Eco-socialism - Wikipedia

Eco-socialism - Wikipedia



Eco-socialism
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Eco-socialism, green socialism or socialist ecology is an ideology merging aspects of socialism with that of green politics, ecology and alter-globalization or anti-globalization. Eco-socialists generally believe that the expansion of the capitalistsystem is the cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental degradationthrough globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.[1][page needed]

Eco-socialists advocate dismantling capitalism, focusing on common ownershipof the means of production by freely associated producers, and restoring the commons.[1][page needed] Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has described her party's brand of socialism as appealing to both middle-class environmentalists as well as working-class socialists.[2]


Contents
1Ideology
2History
2.11880s–1930s – Marx, Morris and influence on the Russian Revolution
2.2Ecoanarchism
2.2.1Social ecology and communalism
2.31970s–1990s – Rise of environmentalism and engagement with Marxism and 'actually existing socialism'
2.41990s onwards – Engagement with the anti-globalization movement and The Ecosocialist Manifesto
2.5Influence on current Green and socialist movements
2.6Influence on "existing socialist" regimes
2.7Ecosocialist International Network (EIN) and other international eco-socialist organisations
3Critique of capitalist expansion and globalisation
3.1Use and exchange value
3.2The "second contradiction" of capitalism
3.3The role of the state and transnational organisations
4Tensions within the eco-socialist discourse
5Critique of other forms of green politics
5.1Opposition to within-system approaches, voluntarism and technological fixes
5.2Critique of Green economics
5.3Critique of deep ecology
5.4Critique of bioregionalism
5.5Critique of variants of eco-feminism
5.6Critique of social ecology
5.7Opposition to Malthusianism and Neo-Malthusianism
5.8The "two varieties of environmentalism"
6Critique of other forms of socialism
6.1Critique of 'Actually Existing Socialisms'
6.2Critique of the wider socialist movement
7Eco-socialist strategy
7.1Agency
7.2Prefiguration
7.3Internationalization of prefiguration and the 'Eco-socialist Party'
8'The Revolution' and transition to eco-socialism
8.1The immediate aftermath of the revolution
8.2Transnational trade and capital reform
8.3Ecological production
8.4Commons, property and 'usufruct'
8.5Non-violence
9Criticisms
10List of eco-socialists
11See also
12References
13External links
Ideology[edit]

Eco-socialists are critical of many past and existing forms of both Green politics and socialism. They are often described as "Red Greens" - adherents to Green politics with clear anti-capitalist views, often inspired by Marxism (Red Greens are in contrast to eco-capitalists and Green anarchists).

The term "watermelon" is commonly applied, often pejoratively, to Greens who seem to put "social justice" goals above ecological ones, implying they are "green on the outside but red on the inside"; the term is usually attributed to either Petr Beckmann or, more frequently, Warren T. Brookes,[3][4][5] both critics of environmentalism, and is common in Australia,[6][7] New Zealand[8] and the United States.[9]

A New Zealand website, The Watermelon, uses the term proudly, stating that it is "green on the outside and liberal on the inside", while also citing "socialist political leanings", reflecting the use of the term "liberal" to describe the left wing in many English-speaking countries.[8] Red Greens are often considered "fundies" or "fundamentalist greens", a term usually associated with Deep Ecology even though the German Green Party "fundi" faction included eco-socialists, and eco-socialists in other Green Parties, like Derek Wall, have been described in the press as fundies.[10][11]

Eco-socialists also criticise bureaucratic and elite theories of self-described socialism such as Maoism, Stalinism and what other critics have termed bureaucratic collectivism or state capitalism. Instead, eco-socialists focus on imbuing socialism with ecology while keeping the emancipatory goals of "first-epoch" socialism.[1][page needed] Eco-socialists aim for communal ownership of the means of production by "freely associated producers" with all forms of domination eclipsed, especially gender inequality and racism.[1][page needed]

This often includes the restoration of commons land in opposition to private property,[12] in which local control of resources valorizes the Marxist concept of use value above exchange value.[13][page needed] Practically, eco-socialists have generated various strategies to mobilise action on an internationalist basis, developing networks of grassroots individuals and groups that can radically transform society through nonviolent"prefigurative projects" for a post-capitalist, post-statist world.[13][page needed]
History[edit]
1880s–1930s – Marx, Morris and influence on the Russian Revolution[edit]

Contrary to the depiction of Karl Marx by some environmentalists,[14] social ecologists[15]and fellow socialists[16] as a productivist who favoured the domination of nature, eco-socialists have revisited Marx's writings and believe that he "was a main originator of the ecological world-view".[13][page needed] Eco-socialist authors, like John Bellamy Foster[17]and Paul Burkett,[18] point to Marx's discussion of a "metabolic rift" between man and nature, his statement that "private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd as private ownership of one man by another" and his observation that a society must "hand it [the planet] down to succeeding generations in an improved condition".[19] Nonetheless, other eco-socialists feel that Marx overlooked a "recognition of nature in and for itself", ignoring its "receptivity" and treating nature as "subjected to labor from the start" in an "entirely active relationship".[13][page needed]

William Morris, the English novelist, poet and designer, is largely credited with developing key principles of what was later called eco-socialism.[20] During the 1880s and 1890s, Morris promoted his eco-socialist ideas within the Social Democratic Federation and Socialist League.[21]

Following the Russian Revolution, some environmentalists and environmental scientistsattempted to integrate ecological consciousness into Bolshevism, although many such people were later purged from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[22] The "pre-revolutionary environmental movement", encouraged by revolutionary scientist Aleksandr Bogdanov and the Proletkul't organisation, made efforts to "integrate production with natural laws and limits" in the first decade of Soviet rule, before Joseph Stalin attacked ecologists and the science of ecology and the Soviet Union fell into the pseudo-science of the state biologist Trofim Lysenko, who "set about to rearrange the Russian map" in ignorance of environmental limits.[13][page needed]
Ecoanarchism[edit]
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Main article: Green anarchism

Green anarchism, or ecoanarchism, is a school of thought within anarchism which puts a particular emphasis on environmental issues. An important early influence was the thought of the American anarchist Henry David Thoreau and his book Walden[23] as well as Leo Tolstoy[24] and Elisee Reclus.[25][26] In the late 19th century there emerged anarcho-naturism as the fusion of anarchism and naturist philosophies within individualist anarchist circles in France, Spain, Cuba[27] and Portugal.[24][28] Several anarchists from the mid-20th century, including Herbert Read, Ethel Mannin, Leopold Kohr,[29] Jacques Ellul,[30] and Paul Goodman,[31] also held proto-environmental views linked to their anarchism. Mannin's 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described by anarchist historian Robert Graham as setting forth "an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrialorganization of society".[31] Important contemporary currents are anarcho-primitivism and social ecology.[32]
Social ecology and communalism[edit]
Main article: Social ecology (theory)
Main article: Communalism (Political Philosophy)

Murray Bookchin

Social ecology is closely related to the work and ideas of Murray Bookchin and influenced by anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Social ecologists assert that the present ecological crisis has its roots in human social problems, and that the domination of human-over-nature stems from the domination of human-over-human.[33] In 1958, Murray Bookchin defined himself as an anarchist,[34] seeing parallels between anarchism and ecology. His first book, Our Synthetic Environment, was published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.[35] The book described a broad range of environmental ills but received little attention because of its political radicalism. His groundbreaking essay "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" introduced ecology as a concept in radical politics.[36] In 1968 he founded another group that published the influential Anarchos magazine, which published that and other innovative essays on post-scarcity and on ecological technologies such as solar and wind energy, and on decentralization and miniaturization. Lecturing throughout the United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the counterculture.

Post-Scarcity Anarchism is a collection of essays written by Murray Bookchin and first published in 1971 by Ramparts Press.[37] It outlines the possible form anarchism might take under conditions of post-scarcity. It is one of Bookchin's major works,[38] and its radical thesis provoked controversy for being utopian and messianic in its faith in the liberatory potential of technology.[39] Bookchin argues that post-industrial societies are also post-scarcity societies, and can thus imagine "the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance".[39] The self-administration of society is now made possible by technological advancement and, when technology is used in an ecologically sensitive manner, the revolutionary potential of society will be much changed.[40] In 1982, his book The Ecology of Freedom had a profound impact on the emerging ecology movement, both in the United States and abroad. He was a principal figure in the Burlington Greens in 1986-90, an ecology group that ran candidates for city council on a program to create neighborhood democracy.

Bookchin later developed a political philosophy to complement social ecology which he called "Communalism" (spelled with a capital "C" to differentiate it from other forms of communalism). While originally conceived as a form of Social anarchism, he later developed Communalism into a separate ideology which incorporates what he saw as the most beneficial elements of Anarchism, Marxism, syndicalism, and radical ecology.

Politically, Communalists advocate a network of directly democratic citizens' assemblies in individual communities/cities organized in a confederal fashion. This method used to achieve this is called Libertarian Municipalism which involves the establishment of face-to-face democratic institutions which are to grow and expand confederally with the goal of eventually replacing the nation-state.
1970s–1990s – Rise of environmentalism and engagement with Marxism and 'actually existing socialism'[edit]

In the 1970s, Barry Commoner, suggesting a left-wing response to The Limits to Growthmodel that predicted catastrophic resource depletion and spurred environmentalism, postulated that capitalist technologies were chiefly responsible for environmental degradation, as opposed to population pressures.[41] East German dissident writer and activist Rudolf Bahro published two books addressing the relationship between socialism and ecology – The Alternative in Eastern Europe[42] and Socialism and Survival[43] – which promoted a 'new party' and led to his arrest, for which he gained international notoriety.

At around the same time, Alan Roberts, an Australian Marxist, posited that people's unfulfilled needs fuelled consumerism.[44] Fellow Australian Ted Trainer further called upon socialists to develop a system that met human needs, in contrast to the capitalist system of created wants.[45] A key development in the 1980s was the creation of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS) with James O'Connor as founding editor and the first issue in 1988. The debates ensued led to a host of theoretical works by O'Connor, Carolyn Merchant, Paul Burkett and others.

