The Emergence of Ecosocialism Kovel Joel 1936 2018

THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM
Collected Essays by Joel Kovel
Edited by Quincy Saul

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/emergenceofecoso0000kove
Here's what people are saying about
The Emergence of Ecosocialism . . .
“Joel Kovel modeled a life time of critical thinking, and rethinking, and in
the process helped guide a generation of readers to ecosocialist thought and
politics.” —Christian Parenti, Department of Economics at John Jay Col-
lege, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography
of Violence (2012)
“T love this book. When Joel explained the use-value of bread as something
contained in everything from its taste and nourishment to its smell, look,
feel, history, ingredients, making, its assembled eaters, our own relation to the
bread, “and so on, out to the edge of the universe,” Beatles songs started play-
ing in my head. His next line had me humming Pink Floyd: “The commod-
ity form isolates these filiations through its wall of exchange-value; restored
use-values begin to break down this wall, and open toward larger horizons.”
It is a beautiful thing when every line of a beloved friend’s collected writings
provides such musical accompaniment. It is even better when those lines also
point presciently towards radical strategies for stopping today’s racist border
walls and fascist defenders of late-stage capitalism, while preparing for ecoso-
cialism’s dawn.” — Leigh Brownhill, Senior Ecofeminist Editor, Capital-
ism Nature Socialism, author of Land, Food and Freedom: Struggles for
the Gendered Commons in Kenya (2009)
“Joel Kovel had a unique sense of the interrelatedness of all aspects of life,
both human and non-human. He recognized the inseparability of what we
seek and how we need to pursue it. His experience ranged across a broad
span of human endeavor, from existential introspection to political/economic
analysis. He looked to the wellsprings of human motivation to find hope
for our collective capacity to surmount the gravest threat to our species-ex-
istence. He weaved together the strands of his exploration in a manner that
does honor to the concept of dialectics. The result, THE EMERGENCE OF
ECOSOCIALISM, is an exposition of distinctive intensity in every piece
of his writing in which the moral force of his engagement emerges in each
sentence.” — Victor Wallis, author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics
and Technology of Ecosocialism (2018)
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an invaluable collection

of essays charting Joel Kovel’s development of a Marxist perspective on
ecology and the simultaneous creation of an ecosocialist movement. Time
and again the essays demonstrate the breadth of Kovel’s theory and the depth
his experience as a psychotherapist gave to his work. The book is also about
Kovel himself. In a moving section called “Tributes, friends and comrades
provide a powerful biography showing how consistently bold he was in his
approach and unafraid of self-criticism. Reading this book, then, you meet
not only a movement but a deeply committed, inspiring comrade. Don't miss
him.” — Silvia Federici, Professor Emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra
University
“This book of essays, THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM by Joel

Kovel, curated by Quincy Saul, is a great gift during the moment of looming
climate crisis and ecological collapse. Kovel pioneered the understanding
and analysis that environmental degradation is inseparable from capitalist
exploitation and commodification of the natural world. Brilliantly and
compassionately written, the essays reflect the life work of a giant among us
and addresses the difficult work ahead.”
— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author
of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2015)
“En este momento, no solo la supervivencia de la especie humana esta en

peligro, sino también todos los seres vivos. ;A quién culpar? Gran capital trans-
nacional, cuyo tinico interés es ganar la mayor cantidad de dinero posible en
el menor tiempo posible. Una persona que, debido a estas amenazas, dedicd
su vida a combatirlos, ya advertir a la humanidad que debe ser consciente de
este peligro y actuar colectivamente para detener el ataque a la naturaleza, fue
Joel Kovel. Lamentablemente fallecié hace muy poco. Afortunadamente, sus
companeros han publicado sus ensefanzas en un nuevo libro, THE EMER-
GENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM. Tenemos la responsabilidad de leerlo y ac-
tuar, en defensa no solo de la humanidad, sino de todos los seres vivos “.
“Right now not only the survival of the human species is in danger, but so
are all living beings. Who is to blame? Big transnational capital, whose only
interest is to gain the greatest possible quantity of money in the least possible
amount of time. One person who, due to these threats, dedicated his life to
combating them, and to warning humanity that it must be conscious of this
danger and act collectively to stop the attack on nature, was Joel Kovel. Un-
fortunately he passed away very recently. Fortunately, his companions have
published his teachings in a new book, THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSO-
CIALISM. We have the responsibility to read it and to act—in defense of not
only of humanity but all living beings.” — Hugo Blanco, editor of Lucha
Indigena, leader of the Campesino Confederation of Peru
“A brilliant work by a real visionary. Joel Kovel was erudite but eminently
readable, in the vital contributions he made to our insights into and
understanding of the great crisis of our time. This volume, THE
EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, brings material hidden in a scholarly
journal into the light.” — Paul Buhle, Senior Lecturer at Brown University,
activist, author, authorized biographer of C.L.R. James
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a magnificent collection of

Joel Kovel’s essays, which along with his books will illuminate the ecosocialist
path forward to overcome fossil capitalism now threatening human
civilization and global biodiversity. We find the vision of Blochian Marxism
and liberation theology in this collection, burning bright as ever.”
— David
Schwartzman, Professor Emeritus at Howard University, activist, and co-
author of The Earth is Not for Sale: A Path Out of Fossil Capitalism to
the Other World That Is Still Possible (2018)
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an essential book for social-

ist struggle in the new millennium. Joel Kovel’s indebtedness to Marx and
his firm embrace of a socialist politics did not incline him to shy away from
embracing spirituality. Kovel did not tread the tremulous trail from the “city
on a hill” as interpreted in Ronald Reagan’s storied ‘Vision for America to
William Blake’s Golgonooza by imbibing the dominant theistic orthodoxy of
Rust Belt evangelicals, or, conversely, the pantheistic ‘all is God and God is
all’ footpath of barefoot Wiccans invoking nature spirits. Kovel’s spiritual per-
spective was, rather, at least to me, panentheistic—all is not God, one thing is
not another, yet God is in all and all is in God, and creatures and God are ir-
revocably and everlastingly intertwined. At the same time, his ontological and
historical vocation, not unlike my mentor Paulo Freire, was to become more
fully human. This magnificent collection of Kovel’s essays, edited by Quincy
Saul, with incisive and heartfelt tributes by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Quin-
cy Saul and Michael Lowy, help to focus the reader’s imagination, infusing
the most urgent political project of our time—ecosocialism!—with the life-
blood of Kovel’s many contributions to repristinating the planet and planting
seeds of the socialist revolution to come.” — Peter McLaren, Distinguished
Professor in Critical Studies, Co-Director, The Paulo Freire Democratic
Project, Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is the broadest, deepest and

most dedicated document of a whole epoch — but something is lacking that
could have been essential for its success as a whole: The enemy of nature is
not just capitalism, because this capitalism has a deep structure — patriarchy
— with its irrational and systemic hatred of life. We do not only have to
invent a new mode of production, but also to abolish patriarchy, the military
and most modern technologies as well. I, in spite of my critical comment,
wish this book to be an international best-seller.” —Claudia von Werlhof,
PhD, Professor for Women Studies and Political Science, University of
Innsbruck, Austria, and founder of the Planetary Movement for Mother
Earth (www.pbme-online.org)
“Prom climate change, to the theology of Bohme; from quantum mechanics,

to racism in Africa; in THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, Joel
Kovel’s ecosocialism is dialectics in action. Kovel speaks the individual
inside the sociological; the spiritual inside the material. For myself, having
come through a time when Marxists dismissed ecology or feminism as
‘bourgeois’ concerns, it was a joy to encounter Joel and to work alongside
him on Capitalism Nature Socialism. He was immediately open to the idea
of an ‘ecological feminist’ editorial collective for the journal. Kovel recognized
interconnection, mutual recognition, and reciprocity, as foundational principles
of nature, and acknowledged these universals in women’s labor as appropriated
by capital. He would even name one of his pieces “The Ecofeminist Ground
of Eco-Socialism.’ Now in the twenty-first century, with ‘the world historic
defeat of women’ still enacted daily across the globe, we turn to Kovel for a
gender-aware understanding of eco-socialism, renewing our hope and political
courage while reading his essays.” —Ariel Salleh, author of Ecofeminism
as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern (2017/1997)
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an excellent book in

which Joel Kovel clearly demonstrates that capitalism is inherently linked
to environment damage. If you want to know the emerging alternative
‘ecosocialism, then this is your book.” —Huajie Cai, Associate Professor,
Fujian Normal University (China)
“Tt is one thing to diagnose a malaise such as the terminal sickness of the pres-
ent dominant civilizations, but quite another to clearly point the pathway
forward. Joel Kovel has done both with great clarity. In THE EMERGENCE
OF ECOSOCIALISM, he shows where we stand and provides the building
blocks for the bridge that must be constructed to keep us from plunging into
the precipice. Ecosocialism or barbarism!” —Nnimmo Bassey, director of
the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, author of To Cook a Continent:
Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa (2012) and
Oil Politics - Echoes of Ecological Wars (2016)
“Joel Kovel, an outstanding representative of ecosocialism, lived a legendary
and wonderful life. His masterpieces, “The Enemy of Nature’ and ‘An Ecoso-
cialist Manifesto, have great world influence. He regards capital as the enemy
of nature and believes that capitalism is the cancerous change of human being,
and holds the view that overthrowing capitalism is the only way to overcome
ecological crisis, which has been widely re€ognized. Based on this collection
of Kovel’s ecosocialist literature, THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIAL-
ISM, edited by Quincy Saul, concentrates on explaining Kovel’s thought of
ecosocialism, which is profound, connotative and worth reading.” —Lang
Tingjian, teacher at Wuhan University (China)
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a must-read to understand

why ecosocialism is a globally important red-green approach, and how to
make it to become a world movement.” —Qingzhi Huan, professor in
comparative politics, Peking University
“Joel Kovel was amongst the first to break the unfortunate schisms between
ecologists and socialists (or other kinds of Marxists). And then, go beyond
to show the crucial importance of a wide ranging alliance between anti-capi-
talists, advocates of the social control over means of production, and planet-
savers. Whether one agrees fully with the ecosocialist vision or not, anyone
engaged in finding pathways out of our multiple planetary crises would have
enough in common with it to find Kovel’s work rich with insights and inspi-
ration. Quincy Saul does us a big favor by ably putting together these essays
in THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, which he rightly calls a ‘rad-
ical celebration of life.” —Ashish Kothari, Kalpavriksh /Vikalp Sangam/
Radical Ecological Democracy (India)
“Joel Kovel was my respected friend. He was not satisfied with explaining the
world; he was trying to change the world. He was both a famous scholar and a
life-long revolutionary activist. Joel has left us with a valuable spiritual legacy.
The best commemoration is the best progress, and I hope that the causes of
ecosocialism will be passed on and carried forward through THE EMERGENCE
OF ECOSOCIALISM.” — Chang
An Lu, Associate Professor, Department
of Philosophy, Hubei Administration Institute (China)
“The “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Second Notice” published

in December 2017 vindicates the ecosocialists. Environmental problems are
not being effectively addressed. Modern civilization, driven by the endless
quest of its ruling elites for more profits is on a trajectory to global ecological
destruction. Only by replacing capitalism will this catastrophe be averted.
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM collects together the most im-
portant essays written over more than twenty years by Joel Kovel, co-author
of An Ecosocialist Manifesto, a founder of ecosocialism, former editor of
the main ecosocialist journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and the author
of The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World.
Ordered in the sequence of their publication, they provide a superb history
of the struggles and advances of ecosocialism. They reveal the developments
in ecosocialist thinking, the vast range of issues being taken up by ecosocial-
ists, what they are confronted by, the insidious ways in which capitalism is
penetrating every facet of life around the world to expand and cripple opposi-
tion to it, and the relationship between ecosocialism and other environmental
movements. The essays in THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM ex-
plain why environmentalists who want to harness the dynamics of capitalism
to generate technical solutions to environmental problems have failed and
will continue to fail. Understanding the theoretical and practical issues and
the engagements as they have taken place reveals very clearly the nature of
the struggle going on, the obstacles to be overcome and what is required to
meet current challenges to life and civilization. Perhaps most importantly,
these essays indicate what ecosocialism entails and what life would be like in
an ecosocialist society. THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM should
be essential reading for anyone concerned with the future life on Earth, and
this should be everyone.” —Arran Gare, Associate Professor at Swinburne
University of Technology (Australia), author of Zhe Philosophical Foun-
dations ofEcological Civilization (2016)
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a remarkable collection

reflecting its author’s analytic reading of our contemporary crisis — a crisis
of our collective selves within capitalist practices, a crisis of our relationship
with our very source of being in planetary nature. A wise physician and
psychiatrist, Joel Kovel was incisive and phlegmatic: his prognosis was
collective suicide, the recommended treatment ecosocialism. This is Marxism
with therapy. Read it. It will give solace to your soul. Then act — the world
needs you.” —Anitra Nelson, Associate Professor, Centre for Urban
Research, RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), author of Small is
Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet (2018)
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, divided into two sections,

shows Joel Kovel in his true dimension. The first places Kovel in the context
of the ecological crisis, as he prefigures the actual contours of an ecosocial-
ist project that cuts across nature and labour. He develops the intermediate
steps toward the transformation of the current order by rethinking several
Marxist concepts, among them the notion of dialectic that entails subjectiv-
ity; as a result, “we feel with the river as well as the people who live on and
by it as victims of pollution.” He revises the nature of wealth by adding the
realm of intrinsic value to build ecosystem integrity. Furthermore, he incor-
porates the multiplicity of movements, such as race and ethnicity, religion
and spirituality, red-green, Israel and Palestine, gender and the provisioning
of ecofeminism as integral to ecosocialism. By exposing how capital affects
all creatures, he concludes that ecosocialism’s struggles against capital have
an ecocentric valuation of life itself to direct the way out of the ecological
and social crises. The second part is a tribute to Joe Kovel that speaks about
the victorious person and intellectual that many of us have called friend and
admired.” —Ana Isla, Professor of Sociology and the Centre for Women’s
and Gender Studies, Brock University
“Joel Kovel was a uniquely compelling voice for an ecosocialism that is inclu-
sive, forward-looking, and profoundly ethical in character. He was among the
first to restore a deep appreciation of the natural world to a Marxist tradition
that had overlooked the ecological dimensions of Marx’s writings for much of
the twentieth century. Kovel’s work was informed by his insights into philoso-
phy, poetry, and human subjectivity, his commitment to radical democracy,
as well as the rich traditions of political economy. THE EMERGENCE OF
ECOSOCIALISM, which consists of Joel Kovel’s ecosocialist essays, commen-
taries and editorials, is infused with his intellectual rigor, generosity of spirit,
and his wealth of important contributions to an emerging ecological left. It is
essential and enlightening reading for all who wish for a progressive politics that
is deeply infused with a holistic ecological sensibility.” — Brian Tokar, lecturer
at the University of Vermont, and author of Toward Climate Justice (2010)
“The appearance of THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a highly

significant event. It is a work ofgreat depth, erudition, and dialectical subtle-
ty in which Joel Kovel explores not only the political, but also the ethical and
ontological dimensions of an ecosocialist worldview. It includes a great deal of
Kovel at his best, which is ecosocialist thought at its best. It demonstrates that
not only is Kovel one of the founders of ecosocialism, but that he is also the
most profound thinker within that tradition, and one of the most important
ecological thinkers of our time. It is a work that helps show the possibilities
that emerge, as he has said, “when boundaries give way.” It will open up new
worlds to perceptive readers: they will find it to be an inspiration, and, in-
deed, a revelation.” —John Clark, author of Between Earth and Empire:
From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community (2019), and editor of
Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Writings of Elisée Reclus (2013)
“Like a hawk catching a thermal in the upper reaches of the sky, or like an
ice-skater crossing a frozen pond in winter, or like a tennis player or base-
ball player who having smacked the ball then gracefully continues to follow
through, Joel Kovel smoothly glides from the high philosophy of dialectics,
to the warm critique of the frigid politics of neo-liberalism, to the actualities
of collision with whatever Nobodaddy throws at him. Skillful, joyful, deep,
and friendly, these essays are essential to the growth and well-being of our
movement, our humanity, our earth.” —Peter Linebaugh, author of The
Magna Carta Manifesto and Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures,
and Resistance
“Here we have an astonishing array of essays, deep in analytical power, pro-

found in thought, and wide in its extensions and relevance. In addition to all
of this, Joel Kovel is important as an activist because of his wide compassion
and deep humanity. Joel Kovel is surely one of the treasures of modern day
revolutionary thought and praxis.” —Salim Washington, professor at the
University of Kwazulu-Natal, co-author of Clawing at the Limits of Cool
“La publicacién de THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM es un acon-

tecimiento. Pocos pensadores de los ultimos decenios han contribuido tanto
como Joel Kovel a la comprensién de la crisis ecoldgico-social y las vias para
construir una cultura amiga de la naturaleza, y esta compilacidn de ensayos
abre muchos caminos practicables. Escribiendo desde Espana, sdlo puedo de-
sear que una traduccién a nuestra lengua—y la de cientos de millones de
personas en América latina—esté pronto disponible.”
“The publication of THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an event.

Few thinkers of the past decades have contributed as much as Joel Kovel
to the understanding of the ecological-social crisis and ways to build a cul-
ture friendly to nature. This compilation of essays opens many practicable
paths. Writing from Spain, I can only hope that a translation into our lan-
guage—and that of hundreds of millions of people in Latin America —will
be available soon.” —Jorge Riechmann, Professor of Moral Philosophy,
University of Barcelona
“La copiosa y emergente compilacién de trabajos, reflexiones, ideas, propu-

estas y comprometidas declaraciones de alto contenido espiritual, las cuales
han sido sistematizadas en el texto de Joe Kovel (THE EMERGENCE OF
ECOSOCIALISM) se constituyen en referencias fundamentales, para la per-
manentemente formacién politica e ideolégica no sélo para nuestros eco-
militantes, quienes apuestan y se han comprometido en la construccién de
una nueva civilizacién para nuestro planeta tierra. También estas lecturas y
aprendizajes, oportuna y epocalmente, nos Ilegan, para llenar el profundo
vacio ideoldgico actual, manifestado en las organizaciones y partidos politicos
de izquierda del mundo, quienes estan llamados a re-significar sus ideologias,
discursos y sus programas estrategicos. Al parecer, se presagia y claramente lo
justifica Joe Kovel sera: el Ecosocialismo’.
“This copious and emergent compilation of works, reflections, ideas,

proposals and committed declarations of high spiritual content, which
have been systematized in Joel Kovel’s text, THE EMERGENCE OF
ECOSOCIALISM, constitute fundamental references for the permanent
political and ideological formation not only for eco-militants, who bet on
and have pledged themselves to the construction of a new civilization for our
planet earth. These readings and learnings, timely and epochally, also come
to all of us, to fill the contemporary deep ideological void, manifested in the
organizations and political parties of the left of the world, who are called to
re-signify their ideologies, discourses and strategic programs. It is presaged
and clearly justified by Joel Kovel: Ecosocialism.” — Miguel Angel Nufez,
former director of the Latin American Institute of Agroecology, author of
Venezuela Ecosocialista
for Danelle
Peace
Lave2 Libare
tion,
yatoyOA
2020 vision
wood sfoek, va
ay oe
Collected Essays by Joel Kovel
Introduction by Kanya D'Almeida
FLORIDA @ NEW YORK

www.2leaforess.org
P.O. Box 4378
Grand Central Station
New York, New York 10163-4378
editor@2leafpress.org
www. 2leafpress.org
2LEAF PRESS INC. isa

nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes
multicultural literature and literacy.
Stephanie Ann Agosto, Executive Director
www.2lpinc.org
Copyright © 2019 Joel Kovel and Quincy Saul

Edited by: Quincy Saul
Covert art: Hannah Allen

Book design and layout: Gabrielle David
Copyedited by: Phyllis Huang
All royalties are being donated to:

Ecosocialist Horizons
PO Box 1111
New Paltz, NY 12561
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966492

ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-95-7 (Paperback)
1 O& © 7 G § “#A B& Bi
Published in the United States of America
First Edition | First Printing
2Leaf Press trade distribution is handled by University of Chicago Press / Chicago Distribu-
tion Center (www.press.uchicago.edu) 773.702.7010. Titles are also available for corporate,
premium, and special sales. Please direct inquiries to the UCP Sales Department, 773.702.7248.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or
otherwise without written permission from 2Leaf Press, Inc., except in the case of brief quota-
tions embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright
law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at editor@2leafpress.org,
For the First Ecosocialist Internat
ional
CONTENTS
BOGOR oP REPACESS 2 tin emicmccc. gee Met ee eae era ear en ee vv
AC ONONWILE DGEIMEINN oa scctirs ato eueeien Oho vee uae eee er herh te Xi
INTRODUCTION? Falling IntoraDreams. 23 4. ee ecient

cae ena 1 ae
COLLECTED WORKS || 11
Ecological MarxisnrandDialecticoes wae 42 2a te a 13
The Struggle for Use-Value:

THOWUSMUS ADOUL The Transition c:teraeree
ton careinctiee 2 etetets 53
AL, ECOSOCIAIISUIMONMCStO wince sa ote eae ne ores tein aa Sy:
iheDialectic of Radical Ecolosies™ « s.2:: ager ter aeenac. 59
RACISHRAINCECOlOS Vasey cause, ohate,caer ers te tetas Wore naett aurea 13
PYISANIGIC EeeRler cee Mar semn ettae in attic Mee emt eraamam cert 81
AiMatenalism Worthyor Nature... 2. osc: eke Wise en wc ase 85
Grace Paley and the Dark Lives of Women................ 97 '
Re MIME anicissee OC nets tee cre ee eeyees conan et oh cee ence Se 103
Ee CIMOSE CELI Oreeae men eata aatn Reseach i acemcrre Ghee) ants casAg

Y Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change........ 119
7 Liberties and*Gommions forrAll’ 2... = sie =e tee oe remenes T33
Thinking Like’aniECosocialiStcm. emcee

aie ee 141
A Speech That Didn’t.Get Delivered: «5 sa... 22 seme ee 147
The Ecosocialist International Network................. q57
The Belem Ecosocialist, Declaration. . 252-220. .i20sn-6 161
The Ecosocialist International Network,

Part 2: Whatis:tosbe DONC 2m stairs clare
eet rere 167
Imperial\BleShs cca gee etevaateamcue eee eer bee eee eer 175
Dark Satanic Mills:

William Blake and the Critique of War................5. 183
Sufferinga SCa-CHaNnSer mau ace 2 am eines mareenn er ene eee 203
On Maran EColosys <= o sacseseas = unter sare taheye cr ven ate ree 24
ANCECOSOCISIISE Cre COP trans apeeetacas ot Bro bnre aere ne ee aee 229
Five Theses On ECOSOCIaISIMiee sem tat metioh oar 233
The Future Will Be Ecosocialist - Because

Without Ecosocialism There Will Be No Future........... 247
’ You Are The Light of the World

Speech via Mic Check at Occupy Wall Street ............ 255
Religion, Spirituality and SOCialiSiieemree

ate eet eee 259
‘ Ecosocialism as a Human Phenomenon..............-. 265
The Emergence of Ecosocialisiiine ....snhne eee 281
TRIBUTES || 294
Joel Kovel. In: Memoria css ac come eels ee ee 293
Joel Kovel Versus The New York Times .............+-.. 295
Welcome to Golgonooza... 2... ee eee cece eee eeeeeee. 307
COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ee Ean ene a ee ee area oui
POU te EDU OR cts. atciisaeds sata neales iunencast as oes Oaanuke eee 519
BOOKS PUBNSHED BYAORL KOVEIA Ac tn. toe tian saue ah 32m
OTHER BOOKS BY ZLEAF PRESS 22.4: Pr Ama we 325

—"
1 ee eee
= a <= 96
aspenees
i a
= Se Ass
if ‘roe
ss) ee ev’ aa
AP Oo _——
_ SS: =a
a © eG eas
= ae, 2 BS
aha, OGUA.
- ae .
7 iow (a aS
we
=.
ige MOT
9 ee
EDITOR’S PREFACE
by Quincy Saul
OPEN THIS BOOK like an advent calendar of ecosocialism—each chapter is

a window revealing the horizons of a new mode of production. Binding to-
gether for the first time the essays of Joel Kovel on this subject, compiled in
the order in which they were written, this book takes us on a journey from the
prehistory of the movement, to its manifestos and declarations, and beyond.
I met Joel Kovel in Harlem in 2010; we were assigned to wash dishes to-
gether after an event organized by a revolutionary artists collective to which we
belonged called Scientific Soul Sessions." He invited me to attend meetings of
the New York City editorial group of Capitalism Nature Socialism, the journal
he edited, and so began my induction into the ecosocialist movement. Unsatis-
fied with merely academic pursuits, we joined forces with a few other comrades
to start an organization dedicated to promoting ecosocialism as a worldview
and movement. And so Ecosocialist Horizons was born, in the months between
the Arab Uprisings and Occupy Wall Street. With this organizational vehicle
we went on to organize events and convergences from Vermont to Mississippi,
hosted a radio show”!, published some books"), and participated in interna-
1. Scientific Soul Sessions was founded by Fred Ho and Salim Washington.

2. The Ecosocialist Horizons Hour! Over fifty hours featuring Joel Kovel are available to listen and/or
download free in the broadcast archive at www.ecosocialisthorizons.com, accessed November 6, 2018.
3. Russell Shoatz, Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz (Oakland,
CA: PM Press, 2013); Quincy Saul et al., Ziuth and Dare: A Comic Book Curriculum for the End and the
Beginning of the World! (New Paltz, New York: Ecosocialist Horizons, 2014); Russell Shoatz, Quincy Saul,
and Songe Riddle, Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018).

tional gatherings from South Africa to Ecuador, and from China to Venezuela.
Along the way it has been my privilege to accompany the emergence of ecoso-
cialism in the life and work of Joel Kovel, which now places upon me the great
honor and equally great challenge of editing this book.
The essays in this volume, written between 1995 and 2017, are mostly
from the journal he edited for many years, Capitalism Nature Socialism,
which under his direction became “A Journal of Ecosocialism”
—the first,
and so far only one of its kind. Joined together in this book with the manifes-
tos and declarations which have been more widely circulated and translated
around the world, these essays chronicle how ecosocialism develops as a line
of reasoning, as a method of analysis, and as praxis at the convergence of
movements for social and ecological justice. In speeches and soliloquy, in
declarations and meditations, in reviews of books and movies, ecosocialism
emerges in confrontation with the military industrial complex, in conversa-
tion with speculative philosophy, and in the dialectics of organization and
spontaneity, theory and practice, matter and spirit. Ecosocialism emerges
from the emergency of modernity; as a ruthless critique of capital and as radi-
cal celebration of life.
Despite its length this is a focused collection: It excludes Kovel’s writings
on many other subjects, and not even all his writings on ecosocialism are in-
cluded here. This selection aspires to be stylistically diverse, but also to build.
to a coherent crescendo. Weaving theory into practice and practice back into
theory, the structure of this book strives to be as dialectical as the thought
behind each of its chapters. The Emergence of Ecosocialism invites struggle
and speculation, criticism and creativity —it is an invocation for analysis and
action on every front.
The geographic breadth of these essays is noteworthy. While Kovel was a
New Yorker, he never fell prey to the urbane cosmopolitan provincialism of
the First World intelligentsia. These essays address Brazil, China, South Africa,
Ecuador; they take us from a police station in Durban to a weapons factory
in Woodstock; and from the World Social Forum in Belem to Occupy Wall
Street in New York City— the sun never sets on the ecosocialist horizon. These
essays are an exercise in accompaniment; recognizing and recording the evolu-
tion and rise of a global movement that recognizes capitalism as the enemy of
nature and seeks its negation and transcendence in a new mode of production.
The historic breadth of these essays is also worth note: From neolithic
male hunting bands to the neoliberal police state, from C-M-C1 to the MIC,
ecosocialism is introduced to world history as the gravedigger of the patriarchal
capitalist world system which is built upon foundations thousands of years old.
vi COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEL

The ancestral roots of ecosocialism are sensed as its distant horizons are seen.
Kovel’s prophetic vision was the product of his own life—born in 1936 in
New York City when it was an industrial manufacturing capital of the world,
he lived to see it and the rest of the world transformed —and summoned a vi-
sion and a theory “as radical as reality itself’ with which to confront it.
A word about the writing itself: Stylistically he’s unique. The prose is
dense, and sometimes difficult, but never unnecessarily. He is after all writing
about “the world as it is, hurtling toward the abyss,” and of equal gravity,
he is writing about “the werld as I would have us struggle to bring about.”
(273) Life and death are at stake! Serious words are needed, careful words —to
distill and decipher the simple from the complex; to grasp that grain of sand
or wildflower, which in the imagination of William Blake (who is quoted in
almost every chapter) allow us to grasp the infinite and eternal. “A// this is indeed
complicated. It is bewildering, chaotic, non-linear, cascading, indeterminate. It
is essential that we appreciate this complexity, and that we be humble before the
unfathomable dynamics of nature. But we must not miss the awful simplicity
at the core of these ecological lesions, that each of these points is organized
according to the great class-structured forces of the human world.” (147) Take
a breath between sentences. His keen appreciation of poetry and literature is
inflected in his prose; each word chosen with a clarity and discipline necessary
to span matter and spirit, capital and nature, conjuncture and cosmovision.
An unrepentant Marxist, Kovel’s ecosocialism introduces and insists on
conceptual frameworks which bend and break the framework of orthodox
Marxist political economy; ecofeminism; the intrinsic value of nature; pre-
figuration; indigeneity; spirituality. Read them emerge and evolve as pages
turn and years go by. With poetry and prophecy, spanning quantum mechan-
ics and the psyche, ecology and alchemy, a materialism worthy of nature and
a spirituality worthy of Marxism, it is difficult to find a peer or parallel to
Kovel’s contribution in our times.
There is a poignant paradox at work here: Read through these essays and
see both the critique of capitalist destruction of nature and the cosmovision
of ecosocialism emerge with impressive clarity and precision over the last two
decades, and on the other hand/page/screen, witness the latest climate science
news; the acceleration of fascism and world war; the ever-expanding mass
extinction; alongside record inequality, vast confusion and infamy in popular
culture, and the near-total impunity of elites. This paradox was something
Kovel learned to live and breathe with. “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
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM vii

present configuration of the world, both as this is anchored in institutions and
as it is registered in consciousness.” (53) Yet there is a kind of faith, resounding
and not unrooted in materialism, that the power of ideas may overcome
the ideas of power. Since the Manifesto was written, explicitly ecosocialist
movements, organizations and collectives have arisen on every continent.
The First Ecosocialist International has been convoked and constituted, with
adherents from five continents united in 500-year plan for the salvation of
Mother Earth."! Like the owl of Minerva, this book flies into the twilight of a
sick civilization, to rescue revelation from the jaws of apocalypse.
But Joel doesn’t have the last word. He always insisted that ecosocialist
theory is in its infancy. The emergence of ecosocialism is a life’s work, a call-
ing and a convocation, reaching out beyond the limits of the self to join with
other minds and hearts and hands and spirits. This book is a compass to find
that horizon, inside you and all around you. Go prefigure!
Joel insists repeatedly on thought fearless of its own conclusions. There-
fore we cannot avoid this one: If the future will be ecosocialist (because
without ecosocialism there will be no future), then this is a very important
book indeed. Convoking nothing less than a new mode of production, it
founds the future of humanity. Revolutionaries in the twentieth century had
to choose between socialism or barbarism, but we in the twenty-first century
must choose between ecosocialism or extinction!
There is repetition—lI believe it is necessary. The radical and fearless
truth is repeated and reformulated in each chapter; that capitalism is the
enemy of nature, and that human freedom and ecological integrity share the
same source in an ancestral past and the same horizon in a revolutionary
struggle for a new mode of production. As Fidel Castro insisted, “the truth
must not only be the truth —it must be told.” Hear it sound again and again!
It is the bell that tolls for thee! Read it and reap!
‘T have set forth my beliefs not to impose them on anyone, but
to encourage the opening of vision. These are someprinciples in
which I believe; they include a conviction that the future will
hold many unexpected things, wondrous as well as horrific.
But there is one thing we can all expect: that there will come
a time when each of us dies and passes out of this world.
It will happen whether or not we take the challenge posed
by the opening to build ecosocialism. From this standpoint
4. “Combined Strategy and Plan of Action
of the First Ecosocialist International,” Ecosocialist Horizons,
2007e ’
Vill COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEL

our lives now appear extraordinarily fortunate — for what
other generation was ever given such a possibility to transform
history itself?” (273)™
— Harlem, New York
December 2018
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editor would like to thank DeeDee Halleck and Molly

Kovel, Gabrielle David, Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, Kanya
D’Almeida, Barbara Laurence, Victor Wallis, Frances
Goldin, Patrick Bond, John Clark, Earl Kooperkamp, Jim
White, Ben Barson, and all fellow travelers, lost and found,
toward ecosocialist horizons.
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM xi

—
Sean
~
inicl te
//
INTRODUCTION
Falling Into a Dream
by Kanya D'Almeida
“Hes dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’
dreaming about?”
Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands trium-

phantly. ‘And ifhe left offdreaming about you, where do you suppose
youd be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “Youd be nowhere.

Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“Ifthat there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “youd go out —

bang! — just like a candle!”
—From Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
WHEN I RECALL JOEL KOVELS MEMORIAL SERVICE, which was held at the
headquarters of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in Glover, Vermont in August
2018, the first image that comes to mind is an artist’s attic, packed with
people from such different walks of life that one wonders how they all came
to be together in one place. On that summer day, in the brightest alcove of
an otherwise terribly depressed town, there were Ubuntu revolutionaries and
eco warriors from Philadelphia; a civil rights activist from New York City by

way of Jackson, Mississippi; the Free Life Music Ensemble from Vermont;
ecofeminists from Canada by way of Amherst Massachusetts; even a radi-
cal pastor from Harlem. As one by one we took the floor to honor Joel, it
struck me that all of us were, in some ways, the Alices in the King’s dream.
Something about our collective had been called into being by Joel's dream of
an ecosocialist future. If he had “woken up” —by taking a well-traveled path,
or by bowing to the pressure to censor his ideas, or by appeasing any of the
establishments he was once part of —then we too might have gone out, like a
candle. Instead, the candle is still burning, and 7he Emergence ofEcosocialism
is, for all who read it, a way to fall ever deeper into his dream.
Joel’s dream, as it is catalogued and captured in this collection, comprises
nothing less than the remaking of humanity in harmony with nature. The
book is a journey, tracking the seedling of an idea up into the vast, leafy
canopy of its realization in a global movement. In “A Speech that Didn't
Get Delivered” (147), Joel pays tribute to the late Chico Mendez—an
indigenous Brazilian rubber tapper, whose efforts to uplift his people while
also preserving the Amazon rainforest led to his assassination by the “land
barons of the great forests twenty years ago.” (149) Before he was killed,
Mendez united indigenous communities with feminist groups and radical
Catholics with environmentalists in a fight that placed human dignity and
ecological integrity on equal footing. Just as Mendez’s struggle and subsequent
martyrdom represent, in some ways, the “origin” of a world ecosocialist
movement, then Zhe Emergence ofEcosocialism can and must be viewed as its
most comprehensive archive to date. The book gathers some of Joel’s finest
prose and scholarship on the most dangerous but most necessary struggle
of our times: to force humanity off the treadmill of capitalist accumulation
and ecological destruction, and return it to its rightful place within the great
web of life—no longer a species alien to and alienated from nature, but once
more a participant in the mystery of creation and existence on this planet.
And if the murderous scorn of the ruling class can serve in any way as a
barometer of the strength and vitality of an idea or movement, then we can
see in both Joel and Mendez’s work the incendiary power—the explosive
potential — of ecosocialism. While Joel, unlike Mendez, was protected from
outright murder by privileges of class and race, these alone could not shield
him from a different kind of assassination: repeated attempts by numerous
academic and literary establishments to diminish his work, discredit his
theories, destroy his career and dishonor his legacy. That his collected writings
on ecosocialism are being published only posthumously speaks volumes to
the censorship and acrimony he faced during his lifetime.

One of my very first interactions with Joel was through a group called
Scientific Soul Sessions—a Harlem-based group of artists and activists whose
mission was to revive a global revolutionary consciousness modeled on the
Black Arts/Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We described
ourselves, our membership, as being majority oppressed nationality, meaning
we comprised mostly black, brown and indigenous peoples from the third
and fourth worlds. We were committed to developing oppressed nationality
leadership, meaning our white comrades were asked to follow the leadership of
people of color—a demand that, historically, has often failed. In the midst of
this formation, which included former Black Panthers and Young Lords, was
Joel Kovel. While being one of the most advanced scholars and thinkers and one
of the most prominent elders in the group, he was immediately prepared to fall
in line behind young women of color who held leadership positions within the
group. It was a new look for me: I had radical professors and mentors before,
but never ones who were committed to the kind of revolutionary practice that
entails an immediate redistribution of social and political power.
In the early years of his mentorship, I took Joel’s sharpness and clarity
for granted. I was a journalist at the time, a profession that breeds a tendency
to search for sound bites: one-line summaries of hugely complex issues,
canape-sized morsels of information that can be swallowed and reprinted and
published. You learn to value sources who you can call up in a rush, on a
deadline, to supply you with a quick quote that keeps readers and editors
happy. This was obviously something Joel could never do. If I wanted to
interview him, I needed to block out at least an hour of my day. I needed to
visit him in person, at his home. I needed to learn that our initial conversation
would not give me the result I was looking for, but would rather be the
beginning of a lengthy investigation into a warren of interconnected subjects
and subjectivities. Basically, I needed to be ready to have my mind blown,
by the sheer breadth of his knowledge, the range of his library, and the reach
of his lasso, which could hook religious texts into a discussion of watershed
management! I was once on a tight deadline for a piece about violence against
prisoners with psychiatric disabilities. A prominent rights group had just
released a major study on the topic and my editor wanted copy by 5:00 p.m.
I called Joel, and of course missed my deadline— that conversation with him
opened my eyes to the fact that the story demanded a much deeper study.
Over the course of three months, we met and talked at length about
the long history of deinstitutionalization in the U.S. in the 1960s and
1970s, that turned tens of thousands of people with disabilities out onto the
streets with no alternative except the carceral system. He connected violence

against prisoners with mental disabilities to the birth of neoliberalism, the
automation of the workplace with the rise of the psycho-pharmaceutical
industrial complex. In his words: “Capitalism increases the incidence of
mental illness, as well as the brutality and heartlessness of its treatment."
He made me understand that “violence” in prisons is not an aberration but
the very foundation of the punitive model, a system doing precisely what it
was designed to do: break humans in mind, body and spirit. Joel's experience
as a psychiatrist — and specifically his career as a teacher's trainer at the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine—is evident throughout this book. Although
he had rejected psychiatry by the time he became an ecosocialist, his training
and trials in this field imbued all his later work with a keen attention to
the inner world of human being. Thus his words and works on ecosocialism
possess a depth lacking in most other authors’ on the subject, steeped as
they are in the mundane world of political economy. This brings wide new
perspective throughout this book to Marxism, to the environmental crisis,
and to theoretical discussions of dialectics.
While it might be tempting to characterize the writings contained here
as essays, they actually strain against, and eventually surpass, that definition.
Some of them might more accurately be thought of as journalistic dispatches
from the frontlines of ecological struggles in the global South. Others are
close examinations or appreciations of various literary traditions, including
poetry. One piece, entitled “Dark Satanic Mills: William Blake and the Cri-
tique of War” (183), blends some of Blake’s most celebrated poems with a
Kovelian analysis of the military industrial complex. In it he explains how
the U.S.’s massive war machine is created and sustained in the unlikeliest of
places, including the town of Woodstock, New York, so long associated with
the anti-war and Flower Power movements of the sixties. Beginning with the
Woodstock-based fan manufacturing company Rotron, Joel peels back layer
upon layer of skin on the great beast of perpetual war, from the entities that
produce weapons of mass destruction to the individuals responsible for their
deployment year after year, month after month, in the service of capitalist
expansion and accumulation. He knits this critique together with a lyrical
analysis of Blake’s notions of the Satanic. It is the kind of writing that would
almost certainly be shunned by literary magazines and newspapers alike: the
former for its unflinching political content, the latter for its irrepressible po-
etry. In fact, poetry is mentioned in almost every chapter of this book, for Joel
was equally inspired by the works of Blake as he was by Marx.
1. Kanya D’Almeida, “In US Prisons, Psychiatric Disability is Often Met by Brute Force,” Truthout, July
18, 2015.

While he was alive, Joel had the singular ability to turn any setting
or situation into an impromptu classroom. He was, at heart, a teacher: a
man whose enormous appetite for books was always searching for its twin,
the student. During one of my many periods of unemployment, Joel was
serving as the chair of the search committee for a new pastor at St. Mary’s
Episcopal church in Harlem. He hired me as a combination scribe/secretary.
It turned out that taking notes in the back room of a little local parish for
three months would teach me almost as much about U.S. empire as an entire
undergraduate degree. Joel had come to Christianity somewhat late in life, and
the discussions he facilitated within the vibrant and diverse search committee
wound up being, for me, a crash course in liberation theology and the history
of U.S. interventions in Latin America, resistance to which was often led by
radical local priests. St. Mary’s calls itself the “Be Not Afraid” church, and Joel
embodied its motto and mission by being the person always to raise issues of
empire, even when it brought him into conflict with his fellow parishioners.
For him, even the simple task of sifting through candidates for a new pastor
meant engaging with the church's long and controversial history, rooted in
crucifixions and the crusades but with tributaries of revolutionary resistance
around the world. So thorough and far-reaching were the committee's
discussions and deliberations that, through them, I became fully aware of an
organization called the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and its role in
destabilizing, invading, and interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations —as
well as the extent of homelessness, police brutality, drug use and incarceration
in West Harlem, where the church was based.
Joel’s attention to the CFR— indeed to the entire National Security
State—as well as the specific historical forms of imperial evil are explored
at greater length in essays like “Imperial Blues” (175). He also delves into
the role of “soft” imperialist formations like the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) in a piece entitled Amandla! (81). Here he turns his pen to the
IMF’s devastating role in post-apartheid South Africa, where it forced upon
the nascent nation a Faustian deal with finance capital. While much of this
book is a phoenix cry of hope, this particular essay illustrates Joel’s ability
to devastate. In four short pages he sketches a history and a portrait of a
country whose victorious liberation struggle shone as a beacon for the entire
world until its future was gambled away in a wave of privatization by leaders
who continue to slake their appetites on the poverty, squalor and sickness of
the majority of the South African population. Joel looks the culprit of this
trend squarely in the face when he states: “Nelson Mandela will be justly
remembered as one of the great figures of our time. But his giant stature, still
THE EMERGENCE OF ECQSOCIALISM

largely beyond criticism, has also served to block out the light of a future
beyond the rule of capital.” (82)
The writings gathered in The Emergence of Ecosocialism follow a parallel
trajectory to Joel’s own spiritual journey. Many of these essays echo the
notion that “a massive spiritual transformation, forged in diverse campaigns,
will have to accompany the emergence of socialism.” As the author notes
in a chapter titled “Religion, Spirituality and Socialism” (259), dismantling
the pervasive patriarchy of existing institutionalized religions will require
more than mocking or deriding the fundamentalism of the religious right.
It will require nothing more or less than the return, or rediscovery, of
humanity’s connection with the spirit-world, a reawakening on a global scale
of the spiritualities still very much alive among First Nations people, but so
hopelessly lost in the chaos of contemporary, consumerist, cosmopolitan life.
For Joel, humanity’s broken bond with spirituality can be traced to our
estrangement from nature, and particularly the radical splintering of the sexes
that defines much of the Judeo-Christian worldview. The perception of women
as representatives of nature, and therefore inferior or “suitable for domination”
forms the very core of capitalist patriarchy. As Joel writes, “The rape of nature
is not simply a metaphor for what capital does. It is a basic dynamic at the
heart of capitalist accumulation itself, defining an unending cycle in which
active male aggression violates passive female nature.” (263) Overcoming this
pernicious cycle of violence calls for not only a new social contract, but a new
spirituality. Joel stands out, indeed is almost alone, among most Marxists and
ecosocialists in the global North, in taking the category of spirit seriously.
If it has not endeared him to the industrialized white intelligentsia, it has
connected him to a much wider stream of revolution, from Nicaragua where
he first encountered liberation theology, to Harlem, where at his memorial
service he was eulogized as a prophet by Reverend Jim Forbes.
In The Emergence of Ecosocialism, the thread of spirituality is entwined
with another filament: what Joel called “ecofeminism.” The term ecofemi-
nism, which was coined by the French writer Frangoise d’Eaubonne in her
book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (“Feminism or Death”) (1974), is used to
describe a feminist approach to understanding ecology. Today, there are many
interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought,
including: ecofeminist art, ecofeminist theory, social justice and political phi-
losophy, religion, contemporary feminism and poetry. Synthesizing the writ-
ings of a myriad women scholars on the subject, Joel explains the term as a
recognition that “what we call life comes from the bodies of women; and the
degradation of women, the darkening of their lives, is also the deadening of

nature [...] Ecosocialism will be an empty repetition of the domination of
nature unless gender is foregrounded.” (100) In the wonderfully succinct es-
say “Grace Paley and the Dark Lives of Women” (97), Joel reminds us not
only ofthe late poet’s grit and flair but of the necessity offinding unity across
silos, as a precondition for ecofeminism and a return to wholeness: “Grace
said that life... presented a three-part aspect. First, there was being a mother,
bringing new life into the world and caring for it; second, there was politics,
how to realize justice and put an end to war; and third, came one’s work... in
her case, writing poetry and short fiction. These were not to be divided and put
into slots, the way work and domesticity are under capitalism, but seamlessly
differentiated. Caring for others was politics and art; politics was caring and
art; and art was politics and caring.” (99) Joel understood this philosophy and
advocated an alternative worldview that values the earth as sacred, recognized
humanity’ dependency on the natural world, and how social norms exert
unjust dominance over women and nature.
“Grace Paley and the Dark Lives of Women,” like so much of the book,
reveals Joel first and foremost not as a teacher but as the eternal student,
ever dissatisfied with his own knowledge, ever hungry for answers. It is the
primary reason I feel so fortunate to have walked, even briefly, alongside this
“Lost Traveller” —the slightly tongue-in-cheek title he gave himself in his
memoirs.”! To me, the words Lost Traveller represent a badge of honor. There
is a saying that people who are truly lost are the ones who think they know ex-
actly where they are. Joel was never that person —never deluded as to where
he was. His was a lifelong quest to get somewhere. Through his writings, he
cut a new path that has been a kind of beacon to people who are also finding
their way, slowly, through the muck and confusion of the world. These days,
the urge to follow the grand, well-lit highway is tremendous. The forces that
contain us and grind us down want nothing more than for us to plod along
on a direct course to the slaughterhouse. To lose yourself in such a world is
a radical act. It means you're free at last to define your own destination. And
by losing himself, Joel helped many others to find a way —a new way. It may
not be the only way.
Sometimes when I think of Joel, I imagine a man walking towards a
horizon, perhaps not even fully understanding how many people are following
in his wake, and not realizing that a hundred other roads, with scores of other
lost travelers, are making their way to the same horizon. Certainly this is
reflected in the unusually large quantity of tributes, accolades and praise from
2. Joel Kovel, The Lost Traveller's Dream: A Memoir (New York: Autonomedia, 2017).

men and women around the world, which the editor has compiled in this
book. When I feel a twinge of regret that Joel didn’t live to see its publication,
I take comfort in the words af the Zapatistas, the indigenous, ecosocialist
rebel army of Mexico whom Joel salutes in the book’s final chapter, “The
Emergence of Ecosocialism,’ (286): Lento Pero Avanzo—Slowly But I
Advance. @
— December 2018
8 COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEL

COLLECTED WORKS
a
Agro
Ecological Marxism and Dialectic
(1995)
1. Introduction
MARXISM AS IT IS NOW COMMONLY constituted appears as a stranger in eco-
logical circles. This is not as it should be, but it is a fact. It is a disastrous fact,
if only because this keeps green movements from understanding the cause of
ecocatastrophe, but it is a fact nevertheless. I do not think the estrangement can
be mended absent a major critique of current green and ecological thought for
residual anticommunism, tendencies toward mystification, general social ob-
tuseness, and latent reactionary potential. However, it is no less essential to criti-
cize Marxism for its role in perpetuating the divide. A lengthy debate is involved
here'! and within the limits of the present essay I can do no more than address
one element of this project, namely, a rethinking of the notion of dialectic.
Marxism is manifestly a central discourse in addressing the gathering eco-
logical crisis inasmuch as it uniquely comprehends capitalism as the efficient
cause of environmental degradation. If classical Marxism developed the “first
contradiction” of capital, namely, the extraction of value from labor, Marxism
now moves toward the ecological by enunciating capital’s “second contradic-
tion,” in brief, the sacrifice of all conditions of production, nature as well as
workers, to the god of profit.” Both contradictions imply the unending crisis
in which we find ourselves. Caught in the cycle of “grow or die” that charac-
terizes accumulation under the terms of relentless competition, capitalism is
revealed as the destroyer of nature as well as of society.
From this point the innumerable political and economic vicissitudes of
capital’s encounter with nature can be tracked down. But at this point, also, a
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM 13

kind of asymmetry appears between the first and second contradictions as ar-
ticulated within Marxism. Marx enunciates the first contradiction not simply
as the chronicle ofa set of economic abuses. He also sees these abuses in the
perspective ofavision of emancipation, grounded in the notion of humanity
alienated from the realization of its being because of capitalist exploitation.
In this way, the first contradiction is developed integrally with the notion of
a revolutionizing subject, for what is alienated at the point of production is
not just the product and the process of making commodities, but also the
worker’s relations with other workers and his/her human nature itself.
The notion of a suffering humanity alienated from its power through cap-
italist exploitation is as basic to Marxism as the theory of surplus value, and
indeed the very notion of the first contradiction arises from it. The Commu-
nist Manifesto, Wage Labor and Capital, Capital—virtually every page writ-
ten by Marx and Engels, and certainly every page that earned for Marxism its
world-historical role—was infused with this vital spirit. Workers read Marx’s
pamphlets, found them resonant with their lived experience, and moved from
there to the paths of theory. From the other side, the theory itself grew from
Marx’s appreciation of the forces at work within capitalist exploitation as they
engulfed the subject. The “internal relatedness” of Marxism includes the re-
latedness of theory and practice—but also that of object and subject, the
relations between which are spelled out in the foundational 1844 Manuscripts
as integral to the alienation of labor. Objectification, the species-potential of
human beings, devolves into the capacity to produce, which capacity is then
violently alienated into labor-power by the imposition of capital’s schemata of
value. But objectification—or “object-making” — necessarily implies subjecti-
fication, or subject making. We produce ourselves as we produce the world of
objects; and the object is also an object for a subject, or self. Entities that have
mass and duration but are not for a subject, or self, are not objects but things.
The alienation of labor is the “thingification” of objects, with a resultant im-
poverishment and suffering of the self.'°) Thus the critique of political econo-
my is internally related to the lived, suffering experience of human beings; and
the enunciation of capital’s first contradiction, which moves within the paths
of this critique, is also internally related to the real lives of human beings.“
The problem before us stems from the fact that classical Marxism con-
tains little that is useful in drawing this relationship for the second contradic-
tion. Specifically, there is no language within Marxism beyond a few ambigu-
ous and sketchy beginnings that directly addresses the ravaging of nature or
expresses the care for nature which motivates people— Marxist or not—to
become engaged in ecological struggle."! And what cannot be put into dis-

course cannot become politically vital. Whatever inhibitions green-minded
people may have about adopting an anti-capitalist position are only rein-
forced if ecological Marxism has no language to reach them.
The absence is manifest in the lack of internal relations connecting the
second contradiction to lived human realjty—or, from another angle, in
the paucity of subjectively resonant terms in Marxism’s discourse on nature.
This is, of course, a relative statement. Certain branches of radical ecologi-
cal politics, for example, movements for environmental justice, are rich in
subjective connotation as well as Marxist affiliation. Thus the inundation
of impoverished communities with toxic wastes dumped into a river is an
instance of suffering about which ecological Marxism already has a lot to
say. Note, however, that what we feel in connection with this circumstance is
not fundamentally different from our response to Marx’s description of child
labor, that is, a directly human sympathy with the victim of capitalist greed."
It takes nothing away from such an apprehension to observe that there is no
necessary extension from it to sympathy with the river as also the victim of
capitalist greed, in other words, to an inclusion of relations with nature into
human reality. It would seem, then, that the absence in ecological Marxism
is situated at the boundary between the human and natural worlds, and that
it consists of a relative privileging of the former with respect to, and perhaps
even at the expense of, the latter.
This is a major point of contention between ecology and Marxism. I am
unable to explore it adequately here, except to say that in the Manuscripts,
Marx provides space for a number of different relations by asserting that Man
was part of nature. Hence what we do to the natural world is also nature
acting upon itself. But Marx is highly abstract on this point; and if there is
no radical split between humanity and nature in his thought, there remain
many ways of differentiating between the two."! In essence, the problem with
Marxism so far as ecology is concerned amounts to a failure to recognize suf-
ficient intrinsic value in nature. By comparison, other elements of the green
movement such as deep ecology, bioregionalism, and ecofeminism establish
a greater degree of direct mediation with nature, hence are richer in subjec-
tive evocation with respect to the ecological crisis. It goes without saying
that this mediation is too often gained through a narrowing of social vision
that implicitly (and at times explicitly) exonerates capital; no doubt, too, this
defect may make these doctrines easier to swallow by the ruling ideological
apparatus and hence tends to give them a spurious boost. To repeat, however:
the critique of the social amnesias that inhabit various ecological politics does
nothing to reduce the need for a critique within ecological Marxism which

would fill the absence between human and natural worlds in such a manner
as preserves intact the critique of political economy and retains for Marxism
its historical honor as the nemesis of capitalism. The strategic point at which
this critique may enter lies in the theory of dialectic.
2. Humanized Nature
THE MAIN PRINCIPLES of ecological thought are reciprocity, mutual recogni-
tion, and interconnection.) Such would be foundational relations for a world
of intersustaining beings, human and nonhuman. Observe that such an “eco-
logic” already contains an immanent critique of capitalist accumulation, as a
world order in which one being, the human, aggrandizes himself over others
in the drive toward profit and in so doing reduces nature to mere external-
ity —a reduction epitomized by the Cartesian bifurcation into knowing sub-
ject and inert object. In this sense, ecology is already primed for Marxism
irrespective of the views of its particular adherents. For Marxism to become
fully ecological is entirely consistent, therefore, with its historical project of
anti capitalism. From another angle, insofar as Marxism fails to develop a
language of nature, so, too, does it fail to surpass capital’s reduction of nature.
Consider one of the sketchy precursors of a Marxist concept of nature
noted above—the passage in the Manuscripts that nature is “man’s inorganic
body.” This notion has the great virtue of connecting the human and natural
worlds, thus providing a potential pathway to the ecologization of Marxism.
At the same time, the proposition apparently blocks the path by suggesting a
radical split between natural and human worlds, the one “inorganic,” the other,
presumably, “organic.” Of the three eco-logic relations, only the last, intercon-
nectedness, is potentially evoked here by Marx. Nature, as inorganic, is neither
reciprocal with nor recognizable by human being.
Marx's view must be considered ambivalent and internally contradictory.
He moves to surpass the Cartesian dualism which epitomizes modern West-
ern —and capitalist— thought; but at the same time he sinks back into dual-
ism. Nature, as inorganic, is inert and Passive; Man arrogates consciousness,
agency, and will. Man is the master, nature the dull, scurrying raw material.
Man is pure Subject; Nature, a mere Thing, an externality to be used or pol-
luted at will. Thus Marxism, to the extent that it fails to sublate Cartesian
dualism, fails also to pass beyond capitalism. Undoubtedly this problem plays
some role in the of a fetish of productionism, accompanied by greater or
lesser degrees of ecological opacity, that has haunted the path of actually ex-
isting Marxism."'! From another angle, the issue is not whether or not we
exert control over natural processes. Of course’ we do, since it is our “human

nature” to do so, and since in so doing we also remain part of nature. Nor are
we about to mutually identify the human and natural worlds, which is to say,
collapse the one into the other, a nonsensical implication that takes place in
the more extreme reaches of deep ecology. The issue rather is to specify the
kind of differentiation that obtains betweep the two, and whether nature is
viewed as pure externality or “subjected” instead to mutual recognition.
To introduce ecological relations, which is to say, to differentiate nature
from human being rather than to split the two apart, two operations are
necessary:
™- nature has to be rendered in such fashion as is reciprocally recogniz-
able with human being; and
= human being has to be rendered in such fashion as is reciprocally

recognizable with nature.
Of these, the second seems much the more accessible, though its implications
are profound and unsettling. At one level, to root human being in nature
merely requires the recognition that we are bodies. The choice of verb is what
makes the issue deep. For it is not that we have bodies, which is perfectly con-
sistent with Cartesianism, mechanistic medicine, and the commodification
of the world, but that we are embodied. What this means, practically speak-
ing—and this is the catch—is the recognition of the language of the body,
the listening to and with the body, which is our indwelling register of nature.
I think that this is also how the First Thesis on Feuerbach is to be interpreted:
Marx bids us go beyond mechanical materialism through the invocation of
“sensuous activity,” that is, the body-self as subject-and-object together.
From this vantage, the first proposition, that nature be made mutually
recognizable to us, becomes more intelligible. For this requires that nature,
which is to say, matter itself, has indwelling agency and even a form of (proto)
consciousness. Interestingly, Marx and Engels on two occasions raised exactly
this issue, by following Jacob Bohme in regarding matter as having the prop-
erty of “qual,” a kind of inner generative agony.'"”! Certainly the subjectivity
of nature is not of the same kind as human self-consciousness, else there is no
point in differentiating us from nature. Notwithstanding, to deny subjectivity
in nature is not only Cartesian in its refusal of agency to nature: it is also a
kind of “creationism,” since it postulates the de novo and miraculous appear-
ance of human being. If organisms evolve, so, too, must their consciousness,
self-consciousness emerging from proto-consciousness.
We have arrived at a two-fold movement of consciousness, from nature
to humanity phylogenetically, and from humanity to nature sensuously. The
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM ALE

differentiating point which distinguishes the subjectivity of humanity from
that of nature, however, is not consciousness as such, but self-consciousness.
The presence of human being-is marked by an internally organized subject,
or self, that endows itself and the object world with qualities. This process of
regarding is also a signification, hence the distinguishing feature of human
self consciousness is the interposition of language. Language is, therefore, not
simply an instrumentality of the pragmatics of information exchange. More
fully, language signals the emergence of an inner, imaginary world created by
the self and through which it moves as it transacts with nature.
Here the distinction between “first” and “second” nature emerges. First,
nature comprises that portion of physical reality which is outside of significa-
tion, that is, would go on existing whether or not we existed to engage nature
in production. It is nature, so to speak, as the abstracted object of “natural”
science, as well as the nature which will surely go on without us."'*! Second
nature, by contrast, is nature both produced and signified, nature that has
entered the human world—that is, it includes nature as acted upon by all
modes of human appropriation.'! In general, when we speak of nature con-
cretely from the standpoint of ecological politics, we have in mind an ensem-
ble of both first and second nature— since without first (and second) nature
under threat, there would be nothing to worry about, and without second
nature there would be no worrying nor any other reaction, in sum, no human
engagement. Thus the old growth forests were originally first nature but have
added the qualities of second nature as people inhabit and care about them,
eventually drawing the forest into corporate assault and eco-political defense.
The forest in question, therefore, is the physical forest, but also the imag-
ined forest: Blake’s “forest of the night” in which his Tyger burned bright.
Such a forest is more than an aesthetic, just as it is more than an economic,
construction. It is ontological. We relate to the forest because our being is con-
structed from nature no less than from labor. Classical Marxism drew power
from its ontological grasp of the origins of human being in social labor. The
power of ecological Marxism may add an equivalent grasp of the origins of
human being as nature is transformed. It is Marxism’s project to see nature
and labor as fully joined in the production of human being, and human being
as second nature made self-conscious through social labor.
3. Dialectic
IF WE PAUSE TO suRveEY this landscape, we see the world as an array of
processes wherein “different kinds of differences” ebb, flow, are born, and
die—in short, enter into and constitute being in general, and human being

in particular. Dialectic is the general term for processes of this kind, defined
by differentiation and the overcoming of differentiation. The word is tradi-
tionally applied to Marxism, although it is currently out of favor with many
Marxists as well as non-Marxists. I would share Tony Smith’s explanation for
this—that as dialectic is a way of comprehending dynamic processes, it falls
from grace in a period such as ours when counterrevolution seems firmly
ascendant and radical change beyond the horizon." But the same reasoning
indicates that an ecological Marxism needs to return to the dialectical roots
and expand them if it is to offer a radical path out of the ecological crisis.
Marx never defined what dialectic meant to him; and while he was surely
going to get around to writing about it, just as he was going to write about
art, law, cosmology and who-knows-what-else, we can only speculate as to the
content he would have given the idea."®! One form it would not have taken,
we should imagine however, is the popularized version often ascribed to Marx
and Engels under the rubric of “dialectical materialism,” namely, that dia-
lectic was a nicely defined tripartite movement of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
This schema has led to two widely disseminated errors:
= that Marx perfected Hegel’s dialectic by making it “materialist.” This
fallacy (if only because Hegel’s dialectic was neither simplistically
- formulaic nor idealist in the first place) tends to promote the false-
hood that the history of dialectic came to an end with Marx, who
perfected the concept by giving it “material” content;"”! and
= that dialectic contains an end-point—the synthesis —which could
happily be given the content appropriate to it by any ruling forma-
tion with the muscle to call itself the synthesis, an opportunity well-
seized by Stalin.
In truth, dialectic cannot be a formulaic, positivist notion; it does not
belong to systems or game theory, nor can it postulate an end-point, except as
a stasis of its own activity (as happens, for example, when Marxists toss it out
of their work, thus making Marxism static) —though even here, said stasis
will be succeeded by an outburst, potentially destructive, at another place.
Perhaps we should add, succeeded by an outburst insofar as dialectic expresses
not just an epistemological process but something about the working of the
real. We hold that it does, expressing the “becomingness” of reality. We also
hold that dialectic functions through a type of relation called negativity. To
quote that problematic dialectician, Saul of Tarsus, God (which is to say, the
formative process in reality) has chosen “things which are not, to bring to
nought things that are.”!’*! Dialectic is an interplay of absences and presences,
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM a9

related negatively. The principle of negativity frees us from positive thinking,
including positive thinking about dialectic."”!
Positive, or we should say, one-sided, thinking sees the world one way
or another: defined narrowly as either object or subject; either as determined
through an orderly hierarchy of being, or as chaotic and random.” But dia-
lectic refuses the either/or; it is no more a close relative of chaos theory than it
is of systems theory. This is because there is a directedness within becoming,
and a dialectic between determinacy and indeterminacy.
Dialectical vision comprehends reality as a plasmatic flux immeasurably
ereater than our puny efforts to grasp and control it. This is a view both an-
cient and radically modern. We see dialectic as the formative process within
the real, the universe giving birth to itself, not in any one grand unfolding but
at myriad foci of absence/presence mediating the emergence of being. The ten-
dency is carried over into human being, but with a quantum leap, as dialectic
now appears in production, language and self-consciousness. Humanity is the
site of a new turn in dialectic, mediated by language, desire and the unruliness
of self-consciousness now deployed over a thousand concrete struggles. In hu-
manity dialectic becomes risky; it does not move forward on any regular front,
nor does it escape ambivalence. Therefore it must be appreciated in its con-
creteness and immediacy, and it must be interpreted and not fit into a single
ontological mold, precisely because the ontologies themselves come into being
as filaments of dialectic. There is, in sum, no singular grand Dialectic, but a
multitude of dialectical processes organized and integrated into the prevailing
mode of production. And each particular dialectic is itself subtle and inward.
We would listen here to Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “(Dialectic is] even essential-
ly unstable, so that it has never been able to formulate itself into theses without
denaturing itself, and because if one wishes to maintain its spirit it is perhaps
necessary to not even name it. The sort of being to which it refers, and which
we have been trying to indicate, is in fact not susceptible of being designated
positively. It abounds in the sensible world, but on condition that the sensible
world has been divested of all the ontologies that have been added to it.”?")
Having said as much, it remains that what we oppose may be said to be a
deformation/stasis of dialectic, while what we seek is a fulfillment of dialectic,
a flourishing, both as epistemology and a kind of participation in reality. Our
allegiance to dialectic is no more, then, than an affirmation of life, as the fit-
ful emergence and propagation of being. Through the endless refractions of
individual dialectics, we can dimly see a vision of a kind of being worthy of
our hopes and of the earth.

