Well, if we are all poor, then we will all fall under the influence of the NGOs who have positioned themselves as intermediaries in the political process throughout the developing world. Just as politicians defer to ‘science’ to clothe themselves in truth, so too do they seek to have their ethical credentials rubber stamped by NGOs.

NGOs are assuming greater influence over the political process. Whatever their aims, this influence is illegitimate. Their funding will come from Governments. For example, the ‘Green ten’ (less Greenpeace) are the recipients of EU funding, for which they are expected… get this… to lobby the EU for environmental legislation.

What I object to (apart from the pathological doom-saying) is the half-baked “environmental justice” meme these organisations have bought into. Using an example from Oxfam’s puking-granny video, they make the connection between “another Asian flood” (from the creepy-crawly newspaper headlines) and the horrible “injustice” monster. And the following is from Oxfam’s website: “Unlucky? Try unfair. Because rich countries produce most of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Yet, it’s the poorest countries that will be hit hardest. More frequent and unpredictable droughts, floods, hunger and disease – this is the future for people living in poverty.”

Let’s see if I understand the reasoning, accepting – purely for argument’s sake – the manmade-CO2/warming/catastrophe line of thought.

1) Wealthy Western countries emit large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Leading to:
2) A rising of average global temperatures. Leading to:
3) More frequent storms and rising sea levels (plus more drought, disease, etc.) Leading to:
4) Poverty and suffering in areas affected by the above, e.g. South Asia.

Even if you consider CO2 emissions an issue (which I actually don’t), what would happen if the UK, let’s say, became completely “carbon neutral”? The answer: it would have very little impact on total greenhouse gas emissions in the world (our CO2 contribution appears to be just under 2%, and dwindling.) In 2007 China emitted 24% of the total, and India emitted 8%. So shouldn’t Oxfam be lobbying Asian nations instead, to be more “humankind” to, um, themselves? That would be logical, but are they doing this?

Another point. Later this century we will probably start to develop sources of abundant energy that may, incidentally, be “carbon neutral” (nuclear fusion, zero-point energy, etc.) Right now, however, most of our wealth comes from commerce and industry that largely depend on energy sources such as oil, coal and gas. It seems to me that if we foolishly crash-dive into carbon neutrality, we will become, in a word, poor. Our ability to make things and do things will be sharply curtailed.

So, where will Oxfam, WWF and other charities and NGOs get their funding? Until now they have had money that comes from our donations, i.e. surplus cash from relatively wealthy economies. If the goose is dead, where will the golden eggs come from? Won’t these organisations suddenly become, er, what’s the word, unsustainable? I’m wondering if they have really thought this through.

Perhaps he gave more credit to readers of the CM in 2008 than they deserved.

Perhaps he didn’t imagine that a conversation about Oxfam’s treatment of the poor Bangladesh would hang on the interpretation of the word ‘idiocy’ 160 years later.

“To my mind, ‘stupor’ and ‘apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind’ also sound pretty contemptuous.”

But that’s because you’re only looking at isolated tracts outside of the context of the work, in order to tie us to a Marxist conspiracy.

‘Stupor’ and ‘apathetic indifference’ are, according to Marx’s theory of history, products of the relations of production that the rural poor were subjects of. Political isolation, not ‘rural lifestyle’ is what causes ‘rural idiocy’.

To my mind, ‘stupor’ and ‘apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind’ also sound pretty contemptuous. And Engels reveals a remarkable ignorance of history in his observation that the rural population “has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years.”

But then perhaps he was more of a political scientist than a historian.

IDIOCY OF RURAL LIFE. This oft-quoted A.ET. [authorized English translation] expression is a mistranslation. The German word Idiotismus did not, and does not, mean “idiocy” (Idiotie); it usually means idiom, like its French cognate idiotisme. But here [in paragraph 28 of The Communist Manifesto] it means neither. In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community. In the Manifesto, it was being used by a scholar who had recently written his doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy and liked to read Aeschylus in the original. (For a more detailed account of the philological background and evidence, see [Hal Draper], KMTR [Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978] 2:344f.) What the rural population had to be saved from, then, was the privatized apartness of a life-style isolated from the larger society: the classic stasis of peasant life. To inject the English idiocy into this thought is to muddle everything. The original Greek meaning (which in the 19th century was still alive in German alongside the idiom meaning) had been lost in English centuries ago. Moore [the translator of the authorized English translation] was probably not aware of this problem; Engels had probably known it forty years before. He was certainly familiar with the thought behind it: in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), he had written about the rural weavers as a class “which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind.” (MECW [Marx and Engels, Collected Works] 4:309.) In 1873 he made exactly the Manifesto’s point without using the word “idiocy”: the abolition of the town-country antithesis “will be able to deliver the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years” (Housing Question, Pt. III, Chapter 3).
————–

Google is a wonderful thing.

I’m reminded of a joke current in the old Soviet Union:

Q: ‘Is communism a science?’
A: ‘No. If it were a science, it would have been tested on dogs first.’

Exegesis of sacred texts is probably best left to true believers, but the room for doubt over Marx’s meaning in the paragraph I quoted is minimal. It was taken from the 1888 edition, translated by Samuel Moore with the assistance of Friedrich Engels – who is of course credited as co-author and who had excellent English. Engels would have been fully aware of the English meaning of ‘idiocy’ and well able to correct any misleading translation if he had so wished.

