The Long Ecological Revolution

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The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 03, 2017 3:48 pm

The Long Ecological Revolution
by John Bellamy Foster
Topics: Ecology , Marxist Ecology
Places: Americas , United States

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Cuban farmers planting sweet potato crop.

Aside from the stipulation that nature follows certain laws, no idea was more central to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and to the subsequent development of what came to be known as modern science, than that of the conquest, mastery, and domination of nature. Up until the rise of the ecological movement in the late twentieth century, the conquest of nature was a universal trope, often equated with progress under capitalism (and sometimes socialism). To be sure, the notion, as utilized in science, was a complex one. As Francis Bacon, the idea’s leading early proponent, put it, “nature is only overcome by obeying her.” Only by following nature’s laws, therefore, was it possible to conquer her.1

After the great Romantic poets, the strongest opponents of the idea of the conquest of nature during the Industrial Revolution were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of classical historical materialism. Commenting on Bacon’s maxim, Marx observed that in capitalism the discovery of nature’s “autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs,” particularly the needs of accumulation. Yet despite its clever “ruse,” capital can never fully transcend nature’s material limits, which continually reassert themselves, with the result that “production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.” Its treatment of natural limits as mere barriers to be overcome, not as actual boundaries, gives capital its enormously dynamic character. But that same refusal to recognize natural limits also means that capital tends to cross critical thresholds of environmental sustainability, causing needless and sometimes irrevocable destruction.2 Marx pointed in Capital to such “rifts” in the socio-ecological metabolism of humanity and nature engendered by capital accumulation, and to the need to restore that metabolism through a more sustainable relation to the earth, maintaining and even improving the planet for successive human generations as “boni patres familias” (good heads of the household).3

In his Dialectics of Nature, written in the 1870s, Engels turned the Baconian ruse on its head in order to emphasize ecological limits:
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first…. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.4
Although key parts of Marx and Engels’s ecological critique remained long unknown, their analysis was to have a deep influence on later socialist theorists. Still, much of actually existing socialism, particularly in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, succumbed to the same extreme modernizing vision of the conquest of nature that characterized capitalist societies. A decisive challenge to the notion of the domination of nature had to await the rise of the ecological movement in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Here criticism of the ecological destruction brought on by modern science and technology and by unbridled industrialism—associated with a simplistic notion of human progress focusing on economic expansion alone—led to an alternative emphasis on sustainability, coevolution, and interconnection, of which ecology was emblematic. Science was said to have been misused, insofar as it had aided in the violation of nature’s own laws, ultimately threatening human survival itself. Through the development of the concept of the biosphere and the rise of the Earth System perspective (in which Soviet ecology played a crucial role), science increasingly came to be integrated with a more holistic, dialectical view, one that took on new radical dimensions that challenged the logic of the subordination of the earth and humanity to profit.5

Recent years have brought these issues renewed relevance, with the climate crisis and the introduction of the Anthropocene as a scientific classification of the changed human relation to the planet. The Anthropocene is commonly defined within science as a new geological epoch succeeding the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years; a changeover marked by an “anthropogenic rift” in the Earth System since the Second World War.6 After centuries of scientific understanding founded on the conquest of nature, we have now, indisputably, reached a qualitatively new and dangerous stage, marked by the advent of nuclear weapons and climate change, which the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson dubbed “Exterminism, the Last Stage of Imperialism.”7

From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene—which stands not just for the climate crisis, but also rifts in planetary boundaries generally—marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large on a more egalitarian and sustainable basis. A long and continuing ecological revolution is needed—one that will necessarily occur in stages, over decades and centuries. But given the threat to the earth as a place of human habitation—marked by climate change, ocean acidification, species extinction, loss of freshwater, deforestation, toxic pollution, and more—this transformation requires immediate reversals in the regime of accumulation. This means opposing the logic of capital, whenever and wherever it seeks to promote the “creative destruction” of the planet. Such a reconstitution of society at large cannot be merely technological, but must transform the human metabolic relation with nature through production, and hence the whole realm of social metabolic reproduction.8

No revolutionary movement exists in a vacuum; it is invariably confronted with counterrevolutionary doctrines designed to defend the status quo. In our era, ecological Marxism or ecosocialism, as the most comprehensive challenge to the structural crisis of our times, is being countered by capitalist ecomodernism—the outgrowth of an earlier ideology of modernism, which from the first opposed the notion that economic growth faced natural limits. If ecosocialism insists that a revolution to restore a sustainable human relation to the earth requires a frontal assault on the system of capital accumulation—and that this can only be accomplished by more egalitarian social relations and more consciously coevolutionary relations to the earth—ecomodernism promises precisely the opposite.9 Ecological contradictions, according to this ideology, can be surmounted by means of technological fixes and continued rapid growth in production, with no fundamental changes to the structure of our economy or society.10 The prevailing liberal approach to ecological problems, including climate change, has long put capital accumulation before people and the planet. It is maintained that through new technologies, demographic shifts (such as population control), and the mechanisms of the global “free market,” the existing system can successfully address the immense ecological challenges before us. In short, the solution to the ecological crises produced by capitalist accumulation is still more capitalist accumulation. All the while, we have been rapidly nearing the “climate cliff” (i.e., the breaking of the carbon budget) represented by the trillionth metric ton of carbon released into the atmosphere, now less than twenty years away if current trends continue.11

In these dire circumstances, it is dispiriting but not altogether surprising that some self-styled socialists have jumped on the ecomodernist bandwagon, arguing against most ecologists and ecosocialists that what is required to address climate change and environmental problems as a whole is simply technological change, coupled with progressive redistribution of resources. Here again, the Earth System crisis is said not to demand fundamental changes in social relations and in the human metabolism with nature. Rather it is to be approached in instrumentalist terms as a formidable barrier to be overcome by means of extreme technology.

The best current example of this tendency on the left in the United States is the Summer 2017 issue of Jacobin, entitled Earth, Wind, and Fire. According to the authors in this special issue and their related works, the solution to climate change and other ecological problems is primarily one of innovation in the development and application of new technologies and does not require a critique of the process of capital accumulation or economic growth. Activist groups such as Greenpeace and most ecosocialists come under attack for their “catastrophism” or apocalypticism, their direct action, and their emphasis on the need for qualitative changes in the human relation to the environment.12 The entire issue, packed with colorful charts and graphics, espouses a techno-optimism in which ecological crises can be solved through a combination of non-carbon energy (including nuclear power), geoengineering, and the construction of a globe-spanning negative-emissions energy infrastructure.

If this stance is “socialist,” it is only in the supposedly progressive, ecomodernist sense of combining state-directed technocratic planning and market regulation with proposals for more equitable income distribution. In this vision, ecological necessities are once again subordinated to notions of economic and technological development that are treated as inexorable. Nature is not a living system to be defended, but a foe to be conquered. As if to punctuate this position, the Jacobin issue includes as an epigraph a quotation from Leon Trotsky, taken from his Literature and Revolution (1924):
Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing “on faith,” is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad.13
Trotsky was hardly alone in promoting such reckless productivism in the early 1920s, and can be at least partly excused as an individual of his time. To repeat the same error nearly a century later, however, when we face the destabilization of the world’s ecosystems and human civilization itself, is to capitulate to the forces of destruction. The current attempt to claim the conquest of nature and ecomodernization as a “socialist” project is dangerous enough that it warrants a thorough critique. Otherwise, we risk turning back the clock on the vital political and theoretical advances made by the ecological left over the last half-century.

The New Promethean Socialism

The first half of Jacobin‘s playfully titled Earth, Wind, and Fire issue is fairly uncontroversial from a left standpoint, cataloguing capitalism’s environmental depredations and calling for radical change. However, editorial board member Connor Kilpatrick sets the tone for the issue’s second part when he suggests that Donald Trump and capitalist entrepreneurs appeal to a broad public by promising a future of economic growth and new technology, while the ecological movement offers only “a politics of fearmongering and austerity.”14 The second half makes the implications of Kilpatrick’s criticism explicit, developing over the course of several articles a thoroughly ecomodernist, techno-utopian vision that is ultimately incompatible with the goals and methods of the grassroots ecological movement.

The penultimate article in the issue, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s “Planning the Good Anthropocene,” along with Phillips’s prior work, captures the essence of this putatively progressive ecomodernist perspective. Phillips is the author of the 2015 book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, and Rozworski is a Toronto-based union researcher and commentator, who frequently writes for Jacobin.15 In his book, Phillips directs polemical attacks on such varied left thinkers, living and dead, as Theodor Adorno, Ian Angus, Brett Clark, David Harvey, Max Horkheimer, Derrick Jensen, Naomi Klein, Annie Leonard, Herbert Marcuse, Bill McKibben, Lewis Mumford, Juliet Schor, Richard York, and myself. He also challenges the concept of planetary boundaries of leading Earth System scientists. At the same time, Phillips gives his ecomodernist seal of approval to Erle Ellis, Roger Pielke, Jr., and the Breakthrough Institute (where both are senior fellows); Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, authors of the Accelerate Manifesto; and Slavoj Žižek (for his attack on the notion of Mother Earth).

One chapter in Phillips’s book, criticizing Greenpeace’s Leonard, is titled “In Defense of Stuff”; another, attacking the work of several thinkers associated with Monthly Review, is called “There Is No ‘Metabolic Rift.'” Phillips dismisses the idea that Marx advanced ecological values, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and accuses the entire ecological left of “doom-mongering” and “catastrophism.” Klein is said to promote an “eco-austerity” that is ultimately no different from the neoliberal version. Phillips flatly rejects the notion that there are limits to economic growth, asserting that “you can actually have infinite growth on a finite world,” by making more with less. According to some estimates, he informs us, “the planet can sustain up to 282 billion people…by using all the land.”16

For Phillips, bigger is beautiful: “The socialist must defend economic growth, productivism, Prometheanism.” The former Soviet Union, for example, is faulted not for its extreme productivism, but only for its lack of democratic planning and insufficient concern for human welfare. He presents a sweepingly anthropocentric definition of nature: “We are nature, and all that we do to nature is natural.” It follows that “our skyscrapers are not separate from nature; they are nature.” (By the very same logic, one might add, so are our nuclear weapons.) Human progress means transgressing all purported natural limits. Viewed in these terms, “energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.” Other species have value only insofar as they provide utilitarian benefits to society. Thus “we should care when species go extinct, not because of their intrinsic worth…but because the loss of species means a decline in the effectiveness of the services that living systems provide to humans.”17

Overall, the New Left of the 1960s and its successors are faulted for rejecting the “Promethean ambition” of ever more production—”more stuff.” Likewise, Phillips sees the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement as out of step with social needs, precisely because it attempts to reconnect workers to the land. What is required is “a high-energy planet, not modesty, humility and simple living.” Ecomodernism would concentrate the land and rely on large-scale agricultural production.18

So enamored is Phillips of nuclear power as the solution to climate change that he says that “a substantial, global reversal of neoliberalism and an embrace of a strong, democratic public-sector ethos” is climatically advantageous mainly because it will allow us to deploy “what is absolutely the strongest weapon we have in our arsenal against global warming,” namely nuclear power. No mention of Fukushima here.19

Phillips and Rozworski bring this same perspective to their contribution to Jacobin‘s special issue—and were no doubt enlisted for that precise purpose. They tout nuclear power as a viable alternative to fossil fuels, as part of a broader ecomodernist fantasy in which economic growth has no limits and humanity rules as the “collective sovereign of Earth.” Although they endorse some form of state planning, they raise no direct objection to the commodification of nature, labor, and society under capitalism, and seem unconcerned by the ways that existing structures of production and consumption distort and exploit human needs. Instead, the future lies entirely with the new machines that can provide humanity with ever more goods, while commanding on an ever-increasing scale “the biogeophysical processes we must understand, track, and master” in order to “coordinate ecosystems.” The goal is self-consciously one of Promethean control of nature through science and technology. It is hardly surprising therefore that Phillips’s outlook, as first articulated in Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, has been lauded by the premier corporate-funded ecomodernist think tank, the Breakthrough Institute, or that the title phrase of the Phillips and Rozworski piece, “The Good Anthropocene,” is lifted directly from Breakthrough Institute’s An Ecomodernist Manifesto.20

In another bold appropriation, Peter Frase, author of the 2016 book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, entitles his contribution to the issue “By Any Means Necessary”—a phrase made famous by Malcolm X, but here denoting planetary-wide interventions in nature. Four Futures shows Frase to be enamored with the idea of the Promethean mastery over the earth. The “grand future” he depicts in what purports to be a realistic ecosocialist scenario (albeit drawing on science fiction) consists of “terraforming our own planet, reconstructing it into something that can continue to support us and at least some of the other living creatures that currently exist—in other words making an entirely new nature.” Like Phillips and Rozworski, Frase has no interest in reducing our impact on nature or treading lightly on the earth; rather we must “manage and care for nature”—the better to serve our own interests. Following the conservative philosopher of science and Breakthrough Institute senior fellow Bruno Latour, Frase insists that in the face of the global ecological crisis we need to be engaged in “Loving Our [Frankenstein] Monsters.” That is, we must learn to identify with the technological-industrial world we have created (or are in the process of creating), with its planned markets, smart parking meters, robo-bees, and new potentialities for geoengineering the planet—all viewed as perfectly compatible with “socialist ecology.”21

In “By Any Means Necessary,” Frase focuses on climate change. Chiding the ecological movement for its “green moralizing,” he calls on the left wholeheartedly to embrace attempts to geoengineer the planet. He praises Oliver Morton’s 2015 book The Planet Remade, which proposes to inject sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays (though scientists have pointed out that the added calamitous effects of this are likely to be far worse than global warming alone).22 Frase himself makes a case for “cloud brightening,” by which clouds can be made to reflect more sunlight away from the earth. “We have to recognize,” he writes, “that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature.” If the left fails to embrace planetary geoengineering, “the bourgeoisie will simply carry out their work without us.” In Frase’s view, socialists have no choice but to climb onto the geoengineering bandwagon, even if this means going against the ecological movement. Still, “the purpose of raising the prospect of geoengineering in a left context,” he says, is “not as a substitute for decarbonization, but as part of a larger portrait of ecosocialism.”