The Australian Democratic Socialist Party launched the Green Left Weekly newspaper in 1991, following a period of working within Green Alliance and Green Party groups in formation. This ceased when the Australian Greens adopted a policy of proscription of other political groups in August 1991.[46] The DSP also published a comprehensive policy resolution, "Socialism and Human Survival" in book form in 1990, with an expanded second edition in 1999 entitled "Environment, Capitalism & Socialism".[47]
1990s onwards – Engagement with the anti-globalization movement and The Ecosocialist Manifesto[edit]

The 1990s saw the socialist feminists Mary Mellor[48] and Ariel Salleh[49] address environmental issues within an eco-socialist paradigm. With the rising profile of the anti-globalization movement in the Global South, an "environmentalism of the poor", combining ecological awareness and social justice, has also become prominent.[12] David Pepperalso released his important work, Ecosocialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice, in 1994, which critiques the current approach of many within Green politics, particularly deep ecologists.[50]

In 2001, Joel Kovel, a social scientist, psychiatrist and former candidate for the Green Party of the United States (GPUS) presidential nomination in 2000, and Michael Löwy, an anthropologist and member of the Reunified Fourth International (a principal Trotskyistorganisation), released An ecosocialist manifesto, which has been adopted by some organisations[21] and suggests possible routes for the growth of eco-socialist consciousness.[1][page needed] Kovel's 2002 work, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?,[13] is considered by many to be the most up-to-date exposition of eco-socialist thought.[20]

In October 2007, the International Ecosocialist Network was founded in Paris.[51]
Influence on current Green and socialist movements[edit]

Currently, many Green Parties around the world, such as the Dutch Green Left Party(GroenLinks)[citation needed] , contain strong eco-socialist elements. Radical Red-green alliances have been formed in many countries by eco-socialists, radical Greens and other radical left groups. In Denmark, the Red-Green Alliance was formed as a coalition of numerous radical parties. Within the European Parliament, a number of far-left parties from Northern Europe have organized themselves into the Nordic Green Left Alliance. Red Greens feature heavily in the Green Party of Saskatchewan (in Canada but not necessarily affiliated to the Green Party of Canada). In 2016, GPUS officially adopted eco-socialist ideology within the party.[52]

The Green Party of England and Wales features an eco-socialist group, Green Left, that was founded in June 2005 and whose members hold a number of influential positions within the party, including both the former Principal Speakers Siân Berry and Dr. Derek Wall, himself an eco-socialist and Marxist academic, as well as prominent Green Partycandidate and human rights activist Peter Tatchell.[21] Many Marxist organisations also contain eco-socialists, as evidenced by Löwy's involvement in the reunified Fourth International and Socialist Resistance, a British Marxist newspaper that reports on eco-socialist issues and has published two collections of essays on eco-socialist thought: Ecosocialism or Barbarism?, edited by Jane Kelly and Sheila Malone, and The Global Fight for Climate Justice, edited by Ian Angus with a foreword by Derek Wall.[53][54]
Influence on "existing socialist" regimes[edit]

Eco-socialism has had a minor influence over developments in the environmental policiesof what can be called "existing socialist" regimes, notably the People's Republic of China. Pan Yue, Deputy Director of the PRC's State Environmental Protection Administration, has acknowledged the influence of eco-socialist theory on his championing of environmentalism within China, which has gained him international acclaim (including being nominated for the Person of the Year Award 2006 by The New Statesman,[55] a British current affairs magazine). Yue stated in an interview that, while he often finds eco-socialist theory "too idealistic" and lacking "ways of solving actual problems", he believes that it provides "political reference for China’s scientific view of development", "gives socialist ideology room to expand" and offers "a theoretical basis for the establishment of fair international rules" on the environment.

He echoes much of eco-socialist thought, attacking international "environmental inequality", refusing to focus on technological fixes and arguing for the construction of "a harmonious, resource-saving and environmentally-friendly society". He also shows a knowledge of eco-socialist history, from the convergence of radical green politics and socialism and their political "red-green alliances" in the post-Soviet era. This focus on eco-socialism has informed an essay, On Socialist Ecological Civilisation, published in September 2006, which, according to chinadialogue, "sparked debate" in China.[56] The current Constitution of Bolivia, promulgated in 2009, is the first both ecologic and pro-socialist Constitution in the world, making the Bolivian state officially ecosocialist.[57]
Ecosocialist International Network (EIN) and other international eco-socialist organisations[edit]

In 2007, it was announced that attempts to form an Ecosocialist International Network(EIN) would be made and an inaugural meeting of the International occurred on October 7, 2007 in Paris.[58] The meeting attracted "more than 60 activists from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States" and elected a steering committee featuring representatives from Britain, the United States, Canada, France, Greece, Argentina, Brazil and Australia, including Joel Kovel, Michael Löwy, Derek Wall, Ian Angus (editor of Climate and Capitalism in Canada) and Ariel Salleh. The Committee states that it wants "to incorporate members from China, India, Africa, Oceania and Eastern Europe". EIN held its second international conference in January 2009, in association with the next World Social Forum in Brazil".[59] The conference released The Belem Ecosocialist Declaration.[60]

International networking by eco-socialists has already been seen in the Praxis Research and Education Center, a group on international researchers and activists. Based in Moscow and established in 1997, Praxis, as well as publishing books "by libertarian socialists, Marxist humanists, anarchists, [and] syndicalists", running the Victor SergeLibrary and opposing war in Chechnya, states that it believes "that capitalism has brought life on the planet near to the brink of catastrophe, and that a form of ecosocialism needs to emerge to replace capitalism before it is too late".[61][62]
Critique of capitalist expansion and globalisation[edit]

Merging aspects of Marxism, socialism, environmentalism and ecology, eco-socialists generally believe that the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, inequality and environmental degradation through globalization and imperialism under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.

In the Ecosocialist manifesto, Kovel and Löwy suggest that capitalist expansion causes both "crises of ecology" through "rampant industrialization" and "societal breakdown" that springs "from the form of imperialism known as globalization". They believe that capitalism's expansion "exposes ecosystems" to pollutants, habitat destruction and resource depletion, "reducing the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital", while submerging "the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power" as it penetrates communities through "consumerism and depoliticization".[1][page needed]

Other eco-socialists, like Wall, highlight how, in the Global South, free-market capitalism structures economies to produce export-geared crops that take water from traditional subsistence farms, increasing hunger and the likelihood of famine; furthermore, forests are increasingly cleared and enclosed to produce cash crops that separate people from their local means of production and aggravate poverty. Wall shows that many of the world's poor have access to the means of production through "non-monetised communal means of production", such as subsistence farming, but, despite providing for need and a level of prosperity, these are not included in conventional economics measures, like GNP.

Wall therefore views neo-liberal globalization as "part of the long struggle of the state and commercial interests to steal from those who subsist" by removing "access to the resources that sustain ordinary people across the globe".[20] Furthermore, Kovel sees neoliberalism as "a return to the pure logic of capital" that "has effectively swept away measures which had inhibited capital’s aggressivity, replacing them with naked exploitation of humanity and nature"; for Kovel, this "tearing down of boundaries and limits to accumulation is known as globalization", which was "a deliberate response to a serious accumulation crisis (in the 1970s) that had convinced the leaders of the global economy to install what we know as neoliberalism.".[63]

Furthermore, Guha and Martinez-Alier blame globalization for creating increased levels of waste and pollution, and then dumping the waste on the most vulnerable in society, particularly those in the Global South.[12] Others have also noted that capitalism disproportionately affects the poorest in the Global North as well, leading to examples of resistance such as the environmental justice movement in the United States, consisting of working-class people and ethnic minorities who highlight the tendency for waste dumps, major road projects and incinerators to be constructed around socially excluded areas. However, as Wall highlights, such campaigns are often ignored or persecuted precisely because they originate among the most marginalized in society: the African-Americanradical green religious group MOVE, campaigning for ecological revolution and animal rights from Philadelphia, had many members imprisoned or even killed by US authorities from the 1970s onwards.[20]

Eco-socialism disagrees with the elite theories of capitalism, which tend to label a specific class or social group as conspirators who construct a system that satisfies their greed and personal desires. Instead, eco-socialists suggest that the very system itself is self-perpetuating, fuelled by "extra-human" or "impersonal" forces. Kovel uses the Bhopal industrial disaster as an example. Many anti-corporate observers would blame the avarice of those at the top of many multi-national corporations, such as the Union CarbideCorporation in Bhopal, for seemingly isolated industrial accidents. Conversely, Kovel suggests that Union Carbide were experiencing a decrease in sales that led to falling profits, which, due to stock market conditions, translated into a drop in share values. The depreciation of share value made many shareholders sell their stock, weakening the company and leading to cost-cutting measures that eroded the safety procedures and mechanisms at the Bhopal site. Though this did not, in Kovel's mind, make the Bhopal disaster inevitable, he believes that it illustrates the effect market forces can have on increasing the likelihood of ecological and social problems.[13][page needed]
Use and exchange value[edit]

Eco-socialism focuses closely on Marx's theories about the contradiction between use values and exchange values. Kovel posits that, within a market economy, goods are not produced to meet needs but are produced to be exchanged for money that we then use to acquire other goods; as we have to keep selling in order to keep buying, we must persuade others to buy our goods just to ensure our survival, which leads to the production of goods with no previous use that can be sold to sustain our ability to buy other goods.[13][page needed]

Such goods, in an eco-socialist analysis, produce exchange values but have no use value. Eco-socialists like Kovel stress that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities - such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence – are unrewarded, while unnecessary commodities earn individuals huge fortunes and fuel consumerism and resource depletion.[13][page needed]
The "second contradiction" of capitalism[edit]

James O'Connor argues for a "second contradiction" of underproduction, to complement Marx's "first" contradiction of capital and labor. While the second contradiction is often considered a theory of environmental degradation, O'Connor's theory in fact goes much further. Building on the work of Karl Polanyi, along with Marx, O'Connor argues that capitalism necessarily undermines the "conditions of production" necessary to sustain the endless accumulation of capital. These conditions of production include soil, water, energy, and so forth. But they also include an adequate public education system, transportation infrastructures, and other services that are not produced directly by capital, but which capital needs in order accumulate effectively. As the conditions of production are exhausted, the costs of production for capital increase. For this reason, the second contradiction generates an underproduction crisis tendency, with the rising cost of inputs and labor, to complement the overproduction tendency of too many commodities for too few customers. Like Marx's contradiction of capital and labor, the second contradiction therefore threatens the system's existence.[64][65]

