctica dropped from 10oC to 2oC between 31 and 1 million years ago. At top are three distinct mammals.
Very recent discoveries tend to corroborate this picture, and its connection to atmospheric CO2 depletion via photosynthesis. In response to new evidence, the onset of glaciation has been pushed back behind the late Pliocene originally thought to have been its locus, and into the Miocene. c27 More recently still, data from a Glomar Challenger expedition a little over a year old indicate a previously unsuspected second Carboniferous age in the early Cretaceous Period:
“... the Deep Sea Drilling Project’s celebrated drill ship has plumbed  extensive deposits of stinking black shales containing so much carbon that, suggests Dr. William Ryan of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory and his colleagues, it could have upset the balance of the Earths atmosphere. Ensuing climatic changes could then have eliminated the dinosaurs and other Late Cretaceous animals.... Under conditions of oxygen lack at the bottoms of poorly aerated basins, the anerobic [ed: anaerobic] decay of vegetable and animal matter leads to the formation of carbon (sometimes as coal) and hydrocarbons, rather than carbon dioxide which, of course, returns to the atmosphere. Evidently, such conditions obtained extensively along the line where the Atlantic ocean was eventually to emplace itself. What has staggered DSDP researchers is the extent of the carbonaceous shales. One estimate places their carbon content as substantially more than that of all of North Americas coal deposits taken together. It seems likely that their formation caused a sharp decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide; that in turn, would have permitted much more of the earths [ed: Earths] heat to radiate into space. The resulting climatic downturn could well have been the death knell. c28
Because the deposits were laid down in a relatively short time geologically speaking, it has been suggested that they represent a rapid withdrawal of carbon from the environment, sufficient enough to have affected composition of the atmosphere and altered the climate, which would have put heavy stress on many forms of life, particularly the highly specialized reptiles.... The black shales not only lie along the African side of the ocean but extend from the continental margin of North America eastward of the Bermuda Rise, according to the drilling results. In view of this, Ryan suggests that the carboniferous period” of the earths [ed: Earths] history occurred 100 million years ago, rather than during the coal-forming 200 million years earlier.c29
Thus, the same accumulation process that formed the oil and coal deposits upon which contemporary industrial societal self-reproduction is founded, and which brought about, evidently, the downfall of the earlier form of the biosphere, the global rainforest, via the associated tendency for the rate of photosynthesis to fall and for world cooling/drought, culminating in the Ice and Desert Ages, may be at least part of the force which brought down the giant plant and animal organisms of the Mesozoic Era, the crowning forms of pre-social multi-cellular evolution, as well.

But our hypothesis places the onset of the
decadence of the biosphere much earlier than the dinosauric extinctions, in the prior Ice Age of the Permian Period, some 280 million years BP (Before Present), just after the all-time peak of photosynthetic reproductivity, the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian coal-forming periods still officially designated the Carboniferous, spoken of at the end of the last quotation. Our best information still indicates this Carboniferous Period, as our opening quotation suggests (see I - The Tendency of the Rate of Photosynthesis to Fall) to have been the ‘biotic boom crowning the ascendant phase of the photosynthetic biosphere (at least in its land plant aspect); the zenith of photosynthetic prosperity, with the highest rate of biospheric reproduction, or expanded reproduction of biomass, so far achieved on Earth. And, the rate of accumulation of biomass may have been mostly negative ever since.

This Carboniferous Age would then also mark the turning point from the ascendant to the decadent phase of the photosynthetic solution” to the problem of the self-reproduction of biotic or biological Nature. Since then, except for the interruption of the newly discovered sub-peak in the Cretaceous just cited, we have evidence of one long depression, or at least stagnation, in the rate of photosynthesis, a depression whose consequences, we hypothesize, included ocean surface waters cooling, hence reduced ocean surface waters evaporation, hence reduced precipitation over the surfaces of the land, hence drought and desertification, massive waves of extinction, balding of the biosphere, and glacial devastation. This depression was evidently, at least, the underlying tendency, perhaps overwhelmed at intervals by countervailing forces such as spates of volcanic eruption, during which great quantities of CO2 are expelled into the atmosphere from deep in the Earth, thus compensating for the photosynthetic losses.

As we shall see in the section following, the photosynthetic mode of reproduction was itself the ‘solution’ to a still earlier crisis of the biosphere, the
Heterotrophic or Fermentation crisis. But, in the Carboniferous, the photosynthetic solution too came up against its immanent limits, and the Great Carbo-Permean Ice Age, following directly on the heels of the Carboniferous, signaled this awesome turn of events:
Following the Silurian, high rates of photosynthesis are induced without corresponding quantities of organic materials immediately available ashore for decay and replenishment of CO2. This suggests that oxygen may have “overswung” the present level to a somewhat higher value as the lush life of the Carboniferous developed. Then, with reduction of CO2, the earth [ed: Earth] would cool, due to loss of the greenhouse effect of CO2, leading to the ice ages of the Permian period. As the earth [ed: Earth] cooled, photosynthesis would sharply fall, leading to a major loss of oxygen.c30
During the Carboniferous period, when most of the coal and oil deposits were formed, about 1014 tons of carbon dioxide were withdrawn from the atmosphere-ocean system. This staggering loss must have dropped the earths [ed: Earths] temperature to chilly levels indeed; it is not surprising that the gigantic glaciers that moved across the earth [ed: Earth] after this period were perhaps the most extensive in history.c31
In summary, we picture the history of the biosphere as one long decrescendo since the Carboniferous, with a ‘turning-point crisis’ in the Early Permian followed by a terminal crisis beginning at the end of the Cretaceous, with the demise of the dinosaurs, and continuing into the glacieral conditions of the Tertiary and Quaternary, potentially fatal conditions for the biosphere which still, ambiguously, persist, and whose outcome is not yet decided. That outcome must be decided by the outcome of the current crisis in social evolution: the terminal crisis of world capitalism. The historical continuum branches ahead of us with essentially two possible trajectories: [econo-politically democratic, i.e., non-state-]Socialism or Fascist Neo-Barbarism.

The process of a successful transition to a world socialist society, involving the rapid burning up of fossil fuel reserves attendant upon the socially-urgent accelerated socialist industrialization of the Third World, plus the econo-ecological renovation of the First and Second Worlds, undertaken on the secure basis of an international crash program to develop and deploy fusion reactors and other post-hydrocarbonaceous energy technologies, coupled with subsequent coastal fusion-desalination plant irrigated agriculturalization and reforestation of Saharan and other desert regions of the planet, would rapidly lower the albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth, while simultaneously raising the atmospheric concentration of CO2. This would rapidly heat-up the global climate, and the primary productivity of the biosphere as well, at last putting a definitive end to the Ice Age and the long period of ecological decline. Cessation of presently intensifying forms of capitalist looting of Nature, such as the deforestation of the Amazon under the Fascist regime in Brazil, which threatens accelerated climatic degradation via increasing the albedo of the Earth in the Amazonian basin, and harmful modification of weather patterns, c32 would also contribute to global climatic improvement. Such measures would also, and not incidentally, augment both the volume of production and the productivity of world agriculture; the former, first of all, by bringing present desert/wasteland under cultivation, the latter by increasing the rate of photosynthesis for present and newly opened areas of cropland alike, via the CO2 enrichment of the air.  Thus, these measures would provide for the urgently needed nutritional upgrading of the standards of living of most of the human race, the present degradation of which represents a central gap in present productive forces, a gap whose closure constitutes a central goal of the first phase of any world socialist society.



Graphic 15: Earths atmosphere

Failing Socialist Revolution, the neo-barbarous collapse of civilization following close upon a short period of intensified natural looting, austerity, and Fascist self-cannibalization of humanity — even somehow assuming the avoidance of thermo-nuclear war — would signal the dé
nouement of social evolution and, with it, of all life on Earth; the shriveling up of humanity and of the rest of the biosphere in the descent into the icy darkness of the last ice age.

The hypothesis of global cooling due to CO2 depletion as an explanation for the Ice Ages was attacked by Opik in the 1952 article quoted several times above, in the following terms:

Variations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a favourite topic in former speculations on climatic changes, need not be considered at all: absorption by water vapour practically covers all the absorption bands of carbon dioxide, and, in the presence of but minute quantities of water vapour, the additional absorption by carbon dioxide is nil. Variation in the amount of carbon dioxide will not alter the absorbing properties of our atmosphere, and will have no effect whatever on climate. If, nevertheless, the greenhouse effect, of carbon dioxide is sometimes mentioned, especially in popular books, this is due to lack of information regarding this particular problem of experimental physics. Practically all other theories of the ice ages and palaeoclimatic [ed: paleoclimatic] changes, which are based on purely terrestrial causes, are of a similar value and, thus, unfounded.c33
This statement seems to directly contradict the statement quoted from Plass herein [see quote related to citation 24] according to which the climatic effects due to carbon dioxide are almost entirely independent of the amount of water vapor and throughout most of the atmosphere carbon dioxide is the main factor determining changes in the radiation flux! Opiks statement also contradicts the absorption spectrum data presented by Plass [see Graphics 12a, 12b, 12c above], which shows very little overlap between waters and CO2s absorption bands, especially in what Plass indicates to be the all-important 13 to 17 micron region of the Earths most intense infrared emission. Plasss article was published in 1959, seven years after Opiks, so that perhaps the information regarding this particular problem of experimental physics had been revised in the interim. However, more recent sources continue to show wavering on this question. For example, Carl Sagan changed his view regarding the respective roles of CO2 and H2O in the runaway greenhouse effect believed responsible for the super-heated climate of Venus:
Since CO2 cannot ensure the necessary opacity over the broad range from 2 to 40 µ «microns», it was assumed in the initial variant of the greenhouse model «Kellog & Sagan, 1962» that the Venusian atmosphere contains a fairly large amount of H2O (10 - 100 gm cm-1).... In a later study, Sagan no longer insisted on large amounts of H2O and, furthermore, pointed to the well-known fact that CO2 absorption increases at the relatively high pressures assumed for the surface. c34
A still more recent study, the book Atmospheres by Goody and Walker, vintage 1972, states that water vapor is the principal absorbing gas in the Earths atmosphere c35 but it is not clear whether this is due, in their view, to the present scarcity of CO2 in the Earths atmosphere, relative to water vapor, or to the deficient absorption capabilities of CO2.

Opik
s objection, however, even if partially true, ignores a salient fact about water vapor itself as a climatic heating agent: its strong correlation to the rate of photosynthesis, controlled by CO2 levels, by way of the rate of evapotranspiration. Transpiration is the process by which plants pull a continuous column of water up through their root-hairs and circulate that water throughout their bodies, by evaporating water through stomata and like structures in the under-surfaces of their leaves. In this process, a kind of reverse rain, land plants act as powerful pumps which daily exhale tons of water into the atmosphere. So strongly correlated is the rate of this process to the rate of photosynthesis, that maps of the Primary Productivity of the globe (a function bounded by the aggregate photosynthesis of the biosphere) have recently been constructed by direct calculation from global evapo-transpiration data. c36 Thus, a high rate of photosynthesis, made possible by a high atmospheric concentration of CO2, should contribute to a warmer global climate, via stimulation of the rate of evapo-transpiration and the H2O greenhouse effect, even if only on a more locally-restricted basis, given Plasss contention [see quote related to citation 24] of the lesser atmospheric diffusability of H2O vapor as against CO2. Likewise, any drop in the level of atmospheric CO2 should shortly amplify its direct cooling effect, by depressing the rate of transpiration, indirectly cooling the climate further through a drop in atmospheric water vapor levels.



Graphic 16: Earths atmosphere with regard to its vertical temperature gradient

With regard to the reversal of the trend of diminution in the atmospheric CO2 content which seems to be an inadvertent (so far) consequence of the principal life-support activities of our species, we should mention a facet so far omitted. Not only do the combustion processes integral to the earlier, hunting,  and to the later industrial technologies of homo sapiens accelerate the return of terrestrial carbon to a gaseous, atmospheric form, but so also do the agricultural activities which came into predominance in-between:
During the past century a new geological force has begun to exert its effect upon the carbon dioxide equilibrium of the earth [ed: Earth]. By burning fossil fuels man dumps approximately six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. His agricultural activities release two billion tons more. Grain fields and pastures store much smaller quantities of carbon dioxide than the forests they replace, and the cultivation of the soil permits the vast quantities of carbon dioxide produced by bacteria to escape into the air.c37
In conclusion: we have arrived at an hypothesis of a general crisis in the biosphere, driven by the  biospheres cumulative net withdrawal of a climate-warming carbon dioxide gas from Earths global atmosphere, expressed also, therefore,  as a long fall-off in that biospheres life-giving rate of photosynthesis since the great boom of the Carboniferous, accompanied, with some lag, by a gradual refrigeration of the planetary climate, punctuated by violent episodes of glacial devastation, preceded by ocean surface water cooling, drought, and desertification, with restriction of the biotically fecund humid rainforests — veritable vegetable bombs by virtue of the rapidity of their photosynthetic and evapotranspirative processes — to an ever-narrowing equatorial girdle. This long, gradual fall was broken by another episode of rapid photosynthesis and net CO2 withdrawal in the Cretaceous, which, however, only intensified the crisis, leading to a Time of Great Dying in which the Great Reptiles and many other then-dominant plant and animal species perished; to stepped-up climatic cooling, to ocean surface waters cooling, thus to reduction in ocean surface waters rates of evaporation, therefore to reduction in rates of precipitation over land, i.e., to drought, leading to desertification, thence on to a new Ice Age, not yet definitively ended. This Time of Great Dying, and the subsequent glaciations, put an end to the predominance of those lineages of organisms which represented the flowering of multicellular pre-social evolution, ushering in the reign of the more gregarious mammalian line. Thenceforth, only evolution surmounting the merely multicellular plane of organization, and building structure on the next, the social, level of  aggregation could provide potential for a new viable basis for the long-term continuity/continuability of the biosphere. That potential was to come to fruition, as potential, through an offshoot of the society-forming mammalian line, in the form of humankind. That potential has yet to be realized, now, in the closing decades of the twentieth century.



Graphic 17: current world deserts


IV - The Crisis of One-Previous

But the multicellular-organism dominated, photosynthetically-based biosphere which came to its crisis in the geologically latest epoch of the history of Earth-life, as we have seen, was, we suspect, itself the solution to a much more ancient crisis, a crisis of the pre-multicellular, pre-photosynthetic biosphere whose life, it is believed, was confined to the warm primeval ocean, and to exclusively unicellular forms.

According to the currently hegemonic
Heterotroph Hypothesis c38, this, the original form of the biosphere, was based not on respiration as today for both higher plants and higher animals, a mode of metabolism requiring the breathing of oxygen, nor on photosynthesis, a form of synthesis of organic food molecules requiring the breathing of CO2, but rather on fermentation, an anaerobic and much less energy-efficient metabolic technology. Large organic molecules which represent food — biological free energy or negentropy sources — for respiratory metabolism, such as acetic acid (vinegars) and alcohols, represent excreta — waste [bio-entropy], or poison — for fermenting organisms. These molecules could become metabolizeable only after free gaseous oxygen (O2) was released into the atmosphere by photosynthesizing plants.

The synthesis of organic molecules required to feed the fermentation of the slowly swelling bloom of unicellular organisms populating the early ocean was accomplished, not of course by photosynthesizing plants, which had yet to evolve, but instead by the primitive, oxygenless atmosphere itself. We could call this process
atmo-photo-synthesis or atmo-thermo-synthesis, or just atmo-synthesis for short. Through processes driven by molecular energy input derived ultimately from the suns light, and perhaps also from the self-heating of the early Earth owing to nuclear decay of the heavier, radioactively unstable, atoms contained in its mass, the gaseous methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water (vapor) thought to have been the main constituents of the early atmosphere combined into larger proto-proteinoid and carbohydrateous molecules which precipitated out into the ocean because of their weight -- wherein the warm brothy solution accumulated in this way promoted further molecule-building and molecule-expanding reactions.

Out of the non-living cell-like colloidal structures known to be formed spontaneously by sufficiently rich concentrations of these macro-molecules — structures called coacervates and microspheres — the early unicellular organisms are thought to have developed. Once vitalized, these structures would systematically turn on the same molecular building blocks out of which they had constructed themselves, and feed, gobbling them up to stoke the slow, biological combustion of their fermentation metabolism, which break apart such organic molecules — to the uses of these primitive cells — thereby releasing to cellular appropriation the solar-derived and heat-derived chemical binding energy that had held those molecules together. It is especially the molecular reactions of autocatalytic and reflexive catalytic type, in conjunction with other circular chemical operations, that are thought responsible for the eventual vitalization of the spontaneous, originally merely mechanically cell-like colloidal formations. c39 Such chemical reactions, of a highly nonlinear”, nonequilibrium sort, give rise to coherent and self-oscillatory steady-states; to dissipative, locally negentropic, spatio-temporally ordered structures and behaviors of a kind believed essential to the phenomenologies which we recognize as life; as “living. c40

Present-day plants are called
autotrophs”, which means, roughly, self-feeders. The term heterotroph, on the contrary, refers to organisms drawing their nourishment from sources other-than-self. The latter term is applied, therefore, to present-day animals, and to the hypothesized primitive cells, dependent for their food on atmosynthesis. Hence the name Heterotroph Hypothesis given to this model of the origin of the biosphere.

As the process of the primitive biosphere continued, the waste products of fermentation —
heterotrophic entropy — must have accumulated in the primeval sea as a growing reservoir of toxic pollution relative to the merely fermentative metabolic technology of primitive unicellular life, threatening to poison the mounting swarms of heterotrophs populating that sea in much the way todays fermenting bacteria and yeast, remote descendants of the primeval heterotrophs — die in their own alcoholic excretions in the process of winemaking. Furthermore, the demand for organic molecules constituted by this mounting population probably eventually outstripped the supply capabilities of a non-increasing, or perhaps declining, rate of atmosynthesis, leading to a relative depletion of food sources, a worsening scarcity of metabolizeable organic matter. Oparin, co-originator of the Heterotroph Hypothesis, describes the resulting crisis of the Heterotrophic Biosphere in the following passage:
The  primitive metabolism of energy was entirely anerobic [ed: anaerobic] «oxygenless» and depended on the interaction of organic substances with molecules of water. But the supply of organic substance which could undergo fermentation must have been, therefore, decreasing in the primitive hydrosphere, being replaced by fermentation products such as carbon dioxide, alcohol, lactic and butyric acid, etc. Sooner or later this process must have come to a natural end with the complete exhaustion of organic nutrient material and the death of all living things. That this did not actually happen is due to the fact that some micro-organisms had acquired the ability to utilize light energy by virtue of their pigmentation.c41
At least one lineage of the primitive organisms, under this mounting constraint, began to internalize the process of atmospheric synthesis of organic molecules. Evolution in the direction of internal synthesis is thought to have proceeded gradually, as a step by step recapitulation in reverse. In other words, whereas atmosynthesis began with simple molecules — H2, NH4, CH4 and H2O — and built complex ones, the evolution of internal synthesis would begin with the synthesis of rather complex molecules, and move back toward synthesis of the simpler ones as it proceeded. Ability to synthesize the scarcest of the common big food molecules (call it A) by internal transformation of several less scarce but less readily etable molecules (call these B, C, and D) would develop first. But the resulting rise in consumption of, B, C, & D would eventually render them in turn scarce, putting a survival-premium on development of the ability to synthesize them from other, perhaps even less etable molecules,  and so on. Development of pigments, such as todays chlorophyll, allowing the use of photons — i.e., the same solar energy source which drove the atmospheric synthesis process — would complete the internalization of atmosynthesis. The autotroph represents an internalization or folding-in of the whole previous environment of atmosynthesis in the same way that the primitive heterotrophs represented a concentrated tucking-in -- in to little colloidal pouches, known as cells — of the chemical ferment of the primitive ocean environment, a ferment originally spread throughout its great volume. The primitive ocean as a whole was thus the first great cell, just as the whole primeval atmosphere was the de facto first great plant’, or chloroplast.

The more perfected forms of photo(n)-synthesis involve the release of free gaseous oxygen, O2, as exhaust. Photosynthetically-produced free oxygen, bubbling up out of the ooze of the primitive sea and, much later, venting out of the stomatic pores of land plants, transformed the chemical nature of the atmosphere, from a reducing (electron-giving) to the opposite, oxidizing (electron-grabbing) state, putting a stop to atmosynthesis. Oxygen stopped atmosynthesis by disrupting the chemical reactions on which atmosynthesis depends, and also by forming an ozone (O3-) layer in the upper atmosphere, shutting out much of the ultraviolet photon flux that had, in part, driven atmosynthesis. But this screening of the harsh ultraviolet rays also facilitated the invasion of the exposed land surfaces by biological organisms. More important, free oxygen allowed the metabolism of fermentation to be upgraded into the much more bio-energy-profitable, aerobic or oxygen-consuming metabolism of respiration. Once respiration came into play, the formidable oceanic accumulations of heterotrophic pollutionwaste or entropy for fermentative life — alcohols, lactic and butyric acids, etc. — could be mined as food; could become biological free energy, or material negentropy for respirative life:
In the absence of free oxygen all these substances are entirely unavailable for the animals of that epoch, but with the advent of oxygen the possibility of their utilization as sources of energy has been realized.c42
Thus photosynthesis solved the fundamental contradiction of the heterotrophic biosphere; its self-discontinuing continuity. That is, photosynthesis was the form of continuum of that otherwise terminal -- self-terminating; self-dis-continuing — biosphere; the form in which a continuity of that biosphere, beyond the heterotrophic limit, was possible. Though we cannot speak with certainty, in direct homology with the form of the photosynthetic limit, of a tendency of the rate of atmosynthesis to fall, we can speak of, a fermentation crisis, and of a tendency of the rate of fermentation to fall. Photosynthesis became the basis of a tremendous expansion in the energy available to sustain and advance the living process, and thus of a tremendous growth of the biosphere itself. The photosynthetic activity of biological agents re-made the atmosphere, the entire biosphere, the rocky face of the Earth itself. The ozonic, atmospheric and other geologic consequences of photosynthesis opened the land to life for the first time, bringing the continental surfaces too — the outer surfaces of the lithosphere, as well as the hydrosphere — under the biospheric blanket of life. We have already explored main features of the shape of this photosynthetic continuum, with its coming to a head in the Carboniferous, its sub-peak in the Cretaceous and its icy texture in the epoch just behind our own.