There is no danger, Frase assures us, to be found in geoengineering technology itself, only in how it is managed (a sophism akin to “guns don’t kill people, people do”). Defending himself in advance against “the charge of hubris and Prometheanism,” he states—no doubt with an eye on Engels—that “the socialist project does not aim at controlling nature. Nature is never under our control, and there are always unintended consequences.” But missing from his analysis is any notion that social relations themselves must change in order to effect qualitative shifts in the human metabolism with nature. Rather, the object seems to be keeping the whole juggernaut going as much as possible, with neither social nor ecological relations seriously addressed in what amounts to a technological tinkerer’s solution. The only alternative to such an extreme ecomodernist strategy, we are led to believe, is a “hair shirt” austerity—a term that Frase uses in common with Phillips to ridicule the ecological movement.23

Daniel Aldana Cohen’s article “The Last Stimulus” promotes a form of Green New Dealism. Against those on the left who argue for the need to develop a steady-state economy—a system no longer governed by the drive for unsustainable and destructive economic growth—Cohen insists that we should take seriously the hype surrounding green capitalism:

Global political and financial leaders now want to invest a trillion dollars a year in clean energy alone. The budget for climate adaption policies will be comparably huge…. Business as “usual” is changing fast…. Thanks to political pressure, millions of workers’ retirement funds are already investing in a happy old age in a stable climate. Globally, trillions of dollars in workers’ retirement savings are up for grabs…. Regional and national governments all over the world are setting up green banks, financial institutions to help shape the booming investment in the energy transition…. This past year, employment in the solar sector expanded seventeen times faster than in the economy as a whole.

From this, Cohen derives his thesis that “so far, green capitalists are the ones shaping the future. They get it. We could too.” While not an advocate of unbridled Prometheanism like Phillips and Frase, he nevertheless sees the solution largely in the fairly conventional terms of state management of technology, the market, and urban development.24

Christian Parenti, a Nation columnist and author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2012), is the best-known of the Earth, Wind, and Fire contributors. The foreboding title of his article, “If We Fail,” refers to the worst-case scenario of unmitigated climate change, namely the Venus Syndrome. As described by climatologist James Hansen and recounted by Parenti, the earth would end up “a lifeless rock swathed in boiling-hot, toxic, water vapors.” Parenti seizes on this apocalyptic image to urge the left to accept drastic technological solutions, which fortunately, he says, are well within reach. Citing an experiment in Iceland, he advocates the building of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) plants that would strip carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it by depositing it in basalt rock. This CCS-in-basalt approach, he claims, offers a “fairly simple,” readymade solution to the climate problem. The only difficulty he sees is that such a CCS scheme must be sponsored by the state rather than left to private enterprise, since it offers few opportunities for profit. And this is where progressives with their support of affirmative government have an essential role to play. The “good news” is that “a radical climate solution, counterintuitively perhaps, requires that we use more, not less, energy. But energy, in the form of solar energy, is the one economic input that is truly infinite.”

Parenti does not, however, address the immense obstacles to the building of CCS plants on the scale and with the speed he imagines. As the energy analyst Vaclav Smil has pointed out, “In order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry, whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storage took generations to build.” CCS technology requires unimaginable quantities of water: as much as 130 billion tons every year, or about half the annual flow of the Columbia River, would be needed to capture and sequester carbon dioxide equal to the annual emissions of the United States alone. And the problems only start there, since the larger technological, economic, and ecological obstacles to such massive attempts at negative-emissions technologies are gargantuan, raising unimaginable difficulties.

If Phillips in his analysis argues that all is nature—that everything in society, from farms to factories to skyscrapers, is “natural”—Parenti suggests the opposite: all is society, to the point that the natural world can scarcely be said to exist at all. It is easy from this standpoint to argue, as he does, in favor of meat factories and fish farms as partial solutions to our ecological problems—while the consequences for ecosystems and the animals themselves are rendered invisible. “Our mission as a species,” he writes, “is not to retreat from, or to preserve, something called ‘nature,’ but rather to become fully conscious environmental makers. Extreme technology under public ownership will be central to a socialist project of civilizational rescue, or civilization will not last.” In both these views (all is nature and all is society), employed in this way, the object is identical: to wish away ecological contradictions and seek the total conquest of the environment, effectively maintaining, rather than fundamentally transforming, existing social and economic structures.25

In her short article “We Gave Greenpeace a Chance,” cultural critic Angela Nagle takes that organization and the broader ecological movement to task. She rejects what she calls Greenpeace’s “diminutive direct action” and the “‘deep green’ primitivism” often associated with the radical environmental movement. Instead she opts once again for hyper-technological solutions to environmental problems, including the global expansion of nuclear energy plants, declaring that “human interference in the natural world is now the only way to save it.” With respect to Trump’s claim that global warming is a myth concocted by China “to make US manufacturing noncompetitive,” Nagle quips that on first hearing this her “only sense of shock…was that someone was actually talking about manufacturing again.” Like Phillips, Rozworski, Frase, and Parenti, she urges the left to abandon its “aversion to ambitious technologies and Promethean modernity” and to love our monsters.26

Other articles in the issue launch similarly one-sided attacks on the Sierra Club (Branko Marcetic, “People Make the World Go Round”) and food cooperatives (Jonah Walters, “Beware Your Local Food Cooperative”). In the latter article, we are led to believe that some of the more radical food cooperatives in the 1970s were simply the product of “Maoist true believers” and “self-styled guerrillas, schooled in the messianic Marxism-Leninism of the late New Left” and “following the model of the Black Panther Party”—in a series of pejoratives designed to throw scorn on these experiments.27

What is remarkable about the contributions to Jacobin‘s special issue on the environment and related works by its writers and editors is how removed they are from genuine socialism—if this involves a revolution in social and ecological relations, aimed at the creation of a world of substantive equality and environmental sustainability. What we get instead is a mechanistic, techno-utopian “solution” to the climate problem that ignores the social relations of science and technology, along with human needs and the wider environment. Unlike ecological Marxism and radical ecology generally, this vision of a state-directed, technocratic, redistributive market economy, reinforced by planetary geoengineering, does not fundamentally challenge the commodity system. The ecological crisis brought on by capitalism is used here to justify the setting aside of all genuine ecological values. The issue’s contributors instead endorse a “Good Anthropocene,” or a renewed conquest of nature, as a means of perpetuating the basic contours of present-day commodity society, including, most disastrously, its imperative for unlimited exponential growth. Socialism, conceived in these terms, becomes nearly indistinguishable from capitalism—not a movement to replace generalized commodity society, but homologous with the fundamental structure of capitalist modernity. At best, this represents a foreshortening of the socialist vision for the sake of success in the liberal political arena. But the cost of such a compromise with the status quo is the loss of any conception of an alternative future.

The Long Ecological Revolution

How then are we to see the necessary ecological and social revolution of our time? In the nineteenth century, Engels emphasized the imperative for society to develop in accord with nature as the only genuine scientific view: “Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves—two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality.”28 Moreover, there was no way to shortchange natural necessity. Engels argued that the Baconian ruse of the conquest of nature—obeying nature’s laws for the sole purpose of promoting capital accumulation—would ultimately prove disastrous, since it ignored the larger consequences in the pursuit of short-term gain. In contrast, the object of “scientific socialism” was not a vain attempt to conquer nature, but rather the advancement of human freedom in accord with the conditions imposed by the material world.29

Today, the growing awareness of such problems, and of the inescapable human connection to the natural world as a whole, has led scientists to explore more sustainable forms of development, as in agroecology, biomimicry, and systems of ecological resilience. “The overarching goal of an ecological society,” Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams write in their new book Creating an Ecological Society, “is to maintain the long-term health of the biosphere while equitably providing for human needs.”30 This is not an impossible task, but it does require the development of science at a higher level—one not simply concerned with mechanical manipulation of the earth and its inhabitants for private gain, but founded on the understanding and concern for the complex collectivities that constitute living systems and human life itself. This requires ecological planning, but that in turn is only possible if social relations also change, reconceiving freedom in terms of needs deeper and wider than those of individual self-interest in a commodity economy.

What this means is that we should not be stampeded by the climate crisis—however catastrophic its likely consequences—into embracing the very same attitudes toward the human relation to the natural world that generated the current unprecedented threats to human civilization. To do so is to seal our fate. We cannot escape the long-term ecological consequences of capitalist development through the Faustian bargain of building more and more nuclear power plants around the globe, or by recklessly injecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere—all for the purpose of infinitely expanding commodity production and capital accumulation. Beyond their technical and economic infeasibility, such plans must be opposed because of the immense, unforeseen repercussions that would inevitably result. To argue, for example, for CCS technology as the primary solution to the climate crisis (there is no question that such technology might play a positive role at some level) is to argue for devoting an immense share of resources to such plants, rivaling in scale the world’s entire existing energy infrastructure, with all sorts of added ecological and social costs and consequences.31

There are better and faster ways of addressing the climate crisis through revolutions in social relations themselves. Moreover, any purportedly socialist approach to environmental problem that focuses only on climate change, ignoring or even rejecting the idea of other planetary boundaries, and sees the solution as purely technological, represents a failure of nerve. It constitutes a refusal to embrace a new, wider realm of freedom, to meet the challenge that historical reality now imposes on us.32 Humanity cannot continue to develop in the twenty-first century without embracing more collective and sustainable forms of production and consumption in line with biospheric realities.

Here it is important to recognize that today’s monopoly-finance capitalism is a system built on waste. The larger part of production is squandered on negative (or specifically capitalist) use values, in such forms as military spending; marketing expenditures; and the inefficiencies, including planned obsolescence, built into every product. The consumption of ever more meaningless and destructive “goods” is offered as a substitute for all those things that people truly want and need.33 Indeed, as Marxist economist Paul A. Baran wrote, “people steeped in the culture of monopoly capitalism do not want what they need and do not need what they want.”34 Beyond the mere physical necessities of food, shelter, clothing, clean water, clean air, and so on, these include love, family, community, meaningful work, education, cultural life, access to the natural environment, and the free and equal development of every person. The capitalist order drastically limits or perverts all of this, creating artificial shortages in essential goods in order to generate a driving desire for non-essentials, all for the purpose of greater profitability and polarization of income and wealth. The United States alone currently spends more than a trillion dollars a year both on the military and on marketing—the latter aimed at inducing people to buy things that they would not otherwise be disposed to purchase.35

There is no doubt that the current planetary ecological crisis requires technological change and innovation. Improvements in solar and wind power and other alternatives to fossil fuels are an important part of the ecological equation. It is not true, however, that all the technologies needed to address the planetary emergency are new, or that technological development alone is the answer. The wonders of smart machines notwithstanding, there is no solution to the global ecological crisis as a whole compatible with capitalist social relations. Any ecological defenses erected in the present must be based on opposition to the logic of capital accumulation. Nor can intervention by the state, acting as a kind of social capitalist, do the trick. Rather, a long ecological revolution adequate to the world’s needs would mean altering the human-social metabolism with nature, countering the alienation of both nature and human labor under capitalism. Above all we must be concerned with maintaining ecological conditions for future generations—the very definition of sustainability.

