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The Ecological Revolution! (review)
Ted Benton, MRzine
John Bellamy Foster. The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. 288pp. $17.95 (pb). ISBN 9781583671795.
This book is a major achievement. It combines enormous breadth of scholarship with consummate theoretical integration to produce a powerful political argument. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about the future of humanity and the planet — that is, everyone! I do have some disagreements, but these take the form of an agenda for future dialogue rather than substantive criticisms.
The book consists largely of papers that have been published before, but revised substantially to make a coherent overall argument. It is divided into three parts. The first includes a series of chapters that draw on a range of sources, each pointing to the depth of our global ecological crisis, and the (necessary) failure of attempts to render the existing framework of globalizing capitalism sustainable. Part two is ostensibly concerned with reviewing and demonstrating the explanatory power of Marx’s historical materialism and his critical theory of capitalist production. Central to this is the concept of socio-natural ‘metabolism’, and the ‘metabolic rift’ engendered by capitalism’s relentless drive to accumulate at the expense of the earth’s life support systems. The notion has its classic source in Marx’s later concern with the consequences of capitalist agriculture and the urban/rural division for soil fertility. However, as Foster and his associates, notably Paul Burkett, have shown us, the ecological concerns of Marx, Engels and their correspondents were much more diverse than this suggests.
The thesis here is that Marx and Engels had an ecological vision at the core of their analysis, and had already developed the concept of sustainable development as key to their conception of the socialist future. One difficulty for this is that the historically dominant readings of Marx and Engels (by sympathisers and opponents alike) have been ‘Promethean’, in the sense that they have been held to premise future human liberation on the ever-advancing human mastery of the forces of nature. The environmental record of the state-centralist regimes that legitimated themselves by reference to the Marxian heritage was dire, but the European socialist and social democratic parties that originally grounded their political projects in Marxism also fought centrally for higher material living standards for organised labour on the basis of state support for economic growth — often at great environmental cost. In much of the organised left until that last couple of decades talk of ecological issues was derided as a ‘middle class diversion’.
Foster does not seek to deny this. Instead he effectively re-writes the history of Marxian and socialist thought since Marx and Engels by bringing to prominence a subaltern tradition of ecologically radical socialist thought and action: early Russian pioneers of ecology and the attempts prior to the ascendancy of Stalin to put Soviet development on an ecological footing, the work of thinkers such a William Morris and Raymond Williams in Britain, and so on. …
Ted Benton is professor of sociology at the University of Essex …
(5 April 2010)
How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too
Chris Hedges, truthdig
Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was in the hands of corporations. Nader’s fate mirrors our own.
… Nader was singled out for destruction, as Henriette Mantel and Stephen Skrovan point out in their engaging documentary movie on Nader, “An Unreasonable Man.” General Motors had him followed in an attempt to blackmail him. It sent an attractive woman to his neighborhood Safeway supermarket in a bid to meet him while he was shopping and then seduce him; the attempt failed, and GM, when exposed, had to issue a public apology.
But far from ending their effort to destroy Nader, corporations unleashed a much more sophisticated and well-funded attack. In 1971, the corporate lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote an eight-page memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” in which he named Nader as the chief nemesis of corporations. It became the blueprint for corporate resurgence. Powell’s memo led to the establishment of the Business Roundtable, which amassed enough money and power to direct government policy and mold public opinion. The Powell memo outlined ways corporations could shut out those who, in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals,” were hostile to corporate interests. Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that attacked government regulation and environmental protection. His memo led to the successful effort to place corporate-friendly academics and economists in universities and on the airwaves, as well as drive out those in the public sphere who questioned the rise of unchecked corporate power and deregulation. It saw the establishment of organizations to monitor and pressure the media to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate interests. And it led to the building of legal organizations to promote corporate interests in the courts and appointment of sympathetic judges to the bench.
… The corporations carefully studied and emulated the tactics of the consumer advocate they wanted to destroy.
