Green ecocapitalists
One of the greatest weaknesses of the mainstream environmental movement has been its failure or refusal to identify capitalism as the root problem. Indeed, many of the world’s Green Parties, including the one in Canada where I live, openly describe themselves as eco-capitalist, committed to maintaining the profit system.
Of course this puts them in a contradictory position when they face the reality of capitalist ecocide.
In Canada, as you may know, oil companies are engaged in what the British newspaper The Independent accurately called “The Biggest Environmental Crime in History,” mining the Alberta Tar Sands. If it continues, it will ultimately destroy an area that is nearly twice as big as New South Wales, in order to produce oil by a process that generates three times as much greenhouse gas as normal oil production.
It is also destroying ecosystems, killing animals, fish and birds, and poisoning the drinking water used by Indigenous peoples in that area,
It’s obvious that anyone who is serious about protecting the environment and stopping emissions should demand that the Tar Sands be shut down. But when I raised that in a talk not long ago in Vancouver, a Green Party candidate in the audience objected that would be irresponsible, because it would violate the oil companies’ contract rights.
Evidently, for these ecocapitalists, “capitalism” takes precedence over “eco.”
But as capitalist destruction accelerates, and as capitalist politicians continue to stall, or to introduce measures that only benefit the fossil fuel companies, we can expect that many of the most sincere and dedicated greens will begin to question the system itself, not just its worst results.
Greens moving left: Gus Speth
An important case in point, and, I hope, a harbinger of what’s to come in green circles – is James Gustave Speth, who is now dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Gus Speth has spent most of his life trying to save the environment by working inside the system. He was a senior environmental advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, and later to Bill Clinton. In the 1990s he was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and Chair of the United Nations Development Group. Time magazine called him “the ultimate insider.”
Last year, after 40 years working inside the system, Speth published a book called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Stability. In it, he argues that working inside the system has failed because the system itself is the cause of environmental destruction.
My conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today …
Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate, and thus grow the economy, typically at exponential rates …
That’s exactly correct, no Marxist could have said it better. Nor could we improve on Speth’s summary of the factors that combine to make contemporary capitalism the enemy of ecology.
An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at almost any cost; enormous investment in technologies designed with little regard for the environment; powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profit from avoiding the environmental costs they create; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred by a worshipping of novelty and by sophisticated advertising; economic activity so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet; all combine to deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the planet’s ability to sustain life.
Speth is not a Marxist. He still hopes that governments can reform and control capitalism, eliminating pollution. He’s wrong about that, but his analysis of the problem is dead-on, and the fact that it comes from someone who has worked for so long inside the system makes his argument against capitalism credible and powerful.
The socialist movement should welcome and publicize this development, even though Speth and others like him, don’t yet take their ideas to the necessary socialist conclusions.
Greens moving left: James Hansen
Similarly, we should be very encouraged that NASA’s James Hansen, one of the world’s most respected climate scientists, joined in the March 20 demonstration against a planned coal-fired electricity plant in Coventry, England. Hansen is another environmentalist who has worked inside the system for years.
He told the UK Guardian that people should first use the “democratic process” by which he means elections. He went on:
What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.
The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated.
I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.
In the same interview, Hansen expressed concern about the approach of the Obama administration:
“It’s not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately I think that will be another case of greenwash. It’s going to take stronger action than that.”
Like Speth, Hansen is not a socialist. But he condemns the most widely-promoted market-based “solution,” and he calls for demonstrations and protests, so ecosocialists can and must view him as an ally.
Why ECOsocialism?
Which brings me to a question I’ve been asked many times, including during this visit to Australia. “Why ecosocialism?”
Why not just say ’socialism’? Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about humanity’s relationship to nature, and what we would today call ecological ideas are deeply embedded in their writings. In the 1920s, there was a very influential ecology movement in the Soviet Union. So why do we need a new word?
All that is true. But it is also true that during the 20th century socialists forgot or ignored that tradition, supporting (and in some cases implementing) approaches to economic growth and development that were grossly harmful to the environment.
Socialist Voice recently published an interview in which Oswaldo Martinez, the president of the Economic Affairs Commission of Cuba’s National Assembly addressed just that question. He said:
The socialism practiced by the countries of the Socialist Camp replicated the development model of capitalism, in the sense that socialism was conceived as a quantitative result of growth in productive forces. It thus established a purely quantitative competition with capitalism, and development consisted in achieving this without taking into account that the capitalist model of development is the structuring of a consumer society that is inconceivable for humanity as a whole.
The planet would not survive. It is impossible to replicate the model of one car for each family, the model of the idyllic North American society, Hollywood etc. – absolutely impossible, and this cannot be the reality for the 250 million inhabitants of the United States, with a huge rearguard of poverty in the rest of the world.
It is therefore necessary to come up with another model of development that is compatible with the environment and has a much more collective way of functioning.
In my view, one good reason for using the word ‘ecosocialism’ is to signal a clear break with the practices that Martinez describes, practices were called socialist for seventy years. It is a way of saying that we aim not to create a society based on having more things, but on living better — not quantitative growth, but qualitative change.
Another reason, just as important, is to signal loud and clear that we view ecology and climate change not as just as another stick to bash capitalism with, but as one of the principal problems facing humanity in this century.
Evo Morales: Save the planet from capitalism
Although he has never used the word, so far as I know, one of the strongest defenders of ecosocialist ideas in the world today is Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, the first indigenous head of state in Latin America.
In a short essay published last November, Evo brilliantly defined the problem, named the villain, and posed the alternative.
Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism, Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world.
In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death … and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under capitalism. And even “climate change” itself has become a business.
“Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.
You know, last year I spent months working with other members of the Ecosocialist International Network, composing a statement to be distributed at the World Social Forum. It was finally published as the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration.
Now I wonder why we didn’t just publish this statement by comrade Evo Morales. He set out the case for ecosocialism, including a program of 20 demands, more concisely, more clearly, and vastly more eloquently than we did. I urge you to read it and to distribute it as widely as possible.
Slamming on the brakes
Writing in the 1930s when Nazi barbarism was in the rise, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin said:
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
That’s a powerful and profound metaphor. Capitalism has been so destructive, and taken us so far down the road to catastrophe, that one of the first tasks facing a socialist government will be to slam on the brakes.
The only choice, the only way forward, is ecosocialism, which I suggest can be defined simply as a socialism that will give top priority to the restoration of ecosystems that capitalism has destroyed, to the reestablishment of agriculture and industry on ecologically sound principles, and to mending what Marx called the metabolic rift, the destructive divide that capitalism has created between humanity and nature.
The fate of the ecological struggle is closely tied to the fortunes of the class struggle as a whole. The long neo-liberal drive to weaken the movements of working people also undermined ecological resistance, isolating it, pushing its leaders and organizations to the right.
But today neo-liberalism is discredited. Its financial and economic structures are in shambles. There is growing recognition that profound economic change is needed.
This is an historic opportunity for ecological activists to join hands with workers, with indigenous activists, with anti-imperialist movements here and around the world, to make ecological transformation a central feature of the economic change that is so clearly needed.
Together we can build a society of Good Ancestors, and cooperatively create a better world for future generations.
It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but together we can make it happen.