From
Capitalism Nature Socialism, March 2002
The idea for this ecosocialist manifesto was jointly
launched by Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy, at a September, 2001, workshop
on ecology and socialism held at Vincennes, near Paris. We all suffer
from a chronic case of Gramsci's paradox, of living in a time whose
old order is dying (and taking civilization with it) while the new
one does not seem able to be born. But at least it can be announced.
The deepest shadow that hangs over us is neither terror, environmental
collapse, nor global recession. It is the internalized fatalism that
holds there is no possible alternative to capital’s world order.
And so we wished to set an example of a kind of speech that deliberately
negates the current mood of anxious compromise and passive acquiescence.
This manifesto nevertheless lacks the audacity of
that of 1848, for ecosocialism is not yet a spectre, nor is it grounded
in any concrete party or movement. It is only a line of reasoning,
based on a reading of the present crisis and the necessary conditions
for overcoming it. We make no claims of omniscience. Far from it,
our goal is to invite dialogue, debate, emendation, above all, a sense
of how this notion can be further realized. Innumerable points of
resistance arise spontaneously across the chaotic ecumene of global
capital. Many are immanently ecosocialist in content. How can these
be gathered? Can we envision an "ecosocialist international?"
Can the spectre be brought into being?
Manifesto
The twenty-first century opens on a catastrophic
note, with an unprecedented degree of ecological breakdown and a chaotic
world order beset with terror and clusters of low-grade, disintegrative
warfare that spread like gangrene across great swathes of the planet--viz.,
central Africa, the Middle East, Northwestern South America--and reverberate
throughout the nations.
In our view, the crises of ecology and those of societal
breakdown are profoundly interrelated and should be seen as different
manifestations of the same structural forces. The former broadly stems
from rampant industrialization that overwhelms the earth's capacity
to buffer and contain ecological destabilization. The latter stems
from the form of imperialism known as globalization, with its disintegrative
effects on societies that stand in its path. Moreover, these underlying
forces are essentially different aspects of the same drive, which
must be identified as the central dynamic that moves the whole: the
expansion of the world capitalist system.
We reject all euphemisms or propagandistic softening
of the brutality of this regime: all greenwashing of its ecological
costs, all mystification of the human costs under the names of democracy
and human rights. We insist instead upon looking at capital from the
standpoint of what it has really done.
Acting on nature and its ecological balance, the
regime, with its imperative to constantly expand profitability, exposes
ecosystems to destabilizing pollutants, fragments habitats that have
evolved over aeons to allow the flourishing of organisms, squanders
resources, and reduces the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold
exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital.
From the side of humanity, with its requirements
for self-determination, community, and a meaningful existence, capital
reduces the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of
labor power while discarding much of the remainder as useless nuisances.
It has invaded and undermined the integrity of communities through
its global mass culture of consumerism and depoliticization. It has
expanded disparities in wealth and power to levels unprecedented in
human history. It has worked hand in glove with a network of corrupt
and subservient client states whose local elites carry out the work
of repression while sparing the center of its opprobrium. And it has
set going a network of transtatal organizations under the overall
supervision of the Western powers and the superpower United States,
to undermine the autonomy of the periphery and bind it into indebtedness
while maintaining a huge military apparatus to enforce compliance
to the capitalist center.
We believe that the present capitalist system cannot
regulate, much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot
solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits
upon accumulation—an unacceptable option for a system predicated
upon the rule: Grow or Die! And it cannot solve the crisis posed by
terror and other forms of violent rebellion because to do so would
mean abandoning the logic of empire, which would impose unacceptable
limits on growth and the whole “way of life” sustained
by empire. Its only remaining option is to resort to brutal force,
thereby increasing alienation and sowing the seed of further terrorism
. . . and further counter-terrorism, evolving into a new and malignant
variation of fascism.
In sum, the capitalist world system is historically
bankrupt. It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism
exposes its underlying weakness. It is, in the language of ecology,
profoundly unsustainable, and must be changed fundamentally, nay,
replaced, if there is to be a future worth living.
Thus the stark choice once posed by Rosa Luxemburg
returns: Socialism or Barbarism!, where the face of the latter now
reflects the imprint of the intervening century and assumes the countenance
of ecocatastrophe, terror counterterror, and their fascist degeneration.