I think we can begin to discern a pattern, common to both the photosynthetic and atmosynthetic continua. In both instances, it is the accumulation of a relative entropy in the extension of the central reproduction process which spells the end of that particular reproduction-process. And the entropy accumulation of the previous mode of reproduction forms part of the essential resource base, the free energy or negentropy of the superseding one: the launching-pad from which it leaps; which gives it its head-start. The smoldering ash in the bowl of the torch of life leaps into flame again as it passes to new hands. With each such passage, the crisis is resolved by an expansion in energy-appropriation and, if you will, in the self-appropriation of Nature. A wider sphere of Nature is drawn into denser self-connection, integrated into the web of ecologic inter-relationship. A higher, more inclusive and more intensive self-organization and interconnection of Nature is born. Yet each of these solutions or levels of relationship (interconnection) is inherently unstable — self-attacking and self-dis-solving — in the long run, because each such solution is founded upon a relatively finite constituent of nature, its epoch-specific form of relative negentropy, which the core life process of that solution consumes and gradually depletes, i.e., converts into something else, something that may be a relative entropy for that core life-process [though it may be a form of negentropy relative to the next-emergent, higher core life-process].

We might take note at this point that the human supersession of photosynthesis — shall we call it petroleosynthesis? — is now approaching its limit: the depletive exhaustion of the fossil fuels. Fusion power — the human-societal ‘internalization’ of the Sun itself, of the core self-reproduction process of the Sun and other stars, namely, that pre-human-natural form of fusion power, known as stellar nucleosynthesis, which [temporarily] sustains the stars against self-gravitational collapse -- looks like the form in which the new continuum can be founded. c43

Can we frame any hypothesis given these three successive instances, as to the general law of ecologic evolution; of planetary, biospheric self-development — i.e., as to the general
geometry of ecological continuum? Do we locate in this pattern a Dialectic; a Dialectic of Nature?

V - The Laws of the Time Continuum
(The Necessity of Evolution)

What we have in this sequence of supersessions, it seems to me, is evidence suggesting a Law of the Necessity of Evolution, pertaining to process-entities, such as planetary biospheres, which constitute significant subtotalities, self-distinguishing sub-unities, of the Cosmos. The conjectured law, characterizing what we might name the Temporodynamics of such entities, can be formulated aphoristically as follows: continuum is evolution; to continue is to evolve; or only that which evolves can continue. Alternative formulations include: Only that which becomes can be, and, in a more Einsteinian vein: Evolution is the necessary substance/content of the space-time continuum.

Evolution, in this conjecture, is not
necessary in the sense of inevitable. It is only that, taking, for example, a biosphere, if it fails to evolve, it will rapidly lose its presence. It will be left behind the present. The occurrence of relative evolutive stagnation at, say, the species level would be taken as a signpost that the species is not the ‘sub-totality-of-reference for this law; that the necessity of evolution resides at the level of the larger whole of which the species is but an organ, and refers to a time-scale appropriate for that larger whole.

All these formulations hinge on the meaning assigned to
evolution. Here it means increase in the density and intensity of the organization of matter. It means change toward increasing negentropy — taking into account that negentropy is a measure of the degree of organization and the information content of material organization. Designation of a universal unit of measure for this generalized energy concept called negentropy remains an unsolved problem. However, Chardins concept of complexity in his Law of Complexity-Consciousnessc44 provides a useful provisional yardstick, despite the quasi-atomistic tendency to presuppose elements as if self-evident and independent of their whole. This Chardin-complexity value of a system is a composite measure of (1) the number of elements fused to form the system, and (2) the number of interconnections among those elements. Evolution then refers to movement of systems in the direction of higher values of this complexity’/degree of  organization/negentropy. Certainly a molecule, grasped as an internalization of the atomic milieu; as a (meta-)atom composed of atoms has a higher complexity-value than one of the atoms of which it is composed, since the make-up of the former is precisely a connection of a multiplicity of the latter! Likewise cells — as molecules of molecules or [atoms of atoms] of [atoms of atoms] — would exceed both molecules and atoms in complexity-value. By the same argument, multicellular organisms exceed unicellular” organisms — and societies exceed multicellular organisms — in complexity-value.

Evolution as defined here corresponds to LaRouches perfectionc45 (meant in the sense of an unending, unbounded process of ever more perfect-tion; not in that of an already attained, static condition of perfect being).

The idea behind this conjecture, stated loosely, is that of the impossibility of
standing still in time. The proposed law is a more specific version of that tenet which resides at the heart of dialectical thought and which expresses the dialectical sense of the essentially dynamic nature of reality. I mean the constant change theorem --  change is; only change is constant, or not-constancy is the only constant  — the theorem about the meta-constancy of in-constancy. Asserted in the negative, this theorem becomes (static) being isnt, or this too shall pass away. Its various formulations go back all the way to Herakleitos [ed: a.k.a. Heraclitus], and no doubt before. Reading the Hegelian rendition of this basic dialectical tenet, we can readily notice that, throughout this report we have merely been exploring, for that particular finite being which is the planetary biosphere, the relation of self-termination and self-supersession which Hegel asserts to inhere in all finite beings whatever:
When we say of things that they are finite, we mean thereby... that Not-being constitutes their nature and their Being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are related to themselves as something negative, and in this self-relation send themselves on beyond themselves and their Being. They are, but the truth of this Being is their end. The finite does not only change,... it perishes; and its perishing is not merely contingent, so that it could be without perishing. It is rather the very being of finite things that they contain the seeds of perishing as their own Being-in-self, and the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.c46
Each of the successive stages of the biosphere we have studied here rests upon an appropriation of a part of the non-biosphere, of the rest of Nature outside it, which is limited and exhaustible. Thereby, each of these stages lacks self-subsistence; is vulnerable, on one side, to using-up that external basis of its reproduction and, on the other side, to an accumulation of results of its own operation which are also outside its appropriation, unusable to it or even inimical to its continuation. Each stage is therefore self-negating. Each terminates its own operation after a definite span of that operation, as the overall result of that operation itself. Self-reproduction passes continuously (continuum-1y) into self-destruction. Further continuity demands transformation, transcendance of that stage; qualitative change. Only a new morphology, one no longer restricted to the old basis; one capable of utilizing, instead of being damaged by, the accumulated results of the old reproduction-process, can provide [meta-]continuity. This continuum is thus a kind of meta-continuity resulting from and achieved in and through qualitative discontinuity. And this new morphology, we conjecture, in each case necessarily involves not just a shifting of basis — as from atmosynthesized organic molecules, to CO2 + photons, to fossil fuels, to hydrogen or (heavy) water as fusion fuel — but an expansion of basis as well. Each successive crisis would then resolve itself by an expanded self-totalization of Nature, bringing a wider sphere of the Cosmos into richer connection with itself, through the agency of the growth front, or meristemof cosmic evolution (locally, at least, this meristem is the biosphere).

This whole conception suggests an extension of the Einsteinian theory of General Relativity. In that theory, the space-time continuum is deformed in the vicinity of concentrations of matter-energy to an extent proportional to the mass of the concentration. This deformation of the geometry (or better, to eliminate geo-centrism, of the topometry) of space manifests for us as accelerations in the spatial motion of objects in the vicinity of such concentrations, i.e., as the mysterious force of gravitation. The greater the mass, the sharper the associated bending or curvature of the space-time continuum, and the greater the corresponding accelerations and forces. But General Relativity can describe only the mass of the bodies and their spatial or external motions (changes of relative position in physical space). The bodies appear for this theory only as featureless, inside-less mass-points. What about the internal organization of these bodies? Shouldnt two bodies of equal mass but different degrees of organization (negentropy) correspond to differing deformations of the total space-time continuum (since their behavior, their total motion, will be different)? c47 The total space-time continuum is the total (universal) field. If, as Einstein claims, the aim of field theory is the description of objects existing in space, and the formulation of laws governing their changes in timec48, how can this theory be considered adequate to itself — to its own definition — if it excludes changes in time other than mere changes of place, changes of location — changes of relative position, relative velocity, etc. That is, what about the internal changes’ or motions, of self-reorganization, of bodies; the kind of change or motion that constitutes their evolutionary changes in time? Further, doesnt evolutionary change also exhibit acceleration? Evidently, it does. c49 Certainly, if the transitions from non-living to living matter and from living matter to conscious matter (us) are taken to represent equal evolutionary steps, equal jumps in negentropy, then tremendous acceleration is evident, the first transition having taken so much longer than the second (in our vicinity, at least). In terms of the readily recognizable succession of levels of organization — namely atoms    molecules    cells    multicellulars    societies — there appears to have been even an accelerating acceleration in evolution, though the exact time-relations here are still very uncertain.

We might then attempt to refer the accelerated evolutionary
motion of concentrations of mass-energy — such as galaxies (wherein pre-atomic matter may have evolved), stars (wherein the atomic species are believed to have evolved), and planetary oceans, etc., to the curvature of the space-time continuum associated with their degree of organization or negentropic level. That is, such a representation would homologize with the way in which General Relativity represents the accelerated spatial motion of bodies by a curvature of the local space-time continuum associated with mass. In our proposed generalization, not just the mass of a body — a rough measure of part (1) of Chardins criteria of complexity; the number of elements — but also the degree of self-interconnection of that mass, the second part of Chardin-complexity, would operate on the structure of the field or the shape of the continuum.

Though space and time cannot be radically separated in this theory, we might for emphasis say that, while General Relativity connects spatial motion or external motion to the curvature of especially the space-continuum, proportional to the local mass-energy magnitudes, this generalization would in addition connect temporal motion or  internal motion (evolution) to the curvature of especially the time-continuum, proportional to the local complexity or negentropic magnitudes. The more evolved the matter in a given vicinity, the more sharply curved the continuum, and the greater the associated force and acceleration of evolution. Hence, the continuing increase in the acceleration of evolution of a body in its own vicinity.

Represented in
force, acceleration , and “velocity terms, the mathematical modeling of the evolutionary movement might require a new generalization of the vector concept. Classically, vectors are conceived as quantities which have direction in space as well as magnitude. The vector of evolutionary force would, on the contrary, have its direction along time; timeward. A chronector, we might call it. Such timeward vectors or chronectors would be closely related to self-forces, describing self-activity, the action of self-development, and described by vectors pointing selfward back at their sources: self-reflexive vectors or reflexors.

Instead of being merely
time-oriented, i.e., of pointing into a temporal dimension conceived as pre-existing, perhaps we should conceive chronectors as being  time-generating. c50 Once we supersede the concept of Newtonian Absolute Time, conceived as flowing at a constant rate, unaffected by the speed or slowness of the motions of material thingsc51, to arrive at the notion of the Relativity of Time, the need for this modification becomes clear. In the Relative concept, Time is the product of material change, including evolution, and disappears without it. It varies in its rate of flow locally, because local processes vary in their rates. Time can only be measured by comparison of the rhythms of change of different material processes.  Time is nothing but change-in-general. The universal independent variable t of mathematics is really but a representation of some other process — of a designated clock-process, such as the revolution of the Earth around its common center of gravity with the Sun, taken as a unit of time — against which the process at issue is being measured and to whose rhythms its rhythms are being compared.

This perspective on time points to a concept of
temporal acceleration linked to those of evolutionary acceleration and evolutionary force. We leave off further investigation of the Law of the Necessity of Evolution or Law of Evolutionary Space-Time Continuum proposal at this stage, however, for its further ramifications would take us far afield. c52 The foregoing is offered as a sketch of the possible broader implications of the dynamic geometry we have uncovered in the special case of the evolution of the biosphere. The general conclusion of immediate practical import to be drawn from it is that only growth of the productive forces can save the planet — growth as instantiated in measures such as an international crash program to develop fusion power and internationally-planned agricultural development of desert areas, which are inherently also moments of a program-of-transition to world socialism.



Graphic 18: world desertification

VI  - The Dialectic of Nature

To what extent does this pattern of natural-historical development constitute a dialectic of the biosphere, a dialectic of Nature?

My answer a1 is as follows: a dialectic is present in whatever we can express by a reflexive sentence; it is present wherever we have a formula containing a subject-object identical. A process which we need to model, in natural language, by a sentence of the following shape is a dialectical process:

( name of entity )            ( acts on, changes (in some way) )        ( itself )
subject                                        verb                                        object

The verb here should be a concrete verb denoting a definite action or operation, not a form of the verb to be or other passive constructions.


By this criterion, we have a
dialectic of Nature whenever we have a process which can be modeled in accordance with the general form:

Nature (acts on) Nature,
and, in so doing, as an inherent, inescapable, non-repetitive result of this [apparent] repetition,
Nature (changes) itself.

In fact, the three instances we have explored above, of the Heterotrophic, Photosynthetic, and Fossil-Fuel based stages of the biosphere respectively, all belong to the general model:

The Biosphere reproduces itself,
and, in doing so, also, as an ineluctable consequence of this [attempted] mere self-maintenance,
The Biosphere transforms itself.

We can further clarify such models if we recognize that the activity denoted by the verb should not be conceived as external to the subject in question, here the biosphere, but, rather, as an inherent part of that agents nature; as essential to and inseparable from its existence and its nature. That is, we should incorporate the activity of the subject with its substance, conceiving it as a process-entity. Then the verb is absorbed into the noun [or vice-versa]. The term the biosphere, denoting the subject and object of the clauses above, would then symbolize both the thing biosphere and the behavior characteristic of a biosphere, by a single term. The conceptual separation between object and event, being and becoming, enforced in our grammar, is rejected.

In mathematical terms, the Biosphere now symbolizes a process, an operation — a very complex one — and, in a move characteristic of mathematical symbolization, we are going to replace the string of phonograms biosphere by the phonogram-become-ideogram B. The symbol B refers to the biosphere by denoting its idea, whereas the word ‘meta-symbol’ made up out of multiple phonetic character-symbols, b i o s p h e r e”, refers to the biosphere by representing the sound of its word.

Our sentence above then condenses to B
of B, B·B, B(B), BB or simply B2 in terms of this ideographic translation of the phonogramic sentence-model. Since the verb is absorbed into B (both Bs), there is no symbol between the first occurrence of B and the second. The action of our sentence is presented simply by the operation of the operator B upon itself, B(B) = BB = B2.

The application or activation of an operation, call it f, upon another operation, call it x, is conventionally denoted simply by their juxtaposition: fx = f(x) = f·x. The leftmost symbol is called the
operator (function) in such cases, and the rightmost is called the operand (argument).

Notice that
multiplication in this generalized sense does not always mean the operation that we call times, but rather, the mutual activation upon one-another of whatever operation is represented by the function and argument, operator and operand symbols. In this generalization, the formula 5×6 = 30 is actually a redundant form. The notation 5(6) = 30 would do just as well. In this case, juxtaposition does mean the operation times — the 5 counts the 6 five times and then sums the resulting five sixes, giving 30 as the product — but this is only due to the symbols 5 and 6, i.e., to the nature of the operation denoted by ordinary numerals, which is the operation of counting. But this is not true for operators in general, for the multiplication of symbols which represent operations other than counting — for example, for the operation written i (), which denotes the operation of 90° counterclockwise circular rotation in an instance of two-dimensional Cartesian number-space interpreted as the Complex Plane  (5i·6i = -30  +30).

In this perspective, a dialectical process is one in whose mathematical (ideographic) representation operator and operand are composed of the same symbol. In function language: a dialectic is represented by a function of itself, also called a reflexive function. c53 In the notation of an operator ideography, examples of what such functions look like would include: f(f), B(B), fx(fx), f(f(f)), and fx(fx(fx) which could also be written f  2, B2, (fx)2, f  3, and (fx)3 respectively. a2

The form a subject-object identical takes on in the notation of an operational ideography — an ideography of operations (a symbolic logic of verbs or of noun-verbs, instead of a logic of nouns) — is that of a self-function, a self-operation. In current mathematical discourse, such a subject-object identical or self-operation is called a nonlinear term. The nonlinear term, i.e., the self-operating generic unknown-function-value, is the form in which self-reflexive function[-value]s, i.e., self-operating operators, crop up within contemporary mathematics.

A nonlinear term in an equation is a self-product term which contains the unknown function or operation for which that equation is meant to be solved. That is, in that term the generic value of the unknown function occurs in a form multiplied against itself some number of times or, as is usually said, it occurs in a power or with an exponent greater than (or less than) 1. c54  Only terms with no power, i.e., of degree a3 1 or unity in the generic value of the unknown operation(s), i.e., terms without self-reflexiveness, are called linear terms.

A simple example of a time-varying or dynamical nonlinear term occurs in the dynamicaldifferential equation:
d(x(t))/dt = d(xt)/dt = ax(t)2 wherein x(t)2 = x(t) . x(t) = xt(xt)

This equation says that the instantaneous rate of change (differential) of x(t) with respect to the differential of t(ime), denoted dt, is proportional, by a factor denoted a, to a second degree of x(t), that is, to the two-fold self-operation of the function-value, denoted x(t), of that function-unknown, denoted x, for the generic value of the time variable, denoted t, i.e., to the operation of the operator xt upon itself. p4 Any equation containing a nonlinear term in the unknown is said to be a nonlinear equation. In particular, a differential equation — an equation involving the operation of differentiation, denoted d — which also includes a nonlinear term involving its function-unknown, is said to be a “nonlinear differential equation”.  By way of contrast, the differential equation dy(t)/dt = by(t), in which only the first power or simple presence of the function-unknown, y(t), occurs, is a linear differential equation, whose asymptotic solution, e.g., for b = -1, is a single point, a fixed point attractor or equilibrium, unvarying in its value for all values of the time-variable, t.  Indeed, in this case, that equilibrium attractor, point of changelessness, or point of no further change is none-other than the value 0.

We see that our dialectical sentence-models, reflexive sentences when expressed in phonogramic writing, take the form, in ideographic writing, of nonlinear equations, containing terms such as B2 — a term of second degree or a quadratically nonlinear term. If our sentence had described the effect of the product of B with B on itself, we would have had B2(B2) instead — a quartically nonlinear term, and so on.

In fact, we can formulate our Biosphere model as a dynamical nonlinear differential equation. a4 We can because the sentence-model is precisely about how B operates on B to produce the transformation of B, i.e., about how B changes B as a process of time. The basic form of the differential coefficient, presently written usually d/dt denotes the operation of measuring the instantaneous ratio of operation-change to clock-change. That is, the dynamical differentiation operation, denoted d/dt, applied to another operation, e.g., an unknown dynamical function, or dynamical function-unknown, stands for the measurement of the “instantaneous rate of change with respect to time of that other operation. The differential operation is actually a [hyper]number, albeit of a non-counting type. c55 The occurrence of the dynamical differential operation symbol, d/dt, in an equation renders that equation a dynamicaldifferential equation, typically describing the dynamics or law of motion of a dynamical system”.

Applied to our operation B this operation, called
differentiation, would yield an equation containing a nonlinear term in (at least) B2. Why? Because the change-making process of the biosphere is symbolized B(B) = B2. Therefore, the time rate of change of B would, in part at least, be proportional to B2:

d/dt(B) = .... aB2 .... + ....

The above would be, because it contains at least one term of degree >1 in the unknown operation B, a nonlinear differential equation. To solve this equation would mean to be able to write another equation B = ....(t).... which would constitute the definition of B. This equation would define B universally and explicitly in terms of other, more basic, operations, for every given moment of time, generically denoted by t.

The explicit version of B on the right-hand side of that equation, revealing the internal anatomy as it were hidden from view inside the univocal symbol B here, should be a rather intricate affair, if our B2 is to represent an at all realistic specification of the dynamical system of the Biosphere as a state space a5 trajectory, the flow or vector field or landscape of whose state-space would represent the multi-dimensional Biosphere operation. Our symbol B represents in fact a ramified system of operations a6 that would have to be expressed in terms of a multitudinous composition of more fundamental verbs or noun-verbs — i.e., operations , [hyper-]numbers, functions.

