[OccupyCU] Fwd: Eco-Socialism: Why We Need It

[jesse phillippe]

This Wednesday, come to a talk on:

Why We Need A
Sustainable
Socialist
Revolution

When: Wednesday @7:30
Where: University YMCA (1001 South Wright Street) Room K-1 (Downstairs)

______________________________________________

Critical Reading: A SocialistWorker.org blog
Michael Löwy on ecosocialism

February 9, 2014 11:21 am CST

>From a very welcome special issue of *New Politics* on "The Left and the
Environmental Crisis<http://newpol.org/content/left-and-environmental-crisis>[1]."
--PG

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Ecosocialism: Putting on the Brakes Before Going Over the
Cliff<http://newpol.org/content/ecosocialism-putting-brakes-going-over-cliff>[2]
Source: New Politics

by Michael Löwy

Winter 2014 Vol:XIV-4 Whole #: 56

*Ecosocialism* is an attempt to provide a radical, civilizational
alternative to capitalism, rooted in the basic arguments of the ecological
movement, and in the Marxist critique of political economy. It opposes to
capitalism's *destructive progress* (Marx) an economic policy founded on
non-monetary and extra-economic criteria: social needs and ecological
equilibrium. This dialectical synthesis, attempted by a broad spectrum of
authors, from James O'Connor to Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster, and
from André Gorz (in his early writings) to Elmar Altvater, is at the same
time a critique of "market ecology," which does not challenge the
capitalist system, as well as of "productivist socialism," which ignores
the issue of natural limits.

Marx and Engels themselves were not unaware of the
environmental-destructive consequences of the capitalist mode of
production: there are several passages in *Capital* and other writings that
point to this understanding.1 Moreover, they believed that the aim of
socialism was not to produce more and more commodities, but to give human
beings free time to fully develop their potentialities. They have little in
common with "productivism," i.e. with the idea that the unlimited expansion
of production is an aim in itself.

However, there are some passages in their writings which seem to suggest
that socialism will permit the development of productive forces beyond the
limits imposed on them by the capitalist system. According to this
approach, the socialist transformation concerns only the capitalist
relations of production, which have become an obstacle--"chains" is the term
often used--to the free development of the existing productive forces;
socialism would mean above all the *social appropriation* of these
productive capacities, putting them at the service of the workers. To quote
a passage from *Anti-Dühring*, a canonical work for many generations of
Marxists, under socialism "society takes possession openly and without
detours of the productive forces that have become too large" for the
existing system.2

The experience of the Soviet Union illustrates the problems that result
from a collectivist appropriation of the capitalist productive apparatus:
from the beginning, the thesis of the socialization of the existing
productive forces predominated. It is true that during the first years
after the October Revolution an ecological current was able to develop, and
certain (limited) measures to protect the environment were taken by the
Soviet authorities. However, with the process of Stalinist
bureaucratization, the productivist tendencies, both in industry and
agriculture, were imposed with totalitarian methods, while the ecologists
were marginalized or eliminated. The catastrophe of Chernobyl is an extreme
example of the disastrous consequences of this imitation of Western
productive technologies. A change in the forms of property that is not
accompanied by democratic management and a reorganization of the productive
system can only lead to a dead end.

Marxists can take their inspiration from Marx' remarks on the Paris
Commune: workers cannot take possession of the capitalist state apparatus
and put it to function at their service. They have to "break it" and
replace it by a radically different, democratic, and non-statist form of
political power.

The same applies, *mutatis mutandis*, to the productive apparatus; by its
nature, its structure, it is not neutral, but at the service of capital
accumulation and the unlimited expansion of the market. It is in
contradiction with the need to protect the environment and the health of
the population. One must therefore "revolutionize" it through a process of
radical transformation. This may mean, for certain branches of production,
to discontinue them altogether: for instance, nuclear plants, certain
methods of industrial fishing (already responsible for the extermination of
several species in the seas), the destructive logging of tropical forests,
and so on--the list is very long! In any case the productive forces, and not
only the relations of production, have to be deeply changed to begin with,
by a revolution in the energy system, with the replacement of the present
sources--essentially fossil fuels--responsible for the pollution and
poisoning of the environment, by renewable ones: water, wind, and sun. Of
course, many scientific and technological achievements of modernity are
precious, but the whole productive system must be transformed, and this can
be done only by ecosocialist methods, i.e. through a democratic planning of
the economy that takes into account the preservation of the ecological
equilibrium.

