Sustainable Consumption: A view from the Global South
Posted Jun 09, 2021 by Eds.
Agriculture , Capitalism , Ecology , Environment Global Newswire Consumption , Sustainability
Originally published: Social and Political Research Foundation by Nikhil Varghese Mathew (June 5, 2021) |
The global discourse on sustainability has revolved around the need to transition towards “Sustainable Consumption” ever since it was introduced during the 1992 Earth Summit chaired by Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman who made his wealth from the oil and gas industry. A couple of years later, the 1994 Oslo Symposium on “Sustainable Consumption” sought to resolve the ambiguities around the term’s definition and decided to define it as: “the use of goods and services that respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life, while minimising the use of natural resources, toxic materials and emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle, so as not to jeopardise the needs of future generations.” (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals n.d.).
However, mainstream developmental approaches have espoused, both in theory and practice, an ideological foundation for sustainable consumption that is ignorant of the societal conditions enmeshed with production relations.1 Instead, the effort is merely towards perpetuating ‘business as usual’. In seeking to posit individual consumption practices as being fundamentally at odds with sustainability, and in seeking to obfusticate the ontological interconnectedness between nature and society by supposing a dichotomous relationship between human development and the environment, “sustainability” (as is conceptualised by mainstream narratives) both decontextualises and ahistoricises socio-ecological interdependencies and extant material power relations (Dolan 2002).
This is evidenced by the following extract from the ‘Agenda 21’ report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The section on ‘Recognizing and Strengthening the Role of Indigenous People and their Communities’ notes:
International development agencies and Governments should commit financial and other resources to education and training for indigenous people and their communities to develop their capacities to achieve their sustainable self-development, and to contribute to and participate in sustainable and equitable development at the national level. (United Nations 1993).
Encouraging modes of development centered around the Global North and consequently free market arrangements, implies credence to the argument made that prevalent policy narratives around broader rubrics of developmental financing and sustainability are designed to allow capital and its advocates thereof to advocate for and lend legitimacy to the paradigm of “nature as capital” (Liodakis 2010; Foster 2014).
Impediments to capital accumulation are overcome through incentivising investments for previously nonexistent natural resource frontiers2 (Sweezy 1967). Thinkers from the Global South thought have gone on to critique the role of multilateral agreements in commodifying nature, with scholars such as Archana Prasad stating in light of the REDD-Plus regime3 and the perpetuation of ‘green capitalism’4 that “REDD-Plus became a vehicle for promoting green capitalism in the wake of a severe capitalist crisis and the need to address concerns regarding dipping profits of corporations” (Prasad 2020).
The global economy has become the field of activity for giant corporations that control over 80% of world trade, where the production chain of commodities is fragmented into multiple links spread across the globe (Wiedmann et al., 2015). The fundamental restructuring of global production and trade networks that has accompanied efforts to entrench green capitalism has resulted in immiseration and expropriation of communities instead of achieving the stated aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Through construing nature as “one vast gasoline station” (Harvey 2015) green capitalism and market environmentalism allows for practices such as corporate greenwashing that undermine efforts towards transcendental change, whilst concomitantly working “to shift the focus from the firm, create confusion, undermine credibility, criticize valuable alternatives, and deceptively promote the firm’s objectives” (Budinsky and Bryant 2013). Green capitalism necessitates reinforcing the conception of the non-human as an externality, placing the onus on the individual as an entity removed and disembodied from the larger matrix of societal phenomenon that produces consumption and production practices. Therefore, under the logic of contemporary production relations, precedence is accorded to micro-level behavioural changes as opposed to larger, structural issues that stitch together all aspects of modern living.
The centralisation of capital, as alluded to in this paper, and the expansion of the “world market,” is built around the need for multinational corporations to access larger markets, inexpensive labour and cheap sources of raw material (Suwandi et al., 2019). The process of the global expansion of capital, headquartered in the Global North, was restrained during the post-second world war period. This restraint has now disappeared with the reintroduction of the spontaneity of the system, resulting in the strengthening of the centralisation of capital on a global scale (Patnaik 2018). Thus, it is argued that the cornerstone of interactions between nation states, at the present stage of industrial development, is the inescapable reality that “a few major corporations from a small number of countries dominate the world market,” wherein through the significant movement of capital from the Global North to the Global South, we see a decentering of production across sectors (Suwandi 2019).
Decentering of production allows, through the restrictions placed on the mobility of labour and a contrasting free mobility accorded to capital, the drain of economic surplus from the global South by holding down wages (Patnaik and Patnaik 2015). In 2012 alone, the net flow of resources to the global North from developing economies was estimated to amount to USD $2 trillion (Suwandi et al., 2019). This exemplifies how multinational corporations are “sucking out the surplus of an economy without any quid pro quo” (ibid.) by higher rates of exploiting labour in the Global South, establishing globalisation of production upon the basis of wide wage differentials between central and periphery economies. Differentials that far exceed their differences in productivity.
The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference is set to take place in Glasgow from the 1st November 2021. In light of this, it is important to reiterate that any genuine and effective exercise in sustainability must be predicated upon broad-ranging equity and social justice, while acknowledging and transcending problems presented by models of mainstream economic growth and development. The much-touted European Commission (2019) strategy document ‘Going Climate-Neutral by 2050’ outlines four axes of policy actions said to be necessary for ensuring carbon neutrality. Points two and three refer to the need to “scale up private investments” and to “provide the right signals to markets”. The strategy demonstrates the developed world’s preoccupation with pursuing ‘business as usual’, which can no longer be allowed to preempt all genuine efforts to arrest climate change.
Edited by: Riya Singh Rathore and Priyamvada Chaudhary
Notes:
↩ Production relations here refers to the relationship between people structured by their ownership of either capital or labour power. Within a system of generalised commodity production, these relations of production are mediated by caste, patriarchy, and racism among other social cleavages. While these can be said to be pre-capitalist forms of exploitation, the logic of contemporary production relations results in their accomodation within the market economy, effectively resulting in a situation wherein the broad underclass of the socio-economically deprived subsidises costs of production.
↩ As seen in the neoliberalistion/ commodification of nature. For instance the commodification of the atmosphere in itself as a form of capital in the creation of carbon credits.
↩ Refer here for additional reading on the issue.
↩ Green Capitalism is the systematic belief that nature’s inherent value is in the monetary profit it makes. This approach is contradictory in nature since although it speaks of the “green” agenda, which implies putting a stop to depletion of Earth’s resources brought about by the “madness of economic reason”, it also advocates for capitalism, a system of accumulation which accounts for nature as a mere input to the accumulation of capital. Refer here for additional reading on the topic.
References
Budinsky, Jennifer and Susan Bryant. (2013). ““It’s Not Easy Being Green”: The Greenwashing of Environmental Discourses in Advertising.” Canadian Journal of Communication 38: 207-226.
Dolan, Paddy. (2002). “The Sustainability of “Sustainable Consumption.” Journal of Macromarketing 22 (2): 170-81.
European Commission. (2019). Going Climate-neutral By 2050: A Strategic Long-term Vision for a Prosperous, Modern, Competitive and Climate-Neutral EU Economy. Luxembourg: Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
Foster, John Bellamy. (2014). “Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature Fifteen Years After.” Monthly Review 66 (7). Accessed 28 May 2021, monthlyreview.org.
Harvey, David. (2015). Seventeen Contradictions And The End Of Capitalism. London, United Kingdom: Profile Books.
Liodakis, George. (2010). “Political Economy, Capitalism and Sustainable Development.” Sustainability 2(8): 2601-2616.
Patnaik, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik. (2015). “Imperialism in the Era of Globalization.” Monthly Review 67(3). Accessed 29 May 2021, monthlyreview.org.
Patnaik, Prabhat. (2018). “Globalization and the Peasantry in the South.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 7(2): 234-248.
Prasad, Archana. (2020). “Ecological Crisis, Global Capital And The Reinvention Of Nature: A Perspective From The Global South.” In Rethinking The Social Sciences With Sam Moyo edited by Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros, and Walter Chambati. New York, United States of America: Columbia University Press.
Suwandi, Intan. (2019). “Labor-Value Commodity Chains: The Hidden Abode of Global Production.” Monthly Review 71 (3). Accessed 27 May 2021, monthlyreview.org
Suwandi, Intan, R. Jamil Jonna, and John Bellamy Foster. (2019). “Global Commodity Chains And The New Imperialism.” Monthly Review 70 (10). Accessed 28 May 2021, monthlyreview.org
Sweezy, Paul. M. (1967). “Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘The Accumulation of Capital’.” Science & Society 31 (4): 474-485.
United Nations. (1993). Report Of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. New York, United States of America: United Nations.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. (n.d.). “Sustainable consumption and production.” Accessed 1 June 2021, sustainabledevelopment.un.org.
Wiedmann, Thomas, Heinz Schandl, Manfred Lenzen, Daniel Moran, Sangwon Suh, James West, and Keiichiro Kanemoto. (2015). “The Material Footprint Of Nations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112 (20): 6271-6276.
https://mronline.org/2021/06/09/sustain ... bal-south/
"Globalization" is a business model and does not represent the totality of political reality. The nation state ain't going nowhere, at least not 'the players' though the less robust will be recolonized by financial arrangements. Because when the going get rough and the talk seems to run out there must be a resort to force. Serious standing military force is very expensive, a cost no corporation wishes to bear. And so these costs are outsourced with the corps paying little or any and profiting mightily. Why would they give up that?
A resumption of imperialist competition, on hiatus since the end of WWII, will be the inevitable result of the decline of US hegemony. Globalization has been an economic manifestation of that hegemony, it could not happen unless the US based corporation profited thereby. The US is not interested in sharing those profits with China or anyone else. As that hegemony declines the cracks will show.
The Long Ecological Revolution
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
‘Net zero’ emissions is a dangerous hoax
June 10, 2021
Corporate ‘climate pledges’ mask inaction and support business as usual
by Brett Wilkins
A new report published Wednesday by a trio of progressive advocacy groups lifts the veil on so-called “net zero” climate pledges, which are often touted by corporations and governments as solutions to the climate emergency, but which the paper’s authors argue are merely a dangerous form of greenwashing that should be eschewed in favor of Real Zero policies based on meaningful, near-term commitments to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Big Con: How Big Polluters Are Advancing a ‘Net Zero’ Climate Agenda to Delay, Deceive, and Deny was published by Corporate Accountability, the Global Forest Coalition, and Friends of the Earth International, and is endorsed by over 60 environmental organizations. The paper comes ahead of this November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland and amid proliferating pledges from polluting corporations and governments to achieve what they claim is carbon neutrality—increasingly via dubious offsets—by some distant date, often the year 2050.
However, the report asserts that
“Instead of offering meaningful real solutions to justly address the crisis they knowingly created and owning up to their responsibility to act beginning with drastically reducing emissions at source, polluting corporations and governments are advancing ‘net zero’ plans that require little or nothing in the way of real solutions or real effective emissions cuts. …. They see the potential for a ‘net zero’ global pathway to provide new business opportunities for them, rather than curtailing production and consumption of their polluting products.”
“After decades of inaction, corporations are suddenly racing to pledge to achieve “net zero” emissions. These include fossil fuel giants like BP, Shell, and Total; tech giants like Microsoft and Apple; retailers like Amazon and Walmart; financers like HSBC, Bank of America, and BlackRock; airlines like United and Delta; and food, livestock, and meat-producing and agriculture corporations like JBS, Nestlé, and Cargill. Polluting corporations are in a race to be the loudest and proudest to pledge ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 or some other date in the distant future. Over recent years, more than 1,500 corporations have made ‘net zero’ commitments, an accomplishment applauded by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the U.N. Secretary-General.”
“Increasingly, the concept of ‘net zero’ is being misconstrued in political spaces as well as by individual actors to evade action and avoid responsibility,” the report states. “The idea behind big polluters’ use of ‘net zero’ is that an entity can continue to pollute as usual—or even increase its emissions—and seek to compensate for those emissions in a number of ways. Emissions are nothing more than a math equation in these plans; they can be added one place and subtracted from another place.”
“This equation is simple in theory but deeply flawed in reality,” the paper asserts. “These schemes are being used to mask inaction, foist the burden of emissions cuts and pollution avoidance on historically exploited communities, and bet our collective future through ensuring long-term, destructive impact on land and forests, oceans, and through advancing geoengineering technologies. These technologies are hugely risky, do not exist at the scale supposedly needed, and are likely to cause enormous, and likely irreversible, damage.”
Among the key findings of the report:
Big polluters, including the fossil fuel and aviation industries, lobbied heavily to ensure passage of Q45, a tax credit subsidizing carbon capture and storage. A 2020 report (pdf) from the U.S. Treasury Department’s inspector general found that fossil fuel companies improperly claimed nearly $1 billion in Q45 credits.
The International Emissions Trading Association—described by the report’s authors as “perhaps the largest global lobbyist on market and offsets, both pillars of polluters ‘net zero’ climate plans”—has leveraged its considerable power to push its greenwashing agenda at international climate talks.
Major polluters have contributed generously to universities including the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Imperial College London in an effort to influence “net zero”-related research. At Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, ExxonMobil retained the right to formally review research before completion and was allowed to place corporate staff members on development teams.
“The best, most proven approach to justly addressing the climate crisis is to significantly reduce emissions now in an equitable manner, bringing them close to Real Zero by 2030 at the latest,” the report states, referring to a situation in which no carbon emissions are produced by a good or service without the use of offsets. “The cross-sectoral solutions we need already exist, are proven, and are scalable now… All that is missing is the political will to advance them, in spite of industry obstruction and deflection.”
“People around the globe have already made their demands clear,” the report says. “Meaningful solutions that can be implemented now are already detailed in platforms like the People’s Demands for Climate Justice, the Liability Roadmap, the Energy Manifesto, and many other resources that encompass the wisdom of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”
Sara Shaw, climate justice and energy program co-coordinator at Friends of the Earth International and one of the paper’s authors, said “this report shows that ‘net zero’ plans from big polluters are nothing more than a big con. The reality is that corporations like Shell have no interest in genuinely acting to solve the climate crisis by reducing their emissions from fossil fuels. They instead plan to continue business as usual while greenwashing their image with tree planting and offsetting schemes that can never ever make up for digging up and burning fossil fuels. We must wake up fast to the fact that we are falling for a trick. ‘Net zero’ risks obscuring a lack of action until it is too late.”
Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development—which endorsed the report—warned that “proclamations of ‘net zero’ targets are dangerous deceptions. ‘Net zero’ sounds ambitious and visionary but it actually allows big polluters and rich governments to continue emitting [greenhouse gases] which they claim will be erased through unproven and dangerous technologies, carbon trading, and offsets that shift the burden of climate action to the Global South. Big polluters and rich governments should not only reduce emissions to Real Zero, they must pay reparations for the huge climate debt owed to the Global South.”
In conclusion, the reports says world leaders must “listen to the people and once and for all prioritize people’s lives and the planet over engines of profit and destruction.”
“To avoid social and planetary collapse,” it states, “they must heed the calls of millions of people around the globe and pursue policies that justly, equitably transition our economies off of fossil fuels, and advance real solutions that prioritize life—now.”
Adapted from Common Dreams, June 9, 2021, under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... rous-hoax/
Hate even getting near Common Dreams but this is spot on. 'Carbon Trading' is a scam. Imploring 'world leaders' to 'do something'' pathetically overestimates the power and will of those store clerks. Only the working class can act in it's own interest to turn things around, anything else is petty bourgeois fantasy and we no longer got time for that.
June 10, 2021
Corporate ‘climate pledges’ mask inaction and support business as usual
by Brett Wilkins
A new report published Wednesday by a trio of progressive advocacy groups lifts the veil on so-called “net zero” climate pledges, which are often touted by corporations and governments as solutions to the climate emergency, but which the paper’s authors argue are merely a dangerous form of greenwashing that should be eschewed in favor of Real Zero policies based on meaningful, near-term commitments to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Big Con: How Big Polluters Are Advancing a ‘Net Zero’ Climate Agenda to Delay, Deceive, and Deny was published by Corporate Accountability, the Global Forest Coalition, and Friends of the Earth International, and is endorsed by over 60 environmental organizations. The paper comes ahead of this November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland and amid proliferating pledges from polluting corporations and governments to achieve what they claim is carbon neutrality—increasingly via dubious offsets—by some distant date, often the year 2050.
However, the report asserts that
“Instead of offering meaningful real solutions to justly address the crisis they knowingly created and owning up to their responsibility to act beginning with drastically reducing emissions at source, polluting corporations and governments are advancing ‘net zero’ plans that require little or nothing in the way of real solutions or real effective emissions cuts. …. They see the potential for a ‘net zero’ global pathway to provide new business opportunities for them, rather than curtailing production and consumption of their polluting products.”
“After decades of inaction, corporations are suddenly racing to pledge to achieve “net zero” emissions. These include fossil fuel giants like BP, Shell, and Total; tech giants like Microsoft and Apple; retailers like Amazon and Walmart; financers like HSBC, Bank of America, and BlackRock; airlines like United and Delta; and food, livestock, and meat-producing and agriculture corporations like JBS, Nestlé, and Cargill. Polluting corporations are in a race to be the loudest and proudest to pledge ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 or some other date in the distant future. Over recent years, more than 1,500 corporations have made ‘net zero’ commitments, an accomplishment applauded by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the U.N. Secretary-General.”
“Increasingly, the concept of ‘net zero’ is being misconstrued in political spaces as well as by individual actors to evade action and avoid responsibility,” the report states. “The idea behind big polluters’ use of ‘net zero’ is that an entity can continue to pollute as usual—or even increase its emissions—and seek to compensate for those emissions in a number of ways. Emissions are nothing more than a math equation in these plans; they can be added one place and subtracted from another place.”
“This equation is simple in theory but deeply flawed in reality,” the paper asserts. “These schemes are being used to mask inaction, foist the burden of emissions cuts and pollution avoidance on historically exploited communities, and bet our collective future through ensuring long-term, destructive impact on land and forests, oceans, and through advancing geoengineering technologies. These technologies are hugely risky, do not exist at the scale supposedly needed, and are likely to cause enormous, and likely irreversible, damage.”
Among the key findings of the report:
Big polluters, including the fossil fuel and aviation industries, lobbied heavily to ensure passage of Q45, a tax credit subsidizing carbon capture and storage. A 2020 report (pdf) from the U.S. Treasury Department’s inspector general found that fossil fuel companies improperly claimed nearly $1 billion in Q45 credits.