We have simply used B to stand for our operational model of the biosphere. We have not displayed here its content in ideographic symbolic form, although this entire study is about that content as formulated in a different, non-ideographic, narrative manner. A manifold operation like B would ordinarily resolve itself into a product of many other operations combined. B would factor out into a very long string of other operators; or into an inhomogeneous polynomial sum of such strings, that is, into a many-elemented n-tuple (vector), or even an n-dimensional array of such strings. Furthermore, there is no guarantee — in fact, very little likelihood — that B could be decomposed into currently formulated operations, i.e., in terms of presently recognized kinds of [hyper-]numbers, or known functions:
As has been abundantly observed in preceding pages of this work, the solution of many types of nonlinear equations in a closed analytical form is not possible. The range of available functions is much too limited and many equations are intractable to the usual devices of analysis. In fact, most nonlinear equations define new functions, whose properties have not been explored nor for which tables exist. c56
Be that as it may, we have found an intuitive link between dialectical processes and nonlinear (integro-)differential equations, allowing us to clarify what we mean by a dialectic of Nature. In fact, the inefficacy of contemporary [capitalist] mathematics with respect to nonlinear processes is to be expected and predicted from a Marxian perspective in view of the ideological and anti-dialectical -- atomistic and reductionist — conceptual premises from which that mathematics has developed. The problem with present-day mathematics is not with ideography as such, but with the ideas currently being graphed and with the missing ideas which are not. It is a conceptual problem. Humanity, collectively, does not yet understand dialectical process. The process of socio-psyche-ological evolution leading to forms of self-identity in the social individual — forms appropriately placed under the heading the socialist ego — which could afford that individual an internal model rendering dialectical process readily conceivable, are still underway, and in hot competition with processes heading toward the neo-barbarian or Fascist ego. In official science, the atomistic model, belonging to the alienated and alien-ized individualist ego, still holds sway. Acquiring the civilizational ability to solve nonlinear integro-differential equations entails the formation of concepts adequate to comprehend such processes in the broad popular mind; acquisition, in other words, of the ability to think dialectically, to think like a social(ist) being. What is needed is not so much new symbols for the missing functions, but the new concepts and new cognitive processes which those new symbols will merely represent.

Dialectical is the nature of any process whose subject is also its object of any process-entity which, as unified subject-object, acts upon itself and thereby changes itself progressively. Not just a human being, or human society, but any entity whose name can properly hold the subject slot in a process-descriptive English sentence is a subject relative to the universe of discourse carved out by our forming that sentence. And any entity whose name can properly hold both the subject and the object slots in such a sentence is the subject of a dialectical process. Certainly some subjects are more dialectical, more reflexive, than others. In fact, the later in evolution one looks, the more dialectical are the systems one finds. Human subjectivity, last to evolve in our vicinity, is certainly the most dialectical subjectivity known to us. But reflexiveness, in graded degrees, characterizes Nature from beginning to end. Biospheres, as we have seen, surely qualify as such dialectical subject-objects. In general, any entity x which can satisfy (solve) a sentence of the shape:

x (operates on) x.

is a dialectical subject. Obviously, the solution-set for x is not restricted to the human species as its only member.


In fact, human history, on this view, including the Socialist Revolution, is but part of the Dialectic of Nature, the latest chapter in that vast dialogue, that great argument which cosmic Nature is having with itself.



According to Hegel, c46 dialectical being is not merely self-changing process. It is self-changing all the way to the point of self-termination and self-sublation. Dialectical process-beings change themselves more and more until finally this accumulated self-change amounts to a leap beyond themselves; a change into something else. The dialectical perspective, in sum, forces us to recognize the non-eternality of the present leading formation of the Nature of this biosphere, of Earth life, namely: ourselves. We must face the realization that humanity, too, will eventually be superseded in its current, meristemal, role — after bringing forth, out of itself, something else, something beyond the human. c57

The dialectic does not rest. In all the Cosmos, only this is at rest!

VII  - The Ideology of Science

It should be noted that the realm of linearity is the only domain of mathematics — and, hence, of conceptualization itself — which has been largely conquered by modern science. The much vaster realm of nonlinearity remains not only untamed, but virtually unexplored by it:
In another volume the author has developed a theory of linear operators, which contains within its scope a considerable domain of analysis. That such a work should include within its limits a large area of mathematics is readily understood from the fact that the assumption of linearity in operational processes underlies most applications of analysis to the problems of the natural world. It is for this reason that a theory of linear operators, in contrast to a theory of nonlinear operators, is comparatively easy to develop. The latter is beset by many difficulties.... But in spite of the difficulties of the general problem, there exists need for a systematic treatment of nonlinear equations. Nature, with scant regard for the desires of the mathematician, often seems to delight in formulating her mysteries in terms of nonlinear systems of equations.... In the domain of linear equations, an essentially complete theory exists for differential equations.... But in the category of nonlinear differential equations, the situation is very different. Satisfactory information exists in general only for certain restricted types of equations and for a limited number of special cases.c58
In other words,  the science of the last 250 years has scarcely begun to explore the realm of dialectics, i.e., of  self-reflexive processes. which characterize the nature of Nature in general, including the nature of human Nature as human social evolution.

Contemporary science is biased in favor of what I will call
externalism. It always expects and seeks out external causes, external forces:
If no external forces act on a body, it moves uniformly c59
is the founding principle of Mechanics — going back before Newton to Galileo — and of all the modern sciences which have sprouted in its penumbra, for mechanics is the founding branch of modern science.

Stated another way,  modern science is biased in favor of models of the following shape:

x (operates on) y.

where it is never the case that x = y. That is, this science is predisposed to find, in the natural process, flexion but not re-flexion. This bias is also seen in the case of its theories of Earth history and of the biosphere. What does Opik say, just after dismissing out of hand the Carbon Dioxide hypothesis?
Practically all other theories of the ice ages and palaeoclimatic changes, which are based on purely terrestrial causes, are of a similar value, and thus unfounded. c33
A rather sweeping rejection, this would seem, without having bothered to consider even one more from among all other theories! Such across-the-board declarations usually signal the involvement of deep-seated underlying assumptions, or unconscious attitudes, about the world, and, in this case we suspect, to a pre-empirical, ideological premise. A yet more explicit specimen of this attitude occurs in a passage, highly convergent with respect to the themes developed here (as we shall see more fully a little further on), in a recent book by Kenneth Boulding, a polemical book written explicitly to discredit the notion of dialectical processes in Nature and society in response to the authors experiences with the Japanese Marxist student Left and the versions of dialectical theory prevalent in that milieu:
Dialectical philosophers may argue that the role of catastrophes in the evolutionary process has a dialectical or at least a revolutionary element in it.... It may well be, for instance, that the unknown catastrophe which destroyed the dinosaurs and led to the extinction of a very large number of species was an essential ingredient in the development of the mammals and the next stage of the evolutionary process... it has been suggested that the Ice Ages played an important part in the development of man.... However, the catastrophes which have punctuated the evolutionary process are not in themselves dialectical, that is, they do not arise by necessity out of the contradictions of previous systems but are usually imposed from without. This is particularly true of climatic changes, which do not in any way depend on the inner workings of the system of biological evolution, but are completely extraneous to it, even though they may have a great impact on it. c60
Modern science is predisposed against perceiving immanent causes or self-forces. This externalist bias is an aspect of the bias toward linearity noted already. The reflexive sentences formulated above, which gave rise to nonlinear terms (reflexive functions) in mathematical translation, express precisely ‘self-causation’; change due to forces arising immanently, or self-change” (Marx). a8 In marked contrast to the modern scientific traditions neglect of autocausation, Hegel, for one, locates such concepts as residing at the heart of adequate thinking about, especially, the biotic world:
...life is essentially a living being; and this is merely excited by the outer world. Here, therefore, the causal relation falls away, and generally in the sphere of Life, all the categories of the Understanding cease to be valid. If, however, these categories are still to be employed, then their nature must be transformed; and then it can be said that life is its own cause.c61
The dialectical tradition includes as one of its moments, an attitude we might call internalism. Not that it emphasizes immanent causation one-sidedly; on the contrary, knowledge of the whole picture of a phenomenon is its goal. It takes into account the total interplay of an “[it-][her-][him-]self agent and its otherness — and all known other agents — the interplay of the internity and ‘externity’ of such a self, of causes both immanent and remote. The total[ity] view includes an emphasis upon those strange conspiracies of events through which an entity and its environment express a unity; through which apparently exogenous circumstances trigger, pace, or provide occasion for, the revelation of some moment of the endogenous nature of that entity; of the inner essence of that entity. This view includes emphasis upon the ways in which apparently remote processes mediate the ‘self-reflexion of an entity — as, e.g., the apparent exteriority of the Milankovich orbital cycles, and the glacieral ice of the Pleistocene Ice Age, mediated the self-reflexion of the activity of the Photosynthetic Biosphere upon itself, through atmospheric CO2 depletion and consequent climatic cooling -- the feeding-back of action to its origin. Self-Re-Flex-ive Action is Action which bends [Flex] back [Re] upon — returns to, or flows back to — its source [Self]. Discovery and explication of this unity of inner and outer is indeed a primary aim of the dialectical exposition of any phenomenology. Dialectic is the complete relationship, or interaction, between a determinate being and the totality, a totality which includes that being itself. Therefore, self-interaction (intra-action) is a moment of the total interaction defining such a being. But ‘other-interaction’ — its relationship with the rest of the universe, other than itself — remains as well, unless the being in question is the entire Cosmos, the totality itself. Only that being is fully self-reflexive, though all the relative totalities or sub-totalities which it brings forth within itself seem to be modeled after it, and to exhibit partial self-reflexiveness, and a drive toward its total self-reflexiveness, in ascending degrees.

The pre- and contra-empirical, ideological syndrome we have identified, calling it externalism, is but one symptom of a deep-seated conceptual disposition of modern science, which I will call atomism. Atomism is the view that reality at the ultimate level is a mere collection or set”, as opposed to an organic totality; a mere ensemble of mutually indifferent, absolutely individual, indivisble, radically separable, self-existent or independently self-subsistent elementary particles. That is, the universe is thought to be composed of irreducible discretenesses which, unlike the living organs of a biological organ-ism, are capable of  existing apart from one another and from any given state of mutual organization of themselves; discretenesses which are thus mutually external, essentially uninvolved in one anothers being, not internally connected, but only externally related, coming into association only in exteriority, contingently, accidentally as it were. All complexity, all phenomena of life and consciousness are, in this view, mere epiphenomena of the aggregations and dis-aggregations of these unchanging, isolatedly self-subsistent particles, and reducible to such — totally explainable exclusively in terms of such -- atomistic particles.

Atomism is the core of the ideology of modern science. For this attitude, the parts — linearly, additively, without synergy — compose the whole. c62 For dialectics, a whole also composes its parts; it inheres in each of its parts as the internal premise and support of each part. A part-icle is what happens when a whole, locally, swallows itself.

With regard to social science, this dialectical axiom shows up as a critique of the Lockian-Hobbesian model of society as a gas of individuals. The dialectical theory of society recognizes the sociality of the human being, which, as the immanent truth of human being, must finally be materialized in history if the human species is to remain viable much beyond its infancy.

The possibility of my specific personality is a social product; the product of a long, deep filament of the evolutionary continuum, a product of the labor of history. My existence rests upon the ramified texture of a world-wide division of labor, on the global effort and cooperation of virtually the whole human race, presently accomplished rather blindly through the mediation of capital or the world market. We — my personality and this social totality — appear and disappear together. Damage this global network, curtail its scale, diminish its productivity, interrupt its flow, and my life is curtailed, diminished, interrupted in proportion. The cost of my existence increases; the impaired metabolism of the network can no longer support the existing population, myself included, in the former quality of health, prosperity, vitality. Mortally wound that network, and my life rapidly evaporates; my personality becomes impossible. On the other hand, every contribution I make to the welfare and advancement of that network — my real body, from which I live — redounds to my benefit as well. Social reproduction is the process of the interproduction of human selves, social individuals. Or, as Marx put it: in social reproduction, the other person is a necessary part of your self. c63

The deeply-held premise of atomism is a symptom of the capitalist envelopment — both internal and external — of modern science, of modern knowledge. This premise arises in the living of the social relations of production, the experience of the self, of modern society. In the terms of an historical socio-psychology, atomism could be defined as the projection of the bourgeois ego-structure into all experience, onto all of Nature. Its secret is the atomism of privatized life, the one-sidedly individualistic life of modern society. The fundamental gestalt of the self, the internalized model of self-identity, reproduced by any society, cannot help but become the universal model for all perception and conception for the personalities formed by that society, the (usually, to date, unconscious) paradigm for judging all experience. Comprehension of Nature is attempted, however consciously or unconsciously, sympathetically, that is, by imaginatively putting ourselves in the place of what we are trying to know, i.e., by projecting ourselves into the object of our inquiry. The basic structure of self-identity against which we interpret all experience will reflect, in turn, our social constitution and social environment, the dominant social relations [of [our] production — that produced and that continue to reproduce us — i.e., the social self-relations of human societal self-re-production of our society]These relations express the attained level of relationship of humanity to itself, the attained development of the productive forces, i.e., of the self-powers, of the social individual, within which our personalities had to form themselves. The environment of Capital, the form human personality manifests in the all-pervading field of the market-nexus, forms the conceptual atmosphere of modern science. The two have developed for the last 300 years and more, hand in hand. As Marx puts it:
In the form of society now under consideration, the behavior of men in the social process of production is purely atomic. Hence their relations to each other in production assume a material character independent of their control and conscious individual action.c64
Under these social conditions, the connections between individual action and the movement of the totality — as in such phenomena as depressions, wars, and chronic impoverishment — are easily obscured.

Bourgeois perception wants to see mere sets — mere collections of mutually-estranged, alienated individuals — everywhere it looks. It expects the elements, the parts, of such sets, to be existable prior to, and, at any time, apart from, the whole they thus, supposedly, merely externally and contingently compose, and to belong to an order of reality more real, more concrete, than the totalities they constitute. However, a part, an organ of an organ-ism — say, a human heart — will rapidly shrivel and decay if it becomes separated — alienated — from the whole in which it inheres; the organism/sub-totality of which it had formed an essential constituent.  An organ, an organic part, cannot be apart; cannot be parted from or withouted from its unity/totality without soon ceasing to be itself — without ceasing to be what it was when it was embedded in and un-separated from its native context. In the course of its historical development, atomism or mechanism has had to leave behind the simple gas models, and to increasingly admit relations, structure-formations, among its elements. But it wants to admit these relations only after the fact, after the fact of the existence of its elementary particles — that is, it admits the relational structures or systems only as derivative from the prior and deeper reality of its elements. c65 Dialectics, on the contrary, sees the particular as an invagination of the global, a self-re-entry or underturning of the manifold of the whole, the world-field. Graphically represented, using a kind of hyper-Venn diagram, this conception might take shape as below:


Graphic 23: the whole containing the parts which contain the whole

In this conception, the particular arises by local self-internalizations of the continuum (here denoted U = Universe); by self-involution of the unitary field. The part contains the whole; the particular contains the totality, itself included. The [present] part-icular is thus conceived as simultaneously [past-]self-containing and [past-]other-containing, and thus as [past-]totality-containing. c66 Such self-nested morphologies are, of course, outside the scope of any Euclidean or flat-space [un-curved]geometry.


Externalism, child of atomism, is closely related to the blind-spot which leads mainstream scientists and ecology activists away from so much as considering a hypothesis of biospheric dynamics such as that proposed herein, even when they verge repeatedly upon its conceptual thresholds, sifting its clues and key evidences before their apparently open eyes. Associated with the externalist bias are two other prevalent tendencies of Ecologism: a tendency toward misanthropy and a bias in favor of equilibrium models of Nature, i.e., in favor of linear dynamical models, which are therefore pseudo-dynamical models, of the biosphere.

Current ecology tends to treat man as an external cause in Nature, Nature as external to Man”, and Man as external to Nature. Its ideologues likes to talk, implicitly — and nonsensically — as if humanity were an invader in the biosphere, arrived here from outside of Nature — from outside of the universe — rather than admitting that humanity is a [locally] new part of Nature; a natural outgrowth of prior Nature; a new kind of part of the universe, one that the universe has recently added to itself. Ecologism likes to abstract man from Nature, to imagine Nature as already completed without humanity, as peacefully self-regulated and serene but for humanitys presence — a perfected cyclic equilibrium, deviating from this stasis only episodically and accidentally — i.e., when disturbed from without. As we have seen, this is far from an accurate picture of the nature of Nature.
In the language of Ecologism, man always only upsets the balance of Nature. c67 But, if our hypothesis is correct, the balance of Nature is no static, timeless fixity, but a self-upsetting process, one which disturbs itself internally. It is not primarily outside agitators, but inside agitators which foment the self-revolutions of Nature.  Nature is a dialectical process-object, a dialectical subject or agent of action and of self-activity; a process of self-creation in which human Nature the noösphere; the self-expanding patch on the biosphere occupied by the human social formation — is the latest product or dialectical synthesis of Nature itself. The notion that man, the socialized arm of Nature, can set Nature right as well as wrong, that biospheric Nature is in trouble without us; that humanity is an outgrowth of Nature lacking  which it would be unbalanced, incomplete — an outgrowth which Nature needs to restore  its moving balance for the next interval ahead, is foreign to Ecologism. It is a conception virtually inaccessible for the psychological structure and premises from which Ecologism grew. The misanthropy of Ecologism has its roots also, we must add, in the dark mood which has overtaken bourgeois ideology since the zenith and turning point of capitalist civilization in the period around World War I; in the whole  historical atmosphere of the decadent phase of capitalist society. We will consider this aspect more closely in the next section.


Underlying the equilibrium model is a perception of time as a kind of empty space, a container of events that can be filled up in arbitrary order and which can hold either change or non-change. Time is not grasped as the very continuum of change — the continuing self-prolongation of universe-al existence due to the continuing culmination of both self-induced change-in-self [self-activity] and other-induced change-inself for all extant cosmological entities taken as selves/subjects/agents in some degree. The dialectical view, by contrast, is anchored in this conception-awakened-perception of the cumulative evernewness of time, such that no two moments can ever be identical. For dialectical perception, change is continuous. Time is just the continuity of change, and apart from change, Time is not. Or, as Herakleitos expressed it so long ago:
Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice in the same river.... It is in changing that things find repose.... Homer was wrong in saying Would that strife might perish from amongst gods and men. For if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist.... The sun is new each day. c68
If Time is grasped as an irreversible cumulative continuum, a never-repeating texture of events in which later and earlier can never quite coincide in their evental content; if duration is grasped as a texture of unique states-of-the-world in which similitude but not identity of events is possible, then the kind of radically dynamic model of Nature proposed here is the first thing one is disposed to look for; is only to be expected. We are not talking about cycles here:  in an evolutionary continuum the photosynthesis-respiration biosphere will not turn back into the atmosynthesis-fermentation one; the present biosphere will not revert to the photosynthetic-respiratory one, but will go to something new, to a new stage based on fusion power. Modern science, on the other hand, expects true cycles. It has not, for the most part, explicitly arisen to the paradigm of the spiral or the helix — that is, to the image which synthesizes the moments of endless self-oscillatory circular recurrence and of self-continuing rectilinear self-extension. c69 Thus, ecologists speak of the CO2 cycle, and tend to expect a set-point fixed for all time for atmospheric CO2 concentration, upon which all the feedback channels of the Earth converge and continue to converge through all the ages since the Earths formation. The idea that Nature does have a history, that the biosphere as a whole, the planet as a whole, and the universe as a whole self-evolve continuously, irreversibly, and cumulatively, is still dawning, and is resisted, although the evolution of particular biological species has long been granted. If evidence for these higher modes of evolution is lacking, this lack is due at least in part to the contra-empirical, ideological biases that make us miss such evidence even when it is staring us in the face.

Thermodynamic equilibrium is essentially a linear phenomenon, and through it linearity is linked to a tendency toward maximal entropy of systems, maximal disorder, codified in the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
...linear systems, in particular, systems close to equilibrium, always evolve to a disordered regime corresponding to a steady state which is asymptotically stable with respect to all disturbances... c70
Lerners Theorem spotlights the connection among linearity, atomism, and equilibrium:
There are two basic, interrelated axioms in the reductionist conception of the universe. The first is that the universe consists of independent elementary particles.... The second is that these particles are organized according to a set of fixed relations, or laws.... Essentially every branch of existing science is reductionist in that it is based on these same axioms — discrete particles and fixed laws.... The fundamental axioms of reductionism necessarily imply a certain conception of the dynamics and development of physical processes and the universe in general. This conception is known variously as the law of increase of entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics. It states that the universe as a whole, or any system in particular, always tends towards a stable or unchanging state, a state of equilibrium. An equivalent statement is that the rate of change of the universe or any system tends to zero: the universe is running down. This dynamic law is a necessary consequence of the fundamental axioms. Any system defined by fixed laws must have some state from which no further change is possible.... The tendency of the universe towards equilibrium is at the same time a tendency towards increasing disorder and randomness, since disorder is more probable than order — that is, there are more possible states of random arrangement than ordered arrangement. This tendency towards increasing disorder is also called the increase of entropy. c71
Nonlinear systems, on the contrary, may exhibit a taxis towards states of increasing order, heightening their internal negentropy by exporting entropy to their environments. That is, they evolve, through a succession of relatively or temporarily stable states located on a continuum leading ever farther from thermodynamic equilibrium:
Our qualitative argument leads us to inquire about the feasibility of extending the concept of order to nonequilibrium situations, to systems in which the appearance of ordered structures, in thermodynamic equilibrium, would be highly unlikely. One of the main conclusions of our theory will be that there exists a class of systems showing two kinds of behavior: a tendency to a state of maximum disorder for one type of situation, and coherent behavior for a second type. The destruction of order always prevails in the neighborhood of thermodynamic equilibrium. In contrast, creation of order may occur far from equilibrium and with specific nonlinear kinetic laws, beyond the domain of stability of the states that have the usual thermodynamic behavior.
Traditionally, thermodynamics has dealt with the first type of behavior, but an extension of irreversible thermodynamics that permits treating the other aspects as well as this one has been developed recently.... One of our main points here will be that an increase in dissipation is possible for nonlinear systems driven far from equilibrium. Such systems may be subject to a succession of unstable transitions that lead to spatial order and to increasing entropy production... «for example» generation of coherent light by a laser may be interpreted as a nonequilibrium phase transition. Below instability is the incoherent regime; beyond the transition threshold, corresponding to a critical value of the radiation field, the system switches spontaneously to the coherent state.... The amplitude and period of the oscillations are determined by the system itself «rather than by the external stimulus of the flash that triggers the lasing». Moreover, the periodic solution is stable in the sense that all perturbations introducing an initial deviation from this state are damped. This type of solution is well known in mathematics and analytical mechanics as a limit cycle. Note that the existence of localized states and wave-like solutions... raises a number of fascinating mathematical problems related to the existence and stability of periodic solutions for nonlinear parabolic differential systems.... c72
As a result of these ideological attitudesexternalism, misanthropism, equilibriumism — most commentaries on the ecological organism of our planet overlook, or repress, any notice of the kind of ecological dynamics we have been exploring herein. Typically, where such commentaries do verge on these considerations, signs of reluctance and anxiety are in evidence. These include several modes of abrupt truncation of discourse; abrupt changing of the subject — for instance, hasty consignment of such speculations, barely broached, to the nether realm of the still unknown, thence quickly passing on to a remote topic. Let us watch the thought-processes in a number of recorded such instances, in order to get a feel for the psycho-ideological phenomenon involved.