Society itself, and not a small oligarchy of property-owners--nor an elite
of techno-bureaucrats--will be able to choose, democratically, which
productive lines are to be privileged, and how much of the natural and
social resources are to be invested in education, health, or culture. The
prices of goods themselves would not be left to the "laws of supply and
demand" but, to some extent, determined according to social and political
options, as well as ecological criteria, leading to taxes on certain
products and subsidized prices for others. Ideally, as the transition to
socialism moves forward, more and more products and services would be
distributed free of charge, according to the will of the citizens. Far from
being by nature "despotic," planning is the exercise by a whole society of
its freedom: the freedom to make decisions. Democratic planning also means
liberation from the alienated and reified "economic laws" of the capitalist
system that determined the individuals' lives and deaths and enclosed them
in an economic "iron cage" (Max Weber). Planning and the reduction of labor
time are the two decisive steps of humanity towards what Marx called "the
kingdom of freedom." A significant increase in free time is in fact a
condition for the democratic participation of working people in democratic
discussion and management of the economy and of society.

While under capitalism use-value is only a means--often a trick--at the
service of exchange-value and profit--which explains, by the way, why so
many products in the present society are substantially useless--in a planned
socialist economy the use-value is the only criterion for the production of
goods and services, with far reaching economic, social, and ecological
consequences. As Joel Kovel observed, "The enhancement of use-values and
the corresponding restructuring of needs becomes now the social regulator
of technology rather than, as under capital, the conversion of time into
surplus value and money."3 Ecosocialist planning is based on the principle
of a democratic and pluralist debate on all the levels where decisions are
to be taken: different propositions are submitted to the concerned people
by parties, platforms, or any other political movement, and delegates
elected accordingly. Representative democracy, however, must be
completed--and corrected--by direct democracy where people directly choose--at
the local, national and, later, global level--between major social and
ecological options.

What guarantee is there that the people will make the correct ecological
choices, even at the price of giving up some of their habits of
consumption? There is no such "guarantee," other than the wager on the
rationality of democratic decisions, once the power of commodity fetishism
is broken. Of course, with popular choices, errors will be committed, but
who believes that the experts themselves do not make errors? One cannot
imagine the establishment of such a new society without the majority of the
population having achieved--through their struggles, their self-education,
and their social experience--a high level of socialist and ecological
consciousness, and this makes it reasonable to suppose that
errors--including decisions that are inconsistent with environmental
needs--will be corrected. In any case, are not the proposed alternatives--the
blind market or an ecological dictatorship of "experts"--much more dangerous
than the democratic process with all its contradictions?

The passage from capitalist "destructive progress" to ecosocialism is an
historical process, a permanent revolutionary transformation of society,
culture, and mentalities. This transition would lead not only to a new mode
of production and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an
alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign
of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising,
and beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are useless or
harmful to the environment. It is important to emphasize that such a
process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of social and
political structures, and the active support by the vast majority of the
population of an ecosocialist program. The development of socialist
consciousness and ecological awareness is a process where the decisive
factor is peoples' own collective experience of struggle, from local and
partial confrontations to the radical change of society as a whole.

This does not mean that conflicts will not arise, particularly during the
transitional process, between the requirements of protecting the
environment and social needs, between the ecological imperatives and the
necessity of developing basic infra-structures, particularly in the poor
countries, between popular consumer habits and the scarcity of resources. A
classless society is not a society without contradictions and conflicts!
These are inevitable: it will be the task of democratic planning in an
ecosocialist perspective, liberated from the imperatives of capital and
profit-making, to solve them, through a pluralist and open discussion,
leading to decision-making by society itself. Such a grassroots and
participative democracy is the only way, not to avoid errors, but to permit
the self-correction by the social collectivity of its own mistakes. Is this
Utopia? In its etymological sense--"something that exists
nowhere"--certainly. But are not utopias, i.e. visions of an alternative
future, wish-images of a different society, a necessary feature of any
movement that wants to challenge the established order? As Daniel Singer
explained in his literary and political testament, *Whose Millenium?*, in a
powerful chapter entitled "Realistic Utopia,"

If the establishment now looks so solid, despite the circumstances, and if
the labor movement or the broader left are so crippled, so paralyzed, it is
because of the failure to offer a radical alternative. (...) The basic
principle of the game is that you question neither the fundamentals of the
argument nor the foundations of society. Only a global alternative,
breaking with these rules of resignation and surrender, can give the
movement of emancipation genuine scope.4

The socialist and ecological utopia is only an objective possibility, not
the inevitable result of the contradictions of capitalism or of the "iron
laws of history." One cannot predict the future, except in conditional
terms: in the absence of an ecosocialist transformation, of a radical
change in the civilizational paradigm, the logic of capitalism will lead
the planet to dramatic ecological disasters, threatening the health and the
life of billions of human beings, and perhaps even the survival of our
species.