The International Emissions Trading Association—described by the report’s authors as “perhaps the largest global lobbyist on market and offsets, both pillars of polluters ‘net zero’ climate plans”—has leveraged its considerable power to push its greenwashing agenda at international climate talks.
Major polluters have contributed generously to universities including the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Imperial College London in an effort to influence “net zero”-related research. At Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, ExxonMobil retained the right to formally review research before completion and was allowed to place corporate staff members on development teams.
“The best, most proven approach to justly addressing the climate crisis is to significantly reduce emissions now in an equitable manner, bringing them close to Real Zero by 2030 at the latest,” the report states, referring to a situation in which no carbon emissions are produced by a good or service without the use of offsets. “The cross-sectoral solutions we need already exist, are proven, and are scalable now… All that is missing is the political will to advance them, in spite of industry obstruction and deflection.”
“People around the globe have already made their demands clear,” the report says. “Meaningful solutions that can be implemented now are already detailed in platforms like the People’s Demands for Climate Justice, the Liability Roadmap, the Energy Manifesto, and many other resources that encompass the wisdom of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”
Sara Shaw, climate justice and energy program co-coordinator at Friends of the Earth International and one of the paper’s authors, said “this report shows that ‘net zero’ plans from big polluters are nothing more than a big con. The reality is that corporations like Shell have no interest in genuinely acting to solve the climate crisis by reducing their emissions from fossil fuels. They instead plan to continue business as usual while greenwashing their image with tree planting and offsetting schemes that can never ever make up for digging up and burning fossil fuels. We must wake up fast to the fact that we are falling for a trick. ‘Net zero’ risks obscuring a lack of action until it is too late.”
Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development—which endorsed the report—warned that “proclamations of ‘net zero’ targets are dangerous deceptions. ‘Net zero’ sounds ambitious and visionary but it actually allows big polluters and rich governments to continue emitting [greenhouse gases] which they claim will be erased through unproven and dangerous technologies, carbon trading, and offsets that shift the burden of climate action to the Global South. Big polluters and rich governments should not only reduce emissions to Real Zero, they must pay reparations for the huge climate debt owed to the Global South.”
In conclusion, the reports says world leaders must “listen to the people and once and for all prioritize people’s lives and the planet over engines of profit and destruction.”
“To avoid social and planetary collapse,” it states, “they must heed the calls of millions of people around the globe and pursue policies that justly, equitably transition our economies off of fossil fuels, and advance real solutions that prioritize life—now.”
Adapted from Common Dreams, June 9, 2021, under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... rous-hoax/
Hate even getting near Common Dreams but this is spot on. 'Carbon Trading' is a scam. Imploring 'world leaders' to 'do something'' pathetically overestimates the power and will of those store clerks. Only the working class can act in it's own interest to turn things around, anything else is petty bourgeois fantasy and we no longer got time for that.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
CAPITAL VS NATURE AND HUMANITY
The Double Deformation
June 17, 2021
Economic exploitation is only one aspect of capitalism. The crisis of humanity and the crisis of the earth system are inseparable
Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His books include The Socialist Imperative, The Contradictions of Real Socialism, and Between Capitalism and Community, all published by Monthly Review Press. This article is excerpted, with permission, from “Know Your Enemy: How to Defeat Capitalism,” published this month in LINKS: International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
by Michael A. Lebowitz
The exploitation of workers is at the core of capitalism. It explains capital’s drive to divide workers in order to grow. Exploitation is the source of the inequality characteristic of capitalism. To fight inequality, we must fight capitalist exploitation. However, inequality is only one aspect of capitalism. In and by itself, exploitation is inadequate to grasp the effects of capital’s drive and thus the products of capitalism. Focus upon exploitation is one-sided because you do not know the enemy unless you understand the double deformation inherent in capitalism.
Recall that human beings and Nature are the ultimate inputs into production. In capitalist production, they serve specifically as means for the purpose of the growth of capital. The result is deformation — capitalistically-transformed Nature and capitalistically-transformed human beings. Capitalist production, Marx stressed, “only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”
But why?
The Deformation of Nature
By itself, Nature is characterized by a metabolic process through which it converts various inputs and transforms these into the basis for its reproduction. In his discussion of the production of wheat, for example, Marx identified a “vegetative or physiological process” involving the seeds and “various chemical ingredients supplied by the manure, salts contained in the soil, water, air, light.”
Through this process, inorganic components are “assimilated by the organic components and transformed into organic material.” Their form is changed in this metabolic process, from inorganic to organic through what Marx called “the expenditure of nature.” Also part of the “universal metabolism of nature” is the further transformation of organic components, their deterioration and dying through their “consumption by elemental forces.”
In this way, the conditions for rebirth (for example, the “vitality of the soil”) are themselves products of this metabolic process. “The seed becomes the unfolded plant, the blossom fades, and so forth.” Birth, death, renewal are moments characteristic of the “metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”
This universal metabolism of Nature, however, must be distinguished from the relation in which a human being “mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” That labor process involves the “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature.” This “ever-lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence,” Marx pointed out, is “common to all forms of society in which human beings live.”
As we have indicated, however, under capitalist relations of production, the preconceived goal of production is the growth of capital. The particular metabolic process that occurs in this case is one in which human labor and Nature are converted into surplus value, the basis for that growth.
Accordingly, rather than a process that begins with “man and his labour on one side, nature and its materials on the other,” in capitalist relations the starting point is capital, and “the labour process is a process between things the capitalist has purchased, things which belong to him.” It is “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements” not of man but of capital.
There is, as noted, “exploration of the earth in all directions” for a single purpose— to find new sources of raw materials to ensure the generation of profits. Nature, “the universal material for labour,” the “original larder” for human existence, is here a means not for human existence but for capital’s existence.
As we have seen, while capital’s tendency to grow by leaps and bounds comes up against a barrier insofar as plant and animal products are “subject to certain organic laws involving naturally determined periods of time”, capital constantly drives beyond each barrier it faces.
However, there is a barrier it does not escape. Marx noted, for example, that “the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profit — stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations.” Indeed, the very nature of production under capitalist relations violates “the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” it produces “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”
That “irreparable” metabolic rift that Marx described is neither a short-term disturbance nor unique to agriculture. The “squandering of the vitality of the soil” is a paradigm for the way in which the “metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself” is violated under capitalist relations of production.
In fact, there is nothing inherent in agricultural production that leads to that “squandering of the vitality of the soil.” On the contrary, Marx pointed out that a society can bequeath the earth “in an improved state to succeeding generations.” But this requires an understanding that “agriculture forms a mode of production sui generis, because the organic process is involved, in addition to the mechanical and chemical process, and the natural reproduction process is merely controlled and guided.” The same is true, too, in the case of fishing, hunting, and forestry. Maintenance and improvement of the vitality of the soil and of other sectors dependent upon organic conditions requires the recognition of the necessity for “systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production.”
With every increase in capitalist production, there are growing demands upon the natural environment, and the tendency to exhaust Nature’s larder and to generate unabsorbed and unutilizable waste is not at all limited to the metabolic rift that Marx described with respect to capitalist agriculture.
Thus, Marx indicated that “extractive industry (mining is the most important) is likewise an industry sui generis, because no reproduction process whatever takes place in it, at least not one under our control or known to us,” and, he noted as well “the exhaustion of forests, coal and iron mines, and so on.” Given its preoccupation with its need to grow, capital has no interest in the contradiction between its logic and the “natural laws of life itself.” The contradiction between its drive for infinite growth and a finite, limited earth is not a concern because for capital there is always another source of growth to be found.
Like a vampire, it seeks the last possible drop of blood and does not worry about keeping its host alive.
Accordingly, since capital does not worry about “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker,” sooner or later it destroys both. Marx’s comment with respect to capital’s drive to drain every ounce of energy from the worker describes capital’s relation to the natural world precisely:
“Après moi le deluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so.”
We are seeing the signs of that approaching deluge. Devastating wildfires, droughts, powerful hurricanes, warming oceans, floods, rising sea levels, pollution, pandemics, disappearing species, etc., are becoming commonplace — but there is nothing in capital’s metabolic process that would check that. If, for example, certain materials become scarce and costly, capital will not scale back and accept less or no growth; rather, it will scour the earth to search for new sources and substitutes.
Can society prevent the crisis of the earth system, the deluge? Not currently. The ultimate deformation of Nature is the prospect because the second deformation makes it easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The Deformation of Human Beings
Human beings are not static and fixed. Rather, they are a work in process because they develop as the result of their activity. They change themselves as they act in and upon the world. In this respect there are always two products of human activity — the change in circumstances and the change in the human being. In the very act of producing, Marx commented, “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language.”
In the process of producing, the worker “acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”
In this “self-creation of man as a process,” the character of that human product flows from the nature of that productive activity. Under particular circumstances, that process can be one in which people are able to develop their capacities in an all-rounded way.
As Marx put it, “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species”. In such a situation, associated producers may expend “their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force”, and the means of production are “there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development.”
For example, if workers democratically decide upon a plan, work together to achieve its realization, solve problems which emerge and shift in this process from activity to activity, they engage in a constant succession of acts which expand their capacities. For workers in this situation, there is the “absolute working-out of his creative potentialities,” the “complete working out of the human content,” the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself.”
Collective activity under these relations produces “free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” In the society of the future, Marx concluded, the productive forces of people will have “increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”.
But that’s not the character of activity under capitalist relations of production, where “it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker.” While we know how central exploitation is from the perspective of capital, consider the effects upon workers of what capital does to ensure that exploitation. We’ve seen how capital constantly attempts to separate workers and, indeed, fosters antagonism among them (the “secret” of its success); how capital introduces changes in production that divides them further, intensifies the production process and expands the reserve army that fosters competition.
What’s the effect? Marx pointed out that “all means for the development of production” under capitalism “distort the worker into ah fragment of a man,” degrade him and “alienate him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process”. In Capital, he described the mutilation, the impoverishment, the “crippling of body and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single specialized operation” that occurs in the division of labor characteristic of the capitalist process of manufacturing.
But did the subsequent development of machinery end that crippling of workers? Marx’s response was that under capitalist relations such developments complete the “separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour.” Thinking and doing become separate and hostile, and “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.
In short, a particular type of person is produced in capitalism. Producing within capitalist relations is what Marx called a process of a “complete emptying-out,” “total alienation,” the “sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end”. Indeed, the worker is so alienated that, though working with others, he “actually treats the social character of his work, its combination with the work of others for a common goal, as a power that is alien to him.”
In this situation, in order to fill the vacuum of our lives, we need things — we are driven to consume. In addition to producing commodities and capital itself, thus, capitalism produces a fragmented, crippled human being, whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. More and more things. Capital constantly generates new needs for workers, and it is upon this, Marx noted, that “the contemporary power of capital rests.”
In short, every new need for capitalist commodities is a new link in the golden chain that links workers to capital.
Accordingly, rather than producing a working class that wants to put an end to capitalism, capital tends to produce the working class it needs, workers who treat capitalism as common sense. As Marx concluded:
“The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.”
To this, he added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker.” That constant generation of a relative surplus population of workers means, Marx argued, that wages are “confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured.”
Accordingly, Marx concluded that the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.”
However, while it is possible that workers may remain socially dependent upon capital in perpetuity, that doesn’t mean that capital’s incessant growth can continue in perpetuity. In fact, given that workers deformed by capital accept capital’s requirement to grow “as self-evident natural laws,” their deformation supports the deformation of Nature.
In turn, the increase in flooding, drought and other extreme climate changes and resulting mass migrations which are the product of the deformation of Nature intensify divisions and antagonism among workers. The crisis of the earth system and the crisis of humanity are one.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... formation/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Interacting climate tipping points may fall like dominoes
June 26, 2021
Cascading changes could move Earth into a dangerous state for the future of humanity and nature
Interactions between climate tipping elements and their roles in tipping cascades.
by Elizabeth Claire Alberts
Mongobay, June 23, 2021
A new risk analysis has found that the tipping points of five of Earth’s subsystems — the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon rainforest — could interact with each other in a destabilizing manner.
It suggests that these changes could occur even before temperatures reach 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the Paris Agreement.
The interactions between the different tipping elements could also lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than expected, according to the research.
Experts not involved in the study say the findings are a significant contribution to the field, but do not adequately address the timescales over which these changes could occur.
When the first tile in a line of dominoes tips forward, it affects everything in front of it. One after another, lined-up dominoes knock into each other and topple. This is essentially what could happen to ice sheets, ocean currents and even the Amazon biome if critical tipping points are crossed, according to a new risk analysis. The destabilization of one element could impact the others, creating a domino effect of drastic changes that could move the Earth into an unfamiliar state — one potentially dangerous to the future of humanity and nature as we know it.
The study, published this month in Earth System Dynamics, examines the interactions between five subsystems that are known to have vital thresholds, or tipping points, that could trigger irreversible changes. They include the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon Rainforest.
Scientists believe the AMOC could reach its critical threshold when warming temperatures weaken the current enough to substantially slow it, halt it, or redirect it, which could plunge parts of the northern hemisphere into a period of record cold, even as global warming continues elsewhere. Likewise, the Antarctic ice sheet may reach its irreversible threshold when warming temperatures trigger a state of constant ice loss, which could ultimately result in a 4-meter (13-foot) rise in global sea levels over the coming centuries. In fact, it’s suggested that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have already passed its critical threshold, and that ice loss is unstoppable now.
These individual tipping points are largely being driven by human-caused climate change, which is considered to be one of nine planetary boundaries — scientifically identified limits on change to vital Earth systems that currently regulate and sustain life. Overshooting those boundaries could lead to new natural paradigms catastrophic for humanity. Climate change has its own threshold of 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, which is the amount that scientists say the atmosphere can safely hold, but this threshold was already passed in 1988. In 2021, CO2 exceeded 417 ppm, which is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
To conduct this new study, the research team used a conceptual modeling process to analyze the interactions between these five Earth subsystems. What they found was that more than a third of these elements showed “tipping cascades” even before temperatures reached 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. At present, almost no nation on Earth is on target to meet its Paris carbon reduction goals.
Significantly, the study also found that the interactions between the tipping elements could lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than anticipated. Additionally, the researchers found that the Greenland Ice Sheet would function as an initiator of tipping cascades, while the AMOC would act as a transmitter that would push further changes, including dieback of the Amazon. Most of these tipping elements have been projected to have a destabilizing effect on each other, with the exception of the weakening of the AMOC, which could actually make the North Atlantic region colder and help stabilize the Greenland Ice Sheet.
“We found that the overall interactions tend to make [things] worse, so to say, and tend to be destabilizing,” lead author Nico Wunderling, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Mongabay.
He said that the findings suggest that we already face significant risk, but that the study does not necessarily provide a forecast. “We have made a risk analysis,” Wunderling said. “This is not a prediction, but it’s more like, ‘OK, if we have this warming, then we might face an increasing risk of tipping cascades.’”
Tim Lenton, a professor of climate change and Earth system science at the University of Exeter, U.K., and co-author of a similar study on tipping points, says the new paper is a “useful addition to the assessment of climate tipping point interactions.”
“The important takeaway message from this study is that the cascading causal interactions between four different climate tipping elements lower the ‘safe’ temperature level at which the risk of triggering tipping points is minimized,” Lenton told Mongabay in an email. “In fact the study suggests that below 2°C of global warming (above pre-industrial) — i.e. in the Paris agreement target range — there could still be a significant risk of triggering cascading climate tipping points.”
However, Lenton says the study does not unpack the timescale in which these tipping cascades would occur, focusing more on their consequences. “In the case of ice sheet collapse this can take many centuries,” he said. “Hence the results should be viewed as ‘commitments’ to potentially irreversible changes and cascades that we may be making soon, but will leave as a grim legacy to future generations to feel their full impact.”
Juan Rocha, an ecologist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, says the findings of the study affirm previous hypotheses about how “the tipping of one system can affect the likelihood of others in a self-amplifying way,” although he also notes its oversight of evaluating timescales.
“The Amazon is likely to tip way earlier than AMOC or Greenland,” Rocha told Mongabay. “Future work needs to take into account the diversity and uncertainty of the feedbacks at play for each tipping element to really understand how likely [it] is that one system can tip the other.”
Rocha says he’s pleased the authors undertook this study and hopes others continue to build on this research.
“I would like to extend an invitation to the authors and the scientific community to keep working on these important questions,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do, a lot that we do not know, and our models can only get us so far. Understanding how different systems of the Earth … are connected is fundamental to avoid the risk of domino effects, but also to empower people to act on time, identify leverage points and understand the extent of action or lack of it.”
Italics added. The problem with this and other studies is that too many, for reasons of predilection or ideology, will conflate studies of this nature as prediction, thereby succumbing to and encouraging despair, which is the last damn thing we need. Like it or not we are living in the Anthropocene, a sorry state of affairs to be sure, which can only be addressed by serious intent and human action. Yes, it could be 'too late'(however you measure that, opinions vary...) but we won't really know until it hammers us into the ground, and maybe not even then. But in the meantime instead of chucking it all or engaging in primitivist fantasies we got work to do . Without doubt the first and most important step is to rid ourselves of the destructive and wasteful capitalist mode of production.
June 26, 2021
Cascading changes could move Earth into a dangerous state for the future of humanity and nature
Interactions between climate tipping elements and their roles in tipping cascades.
by Elizabeth Claire Alberts
Mongobay, June 23, 2021
A new risk analysis has found that the tipping points of five of Earth’s subsystems — the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon rainforest — could interact with each other in a destabilizing manner.
It suggests that these changes could occur even before temperatures reach 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the Paris Agreement.
The interactions between the different tipping elements could also lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than expected, according to the research.
Experts not involved in the study say the findings are a significant contribution to the field, but do not adequately address the timescales over which these changes could occur.
When the first tile in a line of dominoes tips forward, it affects everything in front of it. One after another, lined-up dominoes knock into each other and topple. This is essentially what could happen to ice sheets, ocean currents and even the Amazon biome if critical tipping points are crossed, according to a new risk analysis. The destabilization of one element could impact the others, creating a domino effect of drastic changes that could move the Earth into an unfamiliar state — one potentially dangerous to the future of humanity and nature as we know it.