From this standpoint, a multitude of things can be done now, if humanity mobilizes itself to create an ecological society.36 Given the vast waste inherent in the regime of monopoly-finance capital, which has penetrated into the very structure of production, it is possible to implement forms of revolutionary conservation that both expand the realm of human freedom and allow for rapid readjustment to the necessity imposed by the Earth System crisis. It is far more efficient and feasible to cut carbon emissions drastically than it would be to construct a globe-spanning CCS infrastructure, which would rival or exceed in size the current world energy infrastructure. It would be far more rational to carry out a rapid, revolutionary phase-out of carbon emissions than to risk imposing new threats to the diversity of life and human civilization through attempts to geoengineer the entire planet.

Ecological Marxism offers an opening-up of human freedom and creativity in manifold ways, calling upon humanity as a whole to rebuild its world on ecological foundations in line with the earth itself. Promises of a global technological fix—which becomes more nonsensical if one looks beyond climate change to the numerous planetary boundaries threatened by the capitalist “conquest of nature”—can only lead to elite politics and elite management. It is the ultimate hubris, the final call for the human domination of nature as a means of class domination. Such Promethean views are designed to avoid the reality of the contemporary social and ecological crisis—namely, that revolutionary changes in the existing relations of production are unavoidable. Modernizing the forces of production is not enough; more important is establishing the conditions for sustainable human development. Much can be learned from indigenous and traditional forms of working the land: because human society under capitalism has become alienated from the earth, it follows that less alienated societies offer vital insight into the practice of a more sustainable existence.

Critics on both left and right might reply that it is “too late” for an ecological revolution. The answer to this, as Magdoff and Williams eloquently state, is:

Too late for what? To struggle for a better world means taking the world as it is and working to transform it. Although the ecological and political conditions and trends are in many respects quite desperate, we are not condemned to continue degrading the environment or our social conditions…. A certain amount of global warming will continue regardless of what we do with all of its negative side effects…. However, we can stop the slide to an even more degraded Earth, poorer in species and in the health of remaining species. We can use the vast amount of available human and material resources to reorient the economy to benefit all people. An ecological society will allow us to do all the things that are currently off the table, that capitalism has repeatedly shown itself unable to achieve: providing all people with the ability to develop their full potential.37

But to achieve these things, we will need to break with “business as usual,” that is, with the current logic of capital, and introduce an entirely different logic, aimed at the creation of a fundamentally different social metabolic system of reproduction. To overcome centuries of alienation of nature and human labor, including the treatment of the global environment and most people—divided by class, gender, race, and ethnicity—as mere objects of conquest, expropriation, and exploitation, will require nothing less than a long ecological revolution, one which will necessarily entail victories and defeats and ever-renewed striving, occurring over centuries. It is a revolutionary struggle, though, that must commence now with a worldwide movement toward ecosocialism—one capable from its inception of setting limits on capital. This revolt will inevitably find its main impetus in an environmental proletariat, formed by the convergence of economic and ecological crises and the collective resistance of working communities and cultures—a new reality already emerging, particularly in the global South.38

In the long ecological revolution before us, the world will necessarily proceed from one earthly struggle to another. If the advent of the Anthropocene tells us anything, it is that humanity, through a single-minded pursuit of economic gain benefitting a relative few, is capable of producing a fatal rift in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. It is time therefore to find another path: one of sustainable human development. This constitutes the entire meaning of revolution in our time.

Notes
1↩Francis Bacon,Novum Organum (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 29, 43. On the Baconian “ruse” and Marx’s response, see William Leiss,The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon, 1974). In Latin, as in most languages with gendered nouns, “nature” (natura) is feminine, bringing out the patriarchal aspects of Bacon’s views. For a powerful ecofeminist critique, see Carolyn Merchant,The Death of Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).
2↩Karl Marx,Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 334–35, 409–10. Oddly, Michael Löwy quotes this same passage from Marx as a “good example of the sections of Marx’s work that bear witness to an uncritical admiration for the ‘civilizing actions of capitalist production,'” and the overcoming of natural boundaries. Though plausible on its face, Löwy’s position reflects a deep misunderstanding of Marx’s argument, part of a dialectical critique of the Baconian “ruse”—that nature is to be conquered by a kind of subterfuge—and of the general attitudes of bourgeois science. Equally important is the theoretical context in which Marx wrote, namely the dialectic of barriers and boundaries first introduced in Hegel’sLogic. Based on this dialectical understanding, Marx insists that capital is ultimately unable to overcome natural boundaries, even as it temporarily surmounts them by treating them as mere barriers. This overarching contradiction leads to perpetual, recurrent crises. Michael Löwy, “Marx, Engels, and Ecology,”Capitalism Nature Socialism 28, no. 2 (2017):10–21. For a comprehensive treatment of Marx’s argument, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’sGrundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism,” in Marcello Musto, ed.,Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Routledge, 2008), 100–02. See also István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 568.
3↩Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 636–38;Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 754, 911, 949; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
4↩Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 460–61.
5↩John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,”Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 1–20.
6↩Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?”Anthropocene Review 3, no. 1 (2015): 67; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
7↩E. P. Thompson,Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41–80; Rudolf Bahro,Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster (Bath: Gateway, 1994), 19.
8↩For the larger theoretical implications of the question of the relation of social relations to forces of production, and its connection to recent disputes in Marxian theory, see John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Robert W. McChesney, “Socialism: A Time to Retreat?”Monthly Review 52, no. 4 (September 2000): 1–7. The concept of “social metabolic reproduction” is central to the work of István Mészáros, beginning with hisBeyond Capital.
9↩The notion of a long ecological revolution is meant to draw on Raymond William’s earlier notion of a “long revolution.” For Williams, cultural and ecological materialism were always intertwined, reflecting the long convergence of the Romantic and Marxist traditions. See Williams,The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), andPolitics and Letters (London: New Left, 1979).
10↩For critiques of ecological modernization theory, see Richard York and Eugene A. Rosa, “Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory,”Organization and Environment 16, no. 3 (2003): 273–88; John Bellamy Foster, “The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism,”Organization and Environment 25, no. 3 (2012): 211–37; and Jeffrey A. Ewing, “Hollow Ecology: Ecological Modernization Theory and the Death of Nature,”Journal of World-Systems Research 23, no. 1 (2012): 126–55.
11↩Trillionthtonne.org.
12↩Peter Frase, “By Any Means Necessary,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 81.
13↩Leon Trotsky,Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), 251.
14↩Connor Kilpatrick, “Victory Over the Sun,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 22–23.
15↩Leigh Phillips,Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2015).
16↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 9, 23, 32–33, 39–40, 59–63, 67–68, 88, 132, 217–34, 246–49, 252; Leigh Phillips, “Why Eco-Austerity Won’t Save Us from Climate Change,”Guardian, November 4, 2015. In attacking the notion that Marx developed an ecological critique through his theory of metabolic rift, Phillips claims incorrectly that the concept of metabolism in science is restricted to chemical operations within the body, in isolation from its “exchange” with its environment. He also rejects recent scholarship (beginning with Hal Draper) suggesting that the famous phrase “the idiocy of rural life” in the standard English-language edition of theCommunist Manifesto was a faulty translation. In nineteenth-century usage, the German wordIdiotismus retained the meaning of its Greek origin,idiotes (a private or isolated person) and is more correctly translated as “isolation”—conveying the idea that rural workers were isolated from thepolis. Phillips simply declares that since Marx was not afraid of being politically incorrect he would not have shied away from calling rural workers “idiots” (in the contemporary English-language sense). Here one can only quote Spinoza’s famous phrase: “Ignorance is no argument.”
17↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 60, 76, 85, 252–63. It should be noted that “Prometheanism” has two historic meanings. The first, derived from Lucretius, associates the Promethean myth with the Enlightenment and seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The second and more common contemporary meaning, used here, uses it to denote extreme productivism or industrialism. Marx referred to Prometheus in both senses, lauding Epicurus as the Prometheus of the Enlightenment in antiquity, and later criticizing Proudhon for his mechanistic Prometheanism. See Foster,Marx’s Ecology, 10, 59, 126–30.
18↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 89, 190, 255.
19↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 202-03.
20↩Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, “Planning the Good Anthropocene,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 133–36; Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 67–68; “The Year of the Good Anthropocene: Top Breakthroughs of 2015,” Breakthrough Institute; “Leigh Phillips, Science Writer and Journalist,” Breakthrough Institute http://thebreakthrough.org/people/profi ... omodernism Manifesto, 7.
21↩Peter Frase,Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso, 2016), 91–119. Frase’s notion of “Loving Our Monsters” is taken from Bruno Latour’s article “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children,” Breakthrough Institute, Winter 2012.
22↩The most popular geoengineering solution, the injection of sulfur particles into the atmosphere (sometimes euphemistically called “solar radiation management”) is widely regarded in the scientific community as a solution more dangerous that climate change itself, since it would do nothing to stop the build-up of carbon emissions in the atmosphere, while creating whole new planetary dangers. The moment such sulfur injection stopped, climate change would resume on higher levels than ever before, as determined by the higher carbon dioxide concentration in the environment. The dangers of this form of geoengineering include a drier planet with more severe droughts and monsoons, possible erosion of the ozone layer, and disruption of photosynthesis. Further, it would do nothing to mitigate ocean acidification. Cloud brightening, endorsed by Frase, raises similar objections: if done over the Atlantic, it could contribute to the desertification of the Amazon, introducing new global ecological problems without alleviating any of the underlying causes of climate change. Nicolas Jones, “Solar Geoengineering: Weighing the Costs of Blocking the Sun’s Rays,” Yale Environment 360, January 9, 2014, http://e360.yale.edu; Christopher Mims, “‘Albedo Yaughts’ and Marine Clouds: A Cure for Climate Change?”Scientific American, October 21, 2009.
23↩Frase, “By Any Means Necessary,” 73–81; Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 105.
24↩Daniel Aldana Cohen, “The Last Stimulus,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 83–95.
25↩Christian Parenti, “If We Fail,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 114–27; “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis,”Dissent (Summer 2013);Tropic of Chaos (New York: Nation, 2012); Andy Skuce, “‘We’d Have to Finish One New Facility Every Working Day for the Next 70 Years’—Why Carbon Capture is No Panacea,”Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 4, 2016; “The Quest for CCS,” Corporate Knights, January 6, 2016, http://corporateknights.com; Vaclav Smil, “Global Energy: The Latest Infatuations,”American Scientist 99 (May–June 2011): 219.
26↩Angela Nagle, “We Gave Greenpeace a Chance,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 130–31. One might think that Parenti’s references to the Venus Syndrome would leave him open to charges of “catastrophism.” But such criticisms are seldom levelled at those taking ecomodernist stances, precisely because they tend to present ready-made technological solutions that minimize challenges to the status quo.
27↩Branko Marcetic, “People Make the World Go Round,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 106–07; Jonah Walters, “Beware Your Local Food Cooperative,”Jacobin (Summer 2017): 137–38.
28↩Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 105.
29↩Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 461–63.
30↩Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 247.
31↩Carbon capture technology is most likely to be effective in the form of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
32↩The conception of freedom as the recognition of necessity is fundamental to Marxist theory. It was first introduced in Hegel’sLogic and was incorporated into the materialist conception of history by Engels inAnti-Dühring. See Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 105–06.
33↩John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,”Monthly Review 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1–16.
34↩Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 30.
35↩On military spending, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,”Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 1–19. On marketing, see Michael Dawson,The Consumer Trap(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1. The total quantities of both military spending and marketing have increased massively in the years since these works were written.
36↩On the possibilities presented by an ecological revolution, see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 124–33; Magdoff and Williams,Creating an Ecological Society, 283–329.
37↩Magdoff and Williams,Creating an Ecological Society, 309–10.
38↩On the concept of the environmental proletariat, see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 398–99, 440–41.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 23, 2017 1:28 pm

Capitalism, Exterminism and the Long Ecological Revolution 0Comentarios +

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Exclusive: teleSUR spoke to Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about climate change & the need to fight for an ecosocialist, revolutionary alternative to the profit-driven world capitalist system.

Capitalism, Exterminism and the Long Ecological Revolution

Even the most stubborn climate skeptics found the events of 2017 difficult to cope with. It wasn't just a matter of turning up the air conditioner and switching the channel to Fox News: this time, the inconvenient truth came in the form of monstrous wildfires and tropical cyclones ruthlessly knocking down suburban ranch homes and master-planned housing developments.

Across the globe, climate change took on the frightening form of nation-destroying hurricanes in the Caribbean and U.S.-Mexico border region, record-breaking firestorms in California and the Iberian Peninsula, severe droughts in Africa and biblical floods in Africa and South Asia.