4. Nature and the Revolutionary Subject
IN ANOTHER PASSAGE, Merleau-Ponty conditions dialectic as follows:
Dialectic is not the idea of a reciprocal action, nor that of
the solidarity of opposites and their sublation.... There
is dialectic only in that type of befng in which a junction
of subjects occurs... their common residence, the place of
their exchange and of their reciprocal interpretation.)
This is the leaping-off point for an ecological Marxism

— the notion that
dialectic entails subjectivity. Common residence, a place of exchange and re-
ciprocal interpretation—these are defining features of the ecological world-
view, with its sense of interconnection and mutual recognition. They also are
the loci of resistance to domination in general and capitalist domination in
particular, which deterritorializes exchange’! and denies reciprocity.
A number of points may be introduced here.
First, Merleau-Ponty might be seen as inviting idealism. His condition
seems to insist on a state of affairs in which relations are settled intra-sub-
jectively, whether this be the unfolding of a world spirit, or the gestation of
an idea from another idea. Not so: Merleau-Ponty wrote the above passage
within the discourse of Marxism, and what he says is compatible with mate-
rialism.4! For the claim is that dialectic takes place at a junction of subjects.
In order for subjects to join, they also must be separated, which is to say, have
individual being; and this can only take place if they are materially grounded
and positioned. From another angle, this is to say that the subject is also ob-
ject, and that no idea can take place except within a material stratum.
Second, the condition may be read as excluding processes occurring with-
in an individual, for example, the kinds of propositions disclosed by psycho-
analysis or phenomenology. But this is not the case, either, precisely because
the radical study of subjectivity confirms Marx by disclosing the self as the
“ensemble of social relations,” in other words, as the internalization of subject-
subject dialectics. Subjectivity is also intersubjectivity. This is the “depth” of
the subject, going beyond immediate consciousness and self-understanding.
Finally, Merleau-Ponty opens the door for the “ecologization” of the
Marxist dialectic. But whether anything passes through that door will depend
on Marxism’s willingness to move, which is to say, to negate itself and take
subjectivity seriously —to regard the “social relations” internalized in the self
as more than a simple reflection of the outer world. This is to say that we
need to take seriously a subjectivity which contains forms of consciousness
and traces of being usually considered off the map drawn by the active, exter-

nally-focused, and rationalist approach to the world associated with classical
Marxism. To build dialectic without access to such subjectivity is to work like
a mason without mortar, piling objects on each other without being able to
hold them together. "
This should not be taken as a prescription for “New Age’ thinking or
psychoanalysis, though these modalities are also to some degree responses of
genuine dialectical urgency. More broadly, it is a call to open the question of
spirituality within Marxism, since spirit, as a motion within being, is at the
proper level of abstraction for dialectical appropriation. From this standpoint,
New Age gimmickry, psychotechnologies, etc., may be read as partially real-
ized spirit, lacking appreciation of the concrete “junction” between subjects,
in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, such being another way of describing their lack of a
material conception of society, and more concretely, their indifference to domi-
nation and injustice. Similarly, Marxism inasmuch as it has proceeded to the
doorway of ecological consciousness would also be partially realized spirit, now
awaiting the development of senses to listen to, and recognize itself in, nature.
The Buddhist notion of emptiness may serve as an instance of what such
a sense may be. This is a spiritual appropriation of the boundary, or zone, be-
tween second and first nature; it is the phenomenological reading of what we
are, subjectless, objectless, as the outer layers of being are peeled away. It is also
the phenomenology of absence/lack within dialectic. “If the doors of percep-
tion were cleansed,” wrote Blake, “everything would appear to man as it is:
infinite.”) Blake's infinity is the correlate of the void within which all things
have no bound. Its horizonless perspective unfolds the vision of an alternate
way of being and an alternate relation to nature. Thus the void is subversive.
Emptiness becomes the absence negating the rationalization and chatter of
the socially constructed self. This challenge will not be mounted, however,
without the awareness of suffering, another quality foregrounded in Buddhist
experience. From the position of silence and lack one need not, and indeed,
in the highest practice, should not, be in a simple state of withdrawal from
reality. Rather is consciousness heightened so that in the quiet one hears the
cry of humanity and nature under assault. One suffers with them, and, in the
words of the compassionate Buddha, vows to save all sentient beings
— which
is to say humanity and nature alike inasmuch as the latter contains subjectivity.
Appreciation of this sort—and it must be emphasized that this is not a call
for Marxists to turn to Buddhism, which as a concretely situated practice has
its own, often severe limitations —allows us to feel with the river as well as the
people who live on and by it as victims of pollution, and to expand theory as
well as practice in response to the second contradiction.?°

We might emphasize, however, that Buddhist practice is just that: prac-
tice, a form of labor, an aspect of which is the work of meditation against the
resistance put forward by the socially constructed self. This resistance should
be appreciated with the same degree of seriousness as the resistance posed
by the capitalist state, of which it is an inner reflex. There is a suitable word
for this form of the self within psydiscourse, namely Ego, and we will use it
here, with the understanding that more is meant by Ego than its specifically
psychological relations. To be exact, Ego signifies that type of subjectivity
belonging integrally to Cartesianism and the capitalist mode of production.
Thus it has certain properties that can be apprehended by the prevailing psy-
chology, but others as well:
Ego entails a sharp degree of splitting between self and other, the
splits extending in two directions: externally, between the individual
and other beings in nature and society; and internally, between in-
strumental and immanent subjectivity. It does not recognize itself in
nature, in other people, in its own body or in its own inner being.
Ego in this latter respect is the intense resistance against inner listen-
ing—the “chatter” appearing subjectively as consciousness attempts
to still itself. Fundamentally, Ego is in flight from non-being and in
terror of death.
Ego therefore remains fixated in self-consciousness, hence its associa-
tion with pridefulness. It lives from certain characteristic psychologi-
cal defenses which maintain its isolation and power: in particular,
intellectualization, rationalization, emotional isolation, repression
and suppression. Being such, it resists negation and is antidialectical.
In this sense, far from being a transhistorical given, Ego is the hy-
postatization of the bourgeois world-view, its frozen subjective form
fixated on a hypertrophic, isolated notion of self.
The bourgeois character of Ego appears from two sides. First, Ego
is the mentality of capitalist production. Indeed, all its traits are the
correlates of productivity, of efficiency, of discipline and obeying or-
ders, of tooling the individual into the form of the machine.” Along
with this, Ego is the seat of abstraction and calculation, hence the
locus wherein the exchange principle enters subjectivity. The Ego
binds; and insofar as capitalist production is the “binding of time,”
that is, the conversion of praxis into surplus value through the wage
relation, Ego is the subjective transmission belt for capital formation
itself.

= Ego is also the inner correlate of commodity fetishism and the con-
dition of consumerism. The Ego’s repressiveness, its chasm from the
other, is the breeding ground for desire and the manipulation of desire.
That craving for things, that insensate possessiveness which epitomizes
the capitalist era, is a direct function of egoic being. Experiencing hol-
lowness yet dreading nonbeing, Ego is readily led down the substitu-
tive paths of commodity consumption.
= Capital accumulation becomes ecodestructive through the twin me-
diations of cancerous production and addictive consumption. As the
essential subjective basis of both moments, Ego is also the psycholog-
ical structure underlying the current ecological crisis —that which
refuses to recognize itself in nature and is willing to destroy nature
to fill itself up.
The capitalist mode of production as a whole is the regime of the Ego.
This is not to imply that egoic being is a peculiarity only of the capitalist era,
rather that capitalism builds itself on egoic relations and reproduces egoic
relations on an expanding scale. The situation is homologous to that of wage
labor. Wages were not invented by capitalism, nor would they cease to exist
in post-capitalist society. But wage labor is essential for capital formation, and
capitalism reproduces it on an expanding scale. The same goes for Ego.
The dialectic set into motion by the second contradiction negates thé
prevailing Reality Principle which secures Egoic rationality. Destabilized by
the assault on nature inherent in its own mode of production, Ego begins to
come apart, thus creating lines of cleavage for red/green politics. We say red/
green here, since in order to develop a genuinely transformative politics, both
an expanding interconnectedness within humanity (the red element) and be-
tween humanity and nature (the green element) are needed. These two are not
additive but necessary, each requiring the other. Praxis makes no difference
unless it joins sufficient numbers of people. However people cannot be joined
as though they were passive pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Rather do they need to
come together as activated and self-transformative centers of human power. In
the case of the first contradiction we understand this activation to pass through
the alienated power to produce. In the case of the second contradiction we
understand it to pass through the power immanent in a violated nature. The
passage is through second nature, nature connecting the original non-human
with the human of history. Nature violated becomes now a point of absence/
lack radiating in a twofold dialectic: one, the presence of a consciousness stem-
ming from an awakened, aroused nature—the activated body resonant with

the living universe; another activating a consciousness alienated in a history of
class exploitation, violence, racism and patriarchy. This two fold or combined
dialectic is experienced as singular, its radiations combining into a new spiri-
tual synthesis and the ecological, socialist, radically democratic society which
is its objectification and telos. Thus the red/green dialectic takes the following
general form: ,
A path is opened for red/green transformation when the sec-

ond contradiction of capital destabilizes egoic being and un-
freezes a combined dialectical process engaging an expanding
interconnectedness within humanity (the red element) and
between humanity and nature (the green element).
With this in mind we can envision the activation of, say, workers, peasants,
housewives, or any concretely situated group, to a position of empowerment
and solidarity; and from this place, to the dialectical realization of the assault
on nature.
Theoretically, all differences can be overcome with this schema. But the
gap between theory and reality remains huge. Housewives living in the shad-
ow of Brookhaven Laboratories on Long Island might organize against the
likelihood that they have been poisoned by the Dr. Strangeloves who control
the nuclear establishment, but it is a long way from this salutory piece of
activism to solidarity with Chipko tree huggers in India, not to mention the
conclusion that ecology implies anti-capitalism.'8 ‘Similarly, it might be pos-
sible to convince workers in the forest industries that cutting down the forest
is no way at all to save jobs, and hence that their interests parallel those of the
activists who are trying to stop the lumber industry. But it is another matter
to make this alliance more than a tactical one, or to persuade either party
of the essential importance of the second contradiction of capitalism, not
to mention the detachment of the Ego as a precondition for harmonization
of humanity with nature. In short, red and green dialectics may combine at
superficial
— if beneficial —levels, yet fail to outlive their site-specific appli-
cation and become revolutionary.
It is all very well to put the slogan, “Think Globally, Act Locally,” on one’s
bumper sticker, but another matter to put this sound principle into practice.
The fact is, dialectics cannot be combined like flour and butter in a recipe
when their points of origin lie at remote places in the totality. At one level this
is but another reminder, as if any were necessary, of the abyss between where
the world is and where it should be, and of the radical improbability of radical
ecological politics in the present moment. But from another angle it is a call

to complete, or at least further, the dialectic of the present enterprise so as to
offer a possible framework within which the combination of red and green
dialectic might take place and deepen.
One aspect of this would be a telos, a goal that includes and brings to-
gether the not-yet-to-be of the red and the green. In the sense of the general
principles of red/green transformation, we need to specify the breaking down
of the capitalist Reality Principle and the setting forth of the particular con-
crete dialectics of non-egoic, ecological being — but also the prefiguring of an
ecological mode of production, that is, the transcendence of capitalism itself.
Some might argue that this poses too utopian a demand in light of the
present conjuncture — that it will drive away well-meaning but non-radical
people and inhibit change in the here and now while awaiting a millenium
that may never arrive. But this would greatly mistake the meaning of what
is intended. Prefiguring means just that: a looking ahead, in full realization
that what is seen is not yet here, and that what takes place can only do so on
the basis of what is here. It does not mean the imposition of a rigid sectarian
demand upon a shifting and indeterminate reality. It is the commitment to
a certain direction rather than an end—a direction that includes the provi-
sion of way-stations and partial realization. Thus a red/green telos specifically
needs to be non-millenial, non-messianic and non-totalizing. Western his-
tory is riddled with the quest for a savior-god, a figure to redeem history. We
remain in the shadows of this belief system, with its eschatological doctrine
of last things. The notion of a telos remains suffused with the seductive but
dangerous idea of the end of time and the redemption of the world, with all
the intolerance and anti-ecological thought entailed by this.
However, a telos need not be locked into eschatology. A goal can also be
the dialectical overcoming of the compulsion to transcend. In fact, there can
be no ecological society unless we overcome this compulsion. To transcend
capitalism is to overcome transcendence itself. We seek a path, a direction,
without knowing what lies at its end.
Practically speaking, this means valuing all steps toward ecological sus-
tainability while criticizing whatever it is within them that fails to find the
path toward an ecologically realized society. At an immediate level one sup-
ports recycling while criticizing the free donation of labor that consumers
give recycling industries. One supports local anti pollution measures while
criticizing the tendency toward isolation of wealthier communities and a cor-
relative dumping on the poor. One supports reducing consumption while
criticizing whatever this portends for further impoverishing the producers.
To sum it up, there is nothing wrong with liberal environmentalism except

its failure to radicalize itself. Whatever spares the earth in the here/now gives
more time for change, and provides the opening for a deeper critique and a
more radical politics.
5. Conclusion
FINALLY, THERE IS NO CHOICE: the capitalist Reality Principle lies in ruins,
disintegrated by the second contradiction. The further it decays the more does
reason disappear into rationalization. When the prevailing mode of produc-
tion is demonstrably suicidal, reason must find its basis elsewhere, else it dis-
integrates into a thousand fragments. It is the job of prefigurative thought to
anticipate the new rationality
— in practice, which is to say, by learning from
red/green activation and guiding red/green activation until the architectonics
of an ecological society begin to emerge. An enormous amount has already
been done in this direction; an even more enormous amount remains to be
done. We are not about to undertake a review here. However, a few guiding
principles may be drawn in line with the discussion so far, and extracted as a
kind of skeleton as we bring this essay to a close:
= An ecological mode of production is a socialist mode of production,

as surely as capitalism is anti-ecological. If capitalism can save itself
from its cancerous mode of production, well and good. But there
is no point in waiting around to see if this extremely unlikely turn
of events happens. Meanwhile, ecological principles of reciprocity,
mutual recognition and interconnection are to be applied to the rela-
tions of production as well as to environmentally friendly techniques
of production. Whatever sustainability means, it does not mean the
relentless search for profit. Therefore the basis of this drive in the ex-
traction of surplus value must be undercut. This does not mean the
abolition of technology, money, wage labor or rational features of the
market, nor should it be taken to imply the end of privately owned
enterprise. It does mean production according to the principles of
ecology rather than accumulation. It means Marx's “free association”
of producers to offset the capitalist-egoic notion of value with com-
munitarian-ecological notions of value. And it means that the various
dialectics that cohere into the new mode of production engage those
who produce the world’s goods. The proletariat may not be privileged
in red/green discourse, but it remains a full partner.
= An ecological society is radically democratic. Social power has to be
exercised through a network of localities and freely associated small

producers. Such measures as are essential to coordinate the activi-
ties of society as a whole are to be delegated from below. Any top-
down, massified organ, over society is inherently antithetical to the
fundamental notion of ecology. Therefore, democratization of the
state is an ever-constant imperative—as a result of pressure both
from within the system and without, from a revitalized civil society
(itself responsive to eco-socialist production). An associated notion
is the freest expression of speech and discourse. If ecological fulfill-
ment stems from a flourishing dialectic, then expressive speech is
the social transmission of subject to object, the metabolism of the
inner and outer world, as necessary for the flourishing of dialectic as
light, warmth, water and soil are for the growth of plants. Remem-
ber, dialectic originally meant open discussion and argumentation of
opposing view.
= An ecological rationality is open to deep subjectivity, which includes
the play of spirituality. The hollowed-out Ego is the organ of com-
pulsive commodity consumption. The Ego ablated into soul is the
self freed from addiction to things. Nor, I think, is there ultimately
any other way to summon up the tremendous amount of energy
necessary to motivate masses for a struggle against capitalism and the
capitalist Ego. More generally, deep subjectivity is the point of con-
tact between first and second nature. As such it is anything but inher-
ently anti-scientific, though it remains open to mystifying distortion,
especially when it loses touch with social reality. True spirituality is
the enduring critique of all social arrangements, the living reminder
of the transience and imperfectness of society, the negator of totality
and subverter of all massified power.
Thus the ends of red/green politics also define its means. The further adven-
tures of this dialectic will comprise the narratives of the history to come. m
[Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1995]
NOTES
1. See, for example, Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes
(London: New Left Books, 1971); Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991); John Clark, “Marx’s Inorganic Body,” in Michael Zimmerman,
ed., Environmental Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993); John Bel-
lamy Foster, “Marx and the Environment,” Monthly Review, 47 (July-August, 1995). An
anti Marxist view from the position of “ecocentrism” is presented in Robyn Eckersley,
Environmental and Political Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).

James O’Connor, Conference Papers (CES/Capitalism Nature Socialism Pamphlet 1,
1991). See also, James O'Connor, “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?” in Js Capitalism
Sustainable? ed., Martin O’Connor (New York: Guilford, 1994). O’Connor adds
(personal communication), “the first contradiction speaks to capital's self-destructiveness
in so far as we abstract human-human relations from human-nature relations and the
second contradiction speaks to capital’s self-destructiveness in so far as we abstract human-
nature relations from human-human relations (60th moves being valid only analytically).
Along with the “reobjectification” ofthings as fetishized commodities, i.e., the projection
of alienated human power and a quasi-religious elaboration of the commodity world
highly serviceable to mass culture and bourgeois ideology.
For a general discussion of these themes, see Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971); Istvan Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (Lon-
don: Merlin, 1970).
See Schmidt, op. cit., for a discussion of the conceptualization of nature within classical
Marxism. Adequate discussion of this point is beyond the scope of the present contribu-
tion. Suffice it to be said that whatever the value of Schmidt's critique, Marx’s ambiguity
on the subject is beyond dispute, as is the relative paucity of the treatment of nature
within the Marxist tradition compared to the treatment of, say, labor.
See, for example, Richard Hofrichter, ed., Toxic Struggles (Philadelphia: New Society, 1993).
The views of Marx on child labor, along with Engels’ descriptions of the workers of Man-
chester, may be considered as the original invocations of the second contradiction, where
labor is treated as a disposable condition of production.
For a fuller discussion ofthe terms splitting and differentiation, see my History and Spirit
(Boston: Beacon, 1991).
See Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1985), for a discussion ofthese principles in relation to scientific method.
We cannot pursue this important line of inquiry here; nor have we much to say about
the way these principles are often subsumed into an overarching principle of “holism” by
ecological thought. The problem with this lies in relation to dialectic—see below. In a
word, is the “whole” ofholism seen as containing negation? Often this is not the case. In
my view, a “wholly positive holism” is unable to grasp human reality and society and is
the key to the social obtuseness manifested by many ecological movements.
In Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 75.
Martin O’Connor makes a similar point about anti-ecological tendencies in Marx, with
the salient observation that Marx’s view of the labor process implies total control over
externalities, an impossible condition (“Codependency and Indeterminacy: A Critique of
the Theory of Production,” in O’Connor, ed., op. cit., 53-75).
22 “(Bohme‘s] ‘qual’ was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its
turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person subject to it, in
contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without” (Frederick Engels, “Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works [New York:
International Publishers, 1968]), 382. The concept also appears in Zhe Holy Family.
iS: Assume that one of the newer viruses now being prepared by ecological disruption sweeps
across the globe and eliminates the human species. The physical world would go on with
scarce a hiccough and would doubtless re-equilibrate in short order.

14. Including the practical objects of science, an issue that leads to all kinds of problems for
the practice of science that we are unable to explore here. Another aspect of the distinc-
tion lies in what Freud called the “instincts,” that is, the representative of second nature
internal to the subject and configured by desire.
De Tony Smith, Dialectical Social Theory and its Critics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).
16. See Bertell Ollman, Dialectical Investigations (New York: Routledge, 1993), for a guide.
A wide-ranging treatise which explores the different senses of dialectic within —and out-
side of— Marxism is Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic, The Pulse ofFreedom (London: Routledge,
1993). Marx’s use of the notion was primarily epistemological (as is Ollman’s); Engels
introduced a more ontological perspective, as in the “dialectics of nature.”
Is Bhaskar comments, “I do not think the dialectic stopped with Marx, any more than I
think it will end with dialectical critical realism [his version]” (ibid., 88).
18. 1 Corinthians 1:27-28 (King James version).
19). Thus: “Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity” (Theodor Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1973)], 5); and: “Dialectical
thought thus becomes negative in itself” (Herbert Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic,”
Preface to the second edition of Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960),
ix. Again, in claiming that dialectic is the “axiology of freedom,” Roy Bhaskar goes to
summarize, in his hectic style, its “real definition” as “absenting absences, or, applied
recursively, as absenting constraints on absenting absences. Hence my multiple proofs for
the necessity of negative being.... My prioritization of negativity is in accord with the
dialectical tradition” (Bhaskar, op. cit., 377). Italics in text.
20. Engels writes in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that “the metaphysical mode of
thought... sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, abstract,
lost in insoluble contradiction. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the
connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the begin-
ning and the end of their existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion” (in Tucker, op.
cit., 696).
AN Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 92.
Jphe Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), 204.
BB. Into exchange-va/ue through the universal abstraction ofcapitalist relations. Thus money
is the anti-dialectical substance.
24. Or not; the same passage can also be interpreted subjectivistically. The key depends upon
the inner spirit and the direction of praxis. Once a principled radical, Merleau-Ponty
suffered the burden of Stalinism. He underwent a political involution under the stresses
of post-war politics and by the end of his life had lost faith in revolution and made the
intellectual’ s compact with power, in this case, turning into a Gaullist. For a discussion
of Merleau-Ponty’s political drift, see Istvan Meszaros, The Power of Ideology (New York:
NYU Press, 1989), 161-67.
MDX. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in David Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake (Garden City: Doubleday, 1982), 39.

26. For a discussion of Buddhist politics, see Ken Jones, The Social Face of Buddhism (Lon-
don: Wisdom Pub., 1989). To repeat, there is nothing privileged about Buddhism in
the real world, which generally peters out on the question of a praxis capable of putting
compassion into action. The typical Buddhist of my acquaintance has had no difficulty in
reconciling spirituality with bourgeois values —just as the Tibetan Buddhists have done
well by feudalism, a grievous flaw which allowed China to rationalize its imperialistic
takeover of Tibet. One could have just as well fhade the above points by discussing the
spirituality, say, of American Indians, who recognized themselves in their prey, and asked
the deer for forgiveness —though these, too, do not need idealization. For further discus-
sion, see Kovel, op. cit.
Pfc As the speed-up continues throughout capitalist production, workers are increasingly
compelled to deny bodily functions, including the “calls of nature” of elimination ofwaste.
Thus as capital sows its wastes, it forces labor to retain its wastes. At the same time, the
mechanization of the self is manifest in the increasing fascination with agents such as Prozac.
28. For the Chipko movement, see Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive (London: Zed, 1989); for
Brookhaven, Laura Flanders, “Brookhaven Lab: The Cancer Connection,” Covert Action
51 (Winter, 1994-95).

The Struggle for Use-Value: Thoughts
About the Transition
(2000)
1. Introduction
THE CHIEF SELLING POINT OF CAPITALISM is its phenomenal success at cre-
ating wealth in the commodity form. But the same success creates poverty
and gathering ecocatastrophe. An ecologically rational society, by contrast,
will have to turn away from the entire complex by means of which we have
become enslaved by commodities. To do this, ecosocialism—the name for
such a society —will have to redefine the nature of wealth, and the way people
under capitalism have come to define self-worth by the accumulation of com-
modities. We know that people can be made to act as “economic man” —that
much is shown every day in every way. But we know that we need not be this
way, either, and that the addiction to wealth—
for it is just that—is a piece
of social pathology that can and must be overcome if we are to prevail over
the ecological crisis.
The present essay is a contribution to the development.of the ecosocial-
ist project. Its primary argument concerns an expansion of the notion of
“use-value,” one of the staples of political economy, here removed from its
traditional subservience to the order of exchange (exchange-value) and made
a center of contestation for an ecologically rational society. When we have
completed the task, the main questions regarding the nature of ecosocialism
will remain. But their answers will, we believe, now be more accessible.""!

2. Use-Value
For capitAaL, the whole world, nature and humanity alike, lies before it as
a field for exploitation. The molecular act of this takes place at the level of
the commodity. The core functions of capital —its separation of elements,
dedifferentiation, imposition of hierarchy, quantification, non-recognition,
and the like—are imposed billions and billions of times in the production,
circulation and consumption of commodities. The capitalist economy is what
sees to the efficient regulation of this process and the extraction and accu-
mulation from it of capital itself; while the capitalist state regulates access to
those “conditions of production” —land (i-e., nature), labor (i.e., humanity),
and infrastructure (i.e., the built environment)—necessary for commodity
production and accumulation to move along the prescribed tracks."”!
Broadly speaking, the ecological crisis consists of the degradation of these
conditions of production as a result of the production and accumulation
of capital. This degradation is manifest in innumerable ways, the common
property of which is that ecological interrelatedness is destabilized in a non-
linear, proliferating and ultimately uncontrollable set of feedback loops (for
example, global warming, deforestation, endocrine destabilization, pandemic
diseases, etc.).
Hence the entire ecological crisis, like some titanic and deranged coral
reef, is built from the numberless cells of commodity formation. Its pathology
and cure alike can be linked to the individual level of the commodity —in
the way things are defined and made for the market, and in the ways human
beings are twisted so that this takes place. At this level, exchange-value is
the sign of capital’s presence. However, exchange-value cannot exist alone.
Although it is the work of a natural creature, it has no natural substrate in
itself. The substrate must be found elsewhere. It appears in that aspect of the
economy which does in fact represent nature's presence. This aspect we know
as the use-value to which exchange-value is conjugated. The entire capitalist
system can be seen through the lens of this conjugation between use and ex-
change, though needless to say it cannot be reduced to it.
Use-value reflects nature’s presence within economic activity (exchange-
value being the abstraction away from nature into quantity). However, the
relation of use-value to the material world and its ecosystems is complex. For
use-values are not nature-in-itself but represent the presence of nature in hu-
man activity. They refer to the appropriation of things by humans, a function
not directly physical but mediated by the imagination. Thus use-values can
apply to immaterial and even imaginary entities, for example, commodity fu-
tures. Without this property the expansion and even the existence of capital-

ism is unthinkable. In this sense, use-values entail nature through a limitless
set of mediations one filiation of which may be, and usually is, purely mental
and subjective. It follows that use-values are to be written onto representa-
tions of material reality. They then take on a life of their own and become
attached to other representations and other aspects of material reality. In this
sense, use-value functions according to the principles of language —although
unlike language, it must at some point return to the material world."
It needs to be underscored (as the point is so commonly overlooked) that
use-value is not the same as utility, or the appropriation of the world into
human activity, but represents the passage of this utility into the economy.
Although all commodities have use-value—since no one would be able to
exchange something of no conceivable use to anybody else —by no means is
everything useful a commodity. Hence the term, value, in this context should
not be confused with the ordinary meaning of “that which we hold dear,” but
refers to the appearance of the economic sphere and, within that sphere, to the
emergence of a focal point of dynamic force. Thus as a concept, use-value is
historically specific, finding its fullest realization in the capitalist era. We study
use-values— and, in a way to be described, can try to transform them
— be-
cause of the immense power of the economy, especially under capitalism,
where it becomes the instrument of ecological destabilization. There is no rea-
son, however, to believe—and ample reason to dispute— that a transformed
domain of use-values will correspond to a recognizable economic sphere. To
the contrary, the struggle to transform use-values can be seen as a struggle
against the hegemony of the economic as such. Thus ecosocialism can be seen as
a kind of “withering away” of the economic dimension of things. And as the
commodity form gives way in the development of ecosocialism, the character
of the concepts that account for it will change as well.
Use-values are historical and exist in relation to particular social forma-
tions— precapitalist people, for example, have no use for psychoanalysis, not
to mention commodity futures. They also vary with different times in a given
formation —expressed in the notion of fashion. Far from being natural, use-
values sprout from the historically developing soil of needs, wants and desires,
all penetrating one another, and reflecting the fact of humanity's refusal of
nature.)
At the same time, use-values are not entirely historical inasmuch as cer-
tain needs are transhistorical, even physiological. Take the need for water,
without which we cannot live. Before there was an economy, needless to say,
there could be no use-values that signified water or some derivative thereof.
But once economic activity took hold, it would tend to draw in use-values

connected to imbibing water-based liquids, for the elementary reason of wa-
ter’s fundamental role in life. Thus water will tend to be a component of use-
values in every epoch where commodities are found, however liquid refresh-
ment is constructed. Other needs, say, for fresh air will also be omnipresent,
even if scarcely ever commodified, at least up to the present. Note, too, that
needs of this sort tend to become compromised in the ecological crisis.
Capital has multiple and complex roles with respect to use-values, First,
it seeks to narrow the ground of the last proposition, and to convert whatever
is of utility to a use-value. For capital, the ideal world would be one in which
everything useful—the air, the water we drink, the songs we whistle to our-
selves—would in fact be the occasion of a commodity. Air is still largely free,
though there is a brisk trade in purification devices and elements of it, like
oxygen; while water, as we know, has become increasingly commodified and in
certain locales costs more than gasoline at the supermarket. The ecological crisis
has created new ground for commodity formation, which is just fine so far as
tuling interests are concerned. Capital entails generalized commodity produc-
tion, and the generalization includes penetrating all of reality. It has gone a
good deal of the way toward this goal. Yet in another sense the goal is radically
unattainable given the restlessness of human nature and the limitlessness of
desire and the imagination.
It is this sense which capital exploits to the hilt. For at the same times
it tries to overtake utility and colonize it into use-values, capital also strives
to constantly create new use-values. This is quite consistent with the above,
since nothing can be a commodity that is not useful, hence to continually ex-
pand commodity production requires the continual expansion of needs and
desires, one of the plainest facts about late capitalist society.
It would be unthinkable, however, for capital to let use-values be. At ev-
ery point, they must be controlled and subjugated for the purpose of expand-
ing exchange-value, which is the embryonic form of capital itself. Capital is
like a parasite that lays its eggs on living beings, the creature hatching there-
from undergoing the metamorphic path from exchange-value toward its own
reproduction and accumulation.
But capital cannot simply attach itself to use-values: it must also degrade
them. The parasite does not simply borrow from its host: its embrace sucks the
host dry; its control suppresses the life within. We can see this wherever we
look within the domain of capital. The degradation of production conditions
and that of use-values are therefore continuous—although the latter offers a
finer grain and hence a more practicable handle on the politics of ecological
transformation. The entire ensemble of degradation is given as the “second

contradiction;” it appears wherever profit seeking controls the social process,
and it expresses the essence of the ecological crisis as a global degradation of
use-values, whether these be the fouling of water or the corruption of human
beings whose prime function becomes the insertion of exchange-value into
things.) 4
3. Prefiguration
To RECAPITULATE: capital conjugates utility with exchange to produce use-val-
ues. Then, in a bimodal process without internal limit, it continually expands
the range of use-values— in order to generalize commodity production—and
simultaneously degrades them. Logically, therefore, capital may be countered
through the reversal of this process: use-values are to be somehow restored,
and in so doing, the grip of capital is weakened, and restored use-values are
returned to utility. The question now is one of giving concrete specificity to
these terms, and of relating them to practical struggles.
From this standpoint, we seek a moment of what may be called prefigura-
tion in the practice of ecosocialism. Given the fact that it is both impossible
at present to specify the exact content of an ecosocialist society, as well as the
ways of getting there, we urgently need a handle on the existing possibilities
to see whether or not they are heading in an ecosocialist direction, that is,
whether they are prefigurative of ecosocialism. To take a fairly direct example
which ties together a number of these considerations: even though one can-
not say just what ecosocialism is, it would seem reasonable to claim that an
organic farm is, in however limited a sense, somehow closer to it than would
be the industrial farms of agribusiness. Further, if this farm were run coopera-
tively, without hierarchy and with labor not subjected to the law of value, we
would be able to call it closer still to an ecosocialist outcome, again not know-
ing exactly what this is. We could also move to the next step and assert that
the more such practical arrangements were present, the closer would we be to
ecosocialism. It would also follow that the closer one was to ecosocialism, the
more clearly would it manifest itself, the more attainable would it be, and the
less remotely utopian. At a certain point— just where is of no importance for
now —the actual contours of ecosocialism will come into focus.
The job, therefore, is to spell out the nature of the stepping stones whose
laying down would form this path. Observe that the two hypothetical steps
adduced as prefigurative of ecosocialism variously traverse nature and labor.
This expresses the expansion of traditional (or “first-epoch”) socialism into
ecosocialism. But it also expresses the common ground between nature and
labor within this process. For in each case the prefigurative action accom-

plishes a kind of restoration of a condition that was there before capital ac-
quired the phenomenon. In the terms developed here, the use-values created
and degraded in the course of agribusiness are to be restored in an ecologically
rational, hence anti-capitalist, direction.
An organic farm is not more “natural” than agribusiness," but it is predi-
cated on the appropriation of certain kinds of relationships that are distinctly
foreign to capital as well as resonant with the ways of spontaneously evolving
ecosystems. For example, instead of using chemical inputs to control pests
or accelerate growth, other organisms are introduced or composting is em-
ployed—in each instance, a conscious enhancement of an original process
instead of a substitution for it. From another angle, this introduces a certain
indeterminacy and complexity into the practice of agriculture. Smaller and
more intricately put-together systems, configured to the concrete contours
of the land, replace the monocultures that homogenize landscapes. Thus the
specificities of sites are developed rather than written over, as under capital.!”
All of this is densely and inversely correlated with the degree to which com-
modity values can be extracted from agricultural practice. For “writing-over”
a site, or more generally an ecosystem, means nothing so much as the imposi-
tion upon it of a schema whose effects include placing the system —let us call
it, no pun intended, a “field” —into commodity form. Included in this are a
set of operations:
= Making the field homogeneous so that it can be commodified in
toto;
» Extracting the maximum amount of commodifiable substance from

the field;'*!
= Making the field divisible so that it can be parcelled out;
= In association with this, making the field quantifiable so that it, and
its subunits, can be assigned a monetary value— the exchange-value
which is the building block of capital; associated with this is a quan-
tification of the labor expended on the field, so that it, too, is con-
sidered objectivistically and without regard for the personal involve-
ment with agriculture; and lastly,
= Imposing the maximum feasible amount of control and predictabil-

ity over the process.
These are all interconnected and comprise an ensemble organized about
the redefinition of reality in such terms as would admit exchange-value, sur-
plus value and ground rent and profit—and within this ensemble, the maxi-

mization of profit. In other words, to the extent that this ensemble develops,
so will a greater degree of value be extracted from the agricultural field. This
is the sine qua non for the eventual production of capital, after a set of re-
alization factors, the nature of which need not concern us here, are played
out. What does concern us is the incompatibility between this ensemble and
another ensemble of practices entailed in the pursuit of organic agriculture.
Here the features are fundamentally different:
= The field is now heterogeneous, consisting of a great variety or organ-
isms and sites interacting with each other;
= While the organic farmer is, needless to say, concerned to increase

yield, this is in relation to a variety of useful crops and not to the mere
increase in input;
= The field is inherently less divisible, being in its ideal form, the creation
of an ecosystemic whole; that is to say, the field now has organismic
qualities which a subdivision into parts would fragment and destroy;
# Similarly, many unquantifiable elements are added, including certain

aesthetic and spiritual values associated with the organic growing of
food; in short, the work now incorporates a definite element of un-
quantifiable pleasure, or enjoyment;”! and
# While intelligence and control of natural processes are obviously in-
volved in organic farming, this is distinctly different from the prac-
tice of agribusiness, being less a process over nature, regarded in the
abstracted way outlined above, than one which moves with nature
and to that degree, participates in it. This necessarily involves some
degree of relinquishment of control, and effacement of the human
agent, who is now regarded as an element within a whole rather than
the manager standing over inert matter.
These distinctions may be summarized as a movement from quantity to qual-

ity, from an aggregate of parts to an integration of these into a whole, from a
relation over nature to one with nature, and from an impersonal to a personal
relation with the labor process. We would submit that this complex is integral
to the meaning of restoring use-values.
These features are also seen in the second aspect of the prefiguration, per-
taining to the social relations of labor. Labor not subject to the law of value
blocks the production of capital at the root by declaring that labor power no
longer exists as a commodity exchangeable for wages and made equivalent to
the abstract time of social labor. Along with this:

= Social labor itself moves from homogeneity to heterogeneity. Instead
of an abstract pool of labor power, we have the differentiated labor of
freely associated individuals;
# Simple maximization ofyield is no longer an option, since the quan-
tifiable dimension to the labor process has been removed. In other
words, qualitative activities are now the benchmark, not the schema
according to which surplus value is extracted for unpaid labor time
or increased productivity;
® Similarly, the field of labor is less divisible. No longer a pool of ab-

stract labor power but an articulated and internally differentiated
collectivity, it, too, takes on the quality of a whole. Workers in a capi-
talist workplace are alienated from their human associations; workers
who self-manage their labor can do so as an “organic” collective;
= Removing the law of value opens work to aesthetic and spiritual
qualities. Although wresting nourishment from the land is never far
removed from toil, it can be a deeply gratifying and directly pleasur-
able activity, as millions of gardeners will attest; and finally,
= ‘There is less hierarchical control over the labor process once the law
of value no longer regulates it. The ground has been cut out from un-
der the deskilling and regimentation that characterize the capitalist
workplace. For the central logic for the domination over labor which
epitomizes the regime of capital no longer exists. That is, in essence,
why socialism needs to be built around overcoming the law of value,
and why anything less— whether called “market socialism” or “social
democracy” —is fundamentally the continuation of capitalism un-
der another name.''®) However kindly the face put to it, and however
it is rationalized and justified by appeals to necessity and efficiency,
the fact remains, that by converting our power to transform nature
into a commodity to be exchanged for wages, one reduces human
beings to the level of machines.
A formal parallel exists between the ensembles concerning nature and
labor. The ensemble of agribusiness, with its removal of the human agent
from the web of ecological relations, and his standing over and above an inert
mass of “inputs” to be transformed into groceries, would be exemplary of the
“domination of nature”;'"” similarly, the separation of capital from labor, and
the associated separation of labor power from the organic wholeness of the la-
borer, is essential to the domination inherent to capitalism. In both instances

the movement toward ecosocialism becomes emancipatory through restoring
wholeness— not an original state of grace, but rather the resumption of de-
velopment leading to ever more articulated ecological states of being. We may
continue by examining what this notion may mean, first, from the standpoint
of humanity, and second, from that of nature.
4. Restoration and Struggle

THE RESTORATION OF USE-VALUES is first ofall, no simple atavism, that is, we
do not seek to recapture some.original goodness of use-value in things before
capital subordinated them to exchange value. Use-value is a kind of rela-
tionship; it signifies appropriation between humanity and nature, and within
humanity as part of nature, and cannot be reduced to any crude or absolute
measure of worth. What is restored is not a fixed quality but the potentials
inherent in this relationship.
In any case, such a notion, of original goodness, is antithetical to the very
makeup of human being, except as the occasion of a common illusion. We
appreciate the beauty and wonder of a child, yet we do not applaud a state
of being in which a grown person acts childishly. To be sure, a fully realized
adult carries forward many aspects of the child. But she or he does so by re-
combining these—the spontaneity, playfulness, openness and so forth—at
a mature level of development. Thus we say of this individual that s/he is
childlike and not childish. A similar distinction may be drawn for any being
in relation to its own development.
Capital suppresses the capacity of being to spontaneously evolve and ex-
press itself. The use-values embedded in capitalist commodities are already
marked with this kind of suppression by being bound into exchange. From
this point, their degradation takes off, spurred by deformed need structures,
until the use-values embedded in certain commodities may become plainly
toxic. Thus we would not want to restore the use-value of the alcohol and
tobacco needed to adapt to the stresses of life under capitalism. Nor would
we encourage the development of use-values of gross sport utility vehicles or
diet colas hopped up with caffeine and artificial sweeteners.
However, such a principle requires commitment to a definite view of
human nature. In other words, what is good and bad for people as expressed
in use-values of one kind or another is to be determined by reference to what
conduces or inhibits the flourishing of this nature."”) This in turn brings up
another set of problems. For how does one in a scheme of this sort avoid a
new level of repressiveness? The exchange of one form of domination for an-
other was common to much first epoch socialism, and constitutes one of the

prime lessons to be learned from it. As some have argued, the idea of “limits
to growth” may make ecosocialism seem unacceptably austere. Does not this
line of reasoning also make it seem unacceptably puritanical?
While the scope of this contribution forbids an adequate discussion of
this question, its resolution can be stated fairly succinctly. Non-repressiveness
should be an authentic ecosocialist ideal. As such, however, it has to be com-
patible with a notion of human nature the realization of which would be
non-repressive. In other words, if the character of human nature includes the
capacity for spontaneity and imaginativeness, which is to say from another
angle, a certain degree of negativity, then one is contradicting that nature by
being too proscriptive and straitlaced. Hence the “restoration of use-value”
for human beings can only take place in a non-authoritarian spirit. It seems
to me that this is the case for human nature, and that it is quite possible to
spell out both theoretically and in practical dimensions.
An essential entry point would be through a consideration of childhood.
One feels entitled to say that children have definite needs beyond the physi-
ological, and that if those needs are not met, the child will be missing some-
thing of what it means to be human, even if he or she may narrowly survive.
It is specially important to consider childhood, also, because from this per-
spective— which needless to add, we all share in our way—the function of
caring arises as an authentic human-natural need and capacity. This becomes
a template for value itself. That is, a creature for whom value is an important
category is a creature who is endowed with the capacity to care for another.
And what begins in relation to children extends to the caring for other hu-
mans and for nature, categories foundational for ecosocialism.
Recent research has corroborated, for example, what the parents of the
world’s peoples have spontaneously (i.e., human-naturally) discovered, that
babies positively need an animate dialogue with caretakers— the bouncing
on knees, accompanied with expressive speech, and so on—if they are to
actually develop their innate powers. More, who would deny that children
positively need the opportunity and freedom to play? But if this is so, then
playfulness is a species authentic need, brutally suppressed so that accumula-
tion can go forward through capitalist work discipline and the fetish of pro-
ductivity"! —and that a prime goal of ecosocialism would be its restoration.
I feel secure in the statement, for example, that children positively need to
dance and sing, and to play cooperatively; just so, I feel secure in saying that
they don't need, however they may in some circumstances want, carbonated
soft drinks and candy. But if this is the case, and if certain “childlike” ways
are desirable in grown people," then we have the outlines of at least some

aspect of what restored use-values may be for human beings without at the
same time being prescriptive and repressive.
The potential for ecological sustainability under ecosocialism depends
in great measure on this view of needs. It goes without saying that consider-
able changes in consumption will be necessary if the ecological crisis is to be
resolved. This can either take place through authoritarian means and scarcity,
which is to say, an extrapolation of present conditions into eco-fascism, or
through a restructuring of needs by which the craving for material goods
and the indifference to waste that characterizes the present order will be re-
placed by more ecological ways of being. We have already observed how vast
a gap lies between the presently installed need structure and what would be
required for an ecologically sustainable society. Those with no faith in human
beings deny the latter possibility, or see it as a dreary asceticism. However,
it seems more the case that the present need structure is an imposed one,
requiring first of all the tremendous indoctrination of consumerist culture,
and more basically, life alienated from the conditions of its own realization,
the vacuum created by which is filled with material commodities. It is not
true that children spontaneously crave sweets and violent video games. They
acquire this need structure through intense indoctrination, on the one hand,
and on the other, from boredom, depression, and loss of expressive opportu-
nity—in briefest terms, from a kind of unlived life. Restoration of use-value
depends fundamentally upon this notion. Since use-values are relations be-
tween humans and their world, the quality of human existence will determine
the quality of the world’s appropriation. A fully lived life, in which all our
human capacities are expressed, is one with radically restructured needs.
In sum, restoring use-value means returning humanity to the full expres-
sion ofits own nature: that is the only coherent ground upon which the hu-
man relationship to nature can be mended. We might say, then, that restored
use-values are “human-natural” in quality. This is directly consistent with the
sense given by Marx, especially in his early writings."
The argument takes on additional significance with respect to “labor,”
defined both as a human-natural power of transforming reality, and as the
social and class-defined expressions of that power. Here we must be blunt:
restoring the use-value of labor requires releasing labor from the prison house
of the capitalist labor relation. This is obviously much more than the environ-
mental activist or progressive liberal bargains for. Notwithstanding, the logic
of ecosocialism demands it. Capital corrupts the expressive powers of human
labor by reducing it to the commodity, labor-power. The use-value of labor is
therefore that which is useful to the capitalist, its purchaser. This includes a

certain degree of development— the ability to read, to show up on time, and
so on— but an inevitable degree of vitiation as well, whether expressed in the
particular deskilling of labor, or its constriction to the demands of a given
niche in the accumulation process, or, more generally, the development of
appropriate degrees of submissiveness, passivity, and so forth."° All of these
tendencies are systematic, and they.extend to the entire population as medi-
ated through the schools, the cultural system, religions, even the therapeutic
trades. It is patently idealistic to expect more from capital, or to ignore that
this degradation is inherent in the very fundamentals of the labor contract,
which converts a vital human function into a commodity, thereby imposing
a many-sided stunting of humanity. Marx wrote of this in terms of the alien-
ation of labor, and today, almost 160 years later, the overcoming of alienation
remains the cardinal principle of socialism and hence a foundation of ecoso-
cialism."'7) Thus the restoration of the use-value of human labor points toward
the emancipation of the worker from capital, and the release from bondage
of human power.
5. Usufruct
TURNING TO THE DIMENSION of nature, the fundamental framework of re-
stored use-value is contained in a venerable congener of the notion of “use.”
We can pick up the term as famously employed by Marx in one of his rela-
tively few statements about the relation between society and nature under
socialism:
From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society,

private ownership of the globe by single individuals will ap-
pear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by
another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simulta-
neously existing societies taken together, are not the owners
of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuries,
and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to
succeeding generations in an improved condition.""®
The Oxford Dictionary locates the appearance of “usufruct” in the English

language in the early seventeenth century, though the term is widespread and
ancient, appearing on all continents and going back to the Code ofHammurabi.
In the original English context, usufruct refers to struggles over the commons
in the transition from feudalism to capitalism: “the right of enjoying the use
of and income from another’s property without destroying, damaging, or
diminishing the property.” The term has significance today in context of a

number of struggles of prefigurative relevance to the ecosocialist movement,
for example, squatter’s rights and community gardens, instances in which the
restoration of use-value to urban conditions of production is brought into focus
in a way that closely parallels the examples drawn above for the organic farm."”!
But it also conveys the wider relation to nature in an ecosocialist society.
The traditional notion of usufruct is tied to the relations of individual
property-holders. Marx, however, expands this by referring to private owner-
ship of the gloée. The very notion that the earth can be privately owned is a pe-
culiar arrangement in human history, foisted by Europe in the era of its expan-
sion and colonialism, and carried forward into today’s capitalist era.2" To the
extent that this form of property is globalized—surely the case today —we
have the collective person, the transnational ruling class, owning the collec-
tive natural means of production, or the globe, as one man owns another.
Thus capital enslaves the earth; and the evidence that this has “destroyed,
damaged and diminished” the earth is starkly revealed in the ecological cri-
sis. If ecosocialism, by contrast, can offer a usufructory of the earth, it will
be (combining the notions noted above) one of enjoyment—the aesthetic
dimension previously noted—and improvement. As for the former term, we
recur to the essential importance of pleasure to a fulfilled humanity; while for
the latter, we need to develop a philosophy of nature as such, beyond that of
human nature (though the two levels are interrelated), in which the notion of
betterment can be given substance.
Logically, this entails an evolutionary concept, with the ecological flour-
ishing of nature posited as a kind of natural te/os, and humanity having the
capacity —alienated away under the regime of capital —to foster this.
This requires some consideration of what it means to “value” nature, as
its betterment is predicated on being so held.'*"! It is held in deep-ecological
circles that “wild nature,” that is, a region untouched by human hands, has
inherent value. But this may be seen in two senses, only one of which is valid.
It is the case that a place in nature, say an old-growth forest, may be valued
by us precisely because in it we can sense something of the primordial world,
and relate our fragmented sense of self to something that came before us and
stands beyond us. The spiritual appropriation of nature depends therefore
on its degree of “otherness,” that is, the perceived gap between nature and
the realm of the ego. In this sense, the value “inheres” in nature, precisely
because it is outside us, or “other.” However, this by no means constitutes the
inherent value of “wild” nature as something in-itself, arising from beyond
the human world. Precisely the opposite is the case: the judgment arises from
the ego, as an expression of its separation. More generally, all statements of

value are humanly judged and hence conjunctural and relational. The value
given to wild nature is very much a human value, given in our case in rela-
tion to a sense of lack: to the.extent we perceive ourselves diminished by loss
of contact with nature—or what comes to the same thing, by the alienating
—so is wilderness valued. Needless to say, this is an old
growth of civilization
story, which emerged in full force.in the history of romanticism and today
acquires new intensity. To value the wild is not by that token worthless; quite
the contrary. But it must be understood in relation to the whole historical
complex and not absolutized. Nor can this value be realized by simply clear-
ing all humanity off nature preserves—a measure that deprives nature of one
of her own creatures. Remember, too, that so-called pristine nature reserves
have almost invariably been home in the past to some now-displaced people,
who also held an aesthetic appreciation for nature, however differently it may
have been elaborated.
The idea of locating a piece of “nature” untouched by human hands is
little more than a fantasy, unless one means to establish parks in deep un-
dersea beds, or on the moon or other planets (in many of which places there
today exists some touch of those hands). “Wilderness” parks usually have to
be cleared, and once cleared, have still to be protected from “civilization,” a
process that can never be completely successful so long as they are perfused by
the same air and washed by the same rains into which flow the products of in-
dustry. “Hands” here is in most cases no more than a metonym for that which
those hands hold, namely, technology. If human nature is to alter nature,
the notion of technology expresses the immediate means by which nature is
altered, for better or worse.
Technologies themselves are often commodities, in which case the res-
toration of use-value depends upon whether their “use” is conducive to the
realization of ecologically integral values. The fate of the epoch to come will
have a great deal to do with the vicissitudes of capital’s impulse to remake
nature using technical means, notably through the Frankenstein technologies
of genetic recombination. It must be underscored that these become mon-
strous through their subordination to exchange and accumulation. There is
no logical reason for, and a great deal of empirical counter-evidence against,
the notion that technology in itself (as though such could exist) is harmful to
nature. In any case, ecosocialism is not Luddite. Tools are not neutral means
to be used for good or bad ends, but materialized social relations in which
means and ends are integrated. And the usufructury development of human-
ity necessarily includes the fruitful “use” of technology, including biotechnol-
ogy. Humans at their best have worked with nature to foster the co-evolution

of species and the flourishing of ecologies, through the employment of ap-
propriate technology.’ Just what constitutes an appropriate technological
relationship is no easy matter to decide, but one part of the puzzle should be
clear enough by now: it is to fight for the restoration of use-value and against
the insertion of exchange-value into nature. As our instance of the organic
farm indicated, there is a way of “working with” nature’s processes, as against
one of standing over them, and there is a technology consonant with this way,
which also conduces to the flourishing of human nature.
Ultimately, however, the battle for ecosocialism is not a technical matter
but a question of consciousness and agency. Here the cards seem particularly
stacked against ecosocialism. Consider only the paradox that while it is the
future we fight for against the ecocidal actions of capital, it is capital that
has captured the discourse of the future. During the last years of first-epoch
socialism its positions were commonly thought of as “conservative,” while
capital had firmly captured the lingo of newness and innovation. Thus the
ancien regime passed itself off as the fount of novelty, while those who sup-
posedly represented the utopian consciousness to supplant it were seen as
dreary sticks in the mud.
This paradox carries over into the struggle for use-value, one part of which
is a struggle for the meaning of the notions surrounding the category of“use.”
Although the connotations in everyday speech of “useful” are good, they are
not particularly exciting, either, as the term rarely rises above the instrumental:
what is useful is what gets the job done, so we have time left over to do what
we really want. Thus the notion of intrinsic pleasure associated with a restored
use-value is plainly absent. This is even more pronounced in the meanings
surrounding the notion of “used,” which simply connotes depreciated. That
is, a used item has less of what really matters, namely, exchange-value, than
a shiny new one. We are dealing here with a truly massive formation within
the capitalist order, which runs on a constantly increasing speedup, with its
associated cults of the new, of image, of youth, and fashion, and with the
mountains of waste and garbage that are their inevitable sequelae.) In the
prevailing culture, which functions to define the limits of the possible, the
more “used” something is, the less it is to be valued, whether in economic or
extra economic terms; thus for the average sensibility, the internal relatedness
of “use-value” runs contrary to the sense offered here.
This is connected to the frailty of ecosocialist politics. An organic farm or a
cooperative, as we have seen, are each salutary in themselves and, inasmuch as
they contain an ensemble of restored use-values, are also prefigurative of eco-
socialism. But they are not truly prefigurative unless they contain a “moment”

driving toward the transformation of the given. A degree of this impulse is cer-
tainly present in many of the organic-ecological and cooperative movements;
yet its overall weight and momentum falls far short of its goals. It does not, I
hope, disparage existing green and communitarian practices to say that their
transformative impulse is by and large vague and idealistic, and serves more
to reassure than transform. If we multiplied the number of organic farms or
worker cooperatives by ten we would not be one step closer to ecosocialism.
To be more exact, we would go ten steps forward, increasing practical aware-
ness of the virtues of a restored use-value, along with ten steps back, increasing
one’s position within the capitalist market and augmenting that marketplace
itself. In this sense, organic farms and community cooperatives are akin to
the routine practice of recycling at what used to be called the town dump but
is now the “waste transfer station.” They to some extent counter the culture
of garbage, but also create new markets, providing them with free labor, and
thereby strengthen the overall regime of capital. That is part and parcel of why
they are content to be called “environmental,” as contributors to cleaning up
one corner of the capitalist ecumene without roiling its basic mechanism.
There is nothing in the simple notion of use-value, therefore, that con-
tains the transformative impulse. And that is because the simple concept
remains tied to immediacy. It does not connect to the whole, nor to the
intermediate points between itself and the whole, in particular to the aboli-
tion of the commodity form itself. I have spent much time recycling garbage
at the local dump, and can vouch that it is not a practice that inspires, no
matter how virtuous it may be. Clearly, this is because there is no connection
to anything beyond itself, and this in turn is related to the social relations
with which it is carried out. Each citizen dutifully piles up in an individual
vehicle and grimly hauls the garbage to the various bins and sorts it, with at
most a sidelong glance of resigned commiseration to his or her fellows. The
overriding impression is one of separateness. This is the false virtue of the con-
crete and the immediate remaining in-itself. Note, too, that the “intermedi-
ate points” from which one is separated include other people as well as other
levels within a prefigured whole. Domination and alienation are profoundly
interconnected as functions of the degree of separation institutionalized by
the system, in other words, the dominion of capital over labor and nature is
engrained in the splitting apart of elements, and in the non-recognition by
the master element of the “Others.” "4!
The concept of a restored use-value, by contrast, is distinguished by its
affinity for the whole. By the same reasoning, the emancipatory content of
ecosocialism is entailed in the degree to which it succeeds in differentiating

the fields of nature and labor so that each engages in a process of mutual rec-
ognition inherent to the organismic being of fully developed ecologies.’*) To
recognize is to connect at the level of subjectivity along with that of the objec-
tive. Each being affirms its actual identity along with its association with oth-
ers. What is restored, then, in use-value is the association between individual
points of being—along with the consciousness appropriate to them—and
others in the plenum. The category of use-value arises and is realized in the
context of this web, or ensemble, of relationships—a web whose filaments
necessarily incorporate elements beyond the commodity. When we talk about
the use-value of something like bread, for example, we mean, then, not just
the taste and nourishment of the bread as an object I ingest,?% but the smell,
touch and look of the bread, the history of the bread, and of all its ingredi-
ents, down to their subatomic particles, and of the making of the bread, and
of the ensemble of bread eaters, and of ourselves in relation to bread, and so
on, out to the edges of the universe. The commodity form isolates these fili-
ations through its wall of exchange-value; restored use-values begin to break
down this wall, and open toward larger horizons.
Do we see all these things simultaneously? Of course not; we neither want
to do so, nor have we the capacity to do so— in fact, to move in this way is
to be psychotic, unable to organize the flow of our existence. What a realized
use-value signifies, rather, is accessibility of all these dimensions, their active
potentiality for appropriation. It means to be able to self-determine one’s rela-
tion to bread—as a baker, say, who makes it, or a poet who develops repre-
sentations from it, just one who appreciates this made substance, or to any
other point in the plenum of the universe —and, critically, to do so as a social
actor, a member not simply of neighborhoods, or ethnicities, or nation-states,
but of the human community, and of the natural order in which this com-
munity participates. The actual sense of the “whole” consists of the ensemble
of such integrated structures as arise in the course of this process and of their
unlimited extension outward. The moment of ecosocialist transformation is
constituted when this reaches a degree of development such that the filiations
with capital dissolve. At each point, capital’s grip is to be challenged; and to
the extent that each point is achieved, so will that grip be weakened. At some
point, therefore, it will give way, not simply objectivistically, in terms of the
apparatus of indoctrination and control, but also subjectively, in terms of its
internalized colonies of desire and rationalization. But the exact specification
of that point, and what leads up to it, is a matter for another essay. ™
(Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2000]

NOTES
Originally conceived as part of a joint project on ecosocialism, this essay is very much
indebted to James O’Connor, whose influence was felt at every stage in its composition.
These are, in James O’Connor’s terms, “anything that is not produced as a commodity
according to the law of value or to market forces but that is treated by capital as if it is a
commodity.” James O’Connor, “Ecology Movements and the State,” in Natural Causes
(New York: Guilford, 1998).
Language can form entirely self-referential and imaginary, yet coherent sets of signifiers
(“the golden mountain does not exist”). However, a commodity must at some point be
embedded in a material object if it is to have any value. In other words, mere fantasies,
or psychotic delusions, have no economic value, though they may make perfect linguistic
sense. Even the swindler who sells shares in golden mountains must set up an office, print
stationery, open a bank account, etc.
Marx writes in the Manuscripts: “Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively
is directly given in a form adequate to the human being” (Marx’s italics). From the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, cited in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx
Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 116.
See O’Connor, op. cit., passim.
In a certain sense they are equally unnatural in involving conscious input to refashion
nature for human ends; and in another sense they are equally natural in expressing the
core human-natural propensity of doing just this, as well as in working over the material
world for their objectives.
A particularly interesting development in this direction is the emergence of
Permaculture. The brain-child of a Tasmanian, Bill Mollison, permaculture designs
agricultural environments as ecosystems, using architectural principles and taking into
account the whole range of global to local interrelations. In certain settings, e.g., South
India, microclimatic changes have been induced that reverse generations of ecological
degeneration. In others, substantial food production has been achieved in urban settings.
See Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual (Tygalum, Australia: Tagari
Publications, 1988). The website (http://www.kenyon.edu/projects/permaculture/) gives
an index of the impressive spread of this movement.
This would apply to the total number of inputs and outputs, that is, the pesticides and
fertilizers at one end; the crop at the other. To the extent that this is monocultured, so will
efficiencies of scale be introduced, in terms of gathering the crop, transporting it, etc. In
other words, monoculture lowers certain costs of commodity production, hence increases
the effective yield.
To be sure, capital spares nothing in the effort to quantify and commodify pleasure: the
whole of the entertainment industry rests on this premise. But for reasons that cannot be
explored here, it is not hard to show that this project is always alienating, and leads to the
addictive character of modern mass mediated society.
For a discussion, see Bertell Ollman, ed., Market Socialism-The Debate Among Socialists
(New York: Routledge, 1998).
William Leiss, Zhe Domination of Nature (New York: George Braziller, 1972).
’

Needless to say, the holding of such a position runs contrary to a considerable body of
fashionably anti-foundationalist opinion. Now is not the time to take up this quarrel with
such views, except to say that, despite their flashiness, they may be regarded as essentially
an outpost of bourgeois ideology.
lox This line of reasoning is indebted to Herbert Marcuse, and the notion of the “Performance
Principle” that encapsulated this relation. See ros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon,
1955):
14. I include music here, not to reduce it to childishness but to emphasize its human-natural
ground, and the depth of this as appearing from the first days oflife.
1S: The Manuscripts are pervaded by this sense. Thus, in Marx’s vision of realized
communism: “This..., as fully-developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully
developed humanism equals naturalism” (in Tucker, ed., op. cit., 84).
The classic text remains Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Ae Marx's delineation of the fourfold scheme of alienated labor launched the modern socialist
project. The estrangement oflabor from its product, the labor process, from other workers
(and by a simple extension, the human community as such), and from one’s own human
nature — or what Marx, following Feuerbach, called our “species-being” —is what has to
be overcome. See Tucker, ed., op. cit., 70-81.
18. Frederick Engels, ed., Capital Vol. III (New York: International Publisher 1967), 776.
12: In the case of New York City’s urban gardens, “idle” lots were turned over to community
groups with the stipulation that these be returned in twenty years. At the end of this
period, during which the lots had been both “enjoyed” and “improved,” the city demanded
the return of what was now a significantly enhanced property. In the background were
the developers who have lined Mayor Giuliani’s campaign chest. The people resisted, and
a lengthy struggle is still in progress as of this writing, in which some lots—the overall
number lies in the hundreds — have been sacrificed and others saved.
20. It goes without saying that individual ownership of land goes back to the origins of class
society, and is its core condition. The various ecological disasters of pre-capitalist society
mainly occurred under the auspices of this kind of relation of production. With ownership
under capital, however, the traditional problems were expanded by virtue of the imposi-
tion of exchange-value, and the associated abstract reduction of land to resources.
Pally Note that here we take up the meaning of “value” in its extra politico/economic sense. These
are the values that are ontologically and historically prior to the appearance of use- and
exchange-value —and also those that will supersede them as the commodity form dissolves.
2, See Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest (London: Verso,
1989), for a fascinating account of how the indigenous people of Amazonia played a vital
and conscious role in the evolution of the biosphere of the Amazon basin, known as the
richest source of speciation on earth, and also as a region under massive attack by capital.
Notably, both the creators and the destroyers of life used the technology of burning — the
Indians as a controlled intervention to aid speciation, the destroyers of ecology according
to the ruthless logic of accumulation.
MS. It is possible to argue that the intellectual movements subsumed under the term of “ post-
modernism” have been largely in tow with these developments. See David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990).

24. See my History and Spirit, 2nd. ed. (Warner, NH: Essential Books, 1998), for a wider
discussion of this question.
HX For lack of space we cannot take up here the interesting question of whether and how
entities in the natural world are capable of recognition, except to say that any coherent
philosophy of nature needs to include some such function. This is grounded empirically
in the fact, well-established by children, dog owners, and the like, that the “higher ani-
mals” are certainly capable of recognition. If this is so, then the function is inherent in the
kind of organization evolved in such creatures, while precursory forms must be granted
for others.
26. After, under capitalism, purchasing it, an act that inhibits this exfoliation. The
interposition of exchange-value blocks social relations between humans and the world,
and replaces them with thing-relations, as Marx pointed out in his passage on “The
Fetishism of Commodities,” Capital I, op. cit., 71-83.

An Ecosocialist Manifesto
(2001)
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 fa-
talism 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 ecosocial-
ism 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 imma-
nently ecosocialist in content. How can these be gathered? Can we envision an
“ecosocialist international?” Can the spectre be brought into being?
The twenty-first century opens on a catastrophic note, with an unprec-
edented degree of ecological breakdown and a chaotic world order beset with
terror and clusters of low-grade, disintegrative warfare that spread like gan-
grene across great swathes of the planet—viz., central Africa, the Middle

East, Northwestern South America—and reverberate throughout the na-
tions. 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 over-
whelms 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 un-
derlying 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 impera-
tive to constantly expand profitability, exposes ecosystems to destabilizing
pollutants, fragments habitats that have evolved over aeons to allow the flour-
ishing 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 ofits opprobrium.
And it has set going a network of transtatal organizations under the over-
all 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 be-

cause 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 vio-
lent rebellion because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of empire,
which would impose unacceptable limits orf 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 terror-
ism ... 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 weak-
ness. 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 rub-
bish-heap of history by the failings of its twentieth century interpretations?
For this reason only: that however beaten down and unrealized, the no-
tion 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 “so-
cialism” capable of overcoming the crises capital has set going. And if social-
isms 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 asocialism become adequate for this time.
It is for these reasons that we choose to name our interpretation of social-
ism 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 exist-
ing socialisms, chiefly, the denial of internal democracy along with an emu-
lation 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
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 im-
posing 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 condi-
tions leading to fundamentalist distortions and their terrorist manifestations.
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 indus-
trial 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 disheart-
eningly, 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 recogniz-
able 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 coordina-
tively 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, September 8, 2001

/
oe ii i -_ .
The Dialectic of Radical Ecologies
(2003)
1. Introduction
THE FIRST VERSION OF THIS ESSAY was written in 1992 and appeared the
next year in a collection of readings about environmental philosophy, where
it was placed, under the title of “The Marriage of Radical Ecologies,” in the
section reserved for “Social Ecology.”"! It was commissioned by my friend,
John Clark, an anarchist philosopher and at the time a central figure within
the social ecology movement. An outgrowth of the New Left, social ecology
had been more or less personally launched in the late 1960s by Murray Book-
chin, and reflected the anarcho-communitarian philosophy of that thinker as
applied to the gathering ecological crisis.
I was too much a Marxist socialist to identify myself as a “social ecolo-
gist.” But in those years the notion of an ecological socialism scarcely existed
for me, while social ecology was fairly well developed and was pretty much
the only doctrine, in the United States at least, where a radical who wanted to
come to grips with the gathering ecological crisis could find common ground.
The chief alternatives were the various practices grouped under the rubric of
“Deep Ecology,” all of which suffered from the lack of a serious social theory
and drifted as a result between poles of mystical withdrawal and philosophic
abstraction, on the one hand, and ultra-leftist and violent attacks on forest
workers (“monkey-wrenching”), on the other. The defect was by choice. Deep
ecology took off from the notion that humanity went wrong when we con-
sidered ourselves separate from, and above nature. Hence society itself was the
problem, and not any particular kind of society. Social ecology, by contrast,

was built on the critique of hierarchy. Bookchin’ s premise was that humans
fouled nature because of social domination, whereas a free society would be in
harmony with nature. Thus social ecology imbued ecology with feminist, anti-
capitalist and anti-racist sympathies— obviously more appealing to someone
whose mature political life had been spent on the left.
But there were problems, and they had to do with more than the tension
between anarchism and Marxism.”! The ecological crisis, after all, is more than
an economic or political issue. It encompasses, rather, the whole relationship
of humanity with nature. It is, so to speak, a disorder of human being itself.
The deep ecologists may have amply gone astray in their treatment of this
theme, but they were willing to undertake the notion that there were certain
fundamental problems in the relation between human beings and nature that
no rearranging of the social system could eliminate. Bookchin's social ecolo-
ey —indeed, the left in general, including the traditional Marxist left— tended
to give short shrift to this dimension, and to ontological problems altogether.
This seemed to me unacceptably shallow. Perhaps it has to do with my experi-
ence as a psychoanalyst, but I have never been able to rest with an account of
the human situation that does not take into account our inward being as well
as our external relations with nature. After all, it was Marx himself who raised
in Capital the notion that the labor process entailed imagination, that is, the
internal representation of the world.’ And if labor expresses the metabolism
between humanity and nature, and is the most fundamental category of hu-
man being, then we need to take deep account of the imagining of nature as
well as the external manipulation of nature if we are to comprehend the eco-
logical crisis, and develop ways of contending with it.
That was the impetus for this essay along with a desire to incorporate
the arguments of a recently concluded volume on spirituality, which I wanted
seen as an entry into radical ecological politics.“ Then there was an old habit
of mine of incorporating scraps of poetry and other odd things into texts. In
this case the habit seemed more than justified given the fundamental problem
posed by representation; and as I had recently composed a piece on William
Blake and was more than usually enthused by this great artist, I decided to
incorporate some of Blake’s stunning insights as to the relation between hu-
manity and nature at the end of the essay, in order to make this closing also
an opening.
Indeed it was, though not what I expected. Bookchin was thrown into a
rage by this act of /ese majeste, and attacked me as well as Clark, who had been
sympathetic to the essay. This was more or less standard behavior on his part;
but in the present case it had the liberating effect of allowing me to realize

that I wanted no future within the camp ofsocial ecology.) Thus opened the
prospects for an ecological socialism. | became associated with Jim O’Connor
and this journal, and began that line of work which eventuated in The Enemy
of Nature.
I have changed the title of the essay, added this introduction, and re-
moved references to the discourse ofsocial ecology. Otherwise it is largely as
originally written.
2. The Signification of Nature

ECOLOGICAL POLITICS IS BASED upon an appropriation of what takes place
at the interface between humanity and nature. This rests on the notion of
“human nature” itself, as an expression of the quality of this relationship.
Therefore, radical ecological politics demands a radical conception of human
nature.
In general, ecological politics has treated this matter uncritically. In par-
ticular, it has not attended sufficiently to the domain of language. And yet
language is as close as one can come to describing the specifically human char-
acteristic. That is, “human nature,’ includes the presence of a signified field
within a highly developed and complex subjectivity. This may be thought of
as a dimension of meaning, so long as one regards meaning in its fullest sense,
and not as the mere accumulation of “information.” Humans as languaged
creatures live in a created universe, a constellation of meaningfulness, mediat-
ed by word symbols, that is, language, which incorporates and links together
all aspects of the human world. Language in this respect is sensuous as well as
informational; it is expressive as well as instrumental; it defines the imaginary
as well as the real; and it is the medium for much of culture. Society as well
as the individual in her/his subjectivity would not exist therefore without the
signified realm. No other species, the remarkable dolphin notwithstanding,
lives this way, for no other species creates its own world. In this sense, what
we call the “environment” is a human-made entity—not only created, as it
were, by human hands, but constituted as a signified realm.
I would not call this created, signified world, “second nature,’ because
it does not act like nature but has the stamp of humanness on it: the pres-
ence of signification. There is thus a radical distinction between the human
and natural worlds, the blurring of which gives rise to illusory expectations
that one can be continuously mediated into the other. I do not think such a
continuous mediation is possible. This claim challenges a prevalent attitude
of political ecology, namely, that the human and natural worlds can be har-
monized in a future ecological society. The goal is admirable but tends to be

rather too facilely postulated, in a way that overlooks the fundamental role
played by the signified field. The presence of language, the attachment of the
representations of nature to nature itself, means that the path of harmoniza-
tion between humanity and nature has no endpoint. Nor can it be direct; it
must rather traverse the signified field in a dialectical process.
Of this, more later. First, I should like to spin out some of the implica-
tions of this signified dimension as it relates to the interface between the hu-
man and natural worlds. One would be that “nature” is for us a word before
it is a thing. I have no doubt that the natural world exists independently of
human beings, that we are only an infinitesimal corner of the universe which
has happened to become conscious of itself, and that should our experiment
come to a halt, through ecocide or some other means of annihilation, the
universe, i.e., nature, will continue on its way as before. But all of this is
besides the point, which is that when I, or any other person, regard nature,
I do so through a prism constructed out of language. The only “nature” that
is real for any of us is a linguistically-constituted field. This may or may not
correspond to the natural world that exists independently of human beings.
If it does correspond, then we say that our “science” is good, or that our ap-
prehension of nature is true—a desirable state of affairs. But the nature we
apprehend —and act upon in ecological politics —is never homologous with
nature-in-itself, but always includes the signification of nature. We might say
that human beings may asymptotically approach union with nature, but can
never achieve this so long as we live. When we die, then our flesh is dediffer-
entiated and rejoins the universal cycle of matter; until then, we are fated to
have a kind of peculiar status, given in the capacity for language —or, what
comes to the same thing, consciousness. In this sense language and conscious-
ness are joined, as the peculiarity of human consciousness
— its self-referen-
tiality —is occupied by the signified dimension. As human beings we differ
from the rest of nature in being able to reflect on ourselves and our own exis-
tence. Language is both the tool of such reflection and its necessity. We have a
biologically programmed capacity for language, such as Chomsky and others
have explored. But this is not the end of our relationship to language. We also
have an ontological relation with nature, a relationship where our human
being as such unfolds and language concretely appears. We are given to live
a basic situation within which the apparatus for language matures and takes
form. This situation is defined in the unstructuredness of humans at birth,
and our absolute need to develop a self through a process of attachment and
separation from the source of being. Psychologically this becomes represented
largely as the parent, since the human being relates itself to a human form.

