Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis

[Orwellian_Ghost]

If goods are communal, the profit motive is turned on its head. Rather than accumulating wealth to hoard individually, a person would work collaboratively with others to generate wealth for the community. Individuals might still be motivated by profit, but, in the absence of private property, would not have the opportunity to make choices that are individually beneficial but communally devastating — pollution and environmental degradation, for example. While poisoning a water supply or filling the atmosphere with gasses might fit well into a plan for personal profit, neither is ever compatible with a quest for collective prosperity. Shared wealth would require attentive care of the natural world to ensure that resources remain abundant.



The culture of the United States, however, is very much the opposite of this. It is a society divorced from nature, in which the only concept of wealth is private. In this context, we can expect companies to do anything that yields immediate, individual profit, without regard for the consequences for the community or the future. Because the cultural definition of progress is control of the natural world, it is almost inevitable that technological and economic advancement would come to mean advancement in the direction of increasing abuse of the planet. And, in fact, the most lucrative ventures of the last few centuries have been extremely polluting. Oil is the most obvious example of this. Petroleum does more than just run our cars, trucks, and airplanes — these vehicles are also made out of oil, at least in part, because plastic is made of petroleum. Because all our current practices by and large use non-renewable energy sources that emit greenhouse gasses, petroleum products, like all others, create far more pollution than meets the eye. A car pollutes as it drives, but the gasoline in the car already generated greenhouses gasses as it was pumped, shipped, refined, and shipped again. Similarly, every part inside the car harmed the earth as the raw materials were gathered, shipped, manipulated, shipped, assembled, and shipped for sale.



So far, the devastation created by the capitalist system doesn’t seem to affect corporate profits. In 2005, oil companies “reported record profit . . . before and after the hurricanes struck the United States” (Bajaj) — so companies can make money even in the midst of climate disasters. This means that the system is unlikely to destroy itself before unacceptable casualties takes place. Capitalism hasn’t undone itself yet, and, depending upon how highly one values human life, unacceptable costs may have already been paid. In 2003, some 15,000 people died in France alone because of a heat wave (King 176). The following year, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed a devastating 55,000 people (Lennard, Tran, and agencies), and in 2005, one of the afore mentioned hurricanes killed over 1,300 (“Katrina”). Whether one chooses to link these specific incidents to global warming or not, they make it obvious that climate disasters of every variety are intolerably catastrophic.



So the system must be undone by other means. Because its progress in this direction has been inevitable, there is no reason to expect that the established order will produce different results in the future. In order to overcome the climate crisis, we must abandon the current world order in favor of its opposite: the body of qualities that it has subjugated and victimized. The establishment is a doomsday machine. The antidote is its antithesis — the divine feminine, the archetypal Mother Goddess who embodies a completely different way of being. The divine feminine loves and honors all that has been so brutalized under the current regime, all that has been the Other: the natural, the sustainable, the harmonious, the indigenous. The generous and the communal, the feminine and the gentle, the dark, the earthbound, and the corporal.

...

http://ourdescent.wordpress.com/2007/12/02/capitalism-colonialism-and-the-climate-crisis/#more-1380

[blindpig]

1. Ecosocialist 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.

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

http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Ecosocialist.html

[blindpig]

2. kick, n/t

[blindpig]

3. kick, n/t

[Odin2005]

4. "Mother Goddess"

Spare me the primitivist romanticism, please. :eyes:

[Orwellian_Ghost]

5. Here's a good interview

John Bellamy Foster: We need to go down to 350 parts per million , which means very big social transformations on a scale that would be considered revolutionary by anybody in society today — transformation of our whole society quite fundamentally. We have to aim at that, and we have to demand that of our society. Forget about capitalism, forget about whether the system can do it. Don’t let that be your barometer. Say this is necessary for the planet, for human survival, for justice, for environmental justice, and we just have to do it. We demand that be done, and we work out the operating system of the world economy, we work out our social relations of production, in accordance with necessity, in accordance with what is necessary for the planet, not in accordance with what is necessary for the accumulation of wealth and profits for a very few.

I think there is no other choice — any other choice is absolutely irrational. We’re living in an irrational system — we can’t let that level of irrationality dictate our action. So, we need to do that, but climate change isn’t the whole environmental problem. There’s species extinction, there’s deforestation, desertification, there are a water crisis and the attempt of capital to privatize water, there are umpteen numbers of problems. We have to fight on all these fronts. These are material questions, material in terms of environmental materialism but also in terms of social, historical materialism, and actually all of these problems are going to be connected if we do it right, so that the traditional issues of the working-class are going to conjoin with their materialism, and their attempts to materially transform the world are going to conjoin with any kind of genuine environmentalism that we need.

So there are innumerable ways to struggle. We simply have to do it on the broadest basis that we can. And that means starting with the bottom of society, not relying on the elites to solve the problem for us, because capitalism sells people out. That’s the nature of the system — it sells out — that defines it more than anything else.

http://www.creative-i.info/?p=1799