But why socialism, why revive this word seemingly
consigned to the rubbish-heap of history by the failings of its twentieth
century interpretations? For this reason only: that however beaten
down and unrealized, the notion of socialism still stands for the
supersession of capital. If capital is to be overcome, a task now
given the urgency of the survival of civilization itself, the outcome
will perforce be “socialist,” for that is the term which
signifies the breakthrough into a post-capitalist society. If we say
that capital is radically unsustainable and breaks down into the barbarism
outlined above, then we are also saying that we need to build a “socialism”
capable of overcoming the crises capital has set going. And if “socialisms”
past have failed to do so, then it is our obligation, if we choose
against submitting to a barbarous end, to struggle for one that succeeds.
And just as barbarism has changed in a manner reflective of the century
since Luxemburg enunciated her fateful alternative, so too, must the
name, and the reality, of a “socialism” become adequate
for this time.
It is for these reasons that we choose to name our
interpretation of “socialism” as an ecosocialism, and
dedicate ourselves to its realization.
Why Ecosocialism?
We see ecosocialism not as the denial but as the
realization of the “first-epoch” socialisms of the twentieth
century, in the context of the ecological crisis. Like them, it builds
on the insight that capital is objectified past labor, and grounds
itself in the free development of all producers, or to use another
way of saying this, an undoing of the separation of the producers
from the means of production. We understand that this goal was not
able to be implemented by first-epoch socialism, for reasons too complex
to take up here, except to summarize as various effects of underdevelopment
in the context of hostility by existing capitalist powers. This conjuncture
had numerous deleterious effects on existing socialisms, chiefly,
the denial of internal democracy along with an emulation of capitalist
productivism, and led eventually to the collapse of these societies
and the ruin of their natural environments.
Ecosocialism retains the emancipatory goals of first-epoch
socialism, and rejects both the attenuated, reformist aims of social
democracy and the the productivist structures of the bureaucratic
variations of socialism. It insists, rather, upon redefining both
the path and the goal of socialist production in an ecological framework.
It does so specifically in respect to the “limits on growth”
essential for the sustainability of society. These are embraced, not
however, in the sense of imposing scarcity, hardship and repression.
The goal, rather, is a transformation of needs, and a profound shift
toward the qualitative dimension and away from the quantitative. From
the standpoint of commodity production, this translates into a valorization
of use-values over exchange-values—a project of far-reaching
significance grounded in immediate economic activity.
The generalization of ecological production under
socialist conditions can provide the ground for the overcoming of
the present crises. A society of freely associated producers does
not stop at its own democratization. It must, rather, insist on the
freeing of all beings as its ground and goal. It overcomes thereby
the imperialist impulse both subjectively and objectively. In realizing
such a goal, it struggles to overcome all forms of domination, including,
especially, those of gender and race. And it surpasses the conditions
leading to fundamentalist distortions and their terrorist manifestions.
In sum, a world society is posited in a degree of ecological harmony
with nature unthinkable under present conditions. A practical outcome
of these tendencies would be expressed, for example, in a withering
away of the dependency upon fossil fuels integral to industrial capitalism.
And this in turn can provide the material point of release of the
lands subjugated by oil imperialism, while enabling the containment
of global warming, along with other afflictions of the ecological
crisis.
No one can read these prescriptions without thinking,
first, of how many practical and theoretical questions they raise,
and second and more dishearteningly, of how remote they are from the
present configuration of the world, both as this is anchored in institutions
and as it is registered in consciousness. We need not elaborate these
points, which should be instantly recognizable to all. But we would
insist that they be taken in their proper perspective. Our project
is neither to lay out every step of this way nor to yield to the adversary
because of the preponderance of power he holds. It is, rather, to
develop the logic of a sufficient and necessary transformation of
the current order, and to begin developing the intermediate steps
towards this goal. We do so in order to think more deeply into these
possibilities, and at the same moment, begin the work of drawing together
with all those of like mind. If there is any merit in these arguments,
then it must be the case that similar thoughts, and practices to realize
these thoughts, will be coordinatively germinating at innumerable
points around the world. Ecosocialism will be international, and universal,
or it will be nothing. The crises of our time can—and must—be
seen as revolutionary opportunities, which it is our obligation to
affirm and bring into existence.
Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy
Paris, Sept 2001