To dream, and to struggle, for a new civilization does not mean that one
does not fight for concrete and urgent reforms. Without any illusions in a
"clean capitalism," one must try to win time and to impose on the
powers-that-be some elementary changes: the banning of the HCFCs
(hydrochlorofluorocarbons) that are destroying the ozone layer, a general
moratorium on genetically modified organisms, a drastic reduction in the
emission of the greenhouse gases, the development of public transportation,
the taxation of polluting cars, the progressive replacement of trucks by
trains, a severe regulation of the fishing industry, as well as of the use
of pesticides and chemicals in the agro-industrial production. These urgent
eco-social demands can lead to a process of radicalization on the condition
that one does not accept to limit one's aims according to the requirements
of "the [capitalist] market" or of "competition." According to the logic of
what Marxists call "a transitional program," each small victory, each
partial advance can immediately lead to a higher demand, to a more radical
aim. These, and similar issues, are at the heart of the agenda of the
Global Justice movement and the World Social Forums that have permitted the
convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle
against the system. The another-world-is-possible movement is without a
doubt the most important phenomenon of anti-systemic resistance of the
beginning of the twenty-first century. One could say that this movement was
born with the "Battle of Seattle" that took place at the World Trade
Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. The most striking aspect of this
movement was the surprising convergence between turtles and Teamsters, that
is, ecologists dressed as turtles and the truck drivers and dock workers of
the trucking industry. The ecological issue was present then at the
beginning and at the center of the mobilizations against neo-liberal
capitalist globalization. The movement's slogan was "the world is not a
commodity," meaning, obviously, that the air, the water, the earth, in a
word, the natural environment which has increasingly been subject to
capital's stranglehold. One can say that the another-world-is-possible
movement is made up of three elements: 1) a radical protest against the
existing order of things and its sinister institutions: the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the G-8
group; 2) a number of concrete measures, of proposals that could be
immediately implemented: a tax on finance capital, the suppression of the
debt of the developing countries, an end to imperialist wars; 3) the utopia
of "another possible world" founded on common values such as freedom,
participatory democracy, social justice, the defense of the environment.

The ecological dimension is present in each of these three moments: it
inspires both the revolt against a system that has led humanity to a tragic
impasse and a collection of specific proposals--monitoring of genetically
modified organisms, development of collective transportation--together with
the utopia of a society living in harmony with the ecosystems, as sketched
out in the documents of the movement.

This doesn't mean that there are not contradictions resulting from the
resistance of some sections of the labor union movement to ecological
demands that are perceived as a threat to jobs as well as the limited
nature and lack of social awareness of some ecological organizations. But
one of the most positive features of the Social Forums, and of the
another-world-is-possible movement as a whole, is the possibility of
meetings, debate, dialogue, and of mutual education among the movements.

It is important to emphasize that the presence of ecology in the broader
movements is not limited to ecological organizations--Greenpeace and the
World Wildlife Fund, among others. It becomes more and more a dimension to
be taken into account--in action and reflection--in the different social
movements of peasants, of the indigenous, of feminists, and of the
religious (the Theology of Liberation).

A striking example of this "organic" integration of ecological questions by
other social movements is the Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil,
part of the Via Campesina network, both of which have been pillars of the
World Social Movement and the another-world-is-possible movement. Since it
was founded the MST has been hostile to capitalism and to its rural
expression, agro-business; it has increasingly integrated an ecological
dimension into its fight for a radical agrarian reform and for another
model of agriculture. Since the twentieth anniversary celebration of the
movement in Río de Janeiro (2005) the document of the organizers stated:
our dream is "an egalitarian world that socializes the material and
cultural wealth," a new path for society "founded on equality between human
beings and ecological principles." This translates into action by the MST
against the GMOs--action often on the margins of legality--which is at the
same time a fight against the attempt of the multinationals such as
Monsanto and Syngenta to completely control seeds and thus dominate farmers
and peasants, as well as a struggle against the pollution and
uncontrollable contamination of their fields.

So, thanks to a "savage" occupation, in 2006 the MST won the expropriation
of a transgenic corn and soy field grown from Syngenta Seeds in the State
of Paraná which has since become the peasant camp "Free Land." We should
also mention their confrontations with multinational paper pulp mills that
have multiplied, affecting hundreds of thousands of acres turning them into
veritable "green deserts" comprised of forests of eucalyptus trees that
suck up all sources of water and destroy biodiversity. For the MST leaders
and activists, these various fights are inseparable from a radical,
anti-capitalist perspective.