The study, published this month in Earth System Dynamics, examines the interactions between five subsystems that are known to have vital thresholds, or tipping points, that could trigger irreversible changes. They include the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon Rainforest.
Scientists believe the AMOC could reach its critical threshold when warming temperatures weaken the current enough to substantially slow it, halt it, or redirect it, which could plunge parts of the northern hemisphere into a period of record cold, even as global warming continues elsewhere. Likewise, the Antarctic ice sheet may reach its irreversible threshold when warming temperatures trigger a state of constant ice loss, which could ultimately result in a 4-meter (13-foot) rise in global sea levels over the coming centuries. In fact, it’s suggested that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have already passed its critical threshold, and that ice loss is unstoppable now.
These individual tipping points are largely being driven by human-caused climate change, which is considered to be one of nine planetary boundaries — scientifically identified limits on change to vital Earth systems that currently regulate and sustain life. Overshooting those boundaries could lead to new natural paradigms catastrophic for humanity. Climate change has its own threshold of 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, which is the amount that scientists say the atmosphere can safely hold, but this threshold was already passed in 1988. In 2021, CO2 exceeded 417 ppm, which is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
To conduct this new study, the research team used a conceptual modeling process to analyze the interactions between these five Earth subsystems. What they found was that more than a third of these elements showed “tipping cascades” even before temperatures reached 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. At present, almost no nation on Earth is on target to meet its Paris carbon reduction goals.
Significantly, the study also found that the interactions between the tipping elements could lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than anticipated. Additionally, the researchers found that the Greenland Ice Sheet would function as an initiator of tipping cascades, while the AMOC would act as a transmitter that would push further changes, including dieback of the Amazon. Most of these tipping elements have been projected to have a destabilizing effect on each other, with the exception of the weakening of the AMOC, which could actually make the North Atlantic region colder and help stabilize the Greenland Ice Sheet.
“We found that the overall interactions tend to make [things] worse, so to say, and tend to be destabilizing,” lead author Nico Wunderling, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Mongabay.
He said that the findings suggest that we already face significant risk, but that the study does not necessarily provide a forecast. “We have made a risk analysis,” Wunderling said. “This is not a prediction, but it’s more like, ‘OK, if we have this warming, then we might face an increasing risk of tipping cascades.’”
Tim Lenton, a professor of climate change and Earth system science at the University of Exeter, U.K., and co-author of a similar study on tipping points, says the new paper is a “useful addition to the assessment of climate tipping point interactions.”
“The important takeaway message from this study is that the cascading causal interactions between four different climate tipping elements lower the ‘safe’ temperature level at which the risk of triggering tipping points is minimized,” Lenton told Mongabay in an email. “In fact the study suggests that below 2°C of global warming (above pre-industrial) — i.e. in the Paris agreement target range — there could still be a significant risk of triggering cascading climate tipping points.”
However, Lenton says the study does not unpack the timescale in which these tipping cascades would occur, focusing more on their consequences. “In the case of ice sheet collapse this can take many centuries,” he said. “Hence the results should be viewed as ‘commitments’ to potentially irreversible changes and cascades that we may be making soon, but will leave as a grim legacy to future generations to feel their full impact.”
Juan Rocha, an ecologist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, says the findings of the study affirm previous hypotheses about how “the tipping of one system can affect the likelihood of others in a self-amplifying way,” although he also notes its oversight of evaluating timescales.
“The Amazon is likely to tip way earlier than AMOC or Greenland,” Rocha told Mongabay. “Future work needs to take into account the diversity and uncertainty of the feedbacks at play for each tipping element to really understand how likely [it] is that one system can tip the other.”
Rocha says he’s pleased the authors undertook this study and hopes others continue to build on this research.
“I would like to extend an invitation to the authors and the scientific community to keep working on these important questions,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do, a lot that we do not know, and our models can only get us so far. Understanding how different systems of the Earth … are connected is fundamental to avoid the risk of domino effects, but also to empower people to act on time, identify leverage points and understand the extent of action or lack of it.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... -dominoes/ABSTRACT
Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming.
With progressing global warming, there is an increased risk that one or several tipping elements in the climate system might cross a critical threshold, resulting in severe consequences for the global climate, ecosystems and human societies. While the underlying processes are fairly well-understood, it is unclear how their interactions might impact the overall stability of the Earth’s climate system.
As of yet, this cannot be fully analyzed with state-of-the-art Earth system models due to computational constraints as well as some missing and uncertain process representations of certain tipping elements. Here, we explicitly study the effects of known physical interactions among the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Amazon rainforest using a conceptual network approach.
We analyze the risk of domino effects being triggered by each of the individual tipping elements under global warming in equilibrium experiments. In these experiments, we propagate the uncertainties in critical temperature thresholds, interaction strengths and interaction structure via large ensembles of simulations in a Monte Carlo approach.
Overall, we find that the interactions tend to destabilize the network of tipping elements. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the qualitative role of each of the four tipping elements within the network, showing that the polar ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica are oftentimes the initiators of tipping cascades, while the AMOC acts as a mediator transmitting cascades.
This indicates that the ice sheets, which are already at risk of transgressing their temperature thresholds within the Paris range of 1.5 to 2 ∘C, are of particular importance for the stability of the climate system as a whole.
Wunderling, N., Donges, J. F., Kurths, J., and Winkelmann, R., “Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming,” Earth System Dynamics 12, 601–619.
Italics added. The problem with this and other studies is that too many, for reasons of predilection or ideology, will conflate studies of this nature as prediction, thereby succumbing to and encouraging despair, which is the last damn thing we need. Like it or not we are living in the Anthropocene, a sorry state of affairs to be sure, which can only be addressed by serious intent and human action. Yes, it could be 'too late'(however you measure that, opinions vary...) but we won't really know until it hammers us into the ground, and maybe not even then. But in the meantime instead of chucking it all or engaging in primitivist fantasies we got work to do . Without doubt the first and most important step is to rid ourselves of the destructive and wasteful capitalist mode of production.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
A People’s Green New Deal: An interview with Max Ajl
Les Mées, 2016, by Andreas Gursky
Climate crisis is a disaster which impacts us all, but the culpability is not evenly distributed. The rich nations of North America, Europe, Japan and Australia have contributed 60% of global cumulative CO2 emissions, compared to 13% for the two largest developing economies, China and India, taken together. And yet the overwhelming cost of global warming is being borne by the oppressed world, where ecosystem collapse is causing mass population displacements, while those countries most responsible move further towards fortress nationalisms. It is inevitable that this situation would engender a geographic rift in the environmental movement itself, an issue which is foregrounded in Max Ajl’s new book, A People’s Green New Deal, published by Pluto Press.
In this interview for Ebb Magazine, Ajl offers his perspective on the issues of ecologically unequal exchange, the Palestinian national liberation struggle, China’s model of agrarian revolution, Andreas Malm’s ‘ecological Leninism’, and the prospects for North-South convergence around environmental justice.
Alfie Hancox: The last few years have seen no shortage of left-wing commentary on Green New Deal policies and green manifestos. However, in A People’s Green New Deal, you take a different approach, drawing on Marxist dependency theorists like Samir Amin to foreground capitalist uneven development and what you call ‘ecologically unequal exchange’. Why is this perspective important for progressive environmentalism, and what does it tell us about the limits of social democratic Green New Deals?
Max Ajl: Ecologically uneven exchange (EUE), or essentially the North using a disproportionate share of world resources and space for waste, including more recently atmospheric space for carbon dioxide, has been a structural feature of historical capitalism. EUE is essentially an elaboration of earlier insights from Third World dependency theory, like the work of Samir Amin or Ruy Mauro Marini. It teaches us that southern labouring people are not only more oppressed and exploited, but they also encounter more social and ecological ravages than people in the North. Furthermore, these theories help us interpret modern political and economic history. By showing us how uneven exchange and primitive accumulation happen, they can show us what mechanisms are necessary to challenge them: Third World sovereignty, commodity cartels, national states untrammelled by US/Israeli warfare and subversion, collective self-reliance and bargaining at the United Nations, agrarian reform and sovereign industrialisation, appropriate technologies and eyes askance at unasked-for ‘technology transfer,’ internal and external price engineering. Indeed, many of these ideas were the planks of historical manifestos like the call for a New International Economic Order. We are also learning to see how inter-national oppression and ecological destruction register unevenly within peripheral countries.
Insofar as being determines consciousness, the consciousness which emerges from the social location of the southern labor classes tends to be more radical if not revolutionary. This means the periphery is what Amin identified as the ‘zone of storms.’ Furthermore, the types of theories people produce have a relationship, although not a precise correspondence, to the social conditions from which they emerge. Accordingly, the periphery has been and is more likely to produce the theories fit to put an end to this despoliation. These theories remind us that we need to listen to voices from the South if we want a world in which many worlds can fit. A progressive or anti-systemic environmentalism should depart from such analyses of the world and the remedies those analyses inform.
Uneven and polarised development, on the flip side, has an intellectual component. Class power helps determine epistemes, which then determines the contours of political programs which often reproduce rather than challenge ecologically uneven development. This is why many purportedly progressive internationalisms fail to recognise the national contradiction – that is, South-North value flow – as part-and-parcel of reproducing uneven development.
And such false internationalisms can emerge from the South and North. For example, ideas of extractivism have certainly meaningfully raised the spectre of uneven intra-national costs of commodity extraction. However, they have effectively suppressed the national question in doing so. They have also failed to offer a theoretical articulation capable of responding to national needs for socially and ecologically just development (they have been very useful, to be sure, to attack the radical-nationalist Latin American experiments in Venezuela and Bolivia).
Indeed, many of the same institutions which have avoided dealing with extractivism’s clumsiness when it comes to the national question likewise coo over colonial formulations like Robert Pollin’s Green New Deal proposal – which transforms sovereign demands for North-South climate debt payments to the tune of over $3 trillion per year into vague calls for ‘large-scale assistance.’ This is because they aim to build green social democracy, keeping private control over the means of production intact and essentially dismissing reparations to deal with the colonial legacy. Until that legacy is dealt with by taking seriously demands from the South for climate debt repayments and other difficulties of transition – what are Trinidad and Tobago or Bolivia to do to develop if their hydrocarbon supplies are banned? – metropolitan Green New Deals will not be able to engage in a serious dialogue with the social demands of the Third World.
In this way, from ultra-left to social democratic left, we have an ensemble of ecological thought which systematically suppresses North-South contradiction and value flow and the national question, and prevents theory from informing the political practice which could produce a real internationalism, one recognising the difficulties of socialist construction in an imperialist world system, one which, in the words of Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘insists on the substantive, not cosmetic, dissolution of hierarchies among nations and proletariats in the struggle against capital.’
AH: You provocatively suggest that the green reformism associated with the re-emergence of social democrats such as Corbyn and Sanders had the adverse effect of ‘displacing and erasing an earlier radical environmentalism tied to demands coming from the Global South’, including demands for climate reparations. Given that overturning imperialist unequal exchange would necessarily reduce consumption levels within the Global North (a reality ignored by proponents of ‘luxury communism’), wedding northern socialism to anti-imperialism is, as you say, an ‘Olympian task’. Are there any current movements within the core that provide grounds for hope in this respect?
MA: I want to take a small issue with this way of framing the question, which often in recent times has become rendered in overly polarising terms. If we look at overall wealth, including investments and salaries, which represent claims on labour and resources and goods as they are currently produced under capitalist social relations and capitalist technology, then it is very clear that there are huge disparities between northern and southern consumption. This justifies the use of national aggregates to make sense of these disparities, and to clarify that it is the South which will have to take the lead in a just transition on the global level. Indeed, work like the recent research of Zak Cope suggests that what was classically called a labour aristocracy, sectors of the core working class, consume well in excess of what they produce.
Yet, at the same time, life is very difficult for many people even in the imperial core, especially in a severely underdeveloped country like the US. For example, the US could achieve better healthcare outcomes with an entirely domestically-trained medical corps, using fewer national resources, if we shifted to preventative, community-centred, free medical care. So, it is important to point out that in our current highly, I think at least in some ways over-industrialised world, certain kinds of consumption, like northern use of nearly disposable mobile phones, would have to sharply decrease to enable world-wide developmental convergence between North and South, in the framework of a more or less permanently ecologically sustainable planned world system. But for many people in the North, life could be better and we could have more stable access to higher-quality use values, especially when we consider the enormous waste embedded in imperialist-capitalism, from the military to treating socially-inflicted cancers to socially pathological overuse of cars.
Nevertheless, it is a serious problem that exploited people are woven into social and technological systems that they are used to and do not see an alternative to – in many cases people are even willing to fight to defend them. These systems contain scarce interstices from which to launch a conversion to non-commodified and ecologically sustainable patterns of production and consumption. That’s why the book focuses intensely on Indigenous movements and farmers movements. In the former case, the Indigenous movement challenges the anterior primitive accumulation upon which settler-capitalism rests. In the latter case, ecological farming, as well as moves towards ecologically-appropriate building materials, and overall shifts in architecture, housing, and planning, could be elements of a People’s Green New Deal which has no need to exploit the labour and materials of the South in order to create a good life in the North. Even aspects of the contemporary interest in artisanal goods could be radicalised.
I should be clear about something, too: this book is not a definitive statement, but rather lays out some lines of thinking to inform a discussion, departing from some of the most important southern theories of development which are the necessary basis for world-wide access to a good life, that is, socialism. So, perhaps more importantly in some respects, there is a huge resurgence of interest in dependency theory, anti-imperialism, uneven exchange, and kindred ways of thinking and histories. So, we should expect that such thinking will more and more inform how movements organise, including on ecological questions, and that could lead to an efflorescence of practice and theory, perhaps seeking to update and take from the best of the very rich debate on appropriate technologies as it occurred in the North; the Latin American debate on styles of development; and the Arab debate on appropriate technology as a mechanism of delinking – keeping in mind that these theories almost always defended national metallurgical industries and railroad systems, and were very much in favour of modernity, or complex divisions of labour, and were pro-industry, as well.
AH: In the book you criticise the ‘calcified anti-rural prejudice’ of First World Marxism, which has often neglected the role of the peasantry in socialist transition. Perhaps an exception to this were those Maoist intellectuals in the 1960s-70s who championed China’s model of agrarian revolution, but today much of the western anti-imperialist Left bypasses this period of history and ascribes China’s economic success to its embrace of so-called ‘market socialism’. In your view, does the pre-1978 Chinese development path have sustained relevance?
MA: I would put this simply: anyone who wants to understand the prospects for development in the Third World needs to understand and appreciate and in many ways, seek to repeat, the achievements of Maoist China. Those are many of the fundamental elements for contemporary popular development in the periphery. The most important issue is agrarian reform, and investment in improving the quality and quantity of southern smallholder production. Breaking up large estates immediately re-orients domestic agricultural production to feeding rather than tropical commodity export. For countries to develop, they need to be able to largely feed themselves, and feed themselves well. People who are hungry cannot work, and people who are not eating nutritionally complete food, not just more fruits and vegetables but also say sorghum, millet, or hard wheat in lieu of highly processed soft wheat flour, will be sicker or in poorer health. Such countries also need to produce a surplus, whether for modulated export of raw materials, or processed raw materials, to secure hard currency, for inputs into domestic manufacturing and industrialisation, and for wage-goods like food, to supply those working in domestic secondary and tertiary sectors: industry and services.
Now, it is widely established that agrarian reform can lead to more rational use of labour than larger private farms, whether that means enhanced labour from owners onto farms, increasing production per land area, or through cooperatives freeing up labour for long-term productivity-enhancing or land-enhancing investments, as with China’s creation of vast irrigation infrastructures. The first decades of China’s Maoist rural development policies were based, very often, on proto-agro-ecological innovations: gathering human and animal waste for fertiliser, biological pest control, and appropriate-scale mechanisation. There were also more capital-intensive inputs, of course, but they were not responsible for early yield improvements. These policy measures went alongside price engineering to ensure that country and city developed relatively evenly, to control rural out-migration, and to allow for some channelling of surplus to industrialisation, which reciprocally served the technical upgrading of agriculture. As a result, the Chinese path loomed at the margins or even the centre of economic discourse across the post-colonial world.
These Chinese policies remain relevant: break up the large estates. Slowly and organically introduce producer cooperatives. Increase domestic food production, break through the food grain constraint, and above all, make use the country’s most valuable resource – its labour – to build up the infrastructure of a socialist society. Carry out price engineering to ensure appropriate returns to labour nation-wide. These steps create a wide internal market, allowing for economies of scale in manufacturing and industrial sectors. With such measures, in a decade extreme poverty could be completely eradicated almost world-wide, and nations could be more or less just and decent societies within 30 years, which would still need to develop their forces of production. I do not see any other way for the countries of the Third World to create decent societies in the current context.
Now, as for the post-Mao dismantling of the commune system, it has been established that this led to increased rural inequality, even while at the same time, many of the post-1978 agricultural productivity increases, including yield increases from mounting application of chemical fertilisers, really were long-term yields on investments made in the 1950s-1970s on irrigation technology. And the increasing industrialisation and research capacities rested on the Maoist successes in increasing access to education and of course breaking apart gender oppression in the countryside. So there has been a tendency to over-praise the post-1978 policies even though the earlier ones had similar rates of growth and with more use-values staying in the hands of the poor. So there is a lot to learn from the past.
AH: In America, President Joe Biden has taken on board elements of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which many liberal commentators have applauded as a successful reversal of Trump’s aggressive environmental rollbacks. Is this an accurate assessment?
MA: It is a question of whether the US government will keep pursuing massively destructive policies more quickly or more slowly. The question is one of pace rather than direction. The Biden Green New Deal rejects climate debt. The Biden plan aims for net-zero emissions by 2050, which is far too late, since it means that there will be massive continued emissions which could permanently destabilise the climate. The effects of such emissions, needless to say, fall hardest on the formerly colonised world, including making small island states nearly uninhabitable.
Perhaps even more threatening at some level is the call for ‘net-zero.’ Net-zero is a term which enfolds generally dubious if not outright mendacious ideas that carbon absorption in some places, whether through tree planting or other methods, can offset continued emissions from coal, oil, and gas burning. This is meant, then, first as a gesture of conciliation to the Western oil companies, stating that the Biden administration will try its best to avoid destroying the value of their assets. It also represents a promise to heavily invest in carbon-dioxide-sucking machinery. Furthermore, net-zero is generally to be accomplished through mono-cultural tree planting, which has massively destructive effects on water tables and biodiversity, never mind the massive ethnic cleansing and destruction of pastoral lives which lurks behind such schemes.