In addition, O'Connor believes that, in order to remedy environmental contradictions, the capitalist system innovates new technologies that overcome existing problems but introduce new ones.[64]

O'Connor cites nuclear power as an example, which he sees as a form of producing energy that is advertised as an alternative to carbon-intensive, non-renewable fossil fuels, but creates long-term radioactive waste and other dangers to health and security. While O'Connor believes that capitalism is capable of spreading out its economic supports so widely that it can afford to destroy one ecosystem before moving onto another, he and many other eco-socialists now fear that, with the onset of globalization, the system is running out of new ecosystems.[64] Kovel adds that capitalist firms have to continue to extract profit through a combination of intensive or extensive exploitation and selling to new markets, meaning that capitalism must grow indefinitely to exist, which he thinks is impossible on a planet of finite resources.[13][page needed]
The role of the state and transnational organisations[edit]

Capitalist expansion is seen by eco-socialists as being "hand in glove" with "corrupt and subservient client states" that repress dissent against the system, governed by international organisations "under the overall supervision of the Western powers and the superpower United States", which subordinate peripheral nations economically and militarily.[1][page needed] Kovel further claims that capitalism itself spurs conflict and, ultimately, war. Kovel states that the 'War on Terror', between Islamist extremists and the United States, is caused by "oil imperialism", whereby the capitalist nations require control over sources of energy, especially oil, which are necessary to continue intensive industrial growth - in the quest for control of such resources, Kovel argues that the capitalist nations, specifically the United States, have come into conflict with the predominantly Muslimnations where oil is often found.[13][page needed]

Eco-socialists believe that state or self-regulation of markets does not solve the crisis "because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation", which is "unacceptable" for a growth-orientated system; they believe that terrorism and revolutionary impulses cannot be tackled properly "because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of empire". Instead, eco-socialists feel that increasing repressive counter-terrorism increases alienation and causes further terrorism and believe that state counter-terrorist methods are, in Kovel and Löwy's words, "evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism". They echo Rosa Luxemburg's "stark choice" between "socialism or barbarism", which was believed to be a prediction of the coming of fascism and further forms of destructive capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century (Luxemburg was in fact murdered by proto-fascist Freikorps in the revolutionary atmosphere of Germany in 1919).[1][page needed]
Tensions within the eco-socialist discourse[edit]

Reflecting tensions within the environmental and socialist movements, there is some conflict of ideas. In practice however, a synthesis is emerging which calls for democratic regulation of industry in the interests of people and the environment, nationalisation of some key (environmental) industries, local democracy and an extension of co-ops and the library principle.[66]
Critique of other forms of green politics[edit]


This section relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. (May 2013)


Eco-socialists criticise many within the Green movement for not being overtly anti-capitalist, for working within the existing capitalist, statist system, for voluntarism, or for reliance on technological fixes. The eco-socialist ideology is based on a critique of other forms of Green politics, including various forms of green economics, localism, deep ecology, bioregionalism and even some manifestations of radical green ideologies such as eco-feminism and social ecology.

As Kovel puts it, eco-socialism differs from Green politics at the most fundamental level because the 'Four Pillars' of Green politics (and the 'Ten Key Values' of the US Green Party) do not include the demand for the emancipation of labour and the end of the separation between producers and the means of production.[13][page needed] Many eco-socialists also oppose Malthusianism[20] and are alarmed by the gulf between Green politics in the Global North and the Global South.[12]
Opposition to within-system approaches, voluntarism and technological fixes[edit]

Eco-socialists are highly critical of those Greens who favour "working within the system". While eco-socialists like Kovel recognise the ability of within-system approaches to raise awareness, and believe that "the struggle for an ecologically rational world must include a struggle for the state", he believes that the mainstream Green movement is too easily co-opted by the current powerful socio-political forces as it "passes from citizen-based activism to ponderous bureaucracies scuffling for 'a seat at the table'".[13][page needed]

For Kovel, capitalism is "happy to enlist" the Green movement for "convenience", "control over popular dissent" and "rationalization". He further attacks within-system green initiatives like carbon trading, which he sees as a "capitalist shell game" that turns pollution"into a fresh source of profit".[13][page needed] Brian Tokar has further criticised carbon trading in this way, suggesting that it augments existing class inequality and gives the "largest 'players'... substantial control over the whole 'game'".[67]

In addition, Kovel criticises the "defeatism" of voluntarism in some local forms of environmentalism that do not connect: he suggests that they can be "drawn off into individualism" or co-opted to the demands of capitalism, as in the case of certain recyclingprojects, where citizens are "induced to provide free labor" to waste managementindustries who are involved in the "capitalization of nature". He labels the notion on voluntarism "ecopolitics without struggle".[13][page needed]

Technological fixes to ecological problems are also rejected by eco-socialists. Saral Sarkarhas updated the thesis of 1970s 'limits to growth' to exemplify the limits of new capitalist technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells, which require large amounts of energy to split molecules to obtain hydrogen.[68] Furthermore, Kovel notes that "events in nature are reciprocal and multi-determined" and can therefore not be predictably "fixed"; socially, technologies cannot solve social problems because they are not "mechanical". He posits an eco-socialist analysis, developed from Marx, that patterns of production and social organisation are more important than the forms of technology used within a given configuration of society.[13][page needed]

Under capitalism, he suggests that technology "has been the sine qua non of growth" – thus he believes that, even in a world with hypothetical "free energy", the effect would be to lower the cost of automobile production, leading to the massive overproduction of vehicles, "collapsing infrastructure", chronic resource depletion and the "paving over" of the "remainder of nature". In the modern world, Kovel considers the supposed efficiency of new post-industrial commodities is a "plain illusion", as miniaturized components involve many substances and are therefore non-recyclable (and, theoretically, only simple substances could be retrieved by burning out-of-date equipment, releasing more pollutants). He is quick to warn "environmental liberals" against over-selling the virtues of renewable energies that cannot meet the mass energy consumption of the era; although he would still support renewable energy projects, he believes it is more important to restructure societies to reduce energy use before relying on renewable energytechnologies alone.[13][page needed]
Critique of Green economics[edit]

Eco-socialists have based their ideas for political strategy on a critique of several different trends in Green economics. At the most fundamental level, eco-socialists reject what Kovel calls "ecological economics" or the "ecological wing of mainstream economics" for being "uninterested in social transformation". He furthers rejects the Neo-Smithian school, who believe in Adam Smith's vision of "a capitalism of small producers, freely exchanging with each other", which is self-regulating and competitive.[13][page needed]

The school is represented by thinkers like David Korten who believe in "regulated markets" checked by government and civil society but, for Kovel, they do not provide a critique of the expansive nature of capitalism away from localised production and ignore "questions of class, gender or any other category of domination". Kovel also criticises their "fairy-tale" view of history, which refers to the abuse of "natural capital" by the materialism of the Scientific Revolution, an assumption that, in Kovel's eyes, seems to suggest that "nature had toiled to put the gift of capital into human hands", rather than capitalism being a product of social relations in human history.[13][page needed]

Other forms of community-based economics are also rejected by eco-socialists such as Kovel, including followers of E. F. Schumacher and some members of the cooperative movement, for advocating "no more than a very halting and isolated first step". He thinks that their principles are "only partially realizable within the institutions of cooperatives in capitalist society" because "the internal cooperation" of cooperatives is "forever hemmed in and compromised" by the need to expand value and compete within the market.[13][page needed] Marx also believed that cooperatives within capitalism make workers into "their own capitalist... by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour".[19]

For Kovel and other eco-socialists, community-based economics and Green localism are "a fantasy" because "strict localism belongs to the aboriginal stages of society" and would be an "ecological nightmare at present population levels" due to "heat losses from a multitude of dispersed sites, the squandering of scarce resources, the needless reproduction of effort, and cultural impoverishment". While he feels that small-scale production units are "an essential part of the path towards an ecological society", he sees them not as "an end in itself"; in his view, small enterprises can be either capitalist or socialist in their configuration and therefore must be "consistently anti-capitalist", through recognition and support of the emancipation of labour, and exist "in a dialectic with the whole of things", as human society will need large-scale projects, such as transport infrastructures.[13][page needed]

He highlights the work of steady-state theorist Herman Daly, who exemplifies what eco-socialists see as the good and bad points of ecological economics — while Daly offers a critique of capitalism and a desire for "workers ownership", he only believes in workers ownership "kept firmly within a capitalist market", ignoring the eco-socialist desire for struggle in the emancipation of labour and hoping that the interests of labour and management today can be improved so that they are "in harmony".[13][page needed]
Critique of deep ecology[edit]

Despite the inclusion of both in political factions like the 'Fundies' of the German Green Party, eco-socialists and deep ecologists hold markedly opposite views. Eco-socialists like Kovel have attacked deep ecology because, like other forms of Green politics and Green economics, it features "virtuous souls" who have "no internal connection with the critique of capitalism and the emancipation of labor". Kovel is particularly scathing about deep ecology and its "fatuous pronouncement" that Green politics is "neither left nor right, but ahead", which, for him, ignores the notion that "that which does not confront the system comes its instrument".[13][page needed]

Even more scathingly, Kovel suggests that in "its effort to decentre humanity within nature", deep ecologists can "go too far" and argue for the "splitting away of unwanted people", as evidenced by their desire to preserve wilderness by removing the groups that have lived there "from time immemorial". Kovel thinks that this lends legitimacy to "capitalist elites", like the US State Department and the World Bank, who can make preservation of wilderness a part of their projects that "have added value as sites for ecotourism" but remove people from their land. Between 1986 and 1996, Kovel notes that over three million people were displaced by "conservation projects"; in the making of the US National Parks, three hundred Shoshone Indians were killed in the development of Yosemite.[13][page needed]