Ontologically, however, it becomes thematized as nature itself, the ground of
being; while mythopoesis makes it into the earth mother, and other deities.
Consciousness emerges as languaged in the dense space between self and
other, occupying that space with words and making it into the signified field.
Since we are not born with developed languagé but only its precursors, words
as such are not the first occupant of ontological space in the developing hu-
man being. We postulate, rather, an original “thing-like” quality to subjectiv-
ity, an apprehension of the world unmediated by words, and without the
capacity of a developed nervous system to give full articulation of that world.
In this sense, nature may be regarded as a “thing” before it is a word. How-
ever this original, pre languaged “thingness” belongs to the core or begin-
ning of life, before consciousness as such emerges and becomes configured by
language. Thus from the standpoint of an already developed human being,
nature is a word first, which must be gone through to get at the thing.”
What we call mystical or meditative experience consists in one degree or
another of the appropriation of the primary, unlanguaged relation to nature
through a stripping away of ordinary consciousness. This is what opens onto
the dimension of spirit, in all its myriad manifestations. Yet, the mystic or spirit-
state can never be a full state of being, nor can it define a social field. The value
of mystical experience consists precisely in its unworldly contrast with everyday
consciousness; it depends therefore on stripping away of the “normal” world of
word-significations. However, the state of consciousness is mediated by society,
which presents a great range of possibilities — from the technocratic-egoic form
of being that characterizes industrial capitalism and violently repels spiritual
experience, to the shamanistic modes that actively seek mystical transport and
can still be reclaimed from fragments of the primitive world-view. Nonetheless,
even the most adept sorcerer or shaman is someone who oscillates— relatively
freely, to be sure—between modes of being. Mystical or ecstatic experience is
by definition a sort of passage—and where there is passage, there must be some
baseline state to be passed from, or transcended, and returned to. The differences
between ways of accessibility to radical spirituality are of major historical
significance. They may be seen as a distinction between absolutely repressing
of the spirit-dimension, and being relatively open to it. We might say it is a
matter of splitting or differentiating oneself from an unmediated relation to
nature—in other words, a choice between the radical nonrecognition of nature
in the self, as against degree of recognition of and participation in nature. But
differentiation is still a form of difference; and the most harmoniously achieved
kinds of ecological organization—-say, for example, the justly admired ways
of many American Indians—are still arrangements worked out by a creature

who knows that s/he is not identical to nature, but must still mediate a relation
to nature through language and culture. The most differentiated position is
not one, therefore, of a static approximation to a vegetative condition, but
one of active passage between states of being—a motion that still retains the
distinction between those places and therefore never collapses the human and
the natural worlds into each other.
I mean for this relationship to be understood as an enrichment of and not
a limitation on the possibilities between humans and nature. To realize such
potentials requires that we learn to live with contradiction, that is, dialectically,
between contrary states of being. I mean, live with, and not simply intellectu-
ally understand, for the contradiction in question is existential. Two kinds of
things obtain for us at the same time, in defiance of ordinary logic: we are at
one time part of nature, fully participating in natural processes; and at the
same time we are radically different from nature, ontologically destined by a
dialectic between attachment and separation to define ourselves in a signified
field which by its very “nature” negates nature. This contradiction is embed-
ded in social relations, and may, through struggle, develop into an ecological
society which lives more organically with nature. But the “organic” relation
remains human and signified, hence radically different from other organic
processes in its mediation by the dialectic. To accept the contradiction, to ac-
cept the dialectic, is to live in a differentiated relation to nature. It seems to me
that this should be the ontological foundation for radical ecological politics.
By contrast, to deny that there is a contradiction, which is to say, to live
by splitting, is to engage in the domination of nature. Such a position is
one in which the subject does not recognize nature in the self, or the self in
nature. This notion encompasses the deep-ecological critique of “anthropo-
centrism,” but surpasses it by locating the splits in a social and historical field.
It is specific for capitalism inasmuch as the capitalist mode of production
requires relentless objectification and quantification. Here is the ground of
that project hinted at above, namely, to see capitalism outside its own eco-
nomic terms, as a way of being anchored in class relations and enforced by the
state. This way of being entails the economization of reality, the reduction of
everything to relations of exchange, the continual penetration of markets and
expansion of value, the ever-expanding power of money and the correspond-
ing impoverishment of human relations and the decline of the spiritual and
sacred. The domination of nature is contained in this process; and when the
capitalist economy becomes industrialized, monopolized and globalized, its
unrelenting expansive force turns local domination into the active destruc-
tion of nature, i.e., ecocide.

In a money economy, nothing can be sacred, since to be sacred means
to be non-exchangeable, while a fully developed “market” puts everything on
the block. Social movements, which seek to restore a sense of the sacred, are
already undertaking, therefore, a potentially powerful critique of capitalism.
No doubt, this is easily co-optable and often’ squandered. It easily becomes
irrational, self-indulgent posturing when not connected with real social cri-
tique. It is especially galling to witness the comfortable, empty-headed spec-
tacles of the New Age when one recognizes the emancipatory power inherent
in their originating impulse. However, those who only have room for a “real
social critique, with no sense of the sacred, no drive, that is, to overcome
the ontology of capital as well as its political economy, are certainly no less
stunted in their politics, nor can they overcome the domination of nature.
Note, however, that the critique also applies to that deep-ecological funda-
mentalism which seeks to abolish any sense of specialness from being human,
any essential difference from the rest of nature. This also loses the dialectic. The
radical attack on “anthropocentrism” becomes another form of splitting when,
in seeking to level out all species within nature, it deprives humans of what is
in fact our peculiar nature. The dialectic, to be both part of and separate from
nature, is in fact human nature, not something which can be set aside in an
effort to undo the domination of nature. Aside from the very impossibility
and absurdity of this—for what deep ecologist would give up transforming
food before it is eaten, or wearing clothing, along with other human peculiari-
ties such as speaking, reading, and making love? —the idea is frankly perni-
cious, as it denies to people the development of their very human powers.
One would hope that the deep ecologist wants to respect the needs of all life
on earth. S/he would not want to deprive a dog of the opportunity to sniff at
any interesting odor its phenomenal sense of smell discerns, nor to deprive a
falcon of the chance to fly. Why, then, deny to humans the opportunity to play
sports or string quartets, or any of the infinite number of practices that entail
signification and the productive transformation of nature?
The domination ofnature inheres in splitting itself, in any effort to flatten
out and reduce the dialectic of human being. The fully emancipated ecologi-
cal society is one which encourages this dialectic to ower. Thus an ecological
society is not without conflict, for the basic dialectic is not only preserved but
fully accepted. This confers a sense of respect for nature, indeed, one of won-
der and reverence that logically extends to the care for “wilderness,” since wild
nature, being nature most fully outside of the net of signification and the least
transformed by productive labor, is the most appropriate for the dialectic.
But it does not do so outside ofthe framework of otherness. Indeed, it is only

because nature must, ultimately, remain other to human beings that we can
arrive at the attitude of respect, wonder and reverence."! We can add: a dif-
ferentiated otherness gives rise to this attitude, just as a split otherness makes
nature into an object for domination. What differentiated otherness means
in this context is that the participation of human being in nature—which
is one moment of the dialectic— becomes appropriated within the signified
field —which belongs to the other moment of the dialectic, our separatedness
from nature. Nature therefore does not cease to be an object of transforma-
tion, but it is no longer seen as an inert object outside of ourselves, rather
as an entity from which we draw our own being and re-create in the act of
production. Such an ontological position goes hand in hand with the devel-
opment of “appropriate technology” — technology which, being an extension
of the body, is designed for the act of appropriation, that is, a gathering of
nature within the net of human signification.
At the same time that part of nature within which our being is subtend-
ed—the body—becomes fully invested with meaning. Or to put it another
way, the body ceases to be a place of repression, in the two senses of that word:
as a blockage, a hindrance of flow and energy; and as a denial of full conscious-
ness, a denial of words conjoined with things. The domination of nature begins
with the domination of bodies. Indeed, the major forms of social domination,
of class, of race and of gender, are each mediated through the domination of
nature-as-body. In class society, the oppressed body of the slave/serf/worker is
repressed and converted into a machine for the aggrandizement of the master;
in racism, sensuousness is lost by the master, who splits off bad parts of the
self and invests them in the body of the oppressed; while in patriarchy, female
parts of the male self are degraded, repressed, projected into and conquered in
the body of the woman. It is the myriad interconnections between these zones
of otherness and splitting that constitute the fabric of a society alienated from
nature. This fabric radical ecology struggles to reweave—a task requiring the
overcoming of capital.
3. Poesis and Transformation
I assert for Myself that I do not behold the Outward Cre-

ation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the
Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Ques-
tioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of
fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable
company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is
the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or

Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window
concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.
— William Blake, “A Vision of the The Last Judgment.”
SINCE THE WARP OF THE SOCIAL FABRIC consists of significations, the over-
coming of capital also requires an emancipated relation to language. Eman-
cipation, whether of human slaves or a dominated nature, begins in the sig-
nified field, then spreads dialectically outward. Politics expresses the choices
made by the imagination, whether of freedom or repression. Radical ecology
should begin therefore with the emancipation of the imaginary, signified na-
ture. The production of an emancipated language is, simply put, poetry. Thus
William Blake, who is not just an excellent poet but the poet of a transfigured
imagination, may be appropriated as the poet of radical ecology.
The quotation offered above (and extracted from his notebooks) is outré
even by Blakean standards, and the sort of thing that led the poet engraver-
artist to be called insane. Yet it is perfectly consistent with the rest of Blake,
and is perfectly sensible as well, although extremely demanding. The passage
is quite compatible, for example, with the astounding question asked in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
How do you know but evr’y Bird that cuts the airy way, Is
an immense world of delight, clos’ d by your senses five?!"®!
There was nothing insane about Blake, who remained quite aware of
the fundamental difference between the phenomenal world — Outward Cre-
ation —and the inner world of imagination, the signified field. What is radi-
cally unusual —and difficult— about him is the insistence on the priority of
the inner world, and his willingness to follow it, no matter how eccentric this
made him appear. We cannot collapse the human and natural worlds one
into the other, except as a wishful illusion. We have only the choice as to how
nature is to be signified: as an inert other, or as Blake most fully expressed, an
entity transfigured with spirit. Blake is talking about how to behold nature, as
well as about its physical reality — indeed, he claims that the nature of physi-
cal reality and how it is beheld are functionally related." He is saying, as we
suggested above, that “Action,” that is, politics, or for us, ecopolitics, must
traverse the signified field of nature-as-word even as it engages the material.
Blake claims that this praxis/choice is a matter of perception: that we
can choose to see with or through the eye. We can first of all look at nature
as a mere external given, split-off from our being. This is the Newtonian or,
as he says in his grammar of the imagination, “Urizenic” mode of percep-

tion, in which the perception of the world is considered homologous with
the actual physical nature of the world, so that action seems to be directed
against nature as such. Newtonian perception is the commonplace attitude
toward nature, reinforced by every fiber of the capitalist system, which func-
tions to strip spirit-qualities from existence in order to prepare the way for
commodification. It is the attitude of liberal environmentalism, and of all
technical-instrumental views of nature that reproduce the domination of the
established order. To Blake, this is “single vision.”
Now [a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep"'”
Blake strives for “fourfold vision,” the vision afforded by the development
of his prophetic narratives with their stupendous array of figures: Los, Albion,
Orc, Enitharmon, and their relatives."*! He strives, that is, for a mythopoesis
beyond poesis, the epic/prophetic telling of a story of a people, most fully
realized in his masterworks Milton and Jerusalem, written to emancipate hu-
mankind from mental slavery and hence corporal slavery — the “mind-forg’d
manacles.” But this must be built on a foundation of “twofold” vision, a vision
that combines the imaginative, signified dimension with the thing signified,
that refuses to reduce nature to its physicality, that sees immense worlds of
delight in a flying bird and hears heavenly hosts in the sun’s disk. Twofold vi-
sion is the elemental forging of words into things. Such is the immense work
needed to overcome the inertia of Newtonian single vision!) and its constant
reinforcement of conventional modes of perception. In short, poesis is the
travail of being a radical and revolutionary artist, indeed, the necessity of be-
ing thought mad for wishing to raise “other men into a perception of the
infinite.”!>! Blake was a fulfilled Quixote.
Blake's success in his mental war against Newtonianism is measured by
his merits as a poet, in which pursuit he is able to tack so closely to the inter-
face between language and nature as to raise the dialectic of word and thing
onto unsurpassed heights:
Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past & Future sees
Whose ears have heard, :

The Holy Word,
That walk'd among the ancient trees.!"®
The seemingly simple lyrics written for children are suffused with this
intensity, and with a scream against injustice
an injustice that includes eco-
logical damage:
When my mother died I was very young
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.'"7!
Nor does Blake forget the link between domination, capitalism, and eco-
logical destruction:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?!"*!
Poetic mastery is Blake’s genius and not our business, since we are not
about to argue that radical ecopolitics requires us to be poets. Nor would
we advance the fatuous claim that Blake somehow belongs to an ecological
school of thought. What we would claim, rather, is that Blake’s extraordinary
status stems from his fidelity to dialectics, and that a movement faithful to
the radical challenge posed by the ecological crisis needs to learn from Blake’s
vision of the dialectic. If radical ecology stands in any privileged capacity, it
will parallel Blake in refusing to collapse the human into the natural worlds.
This includes a demand that the domination of nature be seen as entailing the
domination of humans. But this has to be seen in its full, ontologic status, as
the outcome of a creature who lives in two worlds, part of nature yet fated to
signify nature, a creature capable of twofold, dialectical vision. Only when we
allow our specifically human powers to unfold, poetically or politically, can we
truly experience the wonder of natural creation. Marx (who so far as I know
never heard of Blake) put it in the Manuscripts: fully developed humanism is
naturalism, and vice versa. Thus only a fully humanized creature is capable of
protecting and emancipating nature.
Thou seest the Constellations in the deep & Wondrous Night

They rise in order and continue their immortal courses
Upon the mountains & in vales with harp & heavenly song

With flute & clarion; with cups & measures filld with foaming wine.
Glittring the streams reflect the Vision of beatitude,
And the calm Oceans joys*beneath & smooths his awful waves!
These are the Sons of Los, & these the Labourers of the Vintage
Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer
Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance
Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave:
Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,
To touch each other & recede; to cross & change & return
These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains
The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro’ the darksom sky
Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons
Of men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of Eternity
But we see only as it were the hem of their garments,
When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous Visions.) »
NOTES
“The Marriage of Radical Ecologies,” in Michael Zimmerman, ed., Environmental Phi-

losophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993).
Anarchism also has the problem of lacking an adequate critique of capitalist production,
and hence of what should be done to overcome it. Specifically, there is no systematic en-
gagement with Marx’s core notion that capital arises from exploited labor—nor ofcourse
with anything else in Marx. But this theme is not pertinent to the present essay.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976),
284: “the architect [in contrast to the bee] builds the cell in his mind before he constructs
it in wax.” The notion goes back to the 1844 Manuscripts, though space does not permit
its development here.
Joel Kovel, History and Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991 [2nd ed.: Essential Books,
1998}).
Another result was a systematic critique of Bookchin: “Negating Bookchin,” in Murray
Bookchin, Nature’s Prophet, Capitalism Nature Socialism/CPE Pamphlet #5 (1996).
Also published in Capitalism Nature Socialism, 8, March 1, 1997; and in Andrew Light,
ed., Social Ecology After Bookchin (New York: Guilford, 1999). John Clark also broke
with Bookchin, in part as a result of this fracas, and has developed his own reading of
social ecology.
Joel Kovel, Zhe Enemy of Nature (London: Zed, 2002).
As Freud put it, “word-representations” are added to “thing representations,” and thus
provide the ground of consciousness. “The Unconscious,” in James Strachey, ed., The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London:
Hogarth, 1953-73); see also Joel Kovel, “Things ’nd Words,” in The Radical Spirit
(London: Free Association Books, 1989).

The very term, “wilderness,” belongs to the signified realm of one who has to contend
with splitting. Native Americans do not have such a word, according to the principle that
language arises out of a state of separation from the thing signified. For the history of
“wilderness” in North American culture, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American
Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
From David Erdman, ed., The Complete Poet#y and Prose of William Blake (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1982), 565-66.
10. Ibid., 35.
. We cannot take up the point within the confines of this essay, but Blake’s view of the
fundamental nature of physical reality itself is remarkably sophisticated and radically differs
from that of conventional understanding. He seems to have intuited most of the insights
of advanced physics as to the nature of time, space, and energy. See James Ault, Visionary
Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
We, Erdman, op. cit., 722.
3) The figures are themselves arrayed in configurations of four, organized according to points
on the compass, gates to the city, and so on. For a compendium of Blake’s imaginative
universe, see S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence: Brown University Press,
1965).
. Ault writes: “Many central components of Blake’s poetry reveal his struggle to exorcise
the consolidating forms of anti-imaginative forces from his own imagination.” Visionary
Physics, op. cit., 161.
15s Erdman, op. cit., 39. The words are given to the prophet Ezekiel in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, whom Blake asks “why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left
side?”
16. Ibid., 18.

We Ibid., 10. This discussion cannot begin to be complete unless the other prime manifestation
of Blake’s vision is comprehended: that of the pictorial artist who published these poems
as illuminated manuscripts and was as transfigurative in his painting and engraving as he
was in language itself.
18. Ibid., 95.

NS), Ibid., 123 (from Milton). Los is the force of imagination and creativity in Blake’s cosmos.
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM ree

r+ ee i
Racism and Ecology
(2003)
ONE OF THE REMARKABLE FINDINGS about the ecological crisis is that race
and ethnicity are more reliable predictors of environmental pollution than class
and income. Thus a relatively more affluent black community is more likely to
suffer a toxic waste site than is its poorer white counterpart." This is consistent
with the startling fact that some sixty percent of the communities of color in
the United States contain at least one toxic waste site within their boundaries.”!
These findings are associated with, and at least partly explain, well known
statistics as to poorer health and lower life expectancies of communities of
color. The picture can be filled in with evidence of unsatisfactory diets, sec-
ond-rate medical care, pervasive exposure to pollutants—for example, of
children by lead from old paint, or of everyone by bad air from truck diesel
fumes—and overall stress and demoralization. The terrible burden of envi-
ronmental breakdown is underappreciated as a factor in the lives of people of
color, part of the general invisibility that envelops racist phenomena, which
here is even more pronounced than that of the economic or juridical mani-
festations of racism. At the same time, those measures taken at a community
level to struggle against environmental hazard, summed up as the work of the
grassroots “environmental justice” movement, fail to register very forcefully
in the consciousness of the mainstream environmental organizations, thereby
preserving the white and middle class composition of the latter. Thus the
great struggle against ecological breakdown that haunts our time is deprived
of alliances that could make a real difference.
So dismal a picture calls for a deepening of our understanding of racism in
relation to ecology. The problem is only complicated by the fact that until now

these discourses have come together in malignant ways, rising to a crescendo
in Nazi efforts to combine organicity of society with genocidal racism, but
by no means limited to that dreadful chapter in evil-doing.” Both racial and
ecological thinking originated as value-laden impulses with natural-scientific
trappings within the general domain of biology. As such, they comprised tech-
niques of ordering the world, with varying value positions and varying degrees
of awareness as to the boundaries between the human and non-human por-
tions of the world. The notion of race, as a kind of subspeciation, belongs to
the eighteenth century, while ecology came upon the scene a century later,
in 1866, to be exact, as the intellectual child of the German biologist, Ernst
Haeckel, who saw it as a way of unifying the ramifying branches of the life
sciences into the study, as Donald Worster puts it, of “all the environmental
conditions of existence.”
Although ecology remains a respectable biological subspecialty complete
with formidable mathematical means for calculating the populations of in-
terrelating species, its inner drive to bring things together has extended its
domain from the methodological to the ontological sphere. Ecology as a result
has come to stand for whatever discourse would emphasize connectedness, or
the logical consequence of being fully-connected: wholeness. In the context of a
world order hell-bent upon breaking down organicity and wholeness, the eco-
logical perspective readily becomes endowed with ethical and political impli-
cations. Given an ecological crisis that calls into question the very survival of
our world, to “be ecological” has come to signify a commitment to wholeness
and the sustenance of flourishing relationships between different beings —in
ethical terms, an “ecocentric” position. This perspective more or less defines
“greenness, as the global political reaction to the ecological crisis. Thus we
now talk of “ecocentric values” and “ecological politics,” the former including
respect for wholeness and the intrinsic worth of nature, and the latter, all those
measures and social movements taken to approach this receding goal.
And yet a definite tension remains attached to these notions, for who is
to say whether ecocentric wholeness eventuates in the flourishing affirma-
tion oflife or in the disastrous outcome of fascist organicity? The question is
grounded in the problem of incorporating humanity into ecological thinking,
and its answer requires a rethinking of ecology in a more deeply emancipatory
vein,” which will be extended here by incorporating the critique of racism.
As a species, humans are self-evidently part of nature, in fact, that part
whose behavior leads to the alarming implications noted above, as well as to
the drive toward ecocentrism. Can we be both the subjects and the objects
of ecological discourse? We must, I would argue; else there is no connection

between humanity and nature beyond the instrumental, and therefore no
ground for any ecological politics. To exclude humans as natural creatures en-
gaged in our own ecological relations is to ignore those relations humans set
up and impose on other creatures, relations that include both the degradation
of nature and the overcoming of that degradation. If no ecological statements
can be made about humanity, then we are outside the ecological web. And if
this is the case, why should we care about nature, except as it provides com-
forts and resources? Why, that is, should we undertake anything with respect
to the natural world beyond the actions of the Bush administration?
The question is, ow to connect humanity and nature without suc-
cumbing to the reductiveness of naturalization? How are we both part of
nature— including that part which generates the ecological crisis
— while
yet preserving our human identity? Can there be a “human nature” that
preserves human values?
Humanity, like all natural creatures, inhabits specific ecological locations,
or “ecosystems.” As each creature has its own species-specific pattern of eco-
system, so the human ecosystem is distinct from that of all other creatures,
and expressive of humanity's own specific “nature” within the manifold of
nature. Marx, often regarded as an anthropocentric thinker seeing humanity
as essentially over nature and basically distinct from it, was in fact profoundly
concerned about human nature and our organic relation to nature.'! The core
human-natural relationship for Marx is expressed in the fact of production,
the transformative activity of labor that brings this about, and the subjec-
tive, or imaginative, interiority necessary for this.'7 In this regard, humans
produce their own ecosystems, and at the same time, define and reflect upon
them. Such is our “nature,” and the way we produce ecosystemic relations
depends upon whether nature is degraded or restored to integrity.
The formal properties that apply here can be summed up as follows: Eco-
systems that tend toward wholeness may be defined as integral, in which case
they flourish and give rise to new form; while those that fragment or become
static and collapse can be defined as disintegrating. The former engage a pat-
tern of differentiation, in which elements of the ecosystem are distinct but
connected; while the latter employ one of splitting—in which elements lack
common being and move along separate paths—hence disintegrate. Differ-
entiation is a notion within dialectics: the elements are distinct, even clash,
but remain connected and give rise to new configurations of form. Splitting,
on the other hand, is identitarian; it drives not toward wholeness but toward
totalization, and, within the ceaseless flow of ecological relations, toward
eventual breakdown.

Degrees of differentiation and splitting apply to all ecosystems, human as
well as non-human. The distinction! depends upon what is being differenti-
ated or split, that is, upon the fabric of ecosystemic connectivity, which in turn
is a function of the “nature” of the creature involved, and its participation in
the universal givens of living beings. All beings are connected through physi-
cal flows and signals—the molecules and photons, etc., transferred through
basic functions like nutrition, sense-input, etc. But each has its own natural
signature through which these are organized and structured. In human beings
these particulars are subsumed in production and in the dialectics of subjectiv-
ity through which production is organized. This may be described in terms
of recognition and representation. That is, the specifically human is ingrained
in language and through the vicissitudes of consciousness and the self. I have
little doubt that something akin to these functions occurs in other species
with complex nervous systems, but no doubt at all that what is specifically hu-
man organizes itself along radically different lines from other beings, for which
reason humanism—by which is meant Marxist humanism—is an entirely
natural doctrine for a fully developed humanity.”
The integrity of a human ecosystem is therefore a function of the degree
of recognition exercised by its human agents. Such an internal trace, which
amounts to recognizing nature in ourselves and ourselves in nature, is what
ties together the human ecosystem and sets limits to its expansion, as the
aboriginal hunter slays his prey yet honors the common being between them.
This is the sign of differentiation, wherein difference and connection are both
subsumed. Similarly, splitting in ecosystemic terms is manifest as failure of
recognition. We can say that the ecological crisis produces and is produced
by a splitting between humanity and the rest of nature, such that we do not
recognize ourselves as part of nature, nor nature as part of ourselves — that is,
we lose both naturalism and humanism. Capital is the specific agent of this,
its “efficient cause,” whose instrument is the generalization of commodity
production and the regime of exchange value that dissolves the connectiv-
ity of things in the acid of monetization. Compare in this respect the tribal
hunter to the factory farm and slaughterhouse, the former internally limited
by a spiritual, i-e., differentiated, recognition, the latter split apart by the logic
of exchange, and primed to expand until ecological collapse sets the limit.
Thus accumulation drives the ecological crisis."
As humans are part of nature, so may society be viewed from an ecosys-
temic perspective, mediated by the peculiarly human forms of connection.
Since racism is a kind of relationship within sgciety between living beings and
their environment, it, too, should be seen in ecological perspective. This rela-

tionship is historically produced as domination, but defined biologically and
in terms of essences. Therefore the ecological definition of race incorporates
the false biologization of race, and the racist ecologies that arose on that basis.
These need to be destroyed if a truly human society is to arise.
We have observed that “race” was originally a biological term, emerging
in the context of an eighteenth-century furor to classify and subdivide the
world, both natural and human. Within this schema, races were subspecies
at the point of separation into new species—a logic appropriate for ordering
a divided humanity subject to imperialism. The device was highly functional
for the newly independent ex-British colonies in America at the moment of
state formation. The problem was how to fabricate a working democratic pol-
ity given the structurally uneven distribution of slave-based production. The
solution to this dilemma—the infamous counting of slaves as three-fifths of a
person for purposes of representation in Congress—
was necessary as a political
compromise, but clashed with the legitimating discourse of human rights upon
which the new republic had been founded. As laid out in the Declaration of
Independence, Americans were to “hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all
Men are created equal.” Given the slave system, then, either the ideal of human
right did not apply to the new Republic, or those excluded from the polity were
not truly human. In this latter instance—needless to say, the preferred option
for the Founding Fathers—the contradiction would be acceptably resolved if
some legitimate way could be found of defining the slaves as less than human.
Enter the notion of race under the imprimatur of science." Thus, corrupted
science enabled African chattels to be excluded from the category of “Men,”
and helped preserve the legitimacy of the fledgling state at the cost of inserting
racism at a fundamental institutional level. This led in turn to the reinforcing
of science as a legitimation of racism. And so science was subsumed into the
practice of racism from the beginning, in the sense that racism, proper, always
adds an element of essentialist rationalization, and with it a kind of institutional
solidity, to the mass of vicious prejudices inherited from premodern society.!"”!
Scientific racism has continued the work of justifying oppression up to the pres-
ent, despite the crushing refutation of its central claim, that blacks comprise a
subspecies of humankind, closer to the animal world and less than fully human.
03) And racism itself has remained the great mark of splitting within human
ecosystems, a blight the overcoming of which is demanded both by justice and
for the healing of our ecological estrangement.
In the terms developed above, racism is a system of splitting into “races”
mediated by lack of mutual recognition. Contrary to prevailing liberal ideol-
ogy, every such split is an instance of domination in which the dominator
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM (76

assumes the position of “fully human,” and the dominated becomes the “less
than fully human”: what is animal, lustful, instinct-ridden, and essentially in-
capable of civilization. Note that this theme arises directly within the logic of
race, whether or not we search for its ecological connections
— indeed, every
instance of racism is some variation upon it. What else could be the meaning
of Brown v. Board of Education, with its condemnation of the “separate but
unequal” facilities wrought by segregation? Or the meaning of “apartheid” in
its manifold forms, from Jim Crow to the horror of South Africa? The entire
repertoire of racism, raging on despite the elevation of some blacks to posi-
tions of national leadership, entails deeply inbuilt patterns of group forma-
tion resulting in the separation of black and white communities. Residential
and cultural separation, combined with splits deeply sedimented into the col-
lective psyche, become the actual means by which splits are laid down and
reinforced within human ecosystems.
There are some important implications of viewing racism from an eco-
logical standpoint. Because ecology is concerned to see the integration of
parts into wholes, this perspective gives insight as to why racism should not
be reduced to any of its particular elements, whether these appear economi-
cally, or in the “justice” system, or sexually, or psychologically—any of the
innumerable forms in which it surfaces as prejudice and injustice. Racism is a
mark of an entire civilization, and appears within each particle of the whole,
as a virus lodges in each cell of its host. Some years ago I published a work,
White Racism, which essentially argued this theme, except that the common
medium through which racism perfused the West was called a “psychohis-
torical matrix.” This reflected my psychoanalytic practice of the time, and
suffered, with psychoanalysis, from a lingering subjectivism.""#
A key notion of that work was that the “black problem” was really a
“white problem”; thus race emerges as a split-off product of the false identity
of the West, what the whites-are-not. The notion of race already implies rac-
ism, and is organically linked to other structures of Western development,
such as capitalist rationalization and abstraction, or Calvinism. Now, by lo-
cating the whole within the framework of ecology, we can better see how
racism and capitalism alike are embedded within a deep estrangement from,
and repression of, nature, both as body and as external environment. Nature
unrecognized and split-off is the mark of a society lurching toward ecoca-
tastrophe; such nature is a wilderness that is the externalization of the dark
interior of “whiteness”: darkness projected onto the fellow creatures who hap-
pened to be those conquered by the expansion of white civilization and who
now are animalized within it; a darkness set forth as the antithesis of the En-

lightenment. Or as Blake, astounding in his insights into racism, put it into
the mouth of his Little Black Boy: “But I am black as if bereavd of light.”"""
A society riven with such deep splits will clutch at spurious totalizations
in order not to fall apart. Such a society may attempt to recapture its spiri-
tuality as a union with nature, as the Nazis could boast of their kindness to
animals and profess an ecological awareness superior to that of the “degen-
erate’ nations of the West. The telltale mark of such false spiritual totaliza-
tions —and false ecological syntheses —will regularly be revealed to possess
the form of racism. A unity with Spirit or nature that does not at the same
time express the differentiated recognition of other humans is a reliable indi-
cator of fascism, and a predictor of devastation to both humanity and nature.
We now arrive at a reasonably satisfactory explanation of why race is a
better predictor of local pollution than income. It comes down to an arith-
metical combining of the two rejected objects in the machinery of the system:
wasted people and the high-entropy wastes that emerge at the other end of
the assembly lines. Both are drags upon accumulation; and there is an inner
excremental logic that would have one dumped upon the other.""®!
The political implication is clear: that the future of ecology is dependent
upon its anti-racist content. One good place to start would be by forming al-
liances with struggles for environmental justice, in which polluted communi-
ties of color have risen up to reclaim their human power against capital. The
larger lesson is that we cannot heal nature without radical social change, for
a movement that limits itself to cleaning the environment while neglecting
the splitting that disintegrates human as well as natural ecosystems serves the
needs neither of nature nor of humanity.
[Socialism and Democracy, 2003]
NOTES
1. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1990).
2. Daniel Faber, personal communication.
3. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 39f, for
a succinct indictment of the racist uses of ecology.
4. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), 192. Gilroy points out, citing Howard Kaye, The Social Meaning ofModern Biol-
ogy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), that Haeckel’s idea of community was an
influential precursor of National Socialism (Against Race, 362, n. 37).
5. The argument here is drawn from my The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the
End of the World? (London: Zed, 2002).
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM re)

See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). The
verdict against Marx’s ecological credentials arises chiefly from the behavior of the socialist
tradition until now. In my view, which we cannot take further here, whatever ecological
devastation was wrought by “actually existing socialism,” was a sharp indicator of how far
it had strayed from authentically Marxist principles. See the symposium, “Socialism and
Ecology,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (September 2002), 49-117, for a discussion of
the complexities.
See Marx’s famous formulation about the “worst of architects” distinct from the “best of
bees,” as evidenced by the specifically human attribute of building in the imagination
before altering external reality. Capital 1, Chapter 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976),
283f.
Thus from the perspective offered here — for theoretical projects are also ecosystemic — the
strategy is to differentiate human nature from the rest of nature without splitting us from
nature.
Where full development means to Marx that humanity transcends alienation in commu-
nism: “This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism; and as fully
developed humanism equals naturalism...” “Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manu-
scripts of 1844,” in R. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: WW.
Norton, 1976), 84.
10. See Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, for discussion.
Wale This instance is famous and paradigmatic, but should not be considered the sole cause of
racism; rather is it emblematic of an enormous mass of contradictions between values,
desires, and practices which we cannot explore here.
Thus Othello, though once a slave and always stigmatized as black in Shakespeare’s play,
yet rose to be Venice’s Commander-in-Chief, an unthinkable outcome until modern rac-
ism evolved to the point of including, and without disgrace, a Colin Powell. Similarly, Jews
in medieval Europe could convert without prejudice, in contrast to Nazi essentialism.
Often now the discourse moves into the domain of social science, as well-rewarded schol-
ars produce thickly researched tomes on the hopelessness of black culture — a new kind of
victim-blaming grounded in patterns of belief and meaning instead of DNA.
Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984[1970]).
William Blake, “Songs of Innocence,” The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 106f. Part of what is astounding here is Blake’s composing
“The Little Black Boy” at the same time that Kant, Hume, and other avatars of the En-
lightenment were writing amazing racist nonsense about the Africans. While these sages
were pronouncing the essentially subhuman character of the blacks, Blake gives his black
boy these words: “And thus I say to little English boy. /When I from black and he from
white cloud free/And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:...” Racism: a cloud of
blackness and whiteness: who ever put it better?
This is to be combined with the mediating, and entirely consistent, fact that those who
own and control the corporations that pollute do not live in the communities that receive
the pollution. ;

Amandla!
(2006)
FEBRUARY 27, 2006. I am in the Sydenham Police Station with Richard and
Shannon of the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
We are seeking four young residents of the Kennedy Road Settlement who
have been picked up by the Durban Police and beaten for the offense of assem-
bling for a legal march; to be more exact, we are hoping that our presence may
inhibit further brutality. The youths were preparing to assemble along with
four or five thousand other shack dwellers to protest the snail’s pace at which
their subhuman conditions of life are being addressed by the government, but
the police got there first, clogged the roads, harassed the marchers and made
arbitrary arrests. The conditions protested include, besides the shacks which
are sufficient in themselves to drive protest, unemployment of 40 percent in
the townships (South Africa has the highest unemployment rate of sixty-one
countries tracked by Bloomburg News, 26.7 percent); AIDS rates of roughly
30 percent; a steady pulse of evictions and privatization of water and electric-
ity despite virtually no sanitary facilities; phenomenal pollution (in the case of
Kennedy Road this entails being adjacent to a foul-smelling and toxic waste
dump, with no garbage pickup for the community itself); and a tide of crime
that seeps from the settlements to the society beyond. The march was perfectly
legal because South Africa has perhaps the world’s most progressive Constitu-
tion, thanks to the heroic revolution that overturned apartheid. Yet, twelve
years into the “New South Africa,” police are once more bringing the dread
“Kasspirs,” those hideous armored personnel carriers that look like they belong
to a demented video game, into the wretched settlements that continue to scar
this green and pleasant land; and young blacks are still feeling their wrath.

It is my fifth trip to South Africa, and the present issue of Capitalism
Nature Socialism reflects one of its purposes, which is to develop an editorial
group at CCS, and join hands with comrades from the Global South. ‘This
association did not materialize out of thin air. Patrick Bond, the director of
the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is a long-
time Capitalism Nature Socialism contributor and a prominent member of
the international circuit from which the journal emerges. South Africa has
been an important place for me since the late apartheid era. I was fortunate to
have been able to lecture in the country just as the blockade against the racist
regime was giving way in 1989, and I have returned on four occasions since,
in part for family reasons, but also drawn by the sheer dynamism of the place.
The economic product of South Africa is about as large as the rest of the
continent combined, and it plays a hegemonic role within Africa comparable
to, and substantially integrated with, that of the United States from without.
This turn of events was anticipated in some bitter discussions amongst com-
rades on the scene in 1989. It was evident that the long nightmare of apartheid
terror was coming undone under the pressure of mass uprising, global em-
bargo and Cuban arms, and that nothing could stop its unravelling. But there
was also recognition that the impending revolution was going to be bourgeois-
nationalist in character, and that there was no great hope that it would go
onward in a socialist direction given the balance of forces, notwithstanding
the powerful labor movement, the highly developed class-consciousness of the
people, and the presence of the South African Communist Party. This lat-
ter was communist, however, in the pitiable manner of its “stagist” partners
around the world, that is, it saw privatization as the road to socialism. More
importantly, it had long been obvious that the leadership of the dominant
African National Congress saw things the same way, except for the socialist
part, which despite some rhetorical flickers was never on the table so far as it
was concerned. Nelson Mandela will be justly remembered as one of the great
figures of our time. But his giant stature, still largely beyond criticism, has also
served to block out the light of a future beyond the rule of capital.
I suppose Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and the other leaders of the “New
South Africa” reckoned that the violent heritage of apartheid had left the
country vulnerable to a bloodbath if capital were to flee. But there was more
to it than that. An unseemly embrace of the big bourgeoisie and a cold shoul-
der to the pauperized masses has marked the ANC since taking power. And
it was not necessary. I sourly recall during a visit in 1997 watching the great
leader greet with his radiant smile the IMF, delegation come to View With
Pride the fruits of their Structual Adjustment Program, and thinking: Never

had a better opportunity for socialism been squandered. Here, at last, was a
revolutionary surge, with that power from below which it takes first-hand
exposure to Africa to appreciate, but carried out for once in the context of
a high level of development. Not Cambodia here, not Nicaragua, not Cuba
sucked dry by Uncle Sam, not bleeding Russia, not raped China—but a vital
civil society with schooling in democracy and a yearning to move beyond
a disgraceful past, a first-rate technical-industrial apparatus, splendid infra-
structure, a geostrategic setting invulnerable to invasion and packed with
natural wealth, and most important of all, a nation buoyed up by a mass base
yearning to be free. It could have been truly wonderful... And they signed it
over to the IME
As the New South Africa moves through its second decade, the conse-
quences of this betrayal are unfolding. Kleptocratic degrees of corruption are
sensationalized in the press. The deposed Deputy President goes on trial for
rape. President Mbeki jets about the world spinning utopian jargon and mut-
tering about dealing severely with those paupers who agitate to improve their
conditions of life. Meanwhile, a soft fascism creeps into the precincts of the
ANC. As organized resistance is violently suppressed, Mbeki is celebrated like
a tinhorn dictator by the state-controlled TV, which urges the viewer-citizen
to be “Proud to be South African,” while otherwise anaesthetizing her. Is
South Africa heading in the direction of Mexico’s PRI, who took over a victo-
rious revolution and strangled hope for 80 years with a one-party system? Or,
as quite a few fear, is a more rapid downturn in the wings, sometimes called
the “ZANU-fication” of South Africa after the path set forth by Zimbabwe's
Robert Mugabe, who has dealt with the failure of his revolution with a turn
toward racist authoritarianism? What is not speculation, however, is that, in
lockstep with the great centers of global capital, the technicians of the ANC
will keep the beat of privatization going, or as Patrick Bond develops the no-
tion below, continue the “looting of Africa.”
By the standards of this world, neoliberal South Africa is thriving, with
a large budget surplus, a strong currency, and splendid shopping centers. Re-
tool the commodity logos and put the cars on the proper side of the street
(please!), and there are spots here where a stranger can imagine he is in San
Diego or Miami. But the more capital develops wealth, the more it develops
poverty, which in Africa engages a history radically different from that of the
plundering countries—a history inflected by Ashwin Desai in this issue for
KwaZulu Natal, the state of which Durban is the metropolis.
The looting of Africa is the looting ofits people. The profound alienation
of poor Africans is not only revealed in terms of unemployment, AIDS, and

all the indices of material misery, but also stems from the memory of a night-
marish past and the failed promises of the present. On the lee side of a great
emancipatory event, the weight of 350 years of “Europe” presses down all the
harder. But the sufferings inflicted upon these diverse peoples do not take
from them the fundamentals of their humanity, only the means to realize it.
It is the job of resistance to enable a new set of means.
Here the activist in Africa has an advantage over her counterpart in the
metropolis, for the tentacles of capitalist rationalization reach less deeply, and
the degree of emotion that can be mobilized is greater. Multiple legacies can
be engaged —the still-fresh memory of a heroic struggle atop the memories of
original society. I remember getting off the plane in 1989 and being directly
taken to a rally and march protesting the vile apartheid police (who were
given to tossing freshly beaten activists from the tenth floor of their headquar-
ters). Never had I experienced such a sense of power coming from a political
event. I recall thinking: these people are going to win, nothing ultimately can
stop them. That power —in Zulu they call it “Amandla!” —still reverberates,
linked to its response, “Awethu!”: Power to the People! It came forth here in
a remarkable strike at the university, an institution obedient to the dictates of
the Master (there is reason to believe that the World Bank was directly calling
at least some of the shots), and squeezing the public sector just a little more.
A year ago a similar struggle had fallen apart in bickering among the four
unions representing the university’s workers. This time they stood together,
and that wondrous and scarce appreciated phenomenon, solidarity, emerged.
Solidarity —the creation of a new human ecosystem through the sublation of
the existent. A preserving and transforming, the only kind of path toward a
better world. The strike sputtered a bit, but then caught on, asa fire will, a fire
that builds as well as consumes. Service staff and faculty shouted and danced
and marched together, blacks, Indians and whites, women and men—people
talked to each other, opened up, rejoined. After nine days, the administration
crumbled and gave in. The outcome matters enormously to the impoverished
lower end of the working hierarchy. But what matters, too, is the fact that
solidarity, which is the precondition for another world, is possible and ac-
cessible through militant action. The making of a new world is contained
within the hopes and memories of the existing world. Amandla! is its sign
and substance. m

A Materialism Worthy of Nature
(2007)
THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS cannot be properly approached unless the relations

between humanity and nature are properly understood. In his important new
work, Marx's Ecology, John Bellamy Foster argues that this must take place
through an appropriation of materialism, specifically, the materialism of Karl
Marx, who was, along with Darwin, one of “the two greatest materialists of
the nineteenth century” (1). Foster's ambition is to extend the recognition
of Marx's historical materialism, grounded in the primacy of production in
human existence, into the domain of nature. Because Marx had as profound
a grasp of natural science as of history, Foster argues that this expanded mate-
rialism is as authoritative a guide to ecological struggles as it has been to the
struggles of labor.
As Marx got it right, there are those who got it wrong, that is, have placed
ecology in a non-materialist framework. These Foster broadly categorizes as
“Greens.” It is the purpose of Marx's Ecology to displace what Foster views
as the currently influential green theories with a revivified Marxist ecology
incorporating natural as well as historical materialism. Thus:
the aim [of this work] is to highlight the weaknesses of
contemporary Green theory itself, as a result of its failure
to come to terms with materialist and dialectical forms of
thinking that...led to the discovery of ecology (and more
importantly socioecology) in the first place. Put differently,
the goal is to transcend the idealism, spiritualism and dual-

ism of much contemporary Green thought, by recovering
the deeper critique of the alienation of humanity from na-
ture that was central to Marx’s work... ,(19-20).
To Foster, Greens are not simply mistaken, but a serious menace, indeed, “the
whole history of materialist approaches to nature and human existence” is
under the threat posed by “contemporary Green thought.” Green thinkers are
said to attribute “the entire course of ecological degradation to the emergence
of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century,” leading to “a crude
rejection, at times, of nearly all of modern science, together with the Enlight-
enment and most revolutionary movements — a tendency that has fed into
the antirationalism of much of contemporary postmodern thought” (11).
From the indictment of Green “spiritualism,” it follows that the growth
of science/materialism entails the progressive detachment and devaluation of
“spirit,” and equivalently, notions of God, from conceptions of the universe.
Thus, as science developed, “which came to be equated with the growth of
materialism, God was dislodged from the material universe....” To Foster,
“God in the view of modern science [has] no relation to the material uni-
verse” (13).
And not only modern science. One of the chief features of Marx's Ecol-
ogy is the attention given to the post-Aristotelian philosopher Epicurus, about
whom Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation, and for whom Foster has virtually
unbounded admiration. In Foster’s opinion, Marx turned to Epicurus (as against
the idealist Hegel) for his fundamental philosophy of nature — and he did so
because Epicurus was the originator of materialism, as expressed in his core belief
that “nothing comes from nothing.” To Epicurus, all material existence is a cease-
less rearranging of atoms. As he wrote, aligning himself with Democritus, reality
ultimately consists of nothing but “atoms and the void.”
There is much more than an intellectual position at issue here. Epicure-
anism was an intensely moral doctrine whose views on nature were subsumed
into overcoming the fear of death — for once a rational person realizes that
death was only a recycling of one’s atoms, there is, to the Epicurean, nothing
left to fear." Foster’s intensely anti-religious attitude is anchored here. He
sees Epicureanism as a signal triumph in the age-old struggle against religion,
through its affirmation that “an understanding of nature and its laws, that is,
the progress of science, would disperse terror inflicted by religion.”
A kind of syllogism may be abstracted from the above: Foster likes Epi-
curus because he finds in him confirmation of his own anti-spiritual ma-
terialism; Marx admired Epicurean materialism; logically, therefore, Marx’s
materialism must also be of the anti-spiritual, anti-religious kind.

To summarize, Foster's argument entails the following four theses:
= That “contemporary Green thought” is suffused with “idealism, spir-
itualism and dualism;”
= that Marx developed a materialism for his philosophy of nature
which was perforce anti-spiritual (the same applying to historical
materialism, the two being logically linked); and that it is this kind
of materialism, therefore, which should be the guide for political
ecology.
And, at a deeper, more systematic level,
= = that spiritually driven thinkers cannot say anything interesting about

matter and the philosophy of nature;
= that the development of science entails a materialism grounded in the

progressive despiritualization of the world, epitomized by the Epicu-
rean ideal that reality consists of nothing but atoms and the void; and
that within this, God has no relation to the scientific conception of
the material universe.
All of these notions are false.
The first, about the anti-materialist, anti-scientific bias of Greens, is sim-
ply vacuous, insofar as Foster never bothers to prove it beyond the level of
fiat. Not only does he fail to “highlight the weaknesses” of Green thinkers, he
only makes one concrete reference to these enemies of science, and in that, he
contradicts himself by highlighting the strength of the green position.”! This
is odd, considering how important he regards the critique of the greens to be.
In any event, the Greens turn out to be mere rhetorical whipping-boys for
Foster, and need not be discussed further here, however much they need to
be taken up in a fuller treatment of these questions.
As for the other propositions, there is no difficulty in showing that Marx’s
historical materialism was quite hospitable to the spiritual dimension of exis-
tence, and that his materialism of nature, such as it was, was remarkably open
as well to this dimension. Furthermore, that spiritually oriented people, e.g.,
certain mystics, have had highly interesting things to say, “presciently,” about
nature; and finally, that a number of the greatest natural scientists were not
only highly spiritual individuals, but integrated spirituality into their concep-
tions about matter and nature, that is, into their materialism.
Foster’s errors are grounded in a misconception about the meaning of
“spirit.” We can infer (because, as with the Greens, there is no actual critique
of the spiritual) that for him, to be “spiritual” is synonymous with what is

anti-scientific, irrational and superstitious, and is merely a kind of rough con-
gener for the pole of “idealism” in the classic materialism-idealism debate.
He fails here to comprehend the distinction between spirit and religion, that
spirit is an elementary property of being human, and that religions are the
binding of spirit for the purposes of social cohesion. ‘Therefore he also fails to
appreciate that there is much more to spirituality than its religious elabora-
tion, and much more to religions than their spiritual impulse.
Spirit is a dimension of human existence defined by the property of going
beyond the socially constructed boundaries of the self. It is in tension with
reality, therefore, insofar as reality is a social construct. This leaves room within
spirituality for a great many mistakes, and also a great deal of destructiveness.
But it also leaves room for a great deal of anticipatory and prefigurative ex-
perience, when, as often happens, the social construction of reality impedes
the expression of human being. In these cases, the spirit-dimension can both
anticipate a better life, and, crucially, provide a kind of mobilization toward
attaining that life. There are two kinds of “better life” of interest here:
= where the existing state of affairs blocks freedom through one form
of oppression or another; and
= where a kind of spiritual leap is needed in order to see beyond the

established limitations of thought. <
The first instance plays an important role in radical and revolutionary

history, while the second instance plays an important role in the history of
science. Marx was exquisitely aware of the first relationship, and incorporated
spiritual awareness into historical materialism, doing so, it may be added, as
an atheist. This is no contradiction, as there is nothing that says that spiri-
tuality need include a belief in a personal god, nor, certainly, the historically
constructed gods of patriarchal religions. Needless to say, Marx (and Engels)
despised religious obscurantism; how could any champion of human freedom
think otherwise? But they did not confuse the repressive aspects of religion
with the whole of religion. There is copious evidence that Marx and Engels
took a view of religion far subtler, richer, and certainly more dialectical than
Foster's monotonous and obsessive rejectionism. The Marx who wrote that
religion is the “soul of soulless conditions,” at the least took the notion of the
soul seriously, as a form of protest against an atrocious world and a sign of
struggle for a better one. He cannot be regarded as an anti-spiritual thinker,
as Foster would demand of any proper materialist.)
From another angle, it can be argued that although he inveighs against it
throughout his text, Foster’s materialism is essentially of the mechanical kind,

and as a result, a poor guide to developing a political ecology adequate to the
current crisis. The mechanical character of Foster’s materialism emerges as a
reductive view of matter, connoted in his approval of the doctrine that nature
is nothing but atoms and the void. This implies that matter lacks an internally
formative principle, which, in Foster’s hands becomes the pejorative term, a
“vital force.” In taking this stand, he allies himself willy nilly with the form
of materialism that, in the sharp words of Alfred North Whitehead, saw na-
ture as “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of
material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”” As with the blanket rejection of spirit,
there is a failure of dialectical vision, which confuses crude vitalism as well
as crude religiosity with the more profound insight that nature intrinsically
gives rise to form.
Significantly, two other thinkers who do not agree with Foster’s reduc-
tive view of matter are Marx and Engels. There is a remarkable passage in The
Holy Family (also given over to praise of Francis Bacon, though unquoted by
Foster) where we learn that:
Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first
and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and math-
ematical notion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vi-
tal spirit, a tension — or a “Qual,” to use a term of Jakob
Béhme’s — of matter. The primary forms of matter are the
living, individualising forces of being inherent in it and pro-
ducing the distinctions between the species.
Lest this be thought a youthful romanticism, it should be pointed out

that Engels included the point again in his 1892 Socialism Utopian and Sci-
entific, adding the gloss that the “mystic Bohme puts into the German word
something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas; his ‘qual’ was the activating
principle arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous develop-
ment of the thing, relation, or person subject to it... ald)
A “vital spirit” to matter, authorized by reference to the “mystic Bohme” —
what is this world coming to! Yet the notion makes perfect sense in the con-
text of historical materialism. Marx needs a natural-philosophic companion
to his notion of the productive transformation ofnature as the core of human
nature. It follows that unless nature contains a kind of formative principle, in-
herent in matter, humans can have no organic relation to nature, and cannot
be fully natural beings. I would speculate further that Marx and Engels were
drawn to the qualitative aspect of Béhme’s materialism, because of its intrin-
sic adaptability to the notion of use-value. As the domain of the qualitative,

use-values are subordinated to exchange and, more generally, to the quantita-
tive reduction of the world essential to capital. Correspondingly, valorization
of the qualitative is essential for any ecological socialism."
A much more extended discussion would be necessary to clarify the enig-
matic figure of Jakob Béhme (1575-1624) and the scientific and philosophi-
cal issues raised here. But it is certain that Jakob B6hme is not what Foster has
in mind as a proper materialist, nor can his philosophy be remotely described
as Epicurean. To the contrary, this cobbler from Gérlitz in Germany has been
described by Paul Buhle as “North America’s first philosopher of the green
dream,” through his influence on Anabaptist settlers of Pennsylvania who
were inspired by Béhme and built radically feminist, socialist and ecologically
aware intentional communities.”
Bohme was the first, and perhaps the greatest, Protestant mystic. His
works are excruciatingly difficult to read (or even to obtain) and have largely
passed from the general view."°! Yet William Blake praises him in The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, and Hegel cites him as the fount of German dialectical
philosophy. And his writings, gnarled and clotted with wild symbolic imagery,
are full of the most audacious insights into matter and the cosmos, though
remaining deeply Christian and outside the discursive practices of science.
How can this be? Because it is possible to obtain a true insight into nature,
and hence construct one leg of a vital materialist philosophy, through reflec-
tion on lived experience — experience, that is, of an embodied and conscious
creature whose being participates in the universe. Needless to say, insight of
this sort in no way substitutes for the hard, patient verification of nature-in-
itself that can be shared, transmitted and developed through the community
of science. To put it metaphorically, a person does not walk on one leg. But
an in-sight can orient others — as Marx saw something in Bohme’s notion of
“Qual” that corresponded to and helped organize his incipient notion of a his-
torical materialism grounded in struggle, sensuous practice and consciousness,
by orienting it with an equivalently vital materialism of nature.
Bohme was able to transcend the split between flesh and spirit that had
haunted Christianity. This came to him through the perception of a flash of
light in the midst of a deep personal depression. Suddenly he saw all — but
just as remarkably, held off from communicating his insight for years until
the implications could work themselves through. What he came up with, and
continually elaborated for the last decade of his life, were a series of visions
into the basic structure of matter and the cosmos that had to remain merely
spiritual and theosophic until the science of the twentieth century could pose
the questions anew.

Being “theosophic,” Bohme’s language was turned to speaking of nature as
a manifestation of God. But in contrast to Foster’s narrow view, and however
limited, this was not an idealist replacement of nature, rather, an intuitive and
symbolic way of describing the awesomeness of nature that could stand in, so
to speak, until the physics of general relativity 4nd quantum mechanics could
catch up to it. Bohme’s God is not some daddy in the sky, but the very unfold-
ing of universal formativity. His genius was to realize that God itself had to
come into being — formativity is itself formed from within nature. Bohme’s
God does not create heaven and earth, It (though called “He”) is itself created
from non-being — the “Unground” — in a process that bears an uncanny
resemblance to the Big Bang of current cosmological theory.
We need not elaborate further. A study of Bohme by the French-Roma-
nian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu illuminates a number of the is-
sues." Like Whitehead and many other natural scientists of the last century,
Nicolescu has not been ashamed to use the language of spirit to speak about
the awesome spaces into which science has led us. It is a question of seeing
the real: words like “materialism” and “idealism” are only signposts crafted at
a particular historical juncture to orient the direction in which to look; and
by the very nature of things, which includes our own unfulfilled nature, this
needs be a process of unending discovery. Thus the only valid materialism is
an open one. To refer materialism back to authority, whether that of Marx
or Epicurus, is to seek dogmatism and orthodoxy, not truth and certainly
not liberation. Remember, it was Marx who called for “ruthless criticism” of
everything existing, including one’s own views.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to
man as it is, infinite,’ wrote Blake, some time before the coarse views of cau-
sality and matter deriving from our “Newtonian” life on the ground became
sundered by the new science. “Atoms and the void” is, after all, a rather desic-
cated way of envisioning a quantum world where there is no longer a certain
boundary between matter and space, on the one hand, and matter and mind,
on the other. Just so does a kind of “god-talk” become serviceable under such
circumstances — as it has been amongst the greatest of scientists whose
privilege it was to break through the boundaries of the mechanical notion of
matter.""2) To continue with Blake’s lines from The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, “man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of
his cavern.” What is now known of nature explodes these limits, even as the
established science continually reimposes them.
What astounds about the quantum world is the dialectic between its ab-
solute facticity, on the one hand, and its dissolution of the notion of a fact,

on the other. The quantum realm may lie below the threshold of the electro-
magnetic/gravitational set of influences that determine the sensuous founda-
tions of our being, but it is as secure as the laws of mechanics that enter into
the building of a bridge, and for the same reason: the theory defines a set of
practical operations integral to material life. In the words of a recent survey
of the “quantum century” just completed, there exists “an astonishing range
of scientific and practical applications that quantum mechanics undergirds:
today an estimated 30 percent of the U.S. gross national product is based on
inventions made possible by quantum mechanics, from semiconductors in
computer chips to lasers in compact-disc players, magnetic resonance imag-
ing in hospitals, and much more.” 9)
But if quantum mechanics is real, then its incomprehensible implica-
tions are real, too. For example, theory predicts and experiment confirms the
radically counterintuitive finding that photons passing through a double-slit
interference apparatus can be in two places at once; and, moreover, that “ex-
perimenters can choose, after the fact, whether the photon was in both places
or just one.” The article continues:
The simple double-slit interference experiment, in which

light or electrons pass through two slits and produce an
interference pattern...was successfully repeated for ever
larger objects: atoms, small molecules, and, most recently,
60-atom bucky-balls. After this last feat, Anton Zeilinger’s
group in Vienna even started discussing conducting the ex-
periment with a virus. In short, the experimental verdict is
in: the weirdness of the quantum world is real, whether we
like it or not.
I should rather like it, as undermining the notion of discrete atomicity

has powerful practical implications, particularly in the struggles over biotech-
nology. Capital’s control over the genome rests on the assumption that the
gene constitutes a kind of enduring subcellular atom, discrete, commodifi-
able, and suitable for the ideologies of biological determinism. Yet this notion
has been thrown by recent work, as Evelyn Fox Keller puts it, “to the verge
of collapse.”"4) From an extraordinary number of angles, capped off by the
recent bombshell as to the paucity of genes in the human genome (which just
might push the orthodoxy over that edge), it now appears that DNA, while
essential to the organism, cannot be said to act as a linear transmission belt
of genetic information. The reality (excuse the green expression) seems to
be one of “holistic” determination, where the functionality of the cell (and

the organism, and the society...) acts reciprocally on genetic function and
structure, so that the notion of a discrete genic particle simply becomes in-
coherent.
The issue is not whether the counter-intuitive findings of quantum phys-
ics will play a role in unravelling the “mysteries of life,” though it cannot be
said that they will play no role, either, inasmuch as the latter can be played
out at a level where quantum processes operate. Our present purposes are
served, rather, with the realization that the materialism of brute matter that
has reigned over Western science for 400 years has to be overcome, and not
simply for intellectual reasons. The hopes for ecological transformation re-
quire a materialism of nature that may have been intuited by Marx, but re-
mained scarcely developed by him, for sound historical reasons. We will never
construct such an open and vital materialism, however, with an orthodoxy
grounded in stale debates of nineteenth century science.
There is a great deal politically at stake in these seemingly abstruse re-
flections. If one believes that the future of ecological politics depends on a
kind of “red/green” synthesis, then an open materialism serves this goal, while
imposing orthodoxy forecloses it. | am not sure where Foster stands politi-
cally here, though reading Marx’s Ecology, with its contempt for Greens and
high praise for the early ecological advances of the U.S.S.R., suggests that he
would go the route, so to speak, on the old “red path.” Certainly his work
has little resonance with the ferment of social movements and cultural forces
that are becoming the subjects of the struggle for an ecological society, nor
can it give an inkling as to why they have arisen and how they can be unified.
Yet without them, the path toward ecosocialism will be a lonely one that will
dwindle and lose its way, leaving behind only an empty tower of Marxism as
its monument. @
NOTES
1. As he said: “death is nothing to us.” The position is developed at length in the famous
Roman rendering of Epicurus, Lucretius, John Godwin, ed. On the Nature of the
Universe, trans. R.E. Latham, (London: Penguin, 1994).
2. Inthe course of denouncing “Greens” for their “Romantic, organicist, vitalistic, postmod-
ern” hostility to modern science, Foster singles out their attack on Francis Bacon (whom
he likes) for contributing to “the domination of nature” (11). This arguable but coherent
view is then turned on its head in an endnote where, instead of disputing the green cri-
tique, he cites “a classic, brilliant example” ofit,Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature,
and praises its “profound critique of the mechanistic and patriarchal tendencies of much

of seventeenth century science” — in other words, the only specific mention of a Green
idea runs precisely opposite to the position he argues in the text (259, n32). This highly
confusing passage becomes understandable in light of a strong tendency in Marx's Ecol-
ogy to hand out credits to those upon whom, for whatever reason, Foster wishes to confer
favor — in this case, perhaps, to a scholar who, however green, obliged with a jacket en-
dorsement. It may be noted that the encomium, “great” appears, by my count, in at least
35 places in the text, placed next to names that Foster would like to have on his side.
Or see Engels’ appreciative discourse on Thomas Miinzer in The Peasant War in Germany,
where he regards the Anabaptist rebels as the forerunners of proletarian revolutionaries.
See also Marx and Engels on Religion (New York: Schocken, 1964) and of particular
interest, Jose Porfirio Miranda, Marx Against the Marxists (Maryknoll: Orbis Press,
1980). The literature is vast, and entails the entire complicated development of liberation
theology. The general relations of spirit and religion are treated in my History and Spirit,
2d ed.(Warner, NH: Essential Books, 1998).
In a discussion of Justus Liebig, the soil scientist admired by Marx (and, properly, by
Foster himself) we find that: “the material concept of metabolism was mixed rather
inconsistently with the notion of ‘vital force, in which Liebig hearkened back to an
earlier vitalism, identifying physiological motion, even mystical sources (imponderables)
that could not be reduced to material exchange. Liebig’s contribution here fed into a
whole tradition of analysis that has been called ‘vital materialism,’ which tried to avoid
mechanistic approaches to biochemistry.” Much more to Foster’s liking is the view that
“metabolism” —a leading category through which the materialism of nature and that of
humanity are interrelated —is “explicable entirely in terms of a scientific materialism
emphasizing energetics (the conservation of energy and its exchange).” In other words,
he espouses a reductive materialism along the lines of “atoms and the void” (160 italics
added). Epicurus, it should be added, introduces a “swerve” undertaken by the atoms,
which Foster associates with freedom, inasmuch as the motion of atoms is not determined.
But this is at best a weak notion, which can be satisfied by Brownian movement.
Alfred North Whitehead, “Science and the Modern World,” in ES.C. Northrop and Ma-
son Gross, eds., Alfred North Whitehead An Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1961),
412. The error, in Whitehead’s view, lies in mistaken abstraction—a conception ame-
nable to synthesis with Marx. Whitehead, needless to say, was no animist, which is also
a misplaced abstraction. He expounded, rather, a “process” view of nature. Elsewhere,
Whitehead writes of the European “fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the
ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter...spread throughout space in a flux of con-
figurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it
does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from
the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an
assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at
which we have now arrived” (378).
From another angle (and these issues can be no more than suggested within the confines
of this essay) Foster never quite gets beyond the First Law of Thermodynamics, the con-
servation of matter and energy. There is also the Second Law, the entropy principle of the
decay of form, the grand synthesis of which only makes sense in relation to the principle
that nature generates form to be decayed.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975),
151; italics removed. Note the close parallel with Whitehead, cf, n. 5.

See my, “The Struggle for Use Value,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 11, 2 (June, 2000).
Paul Buhle, “Jakob Boehme: A Gate into the Green World,” in Capitalism Nature Social-
ism 7, 1 (March, 1996).
10. The most accessible introduction in English is in Jacob Boehme: The Way to Christ, trans.
Peter Erb (New York: The Paulist Press, 1978). Seeaalso John Joseph Stoudt, Sunrise to
Eternity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957).
idle Basarab Nicolescu, Science, Meaning and Evolution: The Cosmology of Jacob Béehme
(New York: Parabola, 1991).
See Ken Wilber, ed., Quantum Questions (Boulder and London: Shambala, 1984),
in which Nobel Laureates Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Schrodinger, Louis de Broglie,
Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, among other twentieth century physicists deprived
of the corrective of Marx's Ecology, reveal themselves to be remarkably soft on God.
lee Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler, “100 Years of Quantum Mysteries,” in
Scientific American, February, 2001. Wheeler, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, was an
associate of Niels Bohr in the 1930s and proposed this experiment in 1978.
14. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 69. See also,
Mae-Wan Ho, Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? (Bath, UK: Gateway Books,
1998).