In the Global South, these disasters were exacerbated by underdevelopment, maldevelopment, poverty, corruption and gross inequality – social factors inextricably rooted in imperialism. Each extreme weather event carried further social tragedies in tow as communities suffered displacement, hunger, worsened precarity and unrest. In many cases, multinational corporations quickly took advantage of the situation through "redeveloping" and recovery schemes enforced by local governments.

Human society is never alone in facing the shock of "natural" disasters: cataclysmic weather events also disrupt the wildlife, insects, microscopic viruses and bacteria colonies with which we share our habitat. This results in further chaos across the spectrum of environmental, urban and agricultural ecosystems – with incalculable results.

In October, scientists revealed that carbon dioxide or CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere had surged to their highest level in 800,000 years in 2016, offering further evidence that human activities play a decisive role in shaping the Earth's geology and raising alarm over the possibility of an irreversible climate catastrophe.

Attempts by world leaders to enact modest restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions faced a high-profile setback in June when U.S. reality TV-star-turned-President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, delivering on his past statements that climate change is a "very expensive" Chinese "hoax"; in other words, "bullshit."

While G20 leaders reacted with sanctimonious outrage, last month 134 developing nations – including China, Iran, Brazil and India – called out wealthy countries for their hypocritical and deliberate failure to honor the accord's commitments to fund low-emission, climate-resilient development.

So we're all screwed, right? Given an absence of will by ruling elites to address climate change – as well as the need for poor nations to fulfill development goals – what hope is there? Can humankind reverse course before our beloved but contaminated planet decides to throw all life on Earth into the incinerator?

Joining us in conversation is author and sociology professor at the University of Oregon, John Bellamy Foster.

A longtime editor of venerable U.S. socialist journal Monthly Review, Foster has been a leading voice in advancing an ecological revolutionary socialism that highlights the fundamentally "green" nature of the "red" theoretical tradition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

His most recent works include the book Marx and the Earth (2016) and a scathing rebuttal of U.S. Democratic socialist magazine Jacobin, whose authors he charged with jumping on the "ecomodernist bandwagon" and embracing reformist technocratic "solutions" to the planetary crisis rather than system change: "the reconstitution of society at large on a more egalitarian and sustainable basis."

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"Climate change, it should be remembered, is only one of the major planetary boundaries now being crossed." | Photos: Reuters

2017 was a major year in terms of weather events on a cataclysmic scale, from the Caribbean to the U.S. South and most recently, California. What does 2017's climate tell us about the state of relations between ecology and society?

JBF: Science is demonstrating that today's extreme weather events, which are occurring with increasing frequency, can be attributed more and more to climate change as the major driver. The proverbial "100-year flood" is now occurring every few years.

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society recently confirmed that of 27 extreme weather events around the world in 2016, anthropogenic climate change was a significant driver of 21. The likelihood of such events occurring on a century-long time basis is compared against a model of a world in which anthropogenic climate emissions don't exist. On this basis, climate change is seen as engendering such dire meteorological events, in 2016, as usually high temperatures across Asia and the Arctic; coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef; widespread drought in Africa; wildfires along the Pacific Coast of North America; and the warm, destructive "blob" in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Alaska. There can be little doubt that the cataclysmic hurricanes that struck the Caribbean and U.S. South in 2017 – due to their size and frequency, as well as rising ocean temperatures and sea levels, which increase their destructiveness – were to a large extent products of climate change.


All of this tells us that the state of relations between ecology (or what Karl Marx called the "universal metabolism of nature") and society is one of growing peril for humanity and innumerable other species. We are now rapidly approaching under "business as usual" what climatologists refer to as a phase change, pointing to irreversible global warming. The trillionth metric ton of carbon, which stands for an increase in average global temperature of around 2°C, marking the breaking of the planetary carbon budget, is now less than 20 years away, according to current trends.

At that point, human-generated carbon emissions will most likely have altered the climate beyond humanity's power to reverse. We will not be able to get back to the Holocene conditions of the last 12,000 years that were uniquely conducive to the development of human civilization. All sorts of feedback mechanisms will threaten to accelerate climate change still further, propelling the world toward 4°C, a point at which there is reason to believe that industrial civilization as we know it will be impossible. The repercussions of this cataclysmic process in terms of deaths worldwide is incalculable.

Climate change, it should be remembered, is only one of the major planetary boundaries now being crossed. Others include loss of biological diversity (the Sixth Extinction), ocean acidification, deforestation, disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, growing shortages of freshwater, and the toxic contamination of the environment. All of this, of course, has a common denominator in the rapacious system of capital accumulation.

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2017 will likely go down as the third warmest year in the 138-year climate record. | Photo: NOAA

With regard to the United States, first we saw Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and, recently, we saw Washington pull climate change from its National Security doctrine as a threat. What does this augur in terms of the willingness of global elites and capitalist rulers to sacrifice their short-term economic advantage with the ecological necessity of preventing further planetary havoc?

"It now seems clear that key sections of the ruling class in the U.S. have decided to close the small window in which humanity is still able to arrest climate change."

JBF: The Paris climate agreement was itself far too weak an accord to combat climate change at the level and with the speed necessary. True, it included a historical declaration of the need to keep the increase in average global temperature, if possible, down to 1.5°C, which at this point would require some form of negative emissions (sucking carbon out of the atmosphere), but the actual agreement and the voluntary pledges of nations belied this objective.

With the Trump administration now declaring that it will take the United States out of the Paris Agreement and doing everything it can to undermine previous climate strategies – though it should be noted that the new national security stance explicitly allows the U.S. military to prepare for the effects of climate change on its own bases – the situation has become truly grim. This doesn't have to do primarily with climate denialism, as such. Rather, it has always been about the perpetuation of the system of capital accumulation, and in particular the fossil fuel regime, versus attempts to protect the planet as a place of habitation for humanity.

It now seems clear that key sections of the ruling class in the United States (in alignment with capitalist classes worldwide) have decided to close the small window in which humanity is still able to arrest climate change. As difficult as this is to comprehend, much less acknowledge, the exterminist logic of today's monopoly-finance capital is now actively preempting all attempts to protect humanity and a livable planetary environment. David Harvey's reference to "the madness of economic reason" fits well here.

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Recent studies suggest the Arctic Ocean has become the Northern Hemisphere's "dead end" for floating plastic. | Photo: Reuters

Which way forward? How can we fight for a better future in the year(s) ahead, and what sort of short-term, medium- and long-term solutions are desirable?

JBF: We need to see the solution to the problems that confront us today as part of a long ecological revolution, lasting for decades and even centuries, aimed at creation of society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability. Yet, given the cataclysmic ecological and social threats facing society, this movement needs to be revolutionary from the outset, in the immediate months and years ahead, in the sense of actively opposing the logic of capital, and seeking to develop what István Mészáros called a new communal system of social metabolic reproduction to replace the present one. This has to occur on a cellular basis, i.e. in human households and communities, in our most basic human relations and in our social interchange, as well as in the state and the economy. It requires new forms of social reproduction. The first priority has to be the principle of putting people and the planet before profits.

There is no lack of genuine social and ecological solutions to the problem of climate change. There are hundreds, even thousands, of things we can do, quickly and effectively – and indeed the whole problem simply stems from the organization of our system of production, which includes vast waste, untold destruction, gross inequalities, and substantive irrationalities – all of which now objectively call for an alternative system of socioeconomic planning under the control of the direct producers. It is possible to move toward more ecological forms of production and consumption while also enormously increasing the welfare of the population, but to do so means going against capitalism's system of creative destruction, now best seen as planetary exterminism.

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An oil refinery near Los Angeles, California, where numerous health and safety concerns were voiced by locals, 90 percent of whom are people of color. | Photo: Reuters

And what would you suggest for the peoples of the Global South who require the benefits of industrial development and the need to retain their independence from the imperialism?

JBF: Imperialism is at the root of most of the world's problems. It accounts for the most severe forms of exploitation in the world today, the lack of freedom of peoples to make necessary changes, vast inequalities in power, and the dangers of world war and global ecological exterminism. It serves to divide working classes between North and South. Climate change, for example, threatens the poor and Global South more than the wealthy and the Global North, but action to mitigate climate change is the responsibility first and foremost of those nations at the center of the imperialist world system. The reasons are clear. Most carbon historically added to the atmosphere was put there by the handful of nations at the core of the industrial system. Those nations still have the largest per capita emissions by far. They also have the levels of economic development, technology, and wealth per capita that would allow them to institute the sharp, double-digit emission reductions that are now necessary at the core of the system with the least damage to their populations.

The poorest countries still need economic development and cannot be expected to carry the major burden of planetary energy conversion, nor in the case of Fourth World nations would their efforts in that respect have much effect, yet all nations need to move rapidly toward sustainable patterns of development in what must be a planetary readjustment. What is needed is a kind of contraction and convergence of carbon dioxide emissions, which must approach zero by 2050, but with the requirement that rich countries reduce their emissions drastically first, thereby taking on the primary burden for mitigating climate change. Needless to say, other big emitters in the Global South, with much lower per capita emissions but large aggregate emissions, such as China and India, need to be on board too if the world is to reach zero net carbon emissions by mid-century.

The critique of extractivism is important in the sense that fossil fuels need to be kept in the ground. There is also the question of the rights of Indigenous peoples. These, then, are complex issues, but one cannot simply ignore the international division of labor instituted by imperialism, or the realities of international hierarchies that persist in the present. Some Northern NGOs primarily blame poor countries such as Bolivia for their extractivism, even in those cases where the societies are carrying out social and ecological changes that point in more positive directions. Meanwhile, the fact that such extractivism has its impetus at the center of the system, where the main rewards of the expropriation of nature worldwide are concentrated, is all too often played down.

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A view of Guiwan, Samar, one of the areas in the Philippines battered by Super Typhoon Yolanda or Haiyan. | Photo: Reuters

The Philippines has suffered in extraordinary ways from extreme weather events stemming from climate change. What we are seeing there now is an immense tragedy, rooted ultimately in a century of underdevelopment resulting from its status as a U.S. colony and then neocolony. Rapacious extractivism is being carried out in the name of development, but actually feeding into what Andre Gunder Frank called "lumpendevelopment." Today the country is characterized by the growth of an extractivist fascism under Rodrigo Duterte, with the close cooperation of Washington.

The only real alternative for countries in the Global South is delinking as much as possible from the imperialist system and relinking in South-South systems of cooperation. Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and ALBA are partial models of this. At the very end of his life, Hugo Chavez was seeking to extend the ALBA model to the global sphere, and was preparing to call for a New International building on cooperation between nations in the global South and working classes everywhere. This constituted a real response to the world's problems.

Confronted with the effects of climate change, ecological socialism – with its emphasis on communal relations and adaptation to the environment – is far superior to neoliberalism's empty insistence on "resilience." Look at how Cuba has responded to hurricanes, as compared to the grim tragedy foisted on the people of Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony.

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Vivero Organiponico is a 10-hectare (24-acre) urban farm within Alamar, a neighborhood of Havana. | Photo: Center for a Livable Future

On a global scale, what signs of hope have you seen or do you see now in terms of the fight for ecological sustainability and the liberation of working peoples?

JBF: Today we are once again seeing what Marx once called, with reference to the centuries-long decline of feudalism, an "Age of Dissolution." In such times, the potential for constructive, revolutionary action opens up. Tens of millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of people worldwide are now resisting and refusing to cooperate with the capitalist system in various, if still limited, ways. This could expand to billions of people, with the resistance becoming much fiercer and all-encompassing.

Fidel Castro once said that people are like volcanoes: you never know when they will erupt under material pressure. In recent decades, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has done the most to show people what is possible even under conditions of counterrevolution supported from abroad. We should also look for inspiration to Cuba, particularly its history since the Special Period.

I believe that we can see the emergence around the globe of what can be called an environmental proletariat. This refers in many ways back to the classical proletariat, which was revolutionary in its day insofar as it struggled not just over working conditions and jobs but over community, health, and the environment – all of which were at issue during the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays there is no concealing the effects of the economic and ecological crises at the base of society, where they mutually define the material conditions and everyday life of the great majority.

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Jane Kairuthi Kathurima cuts kale from her sack farm in central Kenya's Nturukuma region. | Photo: Reuters

Many of the struggles led by women over social reproduction involve a deepening of the fight against the system, encompassing households, community and the environment – the background conditions of the capitalist regime – rather than simply the state and the economy.

It is this sense of a deepening material crisis, encompassing not only the economy but also the planetary environment, and having its roots in the unsustainable expropriation of the conditions of reproduction of both nature and humanity, that is creating on a global basis a new revolutionary situation, that of the Revolutionary Anthropocene.