Kovel believes that deep ecology has affected the rest of the Green movement and led to calls from restrictions on immigration, "often allying with reactionaries in a... cryptically racist quest".[13][page needed] Indeed, he finds traces of deep ecology in the "biological reduction" of Nazism, an ideology many "organicist thinkers" have found appealing, including Herbert Gruhl, a founder of the German Green Party (who subsequently left when it became more left-wing) and originator of the phrase "neither left nor right, but ahead". Kovel warns that, while 'ecofascism' is confined to a narrow band of far rightintellectuals and disaffected white power skinheads who involved themselves alongside far left groups in the anti-globalization movement, it may be "imposed as a revolution from above to install an authoritarian regime in order to preserve the main workings of the system" in times of crisis.[13][page needed]
Critique of bioregionalism[edit]

Bioregionalism, a philosophy developed by writers like Kirkpatrick Sale who believe in the self-sufficiency of "appropriate bioregional boundaries" drawn up by inhabitants of "an area",[69][page needed] has been thoroughly critiqued by Kovel, who fears that the "vagueness" of the area will lead to conflict and further boundaries between communities.[13][page needed] While Sale cites the bioregional living of Native Americans,[69][page needed] Kovel notes that such ideas are impossible to translate to populations of modern proportions, and evidences the fact that Native Americans held land in commons, rather than private property – thus, for eco-socialists, bioregionalism provides no understanding of what is needed to transform society, and what the inevitable "response of the capitalist state" would be to people constructing bioregionalism.[13][page needed]

Kovel also attacks the problems of self-sufficiency. Where Sale believes in self-sufficient regions "each developing the energy of its peculiar ecology", such as "wood in the northwest [USA]",[69][page needed] Kovel asks "how on earth" these can be made sufficient for regional needs, and notes the environmental damage of converting Seattle into a "forest-destroying and smoke-spewing wood-burning" city. Kovel also questions Sale's insistence on bioregions that do "not require connections with the outside, but within strict limits", and whether this precludes journeys to visit family members and other forms of travel.[13][page needed]
Critique of variants of eco-feminism[edit]

Like many variants of socialism and Green politics, eco-socialists recognise the importance of "the gendered bifurcation of nature" and support the emancipation of genderas it "is at the root of patriarchy and class". Nevertheless, while Kovel believes that "any path out of capitalism must also be eco-feminist", he criticises types of ecofeminism that are not anti-capitalist and can "essentialize women's closeness to nature and build from there, submerging history into nature", becoming more at place in the "comforts of the New Age Growth Centre". These limitations, for Kovel, "keep ecofeminism from becoming a coherent social movement".[13][page needed]
Critique of social ecology[edit]

While having much in common with the radical tradition of Social Ecology, eco-socialists still see themselves as distinct. Kovel believes this is because social ecologists see hierarchy "in-itself" as the cause of ecological destruction, whereas eco-socialists focus on gender and class domination embodied in capitalism and recognise that forms of authority that are not "an expropriation of human power for... self-aggrandizement", such as a student-teacher relationship that is "reciprocal and mutual", are beneficial.[13][page needed]

In practice, Kovel describes social ecology as continuing the anarchist tradition of non-violent direct action, which is "necessary" but "not sufficient" because "it leaves unspoken the question of building an ecological society beyond capital". Furthermore, Social Ecologists and anarchists tend to focus on the state alone, rather than the class relations behind state domination (in the view of Marxists). Kovel fears that this is political, springing from historic hostility to Marxism among anarchists and sectarianism, which he points out as a fault of the "brilliant" but "dogmatic" founder of social ecology, Murray Bookchin.[13][page needed]
Opposition to Malthusianism and Neo-Malthusianism[edit]

While Malthusianism and eco-socialism overlap within the Green movement because both address over-industrialism, and despite the fact that Eco-socialists, like many within the Green movement, are described as neo-Malthusian because of their criticism of economic growth, Eco-socialists are opposed to Malthusianism. This divergence stems from the difference between Marxist and Malthusian examinations of social injustice – whereas Marx blames inequality on class injustice, Malthus argued that the working-class remained poor because of their greater fertility and birth rates.

Neo-Malthusians have slightly modified this analysis by increasing their focus on overconsumption – nonetheless, eco-socialists find this attention inadequate. They point to the fact that Malthus did not thoroughly examine ecology and that Garrett Hardin, a key Neo-Malthusian, suggested that further enclosed and privatised land, as opposed to commons, would solve the chief environmental problem, which Hardin labeled the 'tragedy of the commons'.[20]
The "two varieties of environmentalism"[edit]

Guha and Martinez-Alier attack the gulf between what they see as the two "varieties of environmentalism" – the environmentalism of the North, an aesthetic environmentalism that is the privilege of wealthy people who no longer have basic material concerns, and the environmentalism of the South, where people's local environment is a source of communal wealth and such issues are a question of survival.[12] Nonetheless, other eco-socialists, such as Wall, have also pointed out that capitalism disproportionately affects the poorest in the Global North as well, leading to examples of resistance such as the environmental justice movement in the US and groups like MOVE.[20]
Critique of other forms of socialism[edit]

Eco-socialists choose to use the term 'socialist', despite "the failings of its twentieth century interpretations", because it "still stands for the supersession of capital" and thus "the name, and the reality" must "become adequate for this time".[1][page needed] Eco-socialists have nonetheless often diverged with other Marxist movements. Eco-socialism has also been partly influenced by and associated with agrarian socialism as well as some forms of Christian socialism, especially in the United States.


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Critique of 'Actually Existing Socialisms'[edit]

For Kovel and Lowy, eco-socialism is "the realization of the “first-epoch” socialisms" by resurrecting the notion of "free development of all producers", distancing themselves from "the attenuated, reformist aims of social democracy and the productivist structures of the bureaucratic variations of socialism", such as forms of Leninism and Stalinism.[1][page needed] They ground the failure of past socialist movements in "underdevelopment in the context of hostility by existing capitalist powers", which led to "the denial of internal democracy" and "emulation of capitalist productivism".[1][page needed]Kovel believes that the forms of 'actually existing socialism' consisted of "public ownership of the means of production", rather than meeting "the true definition" of socialism as "a free association of producers", with the Party-State bureaucracy acting as the "alienating substitute 'public'".[13][page needed]

In analysing the Russian Revolution, Kovel feels that "conspiratorial" revolutionary movements "cut off from the development of society" will "find society an inert mass requiring leadership from above". From this, he notes that the anti-democratic Tsaristheritage meant that the Bolsheviks, who were aided into power by World War One, were a minority who, when faced with a counter-revolution and invading Western powers, continued "the extraordinary needs of 'war communism'", which "put the seal of authoritarianism" on the revolution; thus, for Kovel, Lenin and Trotsky "resorted to terror", shut down the Soviets (workers' councils) and emulated "capitalist efficiency and productivism as a means of survival", setting the stage for Stalinism.[13][page needed]

Lenin, in Kovel's eyes, came to oppose the nascent Bolshevik environmentalism and its champion Aleksandr Bogdanov, who was later attacked for "idealism"; Kovel describes Lenin's philosophy as "a sharply dualistic materialism, rather similar to the Cartesianseparation of matter and consciousness, and perfectly tooled... to the active working over of the dead, dull matter by the human hand", which led him to want to overcome Russian backwardness through rapid industrialization. This tendency was, according to Kovel, augmented by a desire to catch-up with the West and the "severe crisis" of the revolution's first years.[13][page needed]

Furthermore, Kovel quotes Trotsky, who believed in a Communist "superman" who would "learn how to move rivers and mountains".[70][page needed] Kovel believes that, in Stalin's "revolution from above" and mass terror in response to the early 1930s economic crisis, Trotsky's writings "were given official imprimatur", despite the fact that Trotsky himself was eventually purged, as Stalinism attacked "the very notion of ecology... in addition to ecologies". Kovel adds that Stalin "would win the gold medal for enmity to nature", and that, in the face of massive environmental degradation, the inflexible Soviet bureaucracy became increasingly inefficient and unable to emulate capitalist accumulation, leading to a "vicious cycle" that led to its collapse.[13][page needed]
Critique of the wider socialist movement[edit]

Beyond the forms of 'actually existing socialism', Kovel criticises socialists in general as treating ecology "as an afterthought" and holding "a naive faith in the ecological capacities of a working-class defined by generations of capitalist production". He cites David McNally, who advocates increasing consumption levels under socialism, which, for Kovel, contradicts any notion of natural limits. He also criticises McNally's belief in releasing the "positive side of capital's self-expansion"[71][page needed] after the emancipation of labor; instead, Kovel argues that a socialist society would "seek not to become larger" but would rather become "more realized", choosing sufficiency and eschewing economic growth. Kovel further adds that the socialist movement was historically conditioned by its origins in the era of industrialization so that, when modern socialists like McNally advocate a socialism that "cannot be at the expense of the range of human satisfaction",[71][page needed] they fail "to recognize that these satisfactions can be problematic with respect to nature when they have been historically shaped by the domination of nature".[13][page needed]
Eco-socialist strategy[edit]

Eco-socialists generally advocate the non-violent dismantling of capitalism and the state, focusing on collective ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers and restoration of the Commons.[1][page needed] To get to an eco-socialist society, eco-socialists advocate working-class anti-capitalist resistance but also believe that there is potential for agency in autonomous, grassroots individuals and groups across the world who can build "prefigurative" projects for non-violent radical social change.[13][page needed]

These prefigurative steps go "beyond the market and the state"[20] and base production on the enhancement of use values, leading to the internationalization of resistance communities in an 'Eco-socialist Party' or network of grassroots groups focused on non-violent, radical social transformation. An 'Eco-socialist revolution' is then carried out.[13][page needed]


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Agency[edit]

Many eco-socialists, like Alan Roberts, have encouraged working-class action and resistance, such as the 'green ban' movement in which workers refuse to participate in projects that are ecologically harmful.[44] Similarly, Kovel focuses on working-classinvolvement in the formation of eco-socialist parties or their increased involvement in existing Green Parties; however, he believes that, unlike many other forms of socialistanalysis, "there is no privileged agent" or revolutionary class, and that there is potential for agency in numerous autonomous, grassroots individuals and groups who can build "prefigurative" projects for non-violent radical social change. He defines "prefiguration" as "the potential for the given to contain the lineaments of what is to be", meaning that "a moment toward the future exists embedded in every point of the social organism where a need arises".[13][page needed]

