Premises of 'eco-socialism'

A COMPATRIOT of mine, a Nigerian, who read my column "Revisiting reform and revolution" (April 24, 2008) in far-away America, shared the article with a colleague of his, a female professor. The latter, in response, sent my compatriot a paper on ecological socialism. My compatriot forwarded the paper to my spouse with a request to share it with me. My spouse then handed the paper to me, as requested. The whole movement was accomplished in a couple of hours. In fact, I got the paper on eco-socialism before I obtained my own copy of the day's The Guardian. It struck me, though not for the first time, that this communication revolution is capable of radically improving the human condition on this planet Earth if production were primarily for use and not for profit - as it is under capitalism. This idea, incidentally, is one of the premises of eco-socialism.

The letter accompanying the paper, An eco-socialist manifesto, was very brief. But the intention of the persons who decided to send it to me was clear enough: I should read this manifesto and see if my perspectives could be broadened in the search for a new-epoch socialism that could save the planet Earth from the calamity that is hovering over it. That calamity is called eco-catastrophe.

An eco-socialist manifesto was a paper jointly delivered by Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy at an international workshop on "ecology and socialism" held in September 2001 in France. By purely academic standards, it is a short paper - my estimate is that it is about 2000 words. This suggested to me, ab initio, that the authors must have been very serious. Joel Kovel is the author of Enemy of nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? published by Zed Books in 2002. Michael Lowy is a frequent contributor to Monthly Review and Socialist Register. One of his more recent works, Eco-socialism and democratic planning, appeared in the 2007 edition of Socialist Register. Let me attempt a presentation of eco-socialist manifesto, a very important work, to those who have not read it. I shall run brief commentaries as we proceed, and at the end.

Written in a "call to arms" language reminiscent of the 1848 Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels and the 1938 Manifesto of the Fourth International drafted by Leon Trotsky, the Eco-socialist Manifesto opens with the declaration: "We all suffer from a chronic case of Gramsci's paradox, of living in a time whose old order is dying (and taking civilisation with it) while the new one does not seem able to be born". It then adds, boldly: "The deepest shadow that hangs over us is neither terror, environmental collapse, nor recession. It is the internalised fatalism that holds there is no possible alternative to capital's world order". We may repeat this: Humanity's Enemy Number One is this propaganda that there is no alternative.

The second section of the Manifesto presents the second main thesis: "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. The crises of ecology and those of societal breakdown are profoundly interrelated and should be seen as different manifestations of the same structural forces".

Explaining the above, the Manifesto says: "The former broadly stems from rampant industrialisation that overwhelms the earth's capacity to buffer and contain ecological destabilisation. The latter stems from the form of imperialism known as globalisation, with its disintegrative effects on societies that stand in its path. 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".

The third thesis has been of particular concern to me, and I have stated it in various ways in this column. Kovel and Lowy put it this way: "We reject all euphemisms or propagandistic softening of the brutality of this regime (that is, globalisation, neoliberalism and global dictatorship): All green washing 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". Comment: We recall that a critic once called this phenomenon "human rights imperialism", and another described it as "using human rights to sell war". We also recall that the Russian rulers now call their system "sovereign democracy", that is, "home-grown" democracy and not the one dictated by the rulers of the West. This is cynicism against cynicism.

Continuing, the Manifesto charges: "Acting on nature and its ecological balance, the regime, with its imperative to constantly expand productivity, exposes ecosystems to destabilising pollutants, fragments habitats that allow the flourishing of organisms, squanders resources, and reduces the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchange - ability 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 labour power while discarding much of the remainder as useless nuisances". Comment: This thesis is an echo of Susan George's The Lugano Report: One preserving capitalism in the 21st Century (1999). Here the "egg-heads" of global capitalism tell us that to be able to preserve the system not less that 60 per cent of the population of the Third (the "useless nuisances") would have to go, one way or the other.

The fourth thesis describes our place in the "globalised village" and the "international community": "Capital has invaded and undermined the integrity of communities through its mass culture of consumerism and depoliticisation. 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 elite carry out the work of repression while sparing the centre the opprobrium. And it has set going a network of transtatal organisations 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 centre".

The fifth thesis is the indictment of the present system: "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 predicted 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 the empire".

The sixth thesis continues the indictment: "Capital's 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 malignant variation of fascism. In short, the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt. It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism exposes its underlying weakness. It is 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 Luxembourg returns: Socialism or Barbarism".

The seventh thesis is the case for eco-socialism: We see eco-socialism not as the denial but as the realisation of the 'first-epoch' socialisms of the 20th century, in the context of the ecological crisis. Like them, it builds on the insight that capital is objectified past labour, and grounds itself in the free development of all producers, or an undoing of the separation of the producers from the means of production. Eco-socialism retains the emancipatory goals of first-epoch socialism, and rejects both the attenuated, reformist aims of social democracy and the productivist structures of the bureaucratic variations of socialism".

Continuing the case for eco-socialism, the eighth thesis says: "Eco-socialism 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 towards the qualitative dimension and away from the quantitative. From the standpoint of community production, this translates into a valorisation of use - values over exchange - values". In short production should primarily be for use.

Concluding comment: The authors' final thesis is one that I hold very dear: "Eco-socialism will be international, and universal, or it will be nothing". This is an early warning against the historically tragic fallacy of "Socialism in One Country". In conclusion, beyond one concern, I have no problem endorsing this Manifesto in its broad outline. The concern is: Eco-socialism, I think, should be an epochal programme of the socialist movement, and not a new name for the movement. The same goes for African Socialism, Democratic Socialism, Humanist Socialism, etc.