The Club of Rome study, Limits To Growth, manifests very sharply the tacit presumption — the pre-evidential and evidence-overriding, dogmatic, supra-evidential, and therefore ideological pre-assumption that any man-made alterations in the biospheric process must be, ipso facto, to its detriment:
At present 97 percent of mankinds industrial energy production comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). When these fuels are burned, they release, among other substances, carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Currently about 20 billion tons of CO2 are being released from fossil fuel combustion each year... the measured amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing exponentially, apparently at a rate of 0.2 percent per year.... If mans energy needs are someday supplied by nuclear power, instead of fossil fuels, this increase in atmospheric CO2 will eventually cease, one hopes before it has had a measurable ecological or climatological effect. c73
The following passage represents an example of equilibrium thinking or cycle-thinking which, while insightful in this case, errs in tending — via a thought-process which might be characterized as one of ontological reductionism — to assimilate human agency entirely to the humanity-preceding supposedly “cyclical”/non-cumulative/non-self-transcending processes of Nature:
The burning of fossil fuels is an element of another cycle that affects atmospheric carbon dioxide; this is the cycle of photosynthesis and respiration.... The rate at which respiration and decay occur is very nearly equal to the rate of photosynthesis.... Nevertheless, there is, on average, a small imbalance, which is important... the rate of photosynthesis is slightly faster than the rate of respiration and decay, and there is a continual addition of carbon, of organic origin, to the sediments at the bottom of the sea. In time, these sediments are converted to rocks, and the carbon is incorporated therein, but the process does not stop there. The layer of sedimentary rocks on Earth is not getting thicker all the time. Instead, the rocks are lifted up above the surface of the sea, where they are subjected to weathering and erosion. The carbon in the rocks is oxidized in the process and returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In this respect, the burning of fossil fuels may be thought of as a greatly accelerated form of weathering. At the present time, the burning of fossil fuel is producing carbon dioxide about thirty times as fast as rock weathering. c74
In the next citation, part of the hypothesis we have explored in this report is virtually broached, and the author admirably and succinctly gives the lie to the now-prevalent, hysterical and Hitlerian/Goebbelsian Big Lie mantric and ad nauseam assertions, by the growing chorus of Rockefeller hired liarsZeroists [Zero-Growthers], Negativists [Negative-Growthers], Smallists, Animalists, People are Pollution genocidal maniacs, neo-Primitivists, neo-Luddites, and Global-Warmists — that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, rather than a primary, vital nutrient/resource, for our photosynthetic biosphere, but the line of inquiry is abruptly diverted:
...carbon dioxide is a relatively rare gas in the atmosphere and its carbon is necessary as a component for all food. If the respiration of all organisms, particularly that of the decomposer micro-organisms, were to stop, much of the available carbon would be tied up in dead material, and photosynthesis rates would slow down. However, man is inadvertently increasing the carbon dioxide content of the air by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil in which the carbon was fixed by photosynthesis millions of years ago. Thus, where carbon dioxide may have been a limiting factor in ecosystem productivity, such productivity may eventually increase. c75
In the following passage, it is nearly recognized that the ecological consequences of human praxis, far from being necessarily uni-directional, can even oppose one another and balance out. Yet, once again, only the possible negative consequences of human agency are envisioned, revealing an underlying assumption that Nature is already finished, perfectly balanced, fixed at perfect values for all of its parameters, and ok as is, so that any man-made changes — whether they raise or lower the Earths temperature, or any other natural parameter; whether they shift a given natural parameter in one direction or in the other, opposite direction -- can, at best, mean only “disturbances” -- movements away from the prevailing, quasi-static perfection — if, hopefully, tolerable ones:
...the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide... «could» raise the earths [ed: Earths] temperature, presumably melting the ice caps and flooding the coastal plains of the world. This much-discussed possibility is only one of the changes in flow that may be expected if further power injections change the world ecosystems composition. Now, increasing turbidity in the air from pollution is reflecting light in many areas, lowering temperature and agricultural production. Somehow we have to prevent major disturbances of the coefficients of the mineral cycles. c76
Finally, we note what is probably the closest approach to the overall hypothesis stated here from orthodox circles, ironically (and by no means accidentally) occurring in a passage explicitly devoted to refuting dialectical concepts — the passage in Bouldings book immediately succeeding the one cited previously:
One possible exception to this proposition is the climatic change which may result from the absorption of carbon dioxide from the air by plants and other living organisms and its present restoration to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. It has been suggested that an increase of carbon dioxide in the air will have a greenhouse effect and will upset the heat balance of the earth [ed: Earth] by letting more heat in through the atmosphere from the sun than it lets out at present temperatures. This would be expected to raise the temperature of the earth [ed: Earth] which would, of course, have profound consequences such as the melting of the ice caps and a change in the whole ecological structure of the biosphere. There may be long cycles of this kind in the evolutionary process which have something of a dialectical character to them, in the sense that it is the contradictions within one phase that produce the next. There is no agreement among natural scientists, however, about the reality of these phenomena — thus the greenhouse effect may be literally overshadowed by increasing cloud cover and again they must be put in the category of interesting speculation. c77
In concluding this section, it should be emphasized that no special sagacity is required to discern the patterns which anchor the hypothesis of biospheric evolution and dialectical continuum put forward here. Required only is the living sense of the involvement of the totality in the particular and of the internal interconnectedness of events, that is, the sense of the unitary fabric of reality alive in ones own identity which is none other than the Socialist sense, a perception of selfhood which is emergent in our times.

VIII -  Ecologism and Pro-Decadence Ideologies

Certainly the ecology movement”, as a grass-roots mass phenomenon, expresses and is nourished by the deep currents of maturation within the human race which are emergent in this time, currents which are also the wellsprings of a Socialist movement. Ecological ideas manifest a sense of organic totality, an awareness of the global consequences of local action or inaction, and of self-reflexive responsibility for such action or inaction. The Zeitgeist is alive in this movement, wherever it encourages thinking in terms of the biosphere as an [auto-]dynamical organic totality. In this respect, ecologistic thinking represents a dawning of a more conscious precursor of dialectical reason among broad layers of the population of humankind.

Certainly the concern with the laws of social reproduction, as they relate to Nature; the concern with the proper care and reproduction of the planetary ecosystem, which is the natural basis c78 of all human life, our real body (Marx) c79, together with the idea that the choice of technology is a matter for public deliberation and social policy, not an affair of private property — all of which animate this ferment as a mass movement — reflect the new consciousness unfolding in the social individual, connected to the historical experience unfolding around him/her; a consciousness without which the transition to a democratically self-planning society would be impossible.

The question which must be addressed once these valid moments are recognized however is this: Does the ecology movement finally go with or against the movement of Capital in its decadent phase? The historical continuum forks ahead of us into basically two contrary contours of possibility with very little in between: Socialism or Neo-Barbarism. Does the ecology movement at last empty out into the whole stream of contemporary capitalist ideology and policy, plunging with them headlong into the rapids of ruin, the runaway social entropy of contracted social reproduction? Or does it truly break with that current, veering off toward a new region of social negentropy, a new and higher organization of society? Does the ecology movement represent a fruition, or a diversion, in the final analysis, of the critical energies gathering force within the human race as we confront the self-destructive consequences of our present socioeconomic activities and organization and begin to consciously confront the task of rectifying them? Do the conceptions of the laws of social and biospheric reproduction prevalent in the ecology movement point the way toward a new state of society, historically conscious, ecologically responsible, spiritually and materially prosperous, or do they augur, if implemented, social (therefore also ecological) catastrophe instead?

There is no doubt here that capitalist society — or rather, the human race during the stage in which it incarnates Capital c80 — turns outward against Nature with a previously unprecedented rapacity. By Capital, I mean that cybernetical organization of social practices and resulting feedbacks and dynamical laws produced by any society based upon exchange-value and wage-labor. This rapacity is particularly evident during the decadent period of Capital, when capitalism passes from its status as a preponderantly self-organizing system into that of an increasingly self-disorganizing system. The period around World War I marked this turning point. But it must equally be recognized that this outgoing rapacity turned outward against external Nature is but a reflection of the rapacity which the Capital mentality also turns inward against human nature. Capital inherently exploits, loots, and brutalizes both. But Capital is an historically specific and inherently self-limited instar in the maturation of the human species. It is not tribalism, nor feudalism, nor is it the democratically self-planning society whose original name was Socialism. Nor can categories like Technology or Urbanism be meaningful if postulated apart from their historically-specific, epochally-specific, content, a content which changes as the basic state of society and social-relations ontology changes. What we have before us today is not Technology in general or as such. Neither is it feudal technology, or socialist technology. It is specifically capitalist technology, and capitalist urbanism. That is, the present manifestations of these historically general categories are forms of capital; the forms which these categories exhibit when filtered through capitalist institutions. They are technology and urbanism as moulded by the inherent system-properties of Capital. They are objectifications of that very specific social relation of production which Capital is:
...capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing, and lends this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is rather the means of production transformed into capital, which in themselves are no more capital than gold or silver in itself is money. It is the means of production monopolized by a certain section at society, confronting living labour-power as products and working conditions rendered independent of this very labour-power, which are personified in this antithesis in capital. It is not merely the products of labourers turned into independent powers, products as rulers and buyers of their producers, but rather also the social forces and the future... (illegible break in manuscript) form of this labour, which confront the labourers as properties of their products. c81
What we know today of technology and urbanism is not only technology turned into a capital — technology as a capital and the city as an expression of capital accumulation, concentration, consolidation, and centralization — but moreover, it is capital as a technology c82 and the geographical morphology of humanity turned into the body of capital.

Of course, then, the shape of technology, so too the patterns of human settlement on the land — the patterns of human geography — along with all other dimensions of our present social morphology, will have to be transformed into congruence with the new system-laws of a new social relation of production, as we make the transition to an economically-democratic as well as politically-democratic self-planning society, the only kind of ecologically sound society which is possible now. But it is the quality of capital-congruence — not of bigness or of any of the other such superficial predicates arbitrarily pried loose and fetishized from superficial, shallow, skin-deep, surface-only, i.e. impressionistic accounts of contemporary social phenomena — which has to be sublated within contemporary technology, urbanism, etc. in order to arrive at their social[-ist] quality. Within that new configuration of society, some things will still be big, some that were big will become small, some that were small will become big, some social organs will be decentralized and some will be centralized — not according to some blanket preference for either bigness or smallness, centralization or decentralization, but rather in accord with the coherence of the new social relation of [human-social self-re-]production -- for the predicates big”, or small, centralized”, or decentralized”, in themselves, in the abstract, are simply not the heart of the matter.

If the ecology ideology is blind to social form and insensitive to historical specificity; unconscious of the operation of the social relation of production, which always resides at the heart of socio-morphogenesis, then it cannot help but go wrong in the remedies it proposes. Seeing the rapacity of Capitals technology and the putrefaction of its contemporary urbanism, but unable to discern the presence of Capital in either, it can only turn against Technology and Urbanism and Science in general and, given that tool-making and settlement-formation and knowledge-accumulation reside close to the essence of humanity, cannot help but finally turn against humanity itself. There is an historic name for this misanthropism and nihilism, this human anti-humanism arisen to ideological hegemony and official social policy: Fascism. And Fascism will remain the finality of Ecologism so long as its practitioners fail to learn the lessons of historical specificity, and to come to recognize in the ecology crisis, just one additional dimension of the general crisis of capitalist civilization in which we live, presently intensifying toward its historical paroxysm and climax, in which we must decide the future of the human race, or rather, whether the human race is to have a future.

The looting and polluting of Nature which we are witnessing and participating in today must be comprehended as a lawful outcome of the nature of Capital; an inevitable tropism of its systemic feedbacks. The ecology movement raises a valid demand when it insists that ecological damage by industry be registered in the social accounts as an economic cost. In no way can the costs of ecologic reparation be properly conceived as extrinsic to the costs of social reproduction. Nature is all that our species has ever had to work with. Technology in general is simply humanity working with Nature — both as natural material and as natural law. Technology is the creative tournement of Nature, the turning of natural necessity back upon itself to accomplish the novel ends and productions (syntheses) whose possibility and conditional necessity arrived in this universe with the emergence of human nature within, and from out of the womb of, universal Nature. All artifacts and instruments are forms of Nature, natural materials as developed further by mankind, expressing the natural tendencies or natures of these materials as evoked and actualized via human intervention.

Nature is our means of production whether in the form of the land and the vegetation that we cultivate, the machinery or other implements with which we equip ourselves, or the faculties of our own bodies which we use in production. For these bodily faculties are likewise products of Nature, as modified by the labor of history, that is, by the action of the species upon itself since its birth out of Nature. What Im getting at is that Nature is the only technology weve got. Human-natures “Technology is just a higher form of Nature.

However, capitalist accounting, and capitalist practice in general, inherently excludes recognition of ecological cost externalities, and capitalist society systematically loots its natural basis — that is, appropriates and consumes Natures formations without meeting the costs of continuity which this entails. c83 Modern society relates to its natural basis in this way for historically specific reasons — reasons which have nothing to do with technology per se (unless the mere consumption or depletion aspect is to be fixed upon, and then pre-human natural processes like Fermentation and Photosynthesis would have to be admitted also into this category, as natural technologies, as well). The reasons have rather to do with the nature of Capital. The looting of Nature, the using up of the use-value of an aspect of Nature without restoration, partially compensates technodepreciation. Technodepreciation refers to the losses on account of fixed capital, debit to the profit account, which result from the growth of the productive forces or of (use-value) productivity which Capital itself initially promotes, as this growth takes effect in an environment of new entry competition. Technodepreciation is the process which epitomizes and focalizes the self-contradiction of Capital. c84 That is, the looting of Nature is one of the primary ways the capitalist system is enabled to cover-up, for a time, its immanent tendency to lower its own rate of profit, or rate of return on investment; to slow down the rate of capital accumulation, its prime vital sign.

Briefly, development of the productive forces — that is, the self-continuing self-development of the social self-force of human species-societys self-re-production; of self-accelerating human-species socio-mass or human negentropy self-productivity — as embodied in (a) design-improved/cheaper substitute products, with higher utility and social “re-productivity” than those of the older vintages for which they substitute, (b) improved, higher-productivity equipment, and/or (c) cheaper equipment due to attainment of higher productivity in the production of that equipment itself, all cause losses to the owners of the earlier vintage product inventories and/or equipment producing competing products thus rendered “obsolete” in pricing and/or in utility.  These losses manifest once the improved/cheaper product and/or equipment is brought to bear upon the old profit-and-price structure that prevailed based upon the older product/equipment, say by newly entering competitors employing that improved/cheaper equipment to produce their competing product [commodity] offerings.  Since these losses on the past, sunk fixed capital investments embodied in that now obsolete/over-valued equipment and/or product subtract out of the current profit-loss account, this process of ‘technodepreciation’ manifests as a fall in the ratio of profit to original or “historical-cost” investment in every accounting/reporting period during which the occurrence of such ‘technodepreciation’ is recognized. Or, such ‘technodepreciation’ impacts may be accounted as a revaluation downward of the capital assets of the enterprise(s) owning the now obsolete/over-valued equipment and /or product inventories, i.e., as a “one-time” or “special” charge against current period profit or retained earnings. Since such technological advances in productivity and utility are a continually-incentivized, hence continually re-occurring feature of capitalist competition, these obsolescence losses, if not compensated or covered up in the various ways which also develop as the capital-relation develops/accumulates further, would tend to lead to a periodic, or even to a secular down-valuing of accumulated fixed capital-value society-wide, hence to a decline in the society-wide average rate of return on investments. c85  p5


The classic example of the looting of Nature is found in the modern petroleum industry. Petroleum is not economically valuable in itself, in general, or in all social epochs of human social evolution, but only in relation to a certain level of self-development of the social economy — of the level of human-societal self-reproductivity, or of the social forces of production, i.e., when it attains to the social-evolutionary stage of molecular power, appropriating negentropy at the molecular level; of organization of pre-human, Nature-al evolution, but not yet, prevalently, at the deeper, earlier-evolved atomic level or sub-atomic level of human-social appropriation of pre-/extra-human-Nature [e.g., those levels wherein the possibilities of the technologies of nuclear fission power and of nuclear fusion power reside]. The state of social negentropy, the level of the productive forces or of industrial organization had, by the late 1800s, rendered mineral oil a valuable material, whereas, at earlier stages, it had been virtually useless, and hence, valueless; unsalable. Thenceforth, however, mere legal title to a piece of ground topping petroleum deposits enabled the holder to pocket the proceeds of the sale of this material, without any further considerations of meeting any ecological reparations costs or costs of continuity incurred. The land holder appropriates the product of Nature, in this case fossil fuel, gratis. Thus, once proprietorship was secured, extracting oil could be likened to digging money out of the ground, as opposed to what is required for profitability in “manufacturing industry wherein production or the transformative application of machine-assisted human labor is the key process adding [profit-]value (and social-negentropic or social-reproductive value) to the final product. That merely extractive industries -- precisely because of the costs, ecological and otherwise, that they can escape given the atomistic accounting feedbacks of Capital — can be very lucrative is reflected in the structure of the present global capitalist ruling class: the dominant multinational corporations and banking interestswhich today represent the wealthiest and most powerful factions of the world bourgeoisie arose to hegemony on the basis of the petroleum industry. I refer, of course, to that constellation of interests clustered around the Rockefeller family fortune, whose wealth originally centered in the Standard Oil Company, and which constellation recently captured, via the Trilateral Commission (founded by Chase Manhattan Bank President David Rockefeller), the Cabinet of the United States Federal government.

That said, a word of caution is in order regarding the concept of ecological costs and ecological reparations. The concept as here invoked refers to costs-of-temporal-continuum for the biosphere or for human society, and, as we have seen above, that continuum is not of a static, but, on the contrary, is of an ever-changing, quality. Hence, this concept does not refer to some equilibriumist notion of a restoration in the same quality or of a replacement in kind. What must be restored is the equipotential for [further self-re-]production of Nature, and this can be achieved generally only as reparation by further evolution.

The cost incurred for econo-ecological self-reproduction by the consumption, or ontological conversion, of nonrenewable aspects of biospheric Nature, such as coal, oil, aluminum ore, etc., is not of a kind which could be met by replacing bauxite with bauxite, by filling up large holes with man-made coal and natural gas, or by pumping petroleum back into the ground. Human production-consumption is not a borrowing of some fixed quality of Nature which needs to be repaid in the same quality. On the contrary, the evolution of photosynthetic capabilities in exchange for the consumption of the products of atmosynthesis; the evolution of an industrial species capable of appropriating and utilizing fossil fuels in exchange for the depletion by the photosynthetic biosphere of atmospheric CO2 and the evolution of a science capable of producing fusion technology in exchange for the depletion of fossil fuels, would exemplify the reparations process as here conceived.

That is, any given stage of cosmic evolution, since it proceeds by consuming [converting; transforming] the products posited by previous stages, which products are relatively finite in extent, therefore incurs, ipso facto, as a condition of its own [even meta-]continuity, the cost, as it were, of self-transcendence; of giving birth to a succeeding stage, of expanding and superseding its original relationship to the rest of Nature, uniting itself to a different and wider aspect of previously-evolved Nature, once it has used up, or, rather, transformed into something else, its original basis. This “necessary cost will not necessarily be paid in every locus/instance of its incurrence; its non-payment simply means that the process/stage of cosmic evolution in question, locally at least, will come to crisis and abort.

In the case at hand, this concept would mean that part of the surplus -- the profits in social-reproductive use-value or human social negentropic terms — realized through the productive consumption of petroleum, would be invested in research and development of a replacement for this species of molecular power in preparation for its eventual demise through fossil fuel depletion, and in upgrading the quality of life so as to develop a human population capable of realizing and broadly utilizing such an advance. For example, part of the proceeds of oil exploitation would have had to have been devoted to fusion research. c86 The prices charged for oil would have had to be set high enough to cover such R&D costs, reflecting, in that way, the true social costs of using them; of developing, mediated through a transient dependence upon them, to a later and enduring status beyond that dependence. Moreover, the costs thus covered by the prices charged would then have had to have been actually and effectively invested in that fusion power R&D. Only then would the ecological costs of, in this case, social reproduction be being met. As we know, this has not been the case. The unmet, unrecognized costs have appeared as the fanciful, outrageous hyper-profitslooted profits — of the Global dictatorship of Petroleum instead. These costs will eventually be registered in the form of an actual energy crisis in the future, and in the initial strain of a sudden, socialist crash program to develop and deploy fusion devices, or, in the social-reproductive collapse of petroleum-based industrial civilization, due to hyper-escalation/-inflation in the price, and the eventual collapse in the supply, of petroleum-power products.