Grace Paley and the Dark Lives of Women
(2007)
I WAS PREPARING TO SIT DOWN and write this House Organ as a reflection
on Capitalism Nature Socialism’s ongoing series of dialogues within ecofemi-
nism, but then Grace died, and so I decided to write about Grace Paley and
the lessons she taught us about life, which includes ecofeminism.
Grace might have said something like that. Her sentences often ended
with wiry turned phrases that shook the words that came in advance of them
before they could settle in and congeal. When she was speaking this way, she
would punctuate with a little dance of her eyes. The package would make you
smile and think, not always consciously, but to good effect. That life should
include ecofeminism is not about to make one smile, but a thought or two on
the subject may be useful.
Grace did not like abstractions that occluded reality. On the last occasion
I saw her, in August of this year at her home in Thetford, Vermont, sitting
outside before the landscape that swept gently down to distant mountains,
she roused herself briefly from the lethargy that was overcoming her spirit
to tell of a train ride in China during the late Mao years in which she and
Bob were part of a delegation, many of whose members were consequential
leftists. As the train chugged through the countryside she gazed through the
window trying to take in the details of the landscape and the myriad activities
of the peasants. But a gaggle of the leftists would have none ofit. For them
the occasion was another opportunity to fight the good fight as to the relative
merits of Mao, Trotsky and Stalin and other leaders of the battle against im-
perialism. They were blind to anything so messy and “inscrutable” as the im-

memorial Chinese countryside. What mattered was arguing about big things
like the mode of organizing the masses. . . .
But then a kind of cloud descended over Grace. She said, “I don’t feel so
good,” and asked to be excused. She had to be escorted away. It was the last
time I saw her and the only time we parted without that smile, Grace’s smile
that contained and projected her name, a smile that graced a person and
made him or her feel blessed.
Grace Paley was well celebrated during her later years with a procession
of prizes, lectureships and so forth, but it is safe to say that while this was a
recognition of the extraordinary achievement of her stories and poems, it
only delineated the outer range of that achievement. This is because what she
wrote about and transferred into words was the silent lives of women, lives
whose centers will remain silent until the social conditions for bringing them
into full speech are achieved.
In a 1982 interview Grace made this explicit:
GP: Fora long time I thought women's lives... I didn’t think
I was shit, but I really thought my life as a woman was shit.
Who would be interested in that crap? I was very interested
in it, but I didn’t have enough social ego to put it down. I
had to develop that to a point where I said, ‘I don’t give a
damn.’ Women who have thought their lives were boring
have found they're interesting to one another.
KH: Is that part of what you meant when you said some-
thing about your stories taking what is dark and hidden and
recreating a balance in the world?
GP: Something like that. Stories illuminate. That’s the pur-

pose of a story for me. To shine a light on what’s dark and
give it light. And the balance is something else. .. . It’s justice.
KH: What are you most interested in balancing?
GP: The dark lives of women. This is what made me write

to begin with. And at the time I thought no one would be
interested in seeing it. But I had to illuminate it anyway. If
for nobody else, for myself and my friends."
This is both an affirmation and a critique of the Enlightenment, whose il-

lumination overlooked the dark lives of womeh. In The Magic Flute, Mozart?!

pushes against the limits of the Enlightenment with a spiritual message while
sharing its perspective on gender. In the part of the Singspiel that ceases to be
farcical or childishly reassuring, the part that skirts the abyss, Mozart counter-
poses the radiant deism of Sarastro and his Freemasonic disciples to the terrify-
ing vengefulness of the Queen of the Night. The Good Father clothes his be-
nign humanism in some of the lowest notes in operatic history, while the Dark
Mother is made to wrestle with an impossibly high F in an extraordinary aria
whose challenge is to be sung so as to rescue musical beauty from an everpresent
risk of shrieking. The Queen isareincarnation of the Erinyes of Aeschylus’s
Orestaiea, those vengeful spirits of the slain mother, Clytemnaestra, who have to
be put to rest if civilization is to proceed. The Magic Flute’s Queen is the vengeful
mother whose cherished daughter, Pamina, has been abducted, her love alien-
ated by Sarastro, shown by Mozart to be reason’s victory over the dark female.
And Pamina, in escaping her mother, escapes becoming like her mother. Mozart
represents her as the partner of her beloved, the youth Tamino; this she achieves
by sharing his rite of passage, hewing a path for the equality of all the daughters
who are to fight their way out of patriarchal tradition with its hysterical, shrew-
ish, shrieking mother-figures.' It is a lovely, endearing touch but raises a nag-
ging question: just what happens to the dark mother made to vanish through
the radiance of Enlightenment; where did she come from, and where will she
go? In The Magic Flute the Queen of the Night is simply driven off by the fanfare
of the coda as all unite behind Good Father Sarastro. In real history, however,
the discarded Mother is to have considerably grimmer consequences, in ruined,
neglected lives, and indeed, through the domination of nature.
Grace Paley experienced these consequences as the worthless and radi-
cally devalued lives of ordinary women. Her greatness lay in bringing a differ-
ent kind oflight to these dark places.
It was a gentle light that conveyed a shrewd dignity and stemmed from
groundedness in the totality of existence. In an interview with Amy Goodman
conducted four years ago, Grace said that life, for people like her, presented a
three-part aspect. First, there was being a mother, bringing new life into the
world and caring for it; second, there was politics, how to realize justice and
put an end to war; and third, came one’s work, one’s self-expression, in her
case, writing poetry and short fiction. These were not to be divided and put
into slots, the way work and domesticity are under capitalism, but seamlessly
differentiated. Caring for others was politics and art; politics was caring and
art; and art was politics and caring. Thus did the dark mother principle come
into the day and take its place with honor and humor—this latter because
the tripartite unity was also a source of irony and the deflation of ego.

Grace never met a label she didn’t dislike, and I’m sure she would have
winced at being called an ecofeminist. But to me, she exemplifies what we
are trying to get at when that word is placed in the center of what Capitalism
Nature Socialism tries to do, which is to bring ecosocialism into the world.
Ecofeminism is the recognition that ecosocialism will be an empty repetition
of the domination of nature unless gender is foregounded. This means that
we do not seek so much to take care of resources as of life. It means recogniz-
ing that for us, what we call life comes from the bodies of women; and the
degradation of women, the darkening of their lives, is also the deadening of
nature. The realization puts the notion of being “grounded” in a new light, as
entering into the entirety of what is meant by “earth”: nature in its practical,
lived being. Thus the grounding of Grace Paley, like the “subsistence perspec-
tive” of Maria Mies and co-workers, are integral to ecofeminism, which is
integral to ecosocialism.")
The “world-historical defeat of women” —to use the term of Engels—is
also the downfall of nature. And the resurrection of nature will not happen
except through the restoration of women to dignity. Maria Mies traced the
lesion back into its mythic Sumerian beginnings in her keynote lecture to the
2005 Capitalism Nature Socialism conference in Toronto, which was published
in this journal in 2006."! History begins with the slaying of the Great Mother,
Tiamut, by her warrior son, Marduk; and Nature begins with the butchering
of Tiamut’s body and the strewing about of its pieces. Thus arose the sky and
the earth and the places on it, suitable for the work of civilization and its orga-
nized systems of production, all under the tutelage of the Fathers. With this,
the male became seen as the creator, and the female, whether as mere matter
or Great Mother, his enemy. Mies writes: “In my view, therefore, one cannot
safely speak of ‘socialism, ‘ecosocialism, or ‘ecofeminism unless one is able to
understand why, when, and how nature was made our enemy. . .”(21)
And we should also understand those for whom nature is a friend, like
Grace Paley:
What would happen

if there were a terrific shortage of goldenrod
in the world
and I put my foot outside this house
to walk in the garden and show city visitors
my two lovely rosebushes
and three remarkable goldenrod plants
that were doing well this year

I would say: Look!
how on each of several sprigs
there are two three dozen tiny stems
and on each stem three four tiny golden
flowers petals stamen pistil and the poflen
which bees love
but insufficiently
otherwise
can you imagine the fields
on rainy days in August brass
streaking the lodged hayheads
dull brass in the rain
and under the hot sun
the golden flowers
floating gold dust of August fields
for miles and miles =
NOTES
Kathleen Hulley, “Interview with Grace Paley,” in Delta, revue du Centre d’Etude et de
Recherches sur les Ecrivantes du Sud aux Etats-Unis 14 (1982), 27. Quoted from Jacque-
line Taylor, Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1990), 10.
Or Emanuel Schikaneder, the actual librettist. |have never read a meaningful dissection
of the relative roles of these collaborators in The Magic Flute. This is related to the fact
that the great majority of commentators regard the libretto of Mozart's last opera as
an embarrassing pastiche, unworthy of being taken seriously, and a mere container of
the immortal music. See also, Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1994).
For example, Mrs. Bennett of Pride and Prejudice; and most of all, the archetypal Mrs.
Rochester of Jane Eyre (and Wide Sargasso Sea). Both are completely cut off from the
earth. Another manifestation ofthe type is the nightmare.
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the
Globalized Economy (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999).
Maria Mies, “War is the Father of All Things” (Heraclitus) “But Nature is the Mother of
Life” (Claudia von Werlhof), Capitalism Nature Socialism 17, no. 1 (March 2006), 18-31.
Grace Paley, “Thetford Poems,” in Leaning Forward (Penobscot, Maine: Granite Press,
1985) 75):
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM 20f

~
co ane
— a we Pa
= iS 24) ipa Y ene Gi

Sa amet (i, Catecres:
im, snp
‘ a a ®
Ss A eh ate te
. | anh
a rpoverenircing
ft ¢€
a hed) _ - 4
[| oe
The Time Has Come
(2007)
And now for the good news about global warming...

EARLY IN MAY, 2007, THE UN-SPONSORED Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-
mate Change released its final report to an expectant world." This, the Sum-
ma Climatologica of the scientific community, was devoted to the question of
“mitigation, that is, what can be done to reduce the Greenhouse Effect, and
what would it cost us. Judging from the collective sighs of relief with which
the report was received, the IPCC had given society a green light to continue
on its present path.
The BBC’s website was typical in its enthusiasm. “Climate change ‘can
be tackled,” said the headline, and under a photo of a pair of hands counting
out what appeared to be a very large amount of cash, we read that “Tackling
climate change need not cost the Earth, the IPCC says.” In the article itself,
the IPCC’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, called the report “stunning,” adding that
“human society as a whole has to look for changes in consumption patterns”
if this was to be realized.)
The essence of IPCC’s good news was that society in its existing form
could avoid calamitous global warming with a sacrifice of an acceptable loss
of economic output (measured as global Gross Domestic Product), and even,
in some scenarios, with a gain in economic product. In other words, the re-
gime of global capital could press on as before, its vital “growth” secured, with
various substitutions and efficiencies to see it through the crisis.
It’s all in the numbers: Presently, atmospheric CO) stands at around 380
parts per million, having climbed from pre-industrial levels of roughly 280

ppm, while the mean global temperature has risen by about 1°C during the
same period. The consensus_among climate scientists is that we must limit
CO, to under 450 ppm by the year 2030 in order to keep the increase to a
relatively safe level of no more than 2°C. On this basis, say the journalists,
the IPCC report concludes that the trick could be done with such mitigation
measures as energy substitution and new transport systems that would cost
less than 3 percent of global GDP. If the world were willing to settle for a
“lite” makeover, it could have it for a mere 0.2-2.5 percent of GDP and arrive
at between 535 ppm and 590 ppm; and if it really wanted to keep raking in
the wealth, it could opt for the package that held CO, to between 590 ppm
and 710 ppm, with a range of economic growth that went from a decrease of
1.2 percent toa miraculous increment of0.6 percent.
This is the news that caused smiles to break out all over and glasses to be
raised to more and cleaner growth. Is there anything wrong with this story?
Let me count some of the ways.
= First, there is the inconvenient fact that the IPCC simply does not
promise what the reporters said it does, namely, a mitigation of glob-
al warming. If this requires keeping the mean temperature increase at
or below the limit of 2° C, as climate scientists say, then no scenario
provided by the IPCC is mitigative. Somehow, the bearers of good
news overlook the fact that within the report itself, all the scenarios
of response accept that atmospheric CQ) will be greater than 450
ppm by 2030 (or 2050 in other sections), and on this basis predict
that global temperature rise will in all cases be greater than 2° C.")
If we keep CO, between 450 ppm and 535 ppm, we get between
2 and 4 degrees Celsius increase; while 535-590 ppm is correlated
with a rise of between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius; finally, the big money
option that actually holds out the hope of an increase in GDP by
allowing CO, to rise to between 590-710 ppm is correlated with a
mean global temperature that will be 4°C to 6°C (about 9°F) higher
than the present.
= All these figures are unacceptable. Aside from the hellish immediate
effects of heat, drought, storms, etc., the prospect of global warming
greater than 2° C opens upon the nightmarish phenomena of run-
away positive feedback loops, for example, the release of sequestered
methane from melting permafrost, or loss of the albedo effect by the
loss of ice and snow cover. Needless to say, what is lost as ice, returns
as rising seas—with all that this portends. The figure of an increase

of between 4 and 6 degrees Celsius, in fact, is often cited as the tip-
ping point beyond which the collapse of civilization becomes a real
possibility. This is the Good News about the future? What should
we think of a society whose main news media are so dishonest and/
or incompetent as to blithely read catastrophe as a happy outcome?
The reporters are aided by the IPCC itself, a global techno-bureacracy,
with mechanistic thinking to match. Whatever the individual scien-
tists who make up its membership may think, the IPCC does not
comprehend process, dialectic and the whole. Its caution should not
be mistaken for prudence. It is, rather, the product of tunnel vision
and the associated lack of imagination. Thus IPCC worships predict-
ability and is made queasy by non-linearity. Its report prates on about
lifestyles, health benefits, and the like, yet regards as entirely unprob-
lematic certain nasty and very destructive technologies like nuclear
power and biofuels, which it deems necessary to overcome the pet-
rocarbon/global warming problem. Meanwhile, the positive feedback
mechanisms mentioned above are tucked away in thickets of opaque
prose: “if the damage cost curve increases steeply, or contains non-
linearities (e.g. vulnerability thresholds or even small probabilities of
catastrophic events), earlier and more stringent mitigation is economi-
cally justified.” This is deadly, obfuscatory nonsense. Given the grav-
ity of global warming, what it calls “small probabilities of catastrophic
events” are precisely the all-too-real harbingers of non-linear change
that have already made the news: the opening up of arctic seas, the ac-
celerating factors that seem to be at play in the melting of Greenland’s
ice caps, the fissuring tundra permafrost, and so forth. How small is
small? In any case, the IPCC is saying, in effect, that it will wait until it
is too late, and only then will it recommend acting radically.
The decisive element is the economy: no serious action is to be taken

unless it is “economically justified.” Not justified in terms of saving
life, or civilization, or our children, mind you...no, these do not
“count” in the great scheme of things. There is a twofold elision of
difference here: judgments about the economy are assumed equiva-
lent to judgments about society as a whole; and the economy itself is
assumed to be a purely rational process in which all share equivalent-
ly. There is no ruling class in the IPCC’s worldview; and no sense of
any potential alternative to the current system: the economy stands
for all of society; the economy is impersonal, benign and rational; it

is measured in terms of pure quantity like GDP. Being such, it is a
beneficient god before whom all must bow and scrape.
Some further words about this economy before we move on. The
dominant ideology flattens everything out into quantification. Thus
whatever makes or involves money is summed into GDP, whether
this be manifestly destructive, ugly, or ecocatastrophic. SUVs hap-
pen to be better for GDP than small hybrids, and the automobile
economy is better for GDP than one based on public rail transport;
that’s just the inevitable result of turning society over to the principle
of accumulation, which is to say, to subordinate quality to quantity.
So long as capital continues to organize consent to its rule—a pro-
cess in which it has been brilliantly successful
— the delusions of the
economy can be sustained. But whether capitalist growth can be sus-
tained is another matter. Perhaps I am too cynical about such things
and unappreciative of economic science, but the forecasts launched
in the IPCC report seem to me to have no more predictive value than
soothsaying by means of the entrails of chickens. However, they do
tell us some general things: that mitigation of global warming will
mean an economic decline, as is always is the case when “externali-
ties” like letting nature be polluted are internalized; and further, that
this decline will be greater the more mitigation is achieved. Finally,
to talk of economic progress at the high end of the spectrum of ris-
ing temperatures is frankly insane. A “growth” at the cost of allowing
mean temperature to rise 4° to 6° from current levels annihilates all
sense of an economy as something that provides “goods.” At that
point, rises in GDP will essentially consist of factors such as money
made on flood-control equipment, body bags, and police technolo-
gies to control migrating masses of people. Moreover—and here
we take into account what the IPCC simply cannot, namely, that
capitalism is a ruthless class society —we can be quite certain that
any decline in GDP will be unevenly distributed and fiercely con-
tested. There are always winners and losers in capitalism's class sys-
tem, and the prospect of decline will excite among capitalist elites a
fierce outbreak of predatory impulses. In a word, war will accompany
the effort to manage global warming under capitalism, the degree to
which this is to be military or economic being irrelevant for present
purposes. And in this world of heightened chaos, war will do what
it always does—sow ecological ruin and political authoritarianism.

This is exactly what has been transpiring in the Middle East (and
increasingly throughout Africa), and there is no way out of it within
the present system. A corollary is the annihilation of even that mini-
mally rational deliberative moment required for the implementation
of the protocols set forth by the IPCC.
Science Wars
TAKEN AS A WHOLE, THE IPCC report represents an uneasy marriage between
two strands of science
— the arcane discourse of comprehending the motion
of global climate across time and into the future, and standing over this, the
aptly-named “dismal” science of economics. Economics stands over climate
science insofar as it is the prime science of the ruling capitalist classes who
control the state and the scientific establishment. The whole of modern in-
dustrial capital is inextricably wound up with the course of science, and so
control over science is an absolute condition for accumulation. Therefore
scientists today are bought and sold in the marketplace. They develop in
tightly structured environments shot through with patronage, hierarchy and
the tentacles of state and corporate power. Isolated geniuses like Newton or
Einstein sailing alone through seas of thought before releasing their findings
to an astonished world will never be found again in a mature capitalism.
Nowadays the world has its imprint on every scientific product through each
stage of its making, and theories are born branded, with patents attached.
Science has become a practice by committee; and the IPCC, swollen with
authority, is the Committee-in-Chief of the climate science establishment.
Given the record of organized science,'! this should alert the critical
imagination to radically question the IPCC and its findings. Bourgeois eco-
nomics is born corrupt. It seeks to justify the regime of private property and
money, and it is bound to corrupt whatever it controls by fixing the results in
a form convenient to the ruling classes. But this does not reduce the findings
of climate science to whatever ideology demands, if only because such would
not be convenient to the capitalist elites. The scientifically attuned bourgeoisie
cannot afford to disregard the actual contours of nature, whether in making a
mobile phone, devising an anti-cancer drug, or, in this case, picking one’s way
through the intricacies of global climate change.'*! However, nature’s actual
contours are not so easily discerned, either as an object of investigation or in
the production of discourses
—in the present case, the discourse of what is
to come in the sphere of climate change. There is a large gray interpretative
area and an irreducible uncertainty within which the presence of class interest
looms to shift the argument in the way of capital.

But this does not imply the wholesale rejection of climate science, such as
has been undertaken by the eminent left journalist Alexander Cockburn in a
series of articles released earlier this year. A number of lessons can be learned
from the ensuing debate.” The foremost of these is that anybody who has not
dedicated years to mastering the intricacies of climate science and its internal
debates is not competent to judge on the question of climate change. Let me
qualify: nobody is fully qualified to judge on climate science, climate scien-
tists included, because the phenomena it subtends are too incompletely un-
derstood, vast, intricate, and non-linear for human comprehension. Climate
scientists, on the other hand, are potentially competent to say something of
use on the subject, having proved their bona fides by years of painstaking ef-
fort to appropriate the collective human endeavor to understand climate. The
rest of us are not competent in an immediate sense: that includes myself, and
the great majority of readers of this column. And it most definitely includes
Cockburn, who is more incompetent than the rest of us, because he is so arro-
gant as to think himself competent. One can demolish Cockburn’s arguments
by pointing to the way he cherry-picks the findings that suit his prejudices, or
the loose way he uses various “experts” who support his views —a number of
whom are proven whores to big business, and in one instance, even a follower
of Lyndon LaRouche—or by his refusal to give adequate documentation
(these points having been usefully made by George Monbiot in an extended
riposte to Cockburn). But the game is already given away by Cockburn’s
style, in which instead of patiently building an argument, he uses vitriolic
rhetoric to thrash about attacking those who disagree with him. Thus for all
his gifts, Cockburn lacks the essential quality of judgment, which begins with
an appreciation of self-limitation and is necessary if one is to be taken seri-
ously in matters of this sort.
The citizen who wishes to evaluate the claims of climate science neither
blindly follows nor rejects the experts, but educates oneself to learn from
them. In brief, we need criteria of plausibility. The collective character of sci-
ence no doubt dulls its edge but is not an unmitigated evil: what it imposes
by constricting the individual imagination, it balances with the corrective of
collective judgment against cranks and frauds. Thus Monbiot properly tasks
Cockburn with failing to honor the criterion of peer review in assessing his
sources. But this criterion must be employed critically, by evaluating the com-
munity of peers according to their relation to the forces of accumulation and
the capitalist state.
The criterion is all too easy to apply to the global warming debate, where
climate scientists who support the greenhouse gas hypothesis have been ex-

cluded from policy positions within the Bush administration and/or replaced
by people who move on a revolving door between the state and oil giants
like ExxonMobil. It is remarkable how minimization of global warming or
downright skeptical hostility to its implications correlates with class position
of capital
— excepting Alex Cockburn, of course, where it seems to manifest
an unfortunate personal idiosyncrasy. In any event, we should recognize that
associations of climate scientists who stand against petrocapital —whether
or not politically elaborated is not at issue—are to be accorded the greater
plausibility.® Nor should it come as a shock to learn that it is these who
consistently support the argument that global warming is real, and that it
is driven primarily by industrial effusions and veering rapidly toward cata-
strophic nonlinear feedback loops.
Said scientists need not take up the implication that the chain of causation
extends into the cancerous system of capital—though of course there is noth-
ing stopping them from doing so as individuals, as indeed is the case for all of
us. Nothing extrinsic, that is. For most are stopped by “mind-forg’d manacles”
of fear and deadly, comfortable torpor, stopped from seeing that the predica-
ment of the planet and all that live upon it demands a revolutionary response
to the common crisis. This is not the place to spell out how the system im-
pedes coming to grips with its own ecodestructiveness. It needs be mentioned,
however, that the insights of people like George Monbiot and Al Gore have to
be criticized for pointing the way toward what needs to be done about global
warming, while failing to give vision into the political measures that need to
be taken if we are to escape the trap set by the dominant way of production.
Nonetheless, the interwoven processes revealed here, between the on-
coming planetary catastrophe and the gross inadequacy of established power
for dealing adequately with it, may illuminate what is both immediately a
necessity and a possibility: that all effort must be given to building an eco-
centric society beyond capital, a free society in harmony with nature. There
are no blueprints at hand for this, but the time for turning in its direction is
now. And the signpost of this turn is the word, ecosocialism. Happily, a meet-
ing is afoot to bring this notion further into the world, to be held in Paris, in
the month of October of this year. The reader may learn more of this on our
website: http://www.CNSjournal.org/. All who want to transform the world
in an ecosocialist way are welcome. @

NOTES
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group

III, draft of May 4, 2007, Final draft to be released in November 2007. The IPCC is a
joint project of the World Meteorolgical Organization and the United Nations Environ-
ment Program.
See BBC News, May 4, 2007, online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/

nature/6620909.stm, accessed January 14, 2019. Other typical responses were:
“Mitigating the effects of climate change is not only cost-effective over the next 25 years,
but it is actually affordable.” Geotimes web extra, “IPCC says Climate Change Mitigation
is Affordable,” May 4, 2007, online at: http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/may07/article.
html?id=WebExtra050407.html, accessed January 14, 2019. “World Has What It Takes
to Fight Climate Change” Climate Ark, Climate Change blog, May 3, 2007.
There is one exception, which is fragmentary and went unnoticed by the journalists I
read: Category Al (on page 22 ofthe report) calls for holding CO, under 400 by the year
2050, leading to a 2.0° to 2.4° increase. The mitigation in CO) requires a reduction of
from 50 percent up to 85 percent in emissions from present levels. No GDP reductions
are given, presumably because they offer no solace to hopes for economic growth. As
noted, the report as a whole is unfinished. It is also fiendishly difficult to follow. If you
enjoy scratching your head, then I can recommend an hour spent in trying to make sense
of the IPCC findings.
IPCC report, op. cit., 26.
Both in terms of direct damage, for example, the nuclear epoch or chemical pollution; or
in the commission ofgross error, for example, the notions ofwitchcraft, phrenology, or of
the races of humankind as biological subspeciation, all produced by what was considered
to be “science” of the day.
I recall reading some years ago that approximately one-third of the economy depended
upon electronics, whose foundation is quantum mechanics, a form of discourse entirely
closed to common sense and way beyond crude manipulation by dominant ideology.
For the debate see https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/denying-time-and-place-in-the-global-
warming-debate-by-derrick-okeefe/, accessed January 14, 2019. Cockburn’s rejection of
the greenhouse gas/global warming hypothesis is longstanding. When I was running for
the U.S. Senate in 1998 on the Green Party line and foregrounding the need to radically
contend with global warming, Alex was supportive except in this respect, in which he
identified me as deluded by the global warming hypothesis.
The most authoritative such network (which even considered /‘affaire Cockburn) is to be
found at http://www.realclimate.org/, accessed January 14, 2019.
Facing End-time
(2007)
The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and
its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East.
Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the
mouth ofthe dragon, out ofthe mouth ofthe beast and out ofthe mouth
of the false prophet. They are spirits of demons performing miraculous
signs, and they go out to the kings ofthe whole world, to gather them for
the battle on the great day of God Almighty. “Behold, I come like a thief}
Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him, so that he
may not go naked and be shamefully exposed.” Then they gathered the
kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
—Revelation 16:12-6, New International Version
ONE PASSES MEGIDDO on the road from Jenin to Haifa, and absent the mark-
er, would pass by. Today just a mound with assorted low ruins, the celebrat-
ed and once strategic spot, continuously inhabited from 7000-500 BCE, is
where Pharoah Thutmose III defeated the Canaanites in 1478 BCE, Egyptian
general Necho II defeated Judah under King Josiah in 700 BCE, and Allenby
defeated the Ottomans and Germans under General Otto Liman von Sand-
ers in 1918, crushing the Turkish armies, securing Palestine for the British
Empire, and enabling Britain to make good on the promise made by Lord
Balfour the year before to turn the land over to the Zionists. The victorious
general took the title of First Viscount Allenby of Megiddo, and the Zionists
seized their opportunity and have never let go.

When John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation in 90 CE, he used
the name of Megiddo (in Hebrew, Har-Megeddo, or Mount Megiddo) to
designate the place where the final battle between the forces of Christ and
Anti-Christ was to be fought. The latter referred of course to Rome, though
named Babylon in John’s text and eponymously called the great whore as the
center of all iniquity and fornication. The Emperor Domitian had just sharp-
ened tension with the emerging Christian church by demanding that all his
subjects call him “Lord and God” and worship his image. John was one of the
resistors and escaped death by entering upon exile. Once safe on the Aegean
island Patmos, he experienced his visions and wrote them down in what was
to become the last book of the Bible.
Like Megiddo, Revelation has seen better days, although not ones of ob-
scurity. Actually, the text did not become famous until the French Revolu-
tion, when its tone of ecstasy became suitable to represent the emotional
overtones of the destruction of an old, corrupt world in the name of a bright
future. It was the one book of the Bible most capable of rendering history as a
universal process (under the auspices of Christ, needless to add), and, because
it was the Bible’s final statement, it became a reflection on the whole, weaving
together the Old and New Testaments. Once the notion of revolution entered
history as a possibility, Revelation became the ur-text of radical transforma-
tion. Reverberations appear in the anti-slavery struggle (recall “The Battle
Hymn of the Republic”), of Communism (think of the Internationale as one
of its chapters), and of Zionism itself.
Revelation’s Old Testament roots derive from the prophetic tradition,
which was a reaction to the corruptions of the first Israeli state. The prophet
was fundamentally critical of established authority, which he dissected from
outside the gates of the city with poetic insight and moral grandeur. In the
spirit of those times the prophetic tradition was messianic, for the arrival of
a messiah signified the overcoming of the burden of iniquity and a path to a
better future. There was in this, however, a profound tension. Prophecy was
an uncovering, an indictment, a mythopoetic revealing, and because of this,
an opening to a new and better world. It could not depict the future itself,
nor could it be a literalism, lest it lose poetic power. That is, prophecy should
not be confused with prediction. To the extent prophecy becomes predictive,
it descends into magical thinking and superstition.
Which of course is just what happened to Revelation as the revolution-
ary traditions to which it was an ancillary became themselves corrupted. As
prediction, the emotive tones of the text no longer turn inward. They become
signposts upon which an external authority can lay out a schema in which myth

and symbol return as actuality. The active encounter with the text required by
prophecy turns into a passive submission to authorities who assume the right to
utter the Word of God. Literalist interpretation of the Bible is to some degree
immemorial, and largely informal and spontaneous. In the modern era, how-
ever, the rise of scientifically based skepticism “forced literalism into the rigid
ideological forms we know under the name of Fundamentalism.
In the nineteenth century this was formalized in England and the United
States as the doctrine of “Dispensationalism,” which rendered the Bible into
a coherent account of world history extending into the future. This ugly word
stands for a great many morbid tendencies. Zionism falls under its rubric,
inasmuch as Dispensationalism authorizes the otherwise risible notion that
God promised Palestine to the Jews. Zionism can be Christian as well as Jew-
ish, a fact that spreads its grim net over a lot of United States Middle East
policy. Dispensationalism is the organizing principle of Christian fundamen-
talism of the sort that Karl Rove gathered for the benefit of George W. Bush.
In novels such as the Left Behind series (which claims sales of 40,000,000
copies) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Revelation is turned into a paean
to genocide and the survival of the Master Race. Dispensationalist funda-
mentalism today supplies the Christian Right with millennial predictions of
the “rapture,” along with its barbarous notions about gender and sexuality, as
well as the firm belief, which locks together the Jewish and Christian Zionist
movements, that God gave Israel the right to Palestine in order to prepare the
way for the final battle of Armageddon, following which the faithful would
be raptured to sit beside Christ for a thousand years. Approximately a third of
the population of the United States believes this to be true."!
These strange developments arise from deep lesions within bourgeois so-
ciety, which millennialism attempts to heal. Neverending anxiety, alienation,
helplessness, and dislocation have marked capitalism from the first days and
grow with the accumulation process as it breaks through all boundaries. This is
the source, and fundamentalism is the twisted response that brings more discord
in its wake. So it is no mystery as to why these movements develop in places
like the United States, where a wide-open field of belief characterizes religious
history and terrible loneliness seeps throughout society. We should heed Marx,
then, and seek to overcome the roots of angst and meaninglessness in capitalist
society rather than brood on the preachers who exploit the misery of the masses.
Since 1945 millennialism has become radically aggravated by the real
possibility that society is not only alienating but potentially doomed. ‘This
has taken shape in two phases, first, with the realization that the state has
the power to annihilate humanity and much of nature with nuclear weap-

onry; and later with an awareness that the ecological crisis may put an end
to things thanks to the disintegration of society's natural foundation. Thus
the notion of an “end-time” which is central to the narrative of Revelation
acquires a permanent, foreboding reality: end-time becomes the end of life.
Where the nuclear era couched this in terms of a single cataclysm (the threat
of which is if anything worse today), we now contend with yet another layer:
growing awareness of ecological breakdown that reproduces the process in a
more extended way, more uncertain in the details of its unfolding, yet more
inexorable, too, in that its dynamics are in place and moving along indepen-
dently of whether a mad general or President pushes a button. The button,
so to speak, has already been activated, and the dynamic is manifest in a fitful
disintegration of socio/nature, loomed over by prospects such as that global
warming may soon— perhaps in as short an interval as ten years according to
some climate scientists —enter upon a “breakaway” period of exponentially
chaotic positive feedback. This could conceivably, in the worst, yet still scien-
tifically arguable, case, leave Earth as uninhabitable as Venus. The issue is not
whether such an outcome is plausible; it is scarcely so. The problem is that
such scenarios are thinkable, and enter the Zeitgeist. A weird kind of dialecti-
cal shadow-play ensues in which the corruptions of end-time literalism are
replaced by a scientifically respectable possibility.
Contending with this awareness, neither minimizing its gravity nor suc-
cumbing to irrational panic, is the great challenge of our era. How can we be-
come strong enough to recognize the truth of the end-time that looms over us,
and bear its implications? One way—necessary but not sufficient—would be
the time-honored means of art. Indeed, the conjuncture has already generated
one great film: Alphonso Cuarén’s The Children of Men (2006), in which the
entire planet twenty years on resembles Baghdad today, migrations of hundreds
of millions of “fugees” (a certain implication of advancing global warming) take
place within the context of fascism, and human life itself is about to be extin-
guished by generalized infertility. In contrast to the great film of the first nuclear
phase of contemporary end-time anxiety, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, Cuarén cannot use the
tropes of black comedy."! Instead he brings forth a babe, a little girl born to
a young black woman who is saved by the film’s protagonist (played by Clive
Owen), and sets this tiny life redemptively against universal ruin. It is impos-
sible to avoid the idea that Cuarén is reintroducing the figure of Jesus, and
re-entering the eschatology of Revelation. But how is this idea to be developed?
The Book of Revelation as a whole, and the events portrayed therein, are
often rendered in terms of an “Apocalypse.” Thus the notion of end-time, and

all the strangeness entailed by this, is also called an apocalypse. In the contem-
porary understanding, the notion of apocalypse and that of Armageddon are
understood to be identical. But this was neither the original meaning of apoca-
lypse, nor, if Revelation be read intently, the meaning of John of Patmos; it is
rather a sign of the corruption of Revelation in our discourse, its descent into
literalism. The word apocalypse in Greek means an unveiling, it is precisely
therefore the “revelation” of an inner, imaginative truth, essential given the vi-
sionary character of the events depicted in the Bible and certainly its last book.
To make these into signs of actual events to come is to deaden the mind and
render it susceptible to tyranny, as dispensationalist tradition amply reveals.
Looking at the text of Revelation 16 above, we can see how John develops
the theme. He sees “evil spirits” coming out of the mouths of the dragon, the
beast and the false prophet, and in a profound phrase, recognizes that they
“perform” “miraculous signs” in order to lure the Kings into Armageddon.
If this is so, then we must learn to read the performance and truly interpret
the signs, we must awaken, and we must do so to prevent the kings of the
world from going to Armageddon; in other words, we stop the war by seeing
through them. Awakening, which is the true meaning of apocalypse, is for
Christians the coming to being of Jesus."! And so Revelation is a poem of
resistance to empire, whose wars it counters with a liberated spirit.
It is not difficult to read in these lines an allegory of the current state of
things, with Babylon/Rome as the United States, its rulers headed for Arma-
geddon, (even on the banks of the Euphrates) and the great whore enthroned
in the entertainment industry (the reader may select his or her favorite star for
the role). But that is not the point. The true significance of apocalypse is its
capacity to strengthen the spirit to bear the burden of the ecological crisis and
to creatively respond to it—in other words, to awaken. We justly turn away
from the kind of thinking that infests the Christian right and drives it toward
violent Armageddon. But unless we can rescue the notion of apocalypse as
emancipated vision, we cannot recognize our predicament, and fall back upon
the ways of thinking that have led into the ecological crisis in the first place.
To the contemporary sensibility The Book of Revelation seems empty of
significance, a remnant of a past in which the mind was dominated by magic
and superstition. But it can also be said that certain imaginative senses have
withered within the modern mind, and that this has deprived us of dimen-
sions of significance, left us feeling alone in the universe, and because we
cannot comprehend a notion like the end-time, unable to bear the insights
required of us by the ecological crisis. This is especially a problem for the Left,
whose politics enables the recognition of capital as the driving force of the

crisis, but whose congenital hostility to the ways of spirit prevents a full ap-
preciation of what needs to be done. Thus many astute and well-intentioned
comrades either minimize the end-time implications of the crisis and/or fail
to recognize that a radically different kind of society will need to be created
if the crisis is to be overcome. They fail to see that although capital drives the
present crisis, capital itself is the product of thousands of years of estrange-
ment. And they fail to critically distinguish between two senses of “end-
time” —that it can mean either the end of life or the end of our way of life,
and that everything hangs in the balance of this judgment. What Einstein
said with respect to nuclear weaponry, that everything has changed but our
way of thinking, remains true for the ecological crisis and is just as ominous.
The mentality of intellectuals, including those of the Left, has been shaped
by industrial capitalism, with its rule of quantity, its mantras of efficiency and
productivity, its philosophy of pragmatism according to which truth is mea-
sured by immediate results, and therefore its reduction of the world to what
Whitehead called the endless scurrying of dead matter. This world-view sees na-
ture as an “environment” outside us, a realm of resources rather than a manifold
to which we belong and whose ruination we bring about as we lose our way.
It has not been the religious world-view, even in its perverted fundamen-
talist form, that has ruined nature, but that of the technocratically advanced,
reasonable and modernizing elites. Capital has seized a reason deprived of the
radical, apocalyptic imagination, which it clears away like other aspects of the
Commons, and has put itself on the spiritual throne. Its economy and state ad-
minister the destruction of nature, but would not do so unless capital also sets
itself up as the god of this world. That is its fetishistic side, brilliantly revealed
by Marx. Abstract value gives to commodities a “mystical character,” in which
we do not recognize our own estranged soul. And so the modern sensibility
worships commodities like the fatted calf and gives reason over to the priests
of capital and its false prophets. How else to explain the monstrous idiocy that
would turn over the reduction of atmospheric carbon to the emissions trad-
ing and neo-colonialism signified by the Kyoto protocols, in other words, that
would ensure that the bandits continue to run their syndicate even as the world
goes to hell? And how can the changes ahead that will preserve and even en-
hance life be conceived unless we recover the imaginative power of apocalypse?
A New Motto for Capitalism Nature Socialism

With this issue Capitalism Nature Socialism no longer calls
itself an “international red-green journal of theory and poli-
tics,” but a “journal of ecosocialism.” We are not so fool-

ish as to think this means that ecosocialism is substantially
nearer than it was a few months ago, or even that the term
is ready for definition. But the challenge of putting it into
being seems more urgent with each piece of news about our
planet’s disintegrating ecosystems, éach manifestation of
capital's feckless power. The word comes up more and more
in everyday discourse, and has even acquired a Wikipedia
page, if not yet space in.official dictionaries. It seems proper,
then, for a journal to dedicate itself to its realization. Eco-
socialism is a notion whose time must come if we are to
save our species and innumerable others; it is a concept that
needs a forum within which to take shape; and so Capital-
ism Nature Socialism is proud to offer itself as the servant of
ecosocialist transformation. m
NOTES
One wonders, what happens after the thousand years are up? Oddly, many hard-core Jew-
ish Zionists go along with this notion, even though it is often the work of anti-Semites,
and they are being set up among its sacrificial victims.
Kubrick evidently tried unsuccessfully for a month to develop a screenplay that would do
justice to the danger of nuclear annihilation as laid out in Peter George’s novel, Fail-Safe.
He was continually stymied until he realized that laughter was interrupting the creative
process. And so he made it the essence of the process. This was possible, one might think,
because the logic of the text depended upon a series of momentary events engineered by
male authority figures, whose activity could be dissolved in the imagination by the comic
impulse. Nothing of the sort will change the ecological crisis, not because it lacks male
authority figures but because the events in question lack the momentary status around
which comic tension can arise.
In Chapter 17, John describes the great whore as sitting on a “scarlet beast” that “was and
is not and is to come.” To understand this enigma “calls for a mind that has wisdom,”
in other words, one capable of interpreting the signs of the text and not submitting
to the authority of an outside authority. He guides the interpretation, heaping enigma
upon enigma, and closes his account, first, with an admonition that one must preserve
the integrity of the text, and then, that doing so opens a path for the coming of Jesus.
The greatest rendering of Revelation in this vein is that of William Blake, who saw the
inner awakening of the emancipated imagination as essential for the changing of the
world and its endless warfare. Blake made the Book of Revelation (along with the Book
of Ezekiel) the centerpiece of his cosmology, or what he called his “Bible of Hell.” He
gave to the whore of Babylon the name of Rahab, and made Jesus the endpoint of his
narrative -- not the Jesus of Christianity (there is no Father to worship in Blake) but
rather the universal body of humanity, and the continual forgiver of sins. See Northrop
Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947).

oy
tO = oe
<t{ meaner belie
74 ea a
<= tua
We weete
Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change
(2008)
SO FAR IT IS ONLY A WoRD, plucked from the bin of radical possibility to

concentrate the mind in this grim age of world-destroying capitalism. We call
it “ecosocialism” because the times, as Hamlet put it, are “out of joint.” That
which should fit together does not, and events cascade chaotically, threatening
unprecedented disaster. “Eco” is the prefix, because the disjointing is of nature.
And “socialism?” We do not need to retrace here the trail leading to the lair of
the perpetrator, capital, the “dis-jointer” of our time. Enough of that has been
done," I think, to allow us to carry forward the imagining of a socialism predi-
cated on the overcoming of capital as nature’s enemy as well as the exploiter of
human labor. The path to ecosocialism has to be made by those who will travel
upon it. But it also has to be imagined in advance, because the socialism of this
present age, if it ever arises, will not much resemble its ancestors from the first
epoch of the doctrine. And yet there is something that can be said about some
of its principles by studying the lessons of the past, along with the workings
of the ecological crisis and its most spectacular feature, global climate change.
A Tale of Two Epochs

A CONSIDERABLE NUMBER Of struggles have emerged in recent times as har-
bingers of a society beyond capital— movements large and small, seemingly
scattered everywhere, just as capital is everywhere, and just as the ecological
crisis can strike everywhere. It is a kind of return of Guevara's foco doctrine,
where the foci are determined by points of ecological rupture driven in by the
contradictions of accumulation —lands devastated in places like Ecuador or
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM bahs)

Nigeria by oil exploitation; failures of the state at points where the various
threads of ecological crisis interweave into disaster, like New Orleans; border-
lands where struggles over labor and migration converge; devastation of sugar
cane workers in Brazil who produce biofuels; the poisoning of farmers, min-
ers, bureaucrats and workers in China who can no longer take a deep breath,
or whose skin is breaking out in cancers;”! and so on and on.
These focal points have the twofold property, first, of igniting the poten-
tial for local revolt, and second, of providing lessons as to the global potentials
of resistance against the regime responsible for the devastation. Such lessons
point to common ground beneath all the various instances of ecological break-
down and have the potential of drawing into the struggle each and every per-
son regardless of position on the map, or how socialized. Neither the author
of these words nor the average person who will read them have directly felt the
devastation of the more immediate victims of the crisis just noted. But we are
all in harm’s way and in the path of the crisis. And we are capable, as humans,
of empathy and reasoning in terms of the whole, and these powers enable us
to learn what the ecological crisis means and what to do about it.
The classical phase of socialism, its so-called “first epoch,” was a project to
negate and overcome the effects of capital’s signature mode of exploitation, the
conversion of labor power to surplus value. Strikes and other work stoppages
were strategies to impede this in workplaces configured by capitalist relations.
As their limits became apparent, the project moved to the question of control
over the workplace and eventually took upon itself the task of placing the state
and the means of production in the hands of the workers themselves. In broad
outline, this is how socialism came to be born.
The capitalist system displayed from its beginnings a profoundly im-
perialist impulse. Because its essential logic is to expand the purely quanti-
tative—and hence unlimited—value term, and because the realization of
value drags nature wantonly along with it without regard for the inherent
regulation of ecosystems, the dominion of capital has been by far the most
destructive phase of human history. This proclivity to lay waste and annihi-
late the pre-existing societies that stood in capital’s way was evident in zones
of expansion into the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Australasia, and was
theorized as such early in the last century by Luxemburg and, at its midpoint,
by Polanyi. But well before then, in 1844, Engels had called attention to the
devastation of the bodies of its proletarian workforce along with their com-
munal life, an insight that Marx greatly advanced in Capital.”
However Engels may have railed againgt the destruction of proletarian
life-worlds in Manchester, or Marx saw fit to describe the worker under capi-

tal as a “crippled monstrosity,” neither the original Marxian socialists, nor
those, like William Morris and Luxemburg, who came after and further de-
veloped the notion that capitalism had ruinous effects on bodies and environ-
ments, saw fit to subsume what was happening into an “ecological crisis” as
such. The reason, plainly, was that the various fnsults to nature and the living
bodies of workers had not taken on a self-expanding momentum in which
they broke loose from their points of origin to consume nature at large. Until
the middle of the last century, then, the wounds inflicted by accumulation
were limited by the buffering mechanisms of the planet's ecology, or could be
set aside in view of a relative abundance of resources. Beginning in the 1970s,
however, these constraints began to break down at innumerable places. Ex-
perts began to talk of the “limits to growth,” and more ominously, of new
developments within the ecosphere in which the very fabric of nature was
becoming undone, as in climate change driven by the greenhouse effect, or
massive and expanding species extinctions.
Now the victims of accumulation were no longer the immediate actors in
the production process but the entire web of nature, including other creatures
and the physico-chemical webs that connected them. However these patterns
may have been set into motion by economic processes, once the effects ap-
peared in the ecosphere, they moved rapidly around the planet. It has been
said, for example, that the highest concentrations of dioxins on the planet
are found in Polar Bears, thanks to the currents that spread these substances
thousands of miles from points of production, and their biological concentra-
tion as they move up the feeding chain.
The distinction between “first epoch” socialism and the “present epoch”
version, or ecosocialism, largely derives from the presence of these processes,
which cannot be superimposed on the traditional categories of political econ-
omy. Nature had been broadly excluded from earlier generations of socialist
thought despite Marx’s admonition that it was just as essential a contributor to
the generation of wealth as labor. Accumulation and the imperative of endless
growth was largely accepted, therefore, by first-epoch socialism, whose chief
distinction with the ruling class in this respect was the distribution of the prod-
uct and power relations at the workplace and in the state. Despite notable ex-
ceptions such as Morris and Luxemburg, nature became marginalized within
socialist thought and more or less indifferently regarded as a gift to mankind,
to be exploited at will. To minds shaped by first-epoch socialism, no less than
the capitalist mentality they fought, the ecological crisis has seemed, therefore,
more like an unprovoked ambush than the inexorable outcome of centuries of
estrangement and domination.

Within the bourgeois order, the response to crisis has been to continue
nature’s subordination to “man,” whether by commodifying the fiction called
“natural capital” and inserting it into regulatory and economic mechanisms,
or more broadly, by foregrounding technological solutions to the crisis, as
though once the mechanisms of environmental disruption were fixed, things
can go on as before. Al Gore has been lavishly honored as the prophet of
overcoming climate change for doing just this. Gore led the way toward the
planetary dead-end signified by the Kyoto protocols. And last year he agreed
to work with billionaire Richard Branson on a project that would award the
grand prize of $25,000,000 to the lucky fellow who devised the best method
of sequestering the carbon released by industrial emissions. Is ecosocialism
to mimic these pathetic and mechanistic reforms? Will the greatest challenge
in human history stimulate no deeper response than business-as-usual? The
words of Albert Einstein on learning of the bombing of Hiroshima still re-
sound: “Everything has changed except our way of thinking, because of which
we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
Your Life or Your Money

ECOSOCIALISM MUST BE A NEW BEGINNING because the ecological crisis sig-
nifies an end, whether of the succession of modes of production that lead to
capitalism, or of civilization itself. Whatever survives the crisis will perforce
be an evolutionary advance for humanity, one enabling us not just to endure,
or “mitigate,” as the buzzword puts it, but rather to heal an ancient lesion
between humanity and nature, and thereby transcend our history. This entails
a “revolution,” but one radically different from the previous upheavals that
bore the name. Ecosocialism will not be announced as cataclysm or Armaged-
don, although when it is done, the world will be transformed. It will not be
spearheaded by a particular class, although it requires that all producers be
given power over their means of production. Nor will it be signified by the
overturning of a state, as the traditional view of revolution had held, although
when the process is complete, the form and content of states will be radi-
cally different from what went before. Nor will it be the result of violence,
although as the state is an instrument of violence and as capitalism will not
give up without a fight, there will be violence from the system aplenty along
its way, violence that has to be endured and overcome.
At heart, ecosocialism is an existential choice. It is rational in that it con-
duces to survival and a better life. However it does not arise through calcula-
tion or instrumental means, but rather by direct confrontation with the raw
edge of things and a realignment of basic values. The notion of existence

derives from the Latin, exsistere, or the coming into being of an entity. The
multiplicity of movements from which ecosocialism arises are each points of
such realization. When people rise up, they do so against an adversary and at
the same moment, for their own being. It is this common feature that allows
the focal uprisings to come together in a comfnon cause.
The present crisis differs from earlier ones in the presence of threats to
nature both large and small deriving from the cancerous invasion of capital.
We can describe this formally as a proliferating set of disintegrations of plan-
etary ecosystems. But we do not see or experience the set in formal terms.
We feel at that raw edge, rather, the menace to nature as a threat to life—to
our lives and the lives of uncountable others. And so, ecosocialism is first and
foremost, on behalf of life, and dedicated to life’s flourishing as well as preser-
vation. That is its existential core. The more deeply it is felt, the more widely
will it surface into social transformation. In this light, capital is not merely
an instrument of economic exploitation, but the angel of death, prepared by
the endless fragmenting of ecosystems through the action of the principle of
exchange. Ecosocialism struggles against capital, therefore, not only to secure
the well-being of the underclasses, but on behalf of life itself —and by exten-
sion the firmament that sustains life. This imperative decenters both technoc-
racy and economism, as unworthy signifiers of what we are. It puts in their
place an ethic, ecocentrism, that gives primacy to the healing of nature and
the enhancement of life.
This brings into focus certain themes which did not loom especially large
in first-epoch socialism, or were neglected.
Where there was no inherent impulsion within first-epoch socialism to
look beyond human welfare, ecosocialism entails a radical shift away from
the anthropocentric attitude that holds humanity over nature. Plainly, if life
is under threat by capital, then the threat applies to all lives. Capital affects all
creatures, songbirds as well as hogs, the latter directly, as a source of factory
farmed commodities, and the former, indirectly, through the expansion that
alters all habitats. The option for an ecocentric perspective, therefore, is not
an instrumental choice affecting only those species of use to us as resources
or domesticated helpers. It is rather a decentering from our narrow species
interest toward a more universal perspective that encompasses the ecosphere:
the plenum of ecosystems, and all creatures, which constitutes and frames
human existence.
We do not, however, consider all creatures equivalently, but from the
standpoint of interrelationships within and between ecosystems. There are
bacteria on whom we depend for life, and bacteria whose life is the occa-

sion for our disease, or our death, or who recycle our substance after we are
gone. And there are creatures like songbirds who do not toil i us or PeOsae
food but are sites of disinterested pleasure, aesthetic joy and simple delight,
and have done so, one would think, transhistorically, since the beginning of
human time. Such creatural delights are not in themselves part of commod-
ity circuits. Strictly speaking, they have no use values— ee of Se
capital can insert these, and does, as in the bird seed, or bird feeder, or bird
handbook, industries. They are creatures, rather, whose absence would be
felt as a great rupture in our being. Existentially, they are points of wonder,
not usefulness: “How do you know,” wrote William Blake in The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, “but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense
world ofdelight, clos'd by your sense five?”
The decentering of “Man as the measure of all things’ does not descend
to the level of certain vulgar forms of Deep Ecology, which, whether from ig-
norance or perhaps an excess of bitterness, eliminate what is distinctive about
humanity in order to reduce us to the level of slime molds—and slime molds
to the level of humans. As a species in nature, we humans are entitled to have
our own corner of nature, i-e., ‘human nature,” respected. I would think that
the human brain is the most complex structure in the universe, which is to say,
it is the point at which nature achieves its null point of entropy, and perhaps
because of this, becomes capable of regarding itself.
From a theoretical perspective, this means that ecosocialism entails differ-
ent and more complex judgments of value than first-epoch socialism. It de-
mands of us that we take into account a kind of valuation distinct from those
values, attached to use and exchange, that enter into economic calculation.
Once we open ourselves to the ecosphere, a realm of intrinsic value opens as
well, a value inhering in ecosystemic being. Since we now place life in the center
of the world and not mere profitability, and since life is a matter of ecosystemic
integrity, so does the value intrinsic to ecosystemic relationship enter the think-
ing of ecosocialism. What is called an “ecocentric ethic” is essentially ethics in
defense of intrinsic value. Simply put, it is the refusal to reduce the world to
cash, and to knuckle under to the lords of economic calculation. It is the refusal
of all fetishisms, of the commodity as well as the machine. This perspective
becomes necessary in the overcoming of the ecological crisis, and therefore the
climate crisis as well. It is the deepest level of the resistance to capital, and the
foundation of all others.
For Marx production was the essential core of human nature and the de-
cisive element in the system of economic structures comprised by exchange,
distribution, circulation, etc. Ecosocialism needs, however, to regard pro-

duction itself ecosystematically, as the human point of intervention with eco-
systems. This is the ground of the critique of production, now to be regarded
from the standpoint of whether or not it enhances the integrity of ecosystems,
to put it theoretically, the formative interrelations of elements in ecosystemic
ensembles. Stripped of theoretic abstraction, this comes down to whether an
instance of production enhances life itself. “
Life is self-replicating form; and production is trans-formation. Therefore
production is to be judged according to the quality of the forms it brings into
existence. Consider the production of waste, which dogs capitalism, and is a
sign of the disintegration of ecosystem. A look at a waste site (whether “toxic”
or not is not the point here; from an ecosystemic perspective, all waste sites
are toxic) reveals this instantly, and is also a microcosm of the planet as a
whole under the regime of capital. “Waste” is the moment of consumption
as it takes on a pseudo-independent zombie-existence within late-capitalist
culture. Socialist as well as bourgeois economists have scarcely begun to criti-
cize consumption; indeed, from every corner, we continue to hear that the
overproduction endemic to capitalism is also underconsumption, as though this
latter were a disease to be remedied by more consumption of more commodi-
ties —when in truth, the level of consumption already imposed by capital is
the immediate instigator of ecological crisis, and therefore, of the derange-
ments of climate change.
Ecosocialism needs to transform production itself, from a system cen-
tered about commodities to one in which the making of integral ecosystems is
the center of social activity. This notion needs to be carefully defined, though
only the briefest effort to do so can be made here. We consider an ecosystem
to be a set of elements in nature internally and externally related such that
they embody formal coherence, sometimes called “wholeness.” Integrity is
then the maintenance of such form, not statically (for stasis does not exist
in nature except as a transient boundary condition), but through a dyna-
mism called differentiation, in which the elements are kept distinct yet in-
terconnected; and this formal relationship continually develops and evolves.
Disintegration, by contrast, entails the splitting apart of the elements of the
ecosystem, and the loss of their coherence, their form, and their dynamism.
The waste site is one such example; the separation of the producer from the
means of production, another. In actual life, it needs be emphasized, the situ-
ation is by no means so neatly divided between integrality and disintegration.
Since we inhabit a multiplicity of ecosystems, interacting levels of dynamic
ensue: thus the prisoner can rally other dimensions of being to free himself;
the worker alienated under capitalist exploitation can struggle to restore her

freedom; the sinner can achieve redemption; a death can bring forth renewed
life. Hence disintegration can become as a moment of reintegration; though
whether it turns out as such is ultimately a political question.
This is another way of calling attention to the centrality oflife for eco-
socialist practice, since integrality of ecosystem is necessary for the preserva-
tion and advance of life. As a new mode of production, ecosocialism creates
places in which this kind of process can flourish. Politically, the notion calls
attention to the revalorization of communal forms as the sites of ecosocialist
production, where the Commons, entailing collective ownership and mutual
aid, is a kind of matrix for the putting of humans into ecosystemic relation-
ship. A communal relationship poses the coming-into-being of integral hu-
man ecosystems and is therefore at the existential as well as the political heart
of ecosocialism. This was already imagined in insights into communism, the
“commune,” the “solidarity” of labor, etc.
The emergence or restoration of Commons is a necessary condition
for ecosocialism, but it would be foolish to regard this sentimentally. The
Commons can disintegrate and degenerate into various tribalisms (includ-
ing national chauvinisms), with the potential for racism, ethnocentricity, and
murderous vendettas. From one side, we think of the Paris Commune as
signifying the hope that ordinary people can rebuild the world free of alien
state and class forces; however, in India, the term “communalism” has come
to refer to episodes of mass murder between Hindu and Moslem communi-
ties. The key question is whether collectivity becomes imbued with a univer-
sal interest, or whether it becomes fixated in any of the splitting points laid
down by the history of our estrangement. In the present crisis this dilemma
is writ large; for looming ecocatastrophe can trigger racism, fascism and re-
ligious fundamentalisms, along with ethnocentricities such as Zionism,” no
less than the ecocentric values of ecosocialism.
I should think that the original point at which splitting enters history is
through the notion of gender, the foundation in human existence of the no-
tion of difference. Awareness of gender difference is the moment in each life
when the idea arises that there are two distinct versions of human being; this
then propagates across all other aspects of the human world. Domination, in
patriarchal form, developed archaically along this axis through the aggression
of male hunting bands. Nature's differentiation between sexes became non-
recognition and emerged as splitting, between selves and within the self. This
inevitably extended back into nature. Now splitting became nature’s “gen-
dered bifurcation.” Within this world-view, the real human being became
masculine, while nature—dumb, passive and devoid of reason—remained

behind as the eternal female. Thus gender violence is the template of nature’s
domination.
What is sundered can be rendered whole; thus the freeing of labor requires
that labor be altered through overcoming the gendered bifurcation of nature.
It is axiomatic that such labor as enhances life needs to be foregrounded within
ecosocialism. This, however, is nothing other than those forms of production
immemorially consigned to women and degraded with the “world-historical
defeat” (Engels) of the female gender: giving birth, to be sure, but also the
tending and nurturance of life, in all the meanings of these terms. An eco-
socialist revolution, in its defense of life, will revalorize the kinds of work
assigned to the female aspect of humanity. This is feminism as ecosocialist:
ecofeminism. It incorporates the bourgeois feminism that demands distribu-
tive equality of the social product, but goes further, to call into question the
productions of economism and demand in their place the making of integral
ecosystems, which is to say, life itself, as women have from the beginning been
given this role.
Justice, Freedom, and Ecological Integrity

JUSTICE IDEALLY MEANS THE MENDING of what has been torn apart. It only
exists because the world is riddled with injustice. It is unfree and torn; and
justice exists to put the world back together according to law. But actually
existing justice is not necessarily just, either, because law as we know it is the
Law of a certain place. In this world, law tends to be a concoction of men
derived according to their social relations, which do not rise above the level of
society. Women slain by their male relatives in certain communal settings'®
because they sought a degree of autonomy and sexual freedom are said to
receive the blows of divine justice, when all they receive is the death-dealing
of patriarchy, the male-principle severed from life; similarly, in cases of capital
punishment in the United States or China, it is proclaimed that justice has
been done, when all that has been accomplished is the demonstration of state
power and the recycling of revenge. We return to our reflections on the Com-
mons: just as the Commons degenerates to tribalism absent a universal mo-
ment, so is it necessary that the Law to which justice hews become a universal
law, above the state, above patriarchy, and most definitely above capital and
its private property.
Though we never fully attain the universal given the limits of human
being, we are able to appreciate it through the lens provided by a given level
of society. This is the deeper meaning of “progress”: that a certain degree of
development may give a vantage on the universal denied to its predecessor.

In our time the ecological crisis shapes the universal as the valuation of life
in order not to collectively perish—an old insight, no doubt, but rendered
urgent when articulated against the grim lessons of PyehSa eRe Wo and im-
perialism. Therefore the Law to which justice presently Hose x that of ECO:
logical integrity, while injustice is a manifestation of ecological Ce
the falling apart of the world. Justice, likewise, takes on a directly ecologi-
cal character: what is “justly just” is what fosters the bringing of humanity
together according to freely associated labor pursuing ecocentric ends. In a
world under the gun of climate change and other species of capital-induced
annihilation, justice necessarily acquires an ecosocialist form.
There is a twofold aspect to justice within ecosocialism. First, the catego-
ry applies to each and every creature from the standpoint of its relationship
to human agency. It makes no sense to speak of the wolf's injustice to the elk,
or of any predatory relationship unmediated by human value and its social
form. It is “Man’s” injustice to nature that is in the dock here."!
The second ecological aspect of justice concerns those injuries suffered
by humans at the hands of other humans. This is distinguished from the first
case by the fact that the victim also has the capacity to fight back and right
what is wrong. We return to the “foci” of struggle at the points where capital’s
invasion of lived space sets going a reaction of “common” people to restore
the integrity of their lives. Here justice initially takes its specifically environ-
mental form, in which the particular lesion—a flood, inundation by toxins,
and so forth—will be addressed by collective action, including the petition-
ing of state authorities. Notably consistent with the above reasoning, these
measures are more often than not, led by women.
The particular points of outbreak of the ecological crisis which lead to ac-
tivism are, generally speaking, instances of this unjust “being in harm’s way”:
the victims of Katrina, of Bhopal, of petroleum extraction in the Niger River
delta or the Ecuadorean forests, those who live next to petroleum refineries
in South Durban, or next to toxic waste sites—all the desolation of the great
disease which has attacked the earth through the agency of the human pest
qua capitalist.
What is environmental, however, can also be universalized as the ecologi-
cal, when the larger connections are drawn to other domains of struggle, and
inevitably, to the common cause that unites all these struggles and gives them
a class content. This ensues immediately from the siting decisions that put
poor and marginalized peoples in harm’s way, and on a larger scale, because
of the inexorable economic and imperial criteria that determine the deci-
sions of capitalists.°! The universal appears, then, in the transformation of

environmental justice to ecological justice, whose logical integration will be
into ecosocialism. Here the state is not merely addressed: the existing “state
of affairs” is overthrown.
These principles extend directly into the politics of overcoming climate
change, the only coherent ground of which is ecosocialist. We recognize cli-
matic pollution with carbon (and other agents, to be sure) to be the effluvia
of capital's expansion through industrialization, and we set the overall goal of
transformation as the overthrow of the mechanism of cancerous growth. This
goal, however, is realized through particular and distinct paths, from South to
North and unified by an ecosocialist ethos of fidelity to life and the free devel-
opment of all creatures. Such technology as is necessary to move to a non-toxic
civilization— renewable energy, for example, or universally available (and free)
mass transportation—are only conceivable in a society defined by “people's
power” and democratic planning. Therefore, overthrowing the capitalist class
is essential for moving forward in all dimensions of the struggle for an inhabit-
able world.
Similarly, measures to mitigate atmospheric carbon are puerile without
bringing down the capitalist ruling class and breaking its power over climate
protocols. Only a massive uprising from below can accomplish this—as by
blocking the forthcoming passage of successors to the Kyoto protocols next
year in Copenhagen. This in turn requires a “movement of movements,”
coalescing from innumerable site-specific focal reactions to the invasion of
capital, especially as this leads to the destruction of lived space by petroleum
extraction (including the shale deposits of Alberta, exploitation of which is
leading to a veritable ecological Holocaust). The unifying force of such move-
ments can only be conjugation of anti-capitalism with ecocentric valuation of
life itself, which is to say, again, a developing ecosocialism.
These various principles converge in the rule that to survive global warm-
ing will be feasible to the extent carbon is kept in the ground in the first place.
Accordingly, we are led to the twofold strategy, first, as observed above, of
supporting all efforts in the periphery that preserve lived space against inva-
sive carbon extraction; and second, and more universal, remaking society so
that it lives far, far more lightly on the earth, thereby ceasing to require the
carbon fix, and able to employ alternative technologies. We insist again, how-
ever, that the basic problem is not technological, but the way we transform
nature and consume the results of our labor. This, too, can only be rationally
approached through an ecosocialist ethos inasmuch as the only cure for the
disease that is consumerism will be the universalization of freely associated
labor, applied ecocentrically. It will require the fruition of human being, as a

creative part of nature, to overcome the curse of “having,” capital’s induced
possessiveness, that now rules the world. .
Ecosocialism will be judged by its fidelity to these goals. But it offers
more. By placing life in the center of our existence, it places us in the center
of life, and better able to bear the hardships ahead. For there will be much
suffering to come, and most definitely no assurance of a happy ending to this
tale. Better by far to face this in the spirit of renewal and dignity for life than
to succumb to the cold and dark dead end signified by a dying capitalism. =
NOTES
1. What follows is based upon the argument of my book, 7he Enemy of Nature, 2nd ed.
(London: Zed, 2007). Specifically, this essay attempts to further explore the notion of
ecosocialism developed in the last third of that work.
2. Of the close to 100,000 spontaneous demonstrations which roil China each year to the
degree that the authorities have to deal with them, approximately half are generated by
environmental ruptures, the rest by some vicissitude or other of the exploitation oflabor.
Needless to say, in the real instance, both factors are routinely engaged.
3. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1951); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957; Friedrich Engels,
The Conditions of the Working Class In England in 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1962); Karl Marx, Capital 1(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
4. The best discussion of this appears in the Introduction to Marx’s Grundrisse (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1973).
5. See my Overcoming Zionism (London: Pluto Press, 2007). Along with being a peculiar
delusion within the Judaic tradition, Zionism shapes the colonial perspective organizing
the conquest of the Middle East by the oil-hungry capitalist nations. Hence its critique is
doubly important for ecosocialist purposes.
6. Inthe Muslim ecumene, from Basra, Iraq, (thanks to the regressive potentials set loose by
Bush-Blair’s gentleman’s war), to Turkey, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Hindu communalities
in India, other tribal formations in Africa, share in this spectacle of male degeneration.
7. All of which has been saturated with and legitimated by the ideology of “progress,” mod-
ernism, and so forth. It would seem that even as justice is not necessarily just, so is
progress not necessarily forward-moving. In every real instance, the critical voice must be
raised to disclose the untruth of the given.
8. Some couplets from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence that perceive the great unity of being
across humanity and nature: “A dog starved at his Masters Gate/ Predicts the ruin of the
State”; and again, “A Robin Red Breast in a Cage/ puts all Heaven in a Rage.” The poet
recognizes both the material survival and the free development of other creatures as mu-
tually essential.
9. ‘The principle is writ large in the notion of “environmental debt,” even if this be presented
in the estranged form of monetization. Thus it has been recently calculated that rich
nations impose an annual burden of some $2.3 trillion on the ecosphere, while the poor,

“developing” nations, despite having far more people, only impose an ecological tax of
$774 billion. The differential between these two figures is the “debt” owed to the poor by
the rich; and this roughly mirrors the gross debt owed by the poor to the bankers of the
rich: $1.8 trillion. James Randerson, “Rich Countries Owe Poor a Huge Environmental
Debt,” The Guardian, January 20, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/
jan/21/environmental.debtl, accessed January 14, 2019.
¢

Liberties and Commons for All
(2008)
READ THIs and weep:
In the future no official shall place a man on trial upon his

own unsupported statement, without producing credible
witnesses to the truth ofit.
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped ofhis

rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of
his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force
against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful
judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.
Almost 800 years ago somebody wrote those words down, and King John of
England signed off on them.
Today is the “future” mentioned above, a disgraceful future in which the
self-proclaimed great democracy of the United States flouts every principle as-
serted in the 38th and 39th chapters of the Magna Carta, noted above. Bush/
Cheney provide a perfect negative of what the Great Charter was striving for,
and this immediately raises the question of why it should be that so promis-
ing a start should have gone so far astray and moreover, under the name ofa
modernity that proves not only to have been no protection against the loss of
freedom but that may even contain the seeds of that loss.
Peter Linebaugh gives insight in his splendid history ofliberty in light of
Magna Carta, an insight drawn from the Charter itself and woven through

centuries of struggle. But to understand this properly, a brief excursion into
the misery of late-capitalist democracy will be useful.
The current interest in Magna Carta is driven principally by fear—fear
that the democratic tradition is collapsing, fear that a new Dark Age of author-
itarian states is upon us, fear that we are, like ancient Rome, sinking from the
level of Republic to that of Empire. It was touching to feel the relief wnen the
U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed the right of Habeas corpus (specifically
derived from the passage quoted above) for prisoners in Guantanamo. But it
was also ominous that just one vote stood in the way of the formal elimination
of a principle that had been assumed to be rock-like. Indeed, elimination of
Habeas corpus will be a near-certainty should John McCain be the next presi-
dent of the United States. The fact that McCain believes that the Guantanamo
decision is one of the worst in the whole history of the United States is dismal
but not surprising. The fact that he could say something so outrageous with
breezy confidence, however, is very scary, because it reveals a sizable constitu-
ency for the sacrifice of essential freedoms on the altar of a state power which
has grown into a monster of Biblical proportions, a kind of Moloch. Bloody
repression accompanied by disregard for Constitutional safeguards has gone
on throughout the history of the United States, and it is ignorant and senti-
mental to pretend otherwise. But there is now a kind of structural character
to state measures against civil liberties that goes far beyond the essentially epi-
sodic outbursts of the past. The attack on Habeas, recall, is only one manifes-
tation of the assault on civil liberty. Left untouched by the Supreme Court’s
decision are the state’s assertions of the right to torture, to wiretap and surveil,
to “extraordinarily render,” to flout Congress with “signing statements.” Most
significantly, the ability of the Executive to get away with these affronts to
basic freedoms is secured through passivity on the part of Congress, indeed,
its frank complicity, across party lines, with executive power—consider only
the refusal to impeach Bush, by far the most impeachable president in United
States history.
The sources of the fear omnipresent within the so-called advanced societ-
ies of modernity cannot be reduced to simple external dangers, if only be-
cause these very real dangers are themselves the fruits of society, including the
danger posed by people like George W. Bush, numerous prototypes of whom
I saw in my student days at Yale. The ecological crisis, which sows anxiety
everywhere, is another expression of this principle, as is of course the entire
era of nuclear weapons, now well into its second half-century. Beneath these
directly life-threatening conjunctures and contributing to them, the “every-
day terror” of capitalism grinds on, indispensable for the society of accumula-

tion. As no self-respecting human being (that is to say, one secure in her- or
himself) would tolerate exploitation, mass anxiety becomes an iron necessity
for the integration of the working classes into the circuits of capital. There are
many mediations for this basic principle. Indebtedness keeps people in line,
as does the dread of losing health insurance or at other, connected levels, the
technology of surveillance that brings Big Brower into the shopping mall, or
the barbarism of mass culture.
Capital, therefore, is not just organized crime, but organized terror as
well. Plagued by debt and the workings of an accumulation machine utterly
indifferent to authentic human needs, the masses experience life as crippling
helplessness and dependence. Consequently, a plenum of fear arises suitable
for attachment to signifiers provided by ideologues. From the tropes ofjingo-
ism, chauvinism and racism to the manipulated fears of terrorists and “illegal
aliens,” advanced society trolls a sea of low-grade paranoia that episodically
bursts into panic. Under such circumstances, the surrender of freedoms to au-
thoritarian and unscrupulous politicians becomes easier to understand. Now,
however, it is these conditions themselves that need elucidation —and here
Peter Linebaugh steps in.
There can be no singular answer as to how so complicated a mess arose.
But the fact that Magna Carta was, so to speak, a statement about the foun-
dation of the democratic movement of Western society gives Linebaugh a
remarkable vantage point to see possibilities and kinds of struggle that will
reverberate across time and space. Peter is very much in the camp of vision-
aries, and it is his capacity to see the deeper structures of historical struggle
that allows us to see the true meaning of Magna Carta, and through that lens,
both the hopes and the bedevilment of the society which is to follow.
Linebaugh calls his book a manifesto, and what it manifests, or reveals,
is what Linebaugh has been exploring since he met Edward Thompson as a
graduate student and, at the invitation of the great British historian, moved
back to England to begin his studies of “history from below.”"! Linebaugh
inhabits the sparsely occupied outpost reserved for those historians who seek
a truth that is true in proportion to the quotient of justice and dignity it
confers upon those upon whose backs soi-disant civilization has risen. Thus
he quotes Brecht’s great poem:
Who built the seven towers of Thebes?