Hope in such times is always strongest because it feeds on humanity's real capacity for change in its basic relations.

By Elliott Gabriel

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/analy ... -0011.html

JBF does a fine job of delineating the issues but while calling for 'revolutionary change' falls short, as usual, of saying that we gotta overthrow the bastards, like yesterday. Fucking academics. Still, there is much of use here.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 20, 2018 8:03 pm

“A world worth fighting for”: Agrarian South reviews Creating an Ecological Society

Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation
388 pp, $25 pbk, ISBN 9781583676295
By Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams

Reviewed by S. Krithi for Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, vol. 6, no. 2, 2017, 406-409, first published, January 2018

At a time when capitalism is widely considered as the only and inevitable system, there are seldom critiques that go beyond understanding the inherent faults of the capitalist system to establishing the possibility of an alternative. This book is the latest contribution by Fred Magdoff and
Chris Williams in their lifelong commitment not only to elucidate the ecological crises entailed in capitalism, but to provide the basis and the possibilities for an alternate system: eco-socialism. This book is unique in integrating a vast range of examples of crises, from socio-economic variables like labour, housing and race-based discrimination to ecological factors like waste and pollution under a single macro-perspective, to present a comprehensive critique of the present capitalist paradigm and its socio-ecological consequences.

The sheer scope of this attempt is bewildering, and it is to the authors’ credit that they bring it together to form a cohesive story. The basic arguments are the following: the present system is unsustainable, and this is not inevitable but the nature of capitalism; there is nothing in biology or in human genes that necessitates the present world order and there are sufficient examples that back co-operation and equality as basic norms of the biological world; it is viable to envision an alternate system from existing knowledge that would address ecological complexities; this alternate system can only be brought by a revolutionary transformation and there are certain preliminary forms that this endeavour could take. These arguments are supported in this book by an immense effort in collecting and presenting information, covering ecological, biological, social, economic and other perspectives.

These arguments are presented in four sections. The first section (Chapters 1–4) presents the nature of the current crises, both ecological and socio-economic, and the systemic reasons behind their origin. The authors bring together the material of their earlier work and expand its scope, presenting the alarming scale of the imminent crisis. The evidence for the immediacy of the environmental crisis is augmented by the differential experiences across race, class, gender and other socioeconomic categories. Simultaneously, they contest the assertion of green alternatives within the capitalist system as the solution. Chapter 2 locates the global socio-ecological crisis in the profit orientation of capitalism. There is a systematic exploration of the nature of capitalism and its rise and growth through slavery, colonialism and imperialism, while elaborating the concepts of profit, commodity and labour. The attack in the neoliberal period is not just on labour but on the progress made by African-Americans, women, environmentalists and other social groups in the 1970s and 1980s. The next two chapters link the drastic environmental changes and the worsening socio-economic conditions as part of capitalism’s destructive tendencies that depend on over-extraction of nature and labour. For instance, the massive waste generation, climate change and other changes due to the capitalist system are in conjunction with imperialism and war leading to greater exploitation of the poorer regions and marginalized sections.

In the second section (Chapters 5–7), the authors show that these tendencies are not inherent in humanity. The desire for equality and fairness characterizes humanity as much as the opposite, and cooperation and pro-social behaviour have been the dominant characteristics of human societies. An in-depth study of history and evolution shows that there has always been a dialectical interaction between people and the environment. The authors propose a re-envisioning of human nature as different from the ‘individualistic, greedy, acquisitive and competitive’ (p. 174) image portrayed under an inevitable capitalist system. Historically, there have been different and less destructive forms of interaction with nature, and the present form can be attributed not to human nature but the nature of the world capitalist system. Violence and war are associated not with humanity but with forms of human society.

It is capitalism with its associated ideas of competition, consumerism and individual greed, particularly among the rich, that has promoted the present world view. This barely covers 0.3 per cent of the history of human evolution on earth. Human behaviour is thus not innate nature but reflective of the economic and societal norms of the day. The authors show how nature and access to it are a socially constructed process, mediated by race, class and gender: this is significantly different from the dominant paradigms today. On the slightly contentious issues, a greater level of emphasis on establishing the argument may have been appreciated, particularly for the sceptics. For instance, for people not convinced yet of the argument, the simple assertion that ‘there is nothing in our biology to constrain or derail its (equality) blossoming’ (p. 210) may seem insufficiently proven.

Once capitalism is not conceived as the end of human development, in the third section (Chapters 8–10), the authors argue for the need to learn alternate possibilities from existing knowledge and experience in the human and animal world. A system directed towards reactive and preventive approaches, with adaptive mechanisms, is far more capable of handling ecological complexities than the present reductive and isolating approaches. This requires building resilience in socio-ecological systems through long-term planning that is ecologically sound. There is a detailed description of the forms this needs to take, such as localized production, promoting diversity and establishing self-regulating systems and balanced natural cycles which focus on improving human resilience at the individual and social levels. It is not the absence of alternate possibilities but antagonism among the ruling classes to such options that curtail their effective implementation. The exposition on what would be ecological approaches to fulfilling human needs starts from re-thinking agriculture and forms of growing food, soil health and livestock management as well as forms of generating energy, water conservation, transportation, reducing waste and creating healthy cities. Though this section is empirically very rich, a sharper theoretical focus may have focused on the point more pointedly.

Having established that another system is possible, the authors present both the values and the framework needed behind this new ecological society and how to reach it, in the final section (Chapters 11–12). This calls for a re-envisioning of society itself and what living well means. Equality and democratic decision-making needs to be given centrality, with an aim of achieving a class-free society. For this purpose, economic rationing and the present capitalist mechanisms will be overturned in favour of ensuring access to all. Not only does private production need to be replaced by public ownership of production, but worker and community control with promotion of communal sharing mechanisms is required. This necessitates planning that places people at the centre of development, with a social purpose that includes ecological considerations. This also implies a changed world order with corresponding ethics and behaviour patterns and new patterns of life, work and leisure. While the ideas seem somewhat utopian, the examples from different countries like Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico keep them grounded.

The final chapter then postulates that the utter socio-ecological crisis necessitates a change that cannot be done through mere reforms, as these are too easily reversed, but need a revolution. This revolution will have to assume a mass movement form and international characteristics, rejecting fragmentation and promoting changing leadership and organizational forms. While resistance from the establishment and ruling classes is inevitable, the fight for a new world system does not end at the point of revolution, but is a sustained effort to keep a new society alive, learning from history, and dismantling the capitalist state. This, the authors proclaim, is a world worth fighting for and a fight that provides meaning to life. Although this book provides some alternatives, the revolutionary content of these alternatives could have been described more exhaustively, especially if more of its examples were drawn from the Global South.

All in all, this is an excellent book for students, scholars and activists looking for an introduction to the environmental crisis and its structural basis that integrates political economy and ecology. It not only critiques the current order but makes another world seem possible, which is very important at the present juncture. Rigorous research provides a complex understanding, making it essential reading, not only for researchers
interested in learning about the socio-ecological crisis, but for people searching for ways of intervention. Dedicated readers in this area may be familiar with some of these arguments, as they draw from Magdoff’s larger work. As always, the authors do a credible and scathing critique of the current dominant theoretical perspectives, though perhaps a greater expansion on the transformation processes may have been of relevance to the movements currently debating alternatives.

S. Krithi
Assistant Professor
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, India

Originally published in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 6 No. 3 Copyright 2017 © Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South (CARES), New Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi

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Bolding added. The right words, but how do academics make them so banal? This apparent need to cater to the petty booj negates the very necessity which they implore.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:01 pm

Marx's essential contribution to ecosocialism
Review by Hannah Holleman
Issue #108: Reviews
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Karl Marx's Ecosocialism:
Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
By Kohei Saito
Monthly Review Press, 2017 · 268 pages · $29.00

“Ecosocialism needs Marx,” Kohei Saito once wrote. In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, Saito shows why. Saito is associate professor of political economy at Osaka City University in Japan. In 2015, he earned a PhD in philosophy from Humboldt University in Berlin and spent time as a guest researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities where he contributes to the editing of Marx’s natural science notebooks. This work and Saito’s familiarity with a range of international debates regarding Marxist theory and practice make possible his beautiful analysis of Marx’s ecosocialism, an analysis that should inform our struggle for revolutionary socioecological change.

In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Saito traces the development (through published works, draft manuscripts, correspondence, and natural science notebooks) of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism and of his vision of a new society emancipated from capital and therefore capable of establishing a wholly different

relationship to the rest of nature. Building on the work of Marxist scholars such as John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Paul Burkett among others, Saito re-embeds Marx’s ecological critique within a broader political and intellectual project that deepened over decades.

Against readings that downplay or deny Marx’s contributions to ecological thinking, Saito shows that powerful ecological insight and analysis gained through intensive study of the natural sciences became central not only to Marx’s political economy and sociology, but also to his political project—what we now call ecosocialism.

One of the many exciting aspects of Saito’s book is that he takes what we learn from previous work on Marx’s ecology and adds a completely new chapter, literally and figuratively. In the chapter “Marx’s Ecology after 1868,” Saito reveals the extensive nature of Marx’s natural science studies after the publication of the first volume of Capital. Saito constructs his analysis based on previously unpublished notebooks made available by the important and ongoing work to compile a completed version of Marx and Engels’s collected works, called the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). The 1868 notebooks reveal Marx’s extensive engagement with scientific debates and developments in his time, especially the critical reception of Justus von Liebig’s provocative thesis that “the law of replenishment” was violated by modern transformation of how people lived and farmed. Liebig predicted that the consequent soil exhaustion would “threaten all of European civilization.” Marx integrated Liebig’s insight into his own analysis of capitalist agriculture as a system of robbery and spoliation.

This chapter is useful for many reasons. It provides new material on Marx’s broad engagement with intellectual and scientific developments across continents and demonstrates his extraordinary ability to put these in conversation with one another in order to arrive at his own critical understanding of what exists, as well as what is possible. In this we see Marx’s methodology for studying the world in order to change it. As Saito writes, rather than develop a philosophical program based on abstract conceptions of what is and what ought to be, Marx “emphasizes the significance of a social and historical investigation with regard to how and why the objectively inverted world beyond human control emerges out of social practice, so that the material conditions for its transcendence can be understood.”

Saito documents Marx’s systematic study of scientists such as James F. W. Johnston, Liebig, and Carl Fraas, historians such as Georg Ludwig von Maurer, and political economists such as Henry Carey and Julius Au. He also draws on Marx’s correspondence with his contemporaries to show how his thinking changed over time with respect to Liebig’s theory of soil exhaustion and expanded to include a sophisticated historical understanding of an array of ecological issues—from desertification to climate change—that now dot the syllabi of environmental studies courses around the world.

Marx linked these issues to a broader social analysis in a fashion far more advanced than anyone in his time. He produced one of the first explorations of ecological imperialism, ecological injustice, and what we now call “sustainability,” or how society may, as Saito summarizes, “consciously regulate the metabolic interaction between humans and [the rest of] nature.”

In other chapters, Saito brilliantly presents several key themes and innovations at the heart of Marx’s ecology. He begins the book with a discussion of Marx’s earlier understanding of the alienation of nature as marking the emergence of the modern, and how his thinking came to diverge from more romantic notions as well as from other popular philosophical and political currents of his day. He moves on to explain and contextualize Marx’s theory of the metabolism of political economy, as well as his own perspective on Marx’s Capital as a theory of metabolism.

Other chapters fill out our understanding of Marx’s study of Liebig and his broader concern with the ahistorical conceptions of soil fertility and ground rent in nineteenth-century bourgeois political economy. All of this is important reading, even for those familiar with earlier work on the same subjects. The way the book is written, from beginning to end, helps lay out the lines of analysis from seed to fruit, offering a way to think about how we might structure our own study and engage with current scientific and political developments in a deeper way in the service of advancing our social change efforts.

Altogether, Saito offers something fresh for readers for whom these topics are familiar, as well as a clear, accessible analysis for readers unfamiliar with Marx or Marx’s ecological insights, but serious about socioecological change. The book also explains and intervenes in central debates in Marxian theory. All of this is truly wonderful to read.

But the reason I decided to write this review is not only for the book’s intellectual and scholarly merit. This work also helps address urgent questions confronting our movements at a time when we have no time to waste. In 2016 an international group of scientists published a paper in Nature Climate Change entitled “Consequences of Twenty-First Century Policy for Multi-Millennial Climate and Sea-Level Change.” The article’s most breathtaking statement was that “policy decisions made in the next few years to decades will have profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems, and human societies—not just for this century, but for the next ten millennia and beyond.”

