The Emergence of Ecosocialism
May 14, 2018
Photo above: Joel Kovel in Durban, South Africa in 2011. The essay below was first written as a communique to introduce his book “The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?” (Zed Books, 2007) to ecosocialist comrades in Latin America. It is published here on the Ecosocialist Horizons website for the first time.
by JOEL KOVEL
New York City, March 2, 2017
The Enemy of Nature was first published in 2001, and reissued in a second edition six years later. It was conceived as a response to a gathering “ecological” crisis in the interactions between humanity and nature, the productive transformation of which defines our species identity. The crisis has been germinating since the emergence of patriarchy and class society; it accelerated with the emergence of industrialization, and in the wake of the Second World War, burst forth in the later years of the 20th century, and now distinctly threatens our survival as a species, alongside of innumerable others. Indeed, Homo Sapiens has the dubious distinction of being the most destructive form of life to inhabit the earth.
The most spectacular aspect of the crisis has been a disintegration of climate resulting from atmospheric accumulation of carbon from the burning of fossil fuel. Climate change, so-called, has come to loom over all other threats; and the effort to overcome this has logically become global in scope. Indeed, some of its radical versions, calling for an energy system based upon renewable sources, approach being revolutionary.
The Enemy of Nature incorporated these principles without becoming consumed by them. A prime reason for this is that catastrophic implications of our relationship to nature extend beyond climate change. Consider the poisoning of our “biosphere,” that is, the whole ensemble of life of which we are a part and for which we are responsible: for example, the dying off of pesticide afflicted honeybees necessary for the reproduction of essential plant-life; or the world wide contamination of drinking water with heavy metals like lead and arsenic, or toxic herbicides; or the poisoning of marine life, from sperm whales to sardines, by ingestion of the trillions of plastic bags, water bottles, etc., dumped into the waters, along with tiny and indigestible filaments of polyester clothing that go from washing machines into the sewers and then out to sea and the digestive tracts of its dwellers.
Finally, consider that war is the ultimate destroyer of nature; and that the present state of the world displays an unprecedented spread of war-making and expenditure on weapons, all the more striking for representing an abject failure to learn from the deaths of 65 million people in the Second World War, and the supreme danger posed by nuclear warfare. In this respect, with the emergence in 2016 of Donald Trump at the head of the U.S. State Apparatus, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has for the first time in seventy years moved the clock of impending nuclear catastrophe as close as two minutes and thirty seconds to the figurative midnight—by which is meant the moment of calamity that brings human history to a close.
In sum, we live in the most ravaged epoch of mass extinction of the last 66 million years. This speaks volumes about the enmity toward nature manifest in the history of our species and its proud “civilization.”(1) The gravity and immensity of the ecological crisis therefore requires conceptualization far more subtle and systematic than the analyses offered by established science, or academia, or governments. For the ecological crisis occurs in societies that are realms of classes in conflict, and in which, as Marx and Engels observed, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. It follows that how we identify, think about, and act upon the present crisis requires ideological awareness and must be criticized from a standpoint beyond the capacity of any established institution.
The Enemy of Nature argues that the notion of a “Mode of Production” offers the most salient perspective from which to observe, understand, and change the way a society lives within nature and changes nature. Its principle conclusion is that the societies of the “West,” organized into empires that descend from Rome, function according to the Capitalist Mode of Production, and that capitalism is in fact the Enemy of Nature and the “efficient cause” of the ecological crisis that must be brought down and transformed if life is to endure and prevail.
The argument concerning capital is developed in detail throughout the first part of The Enemy of Nature, after which we turn to theoretical study about the ecosystems that comprise the units of natural organization on Planet Earth—and from that standpoint, to a discussion of types of ecological politics, moving from those that are relatively indifferent to the presence of capitalism, to those that embrace the necessity of overcoming capitalism. These latter enter the zone of Ecosocialism.
There is a deep theoretical aspect of ecosocialism that embraces speculative philosophies of nature and the world spiritualities of humanity as well as biological and physical science; and there is also a highly political discourse grounded in the concrete specifics of societies and within societies; this attends to themes such as gender, which appears in ecosocialism as the foundational category of “ecofeminism.” And further, when one introduces a Latin American orientation, as here, attention is immediately drawn to what was called within the Sandinista revolution, “El Enimigo de la Humanidad”—the United States, whose presence continues to loom over efforts to struggle for a better world in this part of the world for the foreseeable future.
The precursors of the capitalist Mode of Production came together with the conquest of the Western Hemisphere that began in 1492. Hegemony of the United States appeared across the hemisphere in the 19th Century with the Monroe Doctrine, the conquest of Mexico, and the industrialization that followed after the Civil War and became global once the Second World War cleared away the US’s powerful adversaries. The present crisis is conditioned by a slippage in the coherence and power of the United States and the rise of adversarial states like China, Russia and Iran. Presently, the whole planet vibrates with instability and the rise of contesting power relations, all of which need to be taken into account in the ecological crisis as well as in the foreign relations of nation-states.