If "everything has prefigurative potential", Kovel notes that forms of potential ecologicalproduction will be "scattered", and thus suggests that "the task is to free them and connect them". While all "human ecosystems" have "ecosocialist potential", Kovel points out that ones such as the World Bank have low potential, whereas internally democratic anti-globalization "affinity groups" have a high potential through a dialectic that involves the "active bringing and holding together of negations", such as the group acting as an alternative institution ("production of an ecological/socialist alternative") and trying to shut down a G8 summit meeting ("resistance to capital"). Therefore, "practices that in the same motion enhance use-values and diminish exchange-values are the ideal" for eco-socialists.[13][page needed]
Prefiguration[edit]

For Kovel, the main prefigurative steps "are that people ruthlessly criticize the capitalist system... and that they include in this a consistent attack on the widespread belief that there can be no alternative to it", which will then "deligitimate the system and release people into struggle". Kovel justifies this by stating that "radical criticism of the given... can be a material force", even without an alternative, "because it can seize the mind of the masses of people", leading to "dynamic" and "exponential", rather than "incremental" and "linear", victories that spread rapidly. Following this, he advocates the expansion of the dialectical eco-socialist potential of groups through sustaining the confrontation and internal cohesion of human ecosystems, leading to an "activation" of potentials in others that will "spread across the whole social field" as "a new set of orienting principles" that define an ideology or "'party-life' formation".[13][page needed]

In the short-term, eco-socialists like Kovel advocate activities that have the "promise of breaking down the commodity form". This includes organizing labor, which is a "reconfiguring of the use-value of labor power"; forming cooperatives, allowing "a relatively free association of labor"; forming localised currencies, which he sees as "undercutting the value-basis of money"; and supporting "radical media" that, in his eyes, involve an "undoing of the fetishism of commodities". Arran Gare, Wall and Kovel have advocated economic localisation in the same vein as many in the Green movement, although they stress that it must be a prefigurative step rather than an end in itself.[20][72]

Kovel also advises political parties attempting to "democratize the state" that there should be "dialogue but no compromise" with established political parties, and that there must be "a continual association of electoral work with movement work" to avoid "being sucked back into the system". Such parties, he believes, should focus on "the local rungs of the political system" first, before running national campaigns that "challenge the existing system by the elementary means of exposing its broken promises".[13][page needed]

Kovel believes in building prefigurations around forms of production based on use values, which will provide a practical vision of a post-capitalist, post-statist system. Such projects include Indymedia ("a democratic rendering of the use-values of new technologies such as the Internet, and a continual involvement in wider struggle"), open-source software, Wikipedia, public libraries and many other initiatives, especially those developed within the anti-globalisation movement.[13][page needed] These strategies, in Wall's words, "go beyond the market and the state" by rejecting the supposed dichotomy between private enterpriseand state-owned production, while also rejecting any combination of the two through a mixed economy. He states that these present forms of "amphibious politics", which are "half in the dirty water of the present but seeking to move on to a new, unexplored territory".[20]

Wall suggests that open source software, for example, opens up "a new form of commonsregime in cyberspace", which he praises as production "for the pleasure of invention" that gives "access to resources without exchange". He believes that open source has "bypassed" both the market and the state, and could provide "developing countries with free access to vital computer software". Furthermore, he suggests that an "open sourceeconomy" means that "the barrier between user and provider is eroded", allowing for "cooperative creativity". He links this to Marxism and the notion of usufruct, asserting that "Marx would have been a Firefox user".[20]
Internationalization of prefiguration and the 'Eco-socialist Party'[edit]

Many eco-socialists have noted that the potential for building such projects is easier for media workers than for those in heavy industry because of the decline in trade unionismand the globalized division of labor which divides workers. However, Kovel believes that examples like the Christian Bruderhof Communities (despite elements of patriarchy that he attacks) show that "communistic" organizations can "survive rather well in a heavily industrialized market" if they are "protected" from the dependence on the market by "anti-capitalist intentionality".[73] He further posits that class struggle is "internationalized in the face of globalization", as evidenced by a wave of strikes across the Global South in the first half of the year 2000; indeed, he says that "labor's most cherished values are already immanently ecocentric".[13][page needed]

Kovel therefore thinks that these universalizing tendencies must lead to the formation of "a consciously 'Ecosocialist Party'" that is neither like a parliamentary or vanguardist party. Instead, Kovel advocates a form of political party "grounded in communities of resistance", where delegates from these communities form the core of the party's activists, and these delegates and the "open and transparent" assembly they form are subject to recall and regular rotation of members. He holds up the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Gaviotas movement as examples of such communities, which "are produced outside capitalist circuits" and show that "there can be no single way valid for all peoples".[13][page needed]

Nonetheless, he also firmly believes in connecting these movements, stating that "ecosocialism will be international or it will be nothing" and hoping that the Ecosocialist Party can retain the autonomy of local communities while supporting them materially. With an ever-expanding party, Kovel hopes that "defections" by capitalists will occur, leading eventually to the armed forces and police who, in joining the revolution, will signify that "the turning point is reached".[13][page needed]
'The Revolution' and transition to eco-socialism[edit]


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'The Revolution' as envisaged by eco-socialists involves an immediate socio-political transition. Internationally, eco-socialists believe in a reform of the nature of money and the formation of a 'World People's Trade Organisation' (WPTO) that democratizes and improves world trade through the calculation of an 'Ecological Price' (EP) for goods. This would then be followed by a transformation of socioeconomic conditions towards ecological production, commons land and notions of usufruct (that seek to improve the common property possessed by society) to end private property. Eco-socialists assert that this must be carried out with adherence to non-violence[13][page needed]
The immediate aftermath of the revolution[edit]

Eco-socialists like Kovel use the term "Eco-socialist revolution" to describe the transition to an eco-socialist world society. In the immediate socio-political transition, he believes that four groups will emerge from the revolution – revolutionaries, those "whose productive activity is directly compatible with ecological production" (such as nurses, schoolteachers, librarians, independent farmers and many other examples), those "whose pre-revolutionary practice was given over to capital" (including the bourgeoisie, advertising executives and more) and "the workers whose activity added surplus value to capitalist commodities".[13][page needed]

In terms of political organisation, he advocates an "interim assembly" made up of the revolutionaries that can "devise incentives to make sure that vital functions are maintained" (such as short-term continuation of "differential remuneration" for labor), "handle the redistribution of social roles and assets", convene "in widespread locations", and send delegates to regional, state, national and international organisations, where every level has an "executive council" that is rotated and can be recalled. From there, he asserts that "productive communities" will "form the political as well as economic unit of society" and "organize others" to make a transition to eco-socialist production.[13][page needed]

He adds that people will be allowed to be members of any community they choose with "associate membership" of others, such as a doctor having main membership of healthcare communities as a doctor and associate membership of child-rearing communities as a father. Each locality would, in Kovel’s eyes, require one community that administered the areas of jurisdiction through an elected assembly. High-level assemblies would have additional "supervisory" roles over localities to monitor the development of ecosystemic integrity, and administer "society-wide services" like transport in "state-like functions", before the interim assembly can transfer responsibilities to "the level of the society as a whole through appropriate and democratically responsive committees".[13][page needed]
Transnational trade and capital reform[edit]

Part of the eco-socialist transition, in Kovel’s eyes, is the reforming money to retain its use in "enabling exchanges" while reducing its functions as "a commodity in its own right" and "repository of value". He argues for directing money to "enhancement of use-values" through a "subsidization of use-values" that "preserves the functioning core of the economy while gaining time and space for rebuilding it". Internationally, he believes in the immediate cessation of speculation in currencies ("breaking down the function of money as commodity, and redirecting funds on use-values"), the cancellation of the debt of the Global South ("breaking the back of the value function" of money) and the redirecting the "vast reservoir of mainly phony value" to reparations and "ecologically sound development". He suggests the end of military aid and other forms of support to "comprador elites in the South" will eventually "lead to their collapse".[13][page needed]

In terms of trade, Kovel advocates a ‘World People’s Trade Organization’ (WPTO), "responsible to a confederation of popular bodies", in which "the degree of control over trade is... proportional to involvement with production", meaning that "farmers would have a special say over food trade" and so on. He posits that the WPTO should have an elected council that will oversee a reform of prices in favour of an ‘Ecological Price’ (EP) "determined by the difference between actual use-values and fully realized ones", thus having low tariffs for forms of ecological production like organic agriculture; he also envisages the high tariffs on non-ecological production providing subsidies to ecological production units.[13][page needed]

The EP would also internalize the costs of current externalities (like pollution) and "would be set as a function of the distance traded", reducing the effects of long-distance transport like carbon emissions and increased packaging of goods. He thinks that this will provide a "standard of transformation" for non-ecological industries, like the automobile industry, thus spurring changes towards ecological production.[13][page needed]
Ecological production[edit]

Eco-socialists pursue "ecological production" that, according to Kovel, goes beyond the socialist vision of the emancipation of labor to "the realization of use-values and the appropriation of intrinsic value". He envisions a form of production in which "the making of a thing becomes part of the thing made" so that, using a high quality meal as an analogy, "pleasure would obtain for the cooking of the meal" - thus activities "reserved as hobbies under capitalism" would "compose the fabric of everyday life" under eco-socialism.[13][page needed]

This, for Kovel, is achieved if labor is "freely chosen and developed... with a fully realized use-value" achieved by a "negation" of exchange-value, and he exemplifies the Food Not Bombs project for adopting this. He believes that the notion of "mutual recognition... for the process as well as the product" will avoid exploitation and hierarchy. With production allowing humanity to "live more directly and receptively embedded in nature", Kovel predicts that "a reorientation of human need" will occur that recognises ecological limits and sees technology as "fully participant in the life of eco-systems", thus removing it from profit-making exercises.[13][page needed]