We have been dealing with the long-term social costs pertaining to maintaining the biospheric equipotential for self-reproduction; with the long-range equipotential maintenance program requisite to a viable society, that is, to a temporally ‘continuable process of social evolution. The short-term equipotential costs need also to be noted. Even from the point of view of social reproduction alone, any productive activities which in any way impair the Earths suitability for continued support of productive activities, including its suitability as a habitat for human beings and for the fabric of other organisms upon whose life and integrity human life depends, objectively incurs the cost of healing this damage as a true, direct cost of social reproduction. Damage or wear-and-tear to the natural infrastructure should be accounted — e.g., in the societal self-model of a democratically self-planning society (socialist accounting) — as depreciation of the means of production, and acted upon accordingly. This means obviating, minimizing, or at least costing such losses, and then meeting the costs thus registered.

Capitalist relations, as we know from the work of the ecology movement, as well as from our direct experience of unabated pollution, systematically excludes recognition, or at least encourages evasion, of these
external cost responsibilities. The anarchistic, atomistic system wherein the means of producing society are fragmented into competing private properties and, consequently, wherein accounting of profit (gain) is similarly atomized, creates a situation such that what is a cost or damage for society as a whole does not necessarily feed back to the individual capital which most directly incurs that cost or damage as a system-atically or legally imposed direct cost/damage to that individual capital, thus incentivizing that individual capital to curtail and/or economize-upon that social cost/damage which it is causing.

That which would,
in the dialectical accounting of a democratically self-planning society [an accounting which would measure the total relationship of that society to its natural environment] appear as a loss — for example, the pollution of lakes and streams can today behave as if a profit, a gain (via avoiding disposal costs) from the point of view of a particular capital committing that pollution.

What we experience in polluted, carcinogenic waters; in smoggy, eye-stinging and lung-corroding air, in cancer-causing, heart-disease-causing, diabetes-causing capitalist pseudo-foods, and in side-effects-cascade-engineered capitalist pseudo-medicines, not to mention in late, globalized capitalisms global arms-traffic, global drug traffic, and global human sexual-slaves traffic, is anti-[use-]value, actively social negentropy-annihilating social entropy — the other side of capitalist [pseudo-]profit — the other side of looting profit; of profit realized through reneging on the socio-econo-ecological costs of human social reproduction, through cannibalizing humanity, and cannibalizing the natural basis of social nature, i.e., of that prolongation of human society back into pre-human/extra-human nature which is the foundation upon which human social nature rests. The ecology crisis as a whole is but one of the signs of the decadence of Capital, of the proto-Fascist, pro-totalitarian phase wherein Capital profits and accumulates more and more by vampirism, by looting and parasitism, and less and less by actual production of fresh social-reproductive use-value; less and less by the growth of the productive forces, embodied in an advancing technical composition of accumulating fixed capital, less and less by human social negentropy expanding means, but, on the contrary, wherein paper capital grows more and more by profiting on the “production” of social entropy and social contraction; profiting on its imposition of a catastrophically contracting social reproduction, profiting on cannibalizing, contracting, and reversing the growth of the social forces of production, as epitomized by the non-reproduction -- the starvation and extermination — of the slave-labor populations of the Nazi concentration camps.

The rapacity and toxicity of modern society with respect to global, planetary Nature as a whole (including with respect to itself, as a part thereof!) is located not simply in “Bigness”, nor in “Technology” as a universal category, still less in “man” in general, but rather in the historically specific organism of social feedbacks and tendencies — the specific dynamical properties — of the social relation of production called Capital.  Capital — the largely unconscious but self-organizing capital-praxis of human agents — evolves quite lawfully out of earlier forms of exchange-value — commodities [barter] and, later, money [money-mediated exchange and circulation of money-and-commodities] -- once the density control parameters of commodity production and exchange, driven by the growth of their social productive force or self-productivity, within and among rapidly detribalizing kinship societies, expand beyond certain critical, self-bifurcation thresholds. The specific kind of “Bigness” we experience today is the kind which inheres in the laws of economic motion of Capital; in the consolidation, concentration and centralization moments of the law of Capital accumulation first discovered by Marx, which describes the unified shaping of our entire social process by the cybernetics of  Capital qua the Capital-relation.  Capitalist “Bigness” — concentration, centralization, and increasing oligopolization, monopolization, and state-ification of Capital, together with an accelerating state-power-based guaranteeing of private-Capital-[pseudo-]profitability — does not at all necessarily converge with what would be optimal from the point of view of human-social-negentropic use-value or of self-expanding social self-reproductivity. But this doesn’t mean that “Bigness” in the abstract can be seized upon as a scapegoat, a cheap, quick and “simple” explanation of all of our problems. It doesn’t mean that “Smallness” or “decentralization” is ipso facto optimal from a human-social-negentropic use-value or social-reproductive view-point. Part of the folly of this whole tack resides in the relativity of qualities like “Smallness” and “Decentralization”. “Small” cannot exist apart from “Big” nor “decentralization” apart from “centralization”. All that can exist, all that we can actualistically talk about, is certain possible “states” of interconnection of these pairs; certain possible unities or patterns of interpenetration of these dialectical opposites.

No doubt the mania for Growth exhibited by some capitalist spokespeople is an expression of and an ingredient in the rapacity of modern society. But the Growth actually being referred to by them is that of Capital: namely, accumulation — of debt instruments, of monetary, and of other money-denominated paper titles to wealth. This Growth does not necessarily betoken any expansion of social use-value, of social reproduction, at all: Capital growth can indeed correspond to an increase in goods and services beneficial to society, and to a development of the creative powers of human beings through a deployment and consumption of those powers which is appropriate and conducive to their continual self-expansion. But Capital growth can also correspond to an increase of goods detrimental or wasteful to social reproduction (for example, weapons of mass destruction) or, as with speculative profits, to no goods at all, as well as to the destruction of creative powers through reneging on the costs of reproduction of the working population: the looting of wages and social services (the social wage) for profits. The mania for growth is thus an expression of the drive to self-accumulation inherent in the Capital-relation. The self-destructiveness, the cannibalism manifest in this mania today is a reflection of the fatal self-contradiction inherent in that accumulation drive: that previous accumulation makes further socially-expansive/negentropic accumulation of Capital ever more difficult as the accumulation process proceeds, i.e., as the capital-intensity of production increases. This self-contradiction, as a movement, is the famous Marxian “Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”, manifest empirically as the trajectory of growing indebtedness, followed by accelerating inflation, crash, depression and (usually) inter-capitalist war, and which we have attributed, above, in a way which is not explicit in Marxs extant work, to the dynamic of technodepreciation or of the self-destruction of capital-value — a self-destruction which is mediated by the conversion of previously-accumulated capital-value into non-value through its interaction, in the form of competition, with newly-accumulated capital-value, newer capital-value which is of a higher technical composition than is the older capital-value. c84

The purveyors of the Ecology ideology, owing to their pervasive ideological blindness to the social relations of production, and their blindness to the historically-specific, Capital-relation-related nature of the present world ecology crisis, and owing to an impressionistic empiricism insensitive to the more subtle and intricate textures of social causation, have drawn, for the most part, wrong conclusions about the present predicament of the human species and of the planetary biosphere; have assigned the wrong causes to the problems, and have proposed social-reproductive disasters as solutions. Almost all of their advice comes under the heading of proposals to further enfetter — in fact, to catastrophically reverse — the growth of the productive forces of humanity, that is, to lower the level of negentropy of human society, to disaccumulate the human-species use-value, actual and potential, built up by the labor of centuries; to enforce a suicidal contraction of social reproduction, and a murderous meta-genocidal contraction of the global human population. This is nothing but the blind, contra-temporal’, anti-historical tendency of decadent Capital, coming lately to consciousness, or, rather, to false consciousness, and even mistaking itself for an opposition to capitalism! But Ecologism opposes capitalism only in the way self-contradictory capitalism at last openly opposes itself; the way decadent capitalism attacks and seeks to dismantle all of virtues and values, the structures, psychic and social, of ascendant-phase capitalism: the idea of progress, of material and spiritual betterment through coherent knowledge (“Science”); the institutions of democracy and popular power, of public, all-classes higher education, and so on. Ecologism is a species of the ideology of capitalist anticapitalism; it is a pro-Decadence ideology. And this pro-Contraction, anti-productive-forces bent in public opinion comes at a time when a new upsurge in the productive forces, a worldwide scientific and cultural Renaissance, a globally planned program of quantitative and qualitative growth; of worldwide economic development and social reconstruction, inherently impelling us beyond the Capital-relation, provides our only chance for survival as a species, as for survival of this planets biosphere-noosphere as a whole.

This species-suicidal bent is by no means the accomplishment of the Ecology movement on its own. It has been helped astray by massive funding and other encouragement from the highest ruling circles of international Capital. In particular, the Rockefeller group has systematically selected and nurtured, with regard to population policy especially, the tendencies most convergent with its own plans, which amount to
multi-genocidal and mega-genocidal dismantling of the human race. p6

Citations

c1    BSCS; Biological Sciences: Molecules To Man [Blue Version]; Houghton-Mifflin Co. (Palo Alto, California USA: 1963); pages 448-449.
See also:
c2    W .D. Billings; Plants and the Ecosystem; Wadsworth (Belmont: 1964); page 81.
c3    Ibid.; pages 80-81, 84-85.

c4    Evidence that the earliest human societies interrupted the terrestrial deposition of bio-carbonic sediments by regularly practicing the systematic burning of large tracts of forest and grassland vegetation and detritus, for purposes related to hunting and a host of other conditions, and also that large-scale fires caused by other than human agency must have been exceedingly rare, are to be found in a tome with a surprisingly Marxian-sounding title, for a non-Marxian book:
c5    G. Plass; Carbon Dioxide and Climate in Scientific American  201:1 (July 1959); page 4.

c6    P. Borisov; Can Man Change the Climate?;
Progress Publishers (Moscow: 1973); pages 21-22, 26, 30-31.

c7    Plass; op. cit.; page 42.
See also:
c8    F. Stehl; Permian Zoogeography and its Bearing on Climate, in Cloud, op. cit.; page 8.

c9    J. Durham;
Paleoclimates, in Cloud, op. cit.; pages 819-820.
See also:
c10    E. Barghoorn; “Evidence of Climatic Change in the Geologic Record of Plant Life, in Cloud, op. cit.; page 738.
See also:

c11
    E. Opik
; op. cit.; pages 871-872.

c12    W. D. Billings
; op. cit.; page 66.

c13    W. D. Billings
; op. cit.; page 68.

c14    W. D. Billings
; op. cit.; page 69.

c15    W. D. Billings
; op. cit.; page 70.

c16    W. D. Billings
; op. cit.; pages 70-71.

c17    P. Murphy; Net Primary Productivity in Tropical Terrestrial Ecosystems in Helmut Lieth & Robert Harding Whittacker (editors), Primary Productivity of the Biosphere, (Springer-Verlag, 1975); pages 227-228.

c18    E. Barghoorn; op. cit.; pages 736-737, 740.

c19    E. Barghoorn
; op. cit.; page 737.

c20    R. Stirton
; Time, Life, and Man, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959); page 339.

c21    E. Opik
; op. cit.; pages 870-871.

c22    E. Barghoorn
; op. cit.; pages 739-740.

c23    E. Barghoorn; op. cit.; page 741.

c24    G. Plass; op. cit.; page 41.

c25    R. Stirton; op. cit.; page 371: Most sources of oil and petroleum reservoirs are associated with rocks of marine origin.

c26    C. Emiliani; op. cit.; page 893.

c27   J. Andrews; Glacial Systems, (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1975); page 66: With the development of potassium-argon dating...the inception of glaciation in Antarctica was reassessed; it is now thought to have begun at least in the Miocene.”
See also:
c28    Editors, “Did the Anerobes Defeat the Dinosaurs?”, Monitor Department, New Scientist, (27 November 1975).
Dr. Ryan, however, denies having proposed the climatic-change conjectures described in the New Scientistarticle, pointing out that the “episode of ocean stagnation which affected the atmospheric composition occurred in the Early Cretaceous and the extinction was some 30-40 million years later at the end of the Cretaceous, saying only that Indeed the euxinic interval in the world ocean was impressive and there were several shocks felt on the carbon and sulfur reservoirs in the ocean and atmosphere which most likely had repercussions in the biosphere.” (private communication, June 11, 1976).
c29    That Sea Bottom Oil Could Be Just Shale”; S.F. Chronicle (San Francisco: 15 November 1975); page 42 in the “Business World section.

c30    L. Berkner, L. Marshall; “The History of Growth of Oxygen in the Earth’s Atmosphere”, in Brancazio & Cameron (editors), The Origin and Evolution of Atmosphere and Oceans; page 119.
Also see
c31    Plass; op. cit.; page 44.

c32    “Can Man Alter the Climate (Researchers Think So)”
; The Independent (Pleasanton, CA.: 25 November 1975).

c33    Opik; op. cit.; page 874.

c34    V. Meraz; The Physics of Planets; (1962); page 151.

c35    Goody & Walker; Atmospheres; Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: 1972); page 58.

c36    Helmut Lieth & Robert Harding Whittacker (editors); op. cit.; pages 105, 158-161, 250-254, 257.

c37    Plass; op. cit.; page 47.

c38    BSCS; Biological Sciences: Molecules To Man; op. cit.; pages 76-123.

c39    I. Prigogine, et. a1.; Thermodynamics of Evolution; Physics Today (December 1972); pages 38, 40-42.

c40    I. Prigogine, et. a1.; op. cit.; Physics Today (November 1972); pages 24-26, 28.

c41    A. Oparin; The Origin of Life; Dover (New York: 1938); page 226.
See also:
  • E. Broda; The Evolution of the Bioenergetic Process; MIT Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1968).
c42    A. Oparin; op. cit.; page 231.

c43    A word is in order here about this hypothesized next stage of the biosphere; namely, the econo-ecology centered on fusion-powered human praxis (or plasma-technology-based “industry). We wish to call to attention how the technical transition from fossil-fuel based to fusion-power based econo-ecology evidently depends upon the social transition from capitalism to socialism.

Briefly, the vast techno-depreciation losses to the fixed capital accumulations of the petroleum and fission industries — the former a central focus of the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie since the turning point into decadence — as a result of the competition of fusion reactors, would probably be so great as to destroy the economic viability of the capitalist system at one blow (see Karl Marx; Grundrisse; Nicolaus, Martin (translator); page 543). To avoid this, fission power — actually a form of social entropy, not energy — is pushed and fusion research funded with a comparative pittance. U.S. fusion research funding oscillates as a function of the status of the U.S.S.R. research effort. When the Russian results look too promising, as lately, the U.S. program is stepped up. For, if the U.S.S.R. were first to achieve a workable reactor design, they would for the first time possess a significant capital-equipment export-commodity saleable to the advanced sector, enormously improving their foreign exchange position, their ability to finance badly-needed high-technology capital imports, and giving them an economic weapon capable of obsoleting a fundamental sector of Western capital.

So great is the productive force represented by fusion power that associates of this writer suggest it exemplifies an inherently trans-capitalist technology, a productive force of such magnitude that it could not conceivably be contained with the bounds of capitalist social relations of production. Reactors using “radioactivity-less” or “clean-burning” fusion fuels — i.e., fusion fuels which produce no neutron fluxes, only charged particle fluxes, such as helium-3 with itself [i.e., fusion of Helium 3 nuclei with other nuclei of that same kind] or with deuterium, and hydrogen with boron  (Science (vol. 192: June 1976); page 1321) -- should represent one of the least polluting energy technologies in human history, costing smaller social expenditures for ecological reparation than not only fission, but even than present fossil fuel technologies. Only “thermal pollution” remains which, given the longterm cooling trend of global climate in the present, waning, interglacial, we have discussed, may not turn out to be “pollution” at all, if suitably deployed. In addition, heavy neutron flux from deuterium-deuterium or deuterium-tritium “fusion torches” might even be used to ‘de-radioactivate’ deadly fission by-products, thus canceling some of its otherwise prohibitive ecological costs and social risks ‘retroactively’ (Science 25; June 1976; page 13).

Assume that the sequential order of possible scientific and technical (praxical) evolution for any capitalist society puts fusion power late on the list of inventable technologies. This means that a long history of capital-intensive fixed capital accumulation in the energy field prior the advent of fusion technology must have ensued, if only to arrive at the socio-technical capability for a fusion technology. This capital accumulation must represent a large and vital sector of the economy, since the power industry, whatever its technology, would form the technical basis of all of capitalist industry, and also constitutes an inherently fixed-capital-intensive domain. Note the (projected) nature of fusion power as supplying abundant energy from small quantities of an ubiquitous, virtually unmonopolizable natural resource  (ocean water), one thus almost without enforceable exchange-value. Take into account, then, the devastating techno-depreciation rates to which the advent of fusion power must, in a capitalist market context, subject crucial historic accumulations of sunk capital-value lodged in the capital embodiments of pre-fusion energy-technologies. It then, indeed, appears that fusion devices cannot be imprisoned within the capital-value-form for long. Their existence within capitalist time would mortally wound the body of capital, quickly bringing that time to an end. Capital will either suppress such technical developments until it is overthrown, or else compromise its structure of social relations, no matter in what way it attempts to incorporate such developments. It thus appears that fusion technology by virtue of the inherent nature of its use-value alone, is necessarily a post-capital, trans-exchange-value form of use-value, i.e., of social [re-]productive force. Fusion power, that is, evidently belongs to a region on the state-time continuum of social evolution outside of, or bounding, that interval which can host a capitalist institutional morphology. Such a conclusion, identifying broad connections between forms of use-value and of the social relations of production along the continuum of the social forms of production,  suggest certain novel extensions of the Marxian critique of political economy and theory of social evolution.

c44    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Third Observation” in The Phenomenon of Man;  Harper and Row (New York: 1959); pages 60-62.
See also:
  • P. Weiss; The Living System in Beyond Reductionism; Koestler & Smythies, editors; Macmillan (New York: 1970); page 12.
  • Heinz von Foerster; Logical Structure of Environment and its Internal Representation in International Design Conference Annual (Aspen, 1962); pages 29-30.
c45    Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.; Beyond Psychoanalysis in The Campaigner (Vol. 7, No. 1: November 1973); subsection: The Cartesian Theorems, paragraphs 15-17). Available on the internet at <http://www.ex-iwp.org/docs/1973/beyondpsychoanalysis.htm>.
See also:
  • Lyn Marcus [pseudonym of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.]; Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy; D.C. Heath & Company (Lexington, MA: 1975); pages 71-76. [Note: DC Heath & Company is now Houghton Mifflin].
c46    Herbert Marcuse; Reason and Revolution; Beacon Press (Boston: 1941); page 136.
See also:
  • G. W. F. Hegel; Science of Logic, Volume I; George Allen & Unwin (London: 1929); page 142.
Available on the internet at <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/>.
c47    Such an idea is implicit in:
  • Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.; Dialectical Economics; op. cit.; pages 455 and 465.
See also:
  • Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de; The Phenomenon of Man; Harper (New York: 1975); pages 47, 61,  and 300-303.
  • Quote from Vernadsky, the coiner of the term noösphere in Warren Hamermans The Self-Development of the Biosphere in The Campaigner (8:3 : Jan-Feb 1975); pages 23-24. A corollary is as follows: if the topometry of the universe (field) changes in response to evolution, then the laws of the universe also evolve, since the shape of the space-time continuum or field is their embodiment, and that changed universe-field topometry feeds back upon — constraining and promoting — the direction and process-content of that evolution, which, in turn, partially reconfigures that universe-field. That is, the field is self-evolving, a self-unfolding manifold.
c48    Infeld and Einstein; The Evolution of Physics; Simon & Schuster (New York: 1938); page 291.

c49    Example:
  • Francois Meyer; LAccélération De LEvolution, being Chapitre II in LEncyclopédie Française 20; Larausse (Paris: 1959); pages 20.24-1 to 20.24-6.
c50    E. Jantsch and C. Waddington; Evolution and Consciousness: Human Systems in Transition; Addison-Wesley (Reading: 1976); page 21.

c51    Quoted in Jean Lecomte du Noüy; Biological Time; Methuen (London: 1936); page 141.

c52    Elaboration is planned in a forthcoming paper tentatively to be titled On The Temporodynamics of Evolving Bodies.