New reports emerge every day documenting the advance of climate change, the mass extinction of species, the death of millions of human beings each year due to ecological degradation—234 times more deaths than those occurring in all violent conflicts around the world annually. In spite of international environmental agreements, the unprecedented sophistication of science and technology, the emergence of the so-called green economy, and the miserable, well-documented consequences for life on the planet, the rate of degradation is not slowing, it is increasing. Every earth system is in decline and many of us can agree that capitalism is the problem—so why can’t we agree to get rid of it?

The critique of capitalism from the standpoint of ecology and social justice is mainstream enough. Influential scientists long ago, even before Marx, warned of the dangers posed to life on earth by this economic system geared toward infinite accumulation. Contemporary scholars and scientists continue to build on the vast body of research documenting the social and ecological harms of prioritizing profit over people and the planet.

More recently, large environmental NGOs and environmental movement organizations published statements recognizing capitalism as the source of our ecological crises. Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate was an international bestseller translated into about twenty-five languages. The New York Times even ran an opinion piece entitled, “The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid,” in which the author calls for a democratic socialist alternative.

Internalizing the widespread critique of capitalism, activists are offered many ways to think about change. First and foremost, elite reformers propose changing capitalism. From the World Bank to the UN, “inclusive green growth” and the “green economy” now supplement the “sustainable development” lexicon. While many activists and political groups condemn projects under these banners as maintaining the status quo, they adopt their own version of “green capitalism” as a result of their ideological commitments or calculations about political pragmatism.

As sociologist and activist Herbert Docena writes, many organizations (like 350.org, for example) have “gone on to amplify the reformist discourse by echoing their lines that the climate crisis is primarily caused by the lack of global regulation of capitalism; that it can be solved by enhancing such regulation; and that the ‘enemies’ are primarily, if not only, the fossil fuel companies or the ‘bad capitalists’ and the ‘bad elites opposing global regulation.”1

Law professor and social scientist Paddy Ireland notes, “It used to be the left who emphasized the limits to capitalism and the right who told us of its adaptability. Now, however, it is the right, believing themselves liberated from the credible threat of class struggle worldwide, who candidly stress the incompatibility of workers’ rights, [environmental regulations,] and welfare states with the elementary laws of capital (presented, of course, as “natural”), while the (erstwhile) left is reduced to insisting on the malleability and improvability of both capitalism and its corporations.”2

What becomes so clear in Saito’s rendition of nineteenth century debates and Marx’s own writing is that we have had all of these debates before. We have known about these problems for a very long time. Movements have tried making deals with the “good capitalists.” And where are we now?

Separating issues like climate change from the broader system that creates them, that immiserates lives and cannot stand still to take stock of the depletion of the earth’s life support systems, leads to a naive and Pollyannaish politics that can never confront the drivers of ecological harm or lead to a world that is more socially and ecologically sustainable and just. All of our historical experience affirms the truth of this statement.

Even if we were not confronting such an emergency with respect to life on earth, there are so many reasons to fight for a radically democratic, ecologically sane alternative to a racist, patriarchal, imperialist, winner-take-all system that concentrates wealth at the top, at the expense of the vast majority of the global population’s basic humanity. Saito provides a way of seeing the broader picture Marx offers, which will help activists in this critical moment make the case that “there must be a radical change, with reified social relations replaced by conscious production realized through the association of free producers. Only this emancipation from the reified power of capital will allow humans to construct a different relationship to nature.”

Herbert Docena, “The Politics of Climate Change,” Global Dialogue 6, no. 1 (February 2016), http://isa-global-dialogue.net/the-poli ... te-change/.
Paddy Ireland, “Corporations and Citizenship,” Monthly Review 49, no.1 (May1997), https://archive.monthlyreview.org/index ... 997-05_2/0.

https://isreview.org/issue/108/marxs-es ... osocialism
Marx’s political economy and sociology, but also to his political project—what we now call ecosocialism.
This is dumb, Marx's political project was revolution against the capitalist order. Ecosocialism is embedded in socialism, scientific socialism, as a simple matter of human need as defined by best science available.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 23, 2018 2:31 pm

‘The Only Way to Save the Land is to Give It Back’: A Critique of Settler Conservationism
By Majerle Lister

The narrative that conservationism is an ally of Indigenous people and Indigenous land serves the opportunistic purpose of unifying Indigenous people and pro-conservationist to fight for the land. At the center of the US conservation movement is Theodore Roosevelt, a notable racist and violent imperialist. Any act or criticism against conservation is painted as an insult to the president — or the innocence of a settler nation. Settler conservation, however, has provided great victories for Indigenous people in the form of protecting sacred lands from capitalist development, such as, most recently, the protection of Bears Ears National Monument. Settler conservation plays a dual role, it keeps land away from Indigenous control while conserving land for the settler public. Narratives like this usually flow from one person to another without evaluating the reality from which it was created, all the while ignoring the historical dispossession of Indigenous lands.

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the US, is the soul of settler conservationism. Roosevelt, a “big stick” imperialist, supported the US military invasion of Cuba in 1898, the violent annexation of the Philippines in 1900, the blockade of Panama and annexation of the Panama Canal in 1903. His bloody foreign policy matched his Indian policy. As part of his famous conservation policies, Roosevelt worked to transfer 230 million acres of Indigenous land to public lands. Besides calling Indigenous people “squalid savages,” he firmly believed that the land belonged to the “white race” through conquest and superiority, a staple of imperialism by violently increasing the land mass of the invading settler nation. Roosevelt also defended the Dawes Act of 1887, which opened 90 million acres of Indigenous land for white settlement. He praised the Act because it “pulverized” the tribal land mass and encouraged private ownership and the dissolution of collective tribal lands.

The history of the US conservation movement is a history settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism operates on certain myths so that it can reproduce itself. One of those myths is that Indigenous people of the U.S. were unproductive with the land therefore white settlers were entitled to the land. There are two main points in this myth, the capitalistic characteristic of productivity and the notion of white supremacy. When settlers came over, they deemed the land unproductive despite the complex use of the land by Indigenous people. Following this, they believed they were entitled to the land because they thought themselves superior to manage land and labor. This white supremacy ideology initiated the Indigenous genocide, Indigenous land dispossession, and the enslavement of the African people. Settler land management operates on this notion that indigenous people cannot management their lands themselves despite the romanticism of the “ecological” Indian. If Indigenous people cannot manage the land, who should be in charge? The discussion of control of stolen land shifts to a discussion of the public vs the private.

Indigenous people are quick to recognize the land grabs by the Federal government, or any other government, as the continuation of colonial land accumulation. Yet on the other end, conservationists see it as consolidating lands for the public. The conservationists rally around the term “Public lands” harkening to the spirit of Wood Guthrie’s, “This Land is Your Land.” This shifts the narrative away from Indigenous land claims and dispossession towards a discussion of the public good. Indigenous lands become the public’s land and “the public” — which excludes the original owners of the land — should be the ones who manage and control the land. Examples demonstrating the shift away from Indigenous land control are seen by corporations and non-profits, such as Sierra Club and Patagonia.

Image

The photo above was spread throughout social media and many individuals rallied behind it not fully recognizing the harm it does for indigenous people whose land the public claimed was theirs. Patagonia called it an illegal move because it was an affront to the settler public but the corporation would not recognized the determinate factor behind the foundation of the U.S., Indigenous land dispossession.

Furthermore, Sierra Club posted an image of a white woman wearing a shirt that said “hands off our lands” intended to sell the shirt, and it included #PublicLands in the post. The irony behind a white person wearing a shirt is part of the settler context.

Image

These are small ways in which Indigenous land claims are threatened by the way conservation groups and pro-conservation businesses advance settler colonialism.

Many conservationists can argue that Indigenous people are part of the public therefore it is inclusive. Due to mass genocide, Indigenous people are a small fraction of the settler public and it becomes apparent that indigenous people are rarely invited to the table let alone given much decision-making power — but that doesn’t make their concerns less important. Tribal consultation is usually unilateral or ignored when it comes to use of lands. It is obvious why the notion of public control is questionable from the standpoint of Indigenous people: they are a minority within the public.

The oppression of Indigenous people, via land dispossession, will be not be hidden by putting the sticker “environmentalism” on it. Trump’s attack on Indigenous lands is a clear manifestation of settler colonialism; but conservationism’s shift towards public lands rather than returning Indigenous lands to Indigenous people is little more than theft. (Also, Trump, a violent racist and nationalist, has more in common with Teddy Roosevelt than most conservationists care to admit.) Conservation must be seen for what it is and how it operates in settler-colonialism. The land does not belong to “the public.” It is necessary that it be returned to the management and control of Indigenous people. The only way to “save” the land is to return it to its rightful caretakers — Indigenous people.

https://therednation.org/2018/07/23/the ... vationism/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 28, 2018 7:11 pm

Making War on the Planet: Geoengineering and Capitalism’s Creative Destruction of the Earth
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 26, 2018
John Bellamy Foster

Image

A short fuse is burning. At the present rate of global emissions, the world is projected to reach the trillionth metric ton of cumulative carbon emissions, breaking the global carbon budget, in less than two decades.1 This would usher in a period of dangerous climate change that could well prove irreversible, affecting the climate for centuries if not millennia. Even if the entire world economy were to cease emitting carbon dioxide at the present moment, the extra carbon already accumulated in the atmosphere virtually guarantees that climate change will continue with damaging effects to the human species and life in general. However, reaching the 2° C increase in global average temperature guardrail, associated with a level of carbon concentration in the environment of 450 ppm, would lead to a qualitatively different condition. At that point, climate feedbacks would increasingly come into play threatening to catapult global average temperatures to 3° C or 4° C above preindustrial levels within this century, in the lifetime of many individuals alive today. The situation is only made more serious by the emission of other greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide.

The enormous dangers that rapid climate change present to humanity as a whole, and the inability of the existing capitalist political-economic structure to address them, symbolized by the presence of Donald Trump in the White House, have engendered a desperate search for technofixes in the form of schemes for geoengineering, defined as massive, deliberate human interventions to manipulate the entire climate or the planet as a whole. Not only is geoengineering now being enthusiastically pushed by today’s billionaire class, as represented by figures like Bill Gates and Richard Branson; by environmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council; by think tanks like the Breakthrough Institute and Climate Code Red; and by fossil-fuel corporations like Exxon Mobil and Shell—it is also being actively pursued by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has incorporated negative emissions strategies based on geoengineering (in the form of Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage [BECCS]) into nearly all of its climate models. Even some figures on the political left—where “accelerationist” ideas have recently taken hold in some quarters—have grabbed uncritically onto geoengineering as a deus ex machina—a way of defending an ecomodernist economic and technological strategy—as witnessed by a number of contributions to Jacobin magazine’s Summer 2017 “Earth, Wind, and Fire” issue.2

If the Earth System is to avoid 450 ppm of carbon concentration in the atmosphere and is to return to the Holocene average of 350 ppm, some negative emissions by technological means, and hence geoengineering on at least a limited scale, will be required, according to leading climatologist James Hansen.3 Hansen’s strategy, however, like most others, remains based on the current system, that is, it excludes the possibility of a full-scale ecological revolution, involving the self-mobilization of the population around production and consumption. What remains certain is that any attempt to implement geoengineering (even in the form of technological schemes for carbon removal) as the dominant strategy for addressing global warming, subordinated to the ends of capital accumulation, would prove fatal to humanity. The costs of such action, the burden it would put on future generations, and the dangers to living species, including our own, are so great that the only rational course is a long ecological revolution aimed at the most rapid possible reduction in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with an emphasis on agroecology and restoration of global ecosystems, including forests, to absorb carbon dioxide.4 This would need to be accompanied by a far-reaching reconstitution of society at large, aimed at the reinstitution on a higher level of collective and egalitarian practices that were undermined by the rise of capitalism.