In the course on an Eco-socialist revolution, writers like Kovel advocate a "rapid conversion to ecosocialist production" for all enterprises, followed by "restoring ecosystemic integrity to the workplace" through steps like workers ownership. He then believes that the new enterprises can build "socially developed plans" of production for societal needs, such as efficient light-rail transport components. At the same time, Kovel argues for the transformation of essential but, under capitalism, non-productive labour, such as child care, into productive labour, "thereby giving reproductive labour a status equivalent to productive labour".[13][page needed]

During such a transition, he believes that income should be guaranteed and that money will still be used under "new conditions of value… according to use and to the degree to which ecosystem integrity is developed and advanced by any particular production". Within this structure, Kovel asserts that markets and will become unnecessary – although "market phenomena" in personal exchanges and other small instances might be adopted – and communities and elected assemblies will democratically decide on the allocation of resources.[13][page needed] Istvan Meszaros believes that such "genuinely planned and self-managed (as opposed to bureaucratically planned from above) productive activities" are essential if eco-socialism is to meet its "fundamental objectives".[74]

Eco-socialists are quick to assert that their focus on "production" does not mean that there will be an increase in production and labor under Eco-socialism. Kovel thinks that the emancipation of labor and the realization of use-value will allow "the spheres of work and culture to be reintegrated". He cites the example of Paraguayan Indian communities (organised by Jesuits) in the eighteenth century who made sure that all community members learned musical instruments, and had labourers take musical instruments to the fields and takes turns playing music or harvesting.[13][page needed]
Commons, property and 'usufruct'[edit]

Most eco-socialists, including Guha and Martinez Alier, echo subsistence eco-feministslike Vandana Shiva when they argue for the restoration of commons land over private property. They blame ecological degradation on the inclination to short-term, profit-inspired decisions inherent within a market system. For them, privatization of land strips people of their local communal resources in the name of creating markets for neo-liberal globalisation, which benefits a minority. In their view, successful commons systems have been set up around the world throughout history to manage areas cooperatively, based on long-term needs and sustainability instead of short-term profit.[12]

Many eco-socialists focus on a modified version of the notion of ‘Usufruct’ to replace capitalist private property arrangements. As a legal term, Usufruct refers to the legal right to use and derive profit or benefit from property that belongs to another person, as long as the property is not damaged. According to eco-socialists like Kovel, a modern interpretation of the idea is "where one uses, enjoys – and through that, improves – another’s property", as its Latin etymology "condenses the two meanings of use – as in use-value, and enjoyment – and as in the gratification expressed in freely associated labour". The idea, according to Kovel, has roots in the Code of Hammurabi and was first mentioned in Roman law "where it applied to ambiguities between masters and slaves with respect to property"; it also features in Islamic Sharia law, Aztec law and the Napoleonic Code.[13][page needed]

Crucially for eco-socialists, Marx mentioned the idea when he stated that human beings are no more than the planet’s "usufructaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition".[19] Kovel and others have taken on this reading, asserting that, in an eco-socialist society, "everyone will have... rights of use and ownership over those means of production necessary to express the creativity of human nature", namely "a place of one’s own" to decorate to personal taste, some personal possessions, the body and its attendant sexual and reproductive rights.[13][page needed]

However, Kovel sees property as "self-contradictory" because individuals emerge "in a tissue of social relations" and "nested circles", with the self at the centre and extended circles where "issues of sharing arise from early childhood on". He believes that "the full self is enhanced more by giving than by taking" and that eco-socialism is realized when material possessions weigh "lightly" upon the self – thus restoration of use-value allows things to be taken "concretely and sensuously" but "lightly, since things are enjoyed for themselves and not as buttresses for a shaky ego".[13][page needed]

This, for Kovel, reverses what Marxists see as the commodity fetishism and atomization of individuals (through the "unappeasable craving" for "having and excluding others from having") under capitalism. Under eco-socialism, he therefore believes that enhancement of use-value will lead to differentiated ownership between the individual and the collective, where there are "distinct limits on the amount of property individuals control" and no-one can take control of resources that "would permit the alienation of means of production from another". He then hopes that the "hubris" of the notion of "ownership of the planet" will be replaced with usufruct.[13][page needed]
Non-violence[edit]

Most eco-socialists are involved in peace and antiwar movements, and eco-socialist writers, like Kovel, generally believe that "violence is the rupturing of ecosystems" and is therefore "deeply contrary to ecosocialist values". Kovel believes that revolutionary movements must prepare for post-revolutionary violence from counter-revolutionary sources by "prior development of the democratic sphere" within the movement, because "to the degree that people are capable of self-government, so will they turn away from violence and retribution" for "a self-governed people cannot be pushed around by any alien government". It is therefore essential, in Kovel's view, that the revolution "takes place in" or spreads quickly to the United States, which "is capital's gendarme and will crush any serious threat", and that revolutionaries reject the death penalty and retribution against former opponents or counter-revolutionaries.[13][page needed]
Criticisms[edit]

While in many ways the criticisms of eco-socialism combine the traditional criticisms of both socialism and Green politics, there are unique critiques of eco-socialism, which are largely from within the traditional Socialist or Green movements themselves, along with conservative criticisms.

Some socialists are critical of the word 'eco-socialism'. David Reilly, who questions whether his argument is improved by the use of an "exotic word", argues instead that the "real socialism" is "also a green or 'eco'" one that you get to "by dint of struggle".[75] Other socialists, like Paul Hampton of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (a British third camp socialist party), see eco-socialism as "classless ecology", wherein eco-socialists have "given up on the working class" as the privileged agent of struggle by "borrowing bits from Marx but missing the locus of Marxist politics".[76]

Writing in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Doug Boucher, Peter Caplan, David Schwartzmanand Jane Zara criticise eco-socialists in general (and Joel Kovel in particular) for a deterministic "catastrophism" that overlooks "the countervailing tendencies of both popular struggles and the efforts of capitalist governments to rationalize the system" and the "accomplishments of the labor movement" that "demonstrate that despite the interests and desires of capitalists, progress toward social justice is possible". They argue that an ecological socialism must be "built on hope, not fear".[77]

Conservatives have criticised the perceived opportunism of left-wing groups who have increased their focus on green issues since the fall of communism. Fred L. Smith Jr., President of the Competitive Enterprise Institute think-tank, exemplifies the conservative critique of left Greens, attacking the "pantheism" of the Green movement and conflating "eco-paganism" with eco-socialism. Like many conservative critics, Smith uses the term 'eco-socialism' to attack non-socialist environmentalists for advocating restrictions on the market-based solutions to ecological problems. He nevertheless wrongly claims that eco-socialists endorse "the Malthusian view of the relationship between man and nature", and states that Al Gore, a former Democratic Party Vice President of the United States and now a climate change campaigner, is an eco-socialist, despite the fact that Gore has never used this term and is not recognised as a such by other followers of either Green politics or socialism.[78]

Some environmentalists and conservationists have criticised eco-socialism from within the Green movement. In a review of Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature, David M. Johnscriticises eco-socialism for not offering "suggestions about near term conservation policy" and focusing exclusively on long-term societal transformation. Johns believes that species extinction "started much earlier" than capitalism and suggests that eco-socialism neglects the fact that an ecological society will need to transcend the destructiveness found in "all large-scale societies".[79] the very tendency that Kovel himself attacks among capitalists and traditional leftists who attempt to reduce nature to "linear" human models.[13][page needed] Johns questions whether non-hierarchical social systems can provide for billions of people, and criticises eco-socialists for neglecting issues of population pressure. Furthermore, Johns describes Kovel's argument that human hierarchy is founded on raiding to steal women as "archaic".
List of eco-socialists[edit]

Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Elmar Altvater
Ian Angus
Rudolph Bahro
John Bellamy Foster
Murray Bookchin
Walt Brown
Barry Commoner
Jutta Ditfurth
Ramachandra Guha
Donna Haraway
Joan Herrera i Torres
Jesse Klaver
Joel Kovel
Enrique Leff
Michael Löwy
Caroline Lucas
Andreas Malm
Elizabeth May
David McReynolds
Chico Mendes
William Morris
James O'Connor (academic)
David Orton
Lee Rhiannon
Raül Romeva
Manuel Sacristán
Ariel Salleh
Joan Saura
Jill Stein
Alan Thornett
Derek Wall
Peter Tatchell
Gerrard Winstanley
See also[edit]

Agrarian socialism
Anarcho-primitivism
Anti-capitalism
Anti-globalization movement
Diggers movement
Eco-capitalism
Eco-communalism
Ecological democracy
Ecological economics
Environmental justice
Green anarchism
Green left
Green libertarianism
Green politics and parties
Marxist philosophy of nature
Radical environmentalism
Social ecology
Veganarchism
References[edit]