AH: A key intervention of A People’s Green New Deal is its insistence that effective environmentalism must respect national sovereignty in the Global South, entailing opposition to financial imperialism and ongoing settler-colonial projects. How does an eco-socialist perspective map onto the present Palestinian liberation struggle?
MA: Eco-socialists have to start from the basic demands of colonised peoples: namely national liberation. The Palestinian liberation struggle is one of the few, but not the only, remaining ‘classical’ national liberation struggles, which aims to break foreign settler control over the land. Furthermore, as the writer Soula Avramidis points out, the Palestinian national struggle is also a regional national-agrarian struggle, which has its own unique aspects, reflecting the political economy of the region. As he writes, ‘The theory implicit in nearly every issue of Al-Hadaf was that the struggle against Zionism was more than a struggle to reclaim land – it was a struggle against American capitalist hegemony on whose behalf Israel acted as a gendarme.’ This means the Palestinian national liberation struggle is tied to the broader Arab-Iranian national question, which gives the Palestinians their strategic depth – a point missed in contemporary chatter which seeks to sever Palestine from its strategic support base, either labelling that support ‘sub-imperialist,’ or else simply ignoring it or otherwise denigrating it. Supporting Palestine also means supporting national sovereignty within the surrounding scaffolding of regional front-line states. Inability to ‘see’ these basic contradictions as constitutive of the world-wide struggle for an ecological and socialist world system, are a rehearsal of economism, in the form of ecologism – if the struggles don’t seem to articulate ‘directly’ with the ecological contradiction, they are dismissed.
Now, it’s important to foreground self-determination, but there are many other elements of the Palestinian liberation struggle which do speak more explicitly to the ecological issue. Israel itself has destroyed much of the native flora, and replaced it with ecologically inappropriate pine plantations. It also continues to uproot, year-by-year, ecologically appropriate olive trees. Palestine, like other regions of the Third World, has a dazzling heritage of sustainable peasant or smallholder agriculture, from the remaining terraces of Battir, to terraces in the Naqab to cisterns in the hills of the West Bank. That, too, is being lost, and because such forms of technology are bound to the practices and lives and social systems of the people who have built and maintain them, the loss of these technologies can only be reserved through great struggle, even when Palestine is liberated (Divya Sharma has discussed some of the difficulties of renewal of agro-ecological practices in the Indian context). Furthermore, Israel is the world’s major per capita exporter of weapons, which themselves have been used as part of US aligned or implanted regimes’ wars on poor people and their environmental struggles, as in India and Brazil. Such weapons also produce massive toxins in production and use.
AH: Recently the radical scholar Andreas Malm has advocated an ‘ecological Leninism’ that, as you have elsewhere argued, is nonetheless ideologically eclectic and glaringly Eurocentric. In this Malm may be placed within a broader tendency of the academic Left to downplay the anti-imperialism at the heart of Lenin’s politics. Do you think the framework of eco-Leninism, mentioned briefly in your book, has any redeemable utility?
MA: It is not clear to me that we can recover the term. Leninism as a historical practice was marked by strategic-political creativity, the seizure of state power, a worker-peasant alliance, anti-colonialism, and internationalism more broadly. Except for the seizure of state power, Malm denudes Leninism of its historical substance. However, if Leninism means simply that a central element of socialist construction is the acquisition of state power by Marxist-Leninist organisations, with programs that weld together revolutionary domestic transformation with anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, then Leninism has a great utility. Socialism by definition ought to attend to ecological issues, and we can find a clear concern with such issues in the classic works of Marx and Engels themselves. In fact most of the world’s Marxist-Leninist parties, revisionist or otherwise, have strong climate justice planks in their platforms. Such demands are indeed more urgent than ever in terms of building up Third World and for that matter First World adaptation and resilience capacities, now that the question of avoiding climate change is moot. The question is surviving it and trying to keep countries habitable, and within that effort, taking over state power. As Reinaldo Iturriza, a leading Chavista intellectual, points out, ‘It is not an option to be governed by the criminals who ruled in the past,’ whatever the limits of state power in building socialism – a point which has yet to be answered in theory or practice.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Max Ajl is a postdoctoral fellow at Wageningen University's Rural Sociology Group, and an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He is also an editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society, and is on twitter @maxajl.
https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/a-p ... n-new-deal
Bolding added
Les Mées, 2016, by Andreas Gursky
Climate crisis is a disaster which impacts us all, but the culpability is not evenly distributed. The rich nations of North America, Europe, Japan and Australia have contributed 60% of global cumulative CO2 emissions, compared to 13% for the two largest developing economies, China and India, taken together. And yet the overwhelming cost of global warming is being borne by the oppressed world, where ecosystem collapse is causing mass population displacements, while those countries most responsible move further towards fortress nationalisms. It is inevitable that this situation would engender a geographic rift in the environmental movement itself, an issue which is foregrounded in Max Ajl’s new book, A People’s Green New Deal, published by Pluto Press.
In this interview for Ebb Magazine, Ajl offers his perspective on the issues of ecologically unequal exchange, the Palestinian national liberation struggle, China’s model of agrarian revolution, Andreas Malm’s ‘ecological Leninism’, and the prospects for North-South convergence around environmental justice.
Alfie Hancox: The last few years have seen no shortage of left-wing commentary on Green New Deal policies and green manifestos. However, in A People’s Green New Deal, you take a different approach, drawing on Marxist dependency theorists like Samir Amin to foreground capitalist uneven development and what you call ‘ecologically unequal exchange’. Why is this perspective important for progressive environmentalism, and what does it tell us about the limits of social democratic Green New Deals?
Max Ajl: Ecologically uneven exchange (EUE), or essentially the North using a disproportionate share of world resources and space for waste, including more recently atmospheric space for carbon dioxide, has been a structural feature of historical capitalism. EUE is essentially an elaboration of earlier insights from Third World dependency theory, like the work of Samir Amin or Ruy Mauro Marini. It teaches us that southern labouring people are not only more oppressed and exploited, but they also encounter more social and ecological ravages than people in the North. Furthermore, these theories help us interpret modern political and economic history. By showing us how uneven exchange and primitive accumulation happen, they can show us what mechanisms are necessary to challenge them: Third World sovereignty, commodity cartels, national states untrammelled by US/Israeli warfare and subversion, collective self-reliance and bargaining at the United Nations, agrarian reform and sovereign industrialisation, appropriate technologies and eyes askance at unasked-for ‘technology transfer,’ internal and external price engineering. Indeed, many of these ideas were the planks of historical manifestos like the call for a New International Economic Order. We are also learning to see how inter-national oppression and ecological destruction register unevenly within peripheral countries.
Insofar as being determines consciousness, the consciousness which emerges from the social location of the southern labor classes tends to be more radical if not revolutionary. This means the periphery is what Amin identified as the ‘zone of storms.’ Furthermore, the types of theories people produce have a relationship, although not a precise correspondence, to the social conditions from which they emerge. Accordingly, the periphery has been and is more likely to produce the theories fit to put an end to this despoliation. These theories remind us that we need to listen to voices from the South if we want a world in which many worlds can fit. A progressive or anti-systemic environmentalism should depart from such analyses of the world and the remedies those analyses inform.
Uneven and polarised development, on the flip side, has an intellectual component. Class power helps determine epistemes, which then determines the contours of political programs which often reproduce rather than challenge ecologically uneven development. This is why many purportedly progressive internationalisms fail to recognise the national contradiction – that is, South-North value flow – as part-and-parcel of reproducing uneven development.
And such false internationalisms can emerge from the South and North. For example, ideas of extractivism have certainly meaningfully raised the spectre of uneven intra-national costs of commodity extraction. However, they have effectively suppressed the national question in doing so. They have also failed to offer a theoretical articulation capable of responding to national needs for socially and ecologically just development (they have been very useful, to be sure, to attack the radical-nationalist Latin American experiments in Venezuela and Bolivia).
Indeed, many of the same institutions which have avoided dealing with extractivism’s clumsiness when it comes to the national question likewise coo over colonial formulations like Robert Pollin’s Green New Deal proposal – which transforms sovereign demands for North-South climate debt payments to the tune of over $3 trillion per year into vague calls for ‘large-scale assistance.’ This is because they aim to build green social democracy, keeping private control over the means of production intact and essentially dismissing reparations to deal with the colonial legacy. Until that legacy is dealt with by taking seriously demands from the South for climate debt repayments and other difficulties of transition – what are Trinidad and Tobago or Bolivia to do to develop if their hydrocarbon supplies are banned? – metropolitan Green New Deals will not be able to engage in a serious dialogue with the social demands of the Third World.
In this way, from ultra-left to social democratic left, we have an ensemble of ecological thought which systematically suppresses North-South contradiction and value flow and the national question, and prevents theory from informing the political practice which could produce a real internationalism, one recognising the difficulties of socialist construction in an imperialist world system, one which, in the words of Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘insists on the substantive, not cosmetic, dissolution of hierarchies among nations and proletariats in the struggle against capital.’
AH: You provocatively suggest that the green reformism associated with the re-emergence of social democrats such as Corbyn and Sanders had the adverse effect of ‘displacing and erasing an earlier radical environmentalism tied to demands coming from the Global South’, including demands for climate reparations. Given that overturning imperialist unequal exchange would necessarily reduce consumption levels within the Global North (a reality ignored by proponents of ‘luxury communism’), wedding northern socialism to anti-imperialism is, as you say, an ‘Olympian task’. Are there any current movements within the core that provide grounds for hope in this respect?
MA: I want to take a small issue with this way of framing the question, which often in recent times has become rendered in overly polarising terms. If we look at overall wealth, including investments and salaries, which represent claims on labour and resources and goods as they are currently produced under capitalist social relations and capitalist technology, then it is very clear that there are huge disparities between northern and southern consumption. This justifies the use of national aggregates to make sense of these disparities, and to clarify that it is the South which will have to take the lead in a just transition on the global level. Indeed, work like the recent research of Zak Cope suggests that what was classically called a labour aristocracy, sectors of the core working class, consume well in excess of what they produce.
Yet, at the same time, life is very difficult for many people even in the imperial core, especially in a severely underdeveloped country like the US. For example, the US could achieve better healthcare outcomes with an entirely domestically-trained medical corps, using fewer national resources, if we shifted to preventative, community-centred, free medical care. So, it is important to point out that in our current highly, I think at least in some ways over-industrialised world, certain kinds of consumption, like northern use of nearly disposable mobile phones, would have to sharply decrease to enable world-wide developmental convergence between North and South, in the framework of a more or less permanently ecologically sustainable planned world system. But for many people in the North, life could be better and we could have more stable access to higher-quality use values, especially when we consider the enormous waste embedded in imperialist-capitalism, from the military to treating socially-inflicted cancers to socially pathological overuse of cars.
Nevertheless, it is a serious problem that exploited people are woven into social and technological systems that they are used to and do not see an alternative to – in many cases people are even willing to fight to defend them. These systems contain scarce interstices from which to launch a conversion to non-commodified and ecologically sustainable patterns of production and consumption. That’s why the book focuses intensely on Indigenous movements and farmers movements. In the former case, the Indigenous movement challenges the anterior primitive accumulation upon which settler-capitalism rests. In the latter case, ecological farming, as well as moves towards ecologically-appropriate building materials, and overall shifts in architecture, housing, and planning, could be elements of a People’s Green New Deal which has no need to exploit the labour and materials of the South in order to create a good life in the North. Even aspects of the contemporary interest in artisanal goods could be radicalised.
I should be clear about something, too: this book is not a definitive statement, but rather lays out some lines of thinking to inform a discussion, departing from some of the most important southern theories of development which are the necessary basis for world-wide access to a good life, that is, socialism. So, perhaps more importantly in some respects, there is a huge resurgence of interest in dependency theory, anti-imperialism, uneven exchange, and kindred ways of thinking and histories. So, we should expect that such thinking will more and more inform how movements organise, including on ecological questions, and that could lead to an efflorescence of practice and theory, perhaps seeking to update and take from the best of the very rich debate on appropriate technologies as it occurred in the North; the Latin American debate on styles of development; and the Arab debate on appropriate technology as a mechanism of delinking – keeping in mind that these theories almost always defended national metallurgical industries and railroad systems, and were very much in favour of modernity, or complex divisions of labour, and were pro-industry, as well.
AH: In the book you criticise the ‘calcified anti-rural prejudice’ of First World Marxism, which has often neglected the role of the peasantry in socialist transition. Perhaps an exception to this were those Maoist intellectuals in the 1960s-70s who championed China’s model of agrarian revolution, but today much of the western anti-imperialist Left bypasses this period of history and ascribes China’s economic success to its embrace of so-called ‘market socialism’. In your view, does the pre-1978 Chinese development path have sustained relevance?
MA: I would put this simply: anyone who wants to understand the prospects for development in the Third World needs to understand and appreciate and in many ways, seek to repeat, the achievements of Maoist China. Those are many of the fundamental elements for contemporary popular development in the periphery. The most important issue is agrarian reform, and investment in improving the quality and quantity of southern smallholder production. Breaking up large estates immediately re-orients domestic agricultural production to feeding rather than tropical commodity export. For countries to develop, they need to be able to largely feed themselves, and feed themselves well. People who are hungry cannot work, and people who are not eating nutritionally complete food, not just more fruits and vegetables but also say sorghum, millet, or hard wheat in lieu of highly processed soft wheat flour, will be sicker or in poorer health. Such countries also need to produce a surplus, whether for modulated export of raw materials, or processed raw materials, to secure hard currency, for inputs into domestic manufacturing and industrialisation, and for wage-goods like food, to supply those working in domestic secondary and tertiary sectors: industry and services.
Now, it is widely established that agrarian reform can lead to more rational use of labour than larger private farms, whether that means enhanced labour from owners onto farms, increasing production per land area, or through cooperatives freeing up labour for long-term productivity-enhancing or land-enhancing investments, as with China’s creation of vast irrigation infrastructures. The first decades of China’s Maoist rural development policies were based, very often, on proto-agro-ecological innovations: gathering human and animal waste for fertiliser, biological pest control, and appropriate-scale mechanisation. There were also more capital-intensive inputs, of course, but they were not responsible for early yield improvements. These policy measures went alongside price engineering to ensure that country and city developed relatively evenly, to control rural out-migration, and to allow for some channelling of surplus to industrialisation, which reciprocally served the technical upgrading of agriculture. As a result, the Chinese path loomed at the margins or even the centre of economic discourse across the post-colonial world.
These Chinese policies remain relevant: break up the large estates. Slowly and organically introduce producer cooperatives. Increase domestic food production, break through the food grain constraint, and above all, make use the country’s most valuable resource – its labour – to build up the infrastructure of a socialist society. Carry out price engineering to ensure appropriate returns to labour nation-wide. These steps create a wide internal market, allowing for economies of scale in manufacturing and industrial sectors. With such measures, in a decade extreme poverty could be completely eradicated almost world-wide, and nations could be more or less just and decent societies within 30 years, which would still need to develop their forces of production. I do not see any other way for the countries of the Third World to create decent societies in the current context.
Now, as for the post-Mao dismantling of the commune system, it has been established that this led to increased rural inequality, even while at the same time, many of the post-1978 agricultural productivity increases, including yield increases from mounting application of chemical fertilisers, really were long-term yields on investments made in the 1950s-1970s on irrigation technology. And the increasing industrialisation and research capacities rested on the Maoist successes in increasing access to education and of course breaking apart gender oppression in the countryside. So there has been a tendency to over-praise the post-1978 policies even though the earlier ones had similar rates of growth and with more use-values staying in the hands of the poor. So there is a lot to learn from the past.
AH: In America, President Joe Biden has taken on board elements of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which many liberal commentators have applauded as a successful reversal of Trump’s aggressive environmental rollbacks. Is this an accurate assessment?
MA: It is a question of whether the US government will keep pursuing massively destructive policies more quickly or more slowly. The question is one of pace rather than direction. The Biden Green New Deal rejects climate debt. The Biden plan aims for net-zero emissions by 2050, which is far too late, since it means that there will be massive continued emissions which could permanently destabilise the climate. The effects of such emissions, needless to say, fall hardest on the formerly colonised world, including making small island states nearly uninhabitable.
Perhaps even more threatening at some level is the call for ‘net-zero.’ Net-zero is a term which enfolds generally dubious if not outright mendacious ideas that carbon absorption in some places, whether through tree planting or other methods, can offset continued emissions from coal, oil, and gas burning. This is meant, then, first as a gesture of conciliation to the Western oil companies, stating that the Biden administration will try its best to avoid destroying the value of their assets. It also represents a promise to heavily invest in carbon-dioxide-sucking machinery. Furthermore, net-zero is generally to be accomplished through mono-cultural tree planting, which has massively destructive effects on water tables and biodiversity, never mind the massive ethnic cleansing and destruction of pastoral lives which lurks behind such schemes.
AH: A key intervention of A People’s Green New Deal is its insistence that effective environmentalism must respect national sovereignty in the Global South, entailing opposition to financial imperialism and ongoing settler-colonial projects. How does an eco-socialist perspective map onto the present Palestinian liberation struggle?
MA: Eco-socialists have to start from the basic demands of colonised peoples: namely national liberation. The Palestinian liberation struggle is one of the few, but not the only, remaining ‘classical’ national liberation struggles, which aims to break foreign settler control over the land. Furthermore, as the writer Soula Avramidis points out, the Palestinian national struggle is also a regional national-agrarian struggle, which has its own unique aspects, reflecting the political economy of the region. As he writes, ‘The theory implicit in nearly every issue of Al-Hadaf was that the struggle against Zionism was more than a struggle to reclaim land – it was a struggle against American capitalist hegemony on whose behalf Israel acted as a gendarme.’ This means the Palestinian national liberation struggle is tied to the broader Arab-Iranian national question, which gives the Palestinians their strategic depth – a point missed in contemporary chatter which seeks to sever Palestine from its strategic support base, either labelling that support ‘sub-imperialist,’ or else simply ignoring it or otherwise denigrating it. Supporting Palestine also means supporting national sovereignty within the surrounding scaffolding of regional front-line states. Inability to ‘see’ these basic contradictions as constitutive of the world-wide struggle for an ecological and socialist world system, are a rehearsal of economism, in the form of ecologism – if the struggles don’t seem to articulate ‘directly’ with the ecological contradiction, they are dismissed.