Geoengineering the Planet Under the Regime of Fossil Capital

Geoengineering as an idea dates back to the period of the first discoveries of rapid anthropogenic climate change. Beginning in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union’s (and at that time the world’s) leading climatologist, Mikhail Budyko, was the first to issue a number of warnings on the inevitability of accelerated global climate change in the case of industrial systems based on the burning of fossil fuels.5 Although anthropogenic climate change had long been recognized, what was new was the discovery of major climate feedbacks such as the melting of Arctic ice and the disruption of the albedo effect as reflective white ice was replaced with blue seawater, increasing the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the planet and ratcheting up global average temperature. In 1974, Budyko offered, as a possible solution to climate change, the use of high-flying planes to release sulfur particles (forming sulfate aerosols) into the stratosphere. This was meant to mimic the role played by volcanic action in propelling sulfur into the atmosphere, thus creating a partial barrier, limiting incoming solar radiation. The rationale he offered was that capitalist economies, in particular, would not be able to curtail capital-accumulation-based growth, energy use, and emissions, despite the danger to the climate.6 Consequently, technological alternatives to stabilize the climate would have to be explored. But it was not until 1977 when the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti proposed a scheme for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from electrical power plants and using pipes to sequester them in the ocean depths that the word “geoengineering” itself was to appear.7

Budyko’s pioneering proposal to use sulfur particles to block a part of the sun’s rays, now known as “stratospheric aerosol injection,” and Marchetti’s early notion of capturing and sequestering carbon in the ocean, stand for the two main general approaches to geoengineering—respectively, solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). SRM is designed to limit the solar radiation reaching the earth. CDR seeks to capture and remove carbon to decrease the amount entering the atmosphere.

Besides stratospheric aerosol injection, first proposed by Budyko, another approach to SRM that has gained influential adherents in recent years is marine cloud brightening. This would involve cooling the earth by modifying low-lying, stratocumulus clouds covering around a third of the ocean, making them more reflective. In the standard scenario, a special fleet of 1,500 unmanned, satellite-controlled ships would roam the ocean spraying submicron drops of seawater in the air, which would evaporate leaving salty residues. These bright salt particles would reflect incoming solar radiation. They would also act as cloud condensation nuclei, increasing the surface area of the clouds, with the result that more solar radiation would be reflected.

Both stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening are widely criticized as posing enormous hazards on top of climate change itself, while simply addressing the symptoms not the cause of climate change. Stratospheric aerosol injection—to be delivered to the stratosphere by means of hoses, cannons, balloons, or planes—would alter the global hydrological cycle with enormous unpredictable effects, likely leading to massive droughts in major regions of the planet. It is feared that it could shut down the Indian monsoon system disrupting agriculture for as many as 2 billion people.8 There are also worries that it might affect photosynthesis and crop production over much of the globe.9 The injection of sulfur particles into the atmosphere could contribute to depletion of the ozone layer.10 Much of the extra sulfur would end up dropping to the earth, leading to acid rain.11 Most worrisome of all, stratospheric aerosol injection would have to be repeated year after year. At termination the rise in temperature associated with additional carbon buildup would come almost at once with world temperature conceivably rising by 2-3° C in a decade—a phenomenon referred to as the “termination problem.”12

As with stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening would drastically affect the hydrological cycle in unpredictable ways. For example, it could generate a severe drought in the Amazon, drying up the world’s most vital terrestrial ecosystem with incalculable and catastrophic effects for Earth System stability.13 Many of the dangers of cloud brightening are similar to those of stratospheric aerosol depletion. Like other forms of SRM, it would do nothing to stop ocean acidification caused by rising carbon dioxide levels.

The first form of CDR to attract significant attention from economic interests and investors was the idea of fertilizing the ocean with iron, thereby boosting the growth of phytoplankton so as to promote greater ocean uptake of carbon. There have been a dozen experiments in this area and the difficulties attending this scheme have proven to be legion. The effects on the ecological cycles of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and a host of other marine species all the way up to whales at the top of the food chain are indeterminate. Although some parts of the ocean would become greener due to the additional iron, other parts would become bluer, more devoid of life, because they would be deprived of the nutrients—nitrate, phosphorus, and silica—needed for growth.14 Evidence suggests that the vast portion of the carbon taken in by the ocean would stay on the surface or the intermediate levels of the ocean, with only a tiny part entering the ocean depths, where it would be naturally sequestered.15

Among the various CDR schemas, it is BECCS, because of its promise of negative emissions, which today is attracting the most support. This is because it seems to allow nations to overshoot climate targets on the basis that the carbon can be removed from the atmosphere decades later. Although BECCS exists at present largely as an untested computer model, it is now incorporated into almost all climate models utilized by the IPCC.16 As modeled, BECCS would burn cultivated crops in order to generate electricity, with the capture and underground storage of the resulting carbon dioxide. In theory, since plant crops can be seen as carbon neutral—taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then eventually releasing it again—BECCS, by burning biomass and then capturing and sequestering the resulting carbon emissions, would be a means of generating electricity while at the same time resulting in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon.

BECCS, however, comes into question the moment one moves from the abstract to the concrete. The IPCC’s median-level models are projected to remove 630 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere, around two thirds of the total emitted between the Industrial Revolution and 2011.17 This would occur on vast crop plantations to be run by agribusiness. To remove a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere as envisioned in the more ambitious scenarios would take up a land twice the size of India (or equal to Australia), about half as much land as currently farmed globally, requiring a supply of freshwater equal to current total global agricultural usage.18 The costs of implementing BECCS on the imagined scales have been estimated by climatologist James Hansen—who critically notes that negative emissions have “spread like a cancer” in the IPCC climate models—to be on the order of hundreds of trillions of dollars, with “minimal estimated costs” ranging as high as $570 trillion this century.19 The effects of BECCS—used as a primary mechanism and designed to avoid confrontation with the present system of production—would therefore be a massive displacement of small farmers and global food production. Moreover, the notion that the forms of large-scale, commercial agricultural production presumed in BECCS models would be carbon neutral and would thus result in negative emissions with sequestration has been shown to be exaggerated or false when the larger effects on global land use are taken into account. BECCS crop cultivation is expected to take place on vast monoculture plantations, displacing other forms of land use. Yet, biologically diverse ecosystems have substantially higher rates of carbon sequestration in soil and biomass than does monocrop agriculture.20 An alternative to BECCS in promoting carbon sequestration would be to promote massive, planetary ecological restoration, including reforestation, together with the promotion of agroecology modeled on traditional forms of agriculture organized around nutrient recycling and improved soil management methods.21 This would avoid the metabolic rift associated with agribusiness monocultures, which are less efficient both in terms of food production per hectare and carbon sequestration.

Another commonly advocated technofix, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), is not strictly a form of geoengineering since it is directed at capturing and sequestering carbon emissions of particular electrical plants, such as coal-fired power plants. However, the promotion of a CCS infrastructure on a planetary scale as a means of addressing climate change—thereby skirting the necessity of an ecological revolution in production and consumption—is best seen as a form of planetary geoengineering due to its immense projected economic and ecological scale. Although carbon capture and sequestration would theoretically allow the burning of fossil fuels from electrical power plants with no carbon emissions into the atmosphere, the scale and the costs of CCS operations are prohibitive. As Clive Hamilton writes in Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, CCS for a single “standard-sized 1,000 megawatt coal-fired plant…would need thirty kilometers of air-sucking machinery and six chemical plants, with a footprint of six square kilometers.”22 Energy expert Vaclav Smil has calculated that, “in order to sequester just a fifth of current [2010] CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry, whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storage took generations to build.”23 Capturing and sequestering current U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would require 130 billion tons of water per year, equal to about half the annual flow of the Columbia River. This new gigantic infrastructure would have to be placed on top of the current fossil-fuel infrastructure—all in order to allow for the continued burning of fossil fuels.24

A Planetary Precautionary Principle for the Anthropocene

If today’s planetary ecological emergency is a product of centuries of war on the planet as a mechanism of capital accumulation, fossil-capital generated geoengineering schemes can be seen as gargantuan projects for keeping the system going by carrying this war its ultimate level. Geoengineering under the present regime of accumulation has the sole objective of keeping the status quo intact—neither disturbing the dominant relations of capitalist production nor even seeking so much as to overturn the fossil-fuel industry with which capital is deeply intertwined. Profits, production, and overcoming energy poverty in the poorer parts of the world thus become justifications for keeping the present fossil-capital system going, maintaining at all cost the existing capitalist environmental regime. The Promethean mentality behind this is well captured by a question that Rex Tillerson, then CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation, asked—without a trace of irony—at an annual shareholders meeting in 2013: “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”25

The whole history of ecological crisis leading up the present planetary emergency, punctuated by numerous disasters—from the near total destruction of the ozone layer, to nutrient loading and the spread of dead zones in the ocean, to climate change itself—serves to highlight the march of folly associated with any attempt to engineer the entire planet. The complexity of the earth system guarantees that enormous unforeseen consequences would emerge. As Frederick Engels warned in the nineteenth century, “Let us not…flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.”26 In the face of uncertainty, coupled with an extremely high likelihood of inflicting incalculable harm on the Earth System, it is essential to invoke what is known as the Precautionary Principle whenever the question of planetary geoengineering is raised. As ecological economist Paul Burkett has explained, the strong version of the Precautionary Principle, necessarily encompasses the following:

The Precautionary Principle Proper, which says that if an action may cause serious harm, there is a case for counteracting measures to ensure that the action does not take place.
The Principle of Reverse Onus, under which it is the responsibility of those supporting an action to show that it is not seriously harmful, thereby shifting the burden of proof off those potentially harmed by the action (e.g. the general population and other species occupying the environment). In short, it is safety, rather than potential harm, that needs to be demonstrated.
The Principle of Alternative Assessment, stipulating that no potentially harmful action will be undertaken if there are alternative actions available that safely achieve the same goals as the action proposed.
All societal deliberations bearing on the application of features 1 through 3 must be open, informed, and democratic, and must include all affected parties.27
It is clear that geoengineering promoted in a context of a capitalist regime of maximum accumulation would be ruled out completely by a strong Precautionary Principle based on each of the criteria listed above. There is a near certainty of extreme damage to the human species as a whole arising from all of the major geoengineering proposals. If the onus were placed on status quo proponents of capitalist geoengineering to demonstrate that great harm to the planet as a place of human habitation would not be inflicted, such proposals would fail the test. Since the alternative of not burning fossil fuels and promoting alternative forms of energy is entirely feasible, while planetary geoengineering carries with it immense added dangers for the earth system as a whole, such a technofix as a primary means of checking global warming would be excluded by that criterion, too. Finally, geoengineering under the present economic and social system invariably involves some entity from the power structure—a single multi-billionaire, a corporation, a government, or an international organization—implementing such action ostensibly on behalf of humanity as a whole, while leaving most affected parties worldwide out of the decision-making process, with hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people, paying the environmental costs, often with their lives. In short, geoengineering, particularly if subordinated to the capital accumulation process, violates the most sacred version of the Precautionary Principle, dating back to antiquity: First Do No Harm.

Eco-Revolution as the Only Alternative

As an extension of the current war on the planet, a regime of climate geoengineering designed to keep the present mode of production going is sharply opposed to the view enunciated by Barry Commoner in 1992 in Making Peace with the Planet, where he wrote: “If the environment is polluted and the economy is sick, the virus that causes both will be found in the system of production.”28 There can be no doubt today that it is the present mode of production, particularly the system of fossil capital, that needs to change on a global scale. In order to stop climate change the world economy must quickly shift to zero net carbon dioxide emissions. This is well within reach with a concerted effort by human society as a whole utilizing already existing sustainable technological means—particularly when coupled with necessary changes in social organization to reduce the colossal waste of resources and lives that is built into the current alienated system of production. Such changes could not simply be implemented from the top by elites, but rather would require the self-mobilization of the entire population, inspired by the revolutionary actions of youth aimed at egalitarian, ecological, collective, and socialized solutions—recognizing that it is the world that they will inherit that is most at stake.

Today’s necessary ecological revolution would include for starters: (1) an emergency moratorium on economic growth in the rich countries coupled with downward redistribution of income and wealth; (2) radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; (3) rapid phase-out of the entire fossil fuel energy structure; (4) substitution of an alternative energy infrastructure based on sustainable alternatives such as solar and wind power and rooted in local control; (5) massive cuts in military spending with the freed-up economic surplus to be used for ecological conversion; (6) promotion of circular economies and zero-waste systems to decrease the throughput of energy and resources; (7) building effective public transportation, together with measures to decrease dependence on the private automobile; (8) restoration of global ecosystems in line with local, including indigenous, communities; (9) transformation of destructive, energy-and chemical-intensive agribusiness-monocultural production into agroecology, based on sustainable small farms and peasant cultivation with their greater productivity of food per acre; (10) institution of strong controls on the emission of toxic chemicals; (11) prohibition of the privatization of freshwater resources; (12) imposition of strong, human-community-based management of the ocean commons geared to sustainability; (13) institution of dramatic new measures to protect endangered species; (14) strict limits imposed on excessive and destructive consumer marketing by corporations; (15) reorganization of production to break down current commodity chains geared to rapacious accumulation and the philosophy of “Après moi le déluge”; and (16) the development of more rational, equitable, less wasteful, and more collective forms of production.29

Priority in such an eco-revolution would need to be given to the fastest imaginable elimination of fossil-fuel emissions, but this would in turn require fundamental changes in the human relationship to the earth and in the relationship of human beings to each other. A new emphasis would have to be placed on sustainable human development and the creation of an organic system of social metabolic reproduction. Centuries of exploitation and expropriation, including divisions on the basis of class, gender, race, and ethnicity, would have to be transcended. The historical logic posed by current conditions thus points to the necessity of a long ecological revolution, putting into place a new system of sustainable human development aimed at addressing the totality of needs of human beings as both natural and social beings: what is now called ecosocialism.