The books are filled with the names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,

The city glimmering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese Wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? (204)
In 2002, Linebaugh moved from Northern Ohio to the Hudson River

Valley to take up a position at Bard College. We shall pass over the details of
this unfortunate liaison except to say that they do not flatter that institution.
But Bard was once a training ground for Anglican priests; and the ambience
set Linebaugh thinking that perhaps he could make use of the tradition of
the “freeborn Englishman” as a way of countering the rising tide of jingoism
that was sweeping the nation into the ghastly invasion of Iraq. Linebaugh
decided to take a fresh look at the Levellers, those stalwarts of seventeenth
century British radicalism. This led him to their Large Petition (40,000 signa-
tures), which was submitted to the monarch in 1648 and called for “popular
sovereignty, reparations, juries, religious toleration, and the opening of enclo-
sures.” This document in turn led Linebaugh to ponder its famous anteced-
ent, the first of those signposts by means of which subalterns wrested conces-
sions from authority and set the terms of Western democracy.
Here Linebaugh discovered something that he and the great majority
of historians had either overlooked or failed to appreciate: the Magna Carta
is actually an amalgam of two documents which were put together between
1215, when the Barons confronted King John, and 1225, when its final form
was set down. How this happened is intricate and need not be examined here.
What mattered for Linebaugh and should matter for us was the relationship
between the original 1215 draft and its appendix, the Great Charter of the
Forest, which was elaborated in 1217 and subsequently became incorporated
into the main document. The Charter of the Forest expands upon a notion
that first appeared in 1215, namely, the need of defending the commons from
enclosure. As a result, the final version, from 1225, gives a great deal more
gravitas to the commons than would be suggested by the original document.
This provided the spark for The Magna Carta Manifesto and is the source
of its striking originality and significance. The focus on the forest and the
commons was like turning the conventional reading of Magna Carta on its
head, or better, side: what is customarily taken to be a purely political doc-
trine is seen now equivalently as a defense of personal liberty as well as ecologi-
cal integrity. This emphasis was.no mere add-on; rather, it was an affirmation
of an organic linkage between the politics of individual liberty and those of

our relationship to nature. For “the commons is an activity, and if anything,
it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to na-
ture.” (279)
History from below means the history of the commoners; it is the defense
of the personal freedom and power of the common folk, the folk who live
from commons or try to build it anew, as in the Paris Commune. In these cases
the key is dissolution of class lines through dissolution of the notion of pri-
vate property. If this sounds like communism, that is because it is. Indeed, the
communist idea was set going’in the brain of the young Karl Marx when he
encountered the peasants of the Moselle Valley whose efforts to gather wood
from the forest commons were being criminalized. Linebaugh writes that this:
Led [Marx] directly to the critique of political economy. The
“science” of political economy provided a specious universal
built upon the axioms that commodity exchange and pri-
vate property were natural laws and humankind’s summum
bonum. (145)
The question of whether the authentic roots of communism lie in over-

coming the industrial exploitation of proletarian labor or the valorization of
the commons is not to be resolved here. However, it can be said —and Line-
baugh’s work supports the hypothesis — that the enclosure of the commons,
carried out in innumerable settings over the centuries and still going on as we
speak, is the ur-event in the construction of the modern order, accompanied
by shutting down the ways of cultural and material appropriation suitable
to commoners and replacing them with alienating ways of thinking such as
political economy, which rationalizes the capitalist class system and its alien-
ation of nature. For ideologies and theories can also be enclosures.
Moreover, restoration of the commons is the central process in all those
politica! actions that deserve the title of “radical,” simply because the com-
mons refers to the root of our being. It subtends the original, pre-state and
pre-class mode of production and the social relations grounded in this. The
Forest, Linebaugh reminds us frequently, is not just a location in nature. It
was at this historical moment the principal metabolic junction between hu-
manity and nature, both as the place where the substances transformed by
labor occur, and as the principle source for the energy upon which society
depended for its life process. Before the oil-based economy there was the
coal-based economy; and before the coal-based economy was the wood-based
economy. The Law of the Forest, then, was as central to medieval society as
contro] Over petroleum is to ours.

One of the pleasures of Linebaugh’s text is its dalliance with the ae lan-
guage of the medieval Commons: viz. disafforest, which means removing the
woods from royal jurisdiction, and is a reminder of how seriously protection
of the commons was deemed in those days. “If noticed at all as part of Magna
Carta,” writes Linebaugh, “chapters 47 and 48”! are often discarded as feudal
relics, English peculiarities, or irreleyancies of the heritage industry. Yet if we
see woodlands as a hydrocarbon energy reserve, we may be willing to give the
subject more than a condescending dismissal.”...and then he adds: “We need
to adopt a ‘subsistence perspective.” (31) This is, as many readers already
know, and the rest are reminded in a footnote, not just a point of view; it is
also a work with that title, by Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thom-
sen,°) a work highly controversial, not just because it valorizes subsistence
that is, unpaid labor under the aegis of the commons but does so as a central
statement of ecofeminist discourse, because the labor so valorized is primarily
that of women. A subsistence perspective, then, is the valorization of women’s
life and work outside of the confines of the bourgeois world, and necessarily,
therefore, in the context of the commons. As Linebaugh writes, “[w]herever
the subject is studied, a direct relationship is found between women and the
commons. The feminization of poverty in our own day has become wide-
spread precisely as the world’s commons have been enclosed.” (40) It follows
that the Magna Carta is replete with the provisioning for and protecting of
women. It is especially sensitive and generous where widows are concerned
(especially in its Chapter 7), by facilitating her inheritance, protecting her
from being forced to remarry, and insisting that she have “her reasonable
estover [another splendid word of the time, chiefly, wood, chiefly wind-falls,
to be taken from the lord’s forest for a variety of needs] in the common.”
Linebaugh sees in this latter the prefiguration of an attitude that took 700
years to be realized in social democracy, in the form of Social Security, now
threatened with privatization, i.e., enclosure.
Linebaugh’s introduction of the subsistence perspective is low-key but
far- reaching and deeply considered. For one thing, it represents a considered
move beyond the more traditional, and degendered, Marxism of Thompson
and the other radical historians of Britain, such as Christopher Hill. The shift
was the direct result of Peter’s exposure to Marxist feminists such as Mies
and Silvia Federici, whose work unearths the gendered basis of proletarian-
ization," and its fertilization is evinced throughout the rich tapestry of The
Magna Carta Manifesto, the axial organization of which tracks the varied
configurations of how Magna Garta has been interwoven with tyranny and
the resistance against tyranny down through the years and across the globe.

Throughout we find the central ecofeminist insight, often indirectly implied,
at times brilliantly stated: “[t]he devaluation of woman’s work and the deg-
radation of her body relate directly to the enclosure of open fields, the loss of
commons, and the depopulation of villages.” (64)
There is a larger theoretical, and hence practical, logic embedded in Line-
baugh’s linkage of the political and ecological aspect of Magna Carta as—in
the work’s subtitle, “Liberties and Commons for All” —and in the further
development of the latter term in an ecofeminist direction. He is not just
drawing attention to the empirical conjunction of some elements pertaining
to civil liberties with others to “commoning” and ecofeminism in the same
charter. He is stating that these elements will not stand unless they are joined
in a larger entity and therefore, that the lack of integration between the two
moments is what has cast so long a shadow over Western society and its frag-
mentary, incomplete democracy.
The Magna Carta protected all sorts of people, not just widows and free
peasants. The immediate context for its passage included the need to create
class unity to support the Crusades; war with France provided a similar mo-
tive. The nascent bourgeoisie is also protected in numerous ways, including
the rights of merchants when overseas.) Absent the protection of the com-
mons—and the gender relations it subtends—there is nothing to prevent
the enclosures that would provide the basis for private property, capitalism,
the ecological crisis, and the warrior state, with its built-in antipathy toward
civil liberty and its indifference toward, indeed, domination of, nature. With-
out, therefore, the sustenance of the commons, the purely political protec-
tions will shield those who would destroy the commons and eventually, with
their triumph, corrupt and devour the political realm itself.
Linebaugh details how, over the centuries, the Magna Carta became in-
creasingly under the domination of, and hence interpreted by, the bourgeoi-
sie. It has been therefore no more protected from being abused than the 14th
Amendment, no more capable of stopping the march of tyranny than is the
Democratic Party in the U.S. today. We would add here that the failure to
defend the commons is not just the opening to capital’s invasion. It is also the
precondition for the suffusion of modern society by the great fear indicated
above. There is an explanation for the fear and weakness suffusing so-called
advanced society: it is nothing more and nothing less than the infestation of
a numberless set of social relations whose common feature is the absence of
commonality, along with the substitution of ways of isolation, loneliness and
fragmentation of the self. This is the end-stage of capitalism and the end-stage
of its democracy.

There is no need for Magna Carta nostalgia: the medieval commune could
not withstand the pressures of enclosure absent a deeper and more militant
capacity to defend, indeed expand, the commons. And today, the need for that
militancy, which is to say, the necessity to heed Peter Linebaugh’s manifesto, is
greater than ever before. @
[Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2008}
NOTES
1. Linebaugh’s chief works in this vein have been The London Hanged: Crime and Civil
Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2003); and, with Marcus
Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History
ofthe Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). Chapter 7 of The Magna
Carta Manifesto was published in this journal as “The Law of the Jungle,” Capitalism
Nature Socialism 18, no. 4 (December, 2007), 38-53.
2. Among the most forceful statements of the Magna Carta in defense of the forest. The
former states: “All forests which have been made forest in our time shall be immediately
disafforested; and so it shall be done with riverbanks that have been made preserves by
us in our time.” Note the construction: “forests which have been made forest...” These
people knew well what has been widely forgotten today: that “nature” is a construct, and
naming “matters.”
3. Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the
Globalized Economy, trans. Patrick Camiller, Maria Mies, and Gerd Wieh (New York:
Zed, 1999), 313. Linebaugh writes the work “suggests a new world in the shell of the
old.”
4. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
5. Linebaugh sees in Chapter 42, where this is laid out, as a forerunner of the Palestinian
Right of Return (277).

Thinking Like an Ecosocialist
(2008)
THIS ISSUE OF CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM offers four articles on philo-

sophical themes: John Clark explores the negative dialectic of the second cen-
tury CE Buddhist sage of the “middle way,” Nagarjuna, to arrive at a notion
of the “ecology of emptiness.” Katherine Farrell examines the critical theory of
Herbert Marcuse in search of a philosophical foundation for a “postnormal”
science. Charles Verharen undertakes a novel exploration of “survival ethics”
through an appreciation of socialist Cuba's resilience. And Adrian Wilding
develops a critical philosophy of nature through a re-reading of the Frankfurt
School, with special attention to Marcuse.
The work is diverse, of high quality—and it raises the question of what
role speculative thinking is to play in the development of ecosocialism. Though
the word, ecosocialism, does not appear in any of the four articles, each may be
read as preparing its ground. Now, if to bring ecosocialism into being requires
the overcoming of capital, “the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois
society,” to use a phrase of Marx," and as this must be done in the mind as
well as in the streets and the workplaces, so does ecosocialism require a con-
sistent philosophical perspective. Further, as ecosocialism negates the existing,
capitalist state of affairs, and as dialectic is the discourse and method of nega-
tion, the philosophical approach to ecosocialism is dialectical. Dialectic is the
method of overcoming, eternally negating—even, at its most radical, negat-
ing itself. This is a core feature of Clark’s argument: the negative dialectic in
the hands of a master like Nagarjuna dissolves all fixed and frozen categories,
and hence is essential for thought that overturns the given. The theme recurs

throughout the history of ideas, at times, unexpectedly. Thus St. Ha roughly
Nagarjuna’s contemporary, had a similar insight, which he au his First
Epistle to the Corinthians: “T will destroy the wisdom of the wise, /and the
discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” For “God chose what is foolish in
the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame
the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are
not, to reduce to nothing things that are.” (RSV, 1.19, 27-28).
The dialectical tradition was betrayed by Paul under the exigencies of
church-building and has been reliably betrayed since by ecclesiastical powers.
Nonetheless it was transmitted through religious backchannels. It surfaced in
the subversive early Renaissance science of figures like Paracelsus, and passed
through the minds of mystics like Jacob Bohme on its way to the synthesis of
Hegel, who made the grave mistake of fancying that he had perfected the no-
tion. Marx saw through this and proclaimed the eternally radical implications
of dialectic, nowhere more clearly than in the Postface to the second edition
of Capital. Hegel's dialectic, once demystified,
includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simul-
taneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction;
because it regards every historically developed form as being
in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient
aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by
anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary. ”!
The theme was again sounded by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and
Revolution, and implicitly shapes the contributions of Farrell and Wilding as
they work to restore the influence of that great thinker. From another angle
we hear its echo in Verharen, who recognizes that Cuba, imperfectly socialist
as it may be, nonetheless infuses ethics with a life-affirmative character essen-
tial for surviving the ecological crisis.
Or, to see it from another angle, surviving our own destructivity, of which
the ecological crisis is the manifestation and capital the efficient cause. Paleo-
lithic extinctions of great mammals and birds demonstrate that the proclivity
to harm nature is deeply embedded in human existence, preceding industrial
society by millennia; the harming of nature must be reckoned as the obverse
side of our species-specific productive power. Innumerable societies have per-
ished according to various follies associated with production gone awry.
Capitalism —and the modernity of which it is the productive force—is
not simply the extension of earlier modes of destructivity. It introduces a quali-
tative shift into a new order capable of bringing down civilization itself through

the compulsion to endlessly expand. The specific capitalist mentality is shaped
by this: calculating, subjectively registered, and exfoliating into systems of ideas.
The megamachine driving civilization must be geared and lubricated in all its
parts if it is to function properly. Ideas that do not actively contest capital serve
to enhance the effectiveness of its machine. _
The root of capital’s mentality lies in its law of value and the principle of
exchangeability necessary for endless accumulation. Marx’s dictum that capital
was animated by the principle, “Accumulate, Accumulate! That is Moses and
the prophets!,”?! is no mere rhetorical flourish. It conveys, rather, the mon-
strous force driving the megamachine, a force once drawn from nature, and
experienced spiritually, and now turned against nature. It is an exact measure of
what the ecosocialist impulse must contend with.
If everything can be given a monetary value, then anything can be ex-
changed for anything else. This is another way of saying that under capitalism
nothing is sacred —including all forms of rationality that evolved before so-
ciety came under the spell of capital and its notion of progress. These must be
sequestered and kept from renewing their power. What is pre-capitalist is not
necessarily abandoned, though it is often disparaged and even ridiculed, and
in many cases, appears in the perversions of new age technologies.
Such thoughts occurred to me recently while perusing Green Hermeti-
cism, a book given for review by my friend and Capitalism Nature Socialism
contributor, Peter Lamborn Wilson.! The subtitle of Green Hermeticism, “Al-
chemy and Ecology,” combines one of our most au courant buzzwords with a
term pretty well tossed into the dustbin of history, and the object of scorn by
the educated classes. Like astrology, alchemy is widely regarded as a remnant
of an age in which blind superstition was the rule and backward religion the
dominant power. Pity the poor alchemists! Ignorant of the marvels of atomic
theory—among which we must include all the wonderful products of our
chemical industries —the alchemists wasted their lives in casting spells over
metals in the search for gold, the Holy Grail, and the True Cross.
But Green Hermeticism is no simpleminded affirmation of what is ordi-
narily construed as alchemy. Wilson and Christopher Bamford, his principal
collaborator,! demonstrate, rather, that alchemy was the practical and mate-
rial aspect of Hermeticism, a much vaster enterprise and worldview. Though
restricted by a limited comprehension of the structure of the physical uni-
verse, the Hermeticist/alchemists nonetheless stayed faithful to something
that has been lost in the suicidal race toward maximum production —a pres-
ervation of the whole, which is to say, an ecological integrity that entitles the
two words in Green Hermeticism’s subtitle to be linked.

The wisdom of Green Hermeticism comes into view against the backdrop
of the catastrophes wrought by capitalist industrialization. Wilson in par-
ticular connects alchemy and hermeticism with the romantic protest whose
defeat by modernity opens the way to eco-catastrophe. Significantly, Wilson
considers the fate of Marxism in this light as well. As he puts it:
We need to bury the myth that Magic and Romanticism
are somehow inherently reactionary—a myth deliberately
sponsored both by Stalinists and “democratic” cultural his-
torians...as a form of triumphalist absolutism.
Now that Marxism has crumbled, one victor holds the field:
[sic] Enlightenment Rationalism’s greatest victory: the free
market as inexorable law of nature. The only possible di-
alectical negation of this thesis, I think, must come from
the long-abandoned and even repressed Hermetic Left, and
from Romantic Science, and from spirituality. Green Her-
meticism.
... The poetic and artistic realm is also not peripheral here
but quite central. Only Hermeticism of all traditions recog-
nizes art as praxis rather than as mere auxiliary “support for
contemplation.” Hermeticism defines itself as art-— Our Art.
Green Hermeticism can be the basis for our approach to

the coming revelation, the coherent spiritual movement that
constitutes the only imaginable alternative to unending deg-
radation of Earth and humanity. (54)
Thus these antiquated gestures of a lost science are also shards of defeated
modes of production, the reconstruction of which can shed light upon the
madness of our time.
The figure of Hermes is primordial, standing for that which is in-between
and in motion, as well as everything that flows. Hermeticism belongs to a
stratum that might be called pre-moral: thus Hermes is also known as the
borrower, and especially, the thief. The Greek God, and his Roman confrere
Mercury, are the best-known names by which the principle is embodied, but
Wilson and Bamford properly expand the term with a dazzling tour through
world culture and literature, scarcely missing a note. They also identify many
of the infinitely complex relations between Hermeticism and the religions of
history, in particular, the monotheistic Abrahamic triad — Judaism/Christi-

anity/Islam-—who have arrogated the stage to themselves and largely forced
from it the Hermetic/dialectical modalities nourished by ecosystemic contact
with the earth.” I found particularly valuable here Wilson’s emphasis on the
Hermetic principle of syncretism—inspired borrowing, mingling, and hold-
ing together—which can serve as a necessary methodological ancilla to the
making of dialectic. For Hermes is also the ieaslarorn as “Hermeneutics” is the
study of meanings. Even psychoanalysis can be brought into the mix, Freud’s
voyage into the underworld being suitable to represent the Hermetic quest for
meaning and the subversion of time, even if the actual application has long
since sunk into a bourgeois stupor.
I have one critical observation to offer: that Wilson and Bamford should
better ground their investigation in terms of prehistory. The great body of
Green Hermeticism concerns ancient and modern state formations. Missing is
a consistent treatment of the state-free primordium and its older and deeper
archetype known as the Trickster, Hermes’ ancestor. Evidence of the Trickster
goes back as far as cave paintings from 18,000 years ago. S/he was an om-
nipresent figure in original society, before there were heroes and kings. Like
Hermes to come, Trickster evokes the original and never-ending fluidity of hu-
man being, arising from an epoch when class and the notion of private prop-
erty based on class was non-existent.) The shaman is Trickster’s descendent,
as are the figures on Hermeticism’s tapestry, all the way to Paracelsus, Blake,
and those cultural/political radicals who are charged with rescuing civilization
from the grasp of false reason (Blake's Urizen), and bringing ecosocialism into
the world. @
[Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2008)
NOTES
1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 107.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, tans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1976), 103.
Ibid., 742.
be Peter Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford, and Kevin Townley, Green Hermeticism
(Great Barrington MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2007). The work includes an expanded ver-
sion of Wilson's essay, “The Disciples at Sais,” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 15, no. 2
(June 2004).
5. Kevin Townley adds a brief Postscript describing the formulary of plant medicines (“tinc-
tures”) based on the alchemical principles of Paracelsus.
6. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) employs
a variant but not unrelated notion, of “mercurianism,” to designate those peoples who are
the “middle-men,” intermediaries of stratified societies. Within modernity, Jews have come

to epitomize this concept because of their traditional role on the borders and between
classes— though now everyone else is falling into the same pattern, whence the title.
7. Augustine's City of God is an immense tract dedicated to crushing what he took to be
spurious and phony nature gods and goddesses belonging to the pagan (i.e., countrified)
remnants designated for grinding under the wheels of atriumphant Christianity. It is un-
necessary to iterate, and impossible to explore, the numberless interrelations between the
Abrahamic religions and their internal mystical or ecstatic variants.
8. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Philo-
sophical Library, 1956).

A Speech That Didn’t Get Delivered
(2008)
CLAIMED A HALF CENTURY AGO from a large and shallow valley in Brazil’s
savannah, or cerrado, Brasilia apparently stands for everything ecosocialism
is supposed to contest: massification on an inhuman scale, with suppression
of community; enormous degrees of separation between units, with wretch-
ed public transportation (no light rail transport, not a bicycle lane, scarcely
a sidewalk) and hence choking traffic; spectacular yet aggressive buildings
embodying mathematical rather than autochthonous, earth-centered val-
ues—the capital of Brazil seems at first glance to be that kind of proclama-
tion of modernity whose purpose is to defy mere nature. It has been billed as
a catastrophe, and stuck me as such when | stumbled off my overnight, and
typically wretched, flight to join the Third International Conference on the
Environment sponsored by the Ministry of the same name.
However, I ended up rather fond of the place. Not because the above
findings were proven false, but owing, as one says, to mitigating factors. I
hadn't taken into account the “glory” aspect of Brasilia: its audacity and spirit
of transformation. This was realized through the agency of Oscar Niemeyer,
architect of many of its major buildings."") No doubt, it is problematic to have
one man take on so much in the design of amajor city. But when the person
in question is a radical humanist, the work can become a conduit for the aspi-
ration of a whole people and through them, the rising of the South. However
flawed, Brasilia does not convey the jack-booted aura of fascistic models of
urban design such as those devised by Albert Speer and endlessly reproduced
in our shopping malls and temples of administration. What is totalitarian in
architecture conveys the obliteration of struggle. But Brazil is a zone of strug-

gle, and the capital shows this as well. The very openings between Pees
are both a nuisance and an offering of possibility.’ They let in the winds from
the forest, and as in this conference, a considerable number of people from the
forest as well, some of whom seemed to have just stepped off a canoe.
The whole notion of the national environmental conference is meant to
be an exercise in direct democracy, hence, steeped in struggle. In principle,
the people are to deliberate in congress and at its close, present a set of plans
and demands to the government, which is supposed to take them seriously. In
other words, civil society is to confront the state. Since the latter controls the
terms of the gathering, a certain skepticism is warranted as to whether this is
more than an exercise in public relations. And in fact the ecosocialist move-
ment in Brazil is rather sharply divided between a faction who believes such
gatherings are a waste of time (the PSOL, or Party of Socialism and Liberty)
and another group integrated within the ruling Worker's Party administra-
tion. The PSOL remains active in parliament, and both factions have joined
in the Brazilian Ecosocialist Network, founded in the World Social Forum in
2003 and an important national component of the Ecosocialist International
Network." Thus the inevitable contradictions accompanying the germina-
tion of a radical alternative to the given order of things are both present in
Brazil and substantially more fruitful than elsewhere. Quite a few countries
should be envious of this level of development.
Thanks to this evolving ecosocialist presence, my appearance at the con-
ference was no exercise in tokenism. I spoke before a climate change plenary,
presided over a launching of 7he Enemy of Nature, gave a seminar on the
principles of ecosocialism, and participated in the planning of other ecoso-
cialist activities. Iwas even offered the opportunity of addressing the opening
session of the conference itself, in the presence of 2,000 delegates, along with
much of the cabinet, and in particular, the legendary Minister of the Environ-
ment, Marina Silva, whose brainchild this conference was, as well as His Ex-
cellency the President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, himself. I was told
to prepare a ten minute speech; and after much hemming and hawing— for
how on earth can a self-respecting ecosocialist speak honestly in such cir-
cumstances without being boorish to his hosts?— produced the document
below. This was dutifully submitted, and about a week later, politely declined
for the ostensible reason that there was room for just one foreigner in the
event, and that quota had just been filled by Her Excellency the Environment
Minister of Argentina. I took the blow, showed up, went to my reserved seat,
and found that the Argentine minister was not there. Neither was President
Lula, who sent his regrets and a deputy. I must'say that this relieved my mind,

because it soon became apparent that the meeting was really about Marina
Silva and her possible bid to be the next President of Brazil, which was being
vigorously encouraged; and there is nobody on earth I would less want to
discomfit than she.
Lula and Marina are unrelated by family, but complexly intertwined nev-
ertheless. Both came from the bottom of society, and each was illiterate as a
child —Lula until age ten, Marina until sixteen. The future President, once a
shoe-shine boy, came from Brazil’s industrial South, and his future Environ-
ment Minister, who is twelve years his junior, from its Amazonian North,
the state of Acre with its indigenous, Afro-Indian rubber-tapping culture.
Lula and Marina inhabit distinct ethnic lines as well as distinct fractions of
working-class existence, and, it goes without saying, distinct gender positions
as well. Marina is very definitely a forest person; Lula a specimen of Euro-Bra-
zilian industrial development from its proletarian end. She was a disciple and
associate of the martyred Chico Mendes, who was slain by the land barons of
the great forests twenty years ago for organizing, with her help, indigenous
rubber tappers. Mendes’ Christlike visage hung above the proceedings over
the word recognized by all: “Presente.”
Marina Silva represents the legacy of Mendes within ecosocialism. She
sees the flourishing of the human world and its natural firmament as two
aspects of the same struggle, and stands for the preservation of indigenous
life-worlds as an integral ecosystemic process. The minister for Brazil’s envi-
ronment bears more than a passing resemblance to Frida Kahlo (and shares
with her a history of major illness), and is known to be intensely spiritual and
religious, given to quoting people like Joseph Campbell.
Nobody would ascribe such traits to President Lula, who belongs square-
ly to another, all-too-common type: the working-class militant who sacrifices
his birthright and integrates himself with the ruling class while burnishing his
image as the organic representative of the underlings. Lula’s record reveals a
more or less full capitulation to neoliberalism, all the while skillfully retaining
folksy, commoner ways. Very successful is Lula, though his strategy demands
that he authenticate his image as a champion of the oppressed. For this pur-
pose, Marina Silva proved an indispensable foil. She was to a real extent given
her way, and so long as she stayed within bounds, allowed to be paraded be-
fore the world as the honored champion ofBrazil's environment and its poor.
This marriage of convenience worked for a while; and indeed the pace of
Amazonian destruction slowed discernibly in the first five years of her minis-
try. Over the last year, however, rising commodity prices gave her many an-
tagonists in the “development” and agro-business sector a big boost. Marina

began losing internal battles, and for the past six months, the rate of defor-
estation in Amazonia has accelerated sharply, triggering a major scandal and
much conflict. We must pass over this for now, except to note a crucial turn-
ing point. On May 13, two days after the end of the Environment confer-
ence, Marina shocked the world and President Lula by abruptly resigning her
post. Her replacement, Carlos Minc, was formerly environmental secretary
of Rio de Janeiro State and one of the founders of the Green Party in Brazil.
Agence France Presse observed that “Minc is considered a pragmatic politi-
cian, and as environmental secretary for Rio de Janeiro he has been criticized
for his agility to concede permits for projects. In record time, he approved the
necessary permits to build a gigantic petrochemical center at Itaborai, in the
northern area of the Rio State.” Alas, all too-Green, though we will have to
see how this plays out.
For the moment, Marina is back in the Brazilian Senate. Whether the
sense of her Presidential aspirations sharply conveyed on May 7 is more than
a passing fancy will also have to be seen. In any case, the ecosocialist move-
ment in Brazil will not collapse. The tectonic forces that are transforming
our planet and shaping history grind on. Meanwhile, the genie is out of the
bottle. The little speech I wrote for May 7 did not deserve to be spoken on
that occasion. But perhaps its preservation as text may be useful:
President Lula, Minister Silva, distinguished guests.
I am deeply honored to be here today. I am also deeply im-

pressed that the leadership of a great country such as Brazil,
so completely engaged in the world-system, would be open
to hearing ideas that radically challenge that system. I can
only ascribe this, first, to a remarkable degree of awareness
of the depth of the crisis through which the world is passing,
and second, to the plain courage to face a harsh truth. For
this I salute you—and promise to hold nothing back from
my vision of this dilemma.
I take the view that society is in the grip of a global eco-

logical crisis that can be described as a savage and poten-
tially fatal disease: a kind of cancer that grows malignantly,
invading and metastasizing throughout the ecosphere. More-
over —and this is the more difficult part to accept—
the pa-
thology of this cancer and the driving force of the ecologi-
cal crisis is the accumulation of capital, the very system that

rules the world. Capital can no more check its compulsion
to grow than you or I can voluntarily stop breathing; con-
sequently its prodigious wealth entails a chaotic expansion
of the economic product accompanied by the inevitable dis-
integration of the ecosystems that give us life. The capital-
ist system is killing us—not individually, though countless
lives have been brought down by brutal labor, or expended in
wars
— but as a monster created by society over the last 500
years whose ruthless expansion will bring civilization down
and could well presage the extinction of the human species.
This argument is of course extremely disturbing given the

power of the capitalist system and the awesome implications
of changing it. But I was a physician once, and I learned
then that ifa person has a disease which would be fatal if left
untreated, one is not doing him or her a favor by denying the
seriousness of the problem. The same principle holds here.
The characteristic sign of this disease is that it always places

the highest value on the making of profits in any transac-
tion. This rule is ruthlessly enforced and implies unending
competition throughout society. Greed and egotism come
to rule capitalism, which is animated by a wild mania for
wealth. All limits are set aside except as they increase profit-
ability; and this inevitably splits humanity from nature, and
makes nature a mere repository of resources or a dumping
ground for waste. Inevitably also, this will surface into eco-
logical damage when profit-taking leads to the open deg-
radation of nature along with debasing the conditions of
production, including the bodies of workers.
Ever-widening circles of ecological damage result, reflecting the

system's constant pressure to expand. In 1984 the most violent
localized episode of this kind occurred in Bhopal, India, when
Union Carbide’s pesticide plant blew-up because of profiteer-
ing-driven neglect. Twenty thousand died directly, and almost
twenty-four years later, people are still dying at the site.
As the disorder developed we have seen whole regions dev-

astated as a result of the interaction of different lines of
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM tok

causality bearing the imprint of capital’s degenerative in-
fluence. The nightmare of Hurricane Katrina was one such
catastrophe. It was compounded first, from global warming
driven by capitalist industry’s release of greenhouse gases,
which heated the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to 33°C and
consequently converted a category 1 storm to category 5;
second, from decades of degradation of the Mississippi delta
by excessive development, eliminating much of nature’s pro-
tection from storms; third, from corresponding degradation
of the dykes, levees, and other infrastructures of New Or-
leans, all of which are functions of the corrupting effects of
capital upon government and public services (this greatly
aggravated by the shocking callousness and incompetence of
a federal administration whose entire loyalty is to the class
of capitalists); fourth, from the relative absence of troops to
supplement local authorities in times of crisis, this thanks
to Cheney and Bush’s oil war in Iraq; and fifth but certainly
not least, because it structures disaster and roots it in his-
tory, from the racism accompanying capitalist exploitation
of labor and the fracturing of its society.
Now another catastrophe is emerging: hunger. Not the tra-

ditional famines, which were regional, but famine extended
in time and space, famine that is a plaything of cold eco-
nomic laws. We are seeing for the first time hunger on a
global scale, affecting at least thirty-seven countries, many
of whose governments are quaking as of this writing. . . for
a parent who has to watch his or her child starve is a person
who will stop at nothing. Millions are down to one meal a
day in India; people have been killed in food lines in Cairo;
they eat mud pies in Port au Prince to still their hunger, or
offer their children on the street to whoever can feed them.
Analysts are quick to point out the complexity of the phe-

nomena; they emphasize that there is no single cause for the
hunger. No, no, nothing systematic here, just an unhappy
conjunction, a kind of bad luck. The better-off in places like
India and China—and there are hundreds of millions of
such—are eating more meat, which requires eight grams
of grain protein for every gram yielded of animal protein.

In addition, though the food supply has not yet absolute-
ly dropped below the needs of the world’s stomachs, it is
showing worrisome signs of levelling off and even declining.
Thus China's grain harvest has decreased 10 percent in seven
years, as arable land becomes paved over, or blighted by pol-
lution, or turned to dust by water shortages. In drought-
ruined Australia, meanwhile, annual grain production has
dropped from 25 to 9.8 metric tonnes in a generation... all
this, as food demand is expected to double by the year 2030.
And then there is the matter of the inexorable rise in the

price of petroleum, as ever-increasing demand intersects with
the limits of supply. To ameliorate this, as we all know, the
powers-that-be have hit upon the bright idea of producing
biofuels, which alas, compete with old-growth forests such as
Amazonia, on the one hand, and the nourishment that goes
into people’s stomachs, on the other. And if the needs of fuel
tanks somehow end up taking priority over mere rainforests
or the feeding of poor children, well, that’s just the implaca-
ble working of the market, against which no man can stand.
All this is indeed complicated. It is bewildering, chaotic,

non-linear, cascading, indeterminate. It is essential that we
appreciate this complexity, and that we be humble before
the unfathomable dynamics of nature. But we must not
miss the awful simplicity at the core of these ecological le-
sions, that each of these points is organized according to the
great class-structured forces of the human world. When pri-
ority is given to biofuels production as against feeding poor
people or protecting the forest, or when decisions are made
to exploit newly discovered oil fields such as the tar sands of
Alberta, or closer to home, the offshore Carioca field which
Business Week has recently called “a major reversal of for-
tune” for Brazil, these are decisions for capital and its ruling
class, and against the integrity of the planetary ecology.
The new hunger does not ensue from a random assort-

ment of forces, but is a structure driven by an underlying
dynamic— one that I believe it is not transient, but here to
stay. As with Bhopal and Katrina, the surface phenomena

are set into motion by the social power of accumulation.
Not one phenomenon observed above is detached from
capital—which means, simply put, that all of it can come
out differently if the class forces that enter into accumula-
tion are altered. I mean this in particular instances, as in the
business decisions that enter into the conversion of forests
to biofuels, or deem it more essential to tend to the world’s
motor vehicles than its children. And I mean it on a plane-
tary scale also, for the appearance of phenomena like hunger
on a global scale can only mean that there is a “globalized”
system of capital in place, a neoliberal regime signifying the
metastatic stage of the planetary cancer. That the great in-
dustrial captains, and their politicians, and their academics,
and their media and think-tanks, would consistently distract
our attention from this point is a scandal of world-historical
proportions. That they would naturalize capital instead of
seeing it as a system of human choices, and follow Margaret
Thatcher when she proclaimed the true god of this world to
be “TINA” —that There Is No Alternative to capital as the
god of this world—is a death sentence upon our children.
For there is an alternative; it has been called “another world”

by the emerging Social Forum movement. And it can be
built if the vision and the will are strong enough. But this
world has to be grounded in a new way of production—or
rather, an old way brought into new prominence.
An essential principle is that people must be able to freely

produce, which is to say, be democratically in control of the
means of production, and this for two reasons. First, because
an antagonistic society where a great mass of paupers con-
fronts a small minority in command of the sources of wealth
is as unacceptable ecologically as it is morally. A highly polar-
ized class society is too violent and conflict-ridden to ratio-
nally regulate its relations with nature; hence social justice
and ecological integrity are two aspects of the same structure.
Further, only a free association of producers can summon

the creativity to solve the great problems of building an
ecologically sane world, perhaps the most urgent of which

is to liberate humanity from the trap of the carbon-based
economy. The problems are prodigious: how to keep the
oil in the ground; how to develop alternative energy sourc-
es as a real option, along with modes of production built
around them; how to devise ways of living in harmony
with nature instead of under the compulsions and addic-
tions of capital’s consumerism — how, in sum, to replace
a society grounded in possessiveness — “having” — with
one of spiritual fulfillment—“being”...these are the
challenges of the age, and the greatest in human history.
And they can only be solved “from below.”
Innumerable early steps have been taken across the globe on

such paths, which we may call, to sharpen our minds and fo-
cus our vision, ecosocialism. The challenge for creative gov-
ernment is to clear a way so that this path can be extended.
The challenge for everyone is to see our way beyond a dying
system, into a future worthy of humanity and nature.
NOTES
One hundred and one, I found to my astonishment, and still going strong, Niemeyer
“one of the two last communists on earth” according to Fidel (guess who the other one is)
is currently at work on a monumental sculpture commemorating Cuban resistance to the
United States blockade.
And the forms of the buildings are far from cold abstraction, but rather, mathematized
representations of the female body, as can be seen in the astounding national museum
designed by Niemeyer and consecrated to his work. One can also see in them a
formalization of the hills around the city, grasped by Niemeyer with a certain fragility as
well as aggression.
The manifesto of the Brazilian Ecosocialists states that the organization “is meant to be a
network of ecosocialist militants who act in different spheres of political action according
to the principles and the theoretical reflection built with reference to ecosocialism.”
Upon receiving the “Champion of the Earth” award from the United Nations
Environmental Programme in April 2007, Marina stated: “In these times of doubts
and uncertainty as regards the future, it is increasingly necessary to believe in life as
a succession of rebirths, as expressed in the statement by Joseph Campbell: ‘where we
had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay
another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to
the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with
all the people.’” 2» No doubt, Campbell is a problematic character; but these words admit
ofa vision well beyond the ken or capacity of the bureaucrat.

The Ecosocialist International Network
(2008)
THE SUBURB OF MONTREUIL BEGINS at the Eastern gate of Paris and is best
known as the site of the studio where Georges Méliés developed the art of
cinema out of the raw material of his training as an illusionist and magician.
But those who assembled in the Mairie (prefecture) of Montreuil on October
7, 2007 to inaugurate the Ecosocialist International Network (EIN) might
be forgiven for believing that what they were about to set into motion might
someday be recognized to have far exceeded this accomplishment. Given the
scale of what the sixty or so activists from thirteen countries confronted, how-
ever, one could also be forgiven for wishing that there would be a magician in
the Mairie of Montreuil on that sunny October day.
Ecosocialism is predicated on an insight, that the capitalist system is both
unsustainable and incorrigible; and also a hope, that humanity has the capac-
ity, once this is realized, to build a viable alternative society. If ecosocialists are
wrong in the insight, then capitalism has the power to recuperate its ecocidal
tendencies, in which case, the establishment politicians and intellectuals will
be congratulated for muddling through, and radicals like ecosocialists can
fold up their tents and fade away. But of course ecosocialists do not think of
themselves as wrong in their diagnosis of capital’s cancerous nature. If they
did, they wouldn't be ecosocialists.
Whether the founding of the EIN will ever in fact be celebrated depends
entirely upon whether the hope is realized as well as the insight. In other
words, humanity has to survive the cancer with the help of the remedy pro-
posed by ecosocialism. Daunting is too weak a word to describe this prospect.
Unthinkable is too weak a word to describe not going forward with it.

The territory beyond the given is by definition unknown. It cannot be
blueprinted but only imagined; and the most one can do in the present is to
set forth certain principles drawn from historical experience and philosophical
inference. In the making of the EIN, the first principle is inclusivity. No ideol-
ogy or system of beliefs should be excluded from ecosocialism so long as it is
predicated on the unsustainability of capital, dedicates itself : going beyond
capital, and adopts what could be broadly termed an “ecocentric ethic— that
is, a program in which mending the damage to our natural world is paramount.
EIN is therefore about defining and building ecosocialism, as well as be-
ginning the implementation of ecosocialism to save the planet from ecocatas-
trophe. The two sides of this cannot be separated. While no one who attended
the opening session in Montreuil wanted the EIN to be an academic institu-
tion or a debating society, no one could evade, either, the fact that there were
wide-ranging differences present in the room, and that what we needed first
of all was a way of providing a kind of workshop, or forum, for making these
differences fruitful. In short, the building of ecosocialism entails building a
theory of ecosocialism. This can be seen as a matter of dialectic.
The original meaning of the term, dialectic, was that of a gathering of dif-
ferent voices to build knowledge through contestation. This implies that none
of us are able to grasp alone more than a small portion of truth; that truth is
therefore to be achieved through collective intellectual labor; and that differ-
ences between truth-seekers are not to be suppressed but honored as potentially
fecund sites of interaction. In the dialectical view, then, truth is never finished
and is always a process. It is the product of interaction between the world and
the human self, and an agent in the unfolding of the world. Dialectic is not a
mysterious hand, a theoretic demiurge outside of us, but the real coming to-
gether of communicative individuals to make meaning out of their collective
work. And just as work within external nature, say, the making of a path in the
woods, or a garden, entails a complex process of moving against and with vari-
ous features of the landscape, so does the dialectical building of a human group
like the EIN entail the encountering and overcoming of resistances within, and
the making of bonds between, the human agents of that group. From another
angle, any organization, as the word dictates, is also an organism and a new
ecosystem, which flourishes to the degree it is faithful to dialectic. Such are the
hopes for the embryonic Ecosocialist International Network.
Practically speaking, this means providing a kind of political space so that
the principles of dialectic can be maintained within the building of ecosocial-
ism. This will involve some difficult but necessary maneuvering. The same
inertia that haunts all left practice also haunts ecosocialism: the past that

weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, as Marx famously put it,
and forces us to repeat rather than transcend history. We find this sedimented
along three axes in the making of the EIN: North-South; male-female; and
according to the varieties of thought corresponding to these locations.
To build a radical organization in this world is to accept the constraints
of poverty, and hence, limits on what can be done materially. For the EIN
this meant that we had little choice as where to hold the opening meeting:
it had to be in the North, and Northern Europe in particular, because only
there does the mixture of infrastructure and concentration of activists reach
a critical mass. And so it was France, for the planning session, and England,
for the activists
— twenty of the sixty, representing five different tendencies.
There were other attendees from Canada, the United States, and Denmark,
adding their Northern weight to the affair. Meanwhile, one of the global
South’s most consequential members, Brazil, had but three representatives,
while others, such as Venezuela and India, had none. Only one black face was
seen, and he a Frenchman; the entire continent of Africa was un-represented
(though South African comrades had hoped to come, while another, from
Zimbabwe, could do no more than express enthusiasm in advance), and the
same was so for Asia (though a Nepalese Green tried mightily to make it).
When one considers that the ecological crisis does not respect geographical
boundary, that the majority of humankind lives in the South, and that the
great axis of injustice and exploitation runs from North to South, it follows
that by any rational standard the center of gravity for the EIN should be in
the global South. It also follows that the EIN has a very long way to go.
As for the question of gender, the meeting was remarkably balanced in
terms of numbers of women and men, but quite unremarkable when it came to
who got to say and decide the most: the same old possessors of the y-chromo-
sone (present company not excluded). This may seem by now a tedious lament;
but the issue is not political correctness. Ecosocialism may be a long way from
realization, however we are not totally in the dark as to what it must encom-
pass. To a remarkable, perhaps unique, extent, ecosocialism is distinguished
from other varieties of socialism in insisting that the mending of nature needs
to incorporate a profound transformation of gender relations. This goes far be-
yond the distributive justice of bourgeois feminism. Ecosocialism entails as well
the revalorization, across all strata of society, of what had been degraded over
centuries of patriarchy as mere “women’s work” —that is, ecosocialism must be
ecofeminist. Contrast the immemorial quality of female labor as the tending
of life with the horrendous assault on life under the regime of capital, and the
necessity of ecofeminism within ecosocialism becomes sharply evident.

These matters surface in the kinds of discourses the various actors will
bring to meetings of the EIN, and they will be worked out according to the
kinds of spaces we provide for dialectical engagement. It seems to me in this
respect that the paradigm for our theoretical work is less the traditionally
expressed and rather simplistic notion of “red-green” convergence than it is
the mutual encountering of discourses across the various axes of North/South
and male/female as these are manifested in a myriad of organized forms. This
is obviously not the place to take up so substantial a matter with anything like
the depth it deserves. But I do not see the Ecosocialist International Network
beginning to realize itself until, for example, the Marxist-Leninist (chiefly
Trotskyist) tendencies that were influential in Montreuil are brought into
dialectical engagement with the innumerable “subsistence perspectives” that
lie, relatively dormant, in waiting across the South, including the “Southern
enclaves” of industrial society, like New Orleans, South Durban, and the ban-
lieues of Paris. Now that will be a meeting worth aspiring towards!
The next big opportunity will be the World Social Forum, to be held in
Belem, Brazil, in January, 2009. =

The Belém Ecosocialist Declaration
(2009)
“The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the
disease is the capitalist development model.”
—FEvo Morales, president of Bolivia, September 2007
Humanity’s Choice
HUMANITY TODAY FACES A STARK CHOICE: ecosocialism or barbarism. We need
no more proof of the barbarity of capitalism, the parasitical system that exploits
humanity and nature alike. Its sole motor is the imperative toward profit and
thus the need for constant growth. It wastefully creates unnecessary products,
squandering the environment’ limited resources and returning to it only toxins
and pollutants. Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much
more is sold every day, every week, every year—involving the creation of vast
quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature,
commodities that cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying
the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and
treating our water, air and soil like sewers for the disposal of industrial waste.
Capitalism’s need for growth exists on every level, from the individual
enterprise to the system as a whole. The insatiable hunger of corporations is
facilitated by imperialist expansion in search of ever greater access to natural
resources, cheap labor and new markets. Capitalism has always been eco-
logically destructive, but in our lifetimes these assaults on the earth have ac-
celerated. Quantitative change is giving way to qualitative transformation,
bringing the world to a tipping point, to the edge of disaster. A growing body
of scientific research has identified many ways in which small temperature

increases could trigger irreversible, runaway effects—such as rapid melting
of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of methane buried in permafrost and
beneath the ocean — that would make catastrophic climate change inevitable.
Left unchecked, global warming will have devastating effects on human,
animal and plant life. Crop yields will drop drastically, leading to famine on
a broad scale. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by droughts
in some areas and by rising ocean levels in others. Chaotic, unpredictable
weather will become the norm. Air, water and soil will be poisoned. Epidem-
ics of malaria, cholera and even deadlier diseases will hit the poorest and most
vulnerable members of every society.
The impact of the ecological crisis is felt most severely by those whose
lives have already been ravaged by imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, and indigenous peoples everywhere are especially vulnerable. Envi-
ronmental destruction and climate change constitute an act of aggression by
the rich against the poor.
Ecological devastation, resulting from the insatiable need to increase prof-
its, is not an accidental feature of capitalism: it is built into the system’s DNA
and cannot be reformed away. Profit-oriented production only considers a
short-term horizon in its investment decisions, and cannot take into account
the long-term health and stability of the environment. Infinite economic ex-
pansion is incompatible with finite and fragile ecosystems, but the capitalist
economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth; its constant need to expand
will subvert any limits that might be imposed in the name of “sustainable de-
velopment.” Thus the inherently unstable capitalist system cannot regulate its
own activity, much less overcome the crises caused by its chaotic and parasitical
growth, because to do so would require setting limits upon accumulation
—an
unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die!
If capitalism remains the dominant social order, the best we can expect
is unbearable climate conditions, an intensification of social crises and the
spread of the most barbaric forms of class rule, as the imperialist powers fight
among themselves and with the global south for continued control of the
world’s diminishing resources. At worst, human life may not survive.
Capitalist Strategies for Change

THERE IS NO LACK OF PROPOSED STRATEGIES for contending with ecological
ruin, including the crisis of global warming looming as a result of the reckless
increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The great majority of these strategies
share one common feature: they are devised by and on behalf of the dominant
global system, capitalism.

It is no surprise that the dominant global system which is responsible
for the ecological crisis also sets the terms of the debate about this crisis, for
capital commands the means of production of knowledge, as much as that of
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Accordingly, its politicians, bureaucrats, econo-
mists and professors send forth an endless stream of proposals, all variations
on the theme that the world’s ecological damage can be repaired without
disruption of market mechanisms and of the system of accumulation that
commands the world economy.
But a person cannot serve two masters— the integrity of the earth and
the profitability of capitalism. One must be abandoned, and history leaves
little question about the allegiances of the vast majority of policymakers.
There is every reason, therefore, to radically doubt the capacity of established
measures to check the slide to ecological catastrophe.
And indeed, beyond a cosmetic veneer, the reforms over the past thirty-
five years have been a monstrous failure. Isolated improvements do of course
occur, but they are inevitably overwhelmed and swept away by the ruthless
expansion of the system and the chaotic character of its production.
One example demonstrates the failure: in the first four years of the twenty-
first century, global carbon emissions were nearly three times as great per annum
as those of the decade of the 1990s, despite the appearance of the Kyoto Proto-
cols in 1997. Kyoto employs two devices: the “Cap and Trade” system of trad-
ing pollution credits to achieve certain reductions in emissions, and projects in
the global south —the so-called “Clean Development Mechanisms” — to offset
emissions in the highly industrialized nations. These instruments all rely upon
market mechanisms, which means, first of all, that atmospheric carbon diox-
ide becomes a commodity under the control of the same interests that created
global warming. Polluters are not compelled to reduce their carbon emissions,
but allowed to use their power over money to control the carbon market for
their own ends, which include the devastating exploration for yet more carbon-
based fuels. Nor is there a limit to the amount of emission credits which can be
issued by compliant governments. Since verification and evaluation of results
are impossible, the Kyoto regime is not only incapable of controlling emissions,
it also provides ample opportunities for evasion and fraud of all kinds. As even
The Wall Street Journal put it in March, 2007, emissions trading “would make
money for some very large corporations, but don't believe for a minute that this
charade would do much about global warming.”
The Bali climate meetings in 2007 opened the way for even greater abus-
es in the period ahead. Bali avoided any mention of the goals for drastic
carbon reduction put forth by the best climate science (90 percent by 2050);

it abandoned the peoples of the global south to the mercy of capital by giv-
ing jurisdiction over the process to the World Bank; and made offsetting of
carbon pollution even easier.
In order to affirm and sustain our human future, a revolutionary transfor-
mation is needed, where all particular struggles take part in a greater struggle
against capital itself. This larger struggle cannot remain merely Laas and
anti-capitalist. It must announce and build a different kind of society, and
this is ecosocialism.
The Ecosocialist Alternative

THE ECOSOCIALIST MOVEMENT aims to stop and to reverse the disastrous pro-
cess of global warming in particular and of capitalist ecocide in general, and
to construct a radical and practical alternative to the capitalist system. Ecoso-
cialism is grounded in a transformed economy founded on the non-monetary
values of social justice and ecological balance. It criticizes both capitalist “mar-
ket ecology” and productivist socialism, which ignored the earth’s equilibrium
and limits. It redefines the path and goal of socialism within an ecological and
democratic framework. Ecosocialism involves a revolutionary social transfor-
mation, which will imply the limitation of growth and the transformation of
needs by a profound shift away from quantitative and toward qualitative eco-
nomic criteria, an emphasis on use-value instead of exchange-value.
These aims require both democratic decision-making in the economic
sphere, enabling society to collectively define its goals of investment and pro-
duction, and the collectivization of the means of production. Only collective
decision-making and ownership of production can offer the longer-term per-
spective that is necessary for the balance and sustainability of our social and
natural systems.
The rejection of productivism and the shift away from quantitative and
toward qualitative economic criteria involve rethinking the nature and goals
of production and economic activity in general. Essential creative, non-
productive and reproductive human activities, such as householding, child-
rearing, care, child and adult education, and the arts, will be key values in an
ecosocialist economy. Clean air and water and fertile soil, as well as universal
access to chemical-free food and renewable, non-polluting energy sources,
are basic human and natural rights defended by ecosocialism. Far from be-
ing “despotic,” collective policy-making on the local, regional, national and
international levels amounts to society’s exercise of communal freedom and
responsibility. This freedom of decision constitutes a liberation from the
alienating economic “laws” of the growth-oriented capitalist system.

To avoid global warming and other dangers threatening human and eco-
logical survival, entire sectors of industry and agriculture must be suppressed,
reduced, or restructured and others must be developed, while providing full
employment for all. Such a radical transformation is impossible without col-
lective control of the means of production and democratic planning of pro-
duction and exchange. Democratic decisions on investment and technological
development must replace control by capitalist enterprises, investors and banks,
in order to serve the long-term horizon of society's and nature's common good.
The most oppressed elements of human society, the poor and indigenous
peoples, must take full part in the ecosocialist revolution, in order to revitalize
ecologically sustainable traditions and give voice to those whom the capital-
ist system cannot hear. Because the peoples of the global south and the poor
in general are the first victims of capitalist destruction, their struggles and
demands will help define the contours of the ecologically and economically
sustainable society in creation. Similarly, gender equality is integral to ecoso-
cialism, and women’s movements have been among the most active and vo-
cal opponents of capitalist oppression. Other potential agents of ecosocialist
revolutionary change exist in all societies.
Such a process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of
social and political structures based on the active support, by the majority of
the population, of an ecosocialist program. The struggle of labor —workers,
farmers, the landless and the unemployed— for social justice is inseparable
from the struggle for environmental justice. Capitalism, socially and ecologi-
cally exploitative and polluting, is the enemy of nature and of labor alike.
Ecosocialism proposes radical transformations in:
1. the energy system, by replacing carbon-based fuels and biofuels with
clean sources of power under community control: wind, geothermal,
wave, and above all, solar power;
2. the transportation system, by drastically reducing the use of private

trucks and cars, replacing them with free and efficient public trans-
portation;
3. present patterns of production, consumption, and building, which

are based on waste, inbuilt obsolescence, competition and pollution,
by producing only sustainable and recyclable goods and developing
green architecture; and
4, food production and distribution, by defending local food sovereign-
ty as far as this is possible, eliminating polluting industrial agribusi-

nesses, creating sustainable agro-ecosystems and working actively to
renew soil fertility.
To theorize and to work toward realizing the goal of green socialism does
not mean that we should not also fight for concrete and urgent reforms right
now. Without any illusions about “clean capitalism,” we must work to impose
on the powers that be—governments, corporations, international institu-
tions —some elementary but essential immediate changes:
= drastic and enforceable reduction in the emission of greenhouse
gases,
= development of clean energy sources,
= provision of an extensive free public transportation system,

= progressive replacement of trucks by trains,
= creation of pollution clean-up programs, and
= elimination of nuclear energy, and war spending.
These and similar demands are at the heart of the agenda of the Global
Justice movement and the World Social Forums, which have promoted, since
Seattle in 1999, the convergence of social and environmental movements in
a common struggle against the capitalist system.
Environmental devastation will not be stopped in conference rooms and
treaty negotiations: only mass action can make a difference. Urban and rural
workers, peoples of the global south and indigenous peoples everywhere are
at the forefront of this struggle against environmental and social injustice,
fighting exploitative and polluting multinationals, poisonous and disenfran-
chising agribusinesses, invasive genetically modified seeds, biofuels that only
ageravate the current food crisis. We must further these social-environmental
movements and build solidarity between anti-capitalist ecological mobiliza-
tions in the North and the South.
This Ecosocialist Declaration is a call to action. The entrenched ruling
classes are powerful, yet the capitalist system reveals itself every day more finan-
cially and ideologically bankrupt, unable to overcome the economic, ecological,
social, food and other crises it engenders. And the forces of radical opposition
are alive and vital. On all levels, local, regional and international, we are fighting
to create an alternative system based in social and ecological justice. m
—Joel Kovel, Michael Léwy, Ian Angus, Danielle Follett

[Distributed at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, January 2009]
166 COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEE

The Ecosocialist International Network, Part 2:
What is to be Done?
(2009)
WHEN THE ECOSOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL NETWORK (EIN) was founded on

October 7, 2007 in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil," it was with a sigh of
relief, a thrill of anticipation, and the recognition that there was a great big
hole where the future is to be located: relief that so momentous a possibility
had been set going; anticipation of being part of that history-in-the-making;
and scarcely a clue as to whether what we had brought into being was in fact
going to be.
Three principles define the EIN and unite its members—recognition of
the ecocidal character of capital accumulation; the necessity for a socialist alter-
native as a model for surpassing capital; and the requirement that this new, or
“eco” socialism must do more than deal with the toxic effects of accumulation,
but needs also solve the great problem of social production: how to live within
limits set down by ecological necessity.
These points are comfortably abstract; being so, they give ecosocialists
a common name and some space within which to congregate and to get to
know each other. However, we are not affected abstractly by the ecological
crisis, but according to where life intersects with world-historical forces and
brings forth concrete differences within the broad zones of agreement. Class
distinctions, gender distinctions, distinctions along the great axes of empire,
distinctions according to historical phase, or to generations—these are the
raw material that must fruitfully interact if ecosocialism is to develop as the
alternative to capital’s regime. Thus difference is to be respected as contes-

tation and a place of nonviolent struggle. Differences between ecosocialists
represent where ecosocialism should go to work.
Because Montreuil chiefly manifested a Northern European outlook,
it was wisely decided that the 2009 plenary meeting should be held in the
Global South. There is no place better to realize this than steamy Belém at
the mouth of the Amazon, the old.colonial town located one degree South of
the Equator. And so it was good news that the World Social Forum (WSF)
had decided to hold their ninth global gathering there —and it was to be even
better news that this was to be in the bellwether country of Brazil, for as we
learned in the EIN meeting which piggy-backed on the WSK, the notion of
ecosocialism actually arose in Brazil, in 1991, a full decade before Michael
Léwy and I put together the first Ecosocialist Manifesto.
Brazil has the twofold distinction of containing the earth's largest reserves
of ecosystem resources”! and its most violent urban zones of industrializa-
tion®); it is a land rife with “combined and uneven development,” ranging
from sophisticated social-democratic zones in the South to frankly feudal areas
within the great Northern forests where barons who are a law unto themselves
exist alongside the planet's most variegated communities of First Peoples, a
country that has given us eco-cities like Curitiba and martyrs like Chico Mé-
ndes— in short, the logical place for the notion of ecosocialism to arise.
It was refreshing to have a bloc of Brazilians among the 110 delegates at the
EIN meeting, and also a sizable contingent of Peruvians, including the redoubt-
able Hugo Blanco, who brought the indigenous perspective into the foreground
of the meeting. But no matter who was there, the same challenge loomed. For
whereas 2007 left one blinking at the amazement of getting started, those who
attended the meeting of 2009 had to confront the matter of getting going.
The chief pathway of this was to be the development of the Ecosocialist
Manifesto. The Manifesto of 2001 had essentially been a message in a bottle
tossed into the ocean by two intellectuals who wanted to give the idea of
ecosocialism some international currency.) And indeed, a goodly number
of people who showed up in Montreuil did so on this account. But as the
sole organized product of the ecosocialist movement, so would the manifesto
have to be the first object, so to speak, of ecosocialist labor. In other words,
it would have to be rewritten, in part because of deficiencies in the first draft
(which being composed late in 2001, had, among other problems, too much
of the shadow of 9/11 hanging over it), and mainly because redoing it would
be a way of getting the organization going.
A committee was contentiously chosen for this purpose,! whose work
was to be modified by a mechanism allowing for continual review by the

membership, the process being conducted through the internet. We are grate-
ful for this, and indeed, there would be no EIN without the internet. How-
ever, the difficulties of this means for composing the second manifesto, or as
it came to be called, Declaration, can scarcely be overstated.
In any event, the Declaration was eventually completed, printed out, and
presented to the meeting in Belém. Nobody was under the illusion that it
went beyond the minimal adequacy of being the next rung on our ladder." Its
functionality is simple enough: the Belém Declaration presents the elementary
principles of ecosocialism, principles that need to be worked on by an orga-
nization comprised of those who would subscribe to them. Thus, in order to
join the EIN one has only, so to speak, let the Declaration into her or his heart,
and affirm it while keeping in mind that it falls far short of where we have to
go—and also affirm that we can begin to move to where we have to go by
working collectively to develop and expand the Declaration through praxes
that creatively engage the real differences that shape the innumerable activists
who are drawn into ecosocialism. Neither dogma nor blueprint, the Declara-
tion is essentially a parchment on which ecosocialism can become inscribed.
Climbing the Ladder

WE WERE ABLE TO GATHER SOME 500 signatures to the Declaration in the
weeks leading up to the meeting in Belém on February 2, 2009. About 120 of
these were from Brazil, with sizable collections from Britain, Canada, Greece,
Turkey and the United States. Alas, only one person signed on from Argen-
tina, Germany, and Indonesia, and none from China, Egypt, Iran, Japan, Ko-
rea, Russia, Sweden, and a hundred other nations. It is obvious that the most
pressing task for the EIN is to expand this list all across the globe. We look
toward the day when spell-checks on computers no longer place wavy red lines
of non-recognition under the word, ecosocialism.
The number of those who are ready to sign onto the EIN is very consid-
erable; and the chief limiting factor is our capacity to organize them. Untold
millions are becoming increasingly fed-up with capitalism and ready to think
of radical alternatives. The EIN is from one angle, simply that which allows
them to become “told.” Practically speaking, therefore, the size of the signa-
tory list has nothing immediately to do with the aptness of people for the
message of ecosocialism and everything to do with the organizing of those
who canvass them. We readily admit that an instant poll of the world’s popu-
lation would not at present come up with majority support for the cardinal
principles of ecosocialism. But so what, so long as the number of those who
do is a whole lot larger than 500. How large is this number? No-one knows

for certain, but it could very well be in the millions: say 66 million, which is
but one percent of world population, a very sizable, and certainly a reason-
able, figure. What would a petition with 66 million signatures look like? 6.6
million? 660,000? or even 66,000?
Getting large numbers of people to sign on to the Declaration was the
chief decision taken at Belém. This signifies far more than the passive regis-
tration connoted by the ordinary petition. It is just what it says: a declaring,
an affirmation both by those who present the petition and those who sign
it, a commitment to follow through on its precepts, a medium for propagat-
ing change, a signal to the world at large that major changes are afoot, and a
warning to the powers that be. The gathering defined an intermediate goal for
the EIN. The steps that need to be taken toward this are, one might say, the
immediately visible rungs on the EIN’s ladder. The meeting in Belém began
the discussion of what these should be, and we should carry it forward.
= Yes, people should sign on to the Declaration. But this Declaration,
the Declaration of Belém? Scarcely—not so much for its content,
which is arguable, but because of its unwieldy form, excessive both in
size and rhetoric. Somebody needs to redo it for the purpose at hand,
which is to say, streamline it into a single side of a page, and use it to
convey in as clear and straightforward a way as possible, a message
intelligible to every sentient person on the planet earth, of what’are
the elementary principles of ecosocialism.
= But this demands translation into the languages of the earth, not just
the mainstream languages, but the languages of Africa, Central Asia,
the Indian subcontinent, the indigenous wherever they may be. And
this of course requires translators, distribution networks, and ways of
compiling the signatures and registering the signatories.
= ‘This in turn requires a decentralized structure for the EIN. How
should this be achieved? Should it be by language group, regional-
ized bloc, nation-state? In any case, we are led to a notion that the
network is not like a spider’s web but that it needs to contain nodal
points, with each node devolving in both general and particular di-
rections. Last January, for example, a conference held in Oakland,
California, set forth the idea of EIN-United States —or was it to be
the Western United States, or California, or Northern California?
Meanwhile another grouping shows signs of emerging in the North-
east of the United States. Similar formations have appeared in the
U.K., Brazil, and Turkey, and doubtless elsewhere as well.