Seems to me that you’re at the bottom of what Marx might have called ‘eine Falle für Heffalumpen’.* It might be time to stop digging.

*Usually translated as ‘Heffalump trap’, though some scholars have argued that the phrase is in fact a play on the concept of the ‘Heffalumpenproletariat’.

The IPCC WGII is not ‘scientific’, but assesses ‘Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability’. As we reported last year, it is made up chiefly from social scientists. And as we have pointed out many times, in order to assess the ‘vulnerability’ of society to the environment, you need to make assumptions about what level of development any future society is capable of. These are ‘political’ assumptions. That is to say they are ideological. There are agendas a work, they have interests. It is not ‘science’.

Similarly, the UNEP is committed to ‘sustainable development’, which precludes the level of industrialisation that the West and emerging economies have enjoyed. Necessarily, then, the UNEP, and the IPCC legitimise the political assumptions they make by precluding any political alternative, be that capitalist, or Marxist, or, more importantly, what people in the developing world decide and negotiate for themselves.

Talisker hides a very hollow argument behind the authority of these institutions. He says that Oxfam’s concern is based on their own research and ‘the most authoritative study into the environmental and economic impacts of global warming’. It works for him, but for anyone sceptical of these institutions, Talisker’s argument is entirely circular.

He goes on to say that our ‘remarks on [Bangladeshi production] seem pretty much irrelevant’. Let us remind him that Oxfam’s claim is that climate change is happening, and is being experienced by poor people in Bangladesh, and is pushing people in Bangladesh ‘further into poverty’. Our remarks are attempts to find evidence for this. And we were quite candid about not knowing how much certainty to place in what we had found. But there seemed to be no other way of testing Oxfam’s claims empirically. Agriculture is the most fundamental interface of society and the environment. The majority of Bangladeshi society is rural, and engaged in agriculture. Therefore, if climate change is happening, and making life worse for Bangladeshis, you’d expect to see that reflected in the statistics we have presented above. If Talisker wants to establish a better way of substantiating Oxfam’s claims – without appealing to authority – we would really like to see what they are.

Talisker goes on (and on, and on and on).

‘I’m no expert in this field’

On this point, we agree with him 100%.

He continues, ‘Rice production has indeed increased in Bangladesh over the past couple of decades’

It has risen since 1961.

‘though as far as I can gather this is nothing to do with alluvial sedimentation ‘

But nobody had claimed that it was. We suggested it was because of mechanisation and increased population. Talisker claims that it is ‘mainly the result of improved rice strains’, thanks to Oxfam and the IRRI. But there is no evidence for this. And the site he links to seems to indicate that the system was not rolled out prior to increases in production seen since ‘global warming’ started ‘making life worse’ for the Bangladeshi poor.

Talisker is making things up. He goes on…

‘It was a reply to your vicious and unfounded attempt to portray Oxfam as an organisation motivated by a desire to trap people in rural poverty.’

Whether they desire to or not is immaterial. It is what will happen. We don’t imagine that they are stupid, so they must be doing it wilfully.

He goes on…

‘You, Editors, seem to have nothing better to offer than sneers, smears and thoroughly bankrupt Marxian ideology. ‘

This is simply bullshit. Talisker is upset that we know (and like) people at Spiked-Online and the Institute of Ideas, and we occasionally write for them. He therefore cannot make a distinction between an attempt to empirically test the claim that ‘life is worse for Bangladeshis because of climate change’, and a commitment to Marxism. Not that Talisker even understands Marx particularly well. (Un)fortunately for Talisker, one of us is a political science student.

Talkisker then quotes Marx and asks us, Are you really claiming that this “does not refer to rural lifestyle itself, but the deeply conservative ideas and beliefs which emerge from the romantic conception of rural idyll and nature cults”?

Yes, we are Talisker. Although you occasionally write eloquently, you don’t seem to be able to read quite so well. Marx’s use of the term ‘the idiocy of rural life’ corresponds to the alienation of the rural poor (read the next paragraph in the CM you quoted from), after the bourgeoisie’s centralisation of political activity in Cities. It is not a statement equivalent to ‘living in the countryside makes you thick’, nor that ‘living in the city makes you smart’. Marx recognises that capitalism saw off feudalism, and concentrated the working class people in cities, thus making them creating a political working class. The rural population, however, were alienated isolated by this process. Marx’s remedy is to integrate the rural and the urban. We don’t think that it’s such a big deal in the 21st Century. After all, there are cars, and communications.

Finally, Talisker says, ‘I’d say that this is another clear example of a claim that, when checked against the source, simply does not stand up. ‘

You read the ‘source’ far too literally, and isolated from its context, and forgetting that it was written and translated from German over a century and a half ago. What does the german word for ‘idiocy’ mean in 1948 1848, for example? You also aim to prove far too much from it. I.E. You’re not actually interested in what Marx says, you’re more interested in trying to ‘expose’ our secret agenda. It’s fairly evident that your own ideology seems to prevent you from engaging with the discussion rationally.

Can we assume that Talisker believes rural lifestyles to be more progressive and ‘enlightened’ than urban ones? Does he think we have a special ‘bond’ with nature, that can only be expressed by rural life, perhaps? Maybe he thinks that urban life and industrialisation destroy some kind of authentic human experience? Maybe he thinks it would be a right old laugh living in a pastorial society. Maybe he should think about what it means to say that conditions he simply wouldn’t accept are what others should be grateful for.