Capitalism is anything but simple. Nonetheless, the secret to its compulsion to grow and enmity to nature lies in a peculiar degree of abstraction that introduces and advances money into the center of social relations and, as the center of its social power grew, to the domination of quality by quantity. Eventually, this led to the elevation of finance capital to the dominant position in the capitalist hierarchy. Spurred by chattel slavery of Africans in North America and the Judaeo-Christian identity, it also brought about ideological emergence of Whiteness as the conquering force over nature, organized by the concepts of Puritanism and White Racism.(2)
Capitalist ideology considers the capitalist mode of production to be inherently neutral; therefore, what goes wrong is supposedly the result of abuses that can be overcome with regulation and reform. The view advanced here is radically different, and finds capitalism to be the “Enemy of Nature”—not merely an economic system, but a societally enforced mode of being that requires a specific kind of economy that becomes the agent of imperial expansion and the “Destroyer of Worlds”-to cite the Bhagavad-Gita. The destabilization of ecosystems comprises the fabric of the ecological crisis, even as it produces people who conceive capitalism as “natural” and even “progressive” rather than the enemy of nature.
Much of The Enemy of Nature is given over to such an account of capitalism. It develops the notion of money as the abstraction observed as exchange value in the production of commodities. This becomes capital as labor becomes a commodity meted out in terms of time; similarly money also becomes Value, the source of commodity fetishism and the false God of this World. Ecosocialism describes how ecosystems are to be put together in contrast to capitalism, where money-as-value enters into and destabilizes ecosystems, causing them to disintegrate on an expanding and chaotic scale. The argument is uncompromising, and concludes that the success of capital is the ruin of nature, whereas the provision of a livable and worthwhile world depends on overcoming capital and restoring nature to the degree of signification such as appeared in indigenous society, where nature and spirit flowed together. This necessarily becomes obliterated under capital’s yoke, where society is a zone of endless innovation, celebrating modernity and postmodernity, in other words, tooled to provide the turning of all entities into commodities. As spirit is degraded, addiction becomes the generic type of behavior under capitalism.(3)
Generalization of commodity production and addictiveness are core properties of capitalism; in contrast, the core of ecosocialism’s mode of production is the making of integral ecosystems to decenter commodity production, and with it, to free humanity from the enslavement of society to the money power. The term we apply to this is “freely associated labor”: it signifies a change beyond alteration of workplace conditions or wages and is the actual overcoming of alienation, thereby freeing us to develop our natural creative powers.
Socialism arose in its “first epoch” of a 19th century setting, while the present epoch now links the integrity of nature to the freedom of the human portion of nature. Therefore, the realization of socialism is inseparable to the freeing of nature from its enemy, capital. Thus socialism today is necessarily ecosocialism: Increasing numbers of people across the world are arriving at this conclusion.
The threat to life is global, with specific differentiation according to local circumstances. The general motion of ecosocialist development is the coming together of spontaneous focal uprisings over a great range of settings, at times in response to exploitation of labor or specific injustices, and fundamentally responding to a threat to life. This is associated with a profoundly structural characteristic of ecosocialism, that at its foundation it is an ecofeminist restoration of the power of women, power usurped at the origins of society by male hunting bands who imposed what Engels called the “World-historical defeat of the female sex.” Patriarchal and class-based society was built on this ground.
At present, we observe the capitalist system in the throes of a protracted accumulation crisis the general response to which has been the imposition of “neoliberalism,” a forty year reign of imposed scarcity, shipping of jobs to poor countries, hyper-exploitation of nature as well as labor, along with increased power of finance capital—the most corrupt and alienating possibility within the system—resulting in growing division between rich and poor such as has never been seen before, dissolving the very notion of society in the process. In the United States the level of crisis approaches that of the era just before the Civil War; its manifestation has been the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President, a man no better than a gangster, a despiser of women and people of color, virtually illiterate, contemptuously blind to ecological concerns, a compulsive liar, grandiose and thin-skinned. He is quite capable of launching a nuclear war without reckoning its implications, and is in any case Hell-bent on undoing even the pathetic half-steps taken so far to mitigate or inhibit the damages wrought by the ecological crisis.
Such is bourgeois democracy, US Style, facing up to The Enemy of Nature. But there is more to consider. The first editions of the The Enemy of Nature called attention to the possibility of a fascist outcome if capitalism were not checked and overcome. Something of the sort seems to be in the cards today; indeed, Trump’s most influential advisor, a man named Stephen Bannon, is a Nazi in all but name: an explicit White Supremacist, part of a movement increasingly active in the Western Democracies. Bannon has struck fear bordering on terror in the once confident American Jewish community, even though his explicit Enemy—and that of Trump—is Islam.
All is in flux as of this writing in March, 2017. More people than ever before have taken to the streets in protest of the state of affairs, and also in response to the severe collapse of the established political parties in the United States. The situation is highly charged and full of possibility—including that of ecosocialism. For is this not a collapse of capital—along with a collapse of nature? Today in the heartland of empire, the “Water Protectors,” are coming together to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline(4), and, in an authentic ecosocialist way, are freely building a human ecosystem on the prairie: a prefigured(5) model of future society to face and overcome the corrupt death-dealing society of capital.
