Can we save the Earth?

Submitted by Anon on 3 May, 2007 - 10:02

Bruce Robinson ‘Coming to terms with nature’, the 2007 edition of Socialist Register (Merlin, £14.95).

Global warming, escalating waste and issues of scarce resources have brought home to socialists the need to “come to terms with nature.” The environmental crisis has posed both theoretical and practical political challenges for Marxists.

The editors of the Socialist Register, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, write that “the absence of a strong eco-socialist left is reflected in a lack of coherence in eco-socialist theory... the speed of development of globalised capitalism, epitomised by the dramatic acceleration of climate change, makes it imperative for socialists to deal with these issues now.” The case also still has to be made for how far and in what sense the left today has to be “eco-socialist” and what implications that has for our conception of socialism.

Much of Coming to terms with nature consists of essays outlining the extent of the ecological issues we face, going beyond global warming to consider waste creation and disposal, supplies of food, water and energy and the development of agriculture in the context of the commodification and privatisation of large areas of nature. There are also chapters on the likely environmental impact of China’s industrialisation, the blaming of the poor for Hurricane Katrina by US conservatives, African agriculture and UK energy policy.

One recurring theme is the failure of the market solutions proposed in the framework of neo-liberal policies to deal adequately with the ecological crisis.

The Kyoto Protocol, which is the existing international framework for reducing CO2 emissions, is based on making emissions tradable as commodities. Achim Brunnengraeber comments: “The climate policy targets of the Kyoto Protocol were set low, the instruments were weak, the question of financing was anything but satisfactorily solved and the unjust North-South relationships [whereby less developed countries bear the burdens of adjustment] have not changed. The instruments... are the expression of a ‘creative’ carbon dioxide bookkeeping. Whether they will do anything much for the climate is doubtful.”

The chapter by Harriss and Harriss-White, examining UK policy towards renewable energy, shows how the government has abandoned any real attempt to promote renewables in favour of “aspirational discourse” which acts as a “mass tranquilliser”. A refusal to subsidise renewables seriously — as was and is the case with Blair’s favoured nuclear power — reflects the direct power of private energy interests in determining government and regulatory policy: “The politics of renewable energy is enmeshed in the interests of capital and for the most part these interests are defined in terms of their investments in energy technologies for which renewables would be substitutes... Climate change policy serves to hide increasing total energy emissions, relentlessly polluting energy use and increasing waste... The British state is now almost completely saturated by the ideology of the market, a soft prey to capital. In the energy field, a mix of market-driven politics and state capitulation has undermined the framework of systematic regulation and stripped the state of its capacity to make the long-term plans necessary for capital to invest...”

The book also points to the inadequacies of some Green sacred cows, “eco-populism” and “eco-localism”.

Bernstein and Woodhouse examine the impact of globalised capitalism on the social relations, economy and ecology of the savannah of sub-Saharan Africa, defining an “eco-populist” view that sees traditional small-scale farming and rural communities as virtuous in their supposed ecologically sound practices. They challenge this view as both over-generalising varied forms of agriculture and labour and on the grounds that “there is little convincing evidence that pre-colonial land regimes were concerned with conservation of forest, pasture or water”. This view they say, also ignores the fact that “the ‘customary’ (and the rural ‘community’) are permeated by the class dynamics of commodity relations... To benefit more than a few, the hierarchies and unequal power relations of customary institutions and their submerged dynamics and purposes have to be effectively challenged.” Eco-populism instead proposes a “withdrawal from the market” and a return to what is romantically seen as a more simple way of life.

Greg Albo describes how a passion for the “local” as the appropriate scale for economic and ecological organisation has spread across the political spectrum from the World Bank to sections of the far left, but particularly to environmental movements. Albo points to a link between those who believe in “green capitalism” and more radical green currents in that all have been “more or less comfortable with the decentralization that has accompanied neo-liberalism... all representative of the ‘neither left, nor right but green’ political orientation... which accommodates the acceptance of (local) capitalist markets as the necessary regulators of socio-economic activity.”

Albo deals with the myth that localism will allow the creation of small-scale democratic and environmentally friendly niches within a broader market-driven system. He also points out how the assumed virtues of the local have found their way into socialist thought since at least the Paris Commune, whether in the form of decentralised “red” or “liberated” zones or municipal socialism. Albo argues that the struggle for socialism has to take place across a number of different spatial scales ranging from the local to the global — not least because solidarity and equality requires it.

Several articles relate to debates between Marxists about the relationship between society (and specifically capitalist society) and nature and the extent and form of the ecological crisis.

In a general theoretical article “Nature as accumulation strategy”, the Marxist geographer Neil Smith examines how what has traditionally been considered as the realm of an external nature has become subsumed by capital into the social sphere so that “the increasingly social reproduction of nature increasingly infiltrates any remnant of a recognisably external nature”. The means for this occurring range from agricultural transformations of the landscape through to biotechnology and the increasing commodification of nature, as with GM seeds or the ability to produce transplantable body parts.

Capital is certainly increasingly penetrating into what has previously been defined as the sphere of nature, as it has done since its birth. However Smith goes further, talking of “the production of nature, all the way down”. In other words, for Smith the correct desire to avoid a theory in which nature is just external to society means that the operation of natural processes becomes reduced to “social nature”.