Now, it’s important to foreground self-determination, but there are many other elements of the Palestinian liberation struggle which do speak more explicitly to the ecological issue. Israel itself has destroyed much of the native flora, and replaced it with ecologically inappropriate pine plantations. It also continues to uproot, year-by-year, ecologically appropriate olive trees. Palestine, like other regions of the Third World, has a dazzling heritage of sustainable peasant or smallholder agriculture, from the remaining terraces of Battir, to terraces in the Naqab to cisterns in the hills of the West Bank. That, too, is being lost, and because such forms of technology are bound to the practices and lives and social systems of the people who have built and maintain them, the loss of these technologies can only be reserved through great struggle, even when Palestine is liberated (Divya Sharma has discussed some of the difficulties of renewal of agro-ecological practices in the Indian context). Furthermore, Israel is the world’s major per capita exporter of weapons, which themselves have been used as part of US aligned or implanted regimes’ wars on poor people and their environmental struggles, as in India and Brazil. Such weapons also produce massive toxins in production and use.
AH: Recently the radical scholar Andreas Malm has advocated an ‘ecological Leninism’ that, as you have elsewhere argued, is nonetheless ideologically eclectic and glaringly Eurocentric. In this Malm may be placed within a broader tendency of the academic Left to downplay the anti-imperialism at the heart of Lenin’s politics. Do you think the framework of eco-Leninism, mentioned briefly in your book, has any redeemable utility?
MA: It is not clear to me that we can recover the term. Leninism as a historical practice was marked by strategic-political creativity, the seizure of state power, a worker-peasant alliance, anti-colonialism, and internationalism more broadly. Except for the seizure of state power, Malm denudes Leninism of its historical substance. However, if Leninism means simply that a central element of socialist construction is the acquisition of state power by Marxist-Leninist organisations, with programs that weld together revolutionary domestic transformation with anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, then Leninism has a great utility. Socialism by definition ought to attend to ecological issues, and we can find a clear concern with such issues in the classic works of Marx and Engels themselves. In fact most of the world’s Marxist-Leninist parties, revisionist or otherwise, have strong climate justice planks in their platforms. Such demands are indeed more urgent than ever in terms of building up Third World and for that matter First World adaptation and resilience capacities, now that the question of avoiding climate change is moot. The question is surviving it and trying to keep countries habitable, and within that effort, taking over state power. As Reinaldo Iturriza, a leading Chavista intellectual, points out, ‘It is not an option to be governed by the criminals who ruled in the past,’ whatever the limits of state power in building socialism – a point which has yet to be answered in theory or practice.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Max Ajl is a postdoctoral fellow at Wageningen University's Rural Sociology Group, and an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He is also an editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society, and is on twitter @maxajl.
https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/a-p ... n-new-deal
Bolding added
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
ALBA: Towards A People’s Climate Conference
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 7, 2021
Kawsachun News
ALBA-TCP Ministers and High-level Authorities on Environment met to coordinate joint actions in the fight against Climate Change. July 7, 2021.
Today, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) held a meeting of Environment Ministers of its member states to plan for a people’s climate summit that will draw up proposals for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November. Meeting participants agreed to convene in Venezuela, which will be followed by a people’s conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
The people’s conference “will count with the participation of groups particularly vulnerable to climate change; youth, women and indigenous peoples of the world, with the aim of adopting a declaration with a view to the COP 26 of Glasgow,” said ALBA General Secretary, Sacha Llorenti.
Participating Environment Ministers stressed the need for proposals outside the traditional free market solutions that have failed to challenge the crisis.
Bolivia’s Minister for Environment and Water told the meeting that, “The climate crisis is one of the great challenges of our times, it threatens the existence of life on the planet and is a product of the capitalist system…We reject the vision of the market and the green economy. The Paris Agreement is market-based”.
– Participate in COP26 with a clear joint position, product of the conference which will consolidate the proposals of the technical and political commissions of the member states.
– Carry out, in the second week of July, five days of work between technical and political teams of negotiators from the ALBA countries, under the leadership of the heads of delegation to evaluate and consolidate an ALBA-TCP position with a view to carrying out the COP26 in Glasgow.
– Set up, before August 5, 2021, a youth and climate change team, drawn from ALBA countries to articulate a joint position on environmental issues.
– Develop, in August, an exchange between academics and experts from ALBA countries to generate a position proposal on the impact of economic sanctions and how they impede the implementation of the “Paris Agreement”.
– Hold, in September, a meeting of the heads of delegation to the United Nations with extra-regional partners, so as to promote coordination on the development of a climate change position.
– Celebrate, in August, the second “Reencounter with Mother Earth International Forum” in Caracas, Venezuela, in order to adopt a declaration of ALBA-TCP on the Global South’s vision for the protection and defense of Mother Earth.
– Celebrate, in October, the “Third People’s Summit” in Tiquipaya (Cochabamba, Bolivia), to make an urgent call to avoid climate collapse.
Tiquipaya is the site of the historic World People’s Conference on Climate Change of 2010, led by Evo Morales, which was attended by 30,000 people from social movements of 100 countries. It was at this summit that the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth was published, and from which important proposals emerged such as those around the climate debt owed by imperialist countries to the Global South.
The meeting can be viewed on YouTube and Facebook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPJbqaWtK_0 https://www.facebook.com/ALBATCP/videos ... 136711953/
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/07/ ... onference/
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 7, 2021
Kawsachun News
ALBA-TCP Ministers and High-level Authorities on Environment met to coordinate joint actions in the fight against Climate Change. July 7, 2021.
Today, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) held a meeting of Environment Ministers of its member states to plan for a people’s climate summit that will draw up proposals for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November. Meeting participants agreed to convene in Venezuela, which will be followed by a people’s conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
The people’s conference “will count with the participation of groups particularly vulnerable to climate change; youth, women and indigenous peoples of the world, with the aim of adopting a declaration with a view to the COP 26 of Glasgow,” said ALBA General Secretary, Sacha Llorenti.
Participating Environment Ministers stressed the need for proposals outside the traditional free market solutions that have failed to challenge the crisis.
Bolivia’s Minister for Environment and Water told the meeting that, “The climate crisis is one of the great challenges of our times, it threatens the existence of life on the planet and is a product of the capitalist system…We reject the vision of the market and the green economy. The Paris Agreement is market-based”.
Today’s meeting agreed on constructing the following path towards a people’s climate conference:.@SachaLlorenti: The @ALBATCP approved a roadmap towards the Glasgow Climate Change Conference (COP 26).
With concrete proposals for joint work, we will face the challenge of defending peoples from the devastating effects of the climate crisis.https://t.co/h6fdR8gARv
— ALBA-TCP (@ALBATCP) July 7, 2021
– Participate in COP26 with a clear joint position, product of the conference which will consolidate the proposals of the technical and political commissions of the member states.
– Carry out, in the second week of July, five days of work between technical and political teams of negotiators from the ALBA countries, under the leadership of the heads of delegation to evaluate and consolidate an ALBA-TCP position with a view to carrying out the COP26 in Glasgow.
– Set up, before August 5, 2021, a youth and climate change team, drawn from ALBA countries to articulate a joint position on environmental issues.
– Develop, in August, an exchange between academics and experts from ALBA countries to generate a position proposal on the impact of economic sanctions and how they impede the implementation of the “Paris Agreement”.
– Hold, in September, a meeting of the heads of delegation to the United Nations with extra-regional partners, so as to promote coordination on the development of a climate change position.
– Celebrate, in August, the second “Reencounter with Mother Earth International Forum” in Caracas, Venezuela, in order to adopt a declaration of ALBA-TCP on the Global South’s vision for the protection and defense of Mother Earth.
– Celebrate, in October, the “Third People’s Summit” in Tiquipaya (Cochabamba, Bolivia), to make an urgent call to avoid climate collapse.
Tiquipaya is the site of the historic World People’s Conference on Climate Change of 2010, led by Evo Morales, which was attended by 30,000 people from social movements of 100 countries. It was at this summit that the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth was published, and from which important proposals emerged such as those around the climate debt owed by imperialist countries to the Global South.
The meeting can be viewed on YouTube and Facebook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPJbqaWtK_0 https://www.facebook.com/ALBATCP/videos ... 136711953/
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/07/ ... onference/
You'll not hear that from Biden or the G-7. Which side are they on?“The climate crisis is one of the great challenges of our times, it threatens the existence of life on the planet and is a product of the capitalist system…We reject the vision of the market and the green economy. The Paris Agreement is market-based”.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
No climate future without system change
Originally published: Socialist Party by Socialist Party (July 8, 2021 ) | - Posted Jul 15, 2021
Warnings about how the capitalist mode of production is putting pressure on the earth’s ability to handle all forms of stress have continued to come at an increasing pace. Over the past year, we have seen record numbers of tropical storms in Central America and South-East Asia, extreme heat in Siberia and fires in Australia and North and South America. 2020 was, despite the cooling weather phenomenon, La Niña, the warmest year on record. Although that temperature matched that of 2016, then the warming phenomenon El Niño was significant.Two years after the first global climate strike on 19 March 2019, despite the acute situation, COVID-19 has pushed the question into the background. Yet the coronavirus is in itself a judgement on the capitalist mode of production which destroys ecosystems and creates biological and environmental dangers that threaten the development of our entire biosphere–life on earth writes Jonas Brännberg, a member of our sister organisation in Sweden, Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna.
It is far from just climate change that is the cause of these serious warnings. Other examples are rapid species death, over-fertilisation and the explosion of plastic and other pollutants. According to climate researchers, we have already left the safe zone for four of the nine “planetary boundaries” that hold the earth in the stable state that it has been in for the past 11,700 years, the so-called Holocene.
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of modern socialism, studied capitalism, they were already then able to see the contradiction between the system and nature. Marx expressed it as capitalism having created a metabolic rift between human beings and nature. He gave an example of how nutrients in food were transported from the countryside to the cities to later be washed into the sea as waste products, with soil depletion as a result.
Marx and Engels could, however, only see the first glimpse of what would become a complete transformation of mankind’s relationship to nature. In the hunt for ever greater profits, the earth’s ecosystems and natural resources have been treated as free resources, where raw materials, food products and other resources have been vacuumed up from nature while pollution has been vomited back out into the ground, sea, and air. With the help of fossil fuels, the photosynthetic barrier has been broken–capitalism has quite simply, in order to increase its expansion and hunt for profits, produced more “from” nature than it has been able to restore, give paying attention to the serious consequences.
It is not always easy to see when gradual changes transform quantity into quality (a completely new state), especially while it happens. It is only in the past few years that researchers have been able to reach the conclusion that the earth, by the middle of the 1900s, had already left what is known as the Holocene–the 11,700-year long era with very stable conditions in the earth’s systems.
We are now living in what is called the Anthropocene (the age of humans), even if “Capitalismocene” is a better description. What that means is that we are living in an era where humankind under capitalism has become the most important force in the changing of life on earth. The equilibrium in the earth’s system, which used balance and feedback from a variety of life forms to maintain temperatures between -5 and +2 for 2.6 million years, is now, as a result of industrialisation, seriously threatened.
Throughout human history, the earth or rather–the part of the earth where life can exist–has probably been perceived as more or less infinite. In fact, it is an extremely small fragment of the world we live in. In the universe there are at least two trillion galaxies, and in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, there are up to 400 billion stars. Around one of these stars, our sun, the Earth spins, with a thin layer of life of only 20 km on and above its surface.
With a capitalist system that has gone into turbo-mode in recent decades, this biosphere of life has been severely damaged. It is not just temperature changes that threaten to dramatically change the state under which our civilisation exists. Life on Earth is also shaped by the circulation in the atmosphere (such as the jet streams whose recent changes caused the extreme cold snap in Texas), by the circulation of water through water vapour, precipitation and ocean currents, the extent of the ice caps, the soil, the extent of the ozone layer, nutrient circulation, and so on. With our entry into the Anthropocene, human society affects not only the dynamics of all life on earth but also the entire earth system: the oceans, the ice, the earth, the atmosphere, and the climate.
Never in the history of the planet, since it was created 5 billion years ago, has the diversity of life been as great as the most recent geological epoch. This is dialectically linked to climatic conditions. Stable climatic conditions have created the conditions for life to develop and diversify–but the diversity of life has also stabilised the earth system and created an elastic biosphere–which is able to handle change and uncertainty.
With capitalism, this diversity has been rapidly eroded. Since 1970, capitalism has wiped out 60 percent of mammal, bird, fish, and reptile populations, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). On average, every fourth animal and plant that has been investigated is under threat, indicating that about one million species are threatened with extinction. This is confirmed in the article “Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change“.
This loss of biodiversity threatens us directly, for example in the reduction of pollinating insects that has led to a reduction in food production. But it is also a threat that risks accelerating climate change and making it more difficult to adapt to change. Due to the capitalist agricultural industry, for example, 90% of local crops, which can adapt to climate change, were lost when large multinational companies introduced their high-yield crops.
The capitalist globalisation we have seen in recent decades has thus not only created fragile global production chains, but also made our more intertwined planet more fragile from a biological perspective as well.
In recent decades, 50 percent of the earth’s land has been converted into agriculture, cities, road, and other infrastructure. Today, land use change accounts for 14 percent of greenhouse emissions. An example of this is the report by “Rainforest Foundation Norway” that recently stated that only a third of the world’s rainforests remain untouched.
To exemplify the importance of humans for the biosphere and ecosystems, it can be mentioned, for example, that the weight of the current human population is 10 times greater than that of all wild mammals. If we add the weight of livestock made available for human consumption, wild mammals account for only 4 percent of the total weight.
However, it is capitalism that is the problem, not people or humanity. The richest one percent are responsible for more than twice as much greenhouse gas emissions compared with the poorest half of the world over the last 25 years. The poorest half of the world’s population have basically not increased their emissions at all during the same period, now known as the carbon inequality era. At the same time, there are a few large companies that are exploiting nature’s resources. For example, according to the report “Transnational Corporations as ‘Keystone Actors ‘ in Marine Ecosystems” only 13 giant companies account for 20–40 percent of all marine catches of larger and more valuable fish.
What is particularly threatening about climate change is that it will probably not be a gradual change with rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Just as with mass protests or revolutions, we will see tipping points–where ecosystems due to the rise in temperature change their state quickly and forever.
Examples of this are the melting of the Arctic ice and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the transformation of the Amazon into a savannah, thawing of the permafrost or reduced circulation in the world’s oceans. Recently, there was a worrying report that thawing of the permafrost is going faster than estimated with large emissions of the greenhouse gas, methane, as a result. If this is true, it means that a third of the greenhouse gas budget that keeps us below 1.5-degree warming is already gone.
These tipping points in turn create self-reinforcing feedbacks that risk provoking new tipping points, for example when melting ice sheets stop reflecting heat away from the sun or when burning forests are transformed from carbon sinks to emission sources. The result can be a cascade of tipping points that transform our earth into a “hothouse earth”–even if carbon dioxide emissions are reduced. This will of course take time–maybe hundreds of years–but the problem is that when we reach a tipping point, we do not know if there is any way back.
That is why the call to stay below a 1.5-degree temperature rise is so important. New research shows that the risk of tipping points is much closer than previously thought. Some have probably already passed, such as the melting of the ice in the Arctic or that at least half of all coral reefs will die. Nevertheless, today’s emission levels point to more than a three degree increase in global temperature increase by 2100.
The ability and willingness of the ruling elite to cooperate and change is limited by a system that is in crisis at all levels.
The climate crisis cannot be seen separately from the other crises of capitalism; the economic, social, or political crises. They all point to a system whose contradictions have grown stronger and stronger and which creates crises that all interact with each other.
For example, climate change is fuelling conflicts that can lead to war and refugees, while climate change itself creates climate refugees. According to Oxfam, 20 million people were forced to flee each year during the last decade due to climate change. If society does not change course, the future will be much worse. Depending on different scenarios for population growth and warming, it is estimated that in 50 years, 1–3 billion people could experience Sahara-like conditions–outside the climatic conditions that humans have lived under so far. Already today, climate change, just like the Covid pandemic and other crises, is leading to increased class and gender inequality.
The explosion of injustices with the privatisation, deregulation and austerity of neoliberalism has undermined the position of the bourgeois elite in society, and with the economic crisis the antagonisms between the great powers in the world, especially between the United States and China, have increased. This means that the ability and willingness of the ruling elite to cooperate and change is limited by a system that is in crisis at all levels.
Although the shutdown as a result of the pandemic meant reduced climate emissions of around 7 percent by 2020, there is very little to indicate that this is the beginning of sustainable change. On the contrary, the stimulus that states have poured over capitalists to keep the economy afloat has gone to a much greater extent to the fossil fuel industry than to renewable energy. By November 2020, G20 governments had provided $233 billion in support of activities that support the production or consumption of fossil fuels, while only $146 billion went to renewable energy, energy efficiency and low-emission alternatives (Production Gap Report 2020). Instead of the necessary reduction of fossil fuel production by six percent per year, an increase of two percent per year is planned for 2030.
The realisation of the existential threat we face, the depth of the metabolic rift that Marx only saw the beginning of, makes it easy to understand that the problem cannot be solved by “just” switching to electric cars, installing solar panels, or eating less or no meat. It does not come close to the change that is needed.
Just as they have done until now, the representatives of capitalism will at best act too late and too little. A new report “Fossil CO2 emissions in the post-COVID era” shows how the rate of emission reductions must be increased tenfold compared to the period 2016–2019 in order to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement. Incapacity is not about lack of competence or knowledge, but about the capitalist system, where profit and growth always come first, which means that nature is treated as a free and infinite resource.
We need a complete transformation of society to stay within the planetary boundaries that keep the Earth system and biosphere in a state that is secure for our future. This means an immediate halt to new oil and gas extraction and a democratic plan to reduce to zero emissions within a decade or two. It involves a transformation of agriculture, forestry, mining, transportation, energy production, and other activities to protect biodiversity and convert sources of emissions into carbon sinks. It also means using minimal natural resources and at the same time redistributing wealth and resources as part of a green investment plan.