It is a vital lesson for the future facing the existing death culture. And it involves the indigenous, who have been able to live with and within nature, and are presently standing up once more: not just the Sioux whose land this is, but many nature-rooted societies, with vigorous, integral spiritualties. At the height of agitation in 2016 there were representatives of approximately 200 tribes at Standing Rock along with folk from elsewhere. It is doubtful that anything of the kind has happened before, and necessary to say that this is what ecosocialism, in its early stages, looks like.
The Latin American pathway
The realization of ecosocialism flourishes in proportion to the degree of contact with nature as an original source of power. It is also fair to say, however, that the degree of mobilization by First Peoples is greater south of the US Mexico border than north. One major source lies in the indigenous, or First People societies of Latin America. This correlates with the greater degree of suppression of indigenous life in the lands that became the United States compared with the collection of aboriginal nations that became the States of Latin America.(6) I in no way intend to suppress awareness of the massacres and other hardships and afflictions that took place on Latin American indigenous land, and continue to do so. The point, however, is that a significant distinction exists overall in the two zones, manifest as greater resistance against White “civilization,” accompanied by aptitude for an ecosocialist path “South of the Border.”
We can see this in distinct developments that deserve to be called “ecosocialist prefigurations.” The following is for purpose of illustration and neither intended to be a comprehensive account nor in any particular order:
•Mexico: the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and their civilian bases of support in Chiapas – the bellwether of indigeneity and revolutionary politics in contemporary times, still going strong after 23 years;
•Brazil: the place where the word ‘ecosocialism,’ was first embodied in the 1980s; the brief accession of Marina Silva, disciple of Chico Mendes, who became Environment Minister under Presidente Lula, and supported the Ecosocialist International Network, including at Brazil’s National Environmental Congress in 2008;
•Bolivia: the Cochabamba water war at the turn of the millennium, leading to Evo Morales becoming first Indigenous President of Bolivia in 2006; presses for rights of “Mother Nature” and convenes a world summit on climate change;
•Ecuador: Acción Ecológica in Ecuador negotiates the Yasuni reservation in the Amazonan forest as a National Park. Introduces concept of Ecological Debt;
•Peru: people’s struggles against mining and in the defense of water continue to coalesce and converge, as chronicled by co-founder of the Ecosocialist International Network Hugo Blanco in “Lucha Indigena”;
•Cuba: becomes the leading developer of organic agriculture and urban gardens on a national scale after collapse of USSR;
• Venezuela: during Presidency of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela becomes the first country to declare itself an Ecosocialist Republic-to-be. A ministry of ecosocialism is founded, the first national anti-GMO and anti-patent seed law is passed, and communes are calling for the convocation of the First Ecosocialist International.
Not a single one of these developments (and there are more) has been free of contradictions and moments of defeat. Consider only Acción Ecológica, where the Yasuni reservation, considered to be greatest source of biodiversity on Earth, had to submit to the oil drill for “economic reasons.” Presently, the organization itself is threatened with being shut down by order of President Correa.
One can go on and on as to the difficulties of building ecosocialism in a world of transnational capitalism and capitalist nation-states. But that is no argument at all when set against the collapse of the global system and the challenge posed by the ecological crisis. The task before reason now is to find the best pathway for building a livable society along ecosocialist lines. Considering the evidence of the superlative degree of mobilization in Latin America, it becomes plain, then, that this part of the earth, for all its problems, offers by far the best chances for developing a conversation among ecosocialists to advance movement toward the new world in this critical time.
One could say that a line has been drawn along the whole of the spine of the Western Hemisphere – from the water wars in Bolivia to the defenders of lagoons in Peru to the water protectors in North Dakota – with a continuous reminder of what once was and could be again. So much the better if The Enemy of Nature can play a role in helping to build a path toward the horizon.
Endnotes:
1. Prime Minister Nehru of India is reputed to have replied when asked his opinion of Western civilization that he looked forward to the day when he would see some of this.
2. See Joel Kovel, White Racism. 2d edition 1984. New York, Columbia University Press. The work discusses the greatest novel in the North American tradition, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which is about a White Whale, the hunting of which ends in bringing down the whaling ship, symbolic of nature rebelling against and bringing down capitalism.
3. Stated with genius and amazing foresight in the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Bourgeois society “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor . . . in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
4. The pipeline will run underneath the Missouri River, source of water to 8 million people. And of course, the fossil fuel will accelerate climate change, despite being obsolete inasmuch as the technology of renewable energy is rapidly outstripping carbon based fuels — not fast enough, however, for the fossil fuel oligarchs.
5. A core ecosocialist concept: the visionary guidance toward making an ecologically integral future starting with the immediacy of the present.
6. For purposes of argument we would set aside Canada here, though it would be reasonable to assume it occupies an intermediate zone.
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