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fests By Joel Kovel and Michael Löwy (Sept 2001)
The
twenty-first century opens on a catastrophic note, with an
unprecedented degree of ecological breakdown and a chaotic world order
beset with terror and clusters of low-grade, disintegrative warfare
that spread like gangrene across great swathes of the
planet – viz., central Africa, the Middle East, Northwestern
South America – and reverberate throughout the nations. In our
view, the crises of ecology and those of societal breakdown are
profoundly interrelated and should be seen as different manifestations
of the same structural forces.
The former broadly stems from rampant industrialization that
overwhelms the earth's capacity to buffer and contain ecological
destabilization. The latter stems from the form of imperialism known as
globalization, with its disintegrative effects on societies that stand
in its path. Moreover, these underlying forces are essentially
different aspects of the same drive, which must be identified as the
central dynamic that moves the whole: the expansion of the world
capitalist system.
We reject all euphemisms or propagandistic softening of the
brutality of this regime: all greenwashing of its ecological costs, all
mystification of the human costs under the names of democracy and human
rights.
We insist instead upon looking at capital from the standpoint
of what it has really done.
Acting on nature and its ecological balance, the regime, with
its imperative to constantly expand profitability, exposes ecosystems
to destabilizing pollutants, fragments habitats that have evolved over
aeons to allow the flourishing of organisms, squanders resources, and
reduces the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchangeability
required for the accumulation of capital.
From the side of humanity, with its requirements for
self-determination, community, and a meaningful existence, capital
reduces the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor
power while discarding much of the remainder as useless nuisances.
It has invaded and undermined the integrity of communities
through its global mass culture of consumerism and depoliticization.
It has expanded disparities in wealth and power to levels
unprecedented in human history.
It has worked hand in glove with a network of corrupt and
subservient client states whose local elites carry out the work of
repression while sparing the center of its opprobrium.
And it has set going a network of transtatal organizations
under the overall supervision of the Western powers and the superpower
United States, to undermine the autonomy of the periphery and bind it
into indebtedness while maintaining a huge military apparatus to
enforce compliance to the capitalist center.
We believe that the present capitalist system cannot regulate,
much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot solve the
ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits upon
accumulation – an unacceptable option for a system predicated
upon the rule: Grow or Die!
And it cannot solve the crisis posed by terror and other forms of
violent rebellion because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of
empire, which would impose unacceptable limits on growth and the
whole “way
of life" sustained by empire. Its only remaining option is to
resort to brutal force, thereby increasing alienation and sowing the
seed of further terrorism ... and further counter-terrorism, evolving
into a new and malignant variation of fascism.
In sum, the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt.
It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism exposes
its underlying weakness. It is, in the language of ecology, profoundly
unsustainable, and must be changed fundamentally, nay, replaced, if
there is to be a future worth living.
Thus the stark choice once posed by Rosa Luxemburg returns:
Socialism or Barbarism!, where the face of the latter now reflects the
imprint of the intervening century and assumes the countenance of
eco-catastrophe, terror counterterror, and their fascist degeneration.
But why socialism, why revive this word seemingly consigned to
the rubbish-heap of history by the failings of its twentieth century
interpretations?
For this reason only: that however beaten down and unrealized, the
notion of socialism still stands for the supersession of capital.
If capital is to be overcome, a task now given the urgency of the
survival of civilization itself, the outcome will perforce be “socialist”,
for that is the term which signifies the breakthrough into
a post-capitalist society.
If we say that capital is radically unsustainable and breaks down into
the barbarism outlined above, then we are also saying that we need to
build a “socialism”
capable of overcoming the crises capital has set
going. And if socialisms past have failed to do so, then it is our
obligation, if we choose against submitting to a barbarous end, to
struggle for one that succeeds.
And just as barbarism has changed in a manner reflective of the century
since Luxemburg enunciated her fateful alternative, so too, must the
name, and the reality, of a socialism become adequate for this time.
It is for these reasons that we choose to name our interpretation of
socialism as an ecosocialism, and dedicate ourselves to its realization.
We
see ecosocialism not as the denial but as the realization
of the “first-epoch”
socialisms of the twentieth century, in the
context of the ecological crisis. Like them, it builds on the insight
that capital is objectified past labor, and grounds itself in the free
development of all producers, or to use another way of saying this, an
undoing of the separation of the producers from the means of
production.