All this is not possible within the framework of capitalism. Humankind is embedded in and has its future intertwined with the future of nature and the biosphere that surrounds us. Capitalism, on the other hand, sees nature as an external resource, to consume and exploit, just as with workers. The profit motive that drives that development cannot be stopped either by pious calls or insufficient laws by politicians who defend the same system. For real change, democratic socialism is required: that private profit interests are abolished through the nationalisation of large companies and banks under democratic control, in order to suspend or reorganise environmentally harmful activities, while at the same time satisfying other needs in society.
Regardless of the inevitable decline that the climate movement is now experiencing, more and more people, especially young people, will conclude that the climate fight needs to be anti-capitalist in order to succeed.
Just as the crises of capitalism are closely intertwined and interact, the struggle against the capitalist system and its defenders must be organised and gathered across all borders. The climate movement can only, in international cooperation with the workers’ struggle, the women’s struggle, the fight against racism and other movements, challenge the system which, if not stopped, threatens to destroy the conditions for life and civilisation on this planet.
https://mronline.org/2021/07/15/no-clim ... em-change/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
The Colonial Rift
Originally published: Science for the People by Brandon Burkey & Lydia Patton (July 2021 ) | - Posted Jul 24, 2021
The Dust Bowl is not an event; it is a process. Although the Dust Bowl that took place in the 1930s in the United States is famous in history and literature, it is not the only possible one, nor is it likely to be the last. The appropriation of the land, degradation of the soil, overextraction of nutrients, misuse of fertilizers, and drying up of soil and life has an ugly name: dustbowlification.
Hannah Holleman’s Dust Bowls of Empire analyzes the drying up and blowing away of the land as the predictable consequence of settler capitalist economies. Existing histories explain the Dust Bowl as “a regional phenomenon . . . emphasizing the plight of the land in the U.S. southern plains region and of poor whites.” Holleman argues that this analysis has “two critical limitations”—namely, “the narrow regional focus and an inattention to the settler colonial context.”
To put the Dust Bowl in its true context, Holleman marshals the resources of critical sociology, a tradition found in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Weber, and Jane Addams, and continuing with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Aditya Mukherjee. Holleman blends critical sociology with anticolonial and anti-imperialist analyses—a natural fit. Thus, she sees the Dust Bowl in the United States as only “one spectacular instance of a global problem of soil erosion associated with capitalist colonial expansion.”
Certain forms of social organization are set up to exploit the land rather than support it. Dunbar-Ortiz locates this in “a particular form of colonialism: settler-colonialism.” To understand the Dust Bowl requires perceiving it as but one effect of an ongoing cause. Du Bois, Weber, and Addams were among the first to recognize the “New Imperialism” that surged between 1870 and World War I. Holleman’s analysis attributes the U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s to New Imperialism and recognizes ongoing imperialist projects as evidence that dust bowls will proliferate in the future.
At the most basic level of the book’s analysis is what Holleman, drawing on the work of John Bellamy Foster, calls the ecological rift. Karl Marx is often cited as one of the earliest proponents of the ecological rift view. Marx observed that the interactive relationship between human consumption and soil nutrients was no longer defined by equilibrium but rather by an unequal extraction of nutrients from the soil that relocates them to industrial centers, never to return to the farms where they originated. The soil degradation that constitutes the ecological rift pushed restless capitalist economies to perpetually look for new sources of soil nutrients to exploit. This led to the racialized imperialism that can be seen in a multitude of historical examples predating the Dust Bowl, such as the mid- to late-19th-century wars over bat guano. Racialized imperialism was also evidenced by the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains to make room for the farms that would eventually cause the Dust Bowl.
Holleman argues that notions of white supremacy not only made acts of racialized violence morally permissible in the minds of white settler-colonialists at the time but also contributed to the continued mismanagement of the Great Plains. At the time, it was seen as the “white man’s burden” to bring “progress” and higher productivity to undeveloped lands. However, as Holleman points out, the “white man’s burden,” underwritten by a rapidly growing capitalist economy, prevented policymakers and scientists alike from heeding the widespread scientific evidence that farming practices on the Great Plains were unsustainable. Settlers imposed methods that were developed in other areas but were unsuited to local soils and land, displacing effective Indigenous farming and land care practices developed over thousands of years.
The 1930s Dust Bowl is temporally removed just enough to let us position ourselves as external observers of the catastrophe. Yet the ecological phenomenon it represents is still prevalent in our time, as are the particular social and economic conditions underlying it. Its contemporary relevance can be perceived in the continuing systemic exploitation of the soil and of the environment, as well as in the limitations of current proposals for dealing with the crisis.
Holleman characterizes the most prominent framework for addressing our contemporary ecological crisis as “green capitalism.” This framework rests on an assumption that government regulation of technological innovation driven by private industry and the market will sufficiently reform the capitalist system to the point that further ecological catastrophe and environmental injustice can be averted. Holleman argues that this way of thinking fails to acknowledge that the ecological rift and racial injustice are inherent features of capitalism. She goes further, accusing much of the current environmental movement of falling victim to this historically naïve ideology:
The ahistorical worldview they promote limits the understanding both of past socio-ecological changes and of possibilities for the future. The consequence is a hegemonic environmental politics that reinforces, rather than challenges, the social status quo and contributes to the social organization of irresponsibility and forms of ecological denial.
This is one of Holleman’s most important contributions to the variety of discourses with which she engages. Despite the current aims of many environmentalists to simultaneously avert ecological catastrophe and counteract environmental racism, neither can be truly achieved as long as a capitalist system persists, no matter how “green” capitalism may claim to be.
Holleman’s book is a fierce call to action for scientists but also gives significant attention to the limitations of scientific and technological solutions. As Holleman puts it, “ecological crises are not resolved by increased scientific understanding, commonly held knowledge, sophisticated technological development, advance warnings, or a slew of proconservation elites attempting to tackle the problems.” As Holleman notes, scientists have played a significant part in resistance to the effects of colonial extractivism. Soil scientists sounded the alarm early on about the Dust Bowl. Water management scientists have declared that the stationarity hypothesis—that water resource management can assume an “unchanging envelope of variability”—is dead because of climate change and “human disturbances.”1 For these and other reasons, Holleman notes, “scientists are pleading” with the world to leave carbon in the ground.
Although Holleman acknowledges these contributions from the scientific community, her account emphasizes the limitations of focusing on scientific or technological resolutions alone, in isolation from historical, social, and political analysis. In 2004, four scientists affiliated with NASA published “On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl” in Science. The article, one of the most cited this century, proposes “anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures” and the resulting aberrations of the weather as “the cause” of the Dust Bowl.2 But as Holleman details, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s had roots not only in non-anthropogenic causes like temperature and drought but also in what she dubs “The New Imperialism on the Southern Plains,” including the Dawes Act and the Trail of Tears. This history of dispossession and enslavement is entwined with the practices of cash crop agriculture, which led to “the rapid degradation of the land.” An analysis of the Dust Bowl that skates over these factors to cite physical causes alone may not be wrong within its domain, but is misleading and even dangerous when presented as a complete explanation.
The truth revealed by social and historical analysis is that local ecologies continue to be devastated by capitalist extraction economies. The planned expansion of the Line 3 pipeline from Alberta, in Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin, in the United States, exemplifies how the economics of extractive colonialism continue to devastate Indigenous communities, who have responded with organized resistance to defend the land and water. Holleman criticizes histories that “whiten” the Dust Bowl by focusing on the plight of white settlers. Doing so blocks our ability to construct links between the history of the Dust Bowl and the “necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental history, justice, and solidarity.” The connection between the Dust Bowl and Line 3 is deep, but it has been buried. One of the main aims of Holleman’s book is to show how the Dust Bowl is linked with the global struggle for environmental justice.
By examining the link between the Dust Bowl and New Imperialism, Holleman is able to demonstrate that an “ethno-racial caste system” binds ecological catastrophe to capitalist economies. Holleman’s book ties in well with recent work on “green colonialism,” emphasizing links between “green capitalist” initiatives and extractivist colonial economies. This is a global problem that is only gathering force: “The old imperialists are still at it in the United States and Europe, and empire builders from the Middle East and Asia have now joined suit. Much of the familiar terminology and scenery associated with the heyday of colonialism are still there.” Avoiding “green colonialism,” and setting up societies that build the soil and nurture communities, will require recognizing that dustbowlification is a consequence of capitalist land management. Holleman’s Dust Bowls of Empire succeeds in setting up a framework for that analysis—and in setting an agenda to resist it in the future. “One centimeter of soil can take hundreds to thousands of years to form.” Building it should start today.
https://mronline.org/2021/07/24/the-colonial-rift/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
I have not been a great fan of Angus , until now. 'Outta da park' bp
Anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism: notes on a false dichotomy
Issue: 171
Posted on 23rd July 2021
Ian Angus
In the 1840s, in the manuscripts later published as The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set out the first comprehensive statement of the approach to understanding history and society that underlay their writing and political activity for the rest of their lives. They did this in the form of a series of critiques of philosophers who were then influential in radical circles in Germany.
They began with a fable:
For example, the late David Orton, who called himself a “left biocentrist”, refused to sign the 2011 Belem Ecosocialist Declaration on the grounds that it was “people-centered, not Earth-centered”.2 Similarly, Australian environmentalist Robyn Eckersley writes that Karl Marx had “an instrumentalist and anthropocentric orientation toward the non-human world”, with the result that “eco-Marxists regard ecocentrism as putting an unnecessary restraint on human development”.3
Joel Kovel, long-time editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, argued that ecosocialism must be “motivated by an ecocentric ethic”, and that “the ‘intrinsic value of nature’ is the defining concept that differentiates ecosocialism from the various socialisms of the 19th and 20th centuries”.4 Similarly, the Ecosocialist Horizons group declares: “We believe in the intrinsic value of nature, and believe that the highest expression of this is the global reclamation of the commons, which we call ecosocialism”.5
Such arguments express what have been called the “two dogmas of ecologism”—that anthropocentrism is the root cause of anti-environmental behavior, and that real support for environmental protection and restoration requires recognising the intrinsic value of non-human nature.6 For half a century, these arguments have been central to the academic discipline called environmental ethics.
No ecosocialist questions the importance of non-human nature, and we all condemn the rapacious, anti-ecological actions that characterise capitalism. However, “ecocentrism” and “intrinsic value of nature” are not just words—they are concepts that embody a particular view of the relationship between human and non-human nature, and of how environmental destruction can be stopped. Before adopting them, ecosocialists should have a clear understanding of what they mean, and consider carefully whether they are compatible with our fight against capitalist ecocide.
In my view, the “anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism” debate was misconceived from the beginning, and has directed the attention of people who are sincerely concerned about the environment away from real problems and real solutions. The related concept of the “intrinsic value of nature” has never been clearly defined and only promotes confusion. Both ideas detract from the clear and scientific understanding of the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature that we must have in order to interpret and change the world.
In view of the unfortunate tendency of the left to treat every disagreement as grounds for ostracism, I must stress that this is a disagreement among environmental activists, and I raise it with the goal of advancing our common project, which can only be strengthened by open discussion of our differences.
A war of green ideas
To understand the issues, we must look back to the beginnings of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s.
Rachel Carson’s wonderful book Silent Spring, published in 1962, was the first major statement of modern environmentalism. Before Carson, concern for protecting nature was usually called conservationism, and environmentalism was a word used by psychologists for the idea that personality is formed by life conditions rather than biology. By the mid-1960s, the word had a new meaning, and public concern was reaching mass proportions. This led up to April 1970, when over 20 million people across the United States turned out for rallies and teach-ins on the first Earth Day. The 1970s saw the emergence of a wide range of green activist groups on campuses.
That first decade of environmentalism was marked by a war of ideas. This conflict played out between writers who focused on the socio-economic causes of environmental destruction and those who thought the crisis was driven by human beings as such.
Carson was in the first group. The chief obstacle to sustainability, she wrote, lay in the fact that we live “in an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at any cost is seldom challenged.” Science was being misused to serve “the gods of profit and production”.7 Others with similar views included Murray Bookchin, who attributed air and water pollution to the fact that “the most pernicious laws of the market place are given precedence over the most compelling laws of biology”, and Barry Commoner, who wrote that environmentally destructive technologies were “deeply embedded in our economic, social and political structure”.8
This new kind of environmentalism, rooted in a radical social critique, won a wide hearing on US university campuses in the late 1960s, but as student radicalism waned, views that were less challenging to capitalism prevailed, particularly in academic circles. Between March 1967 and December 1968, two widely reprinted articles and a best-selling book set out a conservative social ideology that has ever since strongly influenced mainstream environmentalism and academic environmental philosophy.
In “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Garrett Hardin blamed over-exploitation of natural resources on human nature, the supposed desire of every man to take more than his fair share of Earth’s resources. In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich argued that the prime cause of all environmental problems was human overpopulation, especially in the Third World. I have written about both of those works elsewhere.9
The third document, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, appeared in the influential journal Science in 1967. In it, historian Lynn White blamed the environmental crisis on mistaken ideas—specifically, on “distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma”.10 Humanity’s “ruthlessness toward nature”, he said, originated with the Judeo-Christian view that “God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.” This led to “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen”. For millennia, working the land involved placating and honoring the spirits and sprites that inhabited and guarded all of nature—but now the church taught that it was acceptable to “exploit nature in a mood of indifference.”
“The victory of Christianity over paganism”, White wrote, “was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.” The effects of that revolution continue to this day, deeply affecting even people who believe they have no religious views. “We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”
Three decades later, the president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics wrote:
Philosophers in full gallop
White’s specific account of anti-nature Christianity overthrowing pro-nature paganism was rejected by most historians, and White himself eventually abandoned it. However, his general claim that anti-nature ideas are to blame for environmental destruction survived. In 1973, philosopher Richard Sylvan secularised the argument by replacing Christianity with generic “Western ethical systems” that supposedly justified such crimes as the hunting of blue whales to extinction. A new ethical system is needed, he wrote, because “human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable”.13 Sylvan’s paper joined White’s as a staple of anthologies and textbooks.
When White and Sylvan wrote their articles on anthropocentrism, colleges and universities in the US were in the midst of a growth spurt: the arrival of the baby boom generation caused total registrations to more than double between 1964 and 1974. That, in turn, created an unprecedented number of teaching positions in specialties that could be marketed as relevant to socially conscious students. One such specialty was Environmental Ethics, a field that did not exist in 1970, but which was a recognised subdiscipline in many university philosophy departments by the end of the decade.
As historian Roderick Nash comments, “the growing perception of an environmental crisis in the 1970s spurred the philosophers into full intellectual gallop”.14 White’s article offered the kind of ideological framework that careers are built on. It was, in the words of one of the founders of the new field, “the catalyst that generated the subdiscipline of environmental ethics.
That argument triggered the birth and rapid expansion of environmental ethics as a subdiscipline in academic philosophy. By the end of the 1970s, it had its own quarterly journal (always a necessity in the “publish or perish” academic world) and frequent conferences. By 2000, there were at least four journals and two professional associations. An incomplete bibliography lists 166 books on environmental ethics published between 1970 and 2002.19 If volume is the measure, this was a successful endeavor.
Dancing on the head of a pin
The founders of ecocentric philosophy were convinced that they were making fundamentally important major advances in philosophy and ethics. Nash grandiosely described the conclusions of environmental ethics as “revolutionary” and “arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought”:
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says that in our time, “in moral argument, the apparent assertion of principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference.” The result is “simulacra of morality” characterised by interminable debates in which there is no rational way to choose between the various positions.21 That is certainly true of the debates among environmental ethicists. After decades of discussion, there is no agreement on what terms such as ecocentrism, biocentrism and intrinsic value actually mean.
In the place of such agreement, we are left instead with a set of unresolved philosophical questions:
*Does rejecting anthropocentrism mean extending moral consideration only to other living things or to all of nature?
*Does moral concern apply to every individual animal, river and tree? Or does it refer only to species and ecosystems?
*Are we talking about all living things or just some? All animals or only those we judge to be sentient? What about insects? What about bacteria, the most numerous living things by a huge margin? Are viruses included?
*What exactly is intrinsic value? Is it somehow inherent in things just because they exist, or is it something that human beings attribute to things? If the latter, is that not anthropocentric?
*Is intrinsic value absolute or relative? Are there levels and degrees of intrinsic value? If the latter, who decides, and how? Does a sleeping child have more or less intrinsic value than a malaria-carrying mosquito? Is it moral to kill mosquitoes before they infect children, or must we respect all living beings equally and let nature take its deadly course?
The questions go on and on, reminiscent of the possibly apocryphal debates among medieval scholastics about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Bizarre and nitpicky as they seem, discussions of such questions have occupied uncounted hours in academic conferences and filled thousands of pages in books and scholarly journals. Environmental ethicists have taken every conceivable position on them—and some that are inconceivable. Rutgers University professor David Ehrenfeld, for example, endorsed a claim that the smallpox virus has a moral right to continue existing.22 That’s an extreme position, but it is also entirely consistent with insistence that all natural things have a moral right to continue without human interference.
The most notable feature of these debates is how abstract they are. Book after book discusses environmental ethics while making few concrete references to actual environmental problems. Instead we are presented with “social/moral theories which presuppose a world radically different from the one we occupy, thereby rendering them irrelevant as solutions to the problems that face us in the real, non-fantasy world”.23
A major case in point is Richard Sylvan’s widely cited and discussed “last man” argument for a new environmental ethic. Sylvan wrote that under the dominant Western ethical systems, it would be morally acceptable for the last man on Earth to systematically and deliberately destroy every other living thing on the planet.24
This fantasy is, as some of Sylvan’s critics have mildly observed, “radically under-described”.25 What happened to all the other people? Did they all die at once or was this a long process? Could one man actually destroy every living thing? Why would the last man destroy everything? Is it wanton destruction, an act of despair or some bizarre religious rite? Even if we willingly suspend disbelief in Sylvan’s Twilight Zone scenario, why would the existence (or not) of ecocentric ethics have any effect whatsoever on the behavior of the last human being on Earth—or of anyone else, for that matter?
It is tempting to enter into these debates and to participate in what Marx and Engels described as “theoretical bubble-blowing”.26 However, although bubbles can be fun, they do not lead us anywhere. MacIntyre’s account of never-ending moral discussions that “apparently can find no terminus” has rarely been better illustrated.27
These are not casual discussions. The participants are professional academic philosophers using the most sophisticated tools of argument and analysis their field has developed. The fact that they cannot agree strongly suggests, as MacIntyre says, that there is something fundamentally wrong:
In the first place, all the participants in the debate are human beings, offering human judgments about human actions. A human cannot think like a mountain, because mountains do not think. We cannot defend the moral interests of fish; we can only defend a human judgment about what we think the moral interests of fish might be. Ecocentric ethics can only be created, defended and acted on by humans. No one suggests that bears or coyotes should be persuaded to accept that rabbits and squirrels have a moral right to live—only humans can make such judgments and behave accordingly. In that practical sense, humans can only be anthropocentric.