^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l Kovel, J.; Löwy, M. (2001). An ecosocialist manifesto.
^ "Labour 'never challenged the austerity narrative' | Owen Jones talks to Caroline Lucas". YouTube. 2015-07-31. Retrieved 2016-07-04.
^ "A Blogroll, please" (Blog). Rats Nest.
^ "No Watermelons Allowed" (Blog).
^ "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow". The American Spectator. 13 July 2007.
^ "Stolen watermelons". Media Watch.
^ "Brown dismisses Govt name-calling". ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). September 7, 2004.
^ Jump up to:a b "The Watermelon".
^ FrontPage magazine.com :: The Green Menace by Christopher Archangelli
^ "Triumph for 'Fundies' hits Green Party", Daily Mail, 21 September 1989
^ Mark Lynas' New Statesman Blog - Even Greens need leaders
^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Guha, R. and Martinez-Alier, J., Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, 1997
^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar asat au av aw ax ay az ba bb bc bd be bf bg bh bi bj bk bl bm Kovel, J., The Enemy of Nature, 2002.
^ Eckersley, R., Environmentalism and Political Theory, 1992 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press)
^ Clark, J., The Anarchist Moment, 1984 (Montreal: Black Rose)
^ Benton, T. (ed.), The Greening of Marxism, 1996 (New York: Guildford)
^ Foster, J. B., Marx's Ecology, 2000 (New York: Monthly Review Press)
^ Burkett, P., Marx and Nature, 1999 (New York: St. Martin's Press)
^ Jump up to:a b c Marx, K., Capital Vol. 3., 1894
^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k Wall, D., Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements, 2005
^ Jump up to:a b c Green Left (Green Party of England and Wales) Website Archived 5 December 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Gare, A., Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken, in Benton, E. (ed.) The Greening of Marxism, 1996
^ "Su obra más representativa es Walden, aparecida en 1854, aunque redactada entre 1845 y 1847, cuando Thoreau decide instalarse en el aislamiento de una cabaña en el bosque, y vivir en íntimo contacto con la naturaleza, en una vida de soledad y sobriedad. De esta experiencia, su filosofía trata de transmitirnos la idea que resulta necesario un retorno respetuoso a la naturaleza, y que la felicidad es sobre todo fruto de la riqueza interior y de la armonía de los individuos con el entorno natural. Muchos han visto en Thoreau a uno de los precursores del ecologismo y del anarquismo primitivista representado en la actualidad por John Zerzan. Para George Woodcock, esta actitud puede estar también motivada por una cierta idea de resistencia al progreso y de rechazo al materialismo creciente que caracteriza la sociedad norteamericana de mediados de siglo XIX.""LA INSUMISIÓN VOLUNTARIA. EL ANARQUISMO INDIVIDUALISTA ESPAÑOL DURANTE LA DICTADURA Y LA SEGUNDA REPÚBLICA (1923-1938)" by Xavier Diez Archived 26 May 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Jump up to:a b EL NATURISMO LIBERTARIO EN LA PENÍNSULA IBÉRICA (1890-1939) by Jose Maria Rosello Archived 2 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine.
^ "The pioneers" Archived 25 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine.
^ "A.3 What types of anarchism are there? - Anarchist Writers".
^ Introduction to Anarchism and countercultural politics in early twentieth-century Cuba by Kirwin R. Shaffer
^ "LA INSUMISIÓN VOLUNTARIA. EL ANARQUISMO INDIVIDUALISTA ESPAÑOL DURANTE LA DICTADURA Y LA SEGUNDA REPÚBLICA (1923-1938)" by Xavier DiezArchived 26 May 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Kirkpatrick Sale, foreword to E.P. Dutton 1978 edition of Leopold Kohr's Breakdown of Nations.
^ Ellul, Jacques (1988). Anarchy and Christianity. Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 71–74. ISBN 9780802804952. The first beast comes up from the sea...It is given 'all authority and power over every tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation' (13:7). All who dwell on earth worship it. Political power could hardly, I think, be more expressly described, for it is this power which has authority, which controls military force, and which compels adoration (i.e., absolute obedience).
^ Jump up to:a b Robert Graham, Anarchism Volume Two: The Anarchist Current (1939–2006). Black Rose Books, 2009 ISBN 1551643103, (p.72-5, p. 272).
^ "While almost all forms of modern anarchism consider themselves to have an ecological dimension, the specifically eco-anarchist thread within anarchism has two main focal points, Social Ecology and "primitivist"."An Anarchist FAQ by Various authors
^ Bookchin, Murray (1994). The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Black Rose Books. pp. 119–120. ISBN 978-1-55164-018-1.
^ "Anarchism In America documentary". Youtube.com. 2007-01-09. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
^ "A Short Biography of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl". Dwardmac.pitzer.edu. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
^ "Ecology and Revolution". Dwardmac.pitzer.edu. 2004-06-16. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
^ "Post-scarcity anarchism, [WorldCat.org]". WorldCat.org. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
^ Smith, Mark (1999). Thinking through the Environment. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-21172-7.
^ Jump up to:a b Call, Lewis (2002). Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-0522-1.
^ "Post-Scarcity Anarchism". AK Press. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
^ Commoner, B., The Closing Circle, 1972
^ Bahro, R., The Alternative in Eastern Europe, 1978
^ Bahro, R., Socialism and Survival, 1982
^ Jump up to:a b Roberts, A., The Self-Managing Environment, 1979
^ Trainer, T., Abandon Affluence!, 1985
^ "Green Politics at an impasse" http://www.dsp.org.au/node/140
^ "Environment, Capitalism and Socialism - DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE".
^ Mellor, M., Breaking the Boundaries: Towards a Feminist, Green Socialism, 1992
^ Saller, A., Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, 1997
^ Pepper, D., Ecosocialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice, 1994
^ "Ecosocialist International Founded - UK Indymedia".
^ "Green Party of the United States – National Committee Voting – Proposal Details". Retrieved 27 July 2016.
^ "socialistresistance.net".
^ "Resistance Books".
^ The New Statesman 18 December 2006 - Person of the year: The man making China green
^ "The rich consume and the poor suffer the pollution".
^ https://web.archive.org/web/20110726013753/http://www.ecocon.org/constitution-of/bolivia-2009/. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011. Retrieved 18 July 2011. Missing or empty |title= (help)
^ Climate and Capitalism Blog - International Ecosocialist Meeting Planned
^ Ecosocialist International Network Website
^ http://www.ecosocialistnetwork.org/
^ United States Social Forum - Ecosocialism vs. Capitalist Ecoside: how do we get from here to there?
^ "Научно-просветительский центр "Праксис"".
^ Joel Kovel "Why Ecosocialism Today?", New Socialist, Issue No. 61 (Summer 2007), p.10. Retrieved 13-01-2016.
^ Jump up to:a b c O'Connor, J., Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, 1998
^ Moore, Jason W. 2011. "Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-Ecology," The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1), 1-46, http://www.jasonwmoore.com/Essays.html
^ For example, Scottish Green Peter McColl argues that elected governments should abolish poverty through a Citizens Income scheme, regulate against social and environmental malpractice and encourage environmental good practice through state procurement. At the same time economic and political power should be devolved as far as is possible through co-operatives, and increased local decision making. By putting political and economic power into the hands of the people most likely to be affected by environmental injustice it is less likely that the injustice will take place - see http://www.redflag.org.uk/frontline/frJune08/ecosoc2.html
^ Tokar, B., Earth for Sale, 1997 (Boston:South End Press)
^ Sarkar, S., Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?: A Critical Analysis of Humanity's Fundamental Choices, 1999 (London:Zed Books)
^ Jump up to:a b c Sale, K., 'Principle of Bioregionalism', in Goldsmith, E., and Mander, J. (eds),The Case against the Global Economy, Sierra Club Books (San Francisco, CA), 1996
^ Trotsky, L., Literature and Revolution, 1924
^ Jump up to:a b McNally, D., Against the Market, 1993 (London: Verso Books)
^ Gare, A., Creating an ecological socialist future in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 11 (2), 2000
^ "Life Among The Bruderhof". The American Conservative. Retrieved 2017-05-25.
^ Meszaros, I., Beyond Capital, 1996 (New York:Monthly Review Press)
^ LeftClick Blog: What is ecosocialism?
^ PaulHampton (28 May 2007). "Joel Kovel meeting - why I'm sceptical about "eco-socialism"".
^ Capitalism Nature Socialism September 2003 - Another look at the end of the worldArchived 12 January 2013 at Archive.today
^ Policy Counsel - Eco-Paganism - Eco-socialism: Severe Threats to America's Future
^ BERG, JOHN C. (1 March 2003). "Reviews Editor's Introduction". New Political Science. 25 (1): 129–143. doi:10.1080/0739314032000071262 – via IngentaConnect.
External links[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Eco-socialism

An ecosocialist manifesto by Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy on Ozleft
The Ecosocialist International Network
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS) (Journal).
The politics of ecosocialism - transforming welfare (book) (2015).
Climate and Capitalism. (An online journal edited by Ian Angus).
Democratic Socialist Perspective, Environment, Capitalism & Socialism (book) (1999).
Extract from Ecology and Socialism by The Socialist Party of Great Britain on Common Voice
Takis Fotopoulos, "Is de-growth compatible with a market economy?," The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2007).
Another Green World: Derek Wall's Ecosocialist Blog
Dan Jakopovich, "Green Unionism In Theory and Practice," Synthesis/Regeneration 43 (Spring 2007).
(preview) Dan Jakopovich, "Uniting to Win: Labor-Environmental Alliances,"Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 20, Is. 2 (2009), pages 74–96
Ecosocialism: A Weblog of Ecosocialist Opinion
Amazon.com: So You'd Like to... Replace Capitalism with Ecosocialism
Robyn Eckersley, Ecosocialism: The Post-Marxist Svnthesis
Robin Hahnel "Protecting the Environment in a Participatory Economy,"Synthesis/Regeneration 34 (Spring 2004). Retrieved (31-03-2013).
Ecosocialism: Where Anticapitalism and Ecology Intersect, video presentation by Ian Angus
After Bali: The Global Fight for Climate Justice , video presentation by Patrick Bond
The official site of "Ecosocialists Greece" Political Organization
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark "Capitalism and Ecological Destruction,"Monthly Review (November 2009). Retrieved (31-03-2013).
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff "What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism" (book)
Ecosocialist Horizons
Categories:
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The Emergence of Ecosocialism

The Emergence of Ecosocialism


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.

Remembering Joel Kovel, a towering pioneer of ecosocialism

Remembering Joel Kovel, a towering pioneer of ecosocialism





1936-2018
Remembering Joel Kovel, a towering pioneer of ecosocialism
Posted on May 31, 2018


Joel Kovel, August 27, 1936 – April 30, 2018

Michael Löwy reflects on the life and contributions of our friend and comrade Joel Kovel, who died on April 30.

by Michael Löwy

The passing of Joel Kovel is a great loss not only for us, his friends and collaborators, but for the broad international ecosocialist movement, of which he was a towering pioneer.

I first met Joel at an International Marxist Conference at the University of Nanterre (Paris), convened in 2001 by my friends of the journal Actuel Marx. We immediately sympathised, and found a common interest: the urgent need to bring together the “Red” and the “Green,” under the aegis of a new concept: Ecosocialism. We felt that the most of the left had not yet understood the need for an ecological turn, and we believed one should attempt to contribute to such a re-orientation. The Fourth International, with which I was associated, had just decided to adopt an ecosocialist program, and Joel felt encouraged by this decision.