We understand that this goal was not able to be implemented by
first-epoch socialism, for reasons too complex to take up here, except
to summarize as various effects of underdevelopment in the context of
hostility by existing capitalist powers. This conjuncture had numerous
deleterious effects on existing socialisms, chiefly, the denial of
internal democracy along with an emulation of capitalist productivism,
and led eventually to the collapse of these societies and the ruin of
their natural environments.
Ecosocialism retains the emancipatory goals of first-epoch socialism,
and rejects both the attenuated, reformist aims of social democracy and
the productivist structures of the bureaucratic variations of
socialism. It insists, rather, upon redefining both thepath and the
goal of socialist production in an ecological framework.
It does so specifically in respect to the “limits
on growth”
essential
for the sustainability of society. These are embraced, not however, in
the sense of imposing scarcity, hardship and repression. The goal,
rather, is a transformation of needs, and a profound shift toward the
qualitative dimension and away from the quantitative. From the
standpoint of commodity production, this translates into a valorization
of use-values over exchange-values – a project of far-reaching
significance grounded in immediate economic activity.
The generalization of ecological production under socialist conditions
can provide the ground for the overcoming of the present crises. A
society of freely associated producers does not stop at its own
democratization. It must, rather, insist on the freeing of all beings
as its ground and goal. It overcomes thereby the imperialist impulse
both subjectively and objectively.
In realizing such a goal, it struggles to overcome all forms of
domination, including, especially, those of gender and race. And it
surpasses the conditions leading to fundamentalist distortions and
their terrorist manifestations. In sum, a world society is posited in a
degree of ecological harmony with nature unthinkable under present
conditions.
A practical outcome of these tendencies would be expressed, for
example, in a withering away of the dependency upon fossil fuels
integral to industrial capitalism. And this in turn can provide the
material point of release of the lands subjugated by oil imperialism,
while enabling the containment of global warming, along with other
afflictions of the ecological crisis.
No one can read these prescriptions without thinking, first, of how
many
practical and theoretical questions they raise, and second and more
dishearteningly, of how remote they are from the present configuration
of the world, both as this is anchored in institutions and as it is
registered in consciousness.
We need not elaborate these points, which should be instantly
recognizable to all. But we would insist that they be taken in their
proper perspective.
Our project is neither to lay out every step of this way nor to yield
to the adversary because of the preponderance of power he holds. It is,
rather, to develop the logic of a sufficient and necessary
transformation of the current order, and to begin developing the
intermediate steps towards this goal.
We do so in order to think more deeply into these possibilities, and at
the same moment, begin the work of drawing together with all those of
like mind. If there is any merit in these arguments, then it must be
the case that similar thoughts, and practices to realize these
thoughts, will be coordinatively germinating
at innumerable points around the world.
Ecosocialism will be international, and universal, or it will be
nothing. The crises of our time can and must be seen as revolutionary
opportunities, which it is our obligation to affirm and bring into
existence.
“The
world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the disease
is the capitalist development model.”
– Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, September 2007
Humanity
today faces a stark choice: ecosocialism or
barbarism.
To the barbarities of the last century – 100 years
of war, brutal imperialist plunder and genocide – capitalism
has added new horrors. Now it is entirely possible that the air we
breathe and the water we drink will be permanently poisoned and that
global warming will make much of the world uninhabitable.
The science is clear and irrefutable: climate change is real,
and the main cause is the use of fossil fuels, especially oil, gas, and
coal. The earth today is significantly hotter than it was a few decades
ago, and the rate of increase is accelerating.
Left unchecked, global warming will have catastrophic impacts
on human, animal, and plant life. Crop yields will drop drastically,
leading to famine on a broad scale. Hundreds of millions of people will
be displaced by droughts in some areas and by rising ocean levels in
others. Chaotic, unpredictable weather will become the norm. Epidemics
of malaria, cholera and even deadlier diseases will ravage the poorest
and most vulnerable members of every society.
The impact will be most devastating on those whose lives have
already been ravaged by imperialism many times over – the
people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and indigenous peoples
everywhere. Climate change has justifiably been called an act of
aggression by the rich against the poor.
Ecological destruction is not an accidental feature of
capitalism: it is built into the system’s DNA. The insatiable
need to increase profits cannot be reformed away. Capitalism can no
more survive limits on growth than a person can live without breathing.
Under capitalism, the only measure of growth is how much is
sold every day, every week, every year – including vast
quantities of products that are directly harmful to humans and nature,
commodities that cannot be produced without spreading disease,
destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing
ecosystems, and treating our water and air as sewers for the disposal
of industrial waste.