c53    See:
  • G. Brown; Laws of Form; Bantam (New York: 1973); pages 97-102.
See also:
  • L. Lofgren; An Axiomatic Explanation of Self-Reproduction in Bulletin of Mathematical Biosciences 30:3 (September 1968); pages 411, 419-420, and 423-424.
  • Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.; Dialectical Economics; (Lexington: D.C. Heath. 1975); page x (Foreword).
  • L. Wittgenstein; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Routledge & Kegan Paul (London: 1974); numbers 3.332, 3.333, 4.442, 5.251, 5.641, and 6.123.
c54    Example:
Charles Kittel, et. al.; Mechanics; McGraw-Hill (San Francisco: 1962); page 228: The x2 term makes the equation nonlinear.
c55    Oliver Heaviside and George Boole are among the first to have recognized the operatorial essence of number in general and of the integral and differential coefficients in particular.
See also:
  • J. B. Rosser; Boole and the Concept of a Function in Royal Irish Academy - Proceedings, #57, Section A (15 November 1955); pages 117-120.
  • John Formby; An Introduction to the Mathematical Formulation of Self-Organizing Systems; Van Nostrand (Princeton, New Jersey: 1965); page 93.
  • George Boole; A Treatise on Differential Equations; Macmillan (London: 1872); pages 381-383.
    Available on the web at <http://math-doc.ujf-grenoble.fr/LiNuM/TM/Gallica/S099509.html>.
  • J. B. Rosser; Logic for Mathematicians (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953); pages 305-320.
  • C. Muse; Hypernumbers and their Spaces: A Summary of New Findings in Journal for the Study of Consciousness 5:2 (1972-1973); pages 254-255.
c56    H. Davis; Introduction to Nonlinear Differential and Integral Equations; Dover (New York: 1962); page 467.

c57    Michael Terry Waters; The Green Cyborg (unpublished manuscript).a7

c58    H. Davis; op. cit.; pages 1 and 7.

c59    H. Davis; op. cit.; pages 1 and 7.

c60    Kenneth Ewert Boulding; A Primer on Social Dynamics: History As Dialectics and Development; The Free Press (New York: 1970); pages 55-56.

c61    G. W. F. Hegel; Philosophy of Nature; Oxford University Press (London: 1970); page 303.
See also:
  • E. Jantsch; Evolution and Consciousness; op. cit.; page 60: ...each cause is the effect of its own effect. Life can come only from life.
c62    See:
  • Bertrand Russell; The Philosophy of Logical Atomism in Monist 28 (1918); pages 496-497.
By contrast, see:
  • H. von Foerster; op. cit.
  • N. Georgescu-Roegen; The Entropy Law and the Economic Process; Harvard University Press (Cambridge: 1974); page 108.
c63    Karl Marx; Free Human Production in Writings of Young Marx on Philosophy and Society; translated and edited by Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat; Doubleday & Company (New York: 1967); page 281.
See also:
  • E. Larson; The Campaigner 7:9:20 (August-September 1974); page 7 (paragraph 9).
c64    Karl Marx; Capital, Volume I; International Publishers (New York: 1967); pages 92-93.
Available on the web at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm>.

c65    W. Ashby; The Place of the Brain in the Natural World in Currents in Modern Biology 1:2 (May 1967); pages 96, 100, and 102.
See also:
  • S. Langer; An Introduction to Symbolic Logic; Dover (New York: 1953); pages 25, 32, 42, and 45.
c66    Herbert Marcuse; op. cit.; page 133.
See also:
  • G. Brown; Laws of Form; op. cit.; pages 58-61, 100.
c67    G. Plass; op. cit.; Scientific American; captions to photo on page 47.

c68    P. Wheelwright; Heraclitus; Atheneum (New York: 1968); pages 29 and 37.
  
c69    A. Meyer-Abich; Evolution-Biology; E.J. Brill (Leiden: 1964); pages 115-116.

c70   G. Nicolis; Mathematical Problems in Theoretical Biology in Nonlinear Problems in the Physical Sciences and Biology; Springer-Verlag (New York:  1973); pages 211-212.

c71   E. Lerner; op. cit.; pages 8-9 (emphasis added).

c72    I. Prigogine; op. cit., (November 1972); pages 24-26.
See also:
  • G. Nicolis; op. cit., pp. 228-229.
c73    Club of Rome; The Limits To Growth; Potomac Associates (Washington, D.C.: 1972); pages 85-85.

c74    Goody & Walker; op. cit.; pages 128-129.

c75    Billings; op. cit.; page 88.

c76   H. Odum; Environment, Power, and Society;Wiley Interscience (New York: 1971); page 2.

c77    Boulding; op. cit.; pages 56-57.
Underline added. It is refreshing to note that the externalist habit of thought does not hold such sway in the scientific tradition of a society permeated by at least an official commitment to dialectical ideas, however much its local backwardness and its envelopment, internal as well as external, by the world market, create social conditions still so much less than fully conducive to the spontaneous anchoring of such convictions in the identity processes of the average individual. These social conditions stem from a preponderantly pre-capitalist background, and must asymptotically approximate forms of integral government capitalism — i.e., of a national supercorporation or single national supercapital, maintained as such in competition with other capitals in the world market — for as long as the world market relation prevails, that is, for so long as capitalist conditions persist unabated elsewhere (particularly in the U.S., the fulcrum of world capital), despite the transient autarkic potential afforded by the vast population, territory, and natural resources of that nation. Nevertheless, the degree of socialization already achieved in that nation, despite its distortions, can and does on a wide scale support a sense of common-wealth and a spirit of expanded egoism — a sense of building a society and of working for the good of the whole society, ones own included -- which is all but impossible to attain on any large scale within the normal conditions of private capital, outside of a Socialist movement. I refer, of course, to the Soviet Union. For example, P. Borisov, in a recent work which emphasizes the Marxian idea that human praxis is a process of Nature which can and should make large-scale improvements in Nature, and which proposes specific projects of international cooperation to ameliorate global climatic conditions, quotes with favor the following passage from K.K. Markov concerning the causation of the climatic changes we have discussed: It is necessary first of all to analyze the change in the geographical peculiarities of the earths [ed: Earths] surface rather than hastening to resort to astronomic and cosmic hypotheses. And, indeed, the whole spirit of this book bespeaks at least a distant kinship with the whole dialectical and Marxian impulse which is still rarely to be found elsewhere in modern science. Contemporary Russian science in general, where it diverges from Anglo-American conventions, often presents novel theories and at least proto-dialectical material of the utmost interest. P. Borisov, Can Man Change the Climate?, op. cit.; page 49.

c78    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; The German Ideology; Progress Publishers (Moscow: 1968); page 31.
Available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/>.

c79    Karl Marx; Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy” in Grundrisse ; translated by Martin Nicolaus; Penguin (Middlesex: 1973); page 542.
Available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/>.

c80   The most comprehensive extant representation of this all-important concept of Marx is to be found not in the three volumes of Capital, which cover only one-sixth of the planned material, but in the Grundrisse, the closest thing we possess to a draft of the whole Critique of Political Economy. This is a rough draft in which one can watch Marx working out the various moments of his concept, a kind of laboratory where many of the key formulations were achieved probably for the first time. A perusal of this document will cure most of the prevalent misconceptions and slanders about the nature of Marxs thought. This work is highly recommended to the reader interested in understanding the nature and uniqueness of Marxian theory.

c81   Karl Marx; Capital, Volume III; International Publishers (New York: 1967); pages 814-815.
Available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/>.

c82   K. Marx; Grundrisse; op. cit.; pages 692-695 and 699-700. This is the major passage in which Marx explains how the Capital-relationship molds machinery, developing as fixed capital, into an object-ification or materialization of that historically-specific human social relationship of [human social self re-]production.

c83   Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.; Dialectical Economics; op. cit.; pages 189, 356, and 358.

c84   This theory cannot be elaborated here due to limitations of space, but will be treated extensively in a forthcoming pamphlet, The Self-Contradiction of Capital: Toward A Dialectical Model of the Capitalist System.

c85   See:
  • Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.; op. cit.; pages 8-10, 132,  260, 296-297, 371-373.
See also:
  • Thorstein Veblen; The Theory of Business Enterprise; Charles Scribners Sons (New York: 1904); pages 229-234.
  • R. Peters; Return on Investment; Amacom (1974); pages 1-5.
c86   See:
  • E.F. Schumacher; Small Is Beautiful; Harper & Row (San Francisco: 1973); lines 25-31 on page 15.
There, Schumacher proposes the same general idea, but he would be appalled at our specific proposal, since fusion reactors evidently inherently house devils, on his view (see Mother Earth News; #42 (Nov. 1976; page 14).  We would like to suggest that, on the contrary, whatever devils we suffer reside in our own false consciousness, not in particular types of objects. Rather than hiding from certain kinds of objects, we must heal our present internal contradictions. Then we will be capable, socially, of handling such objects.

Citations in the Post-Publication Notes
from p1

from p2

c87   James Gleick;  Chaos:  Making A New Science; Viking Penguin, Inc. (New York: 1987); page 170.

c88   J. D. Hays, et. al.; “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit:  Pacemaker of the Ice Ages in Science, 194:4270 (10 December 1967); page 1131.

c89   J. Imbrie and J. Z. Imbrie; Modeling the Climatic Response to Orbital Variations in Science, 207 (09-February-1980); page 943.

c90   M. I. Budyko; The Earth’s Climate: Past and Future; Academic Press (New York: 1982); pages 281 and 285-287.

c91   H. H. Lamb; Climate History and the Modern World; Metheun (New York: 1982); page 267.
See also:
  • H. H. Lamb, ibid; pages 60-61, 63, 90, 107, 114-116, 135-136, 259-262, 313, 315-318, 349-352, 361, and 374.
c92   R. G. Johnson; Climate Control Requires a Dam at the Strait of Gibraltar; EOS, 78:27 (July 8, 1997).
c93   George Ochoa, Jennifer Hoffman, and Tina Tin; Climate:  The Force Which Shapes Our World and the Future of Life on Earth; Rodale International Ltd. (London, U.K.:  2005); pages 77-80.

from p3

c94    See:
  • Hoffman, Paul and Schrag, Daniel, Snowball Earth, Scientific American, January 2000; excerpt below was extracted from pages 68-75.
c95    See also the following book-length popularization of this theory:
  • Gabrielle Walker, Snowball Earth:  The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe that Spawned Life as We Know It, Crown Publishers (NY:  2003).
from p4

c96
c97
c98
c99
c100

from p5

c101
c102
c103
c104
c105

from p6

c106    Julian Simon; Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration; Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, New Jersey: 1993); pages 538-539.

c107    G. Ochoa, J. Hoffman, T. Tin; Climate...; Rodale International Ltd. (London, U.K.: 2005); pages 77 and 80J.

c108    Julian Simon; Population Matters; ibid.; pages 531-532.

c109    Julian Simon; Population Matters; ibid.; pages 530-531.

c110    Julian Simon; Population Matters, ibid.; page 531.

c111    F. Engels; Herr Eugen Duhrings Revolution In Science; International Publishers (NY: 1966); pages 303-305.

Annotations

a1   This answer is based upon the work of Sinek Docchi in his unpublished book Dialectics and Modern Science.  That treatise traces the problem of self-reflexivity [of the bending [flex] back [re] upon, returning to, or flowing back to its source [self] of action] — and of self-reference, its grammatical correlate -- through set-theory and formal logic into mathematics proper, then into natural science, showing how and why this quality leads to paradox and insolubilia, for the present form of mathematico-science, all along the way.  The discussion of the Biosphere model, denoted by B herein, is a gloss of the central conclusions of that study, and would be more in the spirit  of those conclusions if we gave the model in the more abstruse form Bf(t) rather than as B2 or with any fixed exponent. Docchi develops such models, which he calls hyperfunctions or metafunctions, because time-dependence or time-functionality is located, in them, also at the superscript level, not just in the script-level symbol.  Such functions express self-operation as a function of time, t, or, if solved for t, express time as a function of self-operation.  Such functions, involving operator-symbols whose degree or power is variable, may be related to set-theoretical formulas whose logical type — in Bertrand Russells sense — varies with time. They [r]evolve, or self-revolutionize, by self-involution, from one logical-type level to the next higher such level.  For further information, write:  Studies in Dialectics, 2000 Center Street, Berkeley, California, USA, 94704.

a2   The function-value fx denotes, in general, a new operation, composed of the two operations f and x, but  different from either operation by itself. The function-value fx means the product of the operation f acting upon the operation x. The value fx will always be itself, in turn, an operation only to the extent that the operatorial space is closed, i.e., only if the product of any number of operations or operators falls still within that space — is still an operation/operator. Note also that f 2  (fx)2  f(fx2) f(fx) since f(fx) = f 2x, whereas (fx)2 = fxfx or, in commutative cases, (fx)2 = f 2x2.


a3    Degree and power are not identical predicates, since a term in three different unknown functions — say, ax(t)y(t)x(t) = a·x(t)1·y(t)1·z(t)1 is said to be of third degree because of addition of exponents given the fact that the term contains a product of three unknown functions each of which is of the first power. An equation containing this term as its highest degree term would thus be classed together with those containing the terms x(t)3, y(t)3, and/or z(t)3, etc. for their highest degree terms as a third degree or cubically nonlinear equation.

a4   The basic integral operator, denoted
is the inverse operation to that of the differential operator, denoted d(.)/dt, and an equation in which both are present is called an integro-differential equation. For description of dialectical processes we ordinarily expect such integro-differential equations, wherein the future, instantaneously ‘next state of the process at time t, denoted x(t), for t = tp+ dt, wherein tp denotes time present, would be a function of the integration of all of its previous history, of all of its past/present states up to and including tp.
See:
  • F. Donnan; Integral Analysis and the Phenomena of Life in Acta Biotheoretica; Springer (Netherlands: 1937); pages 46-49.
  • V. Volterra; Theory of Functionals and of Integral and Integro-Differential Equations; Blackie & Son (London: 1930); pages 188-196.
a5    A state-space is a space in which every point of the space represents a conceivable state of the system being modeled, where a state is represented by the ordered list, or vector, of all relevant measurements of that system as functions of time, for a particular instant in time, say the moment denoted by ti: s(ti) = [m1(ti), m2(ti), m3(ti), ... , mn(ti)]. State-spaces are implicit in integro-differential equations. Their explicit form would be, for example, a Cartesian space erected by setting up mutually-perpendicular number-lines or measurement-scales — dimensions -- for each of the different unknown measurement-functions or operations-on-time that occurs in the equation(s). Thus, a system of equations with n function-unknown will be represented by an n-dimensional state-space. The system of equations will specify a definite point in this space for each value of t, time. That point will represent the state of the system at time t — i.e., the ordered list of measurement-function-values that quantitatively characterize the condition, status, and quality of that system at the moment in its history denoted by t. The history, biography, or evolution of the system through time will then be represented by a continuum of such state-points forming a track in the state-space, called the state-space trajectory. This trajectory represents the sequence of changes of state constituting the evolution or history of the system described by the equations.

A basic operation thus geometrically or spaceometrically defined, is, then, a general kind of trajectory, a type of rotation or form of movement — a specific choreography — in any such space. Such a choreography may be represented by a certain type of hypernumber unit or unity, such as, for example, the type of hypernumber unit or unity denoted by i:  also called the imaginary unit(y), standing for the square root of negative real unity, and for the choreography of ninety degree counter-clockwise continuous circular rotation in the Complex plane.

a6    Moreover, unless dB/dt = 0, B must denote a system of operations upon time, i.e., t, or its equivalent, is ordinarily the final operand, the ultimate argument, the rightmost factor, in all of the terms or components of B.

a7    I have alluded, at a previous place and time, to one possible such self-transformation. Briefly, noticing the marked similarity between the molecules Chlorophyll and Hemoglobin, the former centered on an atom of magnesium, the latter on one of iron, but closely akin otherwise, we might, without attempting to locate its necessity, but only its possibility, speculate on a deliberate genetic re-design of the human body taking advantage of this relationship, once the state of our artistry with the genetic material achieves a suitable development. This would involve appropriating the biochemical handles latent in certain unfinished features of human physiology. The Hemoglobin process (respiration) intakes O2 and expels CO2. The Chlorophyll process does the opposite. The resulting CO2-O2 circulation forms a central cycle, or, more accurately, a cumulative ‘central spiral or helix, maintaining the present biosphere, as we have seen. Future human societies might decide to internalize this state of their biospheric environment by redesigning the white blood of the lymphatic circulatory system which flows all about the body surface just under the skin. This modification would build into our genes a new inheritance generating chloroplasts in the lymph flow capable of conducting a subcutaneous photosynthesis inside the human body itself. The skin would turn a vivid shade of green. Very little breathing would be required, since O2, formerly inhaled, would be produced internally by the chloroplastic lymph, and CO2, formerly exhaled, would be partially retained and utilized, by the chloroplasts, internally to the body. Less eating would be required because food — sugars, starches, proteins — would be synthesized internally via the lymphatic photosynthesis. People could make their living — the biological part of it at any rate — principally by basking in the sun. This could not help but have profound repercussions on the nature of  human association. Such an organism, requiring much less in the way of provisions for breathing, food, and disposal of bodily wastes, might be more suited to space travel, to the exploration of the awesome reaches of the Milky Way galaxy and beyond. Such an organism would represent the synthesis of the plant and animal polarity of the tree of life on our planet;  for want of a better term, such an organism might thus be called a planimal or animant.

Whether or not such will ever take its place among the forms of an eventual ‘trans-humanity’, it is offered here as an accessible (because it appeals to our atomistic biases) model useful in helping us to loosen up our thinking when we try to conceptualize the dialectic passing beyond ourselves, our own (collective) identity. Such efforts are especially prone to blocking if they evoke, as they often do, an emotion even more yawning, at times, than the anxiety which the contemplation of our individual death ordinarily occasions. However, this emotion need not be suffered. It can also be enjoyed. But steady access to such appreciation seems to be a faculty of the incipient Socialist ego and of the expanded sense of identity belonging to it.

a8   See:
    Karl Marx; thesis 3 of "Theses On Feuerbach" in Writings of Young Marx on Philosophy and Society; translated and edited by Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat; Doubleday & Company (New York: 1967).
Graphics Credits


g1    Excerpted from http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2001Q1/211/notes_for_012401_lecture.html as <biospheric icons>.

g2    Excerpted from http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~jukozyra/images/Atmosphere_coupling2.jpg as <earth-atmosphere-2.jpg>.

g3    Excerpted from http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/213/outline.week_five.html as <iron-factory.jpg>.

g4    Excerpted from http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/graphics/wciceiceage.jpg as <world-glaciers-map.jpg>.

g5    Excerpted from Preston Cloud (editor), Adventures in Earth History (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1970), frontispiece, as <geologic-timescale-1.jpg>.

g6    Excerpted from http://www.unep-wcmc.org/index.html?http://sea.unep-wcmc.org/resources/publications/MountainWatch_Bishkek/presspack/photos.htm~main as <glacier-1.jpg>.

g7    Excerpted from http://atlas.geo.cornell.edu/education/instructor/earthquakes/images/world_seis.gif as <world-earthquakes-map.gif>.

g7b    Private photograph taken of Mt. St. Helens (in Washington, U.S.A.) at sunrise as <StHelensatsunrise.jpg>.

g8    Excerpted from http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/nats1011/lectures/ch08/FIG08_001.jpg as <earth-history.jpg>.

g9    Excerpted from  http://astro4.ast.villanova.edu/pe/gtime.gif as <geologic-time-2.jpg>.

g10    Excerpted from http://www.earlham.edu/~parkero/Geos211/time.gif as <time-1.gif>.

g11    Excerpted from http://earth.geol.ksu.edu/sgao/g100tu/plots/1017_timeline.jpg as <timeline-1.gif>.

g12    Excerpted from http://www-ocean.tamu.edu/education/oceanworld-old/geos105/Images/IRAbsorption.JPG as <IRAbsorption.jpg>.

g12b  
Excerpted from http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/planets_and_atmospheres as <planetatmospheres.jpg>.

g13a    Excerpted from http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/temperature_and_co2_concentration_in_the_atmosphere_over_the_past_400_000_years as <temp-and-CO2concentrations.jpg>.

g13b    Excerpted from http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/comparison_between_modeled_temperature_rise_and_observations_of_temperature_since_1860 as <comparing_modeled_and_observed_temp_rise.jpg>.

g14a    Excerpted from http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif as <CO2-and-temperature.gif>.

g14b  
Excerpted from Preston Cloud (editor), op.cit., in the article Ancient Temperatures by Cesare Emiliani, 1958, Figure 77.2 (page 894) and Figure 77.3 (page 895).

g14c   Excerpted from Preston Cloud (editor), op.cit., in the article Ancient Temperatures by Cesare Emiliani, 1958, Figure 77.2 (page 894) and Figure 77.3 (page 895).

g15    Excerpted from http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/115a/remote_sensing/cir_fig6_6spectralresponse.jpg  as <spectralresponse.jpg>.

g16    Excerpted from http://cot.gbcnv.edu/~ed/class/astronomy/Earth_Atmosphere.jpg as <earth-atmosphere-3.jpg>.

g17    Excerpted from http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/deserts/what/world.gif as <world-deserts-map.gif>.

g18    Excerpted from http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge148/figs/10_fig2.jpg as <world-desertification-map.jpg>.

g19   Excerpted from http://www.davidplattartist.co.uk/page20.html as <self-reflexivity.jpg>.

g20    Excerpted from http://www.dialectics.org, the Postscripts of Diacticoa, Pictographic Summary, Visualizations of the Q Ideography, as <meta-finitary.jpg>.

g21    Excerpted from http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/courses/hegel/dialectx.htm as <stairs.gif>.

g22a    Excerpted from Notations in The Right To Be Greedy, from http://www.antimall.org/Lust-For-Life/ImageFiles/GreedyImages/TRTBG-TSpace-DL.jpg as <TRTBG-TSpace-DL.jpg>.

g22b    Excerpted from Notations in The Right To Be Greedy, from http://www.antimall.org/Lust-For-Life/ImageFiles/GreedyImages/TRTBG-TSpace-FL.jpg as <TRTBG-TSpace-TL.jpg>.

g23    Excerpted from Sinek Docchi, Dialectics and Modern Science.

g24a    Excerpted from http://www.dialectics.org, the Postscripts of Diacticoa, Pictographic Summary, Visualizations of the Q Ideography, as <Q-ideography-a.jpg>.

g24b    Excerpted from http://www.dialectics.org, the Postscripts of Diacticoa, Pictographic Summary, Visualizations of the Q Ideography, as <Q-ideography-b.jpg>.

g24c   Excerpted from http://media.worldhistory.com/nasaimages/full/2180main_MM_Image_Feature_22_rs4.jpg as <sun.jpg>.

g25a   Excerpted from The Totality Is Beautiful, from http://www.point-of-departure.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/ImageFiles/TTIB-figure1.jpg as <TTIB-figure1.jpg>.

g25b   Excerpted from The Totality Is Beautiful, from http://www.point-of-departure.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/ImageFiles/TTIB-figure2.jpg as <TTIB-figure2.jpg>.

g26    Excerpted from http://www.freeindiamedia.com/america/17_jan_05_america1.htm as <rate-of-profit.gif>.