Logically and practically, this implies a kind of “central nervous sys-
tem” for the EIN as a whole. There is no particular reason why this
should be in a fixed place, but it does require a coherent identity and
a means of reproduction. Here arises the dilemma of centralization
of power. However, the only alternative to having such a dilemma
is to not have an EIN at all. If the EIN is going to do work then it
needs to have interdependent parts, and also some central function
to which these relate. Further, there will be a need for funds and the
gathering and distribution of same, inasmuch as we are not quite
ready to usher the money-form off the stage of history. We should
not be dependent upon existing governments or (in the great major-
ity of cases) foundations for this. It would seem necessary, then, for
the regional or national nodes to raise funds from their members and
pass a certain quotient on to the international center. In any case,
there needs to be a process of drafting constitutional by-laws for the
EIN as a whole as well as for its constituted units. And there needs to
be a kind of Constitutional Congress for this, and a way of choosing
its members. It won't be easy. But the EIN is for life and of life. Life
is self-replicating, evolving form; formlessness is heat death—of an
individual, of the universe, and also of the products of human labor,
including international ecosocialist organizations. The EIN must
have a structure; it cannot simply be an internet group, and anyone
who cares about an ecosocialist future for society needs to join in the
process of building this structure.
This model has been derived so far from an elementary function of
the EIN, the propagation of its membership base. But numerous
other functions will normally arise as well. The Declaration, we have
emphasized, is arguable. This means that ways of arguing about it
need to be provided —ways that extend to the many differences that
necessarily arise between those who espouse the core principles of eco-
socialism. Yes, we are against capitalism
— but what, really, is capital-
ism?; and what, really, is, or should be, socialism?; and how is produc-
tion to be ordered so that humankind can express itself freely within
ecosystemic principles? Anyone who is sure that he or she knows the
answers to these questions is simply a fool. There are good grounds to
believe that ecosocialism can do better than capitalism has done. . .
but only if we provide the means for ecosocialists to explore the ques-
tions. And this, too, must be a prime function of the EIN: to provide
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM a Ga

a forum for all who sign on to the Declaration to argue and develop
its points, and to bring in new perspectives. In the first, fledgling
phase of the network, debates about such matters have spontaneously
arisen on the internet: a perfectly sensible idea that has gone nowhere
because there have been no means of going somewhere. Thus notion
after notion is brought forth, provoking a spark here and a quarrel
there, only to disappear into the emptiness of cyberspace. Clearly, we
must do better. Everyone who espouses the common values must be
provided the common means of interacting with others, undoubtedly
using the internet as the most democratic modality we now have of
communicating. But this cannot remain at that level. It must, rather,
be solidified with more formal supports, through the web, no doubt,
but in a more highly organized way. If there is to be funding for the
administrative function of the EIN, this needs to be extended broad-
ly to the educational and communicative sphere. We need a stand-
ing committee on the subject, one extending to the publication of
journals and books—and even, down the road, to the provision of
schools and training centers. I should think it highly important that
this journal be drawn into the process at some level.
= ‘Thus, though it is certainly not appropriate to think of the EIN at
its present stage of development as anything like a political party
or—heaven forbid! —something along the lines of a “Fifth Inter-
national,” I for one would not want the imagination stifled to the
point of forbidding even the thought of such an outcome down the
road. We are not ready now for such a highly developed role. But
if and as we develop properly, there is no ruling it out as the EIN
matures. And in the meanwhile there should be nothing restraining
the emergence of ecosocialist activism from within the network-in-
information.
IT am certain that each of the 500—or the 66,000, or the
66,000,000 — members of the EIN would delight in the news from our most
active Turkish delegation, sixty-nine signatories of the Declaration strong,
which sets a splendid example. Here is an extract from an email communica-
tion of March 22, 2009, from Elif Bokhurt, of Istanbul, to Michael Lowy
and myself:
here, in Turkey; fifth world water forum was done; and

we were in Istanbul to protest. Platform against the com-
mercialization of water staged a demonstration; alternative

workshops were held; seventeen activists are arrested... Last
week we were concentrated with these activities. . .
He goes on to ask for collaboration between the Turkish, French and

English-language journals—and he will, I am sure, get it.
Some would no doubt counsel against stich seemingly extravagant de-
rivatives as have appeared in this little exercise in an imagined climb up a
ladder of development for the EIN. And no doubt, what has been depicted
here appears a long way off. We should keep in mind, however, that it defines
a line of sight, and a path every step along which will be good in itself as well
as the condition for the next step forward. The steps outlined in the Declara-
tion correspond to the real practices of women and men who struggle against
global capital. It is time for this struggle itself to take on a global aspect under
the name of the Ecosocialist International Network. m
NOTES
1. Joel Kovel, House Organ: “The EIN,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 19, no. 1 (March
2008), 1-4.
2. Twenty percent of the planet's fresh water reserves move through the Amazon, one day's
flow of which would supply New York City for a year.
3. In sexy Rio de Janeiro, the most “advanced” metropolis, police wantonly murder about a
thousand young brown and black men annually. A highly effective group, TribunalPopular,
confronted this at the WSE. See the great film Héctor Babenco, dir., Pixote: a Lei do Mais
Fraco (Pixote [small child]: The Law of the Weak) (Brazil: H.B. Filmes, Unifilm 1980),
128 minutes; a/so Fernando Meirelles, dir. City of God (Portuguese: Cidade de Deus)
(Brazil: O2 Filmes, VideoFilmes, 2002), 130 minutes.
4. Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy, “An Ecosocialist Manifesto,” Capitalism Nature Socialism
13, no. 1 (March 2002), 1-3.
5. Lowy and Kovel, plus Ian Angus of Ontario, and Danielle Follett, of Paris. We are
especially grateful to Ian for holding together the internet end, and Danielle for keeping
track of the disorderly whole.
6. See http://ecosocialistnetwork.org/, accessed January 14, 2019.

AR he
|) — —— =
Imperial Blues
(2010)
AT THE CLOSE OF WORLD WAR Il, the United States of America, having
achieved the enviable status of becoming the most powerful country in all
of history, proclaimed itself a full-blown empire by naming the next century
after itself. Projecting enormous force over its ruined enemies and exhausted
allies (including the U.S.S.R., the ally on its way to becoming an enemy),
with mastery over death-dealing technology (including the supreme instance
of nuclear weaponry), and propelled by stupendous growth in the forces of
production thanks to mobilization for war, the Great Democratic Power took
over the cockpit of a global capitalism cleared out and ready to expand after
the grim 1930s.
Comparative Empireology: The Case of Rome

COMPARING EMPIRES IS IN SOME WAYS a fool’s game, but it has its uses. In any
case, the empire that springs to my mind as most akin to that of the United
States is that of Rome, inaugurated in 27 BCE with the coronation of Octa-
vian as Augustus. For all the differences, there is something in the “spirit” of
Rome that matches the American version for ageressivity, grandeur, universal
claim, and sheer dynamism. Although neither actually ruled the entire world,
both Rome and the United States projected an image of global dominion.
They secured their rule by brute military superiority, a system of communica-
tion (roads in the case of Rome, advanced telecommunications for the U.S.),
economic instruments that bound the periphery to the center, and a powerful
cultural apparatus that made the empire's rule seem benign, progressive, and

inevitable through conjunction of the regime of force with strong spiritual
claims—a combination that, oddly enough, both denied and propelled an
extreme appetite for conquest.
Rome did so by making the emperor into a god and controlling the
populace around this theme through skilful application of the device of spec-
tacle.''! The emperor-god did not rule through ideological supremacy; indeed,
Rome achieved a reputation for tolerance in the religious sphere. He was,
rather, the head of a regime of exceptional cruelty, even by the standards of
the ancient world; and his deification was transferred into the spectacle of suf-
fering as a means of social control. This entailed taking the existing model of
crucifixion —a highly visible spectacle in which the death of miscreants was
gruesomely displayed in slow motion (hence the expression, “excruciating
detail”) —and expanding it into the production of entertainments involving
ritual sacrifice of life on an unprecedented scale. Set in amphitheaters spe-
cially constructed for the purpose and financed by the personal funds of the
emperors and ruling classes, Rome's death culture was built upon the viewing
of mass murder of “wild” (for civilization always means the taming of what
is deemed wild) animals, gladiators, and for a considerable time, Christians.
Thousands of living creatures could be sacrificed on such occasions, which
were tightly administered to bind the spectators to the imperial order. Indeed,
the emperor got his money's worth, for the spectacular games transferred dei-
fication to imperial society itself. As Brigitte Kahl has observed:
By exhibiting the frightening image of the other-than-us
at the center, and by staging the Great Combat, the arena
not only exposed but also veiled, covered, softened with its
bloody sand all the deadly tension, violence and injustice
that in reality were at the core of Roman society itself. It
transformed privileged and non-privileged members into a
common Roman subjectivity of one-self, lifting up even the
lowest ranking members of the plebs, the socially others in-
side society, by putting them above someone lower the out-
cast other dying in the arena. It also justified and purified the
audience by defining them as Not-other, that is, not lawless,
not uncivilized, not barbarian, not seditious and therefore
not doomed to die. None of these operations of exorcism,
purification, and justification could have been performed
without visually consuming the blood of the other.”

The Great American Democracy as the Mysterious Spectacle of Capital
OF COURSE WE HAVE COME a long way from the ponderous brutality of Ro-
man culture, what with fabulous technology, many innovations such as rating
systems G to X, and humane taboos against actually killing an actual living
being on screen (note the movie disclaimer¢ to this effect), not to mention,
in public. There is no way here to take up the complexity of the modern cul-
tural apparatus — including the space within it for cultures of resistance. We
would only paraphrase Brigitta Kahl: that under its aegis “the deadly tension,
violence and injustice that in reality [are] at the core of [late capitalist] soci-
ety itself” takes the form of simulations, turns into fun and games, escapes
from the awful grind of reality, and becomes spread over hundreds of theme
parks and channels, innumerable websites, and untold numbers of electronic
game-boards and screens on which the screams of the victims and the shouts
of the victors sound forth under the watchful gaze of the audience counters,
number-crunchers, and people-movers, who give thumbs up or down to the
advertisers and the giant corporate interests behind them according to the de-
gree of commodification achieved. There are more than enough mock deaths
and humiliations to suit any taste: car crashes and the NFL to satisfy the ata-
vistic desire for gladiatorial combat; abundant “stars” to be adored or shocked
by; and, above all, never any threat that reality will intrude in an integral form
outside the domain of entertainment.
The central insight of critical media studies is that of the Canadian scholar
Dallas Smythe, who observed that the key products of the cultural industries
are audiences to be sold to sponsors and advertisers.'*) The emperor in this
case does not need to watch directly, as his deification is no longer at issue.
Nor does imperial power reside with the advertisers and giant corporate inter-
ests, although they are closer to the deity than anyone else— indeed, they are
the High Priests of its Temple. For god has been displaced under capitalism to
the domain of Value itself, which attaches itself to the real things of this world
through the fetish of the commodity and sets them in motion in the cause of
that infinite expansion Marx recognized to be the “Moses and the prophets”
of the capitalist system.
There is no love in this deity, and its culture is even more one of death
than that of Rome. The reign of exchange value/money/capital yanks and
unmoors all that is passing or past and leads to what the Communist Mani-
festo called the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlast-
ing uncertainty and anxiety” that characterize our epoch, where ecosystems
are disintegrated daily and countless species vanish before they are known
to exist. Under these circumstances, religion loses its integrity and becomes

defensive, giving meaning to a world whose real god is cold as any stone, a
calculating and ungiving god, bleak beyond belief. This deity, Moloch-like
in rapacity and cruelty, sets the basic terms. The cultural apparatus rounds
off the edges while itself undergoing “uninterrupted disturbance,” a process
that rewards uncertainty and anxiety, because to do so stimulates the appetite
for commodities. The corrosive effect of capitalist culture causes faith to col-
lapse and also perverts a great deal of religion into fundamentalism. Thus the
spiritually barren choice before us is between a postmodernism that empties
existence of meaning on one hand, and on the other, a fortress-like retreat
into a false certainty.
The primacy of the economic is the salient distinction between empires.
Rome seemed bored by the problem of production, inasmuch as its wealth
could be largely gained through direct conquest and plunder. Military pre-
ponderance enabled the direct plunder of peripheral societies, a labor force
through the acquisition of slaves, the cruel disciplining of peasants and plebi-
ans, and the spectacular and degenerate violence of Roman public culture. It
was an awful picture, with innumerable bad side effects.“ But it lacked what
is driving the present empire to ruin, namely, the foregrounding of the capi-
talist economic system as the supreme and totalizing power in society. Rome
pretended to universality; but this was essentially the incremental extension
of innumerable instances of invasion and domination. Each colony reacted
individually under the aegis of the emperor god; hence the final verdict of
Rome’s depredation is that it was an immense aggregate of use values of great-
er or lesser realization, the corruption of which eventuated in the widespread
but rather slow disintegration of the empire itself.
The United States has been in substantive control of global capitalism
since 1945, and in this sense must be blamed for its depredations, including
the present crisis. But from another angle, it is like the rider of a runaway
horse suffering from the illusion that the beast is under his control because
he sits in the saddle. Capital derives from the monetization of reality as value.
This provides the imperial mentality with satisfaction of its desires for wealth
and power. But it also places empire on a path of endless and fundamentally
chaotic expansion, not of territory, nor of use values, but of value itself, drag-
ging reality behind it. This essential feature reflects back onto the mentality
of empire. Unlike imperial Rome, where direct acquisition of material wealth
could suffice, the empire of capital can set no limits. It is by its inner nature
deterritorialized even though administered by real people who live in terri-
tories such as nation-states and hold nationalist aspirations. Accordingly, as
its crises of accumulation and ecological decay grind on, so does its political/

cultural system long the glue holding the ecumene together—begin to fall
apart and become more and more bizarre. Humpty-Dumpty seems indeed
to be headed toward a great, and irreparable, fall. Two-thirds of the way into
the Great American Century, there is no guarantee that the finish line will be
reached. And if so, then what? ¢
The First Coming; Can There Be a Second?

BOTH EMPIRES DEPENDED upon spirituality for the purposes of consent, se-
cured through a process of terrorization. For Rome, as Brigitte Kahl shows,
to witness the spectacle was to join with the emperor-god in rejection of the
sacrificed Other. For the American empire, the process is more subtle and
diffuse. The plebian class is kept, as the Communist Manifesto put it, in the
state of “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, [and] everlasting
uncertainty and anxiety [which] distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all ear-
lier ones.” The reaction to fear comprises the awesome power of cultural con-
servatism and religious fundamentalism and provides a false fortress of refuge
from the terror without end produced by the capitalist market and rendered
as spectacle through its culture industries. Once again there is an Other to be
rejected and sacrificed, offered to the death god through the long list of sac-
rificial victims demonized, racially degraded, and served up by demagogues.
There have been exceptions to this pattern, the most notable of which
occurred during the early years of the Roman empire. It was brought on by
Rome's colonization of the Eastern Mediterranean and its placement there
of a sort of Jewish quisling regime under the Herods. Out of the destabilized
society emerged many prophetic radicals, one of whom was a Jewish peas-
ant who, in the words of his disciple Paul, embodied the principle that God
would choose “what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to
reduce to nothing things that are.” (1 Cor 1:28). Great mountains of text
have been devoted to the Jesus phenomenon, and I will not sort through
them here. I will only say that, somehow, through the transmission of uncon-
ditional love, Jesus negated the fear at the center of the Roman death culture
even as he entered into and negated the spectacle of crucifixion, affirming
that he was the “resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even
though they die, will live.” (John 11:25)”
It was but a momentary tear in the fabric of Roman domination, and
three centuries later, after any number of Christian martyrs in the Amphi-
theatres, the faith became absorbed into the empire as its state religion.
This ushered in a story not to be recounted here, except to mention that it
shows how ambivalent spirituality can be. Christianity, born as a movement
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM AWS

from below and bearing universal values, became one of the great purveyors
of terror, persecution and racism over the centuries. It has also provided shins
ing examples of transcendent resistance. The key seems to be whether spirit is
articulated in rejection of empire—in which instance we have seen in recent
times, a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Martin Luther King Jr., an Oscar Romero, and
a Lucius Walker,” among others —or whether it becomes empire's servant.
I was reminded with special poignancy of this while watching the spec-
tacular appearance of the notable psychopath Glenn Beck (with Sarah Palin
looking on), on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary
and at the same place as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
For the thousandth time one wondered whether anything was sacred any
more, and for the thousandth time the answer came back: “guess not.” A
crowd of 300,000 people were there, many bused in by Beck’s media ma-
chine. All the folk I saw looked lost and searching. Many of them called out
for Jesus, and for guidance in the midst of our empire's slow, fitful collapse.
They were grateful to Beck for the event and the moment of hope it gave
them; but nobody looked dumb enough to be actually inspired by him. They
were just waiting, and soon they would return to their homes, or what was
left of them.
Although most Marxists have been too steeped in the spirit-corrosive
that is capitalist culture to recognize the fact, the tradition whose name they
bear is the direct offspring of that started into motion by the aforesaid Jewish
peasant.'*! This discourse is currently in eclipse. Given both the necessity of
Marxism for coming to grips with the crises of capital and its empire, along
with its inability to generate transformative social movements of sufficient
faith to move this mountain, it would seem that the time to awaken and
recover this root has come. @
NOTES
1. The notion was made famous by Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995 [1967]). Though DeBord did not take
up the spectacle in Rome in this work, nor, so far as I know, elsewhere, the basic principle
applies to imperial Rome, which may be said to have been the first society in which the
spectacle comes into fruition.
2. Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 154.
3. Dallas Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and

Canada (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981).
4. See G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1989).

John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life ofaMediterranean Jewish Peasant
(San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992); Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Trans-
formed the Ancient World (New York: Grosset Putnam, 1997).
Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). For martyr-
dom, see 419-492. é
Walker (1930-2010) was no martyr, but a minister in the black Baptist church who
undertook many notable missions, including leading material aid caravans across the
boundaries of empire to blockaded Cuba. Most recently he was helping to train interna-
tional brigades of physicians from black and Latino communities. I went on one of his
“Pastors for Peace” caravans, in 1994, and am still trying to absorb its message.
Marx and Engels on Religion, Intro. Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Schocken, 1964). A
very large literature develops this theme. Two titles of importance are Alasdair MacIntyre,
Marxism and Christianity (New York: Schocken, 1968); and José Porfirio Miranda,
Marx against the Marxists (New York, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1980 [originally El cristianismo
de Marx, 1978].

cue Pha nae! 71g > Dap 1%
Dark Satanic Mills:
William Blake and the Critique of War
(2010)
A “Colony of the Arts” Goes to War

SOME TIME AGO I LEARNED THAT WOODSTOCK, the town in upstate New
York I called home for almost three decades, occupies a small but very definite
and enduring place in the satanic structure known as the “military-industrial
complex,” or MIC. Yes, Woodstock, self-proclaimed Colony of the Arts, the
hippie capital of the world, the town oflove, Rock and Roll, all-around mel-
lowness, and also, of PEACE, with a fine-looking Peace Monument on its
Village Green to prove the fact.
We have a firm in Woodstock called Rotron, which was founded in the
1950s by a Dutch gentleman named Constant van Rijn for the purpose of
manufacturing fans. Rotron has grown to employ some 380 people, making
it the largest employer in the area, no small thing in this time of economic
woe. It sits at the end of a long driveway off a main road, and rather few
people have actually seen it. People in the hundreds of cars that go by the en-
trance each day see the sign, and if they think about it at all, think according
to the vague notion that there is good old Rotron, making fans and keeping
local folk employed. As for the product, fans, well, they are useful devices. Ev-
erybody needs a fan now and then to cool down, and so do many machines.
The whole automobile industry would not exist were there no fans. The same
could be said for computers and much else in a world where industry, hav-
ing extracted heat from nature, has to face the problem of disposing of heat
when it becomes excessive. Weapons are machines, too, and every weapon

larger than a rifle needs a fan to cool off sometime or other. Multiple rocket
launchers need fans; so do tanks, helicopters, fighter-bombers, destroyers,
and heavy artillery all the way up to the heaviest; thus thermonuclear-tipped
missiles like the Minuteman, with its guidance systems and launching appa-
ratus served by fancy computers, also needs fans.
It turns out that Rotron has been making fans for these weapon systems
for more than a half-century." This has taken place in plain view, as a small
group to which I belong discovered in an archive in the local library chock full
of press clippings about the firm's contribution to America’s Defense Effort,
including its work on the Minuteman.”! Notwithstanding this and other pol-
luting activities,’ the firm remains an esteemed member of the community,
one essentially immune from criticism, as we discovered when we tried to call
attention to its wrongdoings. This generated the expected outcry that we were
threatening the most reliable employer in the area in hard times, despite our
repeated assertion that we were talking about converting Rotron to produc-
tion of fans that served peaceable ends, for example, wind turbines, rather
than destroying the factory. We also heard what may be called the “widget”
defense: after all, Rotron does not produce the actual death-dealing unit, but
only a harmless component that keeps it cool. Then there was the patriotic
line taken by middle management when we confronted them, that what kept
them going was the challenge of making fans worthy of keeping our troops
safe, not to mention cool and comfortable. Other members of the community
went further to the right, to attack the critics of Rotron with accusations of
communist sympathies, affections for terrorists, disloyalty, etc. But most of
all there was the sense that in challenging the War Machine, we had entered a
zone into which the great majority of the town would not go. They didn’t so
much a disagree with us; they simply turned away, into a space of indifference.
How is this to be explained?
Woodstock is a place with certifiably left credentials dating back even be-
fore the 1960s, especially in the cultural sphere. As it made parts for weapons
of supreme death, the town was poised to become a center of what came to
be called the “counterculture.” Yet the same Woodstock where musicians like
Bob Dylan (he of “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”) and Jimi
Hendrix (remember his performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the
1969 festival?) tore the assumptions of bourgeois society into shreds was the
Woodstock that made fans for the Minuteman. Through it all, Rotron went
about its business and Woodstock slept even as it celebrated its iconic artists.
Today their images and replicas of their guitars delight the strollers who pa-
tronize the boutiques both trendy and funky where consumerism thrives on

the manure spread by the counterculture. And Rotron keeps on making fans
for weapons of mass and local destruction.
Consuming the sixties stands alongside weapon-making as the chief enter-
prise of the town. To this we can add the Healing and Wellness industries, and
even, so it would seem, that religion much favored by the New Age enterprises,
Buddhism, along with its numerous Eastern brethren. ‘The largest center for
Tibetan Buddhism outside of Asia sits atop a small mountain to the North of
Woodstock; a major community of Zen Buddhism occupies what used to be
a Dominican monastery in the forest to the West; and a shop on the Village
Green promotes the Auroville Community in South India. Did I mention
that Mynheer van Rijn, founder of Rotron, was a Buddhist? No contradiction,
there, any more than between the facts that Alfred Nobel gave the world dy-
namite and the Peace Prize. To put it another way, the contradiction is purely
logical, not existential, which is to say, not a vital confronting of different
portions of being. These tend, rather, to be split apart from each other, remain-
ing mutually incommunicado in the classical way that a man spends his day
programming drones to blow up an Afghani village, then comes home, plays
with his kids, tucks them into bed, and sings them a lullaby.
Individuals stepped forth from the Woodstock community to support
our anti-Rotron campaign—for example, the proprietor of the Auroville
store was sympathetic— but they did so as essentially deviations from a social
type, in this case, one of profound inertia.
Meanwhile the True North of the United States remains aligned with
the growth of militarism. Thus the “good” people who enjoy the benefits of
a “high level of civilization” acquiesce in atrocity done in their name. The
problem has been cited innumerably over the years since mass murder by
states and the possible destruction of civilization itself by its own instruments
of death emerged. It has appeared with increasing urgency since the Second
World War exposed the “Good Germans” who went along with Nazi crimes,
along with their mirrored brethren in the allied democracies, who acquiesced
in mass murder of civilians up to and including the launching of nuclear
weapons on Japan in August, 1945. The latter event signaled the emergence of
the United States as the hegemon of global society, and the number one per-
petrator of state violence and terror, responsible—to take just the instances
of its major wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq—for a violent end to perhaps
eight to ten million human lives and the laying waste of whole societies.
The emergence of the Geneva Conventions concerning war crimes and
crimes against humanity has been a salutory development in relation to aug-
mented state violence. Notwithstanding, the epoch known as the “Ameri-

can century” has shown no diminution of state-engineered destruction. The
dreadful record is rooted in the ever-growing militarization of many aspects
of society, enabled by the gelatinous indifference we encountered when trying
to confront Woodstock with its participation in the military-industrial com-
plex. The growth of militarization depends in part, then, on the lack of trac-
tion in the popular mind of the anti-militarization message. Antiwar sensibil-
ity has risen impressively over the last century. Yet it has really achieved very
little. Except for an ambivalent shift away from direct engagement by masses
of troops and toward sophisticated and increasingly remote means of destruc-
tion, the overall rate of mayhem has remained roughly the same, while the
cancer of military production continues to metastasize."! The people, then,
are perfectly capable of “putting an end to war”! but have not wanted to do
so strongly enough, despite all the death, suffering, waste, ecological devasta-
tion, corruption of society, and economic ruination that war brings about.
There is, in short, a kind of mentality produced by militaristic society and
reproducing militarism in turn. It is, one might say, a state of being, subjec-
tive, but not “psychologistic,” that is, not internally generated by thoughts,
fantasies, images, etc., and not really “in the head” at all. It is rather a kind of
structure that represents and organizes the collectively lived life of a people
over historical time. So let us set aside much of the vastness of war— its
geostrategic aspect, its politics, the logic of combat and its psychology, the
economics of the military-industrial complex, etc. —to focus on this territory
both obscure and utterly familiar.
Dark Satanic Mills Revisited
And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic Mills?
— William Blake, Milton, 1804, Plate 1
THE “MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX” (MIC) is identified as “satanic” in the

opening sentence of this essay, perhaps jarring the reader unused to figures
of speech that seem archaic to the contemporary mind. But surely the MIC
is more than the sum of weapons, contracts, factories, military bases, politi-
cal deals and propagandistic manipulations of which it is ordinarily said to
be composed. It must also be anchored subjectively, as part of the consent
necessary for hegemony. For Mind, whether individual or collective, is fed
by deep and archaic springs. These comprise that nightmare in which Marx
recognized the tradition of all the dead generations weighing on the brain
of the living. It is this context that frames an inquiry into the notion of the

Satanic as developed by William Blake (1757-1827), poet and artist but also
philosopher and student of war, and a unique interpreter of what it is to be
a human being.
The kernel of Blake's worldview is this: that the fully realized imagina-
tion is the destiny of human existence. This was to him how we aspire toward
God—not the God of traditional religion Blake dismissed as “Nobodaddy”
(nobody's daddy), but the reaching toward infinity and eternity that is our
supreme faculty. It is a potential never fully attained, and only approximated
through intensive inner discipline and struggle, what Blake called “mental
fight.” We struggle, then, not merely against external evil, but a myriad of
fallen states of being; these exist within the self and are organized externally.
Blake invests them with mythological import and tracks them through his
works, especially the so-called Prophetic books, which he also called his “Bi-
ble of Hell.” These are dramas on a cosmic scale in which the protagonists
are not persons as such but organizations of states of being within and across
human existence and represented in personal form. They entail immemori-
ally human themes— gender, passion, intellect, creativity, mental paralysis,
belief, doubt, rage, rebellion, etc., and they are given names by Blake and
made into the players in his cosmic drama. Thus emerge figures such as Los,
Vala, Urizen (“your reason”), Orc, Tharmas, Rahab, etc., and, to be sure, Sa-
tan. They are at the same time recognizably human and utterly strange: they
alter shape and identity, interpenetrate each other, are mutually constitutive;
they converse with each other and have diverse sexual relations; they absorb,
destroy and renew each other, form alliances, weep tears of blood, go to and
return from “eternal death” i-e., the falling away from eternity into ordinary
life. They are hard to make sense of, but no harder than human existence in
its splendor and misery is to the engaged mind. Thus anyone who is willing
to recognize just what fantastic creatures we are and who has the patience to
put up with a great deal of subtlety and complexity is advised to read and
study Blake—who also, you may recall, wrote gorgeous poetry and painted
or engraved gorgeous images.”
Blake was continually occupied as an engraver and water colorist, such
being how he made his meager living. As a creator of poetic texts (some com-
bined with his unique technique of engraving and coloring the plates indi-
vidually, hence “Illuminated,” while others appear in various notebooks and
drafts), his activity tended to be phasic. One furious outburst occurred in
context of the French Revolution and mainly dates from the early 1790s;
another, more extended, began toward the close of that decade and continued
for roughly twenty years. During this period he composed three large Pro-

phetic works: Vala, or the Four Zoas (uncompleted and unengraved), Milton
(1804), and Jerusalem (1814-1820) (finished and illuminated). They made
practically no impact on the-world, which dismissed their creator as a lunatic.
They are to my eyes the most underappreciated and misunderstood writings
in English literature. They also are unparalleled as a study of war.
The notion of “dark Satanic Mills” appears in the second verse of the
famous opening hymn of Milton,'*! which has become the best known of
all Blake’s work, thanks to its endorsement by the British socialists as an al-
ternative national anthem for Britain. “Satanic Mills” have as consequently
become symbolic of a critique of industrialism as a whole. This is a perfectly
reasonable usage. It is, however, an abstraction from what Blake actually had
in mind, and indeed, moved him to write Milton and his other prophetic
works. For this account we are indebted to David Erdman, a superb research-
er as well as editor of Blake’s collected work.”
Blake spent his entire life in London except for two miserable years at
Felpham on Britain’s Southern coast as the kept artist of his patron, William
Hayley. He was appalled upon his return from exile in 1803 to see what had
become of his native city. To convey the sense of this, he used the image
of “dark Satanic Mills.” Erdman observes that London had neither factories
nor mills in any traditional sense at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
There was, however, one exception: military production. For London “was a
war arsenal and the hub of the machinery of war, and Blake uses the symbol
(of dark Satanic Mills) in that sense.” (E, 396) A transformation in Blake’s
thought was underway; for he had not simply encountered war production,
but the first instance of modern war production, the industrial systematization
of death and the death-dealing of industry: “mills that produce dark metal,
iron and steel, for diabolic [that is, Satanic] purposes.” (E, 396) The London
of 1803, writes Erdman, had become “fortified against French invasion, the
Thames [was] filling with captured French ships...the Tower and numerous
workshops [were] busy turning out small arms night and day....Blake did
observe this daily cast of brazen cannon and hear ambassador and king call
for war before the drying of their signatures for peace. These woes are in his
prophecies.” (E, 395)
War was building against Napoleonic France, and like all large-scale war it
had large-scale effects, mostly very bad. Great numbers of British youth were
being gang-pressed into wretched service with a high risk of death; public
hangings took place at Tyburn, near Blake’s home;!"! intense political repres-
sion and jingoism prevailed everywhere. For Blake, this sorely tried the revolu-
tionary hopes which had propelled the first wave of his Prophetic Books, and

culminated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of 1793 (MHH), a kind of
supernova stirred by the French Revolution and manifesting the radical imagi-
nation. We read MHH today amazed at its audacity and fervor. Blake felt
then, as did the countercultural radicals who took heart from him late in the
twentieth century," ' that Revolution was imminent and could take place, as it
were, automatically, by the eruption of imaginative energy. He had not given
serious thought to revolution as a process entailing not simply the release of
energy but having to overcome dialectically the negative figurations of energy;
nor had he appreciated that the release from the prison-house of repressive so-
ciety ran great risks of violence and opened onto a difficult process of self- and
social transformation. There was much to remind him of these defects a de-
cade later when he encountered both the degeneration of revolutionary France
into Empire and the “dark Satanic Mills” of militaristic London. Through
this dismal gloom he felt the decay of revolutionary hope with the rise of the
war machine and its enabling henchman, the Police State. He must have felt
then how naive he had been, of how he had underestimated the repressive and
murderous side within us, and of how much he needed to further radicalize
his vision. The triad of late works, whose obscurity was as much based upon a
well-founded fear of the authorities!) 2] as it was the product of a radical refusal
to go along with ordinary reason and religion, was primarily then, the rethink-
ing of his earlier vision, not to abandon its goals but to advance them through
a more profound understanding.
The reader will appreciate the parallels with our present circumstances,
especially for those of us who acquired a similarly naive hope during the
1960s, a time when it could seem that the system was ready to topple from
the sheer force of countercultural imagination. Can we learn from Blake in
re-visioning a better alternative?
Enter Satan
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL was grounded in the notion that what
is commonly ascribed to the Devil and the fires of Hell is as essential to hu-
man existence as the notion of Angels and the reward of Heaven. What we
call Evil, in other words, is not necessarily so, and the same holds for Good.
Blake used the figure of John Milton, whom he revered, for some sharp criti-
cism in MHH to make the point:
Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of
Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is
because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without
knowing it. (B, 35)

But then, of whose party was Milton when he was fettered? And what
were the fetters? For this Blake chose to differentiate a figure capable of rep-
resenting the Devil so that the “evil” side could be brought forth to be seen
as distinct from the energic and vital aspect while yet remaining connected to
it. Such was Satan, an unimportant entity in MHH and scarcely appearing
at all before it, who grows to enormous proportion in the larger work named
after the great Puritan poet."’! Satan became the instrument Blake used to
comprehend the rise of the War Party, the militarization of society, and the
shadow cast over revolutionary hope.
Unimportant as he may have been in Blake’s writings before Milton,
Satan looms very large in the Judeo-Christian tradition; while the class of
“spirit-beings” to which he belongs is a transhistorical potential of human
nature, ubiquitous throughout history."'4) This stems from the fact that it
is evidently impossible for the human Self to remain undivided. A primal
ambivalence seems to afflict our species, present in an enormous number of
circumstances, refracted through notions of goodness, badness, and the like,
and variously located within or without the Self. Bad aspects are experienced
in a way that persecutes, misleads, torments, or leads to madness; from the
other shore of ambivalence arises the source of creative activity—since
agency of spirit-being is experienced as coming from beyond the self; thus
a great artist like Blake would write that his work was like taking dictation
from another source. Certain typologies can be sifted out of the great mass
of these forms:
= notions of the Self as inherently plastic and polymorphous, going
back to the aboriginal “Trickster,” ancient Hindu representations
such as Shiva, or the Greek deity, Hermes;
= internal divisions within the Self that do not rise to the level of an
externalized being but are represented as indwelling part-selves with
various functions, generally speaking, malign. The Greek word for
this may be transliterated as daimone, from which the term “demon”
enters our language and spreads out from there into a great plenum
of occurrences. Notably, the technocratic “psy” industries have de-
spiritualized this notion and turned it into numerous complicated
constructions, for example, “introjects,” “subject-objects,” and the
like. To be despiritualized in this sense means to not reach beyond
the socially defined boundaries of the self, and
certain figures that, so to speak, condense from the inward/outward
motion and represent more or less solidified beings, sometimes mon-

strous and bestial, sometimes in human form, who enter the Agora of
events. Satan is perhaps the leading member of this class, appearing
throughout the Bible and as a major figure in the major works of Eng-
land’s two greatest exponents of freedom, John Milton and William
Blake, and ubiquitously in popular cufture.
Originally a minor functionary,"'! Satan becomes throughout Christian
writings the prime antagonist to Christ and God’s project. He appears in
this guise as Lucifer, the superhuman Fallen Angel of Paradise Lost. Blake’s
notion, however, is subtler and more radical, for his Satan’s monstrosity is
dressed in ordinary human form. The Satan who wanders through Milton
shows none of the grandeur of Lucifer; he is rather a mild-mannered conniver
modeled upon Blake’s erstwhile patron, Hayley, a guilt-tripping conformist
who accuses the artist—bearer of the divine vision—of irresponsibility;
and who deceives him and tempts him with careerist distractions and what
Northrop Frye calls “the solid body of organized taste.” (F, 328)
Blake's Satan specializes in accusation, while other functions, like decep-
tion and temptation, are ancillary. It is through the Satanic complex drawn
by Blake that the bureaucratic, pettifogging Satan succeeds where Milton’s
Lucifer, consumed by rebellion, is hurled downward. Blake makes Satan a
functional member of society, but also elevates him to Godlike status. Here
Blake follows Paul (2 Cor, 4.4) in seeing this Confidence Man as “the god
of this world [who] has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them
from seeing the light of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” Ac-
cusation is Satan’s definitive intervention, but can only achieve Satanic power
when supported by material factors, that is, as long as it is the surface of
Authority. And this in turn implies institutionalization, of Church or State.
A Foucauldian ensemble, accusation-as-power devolves from these heights
down to the numberless mediations of everyday life in family, workplace,
and community. Without a dense, reinforcing network of codes, the Satanic
complex would be no more prepossessing than a sand castle waiting for the
next tide. With it—and above all, with the policing functions, the gendar-
merie, courts, prisons; and standing behind them, the ranks of the soldiers
and their hierarchical command structure, sergeants barking; and alongside
that as well, the “Mills” with their manuals and codes, the impersonal weapon
systems (yes, requiring fans, which require manuals and all), and the proce-
dures of the technical elites, it becomes awe-inspiring. Through all this is the
regime established, moving to a drumbeat of accusation. It is this structure
that Blake subtends with the figure of “dark Satanic mills,” in our lingo, the
“Military-Industrial Complex” as it goes to War.
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM slop

War is the health of the state, in Randolph Bourne’s memorable phrase,
and accusation is its plasma. To the degree that a state plans and executes ag-
gression, so must it justify itself. Else the body politic, needing to be made
robust for the task, would fall to pieces. To justify itself, the warrior state must
— from the
incriminate others, and to do this requires signifiers of the Enemy
early twentieth century Communist to today’s Satan-in-Chief, the Terrorist.
Equally important, however, the state requires a malleable populace made
ready to accept the order of things. This happens in part through the low-
grade yet incessant application of accusation pumped through the system of
the warrior state, from its main vessels to its capillaries. Its instrument is sur-
veillance. At one end, then, the great Spy and Terror cases and the spectacular
violations of the Constitution; at the other, numberless reminders of Danger,
each with its implicit subtext: What are you, miserable citizen, doing to stanch
the tide of Terror? Why are you not working hard enough? Just whose side are
you on? Do you not remember the words of Bush the Second: Either you are
with us or the terrorists?
“If you see something, say something,” says the sign in the subway car;
and each rider feels, at some complicit corner of being, insufficiently militant
in the common defense: for she has seen something, has she not; why, then,
has she not spoken to the Authority about it? Then of course, there are the
“Heightened security needs,” intoned by the manufactured voice over the
airport speaker; these require that the loyal traveler, “report all unattended
luggage to the proper Authority.” What, then, about that black object over
there? Who is near it? A miasma of fear supervenes, bonding the State and
citizens eager to prove their fidelity, and opening onto an abyss for those
who hold back. Ostensibly free, we become a society of snitches in a gigantic
compound that is at the same time a prison and a zone of protection against
a terroristic, terrifying outside.
Bear in mind:
First, that these occurrences are generally speaking, minor in themselves,
hence do not rise to the level of emergency, nor do they require full attention.
Like the rituals at the airport security lines, each chipping away seems readily
assimilable into the ranks of the ordinary and forgettable and is remembered,
if at all, as a nuisance. But this adaptation is a danger, for by the same token
these incidents become a kind of firmament and setting for the Satanic.
Second, that they bleed into a pattern highly familiar from normal life,
spreading out spatially into everyday moments of domination and surveil-
lance, and temporally into patterns inculcated from early childhood. Multiply
every disembodied airport voice into scores of messages from the humanoid

ritually asserting on the mechanized phone tree: “This call may be monitored
for quality assurance . . .” So somebody is snooping on your phone call—as on
every bar code you enter into the supermarket checkout process. Add to these
the surveillance cameras, prefigured by Blake as “Satan’s Watch-Fiends.”"4
Thus surveillance, the inescapable accoutrementt of accusation, springs up like
toadstools in the advanced centers of the world: New York, London, Tel Aviv.
‘There is an entire economy of accusation in the regime of Satanic Mills, watch-
ing, nagging, hemming in the mass, extracting power for the aggrandizement
of the state. War is its matrix. And the system prepares for war in all its Mills,
bringing the Satanic arts of surveillance to bear on the workers in advanced,
monopoly capital, where productivity is the mode, and a century-old process of
controlling and invading the bodies of workers is the norm: “quality control”
is the fine structure of domination, the quiet, everyday humiliation of the
worker, the control that does not speak its own name."
Third, how they radiate into patterns of domination set going by the em-
pire of capital, political-economic as well as ecological. The regime of fear and
accusation is endemic to capital, with its spectral economy that divides and
isolates people, making them playthings of aglobal Market more remote and
arbitrary than any figuration of god. John Milton wanted to “justify the ways
of God to Man’; but the ideologues of capital seek to bind people through
confusion. Much has been made since the middle of the last century of the
so-called end of ideology, in other words, how no one interpretation can
encompass the endless variety of life. No Pattern at all, say the ruling classes,
as though their reign, aside from being disinterestedly benign, is random as
well. This is standard bourgeois ideology, like adverts for HSBC (The Hong
Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd., the “World’s Local Bank,”
headquarters, London) which will typically show a triptych of the same image
appended to various points of view, all presumed equivalent, viz, an automo-
bile shown thrice and captioned “freedom,” “status symbol,” and “polluter.”
Anything goes under capitalism; or as National Public Radio calls their news
program: All Things Considered. “Things,” by definition, have no qualities
and no internal relationship with each other; and to string them out this way
dissolves everything into the Sea of Exchange Value, opening new paths of
commodification and leading to that deterritorialization at the heart of capi-
tal’s regime, that transiently exhilarating, soulless emptying out, the “all that
is solid melting into air” that unmoors the self and leaves it empty and con-
fused, a plaything of Satanic forces. Add to this the systematic destruction of
the category of truth inherent in the late capitalist society of the commodity
where huckstering, public relations and advertising are dominant modalities,

and we get a sense of how the transition from Satan as a coherently diabolic
being to a “regular fellow” is achieved —and also of Blake's extraordinary vi-
sion, for he wrote well in advance of the emergence, much less maturation,
of these tendencies.
Here I think we arrive at a partial answer to the question posed earlier,
as to why the “good citizen” presents a gelatinous surface to the challenge of
“putting an end to war.” We might refer to Yeats amazingly prescient poem of
1918, “The Second Coming,” in which he calls attention to the epoch loom-
ing when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
— though we
intensity.”"'® The lack of conviction is different from not caring
see this as well, just as we see plenty of folk, not at all the “worst,” by the way,
shouting with foolish or deluded intensity at their Tea Party meetings. It is
more a function of parts kept apart, of people who lack the means of connec-
tion—to each other, to the knowing that can give coherence, to the deeper
parts of themselves, to the universe of which they form a part— people beaten
down by the steady beat of low-grade surveillance and accusation, made fear-
ful by living powerless, alone and separated, in the entrails of a monster whose
laws grind on irrespective of life, a world where the great sweep of capital
means that life can no longer be actively lived, but must be endured, rather,
within the functioning of the System. No, it is not that the inert ones do not
care. It is that they really do lack conviction, because their life is the life of the
isolated Ego, produced by capital and reproducing capital. Ego: the product of
Satan, the instrument of Satan, Satan himself.
Satan Goes to War
And the Mills of Satan were separated into a moony Space

Among the rocks of Albions Temples and Satans Druid Sons
Offer the Human Victims throughout all the Earth, and Albions
Dread Tomb immortal on his Rock, overshadowd the whole Earth:
Where Satan making to himself Laws from his own identity,
Compell'd others to serve him in moral gratitude & submission
Being call’d God: setting himself above all that is called God.
And all the Spectres of the Dead calling themselves Sons of God
In his Synagogues worship Satan under the Unutterable Name."”!
Who, finally, is Satan? The question is improper, as “who,” implies some-
body and Satan is nobody— though you would have a hard time convincing
a lot of people in the backwater that is the United States of the fact.2% Better
to ask, “what” or “how.” As for the former, Satan is an epithet, to be hurled at
anyone who brings forward the organized degree of evil-doing suggested by

the ancient notion of the devil. Here, it is safe to say, we run into a great deal
of variation depending upon one’s moral universe. The United States freely
uses this device (as in Bush's “Axis of Evil” or Reagan’s “Evil Empire”), while
being the Great Satan to a lot of its victims. Among recent politicians, snarl-
ing Dick Cheney perhaps takes the Satanic laurel for many, though Barack
Obama, the mild-mannered deceiver, is perhaps the more perfect representa-
tive from Blake's perspective. (No wonder they quarrel so!)
Blake's perspective, however, resists any kind of narrow personification of
Satan. For him, the “How,” to be more exact, the way Satan is, becomes the
leading question. Satan is not outside us and takes no particular form. He, or
it, is rather a manifestation of our fallen being, and exists strictly because the
fallibility of human being is as great as is its potential. This latter, the core of
our being, is a gift of nature, for it is the birthright of every human creature as
she or he enters the world: it is the universality of the imagination. As such,
we are set up for a fall—and fallen, create patterns to perpetuate the fall,
which collectively take the name of Satan. Call it Original Sin, if you like, but
if you think of original Sin as a kind of badness or essential evil to the human
being, you are, in Blake’s worldview, perpetuating the sin yourself. You have
then become Satanic, you have become the Accuser, now of humanity in toto.
For Blake, original sin is error, and the path of redemption has a twofold as-
pect: awakening the creative imagination (which is in itself critical and truth-
telling) and pursuing the way of forgiveness. This latter path is that of Jesus,
and explored in Jerusalem—which we need to set aside for present purpose.
Blake makes much of an enigmatic usage in which he asserts that Satan
represents the “limit of opacity.”°" An odd construction. Where have the red
suit and pitchfork gone? Or the serpent in the garden, or Lucifer his rage,
or Mephistopheles making the deal with Faust? Satan instead is something
blocking the passage oflight, something within the sphere ofvisualization, or
perception. He is a defect within us, internalized from humdrum existence
and, one should think, a follow-on to the famous passage of MHH: “if the
doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite.”7) (B, 39.) Satan is the grime covering the doors of perception.”*!
As that which blocks our reaching for ultimate being, the Satanic com-
plex installs various barricades within the Self, and these, in their twistings,
comprise the internal regime of war, as a realm of delusive desire and alien-
ated morality, “[w]here Satan making to himself Laws from his own iden-
tity, /Compell’d others to serve him in moral gratitude & submission/ Being
call’d God: setting himself above all that is called God.” War and aggression
stem not from any particular biological instinct, but from what my men-

tor, Stanley Diamond, called “unlived life.” We can add that this unlived life
breeds what is Satanic and points toward war-making, which under a Satanic
regime takes on a special value precisely because within it, life seems more
authentic than under the conditions of “quiet desperation” lived under ordi-
— even if Satanic life requires unliving, that is, sacrificing
nary circumstances
of the lives of innumerable others. Under Satan war appears as the higher
truth and the more fully achieved existence. Unlike the miasma of everyday
life under capital, it has clarity, focus, and purpose: and “Human Victims
throughout all the Earth” testify to its power.
Satan’s triumph is that of the isolated Ego, a form of the self in which the
visionary dimension is closed off by a system of internal barriers and external
manipulations, specific in this instance to the capitalist system.'“! Egoic being
emerges from that original “fallen” state when the human becomes split-off
from its original matrix, i.e., when the capacity for visionary imagination loses
its way. Capital exploits this just as much as it does the surplus value produced
by the worker; its realm may be seen from the triple perspective of generalized
commodity production, generalized egoic splitting, and generalized warfare un-
der the aegis of the MIC. It is this Satanic Trinity that generates the ecological
crisis, and blocks an aroused awareness of how to overcome it—a subject we
cannot follow further at present, except to say that this approach converges with
David Schwartzman’s insight that a “solar communism” beyond the ecological
crisis cannot take place without thoroughgoing demilitarization. To heal the
ecological crisis, we do need “to put an end to war”: nothing less will do.?*!
Release from bondage to Satan is release from the Ego’s power, and the
resumption of the visionary imagination. It is essential to the struggle against
war. Is this ever achievable? Not in any absolute sense, as neither the infinite,
the eternal nor the notion of god can be an object of knowing. These terms
are, we might say, naturally opaque, in that no word can encompass the “is-
ness” of the infinite—or of the eternal, or of god.?% Just so, all religions, and
all spiritual practices however they may grasp at this truth, can go no further
than to illuminate the lower reaches of the journey. But respecting these lim-
its is necessary as a check to dogmatism, sectarianism, fanaticism, a host of
bad “isms” —including militarism. More to the present point, the journey,
however imperfect, releases us toward a goal illuminated by the recapture of
a lost perspective. We do not reach the infinite, or god, but by seeking it, can
achieve a matchless critique of the given war machine, its capitalist roots, and
the alienated Satanic being worshipped under the name of common sense.
We generate, in other words, that kind of existentially alive engagement in
which portions of being come into fruitful contact, in contrast to the pallid

existence of those “best [who] lack all conviction,’
—the mass of citizenry
who cannot see beyond the Satanic Mills.
There is a contemporary instance, unforeseeable by Blake and the society
of his time, but entirely consistent with his vision. He concludes the extract
quoted above from Milton with mention of thé“Unutterable Name” directed
toward Satan as he becomes the God of this world. It is clear that Blake means
by this the Lord of the Israelites, YHWH. But the unutterable name has been
recast in the age of modern war by the great Christian contemplative, Thomas
Merton, and elaborated by his worthy successor, James Douglass: it becomes
the “unspeakable.”7!
The unspeakable, as Merton and Douglass conceive it, is a kind of shock
produced in us by the overwhelmingness of modern-day militarism, from
world-ending nuclear weaponry down to the white phosphorus launched by
Israel on Gaza. Douglass sees it as the Satanic congerie that converged on the
lonely and brave figure of John E Kennedy and eliminated him before he
could reverse the war machine. It is, writes Merton, “the void that contradicts
everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets
into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment they
are announced and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.
It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his
obedience . . .”?*)
It is the void prepared by Satan, where the immortal vision is not to go,
but must go.
Blake had the last word for our adversary:
To The Accuser who is

The God of This World
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce

And dost not know the Garment from the man.
Every Harlot was a Virgin once,
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Tho thou are Worshipd by the Names Divine

Of Jesus & Jehovah: thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill.??! a
[Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2010)
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM 19.

NOTES
For details, see “Sustainable Peaceful Production or Weapons For War?” Woodstock Peace
Economy, March 9, 2009, https://woodpec.blogspot.com/2009/03/sustainable-peaceful-
production-orhtml, accessed January 14, 2019. A recent contract, from mid-October,
2009, calls for fifty fans for the Israeli air force, paid for by the Pentagon and shipped
directly to America’s Number One Ally, for $27,712.50. In 1998, Rotron was absorbed
by a multinational firm, Ametek, for which it now serves as a flagship unit for Aerospace
and Defense production. See: http://www.ametekaerodefense.com/about/overview.cfm,
accessed January 14, 2019.
There was also a well-made “industrial” film, from 1964, which omits the military con-
nections and concentrates instead on an idyllic image of perfect integration between Ro-
tron and the town, the camera moving between verdant scenes of the mountain village,
the nicely turned out technical staff, all certifiably Caucasian, even Teutonic, busily work-
ing at their benches, and at play at family events such as picnics. This is accompanied by
a soundtrack serenade of tastefully bucolic and relaxing orchestral accompaniment.
A scandal! broke out in the mid-1980s concerning Rotron’s contamination of the local
water supply. Complex machines need to be cleaned as well as cooled. The cleaning agents
often include toxins like trichloroethylene, and the exigencies of profit cause capitalist
firms to not dispose of spent cleaning fluid properly. As a result the poisons accumulate
in steel drums which eventually rust, spring leaks, and discharge into the ground. Such
happened to Woodstock’s water from Rotron. The town has not fully recovered, but the
corporation remains inviolate.
The exact number will always be uncertain. For an internet summary of the innumerable,
hopelessly confused, biased and contentious accounts, see Matthew White, Arlas of the
Twentieth Century, online at http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm, accessed
on January 14, 2019. Needless to say, one needs to add to these the wreckage ofconflicts,
massacres, etc., in which the United States post-World War II has played an indirect role
(e.g., Central America, Indonesia, Iran, many others); see William Blum, Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War I, 2nd Edition (Monroe, ME:
Common Courage Press, 2003); or where states with which it has been deeply complicit
(e.g., Israel) have wreaked havoc in cahoots with it; or more generally, the undoubtedly
greater though also more diffuse worldwide ecological devastation—in terms both of
humanity and nature—brought about by the normal workings of the capitalist system
over which it has presided.
Ambivalent is putting it too mildly. Iraq was scarcely carpet bombed compared to Viet-
nam (this kind of bombing being itself away of sparing the direct intervention ofinfan-
try). Yet the destruction of society and nature, as well as the loss of life, has been of quite
the same order of magnitude.
As the song sung plaintively at peace rallies puts it: “Last night I had the strangest dream
I never dreamed before /I dreamt the world had all joined hands and put an end to war.”
Whenever I hear this I feel a deep melancholy from realizing that this essential struggle
has been relegated to the dream world.
The definitive edition of Blake’s poetry and prose is that of David V. Erdman, ed., The
Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Random House, Anchor Books,
various editions from 1965); henceforth “B,” as the source of quotes from Blake (the
reader is advised to obtain the hardcover edition, as the paperback swiftly falls apart with

use). Erdman also produced an essential study of Blake that demolishes the ignorant view
of the great visionary artist as a mad and other-worldly crank and reveals him instead
as an astute student of the politics of his time and one of the most ardent champions
of freedom to have ever walked the earth: Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd edition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977 [Chicago: Dover Books, 1991]), henceforth
“E.” Of the massive literature on Blake as thinker and poet, the most elegant and
grounded in faith traditions is Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1958); henceforth “F.” See also the highly useful guide to the labyrinth
of Blake’s thought: S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence: Brown University
Press, 1965; henceforth “D.”
Beginning with “And did those feet in ancient time...and concluding with “Till we
have built Jerusalem /In England’s green & pleasant Land.” The project requires ceaseless
“mental fight,” as noted above, the essential praxis for human transformation; and we
must fight to overcome what is signified by the “dark Satanic Mills.”
Erdman was originally a trade unionist and became an official of the United Auto Work-
ers. As the UAW under the leadership of Walter and Victor Reuther became anticom-
munist in the 1950s, Erdman spoke out against the betrayal of class solidarity. Purged
because of this, he changed careers and became a great Blake scholar. His was one of the
few narratives from the anticommunist era with a happy ending.
Peter Linebaugh, Zhe London Hanged (London: Verso, 2006). The pace of execution
was barbarous in the extreme; and the prime inciting influences were evolving capitalist
notions of property. There are fourteen references to Tyburn in Blake, all from the three
Prophetic works.
ie Aldous Huxley took MHH’s famous line that “if the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,” as the source, and title, of his seminal
work on mind-altering mescaline; see below, Note 22. Jim Morrison latched onto the
notion of “Doors” as the name ofhis ensemble; Allen Ginsberg hallucinated the exquisite
poem from “Songs of Experience-The Sunflower,” set many other Songs of Innocence
and Experience to music, sang them at anti-war rallies, and placed MHH at the center
of his world-view. All of this has considerable relevance to the story of Woodstock as the
fount of the counterculture, which locally featured Beat Poet and Blakean Ed Sanders,
who moved to the town early in the 1970s. You may hear Blake Songs on recordings
by Sanders and the group he co-founded with Tuli Kupferberg, The Fugs. Ginsberg’s
renderings are also available in collections of his work. In a famous Woodstock Moment
of the 1980s, Ginsberg sang the Nurse’s Song [B: 15] from Songs of Innocence with the
Fugs.
12. While in Felpham, Blake tossed a drunken soldier out of his garden after the latter refused
to leave when asked politely. The soldier accused him of saying, in the process, “The King
be damned!,” which was enough to trigger a trial for sedition. Blake defended himself and
won the case. Had he lost he would have been ruined. Such were the pressures that framed
his late works. It deserves mention that they also affected the fledgling United States in,
among other measures, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the persecution of Blake’s friend
Tom Paine. Reaction to the French Revolution is still a staple of right-wing thought.
There are three off-handed references to Satan in MHH: that he is an alternative form taken
by the devil; that he appears as a false Messiah in the Book of.‘Job; and that he is an Ante-
deluvian equivalent to the Messiah or the Tempter. By contrast, In Milton, a work roughly
six times as long, the figure appears no fewer than 118 times and is a principle agent within

the text. See David V. Erdman, A Concordance to the Writings ofWilliam Blake (2 Volumes)
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1968). There are 254 references overall to Satan in
Blake’s writings, which after Milton occur mostly in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. In Foster
Damon’s Blake Dictionary, the entry for Satan runs six columns. D, 355-358.
For a discussion, see Joel Kovel, History and Spirit 2d ed.(Warner, NH: Glad Day Books,
1999 [Boston: Beacon Press, 1991)).
See Elaine Pagels, The Origins of Satan (New York: Vintage, 1995). Originally, writes
Pagels, Satan appears as a minor instrument of God used to confound human plans
on behalf of the Almighty. Pagels observes that the writers of the Old Testament took
a twofold path to deal with enemies of the Israelites, and indeed the whole problem of
Otherness. For those outside tribal limits, subhuman figures were drawn, chiefly animal
in character, and devolve onto the notion of the Beast. For enemies within, on the other
hand, human figures were introduced, who gradually grew in power and independence of
the deity. It was at this level that Milton, introduces Satan as the Fallen Angel, Lucifer.
Milton 29: 50 [B, 128]; Jerusalem 35: 1 [B, 181]. He meant the gaze of people like
Hayley, forever on the prowl, from which the artist had to find little spaces of refuge.
Needless to add, the technology of surveillance was then rudimentary, Foucault’s
Panopticon notwithstanding.
The classic text within political economy is Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capi-
tal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). Studies by the Frankfurt School, notably
Herbert Marcuse, became influential in the 1960s to spur countercultural revolt. I never
forgot his phrase, from Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 [1955]): “Ad-
ministration is the pure form of domination.”
“The Second Coming,” concluding with the great, foreboding line: “... what rough beast,
its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” Originally from Mi-
chael Robartes and the Dancer, (Churchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala Press, 1920),
and cited as one of the one-hundred most anthologized poems in the English language. I
would take Yeats’ use of “worst” and “best” ironically and self-reflectively, as a snooty judg-
ment passed upon common folk by a member of the elite lacking all conviction.
Milton 11: 6-14 [B, 104]. Albion means variously England or humanity; the Druids
were, for Blake, the prehistoric savage races of England, or the archaic forms taken by the
Devil; by the Unutterable Name Blake means here YHWH (Yahweh), the name for the
Hebrew deity not to be spoken in the rabbinical tradition. Then, of course, the Pauline
insight of being called God. For additional meanings, see text.
20. Astounding numbers of folk in the United States continue to believe in the existence
of the Devil as an actual flesh and blood person. I have heard scholarly estimates in the
neighborhood of 40 percent. This grim fact tells us a lot about the sociology of this coun-
try, and plays into the tremendous success that diabolization by demagogues and propa-
gandists enjoys, most consequentially through their construction of the Communist and
the Terrorist.
Die All but one of the 32 usages occur in the Prophetic books. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, has
an extensive discussion.
22 See note 11. It is quite unlikely that Blake would have approved of Aldous Huxley’s
reading of this passage, or Jim Morrison’s. Each of these offered something of a “quick
fix,” whether from chemical inputs or the release afforded by performance. My intention
however is not to denounce (accuse), but to keep the question open.

2B. Blake puts it differently in the next line: “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all
things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern,” that is, of the Self.
24, For discussion, cf. History and Spirit, for a summary, 84-85.
Wy, David Schwartzman, “Ecosocialism or Ecocatastrophe?,” Capitalism Nature Socialism
20, no. 1(, March 2009), 6-33. 4
26. Cf. History and Spirit, Chapter 5, 173-196.

Ue Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966); James
Douglass,/FK and the eee Why He Died and Why it Matters (Maryknoll, New
York: Orbis, 2008).
28. Merton, Raids, 4.
29. Conclusion of a short illustrated work, with line engravings: For the Sexes/ THE GATES
OF PARADISE. Date uncertain, though likely late, probably post-1820. B, 269.

Suffering a Sea-change
(2010)
Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the response to

the spill, said Wednesday evening that the government had decided
to try to put equipment on the ocean floor to take accurate measure-
ments. A technical team is at work devising a method, he said. “We
are shoving pizzas under the door, and they are not coming out until
they give us the answer,” he said. Scientists have long theorized that a
shallow spill and a spill in the deep ocean—this one is a mile down—
would behave quite differently. A 2003 report by the National Re-
search Council predicted that the oil in a deepwater blowout could
break into fine droplets, forming plumes of oil mixed with water that
would not quickly rise to the surface. That prediction appeared to be
confirmed Saturday when the researchers aboard the Pelican reported
that they had detected immense plumes that they believed were made
ofoil particles. The results were not final, and came as a surprise to the
government. They raise a major concern, that sea life in concentrated
areas could be exposed to a heavy load of toxic materials as the plumes
drift through the sea.
—The New York Times, May 19, 2010
Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his

bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth
suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange. Sea-

nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.
— The Tempest, \-ii
CONSOLING FERDINAND for the loss of his shipwrecked father, Ariel envisions
the exchange between humanity and nature as unfading, that is, outside the
entropic decay decreed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This basic
law of nature can be offset in certain corners of the universe, among them,
life itself With human life, the situation is more complex. If we exercise our
creative power wisely, then a humanized nature, in which the transforming
imagination brings the “sea-change into something rich and strange,” can
further offset the Second Law and achieve yet lower entropy. Since entropy is
the negation of form and art is the creation of form, the artist is potentially
on the side that stands against the Second Law, as Shakespeare does here with
his powers of language.
There are other potentials at our disposal and other kinds of sea-change
that can violently accelerate the breakdown and collapse of ecosystems. These
were conceivable by the Elizabethan mind, though it remained unaware of
the possibility of a general ruin of nature. When Shakespeare represented
something of this sort, it was as a slate on which human violence could be
inscribed directly. Thus Macbeth:
Whence is that knocking?

How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas in incarnadine,
Making the green one red. (II, ii)
There is no suggestion here that the seas would remain corrupted over a very
long scale and with chaotically unpredictable results—no idea, that is, that
they could be invaded by “immense plumes . . . made of oil particles,” the
combined work of the worst oil company in the world, BP, the frenzy to “drill,
baby, drill” endemic to post-peak oil, the clamor of capitalists undergoing a
severe accumulation crisis, and a cowardly, corrupt, and conniving state."
It was not until some 250 years after the above lines were written that
another great writer stepped forward to envision a relation between human-
ity and nature tending toward general ruin, with the human element of the

relationship being brought down after sowing much devastation. It took the
emergence of industrial capitalism on the soil of a nation-state configured
around the expansive conquest of nature for this to happen. By 1850, the
year that he composed Moby-Dick, Herman Melville had lived thirty-one
years within such a society, spending four of them on a remarkable series of
sea-voyages, including some eighteen months‘on a whaler.”! A “whale-ship,”
he wrote, “was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
The United States was at the time the world’s leading whaling nation, and
whaling was a core element of its economy, and perhaps the most advanced
in developing the forces of production. Whaling entailed an expansion and
coordination of death-dealing technology, the means for breaking down the
huge body of the prey into the different commodities extracted from it and
storing them aboard the ship, and development of the complex hierarchies
of labor necessary for this result.'! Melville’s whaling ship was demonstra-
bly capitalist. It hailed, however, from an intermediate era when production
could be defined as manufacture, that is, when workers, poised between ar-
tisanal production and full industrialization, produced surplus value™! while
directly manipulating, or substituting for, the machines that were transform-
ing nature into commodities.
After 1860, the introduction of steam propulsion and the cannon-fired
explosive harpoon thoroughly changed the dynamics of whaling, with whales
now towed beside the ship to port instead of being processed on board."
Thus the harpooners came before the harpoon-shooting cannon. This suited
Melville's purposes, enabling him to allegorically retool his ship, the Peguod,
as a microcosmos in which the harpooners stood for the diverse peoples sub-
jugated by empire: Polynesian Queequeg, American-Indian Tashtego, African
Daggoo—and with prefigurative irony, the Arab hidden by Ahab, Fedallah.
The laws of accumulation are enacted on the whaling ship, as is the entire
history of colonization and conquest and the spectacle of workers following
a charismatic fascist to their doom. The Pequod, then, is not just a ship or
even a factory, though it is certainly that. It is also suitable to represent the
whole of American society”! and indeed civilization itself, which will sink like
the doomed ship if present arrangements continue to bind the population to
capital as tightly as the crew of the Pequod became bound to Ahab’s mono-
maniacal chase of the White Whale."
Whatever it might have represented, the Peguod in fact was a highly mo-
bile mid-nineteenth century off-shore oil rig. It had to be, as the principle
source of energy in those days was of animal origin, in other words, “non-fossil
fuel,” mainly from whales and above all, the great sperm whale. Spermaceti

oil was the highest value commodity produced by the industry; and as up to
three tons of the stuff could be taken from the head of a large male, the wealth
gained by whaling is no mystery. The oil was chiefly employed in lamps to
illuminate the homes and streets of cities; other functions included the lubri-
cation of machinery and the making of candles, all essential use-values for a
growing society. The year 1850 marked the zenith of the whale oil market. It
also stood on the brink of a radically different mode of extraction, of much
vaster hydrocarbon sources from long-dead vegetation. This now heads toward
its dénouement in catastrophic events like the Deepwater Horizon rupture.
To say the least, the sperm whale was no ordinary animal. At the pin-
nacle of the oceanic food chain with a range spanning the seven seas and an
intelligence, strength and purpose that enabled it to bring down the boats
set upon the job of killing it,!” the sperm whale was in effect the King of the
animal kingdom. This allowed Melville to fashion his allegory into the saga
of humankind’s violent conquest of nature, with Ahab as its apotheosis. The
Pequod’s chase opens upon capital’s immemorial antecedent in Paleolithic
hunting bands (said to be responsible for the extinction of many mammalian
species), and therefore, its common root with warfare and male hierarchies.
Moby-Dick is a treatise on the male psyche. No major work of fiction has
been so bereft of humanizing female influence, its homoerotic moments not-
withstanding, and therefore none reveals so clearly the demonic principle
of command embedded in totemic Ahab, who had not pearls for eyes but a
whale jawbone for a leg—and who would go down to his death bound to the
animal he chased.
Melville sought to ennoble the renegade and castaway workers, and did
so brilliantly. But he also showed their susceptibility to the spell cast by mad
Ahab. Never think, Melville tells us, that the laws of accumulation can be
reduced to the dry calculations of economists, accountants, and technocrats.
That’s why he put first mate Starbuck (Yes, that Starbuck) aboard as the avatar
of on-shore practical reason, to be swept away by the roar of organized male
violence under the direction of Ahab. The rationalized lunacy of Starbuck’s
loyalty to the market system fits into the lunacy of that system itself as re-
fracted through demonic Ahab.
But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not
chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?”
“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death
too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the busi-
ness we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my

commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy ven-
geance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it
will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou

requirest a little lower layer. If money¥ to be the measurer,
man, and the accountants have computed their great count-
ing house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every
three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my ven-
geance will fetch a great premium HERE!”
“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what's that for?

methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.”
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply

smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged
with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
As Ahab makes clear in the next passage, the notion of vengeance conveys
more than getting back at Moby-Dick for the damage he caused to the cap-
tain’s leg. The problem is ontological, and endemic to human being. We won't
be able to develop the implications here; but as it helps us get to the roots of
capital, and indeed, the whole pathology of our relation to nature, the deeper
recesses of Ahab’s madness deserves some register:
Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects,
man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the
living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but
still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features
from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike
through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside ex-
cept by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale
is that wall, shoved near to me.
Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But ‘tis enough.

He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength,
with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable
thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent,
or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon
him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if
it insulted me. (Chapter 36)

The word, “person,” comes from the Latin—per sonare—to speak
through. Through what? Why, a mask, such as is worn throughout Classical
theatre. So the self is divided, between the mask we present to the world and
what speaks through it. It is an ancient fracture, opening upon the being and
pathology of our relation to nature—which is mute to that form of the self
known as the Ego and goes unrecognized by it, breeding hatred and venge-
fulness. Some day political economy and political ecology will catch up with
Herman Melville in understanding such matters.
Sea Change in the Fast Lane

ORGANIZED MALE AGGRESSION, shaped into hierarchies perpetuating ven-
geance and employing ever more sophisticated technological means in the
service of accumulation, was drawn by Melville into his narrative of enmity
toward nature called Moby-Dick. But of course the narrative does not end
with the blowback of a defiled and assaulted nature as the rage of a White
Whale. Rather has it spread, ramifying into the nightmarish wars of the twen-
tieth century and their apotheoses at places like Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
And it goes on still, in the spreading disasters through which the ecological
crisis is inscribed. Ergo Chernobyl, Bhopal, Katrina, the Niger Delta suffer-
ing Shell and Ecuador suffering Chevron, the Alberta tar sands, and today,
Deepwater Horizon, and all the other calamities in between and to come.
And do not forget the silent defilements taking place every day and every-
where, as toxic plumes seep throughout nature, entering ecosystems, corrupt-
ing them, and sowing general ruin.
How could Ariel sing “Full Fathom Five” today, as coral disintegrates in
acidifying oceans and pearls disappear with the pollution of oyster beds?®!
Corrupted seas bring corrupt sea changes in turn. The fundamentals of eco-
systems, indeed, our very bodies, have been altered through intrusion of alien
substances, many from petroleum derivatives. Changed into plastics and end-
less commodities wrapped in plastic, they enter flesh, insinuate themselves in
physiology, and induce disease—which is to say, radically enhance entropy
and accelerate the heat death of our planet. Each of us carries 100-200 alien
compounds in our plasma and lymph, those fluids within that reproduce the
ancient seas out of which life arose. Stuff floats within our bodies for which a
billion years of evolution has left us unprepared: substances that are the prod-
ucts of late capitalist death-genius, powered by oil and the fabricator of oil.”
And it’s not just our flesh. Today the great whales have become our breth-
ren in the worst way possible, as common victims. What industrial whaling

has been unable to do, namely, bring sperm whales to the brink of extinction,
the toxic clouds are succeeding in doing. As a recent study shows, “Sperm
whales,” like humans at the top of the food chain, “feeding even in the most
remote reaches of Earth’s oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic
and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell
danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend
on seafood.” As one expert puts it, “the whales absorb the contaminants and
pass them on to the next generation when a female nurses her calf. “What she’s
actually doing is dumping her lifetime accumulation of that fat-soluble stuff
into her baby, he said, and each generation passes on more to the next.”
Beholding such ruin, poor Ariel could only, I think, weep.
As the Pequod descends, Melville adds a somber reminder of the enmity
toward nature that propelled the fatal search for the White Whale.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves
over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving
a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long
streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with
ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost
touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered
backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the
flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk
that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards
from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag,
and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to
intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and
the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the
submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his ham-
mer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic
shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole
captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his
ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had
dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted
herself with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet
yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides;
then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on
as it rolled five thousand years ago.
(Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2010]

NOTES
Tim Dickinson, “The Spill, the Scandal, and the President,” Rolling Stone, no. 1107
(June 24, 2010). :
A worthy study is Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf,
2005). Delbanco also contributes an Introduction to the edition of Moby-Dick used here:
(New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). The reader is strongly urged to look for
a copy of the 1930 Random House edition, with 144 illustrations by Rockwell Kent.
Not through the sale of labor power for wages, however, which would have been impossible
on voyages that could last as long as three years. Rather, exploitation was exacted by
giving members of the crew shares of whatever profit they created, while driving the scale
down as much as possible, as Melville describes acutely in Chapter 16 of Moby-Dick. For
Marx on “manufacture,” see Capital, Volume I, Moby-Dick was published in England
shortly after Marx arrived in 1848. It was heavily panned, and I know of no evidence that
Marx knew of it, though I like to think he would have enjoyed it greatly.
For a survey of whaling in modern times, see Eric J. Ziegelmayer, “Whales for Margarine:
Commodification and Neoliberal Nature in the Antarctic,” Capitalism Nature Socialism
19, no. 3 (September 2008), 65-93.
“Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massa-
chusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes.” (77). Melville knew that hardly
anybody remembered the Pequot Indians, who were nearly wiped out in 1635 by the first
large-scale massacre of aboriginal people in North America—and today are avenged with
their enormous and very profitable Foxwoods casino in Connecticut.
C.L.R. James wrote an extraordinary study of Moby-Dick while interned at Ellis Island
in the 1950s awaiting deportation: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 1953, 1978). He saw Ahab as a prefigured totalitarian
dictator along the lines of Hitler, and the fate of the Pequod, that of Nazi Germany.
The SS Essex, destroyed by a sperm whale in 1820 with major loss of life, was a major
stimulus to Melville’s story; as was the putative existence of a monster albino whale,
“Mocha-Dick,” much talked about by whaling men of the time.
Peter Tyson, “What's Killing the Oysters?” NOVA, PBS http:/ /www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
pearl/oysters.html, accessed January 14, 2019,
One example among many: L. Hovander, T. Malmberg, et al., “Identification of Hydrox-

ylated PCB Metabolites and Other Phenolic Halogenated Pollutants in Human Blood
Plasma,” Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 42, no. 1 (January
2002) 105-117.
10. Arthur Max, “Toxins Found in Whales Bode Ill for Humans,” Associated Press, June 24,
2010.