Capitalism has always been ecologically destructive. From
power plants in the U.S.A. to the forests of Indonesia; from tar sands
in Canada to oil wells in Nigeria, the global drive for profit has
caused untold damage to nature.
In our lifetimes, these assaults on the earth have
accelerated. Quantitative change is giving way to qualitative
transformation, bringing the world to a tipping point, to the edge of
disaster. A growing body of scientific research has identified many
ways in which small temperature increases could trigger runaway effects
– such as rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the
release of methane buried in permafrost and beneath the ocean
– that would make catastrophic climate change inevitable.
If capitalism remains the dominant social order, the best we
can expect is unbearable climate conditions, an intensification of
social crises and the spread of the most barbaric forms of class rule,
as the imperialist powers fight among themselves and with the global
south for continued control of the world’s diminishing
resources. At worst, human life may not survive.
Capitalism is the primary enemy of nature, including humanity.
Abolishing it has never been more urgent.
The
world is awash with strategies for contending with ecological ruin,
including the ruin looming as a result of the reckless growth of
atmospheric carbon. The great mass of these share one common feature:
they are devised by and on behalf of the dominant global system,
capitalism.
It should not surprise that the same system which drives the
ecological crisis also sets the terms of the debate about the
ecological crisis. For capital commands the means of production of
knowledge as much as of atmospheric carbon. And just as it would be
inconceivable for capital to awaken and turn itself into an
ecologically rational system of production, so must it pretend to be
able to heal the wounds it has inflicted on the earth. Accordingly, its
politicians, bureaucrats, economists and professors send forth an
endless stream of proposals, all variations on the theme that the
world’s ecological damage can be repaired without disruption
of the free market and of the system of accumulation that commands the
world economy.
But a person cannot serve two masters, here, the integrity of
the earth and the profitability of capitalism. One must be set aside,
and since money
rules our world, the needs of mere nature – and therefore of
human survival – will be deferred under capital so that
accumulation may continue. There is every reason, therefore, to
radically doubt the established measures for checking the slide to
ecological catastrophe.
And indeed, beyond a cosmetic veneer, essentially equivalent to the
plantings in the atria of corporate headquarters, the reforms over the
past thirty-five years have been a monstrous failure. Individual
improvements do of course occur. Yet these inevitably become
overwhelmed and swept away by the ruthless expansion of the system and
the chaotic character of its production.
One fact can give an indication of the failure: in the first
four years of the 21st Century, global carbon emissions were nearly
three times as great per annum as those of the decade of the 1990s,
despite the appearance of the Kyoto Protocols in 1997.
Kyoto employs two devices: the “Cap and Trade”
system of trading pollution credits to reach certain reductions in
emissions, and projects in the Global South – the so-called
“Clean Development Mechanisms” (CDMs) – to offset
emissions in the industrial nations.
These instruments all rely upon market mechanisms, which means, first
of all,
that atmospheric carbon directly becomes a commodity, hence under the
control of the same class interest that created global warming in the
first place. Capitalists are not to be compelled to reduce their carbon
emissions but in effect, bribed to do so, and in this way, allowed to
use their power over money to control the carbon market for their own
ends, which needless to say, include the devastating exploration for
yet more carbon resources. Nor is there a limit to the amount of
emission credits which can be issued by compliant governments under the
control of capital.
When we add to this the literal impossibility of verification
or of any uniform method of evaluation of results, it can be seen that
not only is this regime incapable of rationally controlling emissions,
it also provides an open field for evasion and fraud of all kinds,
along with the neo-colonial exploitation of indigenous people as well
as their habitat. As the Wall Street Journal put it
in March, 2007, emissions trading “would make money for some very large
corporations, but don’t believe for a minute that this
charade would do much about global warming”. The Journal called
the carbon trade “old-fashioned … making money by gaming the
regulatory process”.
And yet this worthless system remains the chosen path. All of the U.S.
Democratic Party presidential hopefuls affirmed the Cap and Trade model
in a recent debate. And in December, 2007, at the Bali interim climate
meetings held to prepare the way for the replacement of Kyoto, which
expires in 2012, opened the way for even worse abuses in the period
ahead. Bali avoided explicit mention of the drastic goals for carbon
reduction put forth by the best climate science (90% by 2050); it more
or less completely abandoned the peoples of the South to the tender
mercy of capital, giving jurisdiction over the process to the World
Bank; and made offsetting of carbon pollution even easier. In sum, Bali
was an orgy of neoliberalism, as no fewer than 300 corporations
registered as NGOs in to gain access to the trough of pollution
credits.