But equally, humans are not separate from nature: we are part of and embedded in the natural world, and we cannot act or even exist without it. A person who cuts down a tree or digs a mine uses tools made with an understanding of natural laws, and does so while breathing the air and being held in place by the laws of gravity. In short, human activity changes nature from within, and in that practical sense, we cannot escape being ecocentric.
So-called anthropocentric morality is not the cause of environmental destruction—it is a justification for practices that inevitably occur in a society based on capital accumulation. As Michael Parenti explains:
Morality versus moralism
In the 1990s, several writers tried to formulate a political theory they called ecologism, which would be based on ecocentric ethics. The effort initially appeared successful: Andrew Dobson, whose 1990 textbook Green Political Thought did most to popularise the concept of ecologism, noted in 1995 that when the first edition was published, “I knew of no textbook…that included a chapter on ecological political thought, but now there are several”.30 Nevertheless, ecologism failed to go beyond defining basic principles and criticising other political views as insufficiently green.
The number of new books on ecologism dropped off sharply after 2000. Dobson recently said that by the time the fourth edition of Green Political Thought was published in 2007, “I was no longer so sure that ecocentrism was at the non-negotiable heart of ecologism… The sound of ecocentrism has been drowned out by the sound of pragmatic environmentalism”.31
That is certainly true of most Green parties, which found no practical (that is, electoral) use for philosophy. However, the view that Earth can only be saved by adoption of an ecocentric moral code is still common in environmental movements, including among some ecosocialists. The online journal Ecological Citizen, for example, recently gathered over 1,000 signatures from activists and academics for a “Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism”, which argues that “the recognition of the intrinsic value of nature and strong support for ecocentrism” are “a necessary path for the flourishing of life on Earth”.32
One of the first to sign was prominent environmental philosopher J Baird Callicott, who has argued that “environmental philosophy IS environmental activism of the most radical and effective kind” and that non-anthropocentric ethics has direct practical application:
In the real world, a mountain of hard scientific evidence, including detailed accounts of the impact of global warming on both human and non-human nature, has made no practical difference to greenhouse gas emissions. The power and profits of the fossil fuel industry and its allies determine the environmental agenda, not science or ethics.
As Marx and Engels put it, “liberation is a historical and not a mental act.” For that reason, “communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically, either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source”.34
Human assaults on nature—“lucrative timber extraction, agricultural conversion, hydroelectric impoundment, mining” and many others—do not continue because of bad philosophy, but precisely because they are lucrative. Morality has nothing to do with the plunderers’ decisions. So long as it is profitable to destroy Earth, and there is no counterforce to stop them, they will continue to do so, even if they undermine the sources of their own wealth and the conditions that make our planet livable.
That is not to say that anti-ecological behavior should not be condemned on moral grounds—rather, it is to insist that morality is not the same as moralism. As Perry Anderson writes, that distinction helps to overcome the tendency of moral judgments “to become substitutes for explanatory accounts of history”:
http://isj.org.uk/anthropocentrism-versus-ecocentrism/
Capital or Nature/Socialism or Barbarism dovetail.
Anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism: notes on a false dichotomy
Issue: 171
Posted on 23rd July 2021
Ian Angus
In the 1840s, in the manuscripts later published as The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set out the first comprehensive statement of the approach to understanding history and society that underlay their writing and political activity for the rest of their lives. They did this in the form of a series of critiques of philosophers who were then influential in radical circles in Germany.
They began with a fable:
The philosophers that Marx and Engels criticised are all but forgotten today, but their mode of thinking is present in much modern environmental writing. It is usually expressed in more subtle and sophisticated terms than the fellow who thought drowning was caused by an irrational belief in gravity. Nevertheless, the idea that environmental destruction is caused by wrong ideas, by a false conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, can be found right across the broad green spectrum. In more formal terms, it is the view that saving Earth requires general adoption of an ecocentric philosophy that is nature-centered rather than human-centered. Among radical environmentalists, it is often coupled with the charge that Marxism is anthropocentric—that it is only concerned with, or gives inappropriate priority to, human needs.Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.1
For example, the late David Orton, who called himself a “left biocentrist”, refused to sign the 2011 Belem Ecosocialist Declaration on the grounds that it was “people-centered, not Earth-centered”.2 Similarly, Australian environmentalist Robyn Eckersley writes that Karl Marx had “an instrumentalist and anthropocentric orientation toward the non-human world”, with the result that “eco-Marxists regard ecocentrism as putting an unnecessary restraint on human development”.3
Joel Kovel, long-time editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, argued that ecosocialism must be “motivated by an ecocentric ethic”, and that “the ‘intrinsic value of nature’ is the defining concept that differentiates ecosocialism from the various socialisms of the 19th and 20th centuries”.4 Similarly, the Ecosocialist Horizons group declares: “We believe in the intrinsic value of nature, and believe that the highest expression of this is the global reclamation of the commons, which we call ecosocialism”.5
Such arguments express what have been called the “two dogmas of ecologism”—that anthropocentrism is the root cause of anti-environmental behavior, and that real support for environmental protection and restoration requires recognising the intrinsic value of non-human nature.6 For half a century, these arguments have been central to the academic discipline called environmental ethics.
No ecosocialist questions the importance of non-human nature, and we all condemn the rapacious, anti-ecological actions that characterise capitalism. However, “ecocentrism” and “intrinsic value of nature” are not just words—they are concepts that embody a particular view of the relationship between human and non-human nature, and of how environmental destruction can be stopped. Before adopting them, ecosocialists should have a clear understanding of what they mean, and consider carefully whether they are compatible with our fight against capitalist ecocide.
In my view, the “anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism” debate was misconceived from the beginning, and has directed the attention of people who are sincerely concerned about the environment away from real problems and real solutions. The related concept of the “intrinsic value of nature” has never been clearly defined and only promotes confusion. Both ideas detract from the clear and scientific understanding of the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature that we must have in order to interpret and change the world.
In view of the unfortunate tendency of the left to treat every disagreement as grounds for ostracism, I must stress that this is a disagreement among environmental activists, and I raise it with the goal of advancing our common project, which can only be strengthened by open discussion of our differences.
A war of green ideas
To understand the issues, we must look back to the beginnings of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s.
Rachel Carson’s wonderful book Silent Spring, published in 1962, was the first major statement of modern environmentalism. Before Carson, concern for protecting nature was usually called conservationism, and environmentalism was a word used by psychologists for the idea that personality is formed by life conditions rather than biology. By the mid-1960s, the word had a new meaning, and public concern was reaching mass proportions. This led up to April 1970, when over 20 million people across the United States turned out for rallies and teach-ins on the first Earth Day. The 1970s saw the emergence of a wide range of green activist groups on campuses.
That first decade of environmentalism was marked by a war of ideas. This conflict played out between writers who focused on the socio-economic causes of environmental destruction and those who thought the crisis was driven by human beings as such.
Carson was in the first group. The chief obstacle to sustainability, she wrote, lay in the fact that we live “in an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at any cost is seldom challenged.” Science was being misused to serve “the gods of profit and production”.7 Others with similar views included Murray Bookchin, who attributed air and water pollution to the fact that “the most pernicious laws of the market place are given precedence over the most compelling laws of biology”, and Barry Commoner, who wrote that environmentally destructive technologies were “deeply embedded in our economic, social and political structure”.8
This new kind of environmentalism, rooted in a radical social critique, won a wide hearing on US university campuses in the late 1960s, but as student radicalism waned, views that were less challenging to capitalism prevailed, particularly in academic circles. Between March 1967 and December 1968, two widely reprinted articles and a best-selling book set out a conservative social ideology that has ever since strongly influenced mainstream environmentalism and academic environmental philosophy.
In “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Garrett Hardin blamed over-exploitation of natural resources on human nature, the supposed desire of every man to take more than his fair share of Earth’s resources. In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich argued that the prime cause of all environmental problems was human overpopulation, especially in the Third World. I have written about both of those works elsewhere.9
The third document, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, appeared in the influential journal Science in 1967. In it, historian Lynn White blamed the environmental crisis on mistaken ideas—specifically, on “distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma”.10 Humanity’s “ruthlessness toward nature”, he said, originated with the Judeo-Christian view that “God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.” This led to “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen”. For millennia, working the land involved placating and honoring the spirits and sprites that inhabited and guarded all of nature—but now the church taught that it was acceptable to “exploit nature in a mood of indifference.”
“The victory of Christianity over paganism”, White wrote, “was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.” The effects of that revolution continue to this day, deeply affecting even people who believe they have no religious views. “We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”
Three decades later, the president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics wrote:
White’s article was reprinted in Time Magazine, Horizon, The New York Times, The Boy Scout Handbook, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Sierra Club Bulletin, as well as other publications, including the guidebook distributed at the hugely successful Earth Day teach-ins in 1970. “Almost immediately…it became a standard feature of anthologies and textbooks for use in college courses in environmental studies, the history of technology, and science, society, and technology”.12In that paper, White, whether he intended to do so or not, set a two-stage agenda for a future environmental philosophy. First, identify and criticise those aspects of our inherited worldview that have led us to a dysfunctional relationship with the natural environment; and second, identify and articulate a new worldview, pragmatically validated—a worldview, that is, that will enable us to live sustainably and symbiotically with non-human entities and nature as a whole.11
Philosophers in full gallop
White’s specific account of anti-nature Christianity overthrowing pro-nature paganism was rejected by most historians, and White himself eventually abandoned it. However, his general claim that anti-nature ideas are to blame for environmental destruction survived. In 1973, philosopher Richard Sylvan secularised the argument by replacing Christianity with generic “Western ethical systems” that supposedly justified such crimes as the hunting of blue whales to extinction. A new ethical system is needed, he wrote, because “human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable”.13 Sylvan’s paper joined White’s as a staple of anthologies and textbooks.
When White and Sylvan wrote their articles on anthropocentrism, colleges and universities in the US were in the midst of a growth spurt: the arrival of the baby boom generation caused total registrations to more than double between 1964 and 1974. That, in turn, created an unprecedented number of teaching positions in specialties that could be marketed as relevant to socially conscious students. One such specialty was Environmental Ethics, a field that did not exist in 1970, but which was a recognised subdiscipline in many university philosophy departments by the end of the decade.
As historian Roderick Nash comments, “the growing perception of an environmental crisis in the 1970s spurred the philosophers into full intellectual gallop”.14 White’s article offered the kind of ideological framework that careers are built on. It was, in the words of one of the founders of the new field, “the catalyst that generated the subdiscipline of environmental ethics.
With few exceptions, green philosophers agreed that the environmental crisis was a moral issue. It could thus only be resolved by adoption of environmental ethics based on a non-anthropocentric philosophy that extended moral consideration to non-human nature. In Eckersley’s words:It has profoundly shaped the philosophical debate about environmental values ever since… Most environmental ethicists took White’s criticism to be compelling and proceeded to propose “non-anthropocentric” ethical positions as an antidote.15
The argument, simply put, was that the dominant worldview in modern society considers the needs of humans to be more important than the needs of non-human nature. This viewpoint—variously labeled anthropocentrism, human racism or speciesism—allows humans to harm non-humans in order to benefit humans. “Concern for ourselves at the expense of concern for the non-human world is held to be a basic cause of environmental degradation and potential disaster”.17 So long as anthropocentric ethics predominate, the destruction of the natural world will continue unabated.An ecocentric approach has been shown to be more consistent with ecological reality, more likely to lead us toward psychological maturity, and more likely to allow the greatest diversity of beings (human and non-human) to unfold in their own ways. Indeed, ecocentrism may be seen as representing the cumulative wisdom of the various currents of modern environmental thought.16
What was needed, therefore, was a new system of ethics that recognised the moral right of non-human nature to exist and develop without human interference and regardless of human needs. In short, we must replace our anthropocentrism with ecocentrism.If humans are taken to be more valuable beings than other species, then it would always follow that any human need, want or desire must necessarily take priority over the need or interests of non-human nature, no matter how critical or essential the latter needs may be.18
That argument triggered the birth and rapid expansion of environmental ethics as a subdiscipline in academic philosophy. By the end of the 1970s, it had its own quarterly journal (always a necessity in the “publish or perish” academic world) and frequent conferences. By 2000, there were at least four journals and two professional associations. An incomplete bibliography lists 166 books on environmental ethics published between 1970 and 2002.19 If volume is the measure, this was a successful endeavor.
Dancing on the head of a pin
The founders of ecocentric philosophy were convinced that they were making fundamentally important major advances in philosophy and ethics. Nash grandiosely described the conclusions of environmental ethics as “revolutionary” and “arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought”:
That sounds radical, but in practice evolutionary ethics has proven very difficult to pin down. Conflicting interpretations of non-anthropocentrism and intrinsic value have multiplied.The emergence of this idea that the human-nature relationship should be treated as a moral issue conditioned or restrained by ethics is one of the most extraordinary developments in recent intellectual history. Some believe it holds the potential for fundamental and far-reaching change in both thought and behavior comparable to that which the ideal of human rights and justice held at the time of the democratic revolutions in the 17th and 18th centuries.20
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says that in our time, “in moral argument, the apparent assertion of principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference.” The result is “simulacra of morality” characterised by interminable debates in which there is no rational way to choose between the various positions.21 That is certainly true of the debates among environmental ethicists. After decades of discussion, there is no agreement on what terms such as ecocentrism, biocentrism and intrinsic value actually mean.
In the place of such agreement, we are left instead with a set of unresolved philosophical questions:
*Does rejecting anthropocentrism mean extending moral consideration only to other living things or to all of nature?
*Does moral concern apply to every individual animal, river and tree? Or does it refer only to species and ecosystems?
*Are we talking about all living things or just some? All animals or only those we judge to be sentient? What about insects? What about bacteria, the most numerous living things by a huge margin? Are viruses included?
*What exactly is intrinsic value? Is it somehow inherent in things just because they exist, or is it something that human beings attribute to things? If the latter, is that not anthropocentric?
*Is intrinsic value absolute or relative? Are there levels and degrees of intrinsic value? If the latter, who decides, and how? Does a sleeping child have more or less intrinsic value than a malaria-carrying mosquito? Is it moral to kill mosquitoes before they infect children, or must we respect all living beings equally and let nature take its deadly course?
The questions go on and on, reminiscent of the possibly apocryphal debates among medieval scholastics about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Bizarre and nitpicky as they seem, discussions of such questions have occupied uncounted hours in academic conferences and filled thousands of pages in books and scholarly journals. Environmental ethicists have taken every conceivable position on them—and some that are inconceivable. Rutgers University professor David Ehrenfeld, for example, endorsed a claim that the smallpox virus has a moral right to continue existing.22 That’s an extreme position, but it is also entirely consistent with insistence that all natural things have a moral right to continue without human interference.
The most notable feature of these debates is how abstract they are. Book after book discusses environmental ethics while making few concrete references to actual environmental problems. Instead we are presented with “social/moral theories which presuppose a world radically different from the one we occupy, thereby rendering them irrelevant as solutions to the problems that face us in the real, non-fantasy world”.23
A major case in point is Richard Sylvan’s widely cited and discussed “last man” argument for a new environmental ethic. Sylvan wrote that under the dominant Western ethical systems, it would be morally acceptable for the last man on Earth to systematically and deliberately destroy every other living thing on the planet.24
This fantasy is, as some of Sylvan’s critics have mildly observed, “radically under-described”.25 What happened to all the other people? Did they all die at once or was this a long process? Could one man actually destroy every living thing? Why would the last man destroy everything? Is it wanton destruction, an act of despair or some bizarre religious rite? Even if we willingly suspend disbelief in Sylvan’s Twilight Zone scenario, why would the existence (or not) of ecocentric ethics have any effect whatsoever on the behavior of the last human being on Earth—or of anyone else, for that matter?
It is tempting to enter into these debates and to participate in what Marx and Engels described as “theoretical bubble-blowing”.26 However, although bubbles can be fun, they do not lead us anywhere. MacIntyre’s account of never-ending moral discussions that “apparently can find no terminus” has rarely been better illustrated.27
These are not casual discussions. The participants are professional academic philosophers using the most sophisticated tools of argument and analysis their field has developed. The fact that they cannot agree strongly suggests, as MacIntyre says, that there is something fundamentally wrong:
This project has failed because it was misconceived from the beginning. Anthropocentrism is not the problem, and ecocentrism is not the solution.If those who claim to be able to formulate principles on which rational moral agents ought to agree cannot secure agreement on the formulation of those principles from their colleagues, who share their basic philosophical purpose and method, there is once again prima facie evidence that their project has failed.28
In the first place, all the participants in the debate are human beings, offering human judgments about human actions. A human cannot think like a mountain, because mountains do not think. We cannot defend the moral interests of fish; we can only defend a human judgment about what we think the moral interests of fish might be. Ecocentric ethics can only be created, defended and acted on by humans. No one suggests that bears or coyotes should be persuaded to accept that rabbits and squirrels have a moral right to live—only humans can make such judgments and behave accordingly. In that practical sense, humans can only be anthropocentric.
But equally, humans are not separate from nature: we are part of and embedded in the natural world, and we cannot act or even exist without it. A person who cuts down a tree or digs a mine uses tools made with an understanding of natural laws, and does so while breathing the air and being held in place by the laws of gravity. In short, human activity changes nature from within, and in that practical sense, we cannot escape being ecocentric.
So-called anthropocentric morality is not the cause of environmental destruction—it is a justification for practices that inevitably occur in a society based on capital accumulation. As Michael Parenti explains:
This is why capitalism has not responded to decades of lectures about the immorality of environmental destruction.The essence of capitalism, its raison d’être, is to convert nature into commodities and commodities into capital, transforming the living Earth into inanimate wealth. This capital accumulation process wreaks havoc upon the global ecological system.29
Morality versus moralism
In the 1990s, several writers tried to formulate a political theory they called ecologism, which would be based on ecocentric ethics. The effort initially appeared successful: Andrew Dobson, whose 1990 textbook Green Political Thought did most to popularise the concept of ecologism, noted in 1995 that when the first edition was published, “I knew of no textbook…that included a chapter on ecological political thought, but now there are several”.30 Nevertheless, ecologism failed to go beyond defining basic principles and criticising other political views as insufficiently green.