On Marx and Ecology'!
(2011)
I AM HONORED TO BE HERE to explore with you the relation of Marxism to

ecological civilization. Although the title of this conference may seem ob-
scure to the average person, its importance becomes clear once we realize
that the phrase, “ecological civilization,’ means civilization restored to sanity
in its relations with nature. This is in recognition of the grim fact that our
planet Earth— including all nations, the United States, where I am from,
and China, where we meet today—is undergoing a great “ecological crisis.”
Though humanity is part of nature, it has become radically estranged from
nature. This has introduced an exponentially expanding set of destabilizations
in the ecosystems that represent our relations with nature. Whether expressed
as climate change, species loss, pollution, soil loss, or any of the indices of a
traumatized nature, the ecological crisis, unless creatively resolved, signifies
the downfall of civilization and perhaps the extinction of our species. It is,
simply, the greatest challenge to humankind in all history.
I put the matter bluntly to establish at the outset that this is not a prob-
lem that can be resolved through technological, administrative, or legislative
means, however necessary these may be at an instrumental level. Nor is it my
purpose to address particular political or economic issues, even though some
parts of the globe bear much greater responsibility than others for generating
the crisis, just as certain areas are more afflicted than others. Those reckonings
are for another time and place. We need to focus today on the larger pat-
tern —that the ecological crisis grows out of and reproduces a way of being
rooted deeply in our history. Thus it is not primarily an economic problem,

but one created by a civilization that generates a pathological economy, a kind
of cancer on the earth. Its resolution, therefore, will require a social transfor-
mation of world-historical importance, one that redirects society toward eco-
logical integrity. Every locus of power in society—every nation-state, every
corporation, every university, every religion, and indeed, every person has the
obligation to use that power to foster the ecological integrity of civilization in
order to secure a habitable future for humanity and millions of other species.
And if they do not, then humanity has the right and obligation to rise up and
force them to do so. I am quite aware of how unrealistic this may seem. But
what is more unrealistic? To face a difficult truth and do what one can? Or to
go along with a manifestly suicidal status quo?
My thesis is that an appropriation of Karl Marx in relation to ecology is
necessary —though not sufficient—for this project.) Marx of course never
used the term, ecological crisis. The word ecology had just come into existence
during his later years, and the generalized ruin of nature was not a looming
threat. Nevertheless, in contrast to received opinion, Marx thought and cared
deeply about nature and wrote brilliantly about many ecological problems,
especially those relating to agriculture and the soil. Moreover, his basic cat-
egory of production is inherently ecological, as it deals with the relationship
between one part of nature—the human being—and the remainder of na-
ture as this is transformed by the peculiarly human faculty of labor in the pro-
duction process. Labor and nature, wrote Marx, contribute equally— though
not symmetrically, as I discuss below—to the production of wealth; thus the
entirety of civilization is nothing more, essentially, than different configura-
tions of nature transformed by collective labor. In an important sense, which
cannot be developed fully here, production and indeed, society itself may be
understood systematically in ecological terms.
Further, Marx identified the dynamic responsible for the ecological crisis,
although he did not do so directly, or all in the same place. In one of his earli-
est studies, “On the Jewish Question,” he writes:
The mode of perceiving nature, under the rule of private
property and money, is a real contempt for, and practical
degradation of, nature, ....It is in this sense that [in a 1524
pamphlet] Thomas Miinzer declares it intolerable “that ev-
ery creature should be transformed into property —the fish-
es in the water, the birds of the air, the plants on the earth:
the creature too should become free.” (Marx 1843, 55.)

Thus Marx singles out the property/money system, which is to say,
capitalism, as responsible for the practical degradation of nature; more, he
shares Miinzer’s (a leading figure in the radical Protestant Reformation) view
that nature —all creatures, human and non-human alike—was imprisoned
and must be set free. If this has a Buddhist ring to it as well, I trust you will
not be surprised to learn that Marx, receiving a two-volume biography of
Buddha in the mail, called it “an important work” (Sheasby 2004, 55). In
any case, Marx’s prolific discoveries in the economic sphere were consistently
placed within a larger theoretical whole, one of whose implications is the
avoidance of any singular or narrow lines of explanation. In the same spirit,
we would note that Marx does not indict industrialization as the driving
force behind the ecological crisis. Industry is not the effective cause but an
instrumental means to the ruin of nature. It is, so to speak, the hammer
wielded by capitalist society to smash nature, and is driven in this direction by
the basic principles of its master. As to these, Marx writes colorfully in Capital
that for the ruling class of bourgeoisie, it was “Accumulate! Accumulate! That
is Moses and the prophets,” indicating both the leading dynamic of capitalist
society and the religious fervor with which it is pursued (Marx 1906, 652).
Capital’s dominion has a clear priority: its own accumulation prevails over
all other goals and values, sacrificing nature and humanity to the gods of
profit. Quantity rules over quality; and exchange value displaces use-value, to
refer to key Marxist categories, and takes on an estranged life of its own. This
becomes transferred to commodities as their “fetishism” and flows into the
religious character of accumulation, which, unlimited as only pure number
can be, drives toward infinity and drags the planet Earth to ruin.
The human world has always been troubled, and the history of the harm
inflicted upon nature is long. But the trouble indicated by our ecological
crisis belongs to the specific period of modernity, that epoch organized by
capital’s hegemony. Only under modernity and its late-capitalist reflex of glo-
balization have ecosystems on a planetary scale become debased. While writ-
ing this I recalled being greatly moved, long ago, by centuries-old Chinese
landscape scrolls in which human figures are represented as dwarfed by the
magnificence of their natural surroundings. They were not reduced by this,
however, but became enhanced through participation in nature. The prevail-
ing mood was one of awe, tolerance, and co-existence. Chinese traditional
culture in this respect is like all traditional cultures. All are unique, yet all
share recognition of the greatness of nature and the awe with which humans
beheld it. No modern society holds such an attitude today, and in this fact

lies our doom. There are of course innumerable instances of “Nature Chan-
nels” on television, while parks and nature reserves dot the landscape along
with New Age religious cults» But the key word here is “dot”; for these are the
defensive and dislocated exceptions which prove the rule: that at the center of
all modern culture lies the subordination of nature to “Man,” and with this,
the reduction of nature’s ecosystems to instrumental resources, mere objects
of its master’s needs and desires.
The reduction of nature has been accompanied by an ongoing disintegra-
tion of society. In 1848, Marx and Engels brilliantly observed in the Com-
munist Manifesto that the newly dominant class of bourgeoisie has
put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man
to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other
nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical cal-
culation. (Marx and Engels 1848, 475.)
The term, egotistical, calls our attention to an essential feature of the

capitalist world order: that within its terms the Self, that species-specific qual-
ity of being human, acquires the character of being split-off from its ground
of existence and, with this, from the other beings that populate nature. As
a result, things fall apart, which is to say, disintegrate ecologically. As the
Manifesto puts it:
[E]verlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable preju-
dices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. (Marx and Engels
1848, 476.)
Capital dissolves space and time, the anchor points of ecological integ-
rity, and fashions human beings who have lost the sense of the sacred. Living
under the sign of cash, they are turned into slaves of quantity and cold calcu-
lation, they become addicted to sensation, narcissistic, isolated, and discon-
nected from nature and the recognition of nature within and without the self.
A population of this sort is essential for accumulation, inasmuch as people

who have lost connection with nature are left essentially with two things:
their labor power for sale on the labor markets and their hunger, born of rest-
less despair, to fill their being with commodities and serve in the legions of
consumerism. Both of these are necessary for capitalism in its present phase,
which overproduces commodities and must stimulate their consumption
upon pain of collapse. All this generates the culture of modernity and takes
place under the sign of the new.
The great Western Marxist Rosa Luxemburg in her 1913 study The Ac-
cumulation of Capital realized acutely that capital could never achieve equi-
librium but had to constantly expand. In doing so, it has to “fight a battle of
annihilation” against what she calls the “natural economy” (Luxemburg 1968,
369). And what is this? Quite simply, every form of economy not predicated
on the accumulation of capital, everything, that is, which is traditional and
pre-capitalist. Colonialism, direct and indirect, internal and external, is the
form taken by empire along with an everlasting war on all peasant, indigenous,
and subsistence economies. But to war on the natural economy is to build an
economy that makes war on nature. Therefore capital combines contempt for
tradition with contempt for nature, and pushes both toward the garbage heap.
Thus our inverted world: from humanity within nature to Man over na-
ture. It follows that under these conditions, “Man” is also greatly reduced:
unable to share in nature, and further divided by class, gender, and race,
systems where underlings are designated as closer to despised nature than
their masters. Marx sees this in the terms of alienation, which expresses the
estrangement of humanity from its powers to transform nature and make
ourselves through our history. The necessary condition for this is for people to
lose control over the means of production, whether through legalistic or vio-
lent means. And so the separation of humans from the means of production
and the concomitant exploitation of labor alienates humanity's creative power
and separates women and men from their human nature. Marx in Capital
lays out the human cost of these glittering towers built by accumulation. For
capital “mutilate[s] the worker into a fragment of a man, degrade[s] him to
the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy[s] every remnant of charm
in his work and turn[s] it into a hated toil.... [and] estrange[s] from him the
intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as sci-
ence is incorporated into it as an independent power’ (Marx 1906, 708). By
alienating the creative power of the worker, capital degrades her/him as a hu-
man being, and in so doing, degrades the ecosystems to which s/he belongs.
The worker so mutilated—and here we recognize the whole of humanity
under the sway of alienated capitalist production— becomes incapable of in-

tervening creatively in resolving the ecological crisis, for this requires “the
intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as sci-
ence is incorporated into it as an independent power.” The “dumbing-down”
of the populace includes a dull-witted attitude toward the ecological crisis. It
is greatly aggravated by the constant insecurity of living in capitalist society,
ravaged by debt, deluded by mass culture, kept ignorant by the press, and cut
off from a vital community.)
It follows that Marxism’s eco-political approach is quite distinct from
standard environmental practice, as its prime point is not directly environ-
mental at all but the transformation of the human element in the ecosystem
through the empowerment of the associated producers and the overcoming of
their alienation. To emphasize, this does not preclude environmental practic-
es such as regulation or direct intervention in the non-human elements of the
ecosystem (for example, by improving fertilization or irrigation, or employ-
ing renewable energy, etc.). However, the fundamental logic is quite different
in its prime attention to human creative power rather than the things outside
us in the environment.
A Marxist approach to ecological transformation cannot rest, therefore,
until and unless the capitalist system is surpassed and replaced by one restor-
ing the control by the producers of the means of production. As this fulfills
the power of human nature, so does it constitute the foundation of an inte-
gral human ecosystem. We shall then have, in the words of the Manifesto,
an “association, in which the free development of each is the condition for
the free development of all” (Marx and Engels 1848, 491). It follows that an
integral human ecosystem entails freedom: the self-determination, necessarily
associated with others, of a dignified, integral life. A movement is presently
afoot around the world, as yet very marginal but continually growing, to call
this “ecosocialism.” Its key is conjugation of the socialist element with a fully
empowered intention to heal nature and restore the integrity of ecosystems.
We call its fledgling organization the “Ecosocialist International Network’; it
serves as a kind of forum bringing together exponents of this new tendency
and allowing for the exchange of ideas."
A key principle of ecosocialist practice in a time when these potentials are
still weak may be called “prefiguration.” It involves the dual recognition, first,
that any socialist outcome is very far off given the hegemony of capital; and
second, that it is possible to determine and choose between courses of action
according to which contains the more vital germ of an ecologically integral
future. For example, the politics of climate change include one set of choices
organized around “cap and trade,” a means of creating a commercialized system

of pollution credits, and on another side, a set organized around “climate jus-
tice” movements; these entail means of “keeping the oil in the soil” and are built
around the needs and claims of indigenous folk who happen to be in the way of
corporate initiatives to extract resources. Obviously the former is the province
of capital, and the latter, of its victims. Hence the path of climate justice—a
project grounded in class struggle—is to be chosen as prefigurative of an eco-
socialist future. The same would hold, it must be added, for any practice carried
forth in the name of justice. For justice, like freedom, is a necessary constituent
of integral human ecosystems.
I have used this notion, integrity of ecosystem, often, and it is time to
look more closely into it. The notion of an ecosystem is a molecular concept
within ecology: it is the place where ecological relations take place and are
manifested. Ecosystems consist of differentiable elements, or aggregations of
elements, whether non-living, living and non-human, or human, in an iden-
tifiable pattern of relationship. Since ecology’s central notion is the interre-
latedness of all things within nature, the ecosystem is not unitary; it is rather
connected both internally and externally with other ecosystems; indeed, from
this aspect, nature may be regarded as the integral of all ecosystems. As in
the mathematical notion, the integral has the fundamental attribute of being
a whole, indeed such is the meaning ofits Latin root. It is no simple matter
to define the whole—or used as an adjective, to take a “holistic” approach:
consider only trying to define what makes a certain arrangement of features
on the anterior surface of a human head, a “face,” a whole different from the
sum of its parts—and yet judgments of this kind happen “naturally.” So it is
with ecosystems in general and especially those that engage living and human
elements. However, we know ecosystems to be definite arrangements of mat-
ter and energy; as “arrangements,” they must be aggregations in which formal
relations prevail. The universe began (if the term may be used) as a singular-
ity entirely without structure. According to the best understanding known to
me, it will end as a formless plasma. In between, in the world that we inhabit,
forms appear, change, and evolve. Ecosystems are locations of form, and their
internal and external relations constitute the unfolding of what is called evo-
lution. In this respect, life appears as se/freplicating
form, and human being
as a life-form capable of consciously trans-forming ecosystems. How we do this
depends upon our values, our ethical systems, and our relations with the so-
ciety into which we are inserted. In this sense the struggle for the integrity of
ecosystems is an ultimately ethical imperative to direct human transformative
activity so as to advance and preserve the holistic character of ecosystems. In
the process, aesthetic and spiritual qualities emerge and signify evolution of

one kind or another, according to theory/ praxis (Kovel 1999). From another
angle, we would say that production has to itself be produced. Some fragmen-
tary aspects of this inquiry appear in what follows.
It is remarkable in this context that evolution—and for humanity, the
struggle on behalf of integrity of ecosystems— occurs in context of that most
inexorable principle of nature, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which
dictates that in a closed system, entropy, a measure of disorder and formless-
ness, will rise over time. Life is at heart a struggle against the entropy law
(Schrédinger 1992), and human production a never-ending battle as well,
which the ecological crisis tells us we are losing insofar as civilization is domi-
nated by the forces of capitalist production. But this also tells us, first, that as
the Second Law stands, so to speak, over matter, so must matter—i.e., the
physical stuff of the universe along with its energic relations —be the locus of a
countervailing tendency toward form and the sustenance of form. Otherwise,
no-thing and no being would exist. Hence what exists also resists dissolution.
It must be added, therefore, that there needs be postulated an active formal
tendency inherent in the stuff of the world just as there is a tendency toward
dissolution. An adequate vision of nature must therefore include the presence
of selforganizing potentials. Matter cannot be regarded as dull, inert, and atom-
ized substance lest we violate the lawfulness of the universe. Inert substance
exists, but as a subset of matter: the already dedifferentiated workings of the
entropy principle, matter reverted to its entropically augmented condition, for
example, a decayed corpse, leaf mulch, or the remains of a forest fire— but also
prepared for resumption and re-entry into the cycle of being. This is not “vital-
ism,” since self-organizing potentials do not signify the presence of life every-
where in nature. They do signify, however, the potential toward life somewhere
in nature, and as it must also be, consciousness at a further stage of realization.
A worthy ethic of production would be faithful to this property of
nature, and configure modes of production accordingly. We would expect
the same in a theory of labor, as labor is the dynamic element in production.
In a famous passage from Capital, Volume I, Marx builds such a theory of
labor. Unusually for him, this is framed transhistorically, that is, as a human-
natural process, which will appear in all historical circumstances. The passage
is lengthy, and we have space for only a few key lines:
Labour is...a process in which both man and Nature par-
ticipate, and in which man ofhis own accord starts, regulates,
and controls the material re-actions between himself and Na-
ture. He opposes himselftoNature as one of her own forces,
setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural

forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s produc-
tions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting
on the external world and changing it, he at the same time
changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers
and compels them to act in obedience ty his sway... He makes
use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of
some substances in order to make other substances subservi-
ent to his aims.... Thus Nature becomes one of the organs
of his activity, one thathe annexes to his own bodily organs,
adding stature to himself.... As the earth is his original lar-
der, so too it is his original tool house. It supplies him, for
instance, with stones for throwing, grinding, pressing, cut-
ting, &c. The earth itselfisan instrument of labour... .(Em-
phasis mine, Marx 1906, 197, 199.)
In one of the most definitive statements of his life’s work, then, we see
that though nature indeed plays a role for Marx, it is a highly asymmetrical
and unequal one, and radically passive. Marx sees nature as an organ subor-
dinated to the master’s mind and an instrument of labor; indeed, the whole
earth is seen as such an instrument and even a kind of slave. Though the
worker is a force ofnature, he is a force opposed to nature, and this opposition
is chosen of his own accord, hence not just opposed to, but outside of, nature.
Man, Homo faber, is purely active for Marx here, as nature is passive—in-
deed, it is hard to see how Man can be a force of nature, if in the labor process
he acts of his own accord on a passive nature. Nature is not just passive, but
dumb, inertly waiting for Man to be fashioned into objects of use to him.
It is a striking indication of how much work needs to be done in rethink-
ing the ecological dimension of Marxism that this famous passage has drawn so
little critical attention, despite its logical and ontological incoherence. More, it
is anthropologically inaccurate, as it overlooks the great wealth, subtlety, and
spiritual beauty of indigenous labor over millennia and across the world. And
most remarkable, it is inconsistent with Marx himself, at least the Marx of the
1840s, of the 1844 Manuscripts, and the author of a most interesting passage
in The Holy Family, written in 1845. Here in the course of asurvey of Western
metaphysics, he and Engels pause to pay attention to the early seventeenth
century shoemaker and mystic, Jakob Bohme. They write that:
Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first
and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and math-
ematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM Paks)

vital spirit, a tension—or a “Qual,” to use a term of Ja-
kob Béhme’s—of matter. The primary forms of matter are
the living, individualizing forces of being inherent in it and
producing the distinctions between the species. (Marx and
Engels 1845, 151; italics removed.)
In other words, Marx at age twenty-seven clearly grasped the point that
matter, the “stuff” of nature, needs to have actively self-organizing potentials.
That this realization is no idle fancy is shown by the respect Marx pays to
Bohme, an enigmatic and mystical Christian thinker about as far as can be
imagined from the stereotype of the hard-headed Marxist (Birkel and Bach
2010). In other early works, Marx wrote that Bohme was “a great philoso-
pher” and “divinely inspired”; and Engels repeated and elaborated his praise
of Béhme’s notion in the 1892 English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Sci-
entific. In the twentieth century, the Western Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch
picked up this thread again and developed it into a vision open to a radically
different conception of nature in relation to labor. Discussing the eighteenth
century philosopher, Friedrich Schelling,'! Bloch sounds the heart of this con-
ception. Schelling wrote: “We know nature only as active... philosophizing
about nature means lifting it out of the dead mechanism in which it seems
imprisoned, animating it with freedom as it were and initiating its own free
development.” Here Bloch adds:
.... nor is human history... obliged to nature only as one

that is past. On the contrary: fully manifested nature lies just
the same as fully manifested history in the horizon of the fu-
ture... Ihe more a technology of alliance in particular were
to become possible instead of the superficial one, a technol-
ogy of alliance mediated with the co-productivity of nature,
the more certainly the creative forces of a frozen nature will
be released again. Nature is no bygone, but the building site
which has not yet been cleared at all, the building material
which does not yet adequately exist at all for the human house
which does not yet adequately exist at all. (Italics emphasis
mine, Bloch 1959, 689-690.)
A “technology of alliance” implies an ecologically free and rational civilization

as the transforming place between humanity and nature. The integral activity
of nature can only be recuperated in a society beyond capital, which is being
called “ecosocialism,” as noted earlier. In such a society, nature could freely
‘<9 . : »? . .

express what Bloch calls its co-productivity, respected and valued intrinsically
for itself, and no longer laid to waste and ruin as mere resources for the Sa-
tanic mills of accumulation. Between past and future, the present will become
that zone within which prefigurative practices are developed toward the mode
of production limned by Bloch.'! Such would be the province of a realized
ecological Marxism: a Marxism that understands the laws of capitalist accu-
mulation and also the way beyond those laws and toward an ecological civi-
lization cured of the cancer of accumulation. In my view, Marx opened this
path but then lost his way in the effort to comprehend the process of labor.
How are we to understand Marx’s lapse? It needs to be taken seriously,
not so much as a prescription for how labor is to be done but as a setting
forth of certain guiding assumptions which stay within, indeed reproduce,
the limits of a civilization directed toward capital’s goal of generalized com-
modity production. Marx spent years in devising the structure of Capital,
and arrived at a method—which he announced at the beginning of his mag-
num opus with a flourish of scientific self-congratulation
—that saw the laws
of capitalist production as “natural” laws which worked with “iron necessity
toward inevitable results” (Marx 1906, ii). These laws depended upon the
commodity as the cellular unit of society, and the two forms of value—use
and exchange—as the organizing principles of commodity life. One might
hypothesize that here Marx became the prisoner of a “scientistic” methodol-
ogy and lost the fluidity of dialectic. Thus he came to treat a limited phase of
human labor as a universal instead of—as his own best insights would have
ordained—a historical peculiarity that an ecological civilization could sur-
pass. For Marx and for the socialists who came after him—this was the hori-
zon of reason—and at this one point, his genius abandoned him. Once the
notion of an inert and passive nature worked over by an active Man became
hypostatized, there was no theoretical reason not to move toward all-out de-
velopment of the forces of production. In any case, neither Marx nor by and
large the socialist traditions that followed were able to do more than partially
transcend the curse of capital as it pressed toward unlimited production on
a finite earth. It is not for us here to review the checkered record of actually
existing socialism with respect to ecological integrity, either its important but
partial and non-decisive exceptions (the early U.S.S.R., Cuba after 1991) or
the extensive disasters and blind spots that have blighted its heritage. But
ecological Marxism cannot afford to brush this aside."
I would argue that ecological Marxism requires an appropriation of con-
cepts such as Bloch’s co-productivity of nature and technology of alliance.
We might begin with thinking about certain forms of relations with nature

and kinds of labor that point in this direction. Instances of this are as common
as having dogs tend flocks of sheep or using the wind to sail a ship, or tend-
ing a garden —forms that the metaphors used by Marx in his passages on the
labor process fail to convey. Think, too, of the all-important work of caring for
children —and the “labor” of bringing them into the world: how is this to fit
into “man” actively working over a passive nature? These processes involve, by
contrast with Marx’s dictum about labor, a going-with nature, a reading of its
ways, and fundamentally, a kind of receptivity to nature (by definition, neither
inert nor passive) as the foundation of an ecologically worthwhile labor process.
Now labor is carried out within the spirit of being differentiated from nature
and not split off and above it. With this comes a twofold recognition of our-
selves within nature, and nature within ourselves that can be built upon for a
realized ecological Marxism.
As prefiguration, the movement toward ecological civilization sets for it-
self the goal of breaking the chains of generalized commodity production.
But this requires an additional theoretical perspective from that currently em-
ployed by political economy. Theoretical constructs are also the correlatives of
living choices. And no theoretical construction is more directly related to real
choices than the configurations of value by means of which Marx lay bare the
laws of motion of capital. In this sense, use- and exchange-value are theoreti-
cal points saturated with real implication. Accordingly, capital is that system
where the exchange-value embedded in commodities is made to dominate and
overwhelm use-value. By contrast, we are accustomed as ecosocialists to de-
value exchange-value (and its congeners, surplus value, labor power, and Value
itself); and to valorize use-value as the point of entry of labor into nature.
If ecosocialism is, as James O’Connor was the first to emphasize, the
struggle for use-value, we should be able, so to speak, to draw upon allies
for this struggle. And if nature, as Bloch put it, enjoys co-productivity with
labor in the process of production, then we may invoke nature, as what goes
beyond the human will, in the search for such an ally. From this perspective
we may say that there needs be something beyond use-value, namely, the
intrinsic value of a vitally conceived nature, whose productive relations are
suggested by terms such as “going with” and “receptivity” along with the
twofold process of recognition mentioned above (Peterson 2010). In other
words, nature valued for its “suchness,” and not for what we can make of it.
Use-value is now triangulated with exchange-value and intrinsic value; and
this configuration can be realized as a way of breaking capital’s death-grip. It
transmits energy to the struggle for use-values even as it delegitimates the an-
nihilation signified by exchange within the cancerous order of capital.

Intrinsic value is distinct from use- and exchange-value in not being imme-
diately tied to production at all. It may be likened to the attitude of wonder with
which infants regard the world. As such, it is impossible for us to live by intrinsic
value alone.®! But it may be argued that it is not worthwhile to live without it,
either, inasmuch as intrinsic value is the opening pnto the aesthetic and spirit di-
mensions of existence. I discovered this anew while preparing this lecture. Think-
ing about going to China and wondering how a society so wracked by capital’s
expansion would yet have the audacity to propose a conference such as this, I was
led to recall the landscape paintings I mentioned a while ago, and associated with
the openness to nature deeply enshrined within Chinese culture.
A bit later this perspective became widened. I had been thinking for some
years about the matter of intrinsic value without quite realizing what I was
drawing upon. But then it became clear that this was the same doctrine —or
rather, anti-doctrine— that the landscape paintings expressed. For the notion
of intrinsic value is essentially the message of the Tao Te Ching, which was the
ideology behind the landscape paintings (Lao-Tzu 2007). I had absorbed this
many years ago; and though I had set it aside, it evidently had worked its way
through my psyche, re-surfacing as a critique of Marx's latent productivism.
Is not intrinsic value the lesson of wu wei: actionless action, primordial being
anterior to purposive being, infant-knowing, knowing within the womb, a
gentle scourge to all would-be dictators, the “soft” foundation of the world?
Joseph Needham—a very great influence on me, by the way—wrote that
the central idea of the Taoist philosophers “was the unity of Nature, and the
eternity and uncreatedness of the Tao.” Needham also called Taoism a “ma-
terialist mysticism” (Needham 1956, 111) and declared it open to science.
Its principle is to preserve the integrity of existence against all that would
tear apart the world and make it a wasteland. No less a goal can motivate an
ecological civilization.
Post-script
SOME BRIEF REMARKS are in order about a subject evoked. by this discus-
sion, namely, the role played by the notion of intrinsic value rendered in
Taoist form as practiced by the leading figure of Chinese communism, Mao
Zedong. Maoism is certainly distinct among the variants of Marxism, and it
is tempting to ascribe this to the influence of ancient Chinese philosophical
currents, of which Taoism is the most apt model. So far as I know (which,
given my lack of competency in Chinese is not very far; and I gladly accept
correction for any instances of ignorance in this matter), Mao never explicitly
made this claim, though he professed admiration of Chuang-Tzu for singing

and banging the drum upon his wife's death (Schram 1974, 227). More-
over, it is quite easy to see analogies to Taoism in Mao’s belief system, which
he dramatically imposed on Chinese society. The hatred of bureaucracy and
economism and the coordinated affection for spontaneity; the veneration of
the simple life and purity of motive, above all, a metaphysical sense of a trans-
formative process which vastly exceeds our current frame of reference—all
this put Mao well outside the mold defined by all previous Marxisms, and is
at least suggestive of Taoist influence.
A closer look discloses, however, even more radical divergences from Tao-
ist doctrine, at least as I would understand it. Mao Zedong was an amazing
person, and it often seemed, larger than life. But he was, well...Mao, sui
generis, and no Taoist. The valorization of revolutionary violence, the extreme
voluntarism (such as led to the Great Leap Forward), the fanatical shaping
of a cult of personality —all this eventuated in a style of leadership arbitrary
and capricious in the extreme. The Taoist leader is to exercise restraint in the
veneration of a Way that is far greater than our comprehension; the Mao-
ist leader takes this fact as a license for excesses of every kind and of which
the common denominator is his own aggrandizement. As for nature, whose
intrinsic value is the leading concept brought forward in this essay in the
service of checking capital’s cancerous expansion, I would have to agree with
Benjamin’s Schwartz's assessment that “Mao was committed to the nontradi-
tional Promethean war on nature, and really seems to feel that he has found
new ways to achieve this goal” (Ping-ti & Chou 1968, 379)."! Indeed, the
category of nature, intrinsically valued, veritably disappears behind the screen
of Mao’s megalomania. Thus he took Taoism in precisely the wrong direc-
tion, toward the aggrandizement rather than the ablation of the self, and in
the process ruined the notion of intrinsic value and lost whatever ecological
potential may have existed in his Marxism.
This may be read in the efforts Mao made to revise the dialectic, which he
derived from Engels. Mao grandly reduces the triad of categories— unity of
opposites; transformation of quantity and quality into one another; and nega-
tion of the negation — into one category: the first, which becomes in his hands
a cosmic series of transformations in which humanity is dissolved. Quantity
and quality are seen as opposites to be unified; and as for negation, well, “this
does not exist at all” (Schram 1974, 226).
I would interpret this as a kind of Nietzschean flouting of the modal-
ity of ecosystemic integrity, and in any case a recipe for disaster. Negation
is a profoundly ecocentric concept that expresses the integral form taken by
’
ecosystems; while negation of the negation represents the moment of creative

intervention that preserves and transforms ecosystemic integrity. For Mao,
however, the transformation of opposites is repeatedly linked to the notion of
eating, as the Chinese communists are said to have eaten their adversaries the
Kuomintang. Transformation becomes digestion, assimilation, and excretion,
in a word, annihilation. Negation, which carries also the notion of preserva-
tion, is annihilated; the past is annihilated; the individual is annihilated; and
nature is annihilated. Everything is consumed, nothing is preserved... And
so it went for the Maoist regime itself, as this collapsed and, transmogrified,
became the present species of uncontrollable capitalist expansion. A pure ne-
gation, we might say—and one that awaits its own negation: not to return
to Maoist excess, but as the slender hope of a future. If the capitalist negation
is not itself negated, what will be left when the present ecocidal system runs
its course? #
NOTES
1. This is an expanded version of an address given on November 17, 2010, at the confer-
ence, “Marxism and Ecological Civilization,” sponsored by the Fudan University School
of Philosophy and Center for Contemporary Marxism in Foreign Countries, Shanghai,
PRC. My thanks go to all who made this possible. I am especially grateful to Professor
Guo Jianren for his kind attention to my well-being.
2. Much of this follows the reasoning of Kovel 2007, though the latter sections introduce
some additional perspective.
3. Representations of the ecological crisis abound in horror movies depicting one scenario
or another of the end of the world; they also appear in certain strands of Christian fun-
damentalism that corrupt the meaning of the Book of Revelation (properly seen as a
critique of Roman imperialism). These instill a sense of eschatological panic and further
alienate the capacity for contending with ecological crisis.
4. Further information may be obtained at http://www.ecosocialistnetwork.org.
5. Though he was often dismissed as an Idealist, it is more accurate to see Schelling’s project
as the bridging of the gap between Idealism and Materialism. He referred to himselfas an
“Tdeal Realist.” I am indebted to Prof. Arran Gare for this insight.
6. Bloch subsumed his insight into a delineation of what has been called “neo-
Aristotelianism,” a current of subversive metaphysics that embraces thinkers as diverse as
Averroes, Paracelsus, and Giordano Bruno, and whose common thread was to embrace a
concept of matter akin to that of Bohme. For a discussion, see Ely (1996). To my way of
thinking, Bloch is the leading Marxist philosopher pointing the way to an emancipated
vision of nature and a genuinely Ecological Civilization.
7. There is a lengthy debate on this subject, which I cannot take up here. It involves, among
others, Alfred Schmidt, Ted Benton, Rainer Grundmann, John Bellamy Foster, and the
Japanese School exemplified by Shimazaki and Takada; and has recently been ably sum-
marized by Lixin Han of Tsinghua University in Beijing (Han 2010). He concludes that

Marx’s notion of labor is more open to an authentic dialectic than I have argued in this
contribution. I think this does reflect the potentials shown by Marx. However, it requires
an extensive development and critique of actually existing socialisms. In any case, we should
not rest with a mystification of Marx as having achieved perfection of ecological insight.
8. And destructive as well, to take this line of reasoning into the extremities of “deep ecol-
ogy,” insofar as these simply toss the necessities of production into the dust-bin. We
value nature intrinsically because of our primordial grounding in nature; but nature as
“human-nature” requires us to produce if we are to live, and this implies the use of other
creatures for food, labor, etc.
9. This is not to dispute that a great deal of tremendously important and often highly cre-
ative and valuable changes, particularly in the countryside, were midwifed by Chinese
communism (Hinton and Magdoff 2008). Mao’s influence here is incontrovertible, both
as an enabler of, and tragic limit to, the transformative process.
REFERENCES
Birkel, Michael L. and Jeff Bach, trans. and eds. Genius of the transcendent: Mystical writings
ofJakob Béhme. Boston and London: Shambala, 2010.
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, Paul Knight.
Cambridge, Massachussets: The MIT Press, 1986.
Ely, J. Ernst Block. “Natural Rights and the Greens,” in Minding nature: The philosophers of
ecology, ed. David Macauley. 134-166. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.
Han, Lixin. “Marxism and ecology: Marx’s theory of labor process revisited” in Eco-socialism
as politics: Rebuilding the Basis of Our Modern Civilisation, ed. Qingzhi Huan. 15-31.
Dordrecht: Springer Science BusinessMedia B.V., 2010.
Hinton, William and Fred Magdoff. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Vil-
lage. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008.
Kovel, Joel. History and spirit: An inquiry into the philosophy of liberation, 2nd ed. Warner,
NH: Glad Day Books, 1999.
. The enemy of nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world?, 2nd ed. London
and New York: Zed Books, 2007.
Lao-Tzu. Tao te ching, trans. Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo. Boston and London:
Shambala, 2007 [500 BCE].
Luxemburg, Rosa. The accumulation of capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1968.
Marx, Karl. "On the Jewish Question.” In The Marx-Engels reader. 1978. 469-500. New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 1843.
. Capital, Volume I. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans. Frederick Engels,
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1906 [1867].
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Zhe Holy Family: Or Critique of Critical Criticism. Mos-
cow: Progress Publishers, 1975 [1845].
. Manifesto of the Communist Party. R. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York
and London: W. W. Norton: 469-500, 1978 [1848].

Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilization in China. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1954.
Peterson, Keith R. "From ecological politics to intrinsic value: An examination of Kovel’s value
theory.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 21, no. 3 (2010): 81-101.
Ping-ti, Ho and Tang Tsou. China in Crisis. Chicago: Uniyersity of Chicago Press, 1968.
Schram, Stuart. Chairman Mao Talks to the People. New York: Pantheon, 1974.
Schrédinger, Erwin. What is Life?, and other works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992 [1944].
Sheasby, Walt Contreras. "Karl Marx and the Victorians’ nature: The evolution of a deeper
view, part one: Oceanus." Capitalism Nature Socialism 15, no. 2 (2004): 47-64.

An Ecosocialist Credo
(2011)
THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM, ruler of the world for a half-millennium, is in pro-

found crisis. It staggers toward oblivion, bringing both nature and society
down with it.
We must recognize that capitalism cannot be reformed in any meaningful
sense, any more than cancer can be made to go away with diet, massage and
aspirin. Indeed, capitalism is a cancer upon the earth and a monster within
humanity. Its raison d etre is the production and unlimited accumulation of
value, i.e., money-in-motion, arising through the exploitation of nature and
the human beings who transform nature through their labor. Endless expan-
sion corrupts natural ecosystems by converting them to mere resources; and
it corrupts human beings by accentuating our worst, most possessive and self-
centered potentials. Reforms will be needed to gain time and help build the
foundation for the transformation of capitalism into a worthwhile, sustainable
society. But the goal of radical transformation cannot be set aside, because
capital would rather destroy life on earth than abandon its cancerous path.
We call the post-capitalist society that needs to come into being, ecoso-
cialism. As ecosocialists we have neither blueprints nor dogma, only some
firmly held principles:
# Ecosocialism builds upon the basic socialist principle that capitalism
can only be overcome by freely associated labor —that is, by the com-
ing together of self-determining women and men who can express
their inherent human powers released from exploitation for the sake
of capitalist profit;

= Freely associated people will spontaneously adopt an ecocentric ethic.
Freedom’s context is the release from selfishness and greed, with the
associated emergence of our spiritual and universal being. We now
recognize ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves. Freely associat-
ed people respect nature because, seeing themselves as part of nature,
they can recognize the intrinsic value of nature once this is no longer
an instrument of profiteering. The ecocentric ethic is also an ethic
of nonviolence: do no harm to living beings, respecting their in-
ner, nature-given integrity. Having attained this position, we commit
ourselves to undo the harm humanity has done to nature. In healing
nature, we also heal the disease of accumulation within ourselves.
And this enables the building of barriers against the limitless growth
that generates ecological crisis;
= The political heart of ecosocialism is the restoration of Commons, a

collectively organized site of productive activity expressing the origi-
nal communal impulses of humanity. The innumerable forms taken
by Commons have been continually alienated over centuries of class
society and especially capitalist class society. In the year 2011, under
the influence of intractable capitalist crisis, a dialectical reaction oc-
curred in the emergence of a network of great “occupation” move-
ments— each an instance of “commoning.” Although their explicit
demands have been highly variable and often reformist, the inner
dynamic is structurally ecosocialist, because grounded in reclaiming
Commons through the radically democratic power of freely associ-
ated labor. This has been manifest in all the occupations.
The structurally ecosocialist character of the occupation movements will
press for more radical change if, as expected, the machinery of the capitalist
system fails to meet their needs. Thus the movement stirs radical hope, enlarg-
ing and internally developing itself in the process. This will bring forward an
ecocentric ethic as well, which will interconnect the economic and ecological
sides to the movement, there being no inherent contradiction between them
Ecosocialism will grow non-linearly, bringing together a politics of justice
for humanity and respect for nature. We see its emergence prefiguratively,
where the tremendous gap between where we are and where we need to be if
the earth is to be saved is spanned through a visionary practice that overcomes
the capitalist machine through collectivities of resistance and ecocentric pro-
duction. :

Because of the centrality of vision we call our new organization, Ecoso-
cialist Horizons. It is a place for the coming into being of a New Earth liber-
ated from the icy grip of capital. It is for all who dare to envision the horizon
of the future and make it real. m
[Ecosocialist Horizons, 2011]

Five Theses on Ecosocialism
(2011)
1. Ecosocialism signifies a revolutionary response to an

unprecedented crisis of world-historical proportion, though one
with ancient roots.
WE LIVE IN TIMES of extraordinary turbulence, marked by the intersection of
two types of crisis. From one side, a persistent crisis of capital accumulation
marked by declining rates of profit and a monstrous degree of financializa-
tion, adding layers of indebtedness, widespread insecurity, foreclosures and
the inevitable bursting of bubbles. A fresh outbreak of class warfare has fol-
lowed in train, including bailouts of the criminally inclined financial industry
with public money, the costs being passed onto localities and taken out ofthe
hide of the working classes, this in turn followed by a fresh wave of layoffs
and attacks on working class institutions like unions. All this has provoked a
rising of the “sleeping giant” oflabor, with results impossible to predict as of
this writing early in 2011.
The other side is played out in an intricate counterpoint to the accumula-
tion crisis, although most observers fail to see the connection, as this side of
crisis is seen as located in something called an “environment,” which means,
those objects presumed by deeply ingrained habits of thought to be mere
resources to be taken for our needs, hence having no organic, that is, existen-
tially vital relationship with humanity: in a word, outside us. Therefore, little
effort is made to integrate the one crisis into the other. And yet a complex yet
profoundly important relationship exists between the two, so much so that it
is necessary to consider them as two facets of a larger whole.

Economic slump reduces direct inputs of carbon and other pollutants
into the environment, thereby relieving some of the pressure placed on those
natural ensembles called ecosystems; while on the other side, the pressures of
the accumulation crisis augments the race for resources, thereby stimulating
violence against the earth and cascading into greater degrees of ecological deg-
radation. Consider the notorious phenomenon of “peak oil,” in other words,
the perception (not necessarily the reality, and in some ways more impor-
tant than the reality) that we have reached a turning point in the extraction
of fossil-fuel hydrocarbons —and by extension, many other key resources as
well —after which ever-growing scarcity will act as a brake on accumulation.
This leads to increasing imperial aggression in the search for resources and
plays into wars of plunder, such as in Congo, Libya, or Afghanistan, at times
(as in Congo) of genocidal proportion. On the other side, increased aggres-
sion is applied directly to nature, where we see a greatly aggravated onslaught
on the sites from which resources are extracted, whether mountaintops de-
stroyed so that coal may be extracted, the undersea sites of offshore oil extrac-
tion such as where the Deepwater Horizon disaster took place in 2010, the
tar sands of Alberta, the Niger River Delta, the Marcellus Shale of the Eastern
United States under which vast amounts of natural gas are said to be awaiting
extraction by the injection of colossal amounts of water, and much else, now
and to come. A wildly accelerating, indeed, a kind of exponential and chaotic
process emerges in which ever-growing scarcity of resources combines with
ever-growing aggressiveness of efforts to extract them, all of which increases
scarcity and unleashes a Pandora's Box of pestilential catastrophes— immedi-
ate (for example, the wreckage of mountaintops and the pollution of local
streams), intermediate (for example, widespread “downstream” harm done to
flora and fauna as a result of toxic releases), and most significant because most
indicative of the profundity of our dislocation from nature, the large-scale/re-
mote (for example, acidification of oceans, catastrophic climate change with
great zones of inundation and desertification, species loss, alteration of host-
pathogen relations, and so on).
Climate change, which often is stated as synonymous with the crisis as a
whole and is its most calamitous aspect, is thus a kind of metonym for some-
thing much larger than itself—a wholesale disintegration of the fabric of our
world, human and natural alike. Each of its elements may have a familiar ring,
but the ensemble itself has never appeared on such a scale, in such a mount-
ing pace, or with such a variety of agents. It is fruitless to pinpoint one of its
historical landmarks—
for example, the switch to coal in the industrial revo-
lution, or oil during World War I, or the rise of rampant globalization under

the neoliberal regime—as sufficient to explain the crisis as a whole. That job
requires a grasp of the basic dynamics driving our civilization. Doing so brings
us up against the world-transforming modalities of the capitalist system.
2. Capitalism is the “efficient cause” of the crisis, chiefly because

it entails endless expansion and the rejection of limits.
CAPITALISM TAKES PRIDE IN being the system of “creative destruction” that
thrives on catastrophe and sees in ruin the stuff of heightened profitability.
But this formula is logically tied to a question oflimit: up to a point, capital
thrives on disaster; beyond that point, capitalism succumbs to disaster. In
other words, the fantasy that money can be made out of anything is just that,
a fantasy; all production relies upon the material world, and each commod-
ity, however immaterial its use-value may be (say, phone-sex) always relies on
the real material world for its realization in the circuits of accumulation. The
question is, can capitalism adapt to this? And the answer to this must be in
the negative if the capitalism which rules our world is designed to not be able
to stop at a given point, because it is constructed to find any limit intoler-
able... What then for its vaunted recuperability?
By an efficient cause I mean the one best capable of setting into motion
the combined elements of a concrete situation. It is that level of causation
which must be changed if the situation itself is to change. By definition, capi-
talism is the efficient cause of its accumulation crisis; and a fairly straightfor-
ward extrapolation discloses the same case for the ecological side of the crisis,
hence we say that the two aspects of today’s crisis comprise a larger whole.
We bracket here the important questions as to what was the efficient cause
of ecological degradation under the Soviet system— because the Soviet system
is gone forever, leaving capitalism as the sole functioning agent of ecological
destabilization. This does not remove the necessity to explore eco-destructive
features of Soviet production, or indeed any other productive system. Capital-
ism need not be the only system with radically deleterious effects on nature.
But it is the system that has vanquished all the others, swallowing them whole,
and now stands in need of being surpassed lest it bring down the human species
that created it. With that in mind, we may turn to the workings of the capitalist
mode and its breaking down of what can be called the integrity ofecosystems. For
this is indeed what capital does, with the dire effects sketched in above.
The efficient causality of capital for the ecological crisis can be shown em-
pirically, as by tracing the determinants of any occasion within the crisis back-
ward, from which we learn that the agent(s) in question are preponderantly
capitalist corporations and/or instruments of the capitalist state, including

the military (almost always the worst polluter and consumer of energy and
other resources). It can also be shown indirectly, by critique of the ideology of
capitalist exculpation, that is, greenwashing. None of this huge effort would
be necessary were it not for the complicity of capital as the driving force of the
crisis. The same reasoning holds for the strenuous efforts at political rollback
of all efforts to regulate and contain the ecological crisis
— efforts the success
of which leads to the gathering collapse of the global ecology.
However, capital’s efficient causation of ecological crisis is best explained
by a historically materialist analysis of the elements of capitalist production.
An instance of this was my book The Enemy of Nature, which built on foun-
dations set forth by Marx in the Grundrisse and Capital Vol. 1, as well as
James O’Connor’s “Second Contradiction of Capital”. A threefold causal
structure emerges: first, that capital inevitably attempts to lower costs of the
“conditions of production” including natural inputs (O'Connor), and by do-
ing so degrades ecosystems, raising the very costs it sought to bring down;
second, that capital cannot tolerate limits, and must expand endlessly else it
goes into irreversible accumulation crisis and collapses; and third, that capital
inexorably creates a society of widening differences between rich and poor,
a society so internally split as to be incapable of overcoming its ecological
depredations.
Of these levels, the second is essential, as democratic regulation can po-
tentially mend some of the damages caused by cost-cutting of ecosystems as
well as partially redistribute income and wealth, however difficult these goals
may be to achieve in a political system under capitalist hegemony. However,
regulation and reform cannot stop capital’s cancerous compulsion to expand
without changing the essential features of capitalist production itself, that is,
functionally dismantle capitalism. These features are foremost, a class struc-
ture whose ruling elements derive from private ownership of the means of
production, with the reduction of the remainder of the population to “free
laborers” whose only productive asset is the commodity of labor power for
sale on the labor market; and associated with this, that the labor relationship
is principally defined by adherence to the Law of Value.
The Law of Value signifies the ascension of quantity over quality. It
can be derived from Marx’s two circuits of circulation. The first of these is
C—M—C;,, in which a commodity is taken to market, sold, and the money
obtained is used to purchase a different commodity—in other words, an
arrangement settled along the axis of quality, i.e., concrete difference; while
the second circuit is M—-C—M, in which the holder of money goes to
market, purchases with it a commodity, and sells the latter for a different sum

of money. “M” becomes value insofar as it is expansible; and the economy
takes off into the capitalist stratosphere once the commodity of labor power
is installed as that capable of generating surplus value, or A(M’—M), out
of human productive power. Then the entire schema—and by this we mean
society itself, since the organization of labor is the central point in any soci-
ety—is configured around the augmentatiort ofM into M’, a purely quanti-
tative arrangement. The first circuit is that of use-value—a valuation whose
roots necessarily extend into the sensuously apprehended realm of nature,
and can be expressed in terms such as craft, beauty and usefulness—while
the second circuit is that of exchange value, in respect to which commodities
can only be compared in terms of money. Thus number, and profit, or pure
augmentation, is the criterion of what is desirable under capital. Two features
of world-historical significance obtain here: First, the private ownership of
means of production sets going an inexorably competitive structure that mo-
bilizes greed, aggressiveness, in sum, all the deadly sins of humankind, when
the Ego is torn from its rootedness in being, and, adrift, centers itself around
the amount of money expressible in terms of the production of surplus value.
And second—a point that Marx makes in an off-handed way though it con-
tains within itself the germ of the downfall of civilization and perhaps the
extinction of the species —that the “value” of money is intrinsically without
end, that is, M can expand toward infinity, and with it, expand all the evils to
which humankind is prone.
Capital, then, is in essence a gigantic machine for endlessly expanding
the potentials of destructiveness. Yes, there is more to it, as the ideologues will
insistently tell you, but this is the fatal core: that under capitalism competi-
tion is expressed in monetary terms, placed in a manifold whose predominant
principle is pure quantity —whence all society is made to dance to the tune.
The terms for the monetization of nature and its placement under the thumb
of capital are set by giving anything, from the birds of the air, to the forest,
waterways and mountains, to carbon futures, to the genome itself, a number
value in order to make them property. It is worth noting that this attitude
precedes its formal subsumption into capitalist production. Marx observed in
“On the Jewish Question” of 1843, when he praised Martin Luther's radical
antagonist Thomas Miinzer for declaring, in 1524, that it is “intolerable that
every creature should be transformed into property—the fishes in the water,
the birds of the air, the plants of the earth: the creature too should become
free.” If they could only see it now!
Capitalism is the first system of production in the history of the world
where exchange-value rules over use-value. Its whole history and culture may

be seen from this perspective, which require that money rules the economy,
and that the economy rules over society, subordinating humanity and nature
to the logic of accumulation. This is the central insight of Capital and also
Karl Polanyi’s epic work, The Great Transformation, in which he details the
change from a society inside which an economy is embedded, to an economy
inside which society is embedded: As this becomes the case, everything is
valorized in the light of maximizing accumulation. Polanyi also points out
that such an economy, unchecked, will destroy society, as a cancer destroys a
living body. The apparatuses of reform arise in order to put this insight into
effect, by restraining capital and making the distribution of its wealth fairer;
alas, they are forever destined to play a back-seat role to capital’s primordial
need to expand. The sad story of the neoliberal era has been just this “unleash-
ing” of the economy alongside the steady decline of the reformist impulse
and the power of labor to contain capital. Hence the ever-growing division
between rich and poor, the ever-deteriorating disintegration of democratic
institutions, the ever-growing malign power of the capitalist state, and the
ever-accelerating disintegration of ecosystems—with no surcease of econom-
ic instability, either now or in any conceivable future under capital. This is
aggravated by the unfortunate fact that the acquisition of fabulous wealth by
capitalists does not introduce moderation, much less, wisdom into their pow-
erful brains. Rather does greed grow on greed, spurred by the parallel growth
of competitive threat. This is the brutal truth: that capital—and capitalists,
who are as Marx said, the personification of capital —CANNOT BE SAT-
ISFIED. If any one does, as an individual, this means that he ceases being
capital’s personification, steps off the wheel of accumulation, and is instantly
replaced by a suitable substitute.
That a society predicated upon infinite expansion in a finite world is
doomed to extinction should be evident to the rudest intelligence. Yet the
whole world is set against its recognition.
3. The imperative to cure capitalism of its compulsion to endlessly

grow has dawned on many, including the exponents of “degrowth.”
WELL, NOT ENTIRELY. A certain degree of recognition is taking place of this
menacing truth. ‘The task, however, is to assess its sufficiency. Consider briefly
in this regard the “degrowth” movement, which has made some headway in
Europe confronting the question of capital’s expansion. Generally speaking,
it seems that the degrowth movement dwells on symptoms rather than basic
dynamics; that is, its meaningof “growth” is abstracted from the mode of
production that demands growth. Thus critique tends to be constrained and

pallid. A leading exponent of degrowth such as Serge Latouche will go so far
as to say that “the capitalist mode of production— founded on inequality
of access to the means of production and always engendering more wealth
inequality —must be abolished.” And he will add: “as a radical critique of
consumption society and of development, degrowth is ipso facto a critique
of capitalism.” But the force of the words is diffused by being couched in
high-minded ethical rhetoric: “because sharing is a cardinal ethical principle
of the left” is said to explain the option for change
—a sonorous but vacuous
exhortation: “Altruism must take precedence over egoism, cooperation over
unbridled competition . . .”; and meaningless slogans: degrowth “is about
exiting the economy.”
The key point being evaded by the exponents of degrowth is this: that to
make a real difference in the capitalist regime requires struggle. No adminis-
trative path leads to the society we need; nor, given the necessary conditions
set by the capitalist state, can we vote degrowth into power. The grim record
of capital establishes the bankruptcy of reformism as more than a tactical ex-
pedient to buy time or create tactical openings to confront the real question:
the existential demand to uproot capital —existential in the twofold sense
that it must mobilize the full potentials of our being, and that it pertains to a
struggle for nothing less than existence itself. Whatever fails to mobilize this
will dull the mind and slacken the will.
This brings into focus the notion ofsocialism, whose inner meaning — the
radical supersession of capital—needs to be realized if we are to survive the
present crisis. Ecosocialism is the name given to a socialism of this capacity.
4. The ecosocialist alternative must be first of all socialist, which

entails the radical transformation of capitalism.
ECOSOCIALISM IS A MOVEMENT that postulates a socialism fully realized in so-
ciety and nature alike as the precondition for an ecologically rational society.
Ecosocialism is more a path than a destination, though it is a destina-
tion as well, which is prefigured in the shaping of the path, Both path and
destination reject the false comfort that by merely mentioning capitalism as
the problem and airbrushing it with warm and fuzzy words like sharing and
cooperation, we have embarked upon a transformative and radical journey.
To ecosocialism, capitalism must be uprooted— torn from its points ofinva-
sion of the earth. This earth, however, is not simply defined by the geology of
our planet. No, it is also the living being inside us—the life we have drawn
from the earth and must reclaim to give back to the earth. Thus ecosocialist
politics are primarily existential and not technocratic or reformist. We need

rational and efficient technologies, including renewable energy; and we need
those reforms that can check the immediate damage of ecological insults. But
we need even more the living recognition that we are suffering from a fatal
planetary disease, which cannot be resolved at the level of its symptoms. And
as we need to transform society in order to survive, so it is that the fully real-
ized socialism that appears within écosocialism is a struggle for life as well as
justice.
There are many definitions of socialism, and no magic in this name that
has been rather beaten up by history. But for the purposes of an ecologi-
cal transformation, socialism cannot rest at being a social democracy where
parliamentary reforms blunt capital’s force, nor will it be “worker's power” as
transmitted though big unions or massive bureaucracies, nor a “party-state,”
where the party stands in for the collective producers. These are at best transi-
tional stages that ossify and occlude the actual power of socialism, which can
be only one thing: the power of “freely associated producers,” in other words,
the actual overcoming of capitalism’s deadly grip over human creative power
by reuniting producers with the means of production through a redefinition
of (productive) property along communal lines. Socialism of what we would
call the “first epoch,” that is, of the time before ecological crisis enters the
picture, was careless around this point and tended to forget that true freedom
is predicated upon an association of labor that radically breaks with capital-
ist principles. Remaining hooked into the system, first epoch socialism often
settled for the goal of perfecting the industrial model with improved methods
of distribution deriving from worker power and equality. As a result, first ep-
och socialism generally failed to confront capital’s endless expansiveness, fell
back into capitalist hierarchies and bureaucratization, and became useless for
overcoming the ecological crisis.
Ecosocialism is a transformation of the original socialist project. It is “this-
epoch socialism,” reflecting the ascension of the ecological crisis alongside and
interpenetrated with the accumulation crises of classical capitalism. Accumu-
lation crises pertain to the cycle in which commodities are produced, circu-
lated, sold and consumed, the surplus value derived therefrom being “realized”
in the form of capital as another cycle begins. Crises of this sort grow out of
the exploitation of labor, because by squeezing labor for his own profit, the
capitalist forces the worker to consume less than s/he produces. This thwarts
the transformation of the commodity into capital and restricts accumulation.
Ecological crises appear alongside this when the overproduction inherent to
capitalism (which is the other face of the “underconsumption” that is the bug-
bear of classical economists) causes a breakdown in the capacity of the eco-

sphere to buffer and neutralize damage to nature. This corrupts ecosystem
integrity. It also threatens profit, and inevitably, life itself, which as the flower-
ing of nature into self-sustaining form, requires an integrity of ecosystem that
capital precludes. The two sides of crises are distinct in origin and dynamics
but constantly interact, creating an increasingly chaotic world, as recent expe-
rience has abundantly shown. In any event only an ecosocialist approach offers
a sufficiently wide perspective to take it all in.
Thus socialism evolves. Though traditional socialists still tend to resist
the notion, socialism for the twenty-first century cannot be realized in the
classic forms of its first epoch, when the exploitation of labor provided the
fulcrum for organization. This does not eliminate core socialist relations. It
does, however, challenge certain orthodoxies derived from socialism of the
first epoch, for example, the idea (most notably propounded by Lukdcs) that
the industrial proletariat was the privileged “subject” of the revolution against
capital. Whether or not this ever made any sense—and a case can be made
that it did not"!—it makes no sense now that ecological crisis is imbricated
with accumulation crisis and capital’s curse extends from the sweatshop to
the disappearance of honeybees. It should go without saying that this expan-
sion of the purview of ecosocialism does not remove industrial workers, or
anybody whose labor is exploited, from the zone of struggle. It does mean,
however, that this zone is extended over all points where the cancer of capital
metastasizes, now occurring, as it were, over a surface covering the whole
world—from community board, to agro-ecology cooperative, to industrial
shop, to arts collective, and nursery.
It extends across spatio-temporal and ecosystemic relations of consider-
able subtlety; one may call them, interstitial, to suggest that they take place in
the pores of the world as well as its peaks, and need to be apprehended and
confronted in continually novel ways. Thus, given the interstitial ground of
ecosocialist emergence and the disappearance of a privileged stratum of the
oppressed, we are obliged to discard once and for all the obsolete idea of a
centralized vanguard party to lead the revolution. Such a party is logically
impossible in a world where the advancing crises of capitalism have reached
the scale of generalized invasion of life-worlds. A further reflection will free
ourselves from grief over the passing away of these dinosaurs and permit an
opening onto others more consonant with the present reality. Let us take
up one of the celebrated mottos of radical thought as articulated by Mother
Jones: “Don’t mourn, organize!” ... but organize by respecting the reality be-
fore us, with its new hazards and possibilities.

5. Ecosocialism is not a new kind of economy, but a new mode
of production, and a new way of being: a spiritual as well as a
material transformation proceeding from prefiguration.
THE INTERSTITIAL IS ONE watch-word oforganizing in the present moment.
Prefiguration is another.
The unifying perspective amidst the diversity of capital's interstitial
points of destabilization is that all these manifestations require the counter-
ing of capital’s cancer virus with the core relations of socialist transforma-
tion. The general formula for this is simple enough in principle; it consists
schematically of a twofold movement: first, organize freely associated labor
in each concrete instance; and second and pari passu, extend and intercon-
nect the interstitial loci of socialist transformation into larger wholes. Thus a
path is hewn whose direction is the building of an ecosocialism suitable for
overcoming the ecological crisis. This paradigm takes into account both local-
ity of origin and globality of destination, from the concrete-particular to the
universal-transformative. It defines an organizing that does not rest until the
planet is in ecosocialist hands."”!
Every halfway sentient person knows full well that we are so far from ef-
fective organizing along such lines as to call into question the sanity of anyone
who would claim that ecosocialism is recognizably on the horizon, much less,
just around the corner. But before one backs away from this project out of
fear of being labeled as mad as Miguel de Cervantes Man of La Mancha, it
should be recalled that the estimable Don Quixote (I say this because Quix-
ote provides the template for all radicals to come) lacked what we should now
be able to acquire, namely, the critical faculty to hold on to our visions and
provide them with an anchoring point in reality, so that we can trace a way
from the here-now to the not-yet, and learn just where and how we can set
projects going in the direction of beneficial change.
It is no doubt difficult to see life in terms of process rather than fixed
anchoring points, and to be sufficiently imbued with faith and hope as to be
willing to take the risks to move forward toward a better world rather than
acquiesce in the unbearable one with which we are saddled. But if so, so
much the worse for the rule of false reason that would foreclose this possibil-
ity—the possibility of imagining, and thinking —and risking— prefigura-
tively. The praxis—a word bringing together the unity of theory and prac-
tice — of prefiguration is the capacity to see and act along a skein of time: the
present in terms of the future as well as the past. For while the future can only
be imagined and the past can never be reclaimed; yet the past can be learned

from, in both its errors and glories, so that a worthy future can be claimed.
Prefigurative praxis rejects the shallow, technocratic progressivism which is
mainly a technique for reproducing the hyper-modernity of capital, linch-pin
of the consumerist order that sees everything as “new and improved,” and
succumbs to the imposition—as endless as she cancerous growth of Gross
National Product — of endless desires, styles and gimmicks.
Ecosocialism may not be on the horizon, but prefiguration sees its loca-
tions of coming-to-be and makes these the nuclei of ecosocialist organizing.
Instead of the union or party that stood separately and in advance of the pro-
ducers during the first epoch of socialist organizing, prefiguration proposes
a widening network of interstitially organized productive as well as resistant
ensembles each woven by freely associated labor. What brings these together
into a great, transformative movement is the common ¢elos of a free society
in differentiated harmony with nature: the vision of ecosocialism. Thus each
point of prefigurative organizing has a dignity and strength—and also the
ground of interconnectivity with its sisters and brothers in a laterally spread-
ing contestation with the capitalist machine. There are four qualities evinced
by these cellules of ecosocialism:
they inherently resist centralization and hierarchy;
= they inherently resist the gender distinctions that have permeated

patriarchal society for thousands of years;
= they inherently resist the logic of endless growth; and
= they spontaneously adopt an ethic of ecocentrism, that is, of caring

for nature and granting it intrinsic value.
We do not have space to develop these themes in detail, except to say this:
They are internally related, so that each implies the other; and all are func-
tions ofthe free association oflabor and its ground in forms of “commoning.”
To briefly consider just the last two, it can be stated that what sets ecosocial-
ism apart from all prior socialisms—and needless to say, capitalism — is re-
fusal to yield to economism and the endless expansion of the economic prod-
uct. This potential derives from organizing society along the cellular basis of
ecologically productive ensembles. Only freely productive women and men
will have the fortitude to face up to this task and the insight to understand
its meaning. External coercion may seem to work for a while, but such an
alternative will soon enough explode and/or collapse from the weight of its
contradictions. Nor will an ecocentric ethic emerge to free the earth except
as it emerges from people whose own freedom is predicated on ecologically

productive ensembles. Therefore rejection of “growth” and ecocentrism are
two sides of the same coin, forged in the workshops of ecosocialism’s revolu-
tion for the integrity of life.
Freely associated labor generates solidarity and frees us to be truly hu-
man, universal creatures. From this matrix stems recognition of the mutual
being of all creatures, and with it, an openness to the universe that gives
courage and endurance for the struggle ahead and its inevitable sacrifices. As
humans we do not have, but are a way of being, with creative power, and also
with human-natural potentials often disparaged by “advanced” and “progres-
sive” people. Faith and hope are two such qualities. They are part of the legacy
of every human being who makes it through infancy and childhood. These
are suppressed in all circumstances that come under the rubric of “alienation,”
including most definitely, the alienation of labor at the heart of capitalist
production. And they are mobilized again in the freeing of labor and in the
organizing along interstitial and prefigurative lines.
Ecosocialism therefore encompasses the practical organizing of basic re-
forms such as publicly available health care and free public transportation,
along with technical matters such as the provision of renewable energy. It
requires that we organize worldwide networks unifying the global South and
North in great campaigns for Climate Justice, and that we educate the people
as well as provide spaces for publication of theoretical and practical aspects
of the work ahead." It requires that we use these spaces to conscientiously
debate alternative approaches within the overall framework, including the in-
numerable questions arising around the transition to the new society. And it
is also, as we have just sketched, a visionary and spiritual turn that enters into
relations with humanity’s great faith traditions.
The many points on this road indicate a new mode ofproduction as the
successor to a dying capitalism. Capital, or self-expanding value, has itself to
be produced; and capitalist society is constructed to do so; that is, it compris-
es a specific mode of production. Similarly, a society beyond capital will be
predicated on a newly developed ecosocialist mode of production no longer
bound to accumulation and those ways of life essential to accumulation. Pro-
duction is the historically developing way of transforming nature; and a mode
of production has built into itself a vast array of internally stabilizing patterns
of relations, hierarchies, technologies, ideologies, and modes of spiritual ap-
propriation; hence it achieves a kind of stability, built upon denial of the flux
of time, yet resistant to change until broken down by the inexorable force of
events impinging upon its internal contradictions.
We should think of these productive orders as themselves ecosystems, al-
beit human in kind. Ecosystems are configurations of entities held together by
specific relations that serve as points of connection. In each ecosystem such re-
lations are specific to the entities that enter into its processes, as the organisms
in a pond interact with each other and with the physical components of the
pond. As humans we are that part of nature whose life is expressed in society,
which is another term for a human ecosystem. Much of this is mediated by
physical inputs and signals; but much of it is specifically human, and expresses
our human nature. Here the nodes of connection are given through symbolic,
linguistic and inter-subjective nodes of recognition, for recognition, just like
religion, is a way of expressing points of connection between ecosystemic ele-
ments in a human-natural manifold— along with the kinds of physically me-
diated connections that give form to ecosystems without a human presence.
The science of ecosystematics is still in its infancy, especially its application to
modes of production, which are its chief point of entry into history. Marx was
moving in the direction of doing so, especially in texts such as the preface to
his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical Economy in which he states
that the mode of production “conditions the social, political and intellectual
life processes in general,” and goes on to describe how the “material produc-
tive forces [can] come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or...the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.”
“Then begins,” Marx continues, “an epoch of social revolution.”
And that is where we are today, with the future awaiting to be decided. m
[Ecosocialist Horizons, November 25, 2011]
NOTES
1. There is a contradiction in Marx’s treatment of this subject in Capital, where he simulta-

neously claims that capitalist production creates its “gravediggers,” but also that it saps the
workers’ transformative capacities through the various modes ofalienation. This is chiefly
set in the framework ofthe industrial revolution, the civilizing potentials of which it must
be said that Marx over-rated.
2. This essay was written before the flowering of the “occupation” movements late in 2011.
These are, however, excellent instances of the principles of ecosocialism in action.
3. The journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, which | have edited for a number ofyears, is a
quarterly academic publication that identifies itself as “a journal of ecosocialism.”