This poses problems for the theory, which can be seen by the fact that he has to enter the caveats that “none of this in any way denies the power or existence of ‘natural’ processes” and that “[his theory] makes no pretence to the control of nature.” But it is precisely the form of the interaction between natural processes and social production and consumption that is key to understanding phenomena such as global warming and beginning to conceptualise alternatives.

A similar problem arises with Daniel Buck’s chapter ‘The ecological question: can capitalism prevail?’. Its theme is summed up by Panitch and Leys as being “to avoid an anxiety-driven ecological catastrophism, parallel to the kind of crisis-driven economic catastrophism that announces the inevitable demise of capitalism….[W]e need to recognise the dynamism and innovativeness generated by capitalist competition and accumulation — ‘value in motion’—that could yet allow capitalism to ‘prevail’... Indeed capital is already feeding on ‘the environmental crisis’..”

Buck focuses on possible capitalist responses that may enable the system to survive an ecological crisis. These are all defined in terms of economic mechanisms that could stave it off.

Buck is surely right to point to the likelihood of sectors of capital investing massively in green technologies — this is already happening. But this is dependent on the green sector remaining profitable, which Buck — in common with proponents of a green market capitalism — sees as a possible consequence of a market response to high prices of scarce natural resources, particularly oil.

Buck argues at a very high level of abstraction that competition drives technological change, which may spur a new “long wave” of accumulation. Buck does not specify any particular technology that may overcome the problems of resource scarcity or global warming in this way, arguing rather that such a shift is possible.

This might be true in theory but it is not likely to occur. A massive destruction of capital invested in current processes would be necessary. Buck points out that this occurs in normal capitalist crises but it is then the result of depression or war rather than a conscious choice to shift to new technologies, even if they are more profitable. It would require a massive state intervention to induce the shift. This is unlikely under the current free market regime; it would meet with the resistance of large sectors of capital unwilling to pay the costs of transforming their production.

The focus on catastrophism is perhaps aiming at a straw man. Few Marxists believe that one day we will wake up to find that capitalism has ground to a halt because the oil has run out. As John Bellamy Foster points out, it is the consequences of capitalism continuing rather than whether it might survive that should be the focus: “The very fact that capitalism is not likely to collapse of itself and may “prevail” for some time to come is precisely why the planet is in such absolute peril. Today’s global ecological crisis is principally a product of the logic of capital… Consequently, the global economy is increasingly on a collision course with the biosphere.”

Buck leaves aside any material limits that may constrain the range of responses to the ecological crisis. At best, Buck’s technological fix can only postpone problems rather than resolve them.

At the other end of the spectrum from Buck, Joan Martinez-Allier approaches “Social Metabolism and Environmental Conflicts” from the viewpoint of environmental economics “which views the economy as a metabolic system of materials and energy flows... open to the entry of energy and materials and to the exit of waste.”

He looks at 13 main types of conflicts that occur around what he sees as ecological rather than economic issues. Assessments in these terms can bring interesting results — for example, in plotting an ecological deficit — a net loss of nutrients and water from the land caused by the production of foodstuffs for export from less developed countries.

However Martinez-Allier sees this calculation in material terms as an alternative to Marxist value theory, talking of “a plurality of incommensurable values” as a basis for valuing nature. Accordingly, he identifies the material transformations of capitalism with the “industrial system” as such (though he claims this is a form of “eco-socialism”) and looks to “socio-environmental movements of resistance... which cannot be subsumed under the conflict between capital and labour.”

At the same time, Martinez-Allier is concerned to define “the class nature of environmental conflicts” but ultimately has no basis for doing so other than that they “resist” capitalism, a capitalism no longer described in terms of its motive force of expanding value.

In contrast to both Buck and Martinez-Allier, Elmar Altvater in “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism” seeks to bring together value and material/energy analysis in a way which he argues is characteristic of the ”double character” of capitalism in its metabolism with nature. Therefore “only a holistic attempt to integrate environmental aspects into political economy... can make possible a coherent understanding of environmental problems and yield adequate political responses to the.. ecological crisis.”

For Altvater, energy is at the centre of capitalism’s relation to nature, specifically its “inherent and unavoidable dependence on fossil fuels, particularly on oil” as a result of their characteristics of flexibility, dependability, portability and high returns of energy by comparison with earlier sources of energy such as wind or water. Altvater sees this as setting limits to growth as a result of their scarcity, their production of emissions and the laws of thermodynamics.

Consequently conflicts over sources of fossil fuels will increase — a high price of oil will resolve the problem. In energy terms, it will “ultimately become simply too energy-intensive to extract low-quality or geographically inaccessible oil”. Altvater sees the only viable option in the long run as solar energy and other renewables. He sees such an energy regime as incompatible with capitalism as it requires not merely “appropriate technologies but even more appropriate social institutions and economic forms”.

The implications of this for Altvater’s conception of socialism is made clear in a footnote where he rejects the compression of time and space that occur under “fossil capitalism” in favour of returning to “the natural conditions of work and life.” What these might be is, as Smith rightly emphasises, highly debatable and the implications of doing so are not spelled out either in terms of a standard of living or lifestyle or in terms of their political implications.

It is possible to marry a energy/material analysis of production and consumption with one in value terms — there are several Marxist theories not considered in the book that do that — but none of the contributions here is ultimately successful in doing so. Such a “holistic” analysis is vital both to understanding where capitalism is likely to end up in the face of the ecological crisis and how we can undertake political action as socialists that address both the social and the ecological dimensions.

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