Post-Publication Notes
[Note to readers: Throughout these PPNs, we have marked, with red-colored text, the names of those organizations, individuals, and ideas which, in our opinion, most murderously and egregiously support the People Are Pollution ideology, to signify the vast bloodshed that their power has imposed, and is increasingly imposing. Use of blue-colored text indicates [ev]entities [groups, technologies, individuals] usable for our/humanitys self-affirming, integral, and transcending departure from the current state of dis-affairs and dis-instantiation of humanity. Bold, italics, CAPITALIZATION, and underlining are used for emphasis. Where this emphasis takes place within quotations — to draw attention or to expose the politeness of species annihilatory and predatory policies, organizations, and practices — it will be noted beforehand.
p1    By the term socialists as used herein, we mean political-economic democratistsNOT Stalinist, Leninist, or Trotskyist lobbyists-for-themselves as nuclei of a new, totalitarian, state-capitalist dictatorship of the state bureaucracy as neo-capitalist ruling-class. For a detailed, concrete imagination and specification of what a comprehensive, or Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY as the true, gemeinwesen, communist society might look like, we refer the reader to two books by David Schweickart: Against Capitalism and After Capitalism.

p2    James Gleick, in his 1987 book Chaos: Making a New Science, noted the degree to which the solutions of the equations which model the climato-dynamics of our planet describe an enormous undertow — an attractor, in the language of [nonlinear] dynamical systems theory — toward global glaciation [CCS: italics are added for emphasis by CCS]:
Climatologists who use global computer models to simulate the long-term [and highly nonlinear] behavior of the earth’s [ed: Earths] atmosphere and oceans have known for several years that their models allow at least one dramatically different equilibrium.  During the entire geological past, this alternative climate has never existed [the snowball Earth theory asserts the contrary], but it could be an equally valid solution to the system of equations governing the earth [ed: Earth]. It is what climatologists call the White Earth climate: an earth [ed: Earth] whose continents are covered by snow and whose oceans are covered by ice. A glaciated earth [ed: Earth] would reflect seventy percent of the incoming solar radiation and so would stay extremely cold.... Computer models have such a strong tendency to fall into the White Earth equilibrium that climatologists find themselves wondering why it has never come about... [per the snowball Earth theory, it has]. c87
The concluding lines of the classic paper on the quantitative verification of the Milankovitch  Effect read as follows [CCS: bold and italics are added for emphasis by CCS]:
... the long-term trend over the next several thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.c88
Four years after the “Pacemaker” paper, one of the co-authors introduced a simple nonlinear model to reconstruct climatic response to the oscillatory Milankovitch orbital forcing, then used it to forecast future climate, with the following results [CCS: bold and italics are added for emphasis by CCS]:
“Ignoring anthropogenic effects and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the cooling trend that began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.” c89
Russian climatologist M. I. Budyko sets forth a similar analysis to that of this text, as follows [CCS: bold and italics are added for emphasis by CCS]:
... the process of decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere started in the Cretaceous period and accelerated at the end of the Tertiary period.  The probable reason for the decreasing CO2 mass is the attenuation of volcanic activities, possibly caused by the exhaustion of the reserves of radioactive elements that produce heating of the lithosphere.  From the available approximate estimates it follows that, if this process continues for about a million years [a period short from the viewpoint of the earth’s [ed: Earths] history] one of two ecological catastrophes will occur:  the complete glaciation of the earth [ed: Earth] or the disappearance of autotrophic plants.... It is assumed that in the Pleistocene the earth’s [ed: Earths] biosphere was not far from destruction in the epochs of greatest development of the Quaternary glaciations, which advanced close to the critical latitude [the limit beyond which ice loses its stability and shifts toward the equator as in a self-propelled process].... Assuming the possibility of the disappearance of the biosphere in the not very distant future, one should return to the question of how the biosphere could be maintained for such a long period in the past . . . It is believed that the maintenance on the earth [ed: Earth] of a mean temperature within the narrow zone necessary for life for billions of years seems to be a random event, the probability of which is very low.... The first result of the global impact produced by man on the biosphere that is connected with restoring the ancient CO2-rich atmosphere is an inadvertent consequence of economic activities.  This change in the composition of the atmosphere has increased the stability of the biosphere and decreased the possibility of its complete or partial destruction by glaciations.... It is essential for understanding the present changes in the state of the biosphere that, with an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, the atmosphere returns to the composition typical of the Tertiary period, when climatic conditions were far warmer and plant productivity was higher than at present.  Since the atmosphere lost CO2  for the last hundred million years, directly threatening the existence of the biosphere due to a decrease in the productivity of autotrophic plants and the possible complete glaciation of the earth [ed: Earth], the present anthropogenic impact on the biosphere seems to be a favorable factor that eliminates the indicated threat.
However, it must be mentioned that although many aspects of global warming could be favorable to mankind [a rise in the productivity of autotrophic plants, better usage of land in cold climates, etc.], a number of difficulties can also inevitably arise.  The major difficulty lies in the necessity of adjusting, in a relatively short time, many branches of the economy to the conditions of a rapidly changing climate and other aspects of natural conditions. c90
British climatologist H. H. Lamb noted, in 1982 [CCS: bold and italics are added for emphasis by CCS]:
“... The cooling of the general run of European summers since 1953, albeit with the year-to-year variations stressed in this chapter, has had another consequence which marks out the change of climatic tendency since the middle of the century. The long retreat of the glaciers in the Alps first slowed down; then in 1965 some, mostly small, glaciers which were evidently nearly in equilibrium showed advances; and since 1972 in some regions, 1975 in others, in most years the majority of glaciers, including the big ones, in Italy, Austria, and Switzerland have been advancing. Also in west and north Norway these years have produced the first general advance of the glaciers for many decades past.  Similarly, in North America the earlier twentieth-century predominance of glacier retreat has been followed by advances in some areas, in the Cascade Range in the northwest of the United States from as early as the 1950s.  And on [the large] Baffin Island in northeast Canada, in the central part of which 70 percent of the highland region seems to have been covered by ‘permanent’ ice and snow between two hundred and four hundred years ago and where this had been reduced to 2 percent by 1960, the ‘permanent’ snow beds have been increasing again since and incipient new glaciers have been found.  This has been brought about by a lowering of the summer freezing level by nearly 300 m [1000 ft] in the later years.” c91
Geophysicist R. G. Johnson noted, in the July 8, 1997 edition of EOS, the Transactions of the American Geophysical Union [CCS: bold and italics are added for emphasis by CCS]:
“When the last ice age began 120,000 years ago... the insolation at all latitudes was nearly the same as today.... That today’s climate may be close to the threshold for new glaciation may indeed be the case. Large plateau areas of Baffin Island are now covered with semi-permanent snow fields that expanded during the historic Little Ice Age 150-350 years ago when cool summers and extremely severe winters were frequent in northern Europe.... Canadian glacial nucleation areas are now perilously close to the threshold for new ice sheet growth, as indicated by the historic expansion of snow fields on Baffin Island... Initiation of new ice sheet growth is of great concern because the strong positive feedback of enhanced albedo and heavier cloud cover.... might lock in the ice age growth mode despite CO2 warming. c92
Regarding the Little Ice Age[CCS: bold, italics, and blue color-highlighting are added for emphasis by CCS]:
From about 1450 to 1850, Earth passed through what is called the Little Ice Age. (Some scientists place the start date as early as 1300 and the end date as late as 1890). During this period of renewed cold, alpine glaciers advanced in virtually all the worlds mountain areas, and the Arctic islands ice caps grew larger. Winters became colder and summers cooler, though the effect on winters was generally greater . . . Worldwide, the climate change damaged many ecosystems.  Floods, plague, and famine devastated Europe.  Crops failed, especially in northern regions.  The Baltic Sea froze. Englands Thames river developed ice several inches thick. In higher latitudes, great storms increasingly roiled the skies. A storm that hit southern England on December 7-8, 1703, blew down a lighthouse, wrecked houses, tossed ships onto land, and killed 8,000 people... Drought and flood often besieged the same areas.  . . .  The causes of the Little Ice Age are not well understood.  ...   In general, since the Little Ice Age, climate has been growing warmer. Temperatures reached a high in the 1940s, became cooler until the mid-1960s, and since have been rising again, setting records for warmth in the 1990s. Despite this trend of global warming, some researchers believe that the Little Ice Age may not be over, but that it is being counteracted by rising carbon dioxide levels generated since the Industrial Revolution.  It is possible that atmospheric circulation patterns characteristic of the Little Ice Age may still be in place. c93
p3    Regarding James Gleicks report, cited in Post-Publication Note p1, above, of a belief among climatologists that the global glaciation White Earth climate has never yet come about on Earth, please note that a major accumulation of evidence indicating that this White Earth scenario has already occurred repeatedly on this planet was presented after the initial distribution of this text, building on a theory that gained evidentiary ground as early as 1964 in the work of W. Brian Harland. c94
This excerpt describes a theory of a self-iterating sequence of eco-geo-climatological metafinite self-bifurcation singularities by which Earth progressively oscillated itself between ice-house and hot-house extrema, although thought to be due to causes of cooling different from those hypothesized for the more reCENt [of the late CENozoic] glaciations, explored in this text.

So robust is the global glaciation attractor for the climate of this planet that there may be multiple climatic state-space trajectories, multiple pathways of causality, all converging to this same White Death attractor [CCS: bold and italics are added for emphasis by CCS]:
Our human ancestors had it rough. Saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths may have been day-to-day concerns, but harsh climate was a consuming long-term challenge. During the past million years, they faced one ice age after another.  At the height of the last icy episode, 20,000 years  ago, glaciers more than two kilometers thick gripped much of North America and Europe.  ...  Dramatic as it may seem, this extreme climate pales in comparison to the catastrophic events that some of our earliest microscopic ancestors endured around 600 million years ago.  Just before the appearance of recognizable animal life, in a time period known as the Neoproterozoic, an ice age prevailed with such intensity that even the tropics froze over.  Imagine the earth [ed: Earth] hurtling through space like a cosmic snowball for 10 million years or more. Heat escaping from the molten core prevents the oceans from freezing to the bottom, but ice grows a kilometer thick in the -50 degree Celsius cold. All but a tiny fraction of the planets primitive organisms die. Aside from grinding glaciers and groaning sea ice, the only stir comes from a smattering of volcanoes forcing their hot heads above the frigid surface. Although it seems the planet might never wake from its cryogenic slumber, the volcanoes slowly manufacture an escape from the chill:  carbon dioxide. With the chemical cycles that normally consume carbon dioxide halted by the frost, the gas accumulates to record levels. The heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas — warms the planet, and begins to melt the ice. The thaw takes only a few hundred years, but a new problem arises in the meantime:  a brutal greenhouse effect. Any creature that survived the icehouse must now endure a hothouse. As improbable as it may sound, we see clear evidence that this striking climate reversal — the most extreme imaginable on this planet — happened as many as four times between 750 million and 580 million years ago. c95
p4    <to be added in the v3.1 release>
p5    <to be added in the v3.2 release>
p6    Who Funds, Hence Controls, the Ideology of Ecologism and the People Are Pollution, Humanocidal Pseudo-Religion of Earthism?

Some Hypotheses Concerning the Lobby for Global Genocide

The late Julian Simon outraged the plutocracy in the 1980s and 1990s by systematically and scientifically taking to task their lies, and their hired liars, in the areas of population growth, technological progress, and econo-ecological well-being, possibly at the cost of his own life. He documented, in the final section of his book Population Matters, and for only the two years 1979 to 1981, the massive, multi-million dollar payola of the major ideology-engineering institutions of the ruling oil/banking plutocracy, the global Dictatorship of Petroleum, which that conspiracy of the privileged expended in order to shape and control the Earthist anti-humanity movement, as follows:

Some Foundation Grants to Environmental Organizations, 1979 - 1981

Grand Total: $23,187,111
Funding from Rockefeller Institutions: $9,201,810
Funding from Two Other Institutions of the Plutocracy: $13,985,301


Recipient of Funding
Amount Received (1979-1981)
Funding Provider
Population Council
$3,650,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Population Council
$3,015,000
Rockefeller Foundation
Aspen Institute
$313,000
Rockefeller Foundation
National Resources Defense Council
$210,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Population Resource Center
$200,000
Rockefeller Foundation
National Center for Policy Institute
$140,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Environmental Policy Institute
$130,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Northern Rockies Action Group
$120,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
New Alchemy Institute
$120,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Conservation Law Foundation of New England
$120,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Center for Law and Social Policy
$115,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Sierra Fund Legal Defense Fund
$110,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis [Club of Rome]
$108,000
Rockefeller Foundation
Wilderness Society
$60,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis [Club of Rome] $60,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Aspen Institute
$60,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Environmental Defense Fund $55,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Zen Center [San Francisco]
$50,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Natural Resources Defense Council $50,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
National Audubon Society
$50,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Conservation Foundation
$50,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Citizens for a Better Environment
$40,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Zero Population Growth Foundation
$37,500
Rockefeller Foundation
World Watch Institute
$35,000
Rockefeller Foundation
Lindesfarne Association
$35,000
Rockefeller Foundation
Massachusetts Audubon Society $34,000
Rockefeller Foundation
Survival International
$25,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Natural Resources Defense Council $25,000
Rockefeller Foundation
Community Nutrition Institute
$25,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
$25,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
John Muir Institute
$24,310
Rockefeller Foundation
World Wildlife Fund
$20,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
National Wildlife Foundation
$20,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Environmental Action Foundation
$20,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Southwest Research and Information Center
$15,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Conservation Institute
$15,000
Rockefeller Foundation
Public Land Institute
$10,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Environmental Law Institute
$10,000
Rockefeller Family Fund
Population Council
$7,408,000
Ford Foundation
Natural Resources Defense Council $1,740,000
Ford Foundation
Alaskan Native Foundation
$1,436,000
Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Alan Guttmacher Institute
$1,000,000
Ford Foundation
Native American Rights  Fund
$600,000
Ford Foundation
Environmental Defense Fund $404,000 Ford Foundation
New England Natural Resources Center
$335,500 Ford Foundation
Wisconsin Center for Public Policy
$268,000 Ford Foundation
Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund
$170,000 Ford Foundation
Washington University Center for Biology of Natural Systems
$79,443 Ford Foundation
Consumer Energy Foundation of America
$76,546 Ford Foundation
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) $75.417 Ford Foundation
Survival International
$60.000 Ford Foundation
Center for Law and Social Policy
$50,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Conservation Foundation
$30,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Aspen Institute
$29,395 Ford Foundation
Conservation Foundation
$25,000 Ford Foundation
Hawaiian Coalition for Native Claims $25,000 Ford Foundation
World Wildlife Fund
$25,000 Ford Foundation
Alaskan Native Foundation $20,000 Ford Foundation
Aspen Institute $20,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest
$16,000 Ford Foundation
Alan Guttmacher Institute $15,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Environmental Defense Fund
$15,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Center for Law and Social Policy $12,000 Ford Foundation
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) $10,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Hawaiian Coalition for Native Claims
$10,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Massachusetts Audubon Society $10,000 Ford Foundation
Youth Project
$10,000 Ford Foundation
Consumer Energy Foundation of America
$5,000 Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Institute for Democratic Socialism
$5,000 Ford Foundation

Surprised? Does it shock you that the Small is Beautiful and supposedly anti-Oil-Company ideology of environmentalism is being massively bankrolled, hence controlled, by THE BIGGEST OF THE BIG; that the Zero Population Growth and Zero Economic Growth movements — in truth, the Negative Economic Growth and Negative Population Growth [Global Genocide] movements — are being sponsored by those who continue to experience unprecedentedly big and accelerating POSITIVE GROWTH in their PETROLEUM PROFITABILITY, at the growing expense of the entire human race, TAXING the totality of humanity WITHOUT REPRESENTATION via their oligopolistic power to raise oil prices at will, without fear of anti-trust law enforcement by the governments that they have prostituted, and their human-species-suicidal power to suppress the development of petroleum-power-obsoleting technologies, such as fusion power?

The ecology movement started out as a grassroots movements of the people against capitalist pollution, against the unchecked imposition of increasingly lethal, ever-mounting pollution externalitiesexternal costs — upon a public utterly undefended by the feedbacks of capitalist market-place, by super-rich capitalist oligopolies, whose owners have turned the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of representative-democratic government into their abject whores, bought and paid for, lock, stock, and barrel!

But what grass-roots, people-financed organization can compete with these massively money-manipulated front-groups for the Rockefeller invisible dictatorship? We conjecture that such organizations, receiving such massive amounts of money, tend to succumb to the strings that are attached to that money. Such organizations thus become Whore-ganizations, propagating their funders Party-Line. Even if the creators and/or the true leaders resist becoming Whore-ified in this way, there are typically plenty of unscrupulous individuals hanging around such groups, who will enthusiastically conspire with the funders to oust those creators and/or true leaders, and to take over those organizations on behalf of the funders — drooling all the way to the bank!

Is it any wonder that the grassroots ecology movement has been perverted, by massive infusions of Rockefeller, etc. money, into a Malthusian, People Are Pollution lobby for mass murder in the Third World, and into the conduits of an incessant propaganda for public acquiescence in global genocide through the corporate-prostitute news organizations, in the United States, and world-wide?

This mounting global genocide has been carried out, initially, by servant-dictatorships of the U.S.-centered Plutocracy, and by that Plutocracys proxy/prostitute states — for example, the State of Mexico, the State of Columbia, the State of Iraq, the State of Indonesia, the State of Sudan, and the State of Israel. But now, increasingly, as the Petroleum Plutocracy has secured its tendentially totalitarian grip on the U.S. political system, it is being carried out by direct U.S. military invasion and de facto annexation of other countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

Does it worry you that the ideologies of anti-progress, anti-humanity, pro-genocide Zeroism and Negativism are being engineered by the core ruling faction of the super-rich?

It should, if you value your life, and the lives of your family members.

The Rocke-Nazi Mass-Murder-Machine may have begun it global massacre in the Third World, counting on racism and the People are Pollution propaganda of Ecologism to secure silent acquiescence in this genocide from the publics of the First World, because their totalitarian control in the First World was still weak [The reaction of the U.S. and European publics to their genocide in Vietnam was a big set-back for them — one which they have only recently overcome].

True: they began their global pogrom of mass murder against those of more-melanin-rich skin-tones, against those genetically better-adapted to the more sun-drenched, equator-ward zones of our planet. But it is with the murder of you and your family — and with that of other paler-skinned gooks just like yourself — that their mass murder is scheduled to end.

You are a fool if you expect that Rocke-Nazi Racism will protect you from them. They designed racism for your consumption, not theirs. They designed racism to divide and conquer, to dissuade you from any alliance, against them, with the rest of the family of humanity.

Their own
anti-humanism is quite color-blind: they target the lighter-skinned redundant population for extermination no differently and no less than they target the darker-skinned redundant population, though, for political/tactical reasons, their schedule of extermination generally proscribes the darker-skinned first. The Rocke-Nazi mass media and its massive pseudo-ecology propaganda has put you to sleep, and you are in danger of being murdered in your sleep!

Through an — exceedingly rare — leak of a secret, Plutocracy-foundation letter, Julian Simon was able to document, in this same, final section of Population Matters, the Mafioso-style strong-arm tactics by which the Plutocracy prostitutes Big Science, decreeing that it come to the Malthusian, Meta-Nazi, mega-genocidal conclusions that Big Oil has paid for, science and the truth be damned! Simon was leaked a copy of this letter only because he was maligned in it by name. The following is from pages 538-539 of Population Matters [CCS: bold, italics, red and blue color-highlighting, and underlining are added for emphasis by CCS]:
A Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) sought funds to study the relationship of population, resources, and the environment. Among other potential funding sources, the committee turned to the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation and received a feasibility grant. This is an excerpt from a letter to AAAS discussing further funding, signed by J. Kellum Smith, Jr., Vice President and Secretary of that foundation:
Because the links among population, resources, and environment are so obvious and strong, I was very much in favor of the idea that the AAAS seek ways of thinking systematically about these links. . . . I hope the suggestion of an alternative title [to the original one] does not indicate diffidence, in your group, on the matter of facing up to the malign consequences of rapid population increase. Should such diffidence exist, I would suppose that it might cripple the program and that therefore the exercise might as well be halted  forthwith . . . . . . . the first task of the program must be to elucidate the links. . . . Suggestions for improvement of the situation will come along later; and when they do, most obvious and important among them will presumably be methods of reducing the rate of population growth. Social and technological accommodations to high fertility, though perhaps of ancillary utility, are unlikely to be primary solutions. . . . I am disconcerted by the suggestion that there is a problem in handling the widely divergent views of the Cornucopians and Malthusians. If by the Cornucopians is meant Julian Simon and his few allies, I should think a footnote would be sufficient to dispose of them. . . . If there is nervousness on the point, it had better be faced up to forthwith. The issue of population increase is central to the proposed program. . . the crucial element in any responsible approach to the overall problem will be restraint of population increase. Although it may be unscientific to make the statement that boldly, I do so because I think the outcome so highly probable that if your group finds it unpalatable perhaps the exercise should be abandoned.’  (January 12, 1984). c106
Note: It is possible that the People Are Pollution Lobby decided that Julian Simon was not so easily disposed of, by a mere footnote; that they felt the need to dispose of him in another, more decisive, more definitive way: in the prime of his life, at age 65, Julian Simon died suddenly, on February 8th, 1998.

