Crises by Nature: How Humanity Saved the Biosphere

“... 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 sun’s 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 earth’s [ed: Earth’s] 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 Earth’s 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 Earth’s 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

Graphic 13b: rising temperatures

“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 earth’s [ed: Earth’s] climate about 65 million years ago. This idea was supported by geology, but the evidence was incomplete. At Urey’s 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

Graphic 14b: 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.”

Graphic 14c: falling temperatures

“Temperatures declined during the Age of mammals. Oxygen isotope temperatures (dots) show that Pacific bottom water originating around Anarctica dropped from 10^oC to 2^oC 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 Earth’s 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 America’s 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 earth’s [ed: Earth’s] 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 earth’s [ed: Earth’s] 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 earth’s [ed: Earth’s] 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: Earth’s 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 dénouement 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”! Opik’s statement also contradicts the absorption spectrum data presented by Plass [see Graphics 12a, 12b, 12c above], which shows very little overlap between water’s and CO₂’s absorption bands, especially in what Plass indicates to be the all-important 13 to 17 micron region of the Earth’s most intense infrared emission. Plass’s article was published in 1959, seven years after Opik’s, 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 Earth’s atmosphere” ^c35 but it is not clear whether this is due, in their view, to the present scarcity of CO₂ in the Earth’s 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 Plass’s 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: Earth’s 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 biosphere’s cumulative net withdrawal of a climate-warming carbon dioxide gas from Earth’s global atmosphere, expressed also, therefore, as a long fall-off in that biosphere’s 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 sun’s 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 today’s 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 today’s 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 pollution’ — ‘waste’ 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, Chardin’s concept of ‘complexity’ in his “Law of Complexity-Consciousness” ^c44 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 LaRouche’s “perfection” ^c45 (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 isn’t’, 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 ‘meristem’ of 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? Shouldn’t 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 time” ^c48, 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, doesn’t 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 Chardin’s 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 things” ^c51, 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.

Graphic 19: self-reflexivity

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 agent’s 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 f², B², (fx)², f³, 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 “dynamical” differential 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 ‘dynamical’ “differential 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.

Graphic 20: ‘Image-ination’/‘image-ization’ of the process/auto-kinesis that is the[meta-]Finitary Set of All Sets

[Meta-]Finitary Set of All Sets Self-Driven Self-Iteration =

such that

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.

Graphic 21: dialectics as the ‘process-self’ of a self-unfolding, self-evolving reality — a [sub-]totality ever adding to self new qualities, and, thereby, an incremental concreteness and complexity whereby its successor ‘selves’ ever supercede its predecessor ‘selves’

Graphic 22a: dialectical (three-dimensional) helical logic

Graphic 22b: “flatland” (two-dimensional) circular [formal] logic, as “top view” of Graphic 22a’s helical logic, connoting 2-D logic’s abstraction from/suppression of temporality/cumulative change/process

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 author’s 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 tradition’s 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 CO_² 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 another’s 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.

Graphic 24a: dialectical ideography — “top” view of the helix of the “aufheben” self-operation driving the dialectical process

Graphic 24b: dialectical ideography — ‘toroidal-vortical image-ization’ of the dialectical process

‘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 humanity’s 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.

Graphic 24c: the “object” we call “the sun” is a ferocious, transitorily “self-suspended” ‘ontological/existential self-contra-diction’; whose history is driven by the ‘intra-duality’, or ‘self-duality’, or ‘immanent contra-kinesis/self-antithesis’, or “complex unity”, or “synthesis” of an ongoing self-gravitational self-implosion, united with an ongoing thermonuclear fusion self-explosion!

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.

Graphic 25a: The Price Index, 1867-1973 with 1929 Base (logarithmic Y-scale)

Graphic 25b: U.S.A. Debt in Immanent Dollars (total, corporate, consumer)

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-in‘self’ 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 Earth’s 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

‘Lerner’s 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 ‘attitudes’ — ‘externalism’, 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 mankind’s 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 man’s 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 liars” — ‘Zeroists’ [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 Earth’s 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 earth’s [ed: Earth’s] 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 ecosystem’s 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 Boulding’s 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 one’s 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 Capital’s 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 “détournement” 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 I’m getting at is that “Nature” is the only technology we’ve got. Human-nature’s “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 Nature’s 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-society’s 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

Graphic 26: falling rate of profit and its recent reversal via accelerating cannibalization of humanity by capital

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 interests — which 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-profits — “looted” 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 Earth’s 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” capitalism’s 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 Marx’s 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 planet’s 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

^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.

^c43A 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.

^c44Pierre 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 Hamerman’s “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; “L’Accélération De L’Evolution”, being Chapitre II in L’Encyclopédie 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.

Available on the web at <http://www.voidspace.org.uk/psychology/wittgenstein/tractatus.shtml>.

^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.

^c60Kenneth Ewert Boulding; A Primer on Social Dynamics: History As Dialectics and Development; The Free Press (New York: 1970); pages 55-56.

^c61G. 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.”

^c62See:

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.

^c63Karl 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>.

^c65W. 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.

^c66Herbert 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.
^c69A. Meyer-Abich; Evolution-Biology; E.J. Brill (Leiden: 1964); pages 115-116.

^c70G. 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.

^c73Club of Rome; The Limits To Growth; Potomac Associates (Washington, D.C.: 1972); pages 85-85.

^c74Goody & Walker; op. cit.; pages 128-129.

^c75Billings; op. cit.; page 88.

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

^c77Boulding; 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, one’s 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 earth’s [ed: Earth’s] 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 Marx’s 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 Scribner’s Sons (New York: 1904); pages 229-234.
R. Peters; Return on Investment; Amacom (1974); pages 1-5.

^c86See:

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 Duhring’s 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 B^f(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 Russell’s 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 f² (fx)² f(fx²) f(fx) since f(fx) = f²x, whereas (fx)² = fxfx or, in commutative cases, (fx)² = f²x².

^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 = t_p+ dt, wherein t_p 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 t_p.

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 t_i: s(t_i) = [m₁(t_i), m₂(t_i), m₃(t_i), ... , m_n(t_i)]. 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.

^a7I 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.

^a8See:

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

^g1Excerpted from http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2001Q1/211/notes_for_012401_lecture.html as <biospheric icons>.

^g2Excerpted 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>.

^g5Excerpted 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>.

^g10Excerpted from http://www.earlham.edu/~parkero/Geos211/time.gif as <time-1.gif>.

^g11Excerpted from http://earth.geol.ksu.edu/sgao/g100tu/plots/1017_timeline.jpg as <timeline-1.gif>.

^g12Excerpted 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>.

^g13bExcerpted 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).

^g15Excerpted 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>.

^g18Excerpted 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>.

^g20Excerpted from http://www.dialectics.org, the Postscripts of Diacticoa, Pictographic Summary, Visualizations of the Q Ideography, as <meta-finitary.jpg>.

^g21Excerpted from http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/courses/hegel/dialectx.htm as <stairs.gif>.

^g22aExcerpted 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>.

^g22bExcerpted 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.

^g24aExcerpted from http://www.dialectics.org, the Postscripts of Diacticoa, Pictographic Summary, Visualizations of the Q Ideography, as <Q-ideography-a.jpg>.

^g24bExcerpted 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>.

^g25aExcerpted from The Totality Is Beautiful, from http://www.point-of-departure.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/ImageFiles/TTIB-figure1.jpg as <TTIB-figure1.jpg>.

^g25bExcerpted from The Totality Is Beautiful, from http://www.point-of-departure.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/ImageFiles/TTIB-figure2.jpg as <TTIB-figure2.jpg>.

^g26