Peasant and indigenous movements of Latin America are at the center of the
struggle for the environment. This is true not only through their local
actions in defense of rivers or forests against petroleum and mining
multinationals, but also in that they propose an alternative way of life to
that of neo-liberal globalized capitalism. Indigenous peoples in particular
may be the ones undertaking these struggles, but they quite often do so in
alliance with landless peasants, ecologists, socialists, and Christian base
communities, with support from unions, left parties, the Pastoral Land
Commission, and the Indigenous Pastoral Ministry. The dynamics of capital
require the transformation of all commonly held goods into commodities,
which sooner or later leads to destruction of the environment. The
petroleum zones of Latin America, abandoned by the multinationals after
years of exploitation, are poisoned and destroyed, leaving behind a dismal
legacy of illness among the inhabitants. It is thus completely
understandable that the populations that live in the most direct contact
with the environment are the first victims of this ecocide and attempt to
oppose the destructive expansion of capital, sometimes successfully.

Resistance by indigenous peoples, then, has very concrete and immediate
motivations--to save their forests or water resources--in their battle for
survival. However, it also corresponds to a deep antagonism between the
culture, the way of life, the spirituality and the values of these
communities, and the "spirit of capitalism" as Max Weber defined it: the
subjection of all activity to profit calculations, profitability as sole
criterion and the quantification and reification, the *Versachlichung*, of
all social relations. There is a sort of "negative affinity" between
indigenous ethics and the spirit of capitalism--the converse of the elective
affinity between the Protestant ethic and capitalism--, that is, a profound
socio-cultural opposition. Certainly, there are indigenous or
*metis*communities that adapt to the system and try to gain from it.
Further,
indigenous struggles involve extremely complex processes, including
identity recomposition, transcoding of discourses, and political
instrumentalizations, all of which deserve to be closely studied. Yet we
can clearly see that a continuous series of conflicts characterizes the
relations between indigenous populations and modern capitalist agricultural
or mining corporations. This conflict has a long history. It is admirably
described in one of the Mexican novels of the anarchist writer B. Traven, *The
White Rose* (1929) which narrates how a large North American oil company
seized the lands of an indigenous community after having murdered its
leader.5 The conflict, however, has intensified during the last few decades
because of both the intensity and extensiveness of capital's exploitation
of the environment, and also because of the rise of the
another-world-is-possible movement--which took on this struggle--and the
indigenous movements of the continent.

Such struggles around concrete issues are important, not only because
partial victories are welcome in themselves, but also because they
contribute to raising ecological and socialist consciousness, and because
they promote activity and self-organization from below: both are decisive
and necessary pre-conditions for a radical, i.e. revolutionary,
transformation of the world.

These, and similar issues, are at the heart of the agenda of the Global
Justice movement and the World Social Forums that since Seattle 1999 have
permitted the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common
struggle against the system.

There is no reason for optimism: the entrenched ruling elites of the system
are incredibly powerful, and the forces of radical opposition are still
small. But they are the only hope that the catastrophic course of
capitalist "growth" will be halted. Walter Benjamin defined revolutions as
being not the locomotive of history, but rather humanity reaching for the
emergency brake on the train before it goes over into the abyss...

*About Author*

*Michael Löwy was born in Brazil and lives in Paris. He is the Emeritus
Research Director of the French National Center for Scientific Research
(CNRS). His most recent book is* On Changing the World. Essays in Political
Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin *published by Haymarket Press
in 2012.*

*Footnotes*

1. See John Bellamy Foster, *Marx's Ecology. Materialism and Nature* (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

2. F. Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (Paris, Ed. Sociales, 1950), 318.

3. Joel Kovel, *Enemy of Nature* (London; New York: Zed Books, 2002), 215.

4. Daniel Singer, *Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours?* (New York:, Monthly
Review Press, 1999) 259-260.

5. B. Traven, *The White Rose* (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1979).

   - Read the full
article<http://newpol.org/content/ecosocialism-putting-brakes-going-over-cliff>[3]
   - Back to the Critical Thinking
blog<http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading>[4]

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   1. [1] http://newpol.org/content/left-and-environmental-crisis<http://newpol.org/content/left-and-environmental-crisis>
   2. [2]
   http://newpol.org/content/ecosocialism-putting-brakes-going-over-cliff<http://newpol.org/content/ecosocialism-putting-brakes-going-over-cliff>
   3. [3]
   http://newpol.org/content/ecosocialism-putting-brakes-going-over-cliff<http://newpol.org/content/ecosocialism-putting-brakes-going-over-cliff>
   4. [4] http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading<http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading>
   5. [5] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
   <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml>
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