Trevor,
I'm back from the shadowland of Canberra. Whilst away I noticed that you had written:

"In any case, I don’t see that an Australian Marxist would need to adjust his/her doctrine in light of environmental devastation. Surely this is precisely the outcome that Marxists have always predicted? Environmental devastation is the outcome of the movement of capital. Similarly, Adorno was not silent on the environmental consequences of economic growth. He thought they led to the total extinction of life on the planet. What more do you want?"

A recognition that the categories of political economy do not allow for the value of the environment, since they only presuppose exchange and use value only. A recognition that materialism involves both bodies living in local places and ecological reality. A recognition of the need to live on the earth in a more sustainable fashion than we do now. A recognition that the movement of captial in modernity constructed a technological mode of being.

Is that enough? One can accept that environmental devastation is the outcome of the movement of capital and its domination of nature in the name of utility.

However, in Hegelian terms there was a failure to think through the inherited categories of a historical materialism that enable it to pose as a science but, in practice, becomes little more than a doctrine. Nor did I see the turn to Adorno to soup up this materialism by Australian Critical theoriests then make the turn back to addressing this failure in the Australian context. We ended up with lots of stuff about aesthetics, literature and European writers, but little about Australia. This detour became lost in, and bounded by, European studies in academia It became an academic speciality.

It was romanticism with its emphasis on wilderness (the Franklin River in Tasmania) that gave cultural expression to the destructive mode of life we are living and the need to live otherwise.

You write:

"Let’s be frank – it’s not the Marxists who refuse to talk about the consequences of economic growth but the environmentalists who run about with their ethics failing to notice the material circumstances – the reterritorialisation, as Deleuze would say."