Joel tells the story of our meeting in The Lost Traveller’s Dream, but, in his unassuming and modest way, does not say that the idea of writing an International Ecosocialist Manifesto was his. I immediately agreed with the proposition and we worked out the document together, after several drafts. As he says, it was like sending a message in a bottle thrown into the sea.

Curiously enough, some people picked the bottle, and we were able to gather a meeting at Montreuil in the outskirts of Paris in 2007, with the help of Ian Angus, and the support of the well-known Peruvian indigenous leader Hugo Blanco, who explained to us: “We, the indigenous communities in Latin America, have been practicing ecosocialism for centuries.”

At that meeting, which was enlivened by Joel’s enthusiasm and energy, it was decided to found an Ecosocialist International Network (EIN). It was a short lived experiment, but it had one great success: the Belem Declaration. This Second International Ecosocialist Manifesto, written in 2008 by Joel, Ian and myself, was signed by hundreds of ecosocialists from 40 countries, and distributed — with the help of our Brazilian ecosocialist comrades — in Portuguese and English to the participants of the World Social Forum in the Amazonian town of Belem do Para (North of Brazil, 2009).

By that time Joel had already published his masterpiece, The Enemy of Nature, one of the most powerful ecological condemnations of capitalism ever written, a classic of ecosocialism for the generations to come. During all these years we remained in contact by mail, but also by occasional meetings, in Paris, in Brazil or in New York. A real friendship developed, based on mutual understanding, and a common desire to build ecosocialism as a network of ideas and action. During the last years he invested his generous energy in developing ecosocialism in the US.

His decision to convert to Christianity brought us together in our interest in liberation theology. I remember one of the last times we met: it was when he organized, in a Church, a projection of a film on Monsignor Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador, murdered by paramilitary gangs for denouncing the brutal repression of the popular movements.

I have a great debt towards Joel, I learned much from his writings and was inspired by his inflexible anticapitalist commitment. When he wrote his autobiography, I sent him a short notice for the back cover, which summarizes the importance of his contribution to our movement :

“Bringing together radical spirituality, Marxist socialism and an ecological cosmovision, Joel Kovel is an unrepentant fighter against ‘the Enemy of Nature’ — and of Humanity: Capitalism. By his thought and action, he is a pioneer of the ecosocialist international movement. His dreams are open windows on a different future.”

In an inscription in the copy of the book which he sent me in 2017 he called me “a companion for those insane times,”, and signed it “Joel the Dreamer.” The times are insane indeed, but with the help of Joel’s red and green message, the hope for a sane future is not lost.

If life in the planet Earth is saved from the ecological catastrophe produced by capitalist insanity, Joel Kovel will be remembered as one of the first who raised a prophetic call for radical change, a rational and spirited call for ecosocialism.


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3 Responses to Remembering Joel Kovel, a towering pioneer of ecosocialism

Philip Ward June 1, 2018 at 6:08 am #


I only ecojntered Joel once, at a Fourth International school on ecosocialism in Amsterdam in about 2008. He gave a talk where he introduced (at least to me) the concept of intrinsic value of ecosystems, as a counter to those who only think of them in terms of exchange value and “ecosystem services”. It is useful to think of a broader approach to ecosystems, but I think that ultimately it is not possible to escape human/scientific judgements about how to intervene to improve them: it’s just that we need to abandon the criteria imposed by the dictates of capitalism.

I remember being struck by a passage jn The Enemy of Nature where Joel recohnts Trotsky’s Promethean views on technology and nature. It is probably worth looking into this further, to see how this pervades others of his writings – The Revolution Betrayed springs to mind – and thereby made the trotskyist movement late in taking up environmental issues.. I should add that the Fourth International “provisinally approved” the resolution Socialist Revolution and ecology at its World Congress in 1991. I don’t know what became of itcafter that. The 2001 congress document was controversial, as some thought it downplayed the significance of climate change. Apols for typos: on my tablet it’s almost impossible to move around the text on this site!


Rory Short June 1, 2018 at 1:08 pm #


Humanity is part of Nature and if we behave in ways other than ways that benefit Nature as a whole then those ways are wrong and thus not in our long term interests. The behaviours espoused by the Capitalist system are just such behaviours and therefore clearly not in humanity’s long term interests.


cambiz a. khosravi June 27, 2018 at 10:39 am #


In memoriam to Joel Kovel 1936 – April 30, 2018.

A critical review of Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” It deals with the fundamental reasons why our world is having such great difficulty dealing with global warming and other environmental and socioeconomic problems. This video was produced by Cambiz Khosravi and Joel Kovel.
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Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

Monthly Review | Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy



Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
by Kohei Saito

$29.00 – $95.00


Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2018

Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world’s most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a “Promethean.” According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance—a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright.

Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx’s ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx’s central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks—published only recently and still being translated—Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. “It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx’s] critique of political economy,” Saito writes, “if one ignores its ecological dimension.”

Saito’s book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes—crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialismshows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx’s critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world.


Saito’s book is marked by a deep knowledge of Marxist theory, especially the debate over Marxism and ecology. Saito brings a major new source into the debate: Marx’s forthcoming notebooks on ecology. This results in a new interpretation of Marx, one that is timely, given the economic and ecological crises of contemporary capitalism.

—Kevin B. Anderson, author, Marx at the Margins

There are already important studies about ecological aspects in Marx’s theory, but Kohei Saito is the first to go deeply into Marx’s notebooks, discussing Marx’s research process. Saito has not only an excellent knowledge of Marx’s oeuvre, he is also occupied with Marx’s sources. He provides an exciting journey, showing how deeply ecological questions are connected to Marx’s unfinished project of a ‘Critique of Political Economy’.

—Michael Heinrich, author, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital

In this philologically sophisticated, forensically relentless, and theoretically nuanced analysis, Kohei Saito skillfully and persuasively traces both the continuities in Marx’s critical engagement with nature-human interactions and the successive discontinuities introduced by his break with his erstwhile philosophical consciousness, his turn from a utopian view of technological progress, and his growing recognition of the ecological limits to capital accumulation. Illustrating Marx’s enduring commitment to a unified historical science linking the transformation of nature and social practices, Saito draws creatively on Marx’s excerpt books, personal notebooks, correspondence, draft manuscripts, and published work to show the profoundly ecological nature of his transhistorical account of nature-human interaction and his pointed critique of the ecological harm produced by capital accumulation. This magnificent book shows the heuristic potential of exploring Marx’s intellectual experiments in his theoretical laboratory, expands our understanding of his work over four decades well beyond its ecological aspects, and offers finely-judged comments on other ecosocialist readings of Marx. Like Marx’s Capital, this is a book to study and not just to read.

—Bob Jessop, Lancaster University, UK; author, The State: Past, Present, Future

Kohei Saito received his Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin. He is currently associate professor of political economy at Osaka City University. He has published articles and reviews on Marx’s ecology, including “The Emergence of Marx’s Critique of Modern Agriculture,” and “Marx’s Ecological Notebooks,” both in Monthly Review. He is working on editing the complete works of Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Volume IV/18, which includes a number of Marx’s natural scientific notebooks.

The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement - Kindle edition by Derek Wall. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement - Kindle edition by Derek Wall. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

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Climate change and other ecological ills are driving the creation of a grassroots global movement for change. From Latin America to Europe, Australia and China a militant movement merging red and green is taking shape.

Ecosocialists argue that capitalism threatens the future of humanity and the rest of nature. From indigenous protest in the Peruvian Amazon to the green transition in Cuba to the creation of red-green parties in Europe, ecosocialism is defining the future of left and green politics globally. Latin American leaders such as Morales and Chavez are increasingly calling for an ecosocialist transition.

Drawing on the work of key thinkers such as Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster, Derek Wall provides an unique insider view of how ecosocialism has developed and a practical guide to focused ecosocialist action. A great handbook for activists and engaged students of politics.


Product details

File Size: 1970 KB
Print Length: 208 pages
Publisher: Pluto Press (November 11, 2013)
Publication Date: November 11, 2013

=============
Editorial Reviews

Review
'Derek Wall has done us all a great service by documenting this urgently important development in world politics' -- Derrick O'Keefe, Co-Chair Canadian Peace Alliance and Contributing Editor to SocialistVoice.ca 

'A guide to activism and a manifesto that deserves to be read by everyone who wants a better world. Wall's insightful work clearly shows what ecosocialism is, how it has grown and how it can mount a real challenge to capitalist ecocide' -- Ian Angus, editor of ClimateAndCapitalism.com; author of The Global Fight for Climate Justice 

'Mandatory reading for social, labour, and environmental activists and every concerned person, perhaps no place more than in the politically circumscribed and insular United States. The growth of the global Green Left is hopeful news and coming just in time' -- Howie Hawkins, co-founder of the Green Party in the United States and editor of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate

 'Easily the most important book on this subject - an essential guide for anyone interested in how politics and ecology can come together to solve the most pressing issues of our times' -- Salma Yaqoob, Leader of the Respect Party, UK 

'With our planet in the grip of a severe environmental crisis we should never tire of seeking fresh alternatives. And, with so many our environmental problems being caused and sustained by an unrelenting demand for economic growth, Derek Wall's The Rise of the Green Left sets out a new political agenda of huge significance. Highly recommended' -- Caroline Lucas, MP, Leader of the Green Party 

'There is no one more tuned in to the great range of struggles for ecosocialism across the world and more capable of presenting them in practical and down-to-earth terms than Derek Wall' -- Joel Kovel, author of The Enemy of Nature (2nd Edition, 2007)

 'For too long the official left has ignored, even attacked ecology. We should be grateful to Derek Wall. It is time to recognise that the rights of people rest on the rights of Mother Earth. And this book helps us move in that direction' -- Vandana Shiva, Director of the Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, New Delhi; author, activist, and winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize

================
About the Author
Derek Wall is the author of six books including The Rise of the Green Left (Pluto 2010), The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom(Routledge 2014) and, with Penny Kemp, A Green Manifesto for the 1990s (Penguin, 1990). He teaches Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales.