For a Left Strategy on Climate Change

The Editors

Monthly Review

November 2013

There is a pressing need for a coherent left strategy on climate change and in relation to the planetary environmental threat in general. The current scientific consensus indicates that we have at best several decades before the earth’s average surface temperature rises by 2°C, viewed as the point of irreversible climate change. This means that decisive action must be taken quickly if the world is not to go off the planetary climate cliff.

We therefore read with considerable interest Christian Parenti’s article, “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis” in the Summer 2013 issue of Dissent. Parenti’s main thesis is that since the time with which to address the climate change problem is so short, “it is this society and these [existing capitalist] institutions that must cut emissions. That means, in the short-term, realistic climate politics are reformist politics, even if they are conceived of as part of a longer-term anti-capitalist project of total economic re-organization.”

Capitalism and the destruction of life on earth: Six theses on saving the humans

By Richard Smith

Real World Economics Review, Issue 64, July, 2013

‘Today, the world’s richest 1% own 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Tell me again where Karl Marx was wrong?’

When, on May 10, 2013, scientists at Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of Hawaii announced that global CO2 emissions had crossed a threshold at 400 parts per million for the first time in millions of years, a sense of dread spread around the world – not only among climate scientists.

CO2 emissions have been relentlessly climbing since Charles David Keeling first set up his tracking station near the summit of Mauna Loa Observatory in 1958 to monitor average daily global CO2 levels. At that time, CO2 concentrations registered 315ppm. CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations have been climbing ever since and, as the records show, temperatures rises will follow. For all the climate summits, the promises of “voluntary restraint,” the carbon trading and carbon taxes, the growth of CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations has not just been relentless, it has been accelerating in what scientists have dubbed the “Keeling Curve.”

Read more HERE.

The Epochal Crisis: Converging economic and ecological contradictions

By John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, October 2013

It is an indication of the sheer enormity of the historical challenge confronting humanity in our time that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, sometimes now called the Second Great Depression, is overshadowed by the larger threat of planetary catastrophe, raising the question of the long-term survival of innumerable species—including our own.

An urgent necessity for the world today is therefore to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat—itself a by-product of capitalist development.

Read more HERE.

Unity Statement on Ecological Justice

By FRSO/OSCL 

Tuesday February 5th, 2013

The following unity statement on Ecological Justice — the first new unity statement for FRSO/OSCL since 1991 — was adopted at our January 2013 Congress. With a strong focus on ecology and the necessity of left analysis and practice that centers and emphasizes ecology, the statement is the outcome of the last three years of summation, study, and practice, as well as countless years of experience in environmental justice and ecological work by a number of our members.

In 2010 we embarked on a multi-part national study of ecological crises, social movements that center ecology, indigenous struggles, eco-socialism, eco-feminism and much more. We engaged our membership around key ideas, questions and contradictions facing the left and humanity in relationship to ecological crises as they intersect with economic and political crises in the 21st century. We also prioritized, as an organization, sending members and leaders to retreats hosted by the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.

Out of the national study and the work of the Ecology Workteam of FRSO/OSCL, we drafted a statement, looking towards the adoption of a unity statement at our 2013 Congress. We had four major re-writes of the statement, countless discussions, debate, regional workshops and political education sessions with members in order to reach a place of agreement and unity as members of FRSO/OSCL.

Imperial recipes for a burnt planet

Socialist Worker

April 2, 2013

Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, explains the critical connection between imperialism and ecological destruction.

AT THE turn of the 19th century, industrialist and weapons manufacturer par excellence Alfred Nobel, the guilt-ridden inventor of dynamite, established the Peace Prize that carries his name, proposing that it go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Over 100 years later, for the first time ever, a Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an African woman. The 2004 award was controversial. Politicians from the country responsible for the awards, Norway, wanted to know what this woman from Kenya had done for peace.

Carl I. Hagen, leader of Norway's Progress Party, whose senior political adviser, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, was a member of the Nobel Committee, sneeringly dismissed giving the Prize to a mere environmental activist: "I thought the intention of Alfred Nobel's will was to focus on a person or organization who had worked actively for peace...It is odd that the committee has completely overlooked the unrest that the world is living with daily, and given the prize to an environmental activist."

A critique of the ecosocialist manifesto of the Parti de Gauche

By Daniel Tanuro

International Viewpoint

Sunday 24 March 2013

Click HERE for link

Daniel Tanuro is the author of L’impossible capitalisme vert (“the impossible green capitalism”). In this article, he presents an analysis of the Ecosocialist Manifesto of the French Left Party. Highlighting the real advances contained in this document, but also its limitations, he contributes to the crucial debate on the necessary ecosocialist strategy.

The Ecosocialist Manifesto of the Left Party (PG) is an important document. For the first time in France, a political force with parliamentary representation adopts the concept of ecosocialism to try and combine social and ecological demands, in a perspective of a break with capitalism. The condemnation of productivism is unambiguous.

The fact that the document rejects as socially unjust and environmentally criminal the social democratic strategy of relaunching the system (Thesis 6: "We therefore expect neither the resumption of growth nor the beneficial effects of austerity: we believe in neither the one or the other") demonstrates an awareness of the seriousness of the situation and the urgency of the measures that must be taken to confront it. That is to say that the manifesto contributes to a fundamental political debate: what alternative to co-management of capitalism by the Greens and social-liberalism? What programme, what vision of society, what strategy for an anti-productivist socialism?

Read more HERE.

The Relevance of Marxism Today

An Interview With Michael A. Lebowitz 

By Zhuo Mingliang

MRzine

March 21, 2013

Do you think Marxism is still relevant today? If so, which parts?

I think that Marxism is completely relevant for understanding capitalism now. It's an error to think that capitalism has changed and that therefore we have to change Marxism. Marx grasped the nature of capitalism; and, although capitalism has changed in some of its forms, its essence remains the same. Capitalism is a system based upon the exploitation and deformation of wage laborers for the purpose of profits for those who own the means of production. That has not changed.

Read more HERE.

Ecological Marxism in China

Two Articles from MR
February Issue, 2013

What Does Ecological Marxism Mean For China?

Questions and Challenges for John Bellamy Foster

Zhihe Wang, Meijun Fan, Hui Dong, Dezhong Sun and Lichun Li

Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism

A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars

John Bellamy Foster

Alternatives to Antihumanism

By Murray Bookchin

New Compass
February 23, 2013

This is the conclusion to Murray Bookchin’s Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism (London: Cassell, 1995), pp. 258-260.

What alternatives do we have to the antihumanistic moods percolating through Euro-American culture today?

To exude nothing but optimism would be as simplistic as the pessimism I have criticized in [my book Re-Enchanting Humanity. Whether a rational choice is possible before the present market society exhausts itself in a frenzy of destruction is certainly debatable; capitalism—whose corrosive workings are abetted, not determined, by an ecer more powerful technology—is spreading into the remotest areas of the planet. Europe and North America are not alone in being shaken to their foundations by the system they spawned less than two centuries ago. Today, large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have also been swept into its fold. Capital has become as “rhizomatic” as anything treasured by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose concepts play neatly into the imagery of global capitalism.

A Roundtable for Ecosocialism - by the Parti de Gauche

The Friends of the Left Front Association (UK)

January 10, 2013

On December 1st 2012 the Parti de Gauche organised a round table to discuss the Ecosocialist project. This gave us the opportunity to debate our "Ecosocialist Manifesto ” around 18 themes. Please visit ecosocialisme.com for practical information.

Building a new left wing political synthesis

We now know that human emancipation cannot be achieved by never ending growth: the ecosystem does not allow it. This forces us to reconsider our production and trading system, and generally speaking the entire social and political organisation. Under these circumstances, we propose Ecosocialism as a new reading of our strategy for the future of humanity.

Ecosocialism implies the use of practical radicalism, environmental planning, and a citizens’ revolution. Its means are based on a redistribution of wealth that would take into account environmental constraints, the rejection of all kinds of domination and oppression, and popular sovereignty within a democratic, republican and secular state.

A Marxist Ecological Vision

By Nicolas Davenport
Solidarity
1 November 2012

The following article is adapted from a presentation at the Solidarity summer school in August 2012. Nicholas Davenport is a member of the newly formed Ecosocialism Working Group of Solidarity. The editors of Against the Current view this contribution as part of an urgently needed discussion.

The questions facing environmental activists, and socialists in particular, range from the sheer scale of the environmental disasters already underway to the problems of beginning a transition from a system organized around massive consumption of fossil fuels, vast megacities and global agribusiness.

In the process of doing so, how will an ecosocialist movement and society address the crisis of global inequality and the need to “develop the productive forces” without pushing the planet and human civilization over the environmental cliff? We look forward to explorations of these questions from a variety of angles and viewpoints. — David Finkel, for the ATC editors

THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS presents the starkest possible example of both the necessity of and opportunity for revolutionary change. Nothing but a radical transformation of basic social relations can prevent the worst possible outcomes of the crisis. In spite of its overwhelming and frightening magnitude, the ecological crisis presents a moment to revitalize the world revolutionary movement.

However, much of the socialist response to the ecological crisis so far has been inadequate. When we talk about the ecological crisis, socialists often fail to integrate it into our general analysis of the trajectory of bourgeois society and the opportunities for revolution.

A Plea for an Ecological Reconstruction of Marxism

By Daniel Tanturo

Presentation at the Historical Materialism Conference

London

November 10, 2012

For the first time in history, humanity has to conceive our emancipation under a global ecological constraint, unsurpassable by an increase in labor productivity.

Global warming exemplifies this constraint. In order to stabilize the climate system, the final energy consumption should fall by 50% in the European Union, and 75% in the US, by 2050 (UN, World Economic and Social Outlook 2011). Such objectives cannot be achieved without a reduction in material production and transportation, at least in the so-called “developed” countries. It’s not enough to limit growth.

At the most, the energy system based on fossil fuels must be replaced by another one, renewable, completely new and different. A huge mutation must be carried out within two generations. It requires investments and thus additional energy consumption. In other words, the transition itself, at least in the beginning, will be an additional source of emissions and these must absolutely be compensated. Therefore, a plan is necessary, based on energy efficiency, not cost-efficiency.

Recovering Bookchin: Social Ecology and the Crises of Our Time

By Andy Price
New Compass

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Through an extensive body of political and philosophical ideas he called social ecology, Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) elucidated one of the first intellectual responses to the ecological crisis. However, over the last two decades of his life Bookchin’s ideas slipped from focus, obscured by the emergence of a crude caricature that portrayed him as a dogmatic sectarian who intended to dominate the radical left for his own personal motivations.

In Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price revisits the Bookchin caricature and critically discounts it as the product of a largely misguided literature that focused on Bookchin the individual and not his ideas. By looking afresh at Bookchin’s work, Price argues that his contribution can be seen to provide a coherent practical and theoretical response to the ecological and social crises of our time.

Dr Andy Price is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He has written articles on both Bookchin and social ecology and on contemporary radical movements for the academic and popular press.

This is a work of “recovery” in the best sense, a lucid, sympathetic yet critical account of Bookchin, demonstrating his continuing relevance in the face of ecological catastrophe. Andy Price’s insightful treatment goes beyond the polemics surrounding Bookchin to illustrate the richness and depth of his ecological philosophy, which should do much to revive interest in this bold thinker.
— Jules Townshend, Professor Emeritus, Manchester Metropolitan University

A trenchant and much-needed reassessment of this singular and all too often misrepresented anarcho-green theorist, and of his contribution to social theory. Price indeed “recovers” Bookchin; he does so with admirable verve and analytical rigour, cutting through the myriad distortions surrounding him and providing us with a new framework for understanding social ecology today.
— Dr Chris Ealham, author of Anarchism and the City (AK Press, 2010).

Capitalism, Socialism, and Economic Democracy: Reflections on Today’s Crisis and Tomorrow’s Possibilities

This article seeks to contribute to the development of the ecosocialist project by exploring the connection between the ineffectual way that the mainstream political Left has responded to the current crisis and its lack of a compelling and coherent political project that would allow it to capitalize on the bankruptcy of the neoliberal model. - Costas Panayotakis, Capitalism Nature Socialism, December, 2010

Introduction

In December 2008, after the current economic crisis erupted, Walden Bello speculated that capitalist elites might respond with a new political project: global social democracy. By injecting into global governance a greater concern for equity and sustainability, global social democracy could avoid the evident failure of neoliberal policies. In so doing, this new political project would attempt to breathe new life into the process of capitalist globalization by managing and alleviating the sharpening of economic, social, and ecological contradictions under the neoliberal regime. Bello went on to identify some of the figures who could act as carriers of the global social democratic project, including politicians such as Gordon Brown and Barack Obama and academics such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

As his conclusion made clear, Bello’s purpose in writing this article was not to embrace global social democracy but to warn that such a project was more consistent with top-down, technocratic management than with real social liberation. Bello’s warning was understandable at the time and is well worth keeping in mind today. However, more salient now is the fact that despite the monumental failure of the neoliberal model revealed by the current crisis, the policies and philosophy underlying neoliberalism continue to have the upper hand to the point that even a nod toward global social democracy is nowhere to be seen on the horizon.

Read more HERE.

Catabolic Capitalism and Green Resistance

By Craig Collins, Ph.D.
TruthOut.org

In the first installment of this two-part article we examined the notion that any future without globalization must be an improvement. But globalization and growth only constitute capitalism’s expansionist phase, powered by abundant fossil fuels. As energy becomes scarce, boom turns to bust. But profit-hungry capitalism doesn’t die; it morphs into its zombie-like, undead phase.

Growth-less capitalism turns catabolic. The word catabolism is used in biology to refer to the condition whereby a living thing feeds on itself. Thus, catabolic capitalism is a self-cannibalizing system whose insatiable hunger for profit can only be fed by consuming the society that sustains it.

