Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises
Brett Clark and Richard York, Monthly Review
Rifts and Shifts
—
… Although the ecological crisis has captured public attention, the dominant economic forces are attempting to seize the moment by assuring us that capital, technology, and the market can be employed so as to ward off any threats without a major transformation of society. For example, numerous technological solutions are proposed to remedy global climate change, including agrofuels, nuclear energy, and new coal plants that will capture and sequester carbon underground. The ecological crisis is thus presented as a technical problem that can be fixed within the current system, through better ingenuity, technological innovation, and the magic of the market. In this view, the economy will be increasingly dematerialized, reducing demands placed on nature.2 The market will ensure that new avenues of capital accumulation are created in the very process of dealing with environmental challenges.
Yet, this line of thought ignores the root causes of the ecological crisis. The social metabolic order of capitalism is inherently anti-ecological, since it systematically subordinates nature in its pursuit of endless accumulation and production on ever larger scales. Technical fixes to socio-ecological problems typically have unintended consequences and fail to address the root of the problems: the political-economic order. Rather than acknowledging metabolic rifts, natural limits, and/or ecological contradictions, capital seeks to play a shell game with the environmental problems it generates, moving them around rather than addressing the root causes.
One obvious way capital shifts around ecological problems is through simple geographic displacement—once resources are depleted in one region, capitalists search far and wide to seize control of resources in other parts of the world, whether by military force or markets. One of the drivers of colonialism was clearly the demand for more natural resources in rapidly industrializing European nations.
However, expanding the area under the control of global capitalism is only one of the ways in which capitalists shift ecological problems around.
(November 2008)
Another attempt by the socialist Monthly Review to comes to terms with ecology and the limits to growth. There’s a lot of truth in the analysis, but blaming capitalism is a little too glib. Nominally communist China is rushing towards environmental disaster faster than most of the capitalist countries. The real (not idealized) socialist and communist countries have not been leaders in ecological thought or action. It’s true that Cuba is currently a pioneer in developing a low-energy society, but this is only in response to its losing its access to cheap oil from the Soviet Union.
The authors valiantly search for ecological insights amongst the Marxist classics, but the pickings are sparse. For Marxism to green itself, I think it will have to open up to the vast literature on ecology and sustainability. It will also have to critique itself more rigorously than it has done so in the past.
For an example of a leftist who seems to have incorporated a wider variety of ideas, see the talks by Nafeez Ahmed at today’s peak oil headlines.
-BA
And now for some refreshing Revolutionary Anarcho-Leftism
David Graeber, Interactivist Info Exchange via Wired
Bruce Sterling the Viridian Pope-Emperor introduces this essay with the title And now for some refreshing Revolutionary Anarcho-Leftism.
Guys who think BHO {Barack Hussein Obama] is some kinda Marxist need to cozy up to this screed. Rhetoric like this used to be common. Very common. EXTREMELY common. Last time guys were standing around in soup lines, you heard this all the time.
It never actually went away; it just got sidelined and shouted down.
Hope in Common
We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction — even of “progressives” — is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.
The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?
Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.
… We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup.
(17 November 2008)
I think Bruce Sterling is right, we’re going hear more rhetoric like this as more “guys are standing around in soup lines.” Problem is, leftism comes in 57 different varieties. Some have dismal histories while others look more promising. We could save ourselves a lot of pain by not repeating the mistakes made by leftists in the 20th century. A good starting point for industrial societies are European social democracy and Euro-communism (especially the former Italian Communist Party, now splintered.) The work of Antonio Gramsci has particular relevance. The anarchist and decentralist traditions also have inspired many modern-day activists. -BA
Suggested by Big Gav. Original article at Interactivist Info Exchange.