… [New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal], who banned social critics such as Noam Chomsky from being quoted in the paper and met frequently for lunch with conservative icon William F. Buckley, demanded that no story built around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a corporate response. Corporations, informed of Rosenthal’s dictate, refused to comment on Nader’s research. This tactic meant the stories were never published. The authority of the Times set the agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the Times, other major papers and the networks did not feel compelled to report on his investigations. It was harder and harder to be heard.
“There was, before we were silenced, a brief, golden age of journalism,” Nader lamented. “We worked with the press to expose corporate abuse on behalf of the public. We saved lives. This is what journalism should be about; it should be about making the world a better and safer place for our families and our children, but then it ended and we were shut out.”
(5 April 2010)
How the world works. -BA
10 Lessons for the Climate Movement
Damien Lawson, Green Left Weekly
1. The need for common goals
Diversity is crucial and inherent to successful movements.
… This highlights the importance of developing a common set of concrete goals for the climate movement and a positive, united agenda.
This platform cannot simply be set in the abstract, or necessarily a long period in advance, but must be developed dynamically in the “real world” with consideration to the evolving nature, politics and capabilities of the various forces in the movement. …
2. Transitional thinking
The idea of transition is increasingly popular, but transformations will not happen just because we wish for them. A transition will need to be built and often this will involve small and painful steps.
That does not mean we should lose sight of our end aim, but that successful movements are built through mobilising support for specific concrete actions that intersect with the existing political terrain and exploit its contradictions and weaknesses. …
3. Climate change is THE issue
Across the country thousands of people are engaged in local sustainability projects, such as bush regeneration. Thousands more are mobilised and supportive of other conservation issues such as opposing whaling or campaigning for new national parks.
Many others are engaged in social or human rights issues of one kind or another. All these issues and problems have an inherent worth and value.
But are they more important than climate change? …
4. Harming the poor? …
5. Warming to labour
Very few profound policy changes have been won by social movements in Australia without the involvement of organised labour. So far we have failed to significantly involve trade unions in our movement. Some unions have been a barrier to action by opposing any attempts to curtail the coal industry. …
6. International rabbit hole
The Copenhagen conference has finally confirmed once and for all the bankruptcy of a strategy built around outcomes from international negotiations. …
7. Living with denial
We will never get rid of climate deniers, at least not before it is too late, and psychological denial deepens as the moment of truth nears. In one sense deniers and “climate-gate” have failed: more than 160 leaders – even the Saudis – attended an international conference on climate change in December and accepted that global warming is a real problem.
However, in another sense, the deniers are gaining ground and we can no longer continue the defacto strategy of ignoring them. …
8 Armed with peer-reviewed science
The return of the climate deniers highlights the importance of us all being willing to constantly update ourselves about the climate science. It is and was wrong to ever think that the debate/denial about the science is over. …
9. Are they listening?
There is now a vast array of communications, messages and stories being told about climate change, often in contradictory and complicated ways. But the history of social movements, advertising and modern political communications teaches us that what gets through to the population at large is much more limited.
We need some simple messages that correspond with our goals, and that we repeat ad nauseam, if we are to have an effect on public opinion.
To paraphrase Frank Luntz, the conservative pollster who coined the phrase “climate change” as a way of countering the frame of “global warming”, it is about repetition, repetition, repetition.
As a movement, we are yet to agree on a common language that can win over the public, but we do know some of the things that work and that could be adopted. So let’s start a conversation about how to have the climate conversation. …
10. Vote ‘em where it hurts
It is easy to have an aversion to elections. They are stage managed, dominated by the big parties and often bring out the worst in our leaders and community.
But they are also an opportunity to be heard, because peoples’ eyes and ears are more open in an election year. More importantly, they are an opportunity to exert our power as a movement by causing the government pain, especially if we are able to make climate the issue in knife-edge seats, such that a minister or backbencher could be turfed out because they failed to listen to what the climate movement was advocating. …
[Abridged from a longer article that appeared in the Talk Climatereader prepared by the Melbourne Climate Action Centre for the 2010 Climate Action Summit. ]
(21 March 2010)
Also at Climate and Capitalism.