Despite these vast investments by the Rocke-Nazi-ruled U. S. ruling-class, little hints of scientific integrity, and of human decency, keep cropping up, much to the infuriation of the Rocke-Nazi would-be thought-controllers. For example, Dr. Jennifer Hoffman is a consultant to the World Wildlife Fund, one of the organizations having received Rockefeller money, as listed in the table above. Dr. Tina Tin is a World Wildlife Fund-affiliated climate scientist, who also works with the Natural Resources Defense Council, another recipient of Rockefeller Family Fund and Ford Foundation largesse, as listed above. Nevertheless, no doubt at the risk of their livelihoods — and, quite likely, at the risk of their very lives, once the noose of Bush/Gore/Rocke-Nazi theocratic/ecocratic totalitarianism tightens ever-tighter around the necks of the American people and the people of the rest of the world — Drs. Hoffman and Tin, while generally conforming strictly to the Rocke-Nazi Global Warming Party-Line, let leak the following in their 2005 book Climate: The Force that Shapes Our World and the Future of Life on Earth [CCS: bold, italicsblue color-highlighting, and underlining are added for emphasis by CCS]:
From about 1450 to 1850, Earth passed through what is called the Little Ice Age. . . . In general, since the Little Ice Age, climate has been growing warmer. Temperatures reached a high in the 1940s, became cooler until the mid-1960s, and since have been rising again, setting records for warmth in the 1990s. Despite this trend of global warming, some researchers believe that the Little Ice Age may not be over, but that it is being counteracted by rising carbon dioxide levels generated since the Industrial Revolution. It is possible that atmospheric circulation patterns characteristic of the Little Ice Age may still be in place. And if the Little Ice Age is a Rapid Climate Change Event like the Younger Dryas, it would be expected to last about a thousand years, not four hundred.” c107
Hoffman and Tin do not go so far as to mention the possibility that the so-called Little Ice Age was actually the long-overdue end of the current, > (greater than) ten thousand year interglacial, and the start of the coming, ~ (approximately) one hundred thousand year, next Big Ice Age, averted, temporarily, only by the CO2 contributions of the capitalist Industrial Revolution. But we cannot ask for too much, especially not from people so vulnerably positioned. Professional scientists are abjectly dependent upon, and abjectly beholden to, the Rocke-Nazi prostituted government and the foundations created by the Rocke-Nazi Plutocracy for their livelihoods.

The Population Council is by far the biggest recipient of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Ford Foundation [see table, above]. In our view, if we had truth in naming laws, in the United States, the Population Council would be forced to change its name to The Depopulation Council, as well as to incorporate the swastika into its logo.

Julian Simons evidence of the perversion and prostitution of Big Science to the multi-genocidal Rocke-Nazi global program/pogrom includes the following extended quotation from Paul Demeny, who Julian Simon cites as former president of the Population Association of America and Vice-President and Director of the Center for Population Studies of the Population Council, on the development of a global [De- ]Population Industry, one which we would name The Ideology-Production Industry for the Justification of Global Genocide.

It seems that our Rocke-Nazi rulers, while investing a lot of their own loot [i.e., loot looted from the working classes of the world] in the production of this ideology, were also, of course, once again, able to hijack taxpayers [i.e., workers!] pocketbooks to their anti-taxpayer purposes, forcing workers to give back part of their wages to finance The Rocke-Nazi Global Depopulation Project, through Rocke-Nazi control of the Rocke-Nazi-prostituted U.S. Government.

The following is extracted from pages 531-532 of Population Matters [CCS: bold, italics, red color-highlighting, and underlining are added for emphasis by CCS]:
Population policy was. . . transmogrified. . . into a goal-oriented industry (p. 13) [to reduce population growth] . . .the new population industry . . . is a money-, labor-, and technology-intensive construct. (p. 15) Social science provided the rationale for the creation of the population industry but, once established, the industry took command. Its needs for large-scale funding and the intrinsic logic of the underlying policy concept dictated that much of the resources supporting the population sector come, directly or indirectly, from government budgets. Soon this was true also of the social science research that was considered relevant for the industrys concerns. The official population sector became the dominant patron of [CCS: whore-ified] social [CCS: pseudo-]science research on all matters related to industry interests (p. 16) Big money projects tended to drive out small money research; industry-sponsored work outbid, eclipsed, and displaced work not so sponsored. (p. 16) The particular uses to which industry resources allocated to [CCS: whore-ified] social [CCS: pseudo-]science research have been increasingly put, at least since the early 1970s, was powerfully shaped by strong convictions held by the funding agencies, and by the population industry at large, on what research priorities should be in the population field. With remarkable consistency, the industry insisted that [CCS: whore-ified] social [CCS: pseudo-]science research concentrate on and be maximally helpful in assisting and backing day-to-day execution [CCS: literally!] of the received population policy line. (p. 17) Resource allocation for social science work as mandated by the large funding agencies puts highest priority emphasis on program evaluation [CCS: i.e., on cooking the [research results] books]. . . . the industry considers it important to demonstrate [CCS: however dishonestly] that when fertility continues to be high that condition is linked to various inadequacies and lacunae with the existing family planning program. Conversely, when fertility is declining or has declined [CCS: e.g., via successful Rocke-Nazi genocide campaigns], it is important to attribute the change [CCS: however falsely] to the effects of the family planning program. (p. 20) . . . [CCS: whore-ified] social [CCS: pseudo-]science research directed to the developing countries in the field of population has now become almost exclusively harnessed to serve the narrowly conceived short-term interests of programs that embody the existing orthodoxy in international [CCS: de-]population policy. . . . the population industry seeks, and, with the power of the purse, enforces, predictability, control, and subservience. Pushed to its extreme, this stance generates research that finds what the sponsor already knows to be revealed truth. c108
Simon also quotes the following admissions by Leon Tabah, identified as a former Director of the Population Division of the Rockefeller Foundation itself [CCS: bold, italics, and red color-highlighting are added for emphasis by CCS]:
It is common knowledge that politics took control of demography a long time ago, with unexpected reversals — todays Malthusians becoming tomorrows anti-Malthusians, and vice-versa. . . . In an area as basic as population, scientists and technicians often have ties to the people with decision-making power. Under pressure from their Governments, leading scientists have often been seen defending points of view which they had been opposing shortly before. c109
Simon commented on this quote as follows [CCS: bold, italics, red color-highlighting are added for emphasis by CCS]:
It is most unusual to see such honest statements in print. The last one above is a straightforward accusation of scientific prostitution. And it refers, not to isolated cases, but to the core of the profession. It should be noted that the above statements, and others to come, are all by persons who headed the entity which they were describing, and who are sympathetic to the mainstream thrust of that trend, to wit, that population growth is detrimental to economic development and therefore must be controlled by governments. If someone on the other side of the issue had written those statements, they would be dismissed as partisan and paranoid. c110
But why? What possible motivation could there be for the ferocity of the Rocke-Nazi Plutocracys focus on population reduction in particular, and on the concoction of a Negativist ideology of Ecologism — in fact, of a neo-pseudo-religion of Earthism — in general, with all of the anti-population, anti-progress, anti-science, anti-technology, and essentially anti-humanity policies which this ideology seeks to impose upon us all, world-wide? Arent our rulers humans too? Wouldnt something anti-humanity therefore also be anti-them?

It has become clear to CCS that these plutocrats see themselves as super-human, and the rest of us as sub-human. For them, we are worth keeping alive, as workers, only so long as they are playing the game of capital accumulation as means to sustain and expand their socio-political power. But they have become leery of that game. Beyond a certain point in the development of humanitys social self-productivity — in the development of the social forces of [human self-] production [Marx] — further competitive accumulation of capital, given the capital-competition-driven increasing technical composition of that competitive capital, becomes a threat to their power.

The technical composition of labor therefore necessarily also begins to expand, along with the technical composition of their fixed capital, and, with it, working class education-levels and incomes also rise. More and more workers start to have enough education — and enough capacity and time to observe and to think — to see through the old pseudo-religious ideologies. More workers also achieve enough financial wherewithal to be less penuriously desperate, less dependent upon, hence less subservient to, the capitalist Plutocracy. New millionaires, even new billionaires start to rise up out of the sub-human classes. These upstarts represent, to the Rocke-Nazis, new, partly-independent powers, potential rivals, who may not be willing to join the Rocke-Nazi countries-club, nor to play by the Rocke-Nazi rules.

Every time the plutocracy fails to keep scientists and smaller industrialists sufficiently under their thumbs, the incentives of remnant competitive capitalism are such that upstart scientists, allied with upstart industrialists, keep inventing new, technologically-advanced machinery that zeros-out some of the capital-value of the Rocke-Nazis accumulated capital right out from under them, or leads to defaults on the long term fixed-capital investment loans let out
by the Rocke-Nazi banks.

The nightmare scenario that haunts the Rocke-Nazis now, is the advance from molecular power, whose epitome so far has been petroleum power , to atomic power, not in the form of nuclear fission power, but in the form of nuclear fusion power [The Rocke-Nazis are not so afraid of atomic power in the form of nuclear fission power, in that the uranium fuel-source for the latter is still readily monopolizable by them, like oil, and fission power is inherently less efficient and more pollution-problematic than fusion power, hence less of a potential competitor to fossil-fuel molecular power. And, the Rocke-Nazis have little hope of monopolizing water, the main fuel source for fusion power. The advent of functioning fusion power reactors would wipe-out most of the capital-value of the Rocke-Nazis global petroleum cartel overnight, striking at the financial foundation of their global socio-political predominance.].

Fusion power is their ultimate nightmare, but the Rocke-Nazis face continual, daily, waking mini-nightmares of the technodepreciation of their socio-political power every day that even a modicum of competitive capitalism, hence of technological progress in socially-reproductive industry, continues. What so terrifies the Rocke-Nazis is whats left of ascendant-phase, competitive capitalism, and the rising living standards, rising educational levels, and advancing science and technology engendered by it. And they have decided to bring all of that — all of that threat to their power — to an end. The Rocke-Nazis are capitalist anti-capitalists, who have also, therefore, become human anti-humanists.

In short, what we are confronting, e.g., in Earthism / Ecologism, is the Marxian theory of the capitalist ruling class. Ever advised by the best minds that money can buy, Rocke-Nazis have long-since decided that, in all of the essentials, Marx was right: the continued growth of the productive forces, so feverishly fostered by the profit incentives of the capitalist system — to a degree far greater than by any earlier social system — will, at length, bring their rule to an end. They have therefore vowed, in effect, the following: If the growth of the productive forces is destined to bring about the overthrow of our rule, then we will strike first, destroying the productive forces before they can destroy us.

Given the Rocke-Nazi plan to reverse history — to not merely slow down, or even merely end, the accumulation of capital, but to dis-accumulate capital — creating a Zero Economic Growth that must actually mean Negative Economic Growth, and, hence, requiring a Zero Population Growth actually mean Negative Population Growth — they must also dis-accumulate people; they must implement a global genocide, or forfeit their socio-political predominance. Faced with that choice, rather than retire, gracefully, from the stage of history, they would much prefer to murder us all.

They prefer this option even at the risk of fomenting human species suicide, and planetary eco-suicide, as a result of their destruction of the human-productive forces — humanitys only defense against the eventual end of the current interglacial, and the resumption of Ice Age biosphere-abortion. They are monsters in human skin — the kind of monsters that the absolute corruption wrought by the exercise of unchecked, absolute power, tends to make of what once had the potential to be truly human beings.

By increasingly destroying humanitys potential for accelerating technological advancement / productivity-growth, the Rocke-Nazis are rendering the vast majority of the human population redundant from their point-of-view. They might tolerate that population were they profitably accumulating capital on its back. But, in this, their dis-accumulation apocalypse, they have no need for these billions. The billions in the not-yet-proletarianized portions of the Third-World, and in the high-unemployment ghettoes of the First World, are no longer even potentially a Reserve Army of Labor for the Rocke-Nazi Plutocracy to profit from at some future date. Nor do the Rocke-Nazis need any more profits than are already rolling in to them daily to merely to increase their power: the Rocke-Nazis already own, loot, and rape the whole world! These redundant billions are therefore nothing but a growing potential threat of revolt against Rocke-Nazi rule, especially as Rocke-Nazi destruction of the global productive forces condemns them to increasing privation/starvation.

Thus, for the Rocke-Nazis, all these redundant portions of the population of humanity — the vast majority of the human race — must be exterminated. Nor will the presently employed classes of the First World — including those wearing white collars — escape the Rocke-Nazis FINAL SOLUTION to the problem, for them, of the propensity of humanity to overthrow their despotic rule.

That extermination has to begin by stealth, via Rocke-Nazi genetically-engineered designer diseases like AIDS. However, hand-in-hand with their national-security-justified their totalitarian degeneration of the U.S., the U.K., and the Europe Union, the Rocke-Nazis will increasingly accomplish this extermination by direct, military destruction of global infrastructures, converting whole cities and whole nations into gigantic Meta-Nazi death camps. Finally, as their Global Warming drive strips humanity of its last technological defenses against this ending interglacial, and the impending new Ice Age, this mega-genocide will be accomplished, for the Rocke-Nazis, by Nature itself. As the temperate zones become unlivably cold, their technologically advanced cities locked under ice, the Rocke-Nazis will transplant themselves their tiny chosen remnant of [at last integrated, rainbow skin-toned] house nigger servants to the former Third World, to the equatorial regions, where they imagine that the gigantic, miles-deep glaciers of the next Ice Age will not penetrate, and especially to Africa — long-since depopulated by AIDS, by pre-Ice-Age drought, and by the Rocke-Nazi militaries mass slaughters — setting up their gigantic neo-Iatifundial slave-plantations.

The Rocke-Nazis will continue to increasingly apply to themselves the life extension technologies that they are already so desperately trying to keep secret from the rest of us — the bio-molecular technologies and cellular technologies of genomic re-engineering, embryonic stem-ceIl-based, and beyond — and perhaps also the technologies of extra-genomic, robotic/cyborgic life-duration-expansion as well. They are looking forward to vastly extending their lives of privilege”  — of pillage, torture, rape, and murder.


The Rocke-Nazis may debate among themselves for some time to come as to whether or not their new Permanent society, of Global Equilibrium — their million-year Fourth Reich -- should allow robotics, with the educated technician class that its maintenance would require, and/or should create only a genomically-engineered sub-human species of congenitally servile, chimaeric drones, as slave workforce, or should simply restore the Eternal Stability of a Neo-Feudal slave-society, in which the education of the serfs/slaves, and the pursuit of science and technology, would be forbidden, on pain of the most painful and barbaric execution, by the neo-pseudo-religion, the ideology that they would then engineer to help them control that toiling underclass that, they plan, will serve their every perverted whim.

Of course, if they win in implementing this Plan — their FINAL SOLUTION TO THE HUMANITY PROBLEM - they too, in their arrogance, will be destroyed; they will have rendered themselves technologically defenseless, ultimately, against the hazards that a planet is heir to, including planetary glaciation, and cometary / asteroidal collision. But you would be well-advised to take little comfort in that thought, for, by then, so will the rest of the former human race have been destroyed, by them, long since.

Julian Simon was an apostle of the liberatory virtues of competitive, ascendant-phase capitalism, over against all earlier and inferior forms of human-social reproduction. He understood much of the meaning of Marxs phrase the growth of the productive forces, although not under that name, and within a different system of concepts. He did not realize that competitive, ascendant-phase, representative-democratic capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. He did not see that the very consolidation, centralization, and hyper-concentration of capital which capitalist competition itself drives — the inherent movement of competition to negate itself in oligopoly — creates an irresistible tide toward totalitarianism in late capitalism. The concentration of ever-greater financial power in ever-fewer hands provides the formal possibility of this totalitarian degeneration of capitalist democracy, through its power to prostitute all three branches of the representative-democratic political state — executive, legislature, and judiciary — to its economic power of the purse, thereby circumventing the separation of their merely political powers, and the merely political checks and balances among them. The threat of technological depreciation to wipe out the fixed capital power-base of the greatest, ruling accumulations of capital creates the desperate and implacable motivation, in the ruling financial Plutocracy that owns — and rules by means of the financial power it owes to — the threatened fixed capital, the motivation that then drives these greatest accumulations of capital/power to convert this formal possibility into its grisly actualization.

Tragically, Julian Simon did not realize that the terrible obstacles which he encountered in his career, to publication of pro-progress, pro-productive forces, pro-humanity scientific findings, and, indeed, the very forces which, perhaps, cost him his life, were a lawful outcome of the very capitalist competition which he so championed.

The horrific, auto-genocidal tyrannies of German, Hitlerist, of Russian, Stalinist, and of Chinese, Maoist state-capitalism, in the peripheries of capitalist development, were but prevenient and disfigured prefigurements of that state of human society to which the economic law of motion of modern society [Marx] resistlessly leads, a little later, in the very core and heartland of most-advanced capitalist development: the law of motion of ascendant-phase, competitive, representative-democratic capitalism, transforming itself into decadent-phase, totalitarian, mega-genocidal capitalism.

Frederick Engels, in his Anti-Duhring, foresaw with remarkable clarity this convergence of familial private-capitalism/early joint-stock securitism to state-capitalism. Moreover, he foresaw it arising not primarily in the underdeveloped peripheries of the capitalist/securitist international system — such as Germany, Russia, and China — but in its advanced core, even if he did not seem to grasp the crucial difference between democratically-managed social property and bureaucracy-hijacked state-property, between state [national] socialism and Economic Democracy, nor the absolute corruption, and unexampled rapacious horror, of the totalitarian nightmare which this ultimate concentration of unchecked, near-absolute econo-political power would self-inflict upon humankind in the twentieth century and beyond [CCS: bold, italics, and red color-highlighting are added for emphasis by CCS]:
Both the period of industrial boom, with its unlimited credit inflation, and the crisis itself, through the collapse of great capitalist establishments, urge forward towards that form of the socialisation of huge masses of means of production which we find in the various kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production are from the outset so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalist exploitation. At a certain stage of development even this form no longer suffices; the official representative of capitalist society, the state, is constrained to take over their management. This necessity of conversion into state property makes itself evident first in the big institutions for communication: the postal service, telegraphs and railways. If the crises revealed the incapacity of the bourgeoisie any longer to control the modern productive forces, the conversion of the great organisations for production and communication into joint-stock companies and state property shows that for this purpose the bourgeoisie can be dispensed with. All the social functions of the capitalists are now carried out by salaried employees. The capitalist has no longer any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the clipping of coupons and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists fleece each other of their capital... But neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is essentially a capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its properly, the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution. c111
The fight for human liberty is now, unequivocally, the fight against the inherent, ineluctable taxis to totalitarianism of late, state capitalism.

But humanity, the majority of the human species, the working class has been studiously divided and conquered by race, by nationality, by ethnicity, and by pseudo-religion, through the vast and well-funded ideological engineering activities of the capitalist Plutocracy — funded from the surplus-value extracted from the blood, sweat, and tears of that very majority.

Humanity, today, sprawls, prostrate and comatose, before the pseudo-religions manufactured by the Rocke-Nazis to confuse and vitiate it — to make it impotent to defend itself against their onslaught.

The human race, like a herd of witless sheep, is being slaughtered in its sleep.


Revision History

Release
Date
Released By
Format and Features
v1.0
January 1977
Capitalist Crisis Studies Paper-published original text.
v1.1
January 11, 2006
Point of Departure
PDF made available on the internet.
v2.0
April 15, 2006
Adventures in Dialectics
HTML onto the internet; includes new graphics, reviews & corrections by the author. Includes citations (c1-c86) and annotations (a1-a8).
v2.1
June 4, 2006
Adventures in Dialectics HTML text edits, idea clarifications from the author, and added graphics.
v2.2
July 14, 2006
Adventures in Dialectics HTML additions: updated and reconstructed charts & graphs.
v3.0
November 19, 2006
Adventures in Dialectics
HTML additions: four post-publication notes (p1, p2, p3, p6) by the author. Citations (c87-c111) added. Graphics numbering updated to contour to v2.2 release's additions g1-g26). All citations put into newer format that facilitates cleaner sets of detail delimited by semicolons.
v3.1
Tentative  December 2006 release date
Adventures in Dialectics HTML addition: post-publication note (p4) by the author.
v3.2
Tentative  January 2007 release date Adventures in Dialectics HTML expansion: post-publication note (p6) by the author.
v3.3
Tentative  February 2007 release date Adventures in Dialectics HTML addition: post-publication note (p5) by the author.

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Adventures in Dialectics
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