A tremendous world-wide radical response to the predatory system of
climate regulation, and to all aspects of the life-threatening
ecological crisis, is underway. It has made itself felt at Bali and
elsewhere, with the simple, and life-affirming principle that the only
rational and just solution to the climate crisis is to keep carbon in
the ground in the first place.
Beyond the great range of valuable interventions proposed by this
“movement of movements”, one singular and
overarching perspective is beginning to be discussed: that in order to
affirm and sustain our human future, a revolutionary transformation is
needed, in which all particular struggles are to be seen in the light
of a greater struggle against capital itself. This larger struggle
cannot be merely negative. It must announce a different kind of
society, and this we name ecosocialism.
Capitalist
attempts to solve the ecological crisis have
failed: only a profound change in the very nature of civilization can
save humanity from the catastrophic consequences of climate change.
The ecosocialist movement aims to stop and reverse this
disastrous process. We will fight to impose every possible limit on
capitalist ecocide, and to
build a movement that can replace capitalism with a society in which
common ownership of the means of production replaces capitalist
ownership, and in which the preservation and restoration of ecosystems
will be a fundamental part of all human activity.
In other words, ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical
civilizational alternative to the capitalist/industrial system,
through an economic policy founded on non-monetary criteria: social
needs and ecological equilibrium. It combines a critique of both
“market ecology”, which does not challenge
capitalism, and of “productivist socialism”, which
ignores the
earth’s natural limits.
The aim of ecosocialism is a new society based on ecological
rationality, democratic control, social equality, and the predominance
of use-value over exchange-value. These aims require both democratic
planning that will enable society to define the goals of investment and
production, and a new technological structure for humanity’s
productive forces. In other words: a revolutionary social and economic
transformation.
Emancipation of gender is integral to ecosocialism. The degradation of
women and of nature have been profoundly linked throughout history, and
especially the history of capitalism, in which money has dominated
life. To defend and enhance life, therefore, is not just a matter of
restoring the dignity of women; it also requires defending and
advancing those forms and relations of labor that care for life and
have been dismissed as mere “women’s
work” or “subsistence”.
In order to stop the catastrophic process of Global Warming
before it is too late, we must introduce radical changes in:
To
avoid endangering human survival, entire sectors of
industry and agriculture must be suppressed (nuclear energy, armaments,
advertising), reduced (fossil fuels), or restructured (automobiles) and
new ones (solar energy, ecologically-sound agriculture) must be
developed, while maintaining full employment for all. Such a change is
impossible without public control over the means of production and
democratic planning. Democratic public decisions on investment and
technological change, must replace control by banks and capitalist
enterprises in order to serve society’s common good.
Far from being “despotic”, planning is the whole
society’s exercise of freedom: freedom of decision, and
liberation from the alienated and reified “economic
laws” of the capitalist system, which has controlled
individuals’ lives and death, and locked them in what Max
Weber called an economic “iron cage”.
The passage to ecosocialism is an historical process, a permanent
revolutionary transformation of society, culture and attitudes. This
transition will lead not only to a new mode of production and an
egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an alternative way of
life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign of money,
beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and
beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are useless and/or
harmful. It is important to emphasize that such a process cannot begin
without a revolutionary transformation of social and political
structures based on the active support, by the vast majority of the
population, of an ecosocialist program.
To dream and to struggle for a green socialism does not mean that we
should not fight for concrete and urgent reforms now. Without any
illusions about “clean capitalism”, we must try to
win time and to impose on the powers that be – governments,
corporations, international institutions – some elementary
but essential changes:
Global
Warming will not be stopped in conference rooms and
treaty negotiations: only mass action by the oppressed, by the victims
of ecocide can make a difference. Third World and indigenous peoples
are at the forefront of this struggle, fighting polluting
multinationals, poisonous chemical agro-business, invasive genetically
modified seeds, and so-called “bio-fuels” that put
corn into car tanks, taking it away from the mouths of hungry people.
Solidarity between anticapitalist ecological mobilizations in the North
and the South is a strategic priority.
This Manifesto is not an academic statement, but a call to
action. The entrenched ruling elites are incredibly powerful, and the
forces of radical opposition are still small. But those forces are the
only hope that the catastrophic course of capitalist
“growth” will be halted. Walter Benjamin defined
revolutions as being not the locomotive of history, but as humanity
reaching for the emergency breaks of the train, before it plunges into
an abyss.