The number of new books on ecologism dropped off sharply after 2000. Dobson recently said that by the time the fourth edition of Green Political Thought was published in 2007, “I was no longer so sure that ecocentrism was at the non-negotiable heart of ecologism… The sound of ecocentrism has been drowned out by the sound of pragmatic environmentalism”.31
That is certainly true of most Green parties, which found no practical (that is, electoral) use for philosophy. However, the view that Earth can only be saved by adoption of an ecocentric moral code is still common in environmental movements, including among some ecosocialists. The online journal Ecological Citizen, for example, recently gathered over 1,000 signatures from activists and academics for a “Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism”, which argues that “the recognition of the intrinsic value of nature and strong support for ecocentrism” are “a necessary path for the flourishing of life on Earth”.32
One of the first to sign was prominent environmental philosopher J Baird Callicott, who has argued that “environmental philosophy IS environmental activism of the most radical and effective kind” and that non-anthropocentric ethics has direct practical application:
To take this seriously, we have to believe that only the absence of a “persuasive philosophical case” has allowed giant corporations to continue destroying forests and savannas. Imagine the CEOs of giant fossil fuel and agribusiness corporations such as Exxon Mobil and Monsanto explaining to shareholders that profits are down because a professor had alerted them to the intrinsic value of non-human natural entities. Imagine the shareholders applauding vigorously and approving big bonuses to executives who extend moral consideration to ecosystems.If all environmental values are anthropocentric and instrumental, then they have to compete head to head with the economic values derived from converting rain forests to lumber and pulp, savannas to cattle pasture, and so on. Environmentalists, in other words, must show that preserving biological diversity is of greater instrumental value to present and future generations than lucrative timber extraction, agricultural conversion, hydroelectric impoundment, mining and so on. For this simple reason, a persuasive philosophical case for the intrinsic value of non-human natural entities and nature as a whole would make a huge practical difference.33
In the real world, a mountain of hard scientific evidence, including detailed accounts of the impact of global warming on both human and non-human nature, has made no practical difference to greenhouse gas emissions. The power and profits of the fossil fuel industry and its allies determine the environmental agenda, not science or ethics.
As Marx and Engels put it, “liberation is a historical and not a mental act.” For that reason, “communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically, either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source”.34
Human assaults on nature—“lucrative timber extraction, agricultural conversion, hydroelectric impoundment, mining” and many others—do not continue because of bad philosophy, but precisely because they are lucrative. Morality has nothing to do with the plunderers’ decisions. So long as it is profitable to destroy Earth, and there is no counterforce to stop them, they will continue to do so, even if they undermine the sources of their own wealth and the conditions that make our planet livable.
That is not to say that anti-ecological behavior should not be condemned on moral grounds—rather, it is to insist that morality is not the same as moralism. As Perry Anderson writes, that distinction helps to overcome the tendency of moral judgments “to become substitutes for explanatory accounts of history”:
Outrage at capitalism’s devastation of the natural world is entirely appropriate, but only concrete analysis of the social, economic and political causes of that destruction can identify solutions. The view that environmental problems and crises are caused by false ideas, and so can be overcome by promoting an alternative philosophy, can only lead to political perspectives that are built on sand—or worse, have no foundation at all.Moral consciousness is certainly indispensable to the very idea of socialism. Engels himself emphasised that “a really human morality” would be one of the hallmarks of communism, the finest product of its conquest of the age-old social divisions and antagonisms rooted in scarcity. Moralism, on the other hand, denotes the vain intrusion of moral judgments in lieu of causal understanding… Its end result is to devalue the writ of moral judgement altogether.35
http://isj.org.uk/anthropocentrism-versus-ecocentrism/
Capital or Nature/Socialism or Barbarism dovetail.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
How ecologists of the past defeated ecologists of the future
07/27/2021
Everything is relative
Germany , Austria , China and our Krasnodar Territory are fighting the water element, and Yakutia is fighting terrible fires that have destroyed more than 1.5 million hectares of taiga. It's time to remember the responsibility of a person for what is happening. Practice shows that the current economic system is unable to cope with environmental problems, which only exacerbates the situation. Modern environmentalists tend to blame individual politicians or consumers when the problem goes deeper. But people are quite capable of preserving and protecting the Earth. Let's turn to history.
Plan for the construction of canals and hydroelectric power plants in the USSR / 1949
Features of nature management in the countries of the Eastern bloc
Contrary to the opinion about the "barbaric" policy of the communists in relation to the environment, in the USSR, measures for the protection of nature were carried out everywhere. For example, the collection of waste paper began in the 1920s , which, according to legend, was initiated by V.I. Leninwhen I learned that "the proletarians prefer to waste paper on kindling furnaces." Soviet economists were clearly aware that measures to support the environment contribute to the maintenance of human health. Even then, Soviet specialists raised the position of preventive protection against diseases, which is so popular today. In the course of implementing the relevant programs, it was possible to reduce the burden on Soviet medicine. To combat drought and floods, Soviet specialists pursued a policy of planting forests and created forest shelters in the Volga region and in southern Russia . Unfortunately, as can be seen from the state of the environment today, today's economists are not so far-sighted.
Special efforts to protect the environment were undertaken in the 60s , when the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted the draft law "On the Preservation of the Environment in the Territory of the RSFSR." From that moment on, ecology became one of the key issues in the policy of the Soviet leadership.
Forest shelter belts
Since 1975 , the five-year and annual plans for the economic and social development of the USSR additionally include special sections on environmental management. At the same time, state planning applies to:
*air basin protection;
*protection and rational use of water resources;
*protection and rational use of land;
*protection and rational use of mineral resources;
*protection and rational use of forest resources;
*protection and reproduction of wild animals and birds;
*organization of reserves, natural parks, botanical gardens, wildlife preserves.
The directives of the XX , XXII , XXIII , XXIV , XXV and XXVI congresses of the CPSU had a programmatic significance on the issue of ecology . So, the XXV Congress of the CPSU is among the most important tasks of the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1976-1980 . named the development and implementation of measures for environmental protection, rational use and reproduction of natural resources.
In 1972-1978 , a number of environmental management regulations were adopted . Then, in December 1978 , the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers adopted a resolution "On additional measures to strengthen environmental protection and improve the use of natural resources."
Recycling of used resources became widespread, including the collection of waste paper, scrap metal and other recyclable materials. As an incentive for participating in waste collection, a citizen received a small monetary reward - up to 30 kopecks. per container. Thanks to the efforts of citizens, it was possible to process about 90% of the collected waste paper , and other recyclable materials, at the time of 1987 , more than 70% were involved in circulation .
Collection of waste paper by schoolchildren
At enterprises located near water bodies, biological productivity, purity and volume of water were maintained. Measures to prevent an increase in salinity, restore fish productivity were carried out in the Caspian, Black and Azov Seas. Enterprises, whose activities could affect the state of groundwater, took up the issues of preserving their original appearance.
The Soviet forestry protection minimized the incidence of forest fires and forest thefts. Today's Russia should learn from its ancestors the experience of extinguishing and preventing fires; the experience of annual fires, which can be called the "All-Russian Forest Burning", in Soviet times was unimaginable.
The whole range of measures taken by the Soviet Union was called "socialist environmental management", elements of which are adopted as half measures by bourgeois economists - just remember the growing fashion for "string bags", for example, in 2020 , the fashion-setter Miu Miu released their expensive shopping bags . Modern Russia and many other countries cannot compete in the issue of ecology with the achievements of the past century. While in the USSR environmental disasters, periodically occurring, were resolved in a timely manner, today's Japan still cannot cope with the consequences of Fukushima , and in the Russian Chelyabinsk Oblast , Karelia and Chukotkapeople are on fire and do not receive proper assistance from the state. At the same time, our country takes part in extinguishing fires thousands of kilometers from the border (for example, Shoigu recently sent an amphibious aircraft to Turkey ).
Meanwhile, the last century was remembered for its careful attitude to the surrounding world. The socialist countries actively adopted the experience of the Soviet Union in the protection of nature and the use of natural resources. So, the GDR , which inherited from the eastern part of Germany the ecology ruined during the wars and industrialization and destroyed enterprises, despite the huge costs for the creation and restoration of the economy, in particular, heavy industry, pursued an active environmental policy. In 1972 , the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Water Resources appeared in the GDR. The issue of energy supply for the state was of particular importance: coal-fired power plants turned out to be too harmful for the already suffering local ecology, in connection with which the Germans were actively developing nuclear energy.
In all socialist countries, a culture of collection, sorting and processing of waste was introduced, and measures for forest restoration and forest protection were made traditional.
Environmental management in the market West
In the United States , it wasn't until the 1970s that a full-fledged fight to preserve the environment began when the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed. At the same time, the United States began to celebrate Earth Day. Unlike the socialist countries, which initially cared about the environment, in the capitalist countries, the struggle for the environment was initially largely left to the mercy of citizens, which became a prerequisite for the active development of environmental social movements.
In order to reduce reputational and other costs, big capital is often limited to measures that experts assess as ineffective. For example, many people remember the performance of Greta Thunberg , which raised the rating of the Green party and contributed to the creation of a salable brand. As a result, no real measures were taken, but the capital was able to once again clothe the issue of ecology in the form of a product and sell it profitably. But, unfortunately, Greta's performance is just the tip of the iceberg. The real miracles of the helplessness of capital have manifested themselves in the processing of plastic and polyethylene: the problem of pollution of the environment by oil products has been in the air for almost half a century!
The annual large forest fires in Russia and the United States are caused by the success of capitalists in the "optimization" of forest conservation, and their extinguishing is often carried out carelessly. So, in 2019 , a scandal thundered all over the country with the statement of the Governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory Alexander Uss :
“… Something similar, I think, in relation to forest fires in the control zone. The fact is that this is a common natural phenomenon, and it is senseless to fight against it, and maybe even harmful somewhere. "
The main reason hindering the solution of the environmental crisis is the unwillingness, and often the inability to spend extra funds on activities that "can wait". Capital is busy with the issue of growth and scaling, tied to making a profit for the purpose of further accumulation. Departure from the paradigm of achieving superprofits at any cost leads to defeat in the competition. Thus, a businessman who cares about the environment will receive less profit than his colleague who just makes money. If the business still has to solve the environmental issue, then it tries to transfer spending to competitors, and leave its reputation clean and money untouched. Ignoring "inconvenient" disasters is illustrated by the policy of the world's largest environmental organization GREENPEAC". For example, the 2010 environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was ignored by GREENPEACE specialists for a long time; the organization took no action to control the oil spill, but issued a statement to that effect .
Gulf of Mexico oil spill
As history shows, the effectiveness of conservation measures is not only the result of economic power or clearly expressed intentions to change the situation. The way of doing business is becoming a fundamental factor. Planning mechanisms aimed at preserving and developing the potential of the territories have demonstrated much greater stability and resilience than a chaotic market economy.
https://www.rotfront.su/kak-ekologi-pro ... li-ekolog/
Google Translator
07/27/2021
Everything is relative
Germany , Austria , China and our Krasnodar Territory are fighting the water element, and Yakutia is fighting terrible fires that have destroyed more than 1.5 million hectares of taiga. It's time to remember the responsibility of a person for what is happening. Practice shows that the current economic system is unable to cope with environmental problems, which only exacerbates the situation. Modern environmentalists tend to blame individual politicians or consumers when the problem goes deeper. But people are quite capable of preserving and protecting the Earth. Let's turn to history.
Plan for the construction of canals and hydroelectric power plants in the USSR / 1949
Features of nature management in the countries of the Eastern bloc
Contrary to the opinion about the "barbaric" policy of the communists in relation to the environment, in the USSR, measures for the protection of nature were carried out everywhere. For example, the collection of waste paper began in the 1920s , which, according to legend, was initiated by V.I. Leninwhen I learned that "the proletarians prefer to waste paper on kindling furnaces." Soviet economists were clearly aware that measures to support the environment contribute to the maintenance of human health. Even then, Soviet specialists raised the position of preventive protection against diseases, which is so popular today. In the course of implementing the relevant programs, it was possible to reduce the burden on Soviet medicine. To combat drought and floods, Soviet specialists pursued a policy of planting forests and created forest shelters in the Volga region and in southern Russia . Unfortunately, as can be seen from the state of the environment today, today's economists are not so far-sighted.
Special efforts to protect the environment were undertaken in the 60s , when the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted the draft law "On the Preservation of the Environment in the Territory of the RSFSR." From that moment on, ecology became one of the key issues in the policy of the Soviet leadership.
Forest shelter belts
Since 1975 , the five-year and annual plans for the economic and social development of the USSR additionally include special sections on environmental management. At the same time, state planning applies to:
*air basin protection;
*protection and rational use of water resources;
*protection and rational use of land;
*protection and rational use of mineral resources;
*protection and rational use of forest resources;
*protection and reproduction of wild animals and birds;
*organization of reserves, natural parks, botanical gardens, wildlife preserves.
The directives of the XX , XXII , XXIII , XXIV , XXV and XXVI congresses of the CPSU had a programmatic significance on the issue of ecology . So, the XXV Congress of the CPSU is among the most important tasks of the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1976-1980 . named the development and implementation of measures for environmental protection, rational use and reproduction of natural resources.
In 1972-1978 , a number of environmental management regulations were adopted . Then, in December 1978 , the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers adopted a resolution "On additional measures to strengthen environmental protection and improve the use of natural resources."
Recycling of used resources became widespread, including the collection of waste paper, scrap metal and other recyclable materials. As an incentive for participating in waste collection, a citizen received a small monetary reward - up to 30 kopecks. per container. Thanks to the efforts of citizens, it was possible to process about 90% of the collected waste paper , and other recyclable materials, at the time of 1987 , more than 70% were involved in circulation .
Collection of waste paper by schoolchildren
At enterprises located near water bodies, biological productivity, purity and volume of water were maintained. Measures to prevent an increase in salinity, restore fish productivity were carried out in the Caspian, Black and Azov Seas. Enterprises, whose activities could affect the state of groundwater, took up the issues of preserving their original appearance.
The Soviet forestry protection minimized the incidence of forest fires and forest thefts. Today's Russia should learn from its ancestors the experience of extinguishing and preventing fires; the experience of annual fires, which can be called the "All-Russian Forest Burning", in Soviet times was unimaginable.
The whole range of measures taken by the Soviet Union was called "socialist environmental management", elements of which are adopted as half measures by bourgeois economists - just remember the growing fashion for "string bags", for example, in 2020 , the fashion-setter Miu Miu released their expensive shopping bags . Modern Russia and many other countries cannot compete in the issue of ecology with the achievements of the past century. While in the USSR environmental disasters, periodically occurring, were resolved in a timely manner, today's Japan still cannot cope with the consequences of Fukushima , and in the Russian Chelyabinsk Oblast , Karelia and Chukotkapeople are on fire and do not receive proper assistance from the state. At the same time, our country takes part in extinguishing fires thousands of kilometers from the border (for example, Shoigu recently sent an amphibious aircraft to Turkey ).
Meanwhile, the last century was remembered for its careful attitude to the surrounding world. The socialist countries actively adopted the experience of the Soviet Union in the protection of nature and the use of natural resources. So, the GDR , which inherited from the eastern part of Germany the ecology ruined during the wars and industrialization and destroyed enterprises, despite the huge costs for the creation and restoration of the economy, in particular, heavy industry, pursued an active environmental policy. In 1972 , the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Water Resources appeared in the GDR. The issue of energy supply for the state was of particular importance: coal-fired power plants turned out to be too harmful for the already suffering local ecology, in connection with which the Germans were actively developing nuclear energy.
In all socialist countries, a culture of collection, sorting and processing of waste was introduced, and measures for forest restoration and forest protection were made traditional.
Environmental management in the market West
In the United States , it wasn't until the 1970s that a full-fledged fight to preserve the environment began when the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed. At the same time, the United States began to celebrate Earth Day. Unlike the socialist countries, which initially cared about the environment, in the capitalist countries, the struggle for the environment was initially largely left to the mercy of citizens, which became a prerequisite for the active development of environmental social movements.
In order to reduce reputational and other costs, big capital is often limited to measures that experts assess as ineffective. For example, many people remember the performance of Greta Thunberg , which raised the rating of the Green party and contributed to the creation of a salable brand. As a result, no real measures were taken, but the capital was able to once again clothe the issue of ecology in the form of a product and sell it profitably. But, unfortunately, Greta's performance is just the tip of the iceberg. The real miracles of the helplessness of capital have manifested themselves in the processing of plastic and polyethylene: the problem of pollution of the environment by oil products has been in the air for almost half a century!
The annual large forest fires in Russia and the United States are caused by the success of capitalists in the "optimization" of forest conservation, and their extinguishing is often carried out carelessly. So, in 2019 , a scandal thundered all over the country with the statement of the Governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory Alexander Uss :
“… Something similar, I think, in relation to forest fires in the control zone. The fact is that this is a common natural phenomenon, and it is senseless to fight against it, and maybe even harmful somewhere. "
The main reason hindering the solution of the environmental crisis is the unwillingness, and often the inability to spend extra funds on activities that "can wait". Capital is busy with the issue of growth and scaling, tied to making a profit for the purpose of further accumulation. Departure from the paradigm of achieving superprofits at any cost leads to defeat in the competition. Thus, a businessman who cares about the environment will receive less profit than his colleague who just makes money. If the business still has to solve the environmental issue, then it tries to transfer spending to competitors, and leave its reputation clean and money untouched. Ignoring "inconvenient" disasters is illustrated by the policy of the world's largest environmental organization GREENPEAC". For example, the 2010 environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was ignored by GREENPEACE specialists for a long time; the organization took no action to control the oil spill, but issued a statement to that effect .
Gulf of Mexico oil spill
As history shows, the effectiveness of conservation measures is not only the result of economic power or clearly expressed intentions to change the situation. The way of doing business is becoming a fundamental factor. Planning mechanisms aimed at preserving and developing the potential of the territories have demonstrated much greater stability and resilience than a chaotic market economy.
https://www.rotfront.su/kak-ekologi-pro ... li-ekolog/
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."