As it rampages down the road to ruin, this system gorges itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another. Unless we bring it down, catabolic capitalism will leave its survivors rummaging through the toxic rubble left behind.

Murray Bookchin: The Man Who Brought Radical Ecology and Assembly Democracy to the Left

By Janet Biehl

New Left Project

August 9, 2012

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) understood earlier than almost anyone that an ecological crisis was not only looming but posted a challenge to capitalism and the whole social order. In the 1950s and 1960s, before most people even knew what ecology was, he was proposing fundamental solutions. Being ahead of his time, however, meant that his ideas were either ignored or condemned when they were first published; they remain insufficiently recognized today.

Bookchin joined the American Communist movement at the age of nine, during the Great Depression; disillusioned, he was a Trotskyist—a member of the Socialist Workers Party (Fourth International)—from 1939 to 1947. He thereafter abjured political Marxism but remained committed to advancing the project of anticapitalist revolution. He would rethink revolutionary politics, find a new framework for it. He dedicated the rest of his life to theorizing, inspiring, and trying to organize a revolution that would be not only socialist but (unlike Marxian socialism) antihierarchical, democratic, and ecological.

Ecosocialist Worldview

The Spectre Confronting Neoliberals and Pseudo-Marxists

By Arun G. Mukhopadhyay

Dissident Voice

July 17th, 2012

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was certainly one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Marx accused capitalism as the source of growing inequality between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in his theory of historical materialism. In crafting a novel world-view, Marx’s scholarship deconstructed the inner functioning of capitalism and its contradictions. Marx envisioned that these contradictions would obviously endanger the waning social order. 

But Marx had failed to accommodate properly some of his brilliant ecological ideas in his emanicipatory project which engendered ambiguities. Alex Night in his November 2010 article observed that Marx’s primary flaw was his blindly following the philosophy of Hegel that exemplify human society as constantly evolving to higher stages of more rational development. Considering capitalism as an “advance” led him to greet industrialization as the necessary material conditions for the “scientific domination of natural agencies”. 

Marx thus allegedly shares a similar anthropocentric belief with the capitalist ideology in the domination of Nature. But transcending Marxism cannot be accomplished without it. Marx’s theory of the ‘metabolic rift’ between town and countryside is about the rift between humans and nature. Based on this Marxian concept, Jason Moore in his 2011 papers, has developed the theory of capitalism as world-ecology, a perspective that bonds the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity.

Read more HERE.

Marx and Mother Nature: Towards an eco-materialist conception of history

Marx & Mother Nature: Toward an Eco-Materialist Theory of History

The Great Eco-Leninist Conspiracy

By Freedom Road Ecology Workteam
June 27, 2012

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.

- The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Engels 1876

Each April 22nd we celebrate Earth Day and Lenin’s birthday.

In what is believed by rational people to be pure coincidence, the first Earth Day April 22,1970 fell on Lenin’s 100th birthday. At the time, the Daughters of the American Revolution said, “subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that’s good for them.” Conspiracy theorist J. Edgar Hoover urged the F.B.I. to investigate the mass environmentalist demonstrations.

Even today the Earth Day/Lenin’s birthday convergence is seen as by the extreme right as conspiracy of communists attacking the rights of oil companies and private property. In a sorry attempt at wit, they suggest that Earth Day should be moved to April 20, Hitler’s birthday, because Hitler was more caring about the environment than Lenin. Many mainstream environmentalists find the coincidence vaguely distressing and tend to talk about the disaster at the V.I. Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Plant and show photos of pollution in Chinese cities as examples of how fair they are in their views of ecological devastation. 

In Search of a Broad, Coherent, Social Ecology

Better Worlds, Brighter Futures
April 15, 2012

Recently, someone immersed in Murray Bookchin‘s late-period works asked my definition of social ecology. This brought up an important issue. How is social ecology to be defined generally, taking the entirety of the field and its historical development into account? This implies a broad conception–one that recognizes both Bookchin’s open, early approaches, his later narrower variation, John P. Clark‘s contribution, as well as antecedent and contemporary influences that continue to be discovered.

Investigating the Social Roots of Ecological Crisis

Social ecology is concerned with the social roots and implications of ecological dislocation. Broadly speaking, this interdisciplinary field begins with the scientific fact of ecological crisis, seeking to overcome this crisis through an understanding of its origin(s) within human society. Because this social and scientific exploration seeks to get “to the root” of this problem through an analysis of existing, yet mutable, social institutions, values, and relationships, it is considered one of the three core radical ecological philosophies (along with deep ecology and ecofeminism).