References

http://trillionthtonne.org, accessed June 3, 2018
Earth, Wind and Fire, special issue, Jacobin 26 (Summer 2017)
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Karecha, Karina von Schuckmann, David R. Beerling, Jungi Cao, Shaun Marcott, Valerie Msson-Delmotte, Michael J. Prather, Eelco J. Rohling, Jermy Shakun, Pete Smith, Andrew Lacis, Gary Russell, and Reto Ruedy, “Young People’s Burden: Requirements of Negative CO2 Emissions,” Earth System Dynamics 8 (2017): 577-616; James Hansen, et. al., “Young People’s Burden: Requirements of Negative CO2—Blog Post,” July 18, 2017, http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/ ... cation.pdf.
See John Bellamy Foster, “The Long Ecological Revolution” Monthly Review 69, no. 6 (November 2017): 1-16.
Spencer Weart, “Interview with M.I. Budyko: Oral History Transcript,” March 25, 1990, http://aip.org, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 85-88; Climate and Life (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 485; M.I. Budyko and Yu. A. Izrael, ed., Anthropogenic Climate Change (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 1-6; Blue Planet Prize, “The Laureates: Mikhail I. Budyko (1998),” http://www.af-info.or.jp/en/blueplanet/ ... budyko.pdf; John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,” Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 7-10.
M.I. Budyko, Climatic Changes (Washington, D.C.: American Geophysical Union, 1977), 235-36, 239-46; Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology,” 11.
Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 137-38.
Alan Robock, Luke Oman, and Georgiy L. Stenchikov, “Regional Climate Responses to Geoengineering with Tropical and Arctic SO2 Injections,” Journal of Geophysical Research 113 (2008), D16101; Alan Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 64, no. 2 (May-June 2008): 15; Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 64.
Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” 16.
Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” 16.
Michel E. Mann and Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 123; Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” 16.
Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 65-67; Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” 17; Carbon Brief, “Six Ideas to Limit Global Warming with Solar Geoengineering,” May 9, 2018, https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-s ... ngineering.
Hamilton, Earthmasters, 52-55; Carbon Brief, “Six Ideas.”
Hugh Powell, “Fertilizing the Ocean with Iron,” Oceanus Magazine (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) 46, no. 1 (January 2008), http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/fer ... -with-iron; Hamilton, Earthmasters, 27-35.
Powell, “Fertilizing the Ocean with Iron”; Hamilton, Earthmasters, 35.
Abby Rabinowitz and Amanda Simson, “The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster,” Wired (December 10, 2017), https://www.wired.com/story/the-dirty-s ... -disaster/.
Abby Rabinowitz and Amanda Simson, “The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster,” Wired (December 10, 2017), https://www.wired.com/story/the-dirty-s ... -disaster/.
Julia Rosen, “Vast Bioenergy Plantations Could Stave Off Climate Change—and Radically Reshape the Planet,” Sciencemag.org, February 2018, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/ ... ape-planet; Rabinowiz and Simson, “The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster”; ETC Group, Biofuel Watch, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, The Big Bad Fix: The Case Against Climate Geoengineering (2017), https://www.boell.de/en/2017/12/01/big- ... ngineering, 22.
James Hansen, “Young People’s Burden,” October 4, 2016, http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/ ... cation.pdf; Rabinowiz and Simson, “The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster.”
ETC Group, Biofuel Watch, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, The Big Bad Fix, 20-22; “Why Geoengineering Is Not a Remedy for the Climate Crisis,” MR Online, May 22, 2018, https://mronline.org/2018/05/22/why-geo ... t-of-view/
Michael Friedman, “Why Geoengineering Is Not a Remedy for the Climate Crisis,” MR Online, May 22, 2018, https://mronline.org/2018/05/22/why-geo ... t-of-view/
Hamilton, Earthmasters, 47-50.
Vaclav Smil, “Global Energy: The Last Infatuations,” American Scientist 99 (May-June 2011), https://www.americanscientist.org/artic ... fatuations. See also Jeff Goodell, “Coal’s New Technology,” Yale Environment 360, July 14, 2008, https://e360.yale.edu/features/coals_ne ... sky_gamble
Andy Skuce, ‘We’d Have to Finish One New Facility Every Working Day for the Next 70 Years’—Why Carbon Capture Is No Panacea,” Bulletin of Atomics Scientists (October 4, 2016), https://thebulletin.org/‘we’d-have-fini ... anacea9949.
Tillerson quoted in Michael Babad, “Exxon Mobil CEO: ‘What Good Is It to Save the Planet if Humanity Suffers?’” Globe and Mail, May 30, 2017 (updated June 19, 2017).
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 25, 460-61.
Paul Burkett, “On Eco-Revolutionary Prudence: Capitalism, Communism, and the Precautionary Principle,” Socialism and Democracy 30, no. 2 (2016): 87.
Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: New Press, 1992), ix
See ETC Group, Biofuel Watch, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, The Big Bad Fix, 10.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2018/07/ ... the-earth/

Lots of scary/useful information but my god that last paragraph is so fucking lame. We need a revolution, why can't you academics say it?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Sat Jul 28, 2018 8:40 pm

Today’s necessary ecological revolution would include for starters: (1) an emergency moratorium on economic growth in the rich countries coupled with downward redistribution of income and wealth; (2) radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; (3) rapid phase-out of the entire fossil fuel energy structure; (4) substitution of an alternative energy infrastructure based on sustainable alternatives such as solar and wind power and rooted in local control; (5) massive cuts in military spending with the freed-up economic surplus to be used for ecological conversion; (6) promotion of circular economies and zero-waste systems to decrease the throughput of energy and resources; (7) building effective public transportation, together with measures to decrease dependence on the private automobile; (8) restoration of global ecosystems in line with local, including indigenous, communities; (9) transformation of destructive, energy-and chemical-intensive agribusiness-monocultural production into agroecology, based on sustainable small farms and peasant cultivation with their greater productivity of food per acre; (10) institution of strong controls on the emission of toxic chemicals; (11) prohibition of the privatization of freshwater resources; (12) imposition of strong, human-community-based management of the ocean commons geared to sustainability; (13) institution of dramatic new measures to protect endangered species; (14) strict limits imposed on excessive and destructive consumer marketing by corporations; (15) reorganization of production to break down current commodity chains geared to rapacious accumulation and the philosophy of “Après moi le déluge”; and (16) the development of more rational, equitable, less wasteful, and more collective forms of production.29
The second to last paragraph is just as bad. He says that the only solution is to make everybody's life worse. Which explains why he hits every inch of the dance floor except revolution..can't base revolution on "austerity"..

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blindpig
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun Jul 29, 2018 6:10 pm

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Sat Jul 28, 2018 8:40 pm
Today’s necessary ecological revolution would include for starters: (1) an emergency moratorium on economic growth in the rich countries coupled with downward redistribution of income and wealth; (2) radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; (3) rapid phase-out of the entire fossil fuel energy structure; (4) substitution of an alternative energy infrastructure based on sustainable alternatives such as solar and wind power and rooted in local control; (5) massive cuts in military spending with the freed-up economic surplus to be used for ecological conversion; (6) promotion of circular economies and zero-waste systems to decrease the throughput of energy and resources; (7) building effective public transportation, together with measures to decrease dependence on the private automobile; (8) restoration of global ecosystems in line with local, including indigenous, communities; (9) transformation of destructive, energy-and chemical-intensive agribusiness-monocultural production into agroecology, based on sustainable small farms and peasant cultivation with their greater productivity of food per acre; (10) institution of strong controls on the emission of toxic chemicals; (11) prohibition of the privatization of freshwater resources; (12) imposition of strong, human-community-based management of the ocean commons geared to sustainability; (13) institution of dramatic new measures to protect endangered species; (14) strict limits imposed on excessive and destructive consumer marketing by corporations; (15) reorganization of production to break down current commodity chains geared to rapacious accumulation and the philosophy of “Après moi le déluge”; and (16) the development of more rational, equitable, less wasteful, and more collective forms of production.29
The second to last paragraph is just as bad. He says that the only solution is to make everybody's life worse. Which explains why he hits every inch of the dance floor except revolution..can't base revolution on "austerity"..
I can see your argument on point 1, though I do not think that necessarily the case. If redistribution left the working class with the equivalent of average 60K income would that be a start point? I suppose it depends upon how far redistribution gets us. I suspect pretty far, elimination of arms industry and imperial military alone would be staggering. And of course the definition of 'economic growth' is all important, so much now counted is anti-human. Are there any other points you would include?

It's quite a laundry list and I'd certainly tweak it some, the execution sequence(I cannot see it all at once, too much) dictated by the immediacy of human necessities to be addressed. But it's all quibbling about angels on pinheads until there is a revolutionary organization, for starts.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Mon Jul 30, 2018 1:02 am

I can see your argument on point 1, though I do not think that necessarily the case. If redistribution left the working class with the equivalent of average 60K income would that be a start point? I suppose it depends upon how far redistribution gets us. I suspect pretty far, elimination of arms industry and imperial military alone would be staggering. And of course the definition of 'economic growth' is all important, so much now counted is anti-human. Are there any other points you would include?
You're right that there is too much ambiguity in his (non)-definition of "economic growth" to make any solid appraisals. The issue for us is two fold:

1. Socialism is going to be cast as a "competing" system -- especially on the matter of delivering a BETTER quality of life. In practice we've seen how nasty and fractious this becomes. Certainly, it can/will be depicted as disingenuous on our part since the two contending classes do not share the same vision of what constitutes "better" (they sanctify consumerism and accuse of us of intending to take everyone's pet rocks away..and lying about it) -- but the matter can't be sidestepped because those competing visions ARE the bone of contention.

2. Ecology has a bad -- and highly politicized -- track record when embraced in a fundamentalist (for lack of a better word) way. Yes, climate change is a central concern/constraint. However, it has also historically functioned as a bludgeon against China and its incredible economic expansion. Disentangling those two dimensions (which feeds back directly into #1 since "no soup for anyone" is not a valid alternative to "no soup for you..slurp, slurp") is of paramount importance.

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blindpig
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 30, 2018 1:00 pm

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Mon Jul 30, 2018 1:02 am
I can see your argument on point 1, though I do not think that necessarily the case. If redistribution left the working class with the equivalent of average 60K income would that be a start point? I suppose it depends upon how far redistribution gets us. I suspect pretty far, elimination of arms industry and imperial military alone would be staggering. And of course the definition of 'economic growth' is all important, so much now counted is anti-human. Are there any other points you would include?
You're right that there is too much ambiguity in his (non)-definition of "economic growth" to make any solid appraisals. The issue for us is two fold:

1. Socialism is going to be cast as a "competing" system -- especially on the matter of delivering a BETTER quality of life. In practice we've seen how nasty and fractious this becomes. Certainly, it can/will be depicted as disingenuous on our part since the two contending classes do not share the same vision of what constitutes "better" (they sanctify consumerism and accuse of us of intending to take everyone's pet rocks away..and lying about it) -- but the matter can't be sidestepped because those competing visions ARE the bone of contention.

2. Ecology has a bad -- and highly politicized -- track record when embraced in a fundamentalist (for lack of a better word) way. Yes, climate change is a central concern/constraint. However, it has also historically functioned as a bludgeon against China and its incredible economic expansion. Disentangling those two dimensions (which feeds back directly into #1 since "no soup for anyone" is not a valid alternative to "no soup for you..slurp, slurp") is of paramount importance.
A better word is 'idealistic'. That's been the problem since 1970. They have and will continue to use it to beat on China, but as the Chinese have gotten over the humps of 19th and 20th century techs and are now roaring full bore into the 21st with some of the most environmentally compatible and applicable tech going that will be an effort of diminishing returns. Which won't some them from doing it.

As our environment continues to deteriorate the definition of these competing visions will come into sharper relief and however they amp up the propaganda will not change what's going on outside the window.

The problem with environmentalism is that it has been a petty booj enterprise since day one. That they have failed utterly in achieving their stated goals is a result of class interests. As to the unstated goals, not in any orgs by-laws, of distracting people from anything that might adversely affect capital, that's class too. This task falls to us in any case as a matter of human need.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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