=
=
~
aes
~
—
®,
Teh VL Seinen ae
The Future Will Be Ecosocialist - Because
Without Ecosocialism There Will Be No Future
(2011)
SOCIALISM WAS ORIGINALLY seen as victory in a struggle for justice. The pro-
letarians, concluded the Communist Manifesto, “have nothing to lose but
their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN|[sic] OF ALL
COUNTRIES UNITE!”
All this remains true. Working women and men continue to suffer ex-
ploitation, in the workplace and throughout a society ruled by capitalism’s
money-power. Structural unemployment, along with increasing divisions
of wealth and poverty, the curse of indebtedness and the militarism of the
capitalist state—all this, and more, continues to afflict the people. Now as
in 1848, workers need a revolutionary socialist transformation. They need
to unite, and to again quote the Manifesto, achieve “an association in which
the free development ofeach is the condition of the free development of all.”
But the world we have to win is profoundly changed from the world of
1848. It is a world not simply to be won, but also to be saved from a terrible
affliction. A day of reckoning has arrived far beyond anything humanity has
ever experienced, though it has been building for centuries, indeed, from the
beginnings of humanity’s time on earth. For we are the animal who became
human by producing. Production is about the transforming of nature— the
real physical world that is our legacy and matrix— into the objects we use for
our lives. Transforming nature means changing nature; and changes may be
harmful as well as beneficial as they build up over historical time. Today, the
harm wrought by human production has reached intolerable proportions.

Our generation has inherited a world both transformed and deformed, to a
degree that raises the question of whether humanity can continue to produce
the means of its own survival. We see this taking shape in the menaces of
climate change, massive species extinctions, pollution on a scale never before
encountered, and more—all signs that humanity has so destabilized nature
and our relation to it as to raise-the real question of whether Homo sapiens,
a species that has triumphed over nature to build the mighty civilization that
now tules over the earth, has also prepared the ground for its own extinction.
The ecological crisis and capital accumulation

DESTABILIZATION OF THE NATURAL FOUNDATION of society is the supreme
question for our age, and because collective survival is at stake, the greatest
challenge ever faced by humanity. Because it involves relationships between
ourselves and nature, and because the study of relationships between living
creatures and their natural environment is named ecology, we can say that
what we are going through is an ecological crisis. But whether its meaning
is properly understood is another story. Unhappily, despite a vast amount of
scientific investigation into the individual disasters that manifest the ecological
crisis, there is very little awareness of its causes and real character, or even that
it is an ecological crisis, between humanity as part of nature and nature itself.
Instead, the dominant opinion, from all points of the political compass from
left to right, sees this crisis under the heading of “environmentalism,” which is
to say, as something between ourselves and the external things of nature.
Environmental problems appear as a great set of discrete troubles, item-
ized like a huge shopping list. The movement that attempts to deal with “the
environment” also becomes listed among other worthy causes, like jobs,
health care, and the rights of sexual minorities. Environmental problems are
accordingly dealt with by regulations, legislation, and policy changes under
the watchful eye of a host of NGOs dealing with one aspect of the disruption
in nature or another. These petition large bureaucracies like the UN carbon
regulation system or the EPA. Typically environmentalism seeks technical fixes
or personal lifestyle changes, such as recycling and buying “green” products.
There is nothing wrong with environmentalism, except that it completely
ignores the root of the ecological crisis by focusing on external symptoms and
not the underlying disease. This is as effective in mending the ecological crisis
as treating cancer with aspirin for the pain and baths for the discomfort. In
other words, the prevailing approach fails to recognize that what is happening
is the sign of a profound disorder. Environmentalism cannot ask what can be
wrong with a society that so ravages the earth, but simply attempts to tidy up

the mess in a piecemeal and fundamentally doomed fashion. Of course, each
and every ecological threat must be vigorously met on its own terms. But we
need to see the whole of things as well. We cannot put nature on a list, even at
the head of a list. Nature is the entirety of the universe. We are a part of nature,
and our society reflects whether we are at home iw nature or estranged from it.
Failure to understand this on the deepest level and to make necessary changes
in our relationship to nature puts everything at risk, including, most poignant-
ly, the lives of our children and grandchildren and all future generations.
If the choices embedded in our society lead to ruin and death, then the
obligation-is to remake society from the ground up in the service of life. And if
this be read as a demand for revolution, so be it! But a revolution of what kind?
Look at the society that rules the earth and its guiding inner dynamic, the
production of capital. However capitalism may be dressed up as the society of
democracy, free markets, or progress, its first and foremost priority is economic
Growth, the eternal expansion of the economic product across society, con-
verted into monetary units. The best word for this compulsion is accumulation.
The accumulation of capital is the supreme value of capitalists, and all elements
of capitalist society—from control over resources, to labor relations, to fiscal
and tax policy, to culture and propaganda, to the workings of academia, to war
and imperialism, and to be sure, policy towards the natural world— converge
to gratify this hunger. Any diminution or even slowing of the rate of accumula-
tion, is perceived as a deep threat provoking the most ruthless, violent, coun-
termeasures to restore order. As Marx vividly wrote in Capital: “Accumulate!
Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets.” In other words, he saw a religious
impulse at work— Satanic in form, no doubt—driving the capitalist system to
convert the entire earth, its oceans and atmosphere, everything under the sun,
into commodities, to be sold on the market, the profits converted to capital.
Here we arrive at the obvious, straightforward, yet profound explanation
of the ecological crisis and its life-threatening character. For though the uni-
verse itself may be infinite and have no boundaries, the corner of the universe
inhabited by life is quite finite and thoroughly bounded: that, after all, is
what ecology as a scientific study is about. So it follows that a system built on
unboundedness and endless growth is going to destroy the ecosystems upon
which it depends for energy and other resources, and is also going to destroy
the human ecosystems, or societies, that have emerged from nature to inhabit
the earth. That this brutally obvious truth is not widely accepted is partly the
result of how hard it is to face up to a harsh reality, but chiefly the result of
the titanic effort waged by capitalist ideology to deny its responsibility for the
ruin of planet earth.

Seen in this light, capitalism is truly pathological; it may well be called a
kind of metastasizing cancer: a disease that demands radical treatment, which
in this context, means revolutionary change. And since socialism is—or
should be—the movement toward the supersession of capitalism, the fact
that the present ecological crisis is basically driven by the accumulation of
capital puts socialism in a radically different position from that to which we
have become accustomed. In this light we see the need to radicalize socialism
and turn it to ecological ends alongside, indeed, as part of, the provision of
justice to working people.
This means, however, that socialism itself must be transformed and pro-
duced anew. It can no longer be the reformist social democracy that has be-
trayed its promise by seeking to perfect instead of going beyond capitalism.
Socialism today must be invigorated by the awareness that its goal is a post-
capitalist society serving the well-being of humanity and nature alike. Most
critically, because accumulation is the mainspring of capitalist society, the
new socialism must respect the notion of limits and see production itself in
ecological terms. The test of a post-capitalist society is whether it can move
from the generalized production of commodities to the production of flour-
ishing, integral ecosystems. In doing so, socialism will become ecosocialism.
First ecosocialist lessons :

Nosopy Is UNDER THE ILLUSION that we are anywhere near these goals. But
that does not mean that we lack a mapping of the route toward ecosocialism.
Let me give an outline of this, and conclude this brief communication with a
sense of how these can be applied to a case of the greatest urgency: overcoming
the menace of climate change.
= Ecosocialism is still socialism. What was stated at the beginning of
this article remains. The basic principle of ecosocialism is that of
socialism itself: freely associated labor. It is safe to say that applica-
tion of this is the key to everything else. For ecosocialism, the res-
toration of nature does not begin with manipulating the external
environment, but with the liberation of human beings and faith that
women and men in full possession of their powers will use the ap-
propriate technology and make the correct decisions as to how to
organize their social relations and self governance in such a way that
the integrity of nature is restored and preserved. The principle ap-
plies equally to the caring for nature and the provision of a good life
for humanity. A common root is the fact that to the degree we are
in possession of our creative powers, so also do we move beyond the

addictive and false way of being indoctrinated into us from cradle to
grave by capitalism and its ideology of consumerism. We break loose
from the capitalist rat-race, of trying to fill our inner emptiness with
commodities, a motif absolutely necessary to the reproduction of the
ecological crisis. Instead, we recognize ourselves as natural creatures,
and recognize nature itself, thus positioning ourselves for nature’s
restoration. This also applies to the so-called “population problem,”
since freely associated human beings, women in particular, will have
no trouble at all in regulating their numbers. In sum, we would say
that ecosocialism is that form of society animated by freely associated
labor and guided by an ethic of ecological integrity such as free hu-
man beings would freely choose.
We free ourselves in collective struggle, the meaning of which for eco-
socialism is primarily “Commoning.” Commons refers to the original
communism of “First Peoples”; and also to the absence of patriarchy
and class society among them. The word denotes collectively owned
units of production. From the other side, the rise of class society
and patriarchy, all the way to the appearance of capitalism and right
through to the present day, is a matter of “enclosing” the Commons,
which includes separating people from control over their productive
activity, thereby alienating them from nature and their own powers.
Commoning can be as basic as making a community garden or day-
care center. And it extends all the way to building intentional commu-
nities, organized democratically, and by extension, to a global society.
We see ecosocialism from a twofold aspect, in terms of communities
of resistance to capital and the capitalist state, and as communities
of production outside of capitalist hierarchical relations between the
owners of the means of production and the “wage slaves” who feed
the capital-monster. Traditional labor organizing can come under this
heading, insofar as it does not reproduce bureaucratic hierarchies;
or, from another standpoint, to the degree that it builds authentic
“unions” and “solidarity,” both terms drawn from the language of
ecology as well as the history of class struggle.
The wave of “occupations” washing over the United States as this is
being written is very much an example of Commoning along ecoso-
cialist lines, however scattered and reformist many of their immediate
demands may seem in this early stage of development. Though the
term itself is not applied, the structure is ecosocialist, arising out of
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM pare b

the fundamental human drive toward collective control over a Com-
monly held space, both in terms of resistance—as by disrupting the
established governmental and corporate ways; and production —as
in providing the means of one’s own subsistence while doing so.
= Time and space are to be reclaimed through ecosocialist prefigura-
tion. Keeping this term in mind is essential in navigating the great
distance between where we are and what we need to become. Seizing
a kind of Commons next to Wall Street is both symbolic of imme-
diate demands for economic justice and prefigurative of liberated
zones of ecosocialist production through freely associated labor. Our
sustainable and worthwhile future will be a network of Commonal
zones, beginning small but spreading and connecting across the ar-
tificial boundaries set up by class society and capital. Thus ecosocial-
ism is transnational, global in scope, and above all, visionary; and
each local moment of Commoning will contain the germ of this
imagining. Prefiguration means the emerging of the vision neces-
sary to imagine a world beyond the death-dealing society of capital.
We need to see the coming-to-be of the new society in the scattered
campgrounds of occupied zones within the capitalist order. Without
vision, the people perish, as the saying goes. And with vision —and
organizing to match—a new and better world can be won.
Postscript: An ecosocialism beyond climate change

NOTHING STANDS MORE FOR THE HORRORS induced by capital-driven eco-
logical crisis than the specter of climate change. There is no space here for
detailing this menace, which, while not identical with the ecological crisis as a
whole, suffices to sum up its deadly mechanisms and is full of lessons for how
these are to be surmounted. Let me put the matter with extreme brevity to
draw out some essentials and the important lessons to be derived from them.
We stand on a kind of crumbling precipice whose “geology” is given
by growing atmospheric CO, loaded by our capitalist-industrial, accumula-
tion-compelled system. The precipice is both a matter of harm already done,
and, if successful action is not taken, far worse harm to come from positive
feedback loops that will effectively exceed human capacity to contain them,
dooming us, perhaps by the end of the century, perhaps sooner, to downfall
via catastrophic climate events, rising seas, and associated nightmares like
famine and pandemic diseases.
Two configurations are now assembling to do battle over the fate of this
future. One is that of capital and the capitalist state: the ancien regime. It is

addicted to growth, rapacious for resources, and seeks to finagle its way out of
the crisis by an utterly bankrupt system of commodifying nature and trading
pollution credits; that is, it seeks more paths of accumulation while continu-
ing its resource extraction, and the future be damned.
The other is ecosocialist in concept and prefigurative in structure. It sets
forth from multiple points of resistance, notably combining North and South
by bringing together a coalition of ecosocialists, radical climate activists and
specialists in renewable energy; these are increasingly working with indigenous
folk whose lives are directly threatened by enclosures and ever-more violent
methods of hydrocarbon extraction from places as varied as the Gulf of Mexi-
co (deep offshore drilling), Northern Alberta (tar sands extraction), the Niger
Delta and Peruvian and Ecuadorian rainforests (rapacious oil-drilling), West
Virginia (mountaintop removal for coal), and rural New York and Pennsylvania
(hydrofracking for natural gas). The list is quite partial, but the scope is global
and inherently ecosocialist, by involving Commoning, global resistance, and
prefigurative efforts to think the unthinkable: a world actually beyond hydro-
carbon-based industrialization, that is, one where the future is really envisioned
and the visionary is made real as a mode of production liberated from the com-
pulsion to accumulate and loyal to the ecocentric respect for limit.
The best science tells us that this is the only path of survivability. But the
best science cannot be implemented within existing capitalism. It will take free-
ly associated labor, motivated by an ecocentric ethic and organized on a vast
scale, to effect these changes—in terms of resistance to the given carbon system
and forcing through its alternative; and also in terms of actually building the
alternative, a kind of Solar/Wind-based energy economy, including the effort to
actually bring down the level of atmospheric CO, from 395 ppm to 345 ppm.
Unthinkable, right? Wrong: it is only unthinkable to minds chained to
the ruinous and suicidal capitalist system. Quite possible though fantastically
challenging, otherwise
— especially if we consider that such a path, once free
from bondage to accumulation, will be able to solve the problems of structural
unemployment that haunt capitalist society. Imagine the creative possibilities
inherent in an ecosocialist energy pathway. Then think, and choose whether
to stay with the present system, or to step forth into a renewed world. =
[Ecosocialist Horizons, November 27, 2011]
A shorter version of this essay also appears in

IMAGINE: Living in a Socialist USA edited
by Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael
Steven Smith (Harper, 2014)

You Are The Light of the World
Speech via Mic Check at Occupy Wall Street
(2011)
I am honored to be here this evening,

because you are the light of the world.
I’m not saying this to flatter,
but because we have to understand it deeply.
Your genius has been to seize upon the emerging hopes of humanity —
and give them a form of realization.
Now you are on the threshold of a world-transforming process,
and you must decide whether to cross over it.
Most of you have been spurred to come here by economic and

political injustice:
vicious indebtedness, precarious employment or unemployment, a
nightmarish rise in inequality of wealth.
In short, the workings of a system that is corrupt, manifestly broken and,
it seems, in terminal crisis.
But that is just one side of the problem, and, I fear, the lesser side.
The brutal fact of the other side is that our planetary ecology is
breaking down.
Climate change, species loss, widening circles of pollution are some
of its marks.
All this and more testify to

an ecological crisis of unprecedented proportion that threatens
the future of civilization, and even the extinction of our species
along with many others.
It is the greatest challenge in all human history.
To meet it we need to begin with a basic truth:

That the same system which causes economic and political injustice
also causes ecological breakdown.
Tt follows that to understand and change both sides of our predicament,
we need to be able to name and understand this system —
and first of all to see it as a system
and to understand its root,
so that we can uproot it!
The system, in a word, is capitalism.

Capitalism is more than the set of corporations,
though corporations are among its instruments.
It is a deep-seated ailment in the human condition
that centers around the conversion of everything to money
and lives from the expansion of money, or profit, which
becomes capital itself.
This expansion is inherently endless, because money is number, and
number has no limit.
We call this “capital’s accumulation,” and it is the supreme value
of the capitalist system.
To accumulate, capital has to start somewhere.

This takes place in something called a Commons.
A Commons is a portion of nature collectively worked on and
enjoyed by people.
When the capitalist class takes control of the Commons, it’s
called an enclosure.
Thus the history of capitalism can be written as an ongoing and
expanding series of enclosures —
and the struggles against this.
When the European settlers came here they saw that the Indians
were communists who lived according to the Commons.
’

This aroused their vampire-like greed and so they set out on a
path of destruction and possession.
They enclosed the Commons, put walls around it, and
converted it to private property.
And yes, Wall Street is named for a real wall built om the actual site
of today’s street.
It defined an enclosure built to “wall off the Algonquin Indians
and keep them out of the settler’s way.
This can be said to be the launching point of capitalism in North America.
It has grown into the metastasizing cancer known as
“finance capital” you see all around you,
extending everywhere to the outer limits of empire,
and into the depths of our souls.
Indeed, the name, “Wall Street,” has come to mean capitalism itself.
So you see, when you occupy Wall Street you are truly
reversing the enclosure of Commons and tearing at the
very root of capitalism.
Welcome to the Indian Nation!
And this, friends, is the secret to your stroke of genius that

makes you the light of the world.
If we are faithful to this lesson we can transform society, bring about justice
for all, and overcome the ecological crisis.
For you have created a pathway of “commoning.”
Your space of occupation is both a site of resistance and a site of production.
This dual nature is what gives strength and resilience to your movement
and ignites the spark to inspire the whole world,
even as you have been inspired by other examples of creative commoning.
Now a resistant and productive commons is itself a flourishing,

integral ecosystem,
and the building ground for healing and restoring other ecosystems.
It is implied in what Karl Marx wrote in 1848 —
and I hope you are not ashamed to learn from Karl Marx —
that we will build “an association in which the free development of each is
the condition for the free development of all.”
Therefore freedom is the essential condition for a society beyond capitalism.
An association of free people will take care of nature

because they see themselves as part of nature.
They will struggle for a new world based on a new kind of production that
gives nature intrinsic value.
They will develop the tools for overcoming and healing the cancer of
accumulation
and the ecological crisis it generates.
Such a society will be in harmony with nature and not nature’s enemy.
I would call it “ecosocialism,”
and I hope you will join in its building.
The task is fantastically difficult.

But once you realize that
you are not here to want what they want you to want:
to help out the Democratic party;
to get a seat at the big table;
to rationalize the deadly regime of accumulation...
new choices open before you.
And this choice, this is the one for the flourishing of life.
Neither are you here to want what I want you to want.
You are here to seize the day whose dawning you have brought about,
and to direct it into the future.
Much study lies ahead,

much frustration, indeed, much sacrifice...
but also much joy —
once you accept the truth that the old order is dying
and the faith that a new one can be born. #
Also published in Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, 2014

Religion, Spirituality and Socialism
(2012)
THE UNITED STATES WAS BORN IN A STORM Of religious innovation. Each of

the thirteen original colonies had a distinct religious profile, generally a mix
of Christian denominations and a wild degree of often-utopian experimen-
tation. The Founding Fathers, fearful that one faction could take over and
install a repressive established religion, built in the strong protection of the
First Amendment against that possibility. Thus the United States became a
democracy closed to centralized state religion, and also a greenhouse for the
cultivation of religiosity of all stripes.
The twofold principle embedded in this—that religion should neither
be suppressed nor promoted by state authority — remains valid. It holds with
special force when the possibility of socialism is raised. A socialist society un-
der the dictate of any religion is a mockery of authentic religion, as well as of
the freedom that must be the foundation of socialism; by the same token, a
socialist society that suppresses religion is unworthy of the name of socialism.
But there is another side to consider: That there is something about religion
that may be essential to incorporate in the struggle to transform society from
its capitalist present to a socialist future.
We call it “spirit.” As I put it in my 1991 book, History and Spirit, this
is the universal human capacity for going beyond the boundaries of our self-
hood—the inner representation of who we are in relation to the world we
make and inhabit. The forms taken by spirit are as limitless as the human
imagination itself. Spirit is organized by practices of “spirituality,” which are
socially as well as individually determined, and play a great role in the ways

we define our social reality and change it. Religions are the structured societal
versions of spirituality, when “spirit-beings” — gods, demons, etc., step forth
and intervene in the affairs of humans. In more complex societies, religion be-
comes institutionalized and often plays a powerful role in politics —at which
point, however, it becomes part of that world which spirit seeks to go beyond.
Such is the restlessness inherenoto human nature. No effort to regiment spiri-
tual life can permanently succeed —though that has never stopped authori-
ties from trying to do so, for the simple reason that an unbridled spirit, reach-
ing out beyond the boundaries of the given, is the perennial accompaniment
to the radical social change that authority seeks to stifle.
To my way of thinking, a life without spiritual aspiration is not worth liv-
ing. However, we should not fall into the trap of thinking that spirituality is
some kind of panacea for an ailing humanity in this age of capitalist material-
ism. Though it’s accurate to say that a spiritless life is poorly lived, to expect a
better life simply by adding spirituality is nonsensical, since going beyond the
boundaries of the self can range all over the map of human possibility, from
the sublime to the disastrous.
Spiritual outcomes can be enormously powerful, but power can bring
about evil as well as good. The human sacrifices of the Aztecs were palpably
evil as well as spiritual, as was the Spanish Inquisition of the fifthteen century
and the witch burnings that blighted Christianity for centuries afterward. More
recently, the scourge of Nazism was consciously promoted as an answer to the
“spiritual crisis of modern society,” and as such bamboozled many intellectuals,
including the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the psychologist Carl Jung.
Today, the world is afflicted by right-wing religious fundamentalism in
all three “Abrahamic” religions
— Judaism, Christianity and Islam —and Hin-
duism as well. Their impact is pernicious, but can't be shouted down with
blanket diatribes against religion. Many so-called progressives somehow think
that proclaiming their “atheism” or “humanism” as a superior alternative to
the religious right will somehow turn the world in a better direction. This is a
remarkably foolish idea, and not simply because it ignores the concrete good
carried out by many religions or the indisputable role that the great religious
narratives have played in movements of liberation down through the ages.
More fundamentally, it overlooks the fact that atheists and humanists, if they
want to make a difference in pointing a way toward a better world, will have
to define a worthy spirituality in order to do so. A spiritless political movement
is like a becalmed, rudderless sailboat. Spirit imbues the movement with vital
force, which has to be directed intelligently even if there can be no precise cal-
culus for doing so. As the saying goes, we do not live by bread alone.

The path to a better world requires a beneficial spirit, or as it is sometimes
referred to, being of “good will.” Its appeal must grip the heart as well as the
mind, or, to use a core spiritual term, the “sou/”—by which is meant a self
open to the spirit dimension —and lift it to give people good cheer, fortitude,
endurance, courage, and that which integrates allthese, solidarity. All of this
is necessary if we are to bring about a socialist revolution. Socialism is much
more, then, than an economic or political arrangement. Though it requires
bringing down the capitalist state and restoring power to working people, this
has to be done by seizing the spirit (that is, the inner truth) of a historical
moment and transforming it into solidarity. This will take more than singing
inspiring (that is, spirit-inducing) songs. Though music is a powerful feature
of spiritual practice, revolution requires an integral spiritual transformation
across all levels of existence if it is to foster life’s flourishing. Such is the out-
come of spiritual goodness; while that which is spiritually evil denies life its
expressive power.
In these harsh and crisis-ridden times, growing resistance to capitalist rule
has largely failed to do more than irritate the system and increase its vicious-
ness. The lines have been drawn: a massive spiritual transformation, forged in
diverse campaigns, will have to accompany the emergence of socialism.
Lessons from the annals of spiritual warfare

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the
new canot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid
symptoms appear.
— Antonio Gramsci
THE EVIL INFESTING RELIGION ToDay often manifests itself as a war against
women and alternative sexualities. Looking more closely, we see the interac-
tion between the ancient framework of male domination and the capitalist
system in its present crisis. Four major developments stand forth:
= capital’s relentless commodification of sexuality through the interna-

tional sex trades, pornography, and the entertainment and advertis-
ing industries. The result is a profound alienation affecting all di-
mensions ofsocial relations, with special emphasis on that of gender;
= now entering its fifth decade, the campaign against the working and
middle classes wreaked by neoliberalism has severely damaged the frag-
ile structures of masculine pride. Father Knows Best, a sitcom from
the “good old days,” would not go very far in these bad new ones; and

= endless empire spawns endless militarism, reinforcing traditional
hierarchies while incorporating women as accomplices and victims,
witness the statistic that one in three women in the U.S. military
experiences some degree of sexual assault;
= most basic, the continuing breakup of community and fragmentation

of human relationships, an iron condition of the capitalist system,
continues apace, its general alienation fostering violence of all kinds.
A kind of continuing chaos ensues, a regime of endemic fear in which
the masses of folk who are victimized by the crisis reach desperately for some
mooring in traditional patterns and values. The system gives as it takes away,
producing and enabling widespread sexual alienation at the same time as its
minions in the religious right inject a spurious security through fundamental-
ist ideology, and identify suitable victims for its violence: liberated women,
sexual minorities, and the de jour object of racism: Muslims.
Right-wing spirituality purports to protect women from the dangers of
this age; but by degrading their humanity it breeds evil and increases the ulti-
mate level of violence. Patriarchy — the ancient framework of male domina-
tion — has always had an ambivalent relationship to capitalism — associated
in power, yet deeply threatened by the entry of women into the capitalist
work force and the roiling of traditional social relations. In capital’s ascend-
ing phase it gave rise to the feminist call for full equality of human right. This
grew fitfully throughout the nineteenth century, and peaked after the second
third of the twentieth century. Now, religious reaction erodes this and denies
feminism its emancipatory potential, leaving only a narrow opening toward
dividing up the economic pie in a world where the mantle of female achieve-
ment belongs to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.
Only a socialist revolution can overcome the structural inequalities that
support this impasse. Yet how is the socialist alternative to contest the perni-
cious influence of the religious right when its own spiritual development has
been so barren? Mere sloganeering about the evils of fundamentalism emptily
reassures liberals of their virtue. To contest the powerful spirituality of the
religious right requires an alternative and more powerful spirituality adequate
to the necessity for socialism.
There is a path, scarce recognized, toward just such an outcome. It derives
from the imperative to transform a fundamental dynamic of the capitalist system.
A path toward a viable future

To CONFRONT THE PRESENT MOMENT in history is to recognize that there
will be no worthwhile future unless we reverse the ongoing drift toward eco-

logical collapse caused by global capital. We cannot pick apart and mend the
ravages caused by capital's accumulation one by one. Mere reformism spells
doom. Transformation of the system as a whole is demanded: an ecosocialist
revolution.
Ecological collapse means a breakdown across the whole realm of nature
caused by human productive activity. This ig now shaped by capital, but its
ancient and enduring root was installed through patriarchy, in this context, a
splitting between genders in which the human being is regarded as male and
women represent nature, considered as an inferior level of being suitable for
domination and, eventually, its reduction to the least common denomina-
tor of cash value. Thus the rape of nature is not simply a metaphor for what
capital does. It is a basic dynamic at the heart of capitalist accumulation itself,
defining an unending cycle in which active male aggression violates passive
female nature.
It follows that to overcome the ecological devastation of the capitalist or-
der, a transformation of gender relations becomes essential. This translates into
a new phase of feminism— ecofeminism—and requires an ecofeminist dimen-
sion to the project of ecosocialism. It means removing all traces of domination
from the sphere of gender, enabling the full humanity of the female portion
and an intrinsic value given to nature by the male. Thus the human is no
longer estranged from nature and as such, is rendered capable of restoring the
integrity of ecosystems. This is very much a spiritual process, as it engages a
major transformation of the historically constructed self.
The gender system is embedded in virtually all of the world’s spiritual
traditions, as these shape and are shaped by the actual ecological behavior of
the societies that form around them. The greatest ecological menaces emerge
from those whose spirituality most sharply splits the world between “male”
humanity and “female” nature, such as has been deeply associated with the
Judaeo-Christian traditions.
The spiritual politics of ecosocialism and ecofeminism involve challeng-
ing the defects of established spiritualities and making alliances with their
radical elements. This would include substantial contributions from the leg-
acy of the First Peoples around the world, generally marked by a more fluid
gender system and far less ecological devastation than the societies of their
conquerers.
The situation more than superficially resembles the great surge of “lib-
eration theology” during the 1960s and 1970s. This was chiefly spurred by
the crumbling of the Western colonial system in the wake of the Second
World War. Centered in Latin America, liberation theology set into motion

a profound democratization throughout the Christian faiths, including an
incorporation of Marxist and socialist elements, before it was turned back by
neoliberal counterattack and.the Papacy of John Paul II.
Now it could be that we are primed for a second wave of emancipatory
spirituality, less exclusively focused on Christianity, and deriving rather from
the struggle for ecological integrity. Both waves, however, require undoing
the evil wrought by empire under the aegis of capital.
If I have downplayed the role of established religion here, it is owing to
the corruption of its establishment and the falling away of great numbers of
people in the industrialized Western world. But this reveals a serious problem,
because religion, despite all, can mobilize degrees of commitment that the
secular world urgently needs. In my view, there will have to be a great revival
of faith within the ecosocialist/ecofeminist movements if they are to prevail.
The path taken by much non-religious contemporary politics has its virtues,
especially as it incorporates a demand for universal justice. But the challenge
remains of achieving the capacity of authentic religion to assuage the doubt
and fear that lurk about the edges of such existentially radical choices as lie
before us in the revolutionary period ahead.
The most frequent admonition in the Bible, I have been told, is to “be
not afraid.” Capitalism, like any reigning system, works by instilling a zone
of fear that stifles radical options for change. Unless we conquer our fear, we
cannot overcome the system.
Since the 1980s, I have found myself drawn to the practices of radical
Christians in struggles to support Central American revolutionaries, in work-
ing for a nuclear-free world, and in opposing police brutality over youth of
color. It was not the superiority of their intellectual analysis, however bril-
liant, that pulled me in, but their attitude, composed of fearlessness and good
cheer. We need to find such a way of being if we are to move beyond the
death-dealing world of capital. =

Ecosocialism as a Human Phenomenon
(2014)
WE LIVE IN AN EPOCH OF RADICAL CRISIS. From the economic side, we see

intractable stagnation and vicious class polarization. And from another side,
which I shall call the ecologica!, we find that the dominant system of produc-
tion appears hell-bent on destroying the natural foundations of civilization
as it thrashes about in response to economic difficulties. Generally speaking,
the two aspects are treated separately from each other. I would argue, rather,
that they are facets of a much deeper crisis, an estrangement from nature
stemming back to the origins of civilization, which has now reached global
proportions and appears to be on a trajectory headed toward a Dark Age such
as has never been known before, and one that could even foreshadow our
possible extinction as a species.
Needless to say, a great deal of attention has been paid to various aspects
of these matters. However, virtually all of it misses the fundamental unity
arising from our relationship to nature itself. Make no mistake, there is plenty
to be studied in the complexities that exist in different countries and zones
of the planet, in the relations between North and South, or empires and the
imperialized, or in distinct problems of energy, agriculture, water, climate
change, toxic pollution, technology, and so forth. The subject is inexhaust-
ible. Some of these matters will be brought forth here to exemplify a point;
a goodly number will be debated in this conference; and any real solution
to our predicament must engage them. Yet they must be bracketed for now
while we attend to the deeper currents that agitate our troubled times. Thus,
my argument sets aside the prevailing focus on what can be called the “envi-

ronment,” that is, the world as viewed outside of us, as “inputs, “resources,”
in other words, as analytically separable substances and mechanisms. It is, as
stated above, essentially “ecological” in character, where Ecology connotes
the connection between elements of nature —organized, as we would also
say, into “ecosystems,” the coming into being of the structures of nature it-
self. As we are part of nature, so do the “connections” connect us as well in
ecosystems. Thus, the ecological crisis ought to be seen in existential terms as
well as those of physical inputs. Yet this does not happen because we are also
alienated from nature—a fatal rupture the overcoming of which is a prime
goal of radical eco-politics.
Two focal points configure this talk. The first denotes the structure of the
world as it is, hurtling toward the abyss; the second concerns the world as I
would have us struggle to bring about. The word capitalism widely serves to
elucidate the first point. We know it only too well, and yet scarcely at all, even
though capital is what Marx (1993, 107) called the “all-dominating economic
power of bourgeois society,” surrounding and penetrating our lives from ev-
ery angle. The second I would have us call ecosocialism. It is a word that does
not appear so far as I know in any established dictionary, while those who are
concerned with its development are scattered loosely across the world.
Capitalism is the reigning or, we might say, hegemonic economic system
built around the systematization of profitability. It is equipped with an elabo-
rate class structure and a vast apparatus of institutions to establish its global
reach and penetration into lives. In this sense capitalism is the “mode of pro-
duction” characteristic of our epoch, where production signifies our human-
specific trait of transforming nature in our image. Capitalism, then, refers to
the means installed in order to produce “capital” as the core activity of the
system. The “economy,” broadly conceived, comprises said means. Capitalism
is therefore not simply an economic system; it is the systematization of the
economy and its promotion into the leading institution of society. Accord-
ingly, we consider capital to be the “efficient cause” of our crisis, that is to say,
that cause the overcoming of which is the focal point of ecosocialist politics.
Looking more closely at the capitalist system, we observe something that
its greatest critic, Karl Marx, called attention to, namely, the tendency to
grow without end. Marx was not above using colorful language rich with ref-
erences to antiquity and the Bible. I think that we should take these references
seriously at face value and not reduce them to the terminology of economics,
a discourse he spent much of his life deconstructing. There were times when
Marx would heuristically use metaphoric language, as when he referred, in
Capital 1, to the human labor process by the production of the architect

and the bee, in order to make the point that production was a specifically
human agency entailing the imagination. But at times his language went far
beyond the figurative and into another zone of human existence. One of these
occurred when Marx ({1976] 1990, 742) referred to that central feature of
capital— its endless accumulation —as:
di
Accumulate Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!
This tells us that capital is not metaphorically like Moses and the Proph-
ets: it is Moses and the Prophets. The insight is fully communicable only
in religious terms. It has mediations in class structure and competition, but
these do not account for its unique force. At the core, therefore, capital is not
even an economic proposition, but one dictating that the economy rules over
society as God rules over the world. It also tells us that the capitalist ruling
class, which sits atop the world as has no previous ruling class and wields
power unimaginable to the Pharaohs, Emperors, and Czars of the past, does
so directed by a delusion of religious compulsion.
Marx also describes the workings of the mechanism by means of which
the world is coming undone. For if religious compulsion rules over an econ-
omy which is the leading institution of society, it overrides all else. The im-
plications are profound, as this dynamism puts to the lie all efforts to control
carbon emissions within “market” relations, as by cap and trade, or by trying
to regulate the financializing frenzy of the great banks. It disproves the con-
ventional logic that accumulation is regulated primarily by a calculating logic
of profit or loss—or from a different standpoint, it undermines the idea that
profit-seeking is a rational mode of operation. For what can be rational that
so plainly conduces to generalized ruin? Is cancer a rational response of the
organism?
The annals of history are full of instances in which humans have used their
rational endowment as a means toward fanatical ends. But nothing surpasses
what the capitalist does when he forces “reason” down the world’s throat with
an immense ideological apparatus and turns it into the instrument of world
destruction. The supreme example lies with the economy of the U.S. —leader
of the Western Powers and their military wing of NATO—now stopping at
nothing to become the world’s leading hydrocarbon producer (having just
passed Saudi Arabia) and using all the instruments of so-called advanced
technology to do so, even if it means literally tearing the earth apart through
hydro-fracking, mountain-top removal, deep-sea drilling —with many other
examples in Nigeria, Ecuador, and related countries; and over it all, the prom-
ise of doom by climate change. Or consider the activities of the Monsanto

Corporation, fully protected by the Obama administration, as it engages in
lethal forms of production that will, in just one instance of depredation, fin-
ish off honeybees worldwide through its nicotinamide pesticides. Thus we an-
ticipate a future without pollinators, sacrificed on the altar of accumulation.
The disregard for what nature has evolved over four billion years beggars the
imagination. Indeed, if corporations are persons, as the U.S. Supreme Court
insists, then the Exxons and Monsantos of the world are better described as
suicide bombers in the service of accumulation than as rational economic
actors. Like Melville’s (1992, 202), Captain Ahab—who says to himself that
“all my means are sane, my motive and object mad” —the capitalist system
displays itself as a pure agent of nihilistic destruction.”
Marx’s conception of accumulation puts into a deep shade all efforts at
liberal reform of capitalism, for when reform becomes the goal, it works to
improve, even perfect, the functioning of the system along with remedying
its damages. This comprises an iron contradiction in the case of capital. There
is much we do not know about overcoming the ecological crisis. But we do
know enough to not settle for partnerships between environmental and green
groups, on one side, and the capitalist power structure, on the other—for
example, the efforts of 350.org activist Bill McKibben has made to build
partnership with Ceres Investors, referred to as their “Wall Street friends,”
in divestment campaigns to check the power of the hydrocarbon industrial
complex. Who would you believe: Bill McKibben or Karl Marx, as to the
world-destroying activity of capital?
This is not the place for a definitive treatment of the questions of re-
forming abuses inherent to capitalist production, a certain degree of which
is necessary in the face of overwhelming misery or immediate threats to life.
The key point is whether a means has not become an end. If a century of
reform has left us with monsters like Monsanto in command, we need to de-
clare that, in face of the existing system, we need to trans-form, not re-form,
capitalism. For no reform is justifiable insofar as it contributes to the endless
expansion of the economic product. We need to build, therefore, a new mode
ofproduction that transforms nature without directing the product toward
the goal of accumulation.
The mode of production of any society embodies the rules of transform-
ing nature and translates these into every facet of existence. A mode of pro-
duction is a form of thinking and a way of being. Under the regime of capital,
the supreme, godlike mode of this logic is to accumulate at all costs. Where
capital reigns, the economy must dominate society as the instrument of ac-
cumulation. Our obligation— to our childrem and grandchildren, to life, and

the future itself—is to find a way toward a society whose productive logic
does not impose accumulation on the world.
Such is the core principle of ecosocialism, the prime goal of which is to
generate a mode of production necessary and sufficient to overcome the com-
bined accumulation crisis and ecological crisis we now suffer. Ecosocialism
does not settle therefore for anything less than the transcendence of capitalism
as a mode of production, and whatever reforms it tolerates are not seen as ends
in themselves but as means to its end.
This is a revolutionary claim but not a utopian one. I know as well as
anyone the powerful obduracy of this system and its deep-rootedness. I know
we are fated to live within it for the foreseeable future and that we cannot
wish its successor to magically appear but must instead find ways of strug-
gling for it within the given, fallen world. Nor should we permit ourselves the
illusion that we are bound to triumph in the long run over the beast — for,
as everyone can see, the system becomes more murderous and fascistic as its
crisis deepens, whether in increasingly reckless extraction of resources (energy
and otherwise), increasing division between rich and poor, increasing surveil-
lance, militarism, state violence and repression and, indeed, perpetual war.
My claim is simply that there is no worthwhile alternative to the eco-
socialist way. I mean worthwhile both in the sense of the only genuinely
rational alternative and as an ethic for living in the best way possible. The
great Rosa Luxemburg, whose masterwork was a critique of accumulation
itself, coined the aphorism: “Socialism or Barbarism!” Well, we did not get
socialism, and so we have inherited barbarism distinguished by ecological
degradation of catastrophic proportion— something Rosa Luxemburg could
have anticipated, as she stood out among Marxists of her day in taking nature
seriously as a category. And so we are obliged to bring Luxemburg’s aphorism
up to date, and proclaim: “Ecosocialism or Ecocatastrophe!” Keeping such
a principle in mind in a faithful and conscientious way is what is meant by
not settling. It means steadfastly recognizing that an ecosocialist world is far
off and can appear in many contexts, while at the same time refusing to turn
away from the goal of transformation —a goal that applies to ourselves as well
as the world.
Ecosocialism makes a very large claim that must be realized in a host
of individual and often seemingly disparate instances, or paths. There is, in
other words, no privileged agent of ecosocialist transforming. The agents of
transformation emerge interstitially, which is a fancy word for “anywhere
contradictions ripen and manifest themselves as transformative opportuni-
ties:” a storm, a mine, a pipeline, a toxic dump, even a classroom, or an

individual mind undergoing spiritual development. Each ecosocialist path
is a place of production—for paths have to be made—as well as one of
the resistance against the form of production whose banner is capitalist ac-
cumulation. We can also think of these as zones of emergence that appear
as contradictions mature and open up on different vistas; hence, we can call
them “horizons” of various kinds, as the title of an organization I work with
puts it. A horizon is by definition some way off; yet, it can also be brought
closer through devising ways of struggle. Often these processes can be for-
mulated in terms of the “Commons,” by which are meant collectively owned
and organized spaces, originating in the primordial communistic productive
zone whose enclosure is a hallmark of capitalist accumulation. Forming new
conditions of Commoning unifies productive zones and can come to connect
them. All this bears more than a superficial resemblance to the building of
ecosystems which — in the ecosocialist mode of production— comes to stand
in the place that capital reserved for the commodity. Capitalism may be de-
fined as generalized commodity production; just so is ecosocialism definable
as generalizable ecosystem production—this being, however, ecosystems of
a definite kind conducive to the flourishing of life, as shall be developed later
on. First, we need to talk further about some of the preconditions of ecosocial-
ist organizing.
Each circumstance demands understanding of the mutual relationship of
different historical phases. Once appropriated ecosocialistically, the horizons/
zones of Commoning converge and become capable of being integrated with
each other. That is how a widening process of ecosocialist transformation un-
folds. We call this the principle of prefiguration. The notion is essential for
grasping the abundance of paths that define the ecosocialist way and not get-
ting discouraged by the scale of our challenge. There is no switch to turn the
particular locations of ecosocialist development on. It is made steadfastly, over
time and space, and universalizes itself as it goes.
Success depends, however, on how well the paths are made. This entails
a process of self-reflection and also of self-criticism. Marx insisted upon this
as far back as 1843 when he wrote his friend and coeditor Arnold Ruge that,
not being able to predict the future, our rule must be to proceed fearlessly in
the present, neither sparing the powers that be nor our own conclusions. For
ecosocialism this takes on a new meaning today, as awareness is finally sinking
in that the world is in desperate straits and, among a growing minority, that the
capitalist system is structurally implicated in the trouble. Thus, where mention-
ings of ecosocialism were once‘as scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth, now they
proliferate on the left—such as it is. Conferences, blogs, news services now
270 COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEE

spring up all over the landscape using this new word. ‘This is no doubt a good
thing, so long as it is met by a sharply critical eye. For the left “such as it is” is
deeply burdened with generations of failure to contest, much less overcome,
the onslaught of capitalism and its genius of co-opting resistance. Seduced by
social-democratic parties, trapped in the irrelevancy of academia, lost in the
bureaucracy of NGOs, deluded by dreams of Lenfinist glory, mystified by deep-
ecological escapism, and lulled by the easy consolation of the so-called “Green
Alternative,” left opposition today is united chiefly by its failure to transcend
capital, in thought as well as deed. It is all very well to march around, as do
certain socialist groups in the U.S. under banners spelling “We want system
change, not climate change,” but tell us—exactly—what is the system, and
what is the change, and what is the burden of your complicity in capitalism?
One obstacle—an obstacle that is at the same time also an opportu-
nity—exists between different points of the historical continuum. Simple
reflection tells us, as a general rule, that the earlier the social structure, the less
estranged from nature. Thus, a gradient exists between pre-modern and mod-
ern society according to which the latter, in conquering the former, destroys
its relatively greater integration with nature in the service of accumulation
and empire. Thus, significant discontinuities in development are a feature of
all societies. In particular, each capitalist society exists in relation to its own
indigenous precursors. Notwithstanding, indigeneity serves as an important
index of ecosocialist potential. Societies like Western Europe, where both the
actual presence and the cultural trace of the indigenous past are the most sup-
pressed, also have the weakest potential for ecosocialist transformation. They
are also the most likely to produce the “3R’s” of ecological governance—a
highly regulated, rationalized, and reformist code subsumed within late capi-
talist efficiency.
By contrast, in the Northern Andean nations of South America the pow-
er of the indigenous is relatively more intact; and it is to this, I believe, that
we owe the occurrence in countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, of
advances in an ecosocialist direction that are relatively greater than anywhere
else in the world. Thus, the Bolivarian government of Venezuela has been the
first anywhere to proclaim ecosocialism as a national goal. Throughout this
zone we see proclamation of the Rights of Mother Earth, in which Ecuador
has pioneered. This has served as an inspiration around the world for people
of an ecosocialist persuasion. I know it was received with electric enthusiasm
by myself and my friends.
Are such proclamations mere figures of speech to rouse the spirits of
people fighting the capitalist beast? After all, a government steeped in a global

system of accumulation, debt, and extraction of resources will strive like any
other to serve capital. Proclaiming the inherent rights of Mother Earth ap-
pears to fit into this category. It sounds like an empty gesture, rather like a
progressive version of the greenwashing and other image-building stunts em-
ployed by corporations, exemplified by British Petroleum’s repackaging itself
as “Beyond Petroleum,” and then proceeding to ravage the ocean-bed of the
Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
There is much truth to this charge. It readily applies to the extractivist
government of Ecuador where, as we speak, the state corporation PetroEcuador
is ravaging the rainforest just as Texaco and Chevron did thirty years ago. Fur-
thermore, and even worse, has been the news we just received of the destruction
of the status of the Yasuni reservation as an extraction-free zone by President
Correa. Now is not the time to dissect the details of this betrayal of one of our
best hopes for inhibiting capital’s predatory invasion of nature. All we can do at
present is to underscore the resolution of never resting until capitalism—and
the capitalist state—are brought down once and for all.
Nor do we turn away from the proclamation of the rights of Mother
Earth as an essential component of this, or of the necessity for indigeneity to
be at the center of ecosocialist struggle. These imperatives are emerging into
consciousness as of one of humanity’s dreams—ancient, long suppressed,
and empowering. They need to be expanded rather than abandoned, and to
extend beyond the slogan of Earth as a mother into the core of its meaning.
Let us begin by shifting the subject of discourse from the fanciful Mother
Earth to the notion of Nature itself. Mother Earth certainly belongs to na-
ture—and so do we. What does it mean, then, to stand for the rights of
nature, which is the source of our being yet eternally beyond us? If nature
has no rights, then we have no rights, either—except for those granted by
human authorities, which are arbitrary derivatives of worldly power and the
legitimized violence of states. An authentic ecosocialism has to appeal to a
source of right that surpasses the Market, however godlike and sanctified this
is made to appear under capitalism.
Nature is the totality of the universe, and we are but one odd creature
within it, though we have a self-contradictory power that exists nowhere else
so far as is known, of being capable of harming ourselves by willfully harming
nature, while also being able to care about this fact and struggle against it. Be-
cause we are conscious beings, and because the violation of Nature can make
us feel responsible for what has been done in humanity’s name, we can also be
led to reconcile ourselves with nature, to identify with it, and to achieve the
status to heal the wounds that capitalism has inflicted on it.
272 COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEEL

To affirm the rights of Mother Earth means, then, to affirm our right—and
power—to defend what “Mother Earth” signifies to us. This is to connect the
majesty of Earth to the life-giving power invested in the figure of Mother, that
all-encompassing being from which each individual being arises, and to extend
this into nature. Nature in itself is no being, yet it generates beings — indi-
vidual creatures with boundaries and boundary phenomena, including human
beings who have an internalized, subjective self and a variable subject—object
boundary. Living beings, human and otherwise, in the context of surrounding
nature, come together to form ecosystems. From this perspective, nature may
be said to be the matrix and integral of all ecosystems.
First Peoples and their indigenous successors —all the way up to the on-
set of capitalist modernity — experience ecosystemic being and the generativ-
ity of nature in their spirituality. This provides the foundation from which
the notions of earth and nature as Mother arise. Thus, the naming of Nature
as mother expresses a more or less universal activity of First Peoples and their
successors. It reflects a condition in which spirit and matter are experienced as
interpenetrated with each other. In the case of European society this extended
well into the second millennium of the Common Era, after which capital-
ism and the onset of Western empire supervened. The process ground to a
halt once capitalist modernity became hegemonic and introduced generalized
despiritualization. As this happened, spirit was allocated to the Disney Cor-
poration and the other incarnations of the culture industry, where it became
rendered into a commodity like racing cars, sides of bacon, and supermodels.
Clearly, a social order such as this will produce human beings so spiritually
confused as to be incapable of ecosocialist transformation.
It follows that a prime task for ecosocialism must be to produce ecoso-
cialists capable of bringing nature into continuity with humankind’s rooted-
ness. This is the spiritual process at the heart of ecosocialist politics. Ecoso-
cialism entails a kind of identification with nature that fills the self with its
grandeur and fires it up to realize the vision of William Blake (1988, 223,
Plate 69), who wrote that “all things exist in the human Imagination”. We are
nothing in comparison to Nature and yet everything through our recogni-
tion of nature. This affirmation of responsibility and caring for the damaged
Earth fill us with Nature’s grandeur and strengthen us for the long march
toward an ecosocialist society. It casts light on the prefigurative processes es-
sential to ecosocialism, and also calls attention to an urgent need of combin-
ing the necessity for a perspective in which all things are recognized as unified
within the imagination with the obdurate fact that they do not only exist in
the imagination but also—as Blake was abundantly aware —in the external

world independently of our will. It would be a sad shadow of ecosocialism
that deeply and imaginatively rooted itself in nature without attending to the
extremely urgent matters going on in the fragmented and chaotic external
world under capital’s dominion.
Rethinking Value Theory

I BELIEVE THAT A RESOLUTION of this dilemma is at hand through an expan-
sion of the theories of value laid down by Marx in his contributions leading
up to the issue of Capital, Vol. 1, in 1867. There are two conjoined aspects of
this. The first entails a rethinking of value in a framework that goes beyond
its insertion into political economy. In actual life, values play vital roles in the
dynamic relations between the self and the world. This is consonant with the
everyday sense of the word, in which to value something implies an energetic
disposition to bring it about. I would call this “the conative model of value,”
that is, value as an expression of the will.
The other aspect is to add another, third form of value to the two used
by Marx in his critique of political economy: the theoretical abstractions cor-
responding to Use and Exchange. These two positions remain inside the capi-
talist world-system, for the comprehension of which they are necessary. Use-
value corresponds to what production does to nature; while exchange-value
refers to the abstraction from the material world necessary for the develop-
ment of money. However, the surfacing of notions such as the intrinsic rights
of nature, or Mother Earth, are conative forms of value deeper and more
ancient in origin than the political-economic notions of use-and exchange-
value (U-V and X-V) that enter into Marx’s understanding of the structure
of commodities and the dynamics of accumulation. The presence of the two
forms of value, dedicated to use and exchange, nicely expresses the closed
world of political economy under the regime of capital. But this is the world
we want to open up, bring down, and get rid of, as it reinforces the delusion
that nature is under man’s power, open to being commodified, a delusion that
immanently legitimates the degradation inflicted by civilization on nature.
Marx says that the process of labor begins in the imagination and proceeds
to the transformation of reality. Let us, therefore, prepare the way for social-
ism and in particular, ecosocialism, by imagining a third form of value that
respects the intrinsic worth of nature, and let us bring this into the closed
system of political economy so as to foster the breakdown of capital.
Under the regime of capital, the commodity rules, as fetish, or idol, or
false god, over an enclosed yet battered space. This is but another aspect of
Marx's insight into the false spirituality of accumulation. To transcend this

world we would open this space and prepare the way for transformation with
a form of value that is neither directed toward use, nor exchange, but is for the
intrinsic value of nature or I-V. Values do not exist in nature but in the mind
of a natural creature. Let us add to this mind or, to be more exact, strengthen
it, by recognizing an I-V that is already present and allow it to enter into the
interplay between U-V and X-V. The ensuing refationships with these can be
mobilized for the building of an ecosocialist society, from the first prefigurative
baby steps all the way to victory in the confluence of the Commons.
I would define I-V as an assertion that we should value nature for itself,
irrespective of what we would do to it—value it intrinsically and thereby as
a function of its inherent right—a right which must be fought for and so is
established as a dynamic factor in the struggle to undo the curse of accumu-
lation. When I say that values do not exist in nature but in the mind, I do
not mean that there is nothing external from which they can be built. Quite
the contrary, the mind to which they belong is that of a natural creature,
composed of matter in dynamic flux, in communication with the universe,
played upon by a host of influences between which a choice must be made to
guide life activity. Use-values arise in the course of the productive activity by
means of which nature is transformed; exchange-values arise in the course of
economic activity and require abstraction from nature. However, the intrinsic
value of nature is responsive to a wider and deeper spectrum bound to neither
zone of political-economic activity. It therefore reminds us that there is more
to existence than the making of commodities and the reproduction of capital.
It tells us that there is a kind of primordium that later becomes differenti-
ated into a primarily objective zone, which becomes the ground for practical,
scientific, and technical knowing, and a primarily subjective zone of spirit, in
and through which the self’s transactions with the world are registered, made
conscious, and become spiritual modes of being.
To intrinsically value nature means to choose a form of relationship set
against all the powers of the historically developed and capitalist world. How
this choice develops and how it turns out can vary enormously depending on
the balance of forces. We can think of this in terms of freedom or unfreedom
along many different axes that cannot be taken up here. But even though we
do not have wholly free choice (or will), we do have real choices and a will
that, however constrained, is still capable of great power. Such is the human
condition in its essence as soon as the self crystallizes out ofits infantile ma-
trix. It matters a great deal as to whether we become fully conscious of these
choices and how we act on them — which is where ecosocialist practice enters
the picture. We can, in short, choose whether to value nature intrinsically;

and this can matter enormously if we are faithful to it. Our fidelity is itself
induced through the suffering and self-discipline that accompanies intrinsi-
cally valuing nature. :
Nature is primordially constructed across human existence and enters
through many pathways, often quite subtle. This is because I-V is not im-
mediately as gratifying as commodities are made to be. More broadly, it is not
immediately connected with production, since it is predicated on the “such-
ness” of nature, a mode of being anterior to whatever human beings do to it
and manifest in our receptivity to it. The method consists of refusal to pin
down nature with the shallow fasteners of common sense. It is akin to what is
sometimes called “negative theology”: definition by the absence of properties.
As the Tao Te Ching, perhaps the greatest text setting forth negative theology,
and hence intrinsic value, states it:
Tao is empty—
Its use never exhausted.
Bottomless—
The origin of all things.
It blunts sharp edges,

Unties knots
Softens glare
Becomes one with the dusty world.
Deeply subsistent—
I don't know whose child it is.
It is older than the Ancestor. (Lao-Tzu 2007, Stanza 4)
The very real discordance with political economy contrasts with the per-
fectly obvious fact that I-V enters deeply into human existence, and not just
by encountering wilderness, looking at the heavens, or listening to birdcalls
on a summer evening. No, it begins from our timeless time in the womb, goes
on through the universal givens of infancy, enters the entire panoply of spiri-
tual and religious forms, including those that engage the most selfless kind
of love, and ranges to speculative philosophy and the most advanced science
(where I-V enters as a perpetual fount of inspiration—consider only one,
albeit the greatest, example, that of Albert Einstein). Of these the greatest is
love (as proclaimed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13), for it is love which generates
compassion and the desire to heal the wounds inflicted by civilization. And
with love comes— in the degree to which we become open to nature— faith,
forbearance, and hope. All this renders I-V the essential ground from which

to challenge the insanity of capitalist accumulation, and upon which the eco-
socialism of the future can be built.
I would venture to say that the intrinsic value of Nature is the defining
concept that differentiates ecosocialism from the various socialisms of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does not in the least vitiate the eman-
cipatory drive of these “first-epoch” socialisms¥ insofar as these are rooted
in “freely associated labor.” Indeed, ecosocialism strengthens that drive. But
it powerfully challenges the fatal compact that socialisms have made with
industrial capitalism and the terrible impact this has had, and continues to
have, upon indigenous folk.
To undo these injuries goes far beyond the logic of reparations— though
that is definitely not to be set aside. In any event, the damage inflicted on
First Peoples and their world cannot be recuperated absent postulating I-V.
Neither can the necessary ecosocialist task of bringing down runaway accu-
mulation be accomplished without grounding in I-V, for to the degree that
one feels for nature, to that same degree will one turn away from possessive-
ness and egoism, and become strong enough for the long march ahead.
Some Last Reflections

BEFORE HIS ILLNESS FORECLOSED THE POSSIBILITY, I worked very closely
with James O’Connor, founder of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism
and pioneer of an ecological reading of Marxism with his second Contradic-
tion of Capitalism. Jim’s original ambition was to employ the core notions of
the second Contradiction, which focused on depredations in the “conditions
of production” — nature, labor, and infrastructure—as bringing in oppor-
tunities for forms of struggle that were non-traditional with respect to the
history of the labor movement yet could also be integrated into a broad anti-
capitalist strategy. In other words, the original politics fostered by Capital-
ism Nature Socialism could be conceptualized as belonging to a “Red-Green”
convergence; and this was how it appeared to me when I came aboard in the
mid-1990s.
Sometime in the late 1990s, Jim concluded that we needed to further
develop the concept of use-value. Without formally bringing in the notion
of ecosocialism, we were beginning to think positively on a larger stage of
activity than anti-capitalism, pointing, rather, toward a transformed society
organized around what Jim called “the struggle for use-value.” This required
that we critically regard the core category of production itself, calling for the
restoration of production for human needs and enjoyment rather than profit.
Moreover, it required an option for quality (the province of U-V) to be set
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM anf,

against the grim, quantitative accounting driven by the exchange principle,
especially its legacy in finance capital. Jim suggested a jointly edited book on
the subject, I took up the idea enthusiastically, we began to work, and then
his illness took over and brought this project to an end.
But he had set in motion the idea that forms of value were also forms of
practice and struggle. After I assumed the editorship of Capitalism Nature
Socialism in 2003, it became possible to think of ecosocialism in these terms
and using the notions developed in Zhe Enemy of Nature (Kovel 2007) —as a
successor mode of production to that of capital, in which productive activity
would be centered about the making of ecosystems rather than commodities.
Thus, the realm of the economic would be decentered and made subordinate
to a fully realized human society. An enhanced notion of value itself would
be entailed, no longer captive to the economy and its endless expansion: the
notion of intrinsic value had come into its own.
Capital overthrew the natural economy, as Luxemburg stated, replacing
it with the “icy waters of egotistical calculation,” as Marx wrote in the Mani-
festo. Continuing our figurative model, capital does not simply require X-V:
it requires its hegemony, or to put it more vividly, it requires its mutation into
a cancer virus. Therefore, the formula for capital is X-V > U-V. This insight
is no more than writing large the ancient adage that “money is the root of all
evil.” But that is quite a lot. Marx identifies the precise point of its emergence
from a root to a toxic plant capable of rendering accumulation as a prophetic
demand. This arises in the fetishism of the commodity, that “mystical charac-
ter” which follows upon the conversion of labor itself into a commodity. Then
the human being drops out of the equation, commodities become gods
— or
idols, or fetishes —and we are on the road to ecological ruin. Marx ([1976]
1990, 165) puts this concretely: to understand the fetishism of the commod-
ity, “we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.” The cancer virus of
capital is therefore a spiritual force, albeit of an evil kind. One might even call
it Satanic. Whatever we call it, we need to recognize commodity fetishism as
the heartbeat of expansive accumulation and the active force in consumerism.
Combined with icy egotistical calculation, it results in the progressive de-
struction of nature known as the ecological crisis that marks the present era.
The cancer virus will prevail unless its pathological influence is met by
a stronger opposing force. Hence, the logic of I-V, which may be called the
spiritual antagonist of X-V. We may think figuratively here, as I-V vies for the
heart of U-V in the battle ground of ecosocialism. U-V remains conceptu-
ally at the center of the struggle for ecosocialism as a mode of production,
emerging through the collective effort to rebuild the Commons, from below
’

and on a planetary scale. Now ecosocialists strive for freely associated labor
motivated by ecocentric ethics, so that commodity production is phased out
and replaced by production of life-flourishing ecosystems, until a global eco-
socialist society animated by an ecocentric mode of production has arisen to
emancipate U-V and realize the potential of humanity. Since we are part of
ecosystems, they cannot be exchanged unleswwe give up our being. Therefore,
when we produce ecosystems instead of commodities, we step outside the
demands of exchange — because we are part of such ecosystems and pay hom-
age to nature, now authentically seen as a Good Mother. The associative force
pulling this together is the love flowing from the intrinsic value of nature.
No doubt the chances for this occurring on a mass scale are slender, given
the systematic inculcation by capitalist reproduction of all that is worst in hu-
man nature, with its ethos of possessive individualism, machismo, addiction
and cold calculation —all those things induced and structurally rewarded by
education and mass culture.
At least they have been until now—when the realization begins to dawn
across the planet that this vaunted system, with its stupendous wealth and
technological progress, is beneath it all what the Prophet Daniel called, the
“abomination of desolation,” and thus the tocsin of universal calamity. The
unprecedented character of our times sets a limit on the degree to which rep-
etition of the tedious themes of capitalist propaganda can work to reproduce
the order itself: For unprecedented times are necessarily times of change and
emergence of new possibilities. There will always be opportunists and fools,
and they will continue to stumble about the ruins of a dying social order.
Meanwhile, the rest of us—and our ranks will increase in time—have a
world to build.
Some might ask as well: does not the notion of I-V require fundamen-
tal changes in Marxism? Well, yes it does; and a good thing, too. Certainly,
Marxism can use some work. We should never be enslaved to even the great-
est of thinkers lest we bring him or her down with us. Every living doctrine
needs regeneration as history unfolds. I am sure that Karl Marx, who thanked
God that he was no Marxist, would agree.
I have set forth my beliefs not to impose them on anyone, but to en-
courage the opening of vision. These are some principles in which I believe;
they include a conviction that the future will hold many unexpected things,
wondrous as well as horrific. But there is one thing we can all expect: that
there will come a time when each of us dies and passes out of this world. It
will happen whether or not we take the challenge posed by the opening to
build ecosocialism. From this standpoint our lives now appear extraordinarily

fortunate—for what other generation was ever given such a possibility to
transform history itself? m
[Keynote address from International Ecosocialist Conference,

Quito, Ecuador, June 2013; published in
Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2014)
NOTES
1. There can be no doubt that, among other motives, Moby-Dick was written to expose the
deadly compulsions of capital: whaling being the leading industry and source of hydro-
carbon energy at the time.
REFERENCES
Blake, William, “Jerusalem,” 7he Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, David Erdman,
ed. (New York: Random House, 1988), 223.
Kovel, Joel, Zhe Enemy of Nature. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2007.
Lao-Tzu, Tao te Ching. trans. and eds. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo, Boston,
Massachussets: Shambala, 2007.
Marx, Karl, Capital. Vol. 1. trans. and ed. Ben Fowkes, West Drayton, UK: Harmondsworth:
Penguin, [1976] 1990.
Marx, Karl, Grundrisse. trans. and ed. Martin Nicolaus. West Drayton, UK: Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1993. 5
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. West Drayton, UK: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.

The Emergence of Ecosocialism
(2017)
‘THE ENEMY OF NATURE was first published in 2001, and reissued in a second
edition six years later. It was conceived as a response to a gathering “ecologi-
cal” crisis in the interactions between humanity and nature, the productive
transformation of which defines our species identity. The crisis has been ger-
minating since the emergence of patriarchy and class society; it accelerated
with the emergence of industrialization, and in the wake of the Second World
War, burst forth in the later years of the twentieth century, and now distinctly
threatens our survival as a species, alongside of innumerable others. Indeed,
Homo Sapiens has the dubious distinction of being the most destructive form
oflife to inhabit the earth.
The most spectacular aspect of the crisis has been a disintegration of cli-
mate resulting from atmospheric accumulation of carbon from the burning
of fossil fuel. Climate change, so-called, has come to loom over all other
threats; and the effort to overcome this has logically become global in scope.
Indeed, some of its radical versions, calling for an energy system based upon
renewable sources, approach being revolutionary.
The Enemy of Nature incorporated these principles without becoming
consumed by them. A prime reason for this is that catastrophic implications
of our relationship to nature extend beyond climate change. Consider the
poisoning of our “biosphere,” that is, the whole ensemble of life of which
we are a part and for which we are responsible: for example, the dying off of
pesticide afflicted honeybees necessary for the reproduction of essential plant-
life; or the world wide contamination of drinking water with heavy metals
like lead and arsenic, or toxic herbicides; or the poisoning of marine life, from

sperm whales to sardines, by ingestion of the trillions of plastic bags, water
bottles, etc., dumped into the waters, along with tiny and indigestible fila-
ments of polyester clothing that go from washing machines into the sewers
and then out to sea and the digestive tracts of its dwellers.
Finally, consider that war is the ultimate destroyer of nature; and that the
present state of the world displays an unprecedented spread of war-making
and expenditure on weapons, all the more striking for representing an abject
failure to learn from the deaths of 65 million people in the Second World
War, and the supreme danger posed by nuclear warfare. In this respect, with
the emergence in 2016 of Donald Trump at the head of the U.S. State Ap-
paratus, the Bulletin ofAtomic Scientists has for the first time in seventy years
moved the clock of impending nuclear catastrophe as close as two minutes
and thirty seconds to the figurative midnight—by which is meant the mo-
ment of calamity that brings human history to a close.
In sum, we live in the most ravaged epoch of mass extinction of the last 66
million years. This speaks volumes about the enmity toward nature manifest in
the history of our species and its proud “civilization.” The gravity and immen-
sity of the ecological crisis therefore requires conceptualization far more subtle
and systematic than the analyses offered by established science, or academia,
or governments. For the ecological crisis occurs in societies that are realms of
classes in conflict, and in which, as Marx and Engels observed, the ruling ideas
are the ideas of the ruling class. It follows that how we identify, think about, and
act upon the present crisis requires ideological awareness and must be criticized
from a standpoint beyond the capacity of any established institution.
The Enemy of Nature argues that the notion of a“Mode of Production”
offers the most salient perspective from which to observe, understand, and
change the way a society lives within nature and changes nature. Its principle
conclusion is that the societies of the “West,” organized into empires that de-
scend from Rome, function according to the Capitalist Mode of Production,
and that capitalism is in fact the Enemy of Nature and the “efficient cause”
of the ecological crisis that must be brought down and transformed if life is
to endure and prevail.
The argument concerning capital is developed in detail throughout the
first part of The Enemy of Nature, after which we turn to theoretical study
about the ecosystems that comprise the units of natural organization on
Planet Earth—and from that standpoint, to a discussion of types of ecologi-
cal politics, moving from those. that are relatively indifferent to the presence
of capitalism, to those that embrace the necessity of overcoming capitalism.
These latter enter the zone of Ecosocialism.

There is a deep theoretical aspect of ecosocialism that embraces specula-
tive philosophies of nature and the world spiritualities of humanity as well
as biological and physical science; and there is also a highly political dis-
course grounded in the concrete specifics of societies and within societies;
this attends to themes such as gender, whichzappears in ecosocialism as the
foundational category of “ecofeminism.” And further, when one introduces
a Latin American orientation, as here, attention is immediately drawn to
what was called within the Sandinista revolution, “El Enimigo de la Humani-
dad” — the United States, whose presence continues to loom over efforts to
struggle for a better world in this part of the world for the foreseeable future.
The precursors of the capitalist Mode of Production came together with
the conquest of the Western Hemisphere that began in 1492. Hegemony of
the United States appeared across the hemisphere in the nineteenth century
with the Monroe Doctrine, the conquest of Mexico, and the industrialization
that followed after the Civil War and became global once the Second World
War cleared away the U.S.’s powerful adversaries. The present crisis is con-
ditioned by a slippage in the coherence and power of the United States and
the rise of adversarial states like China, Russia and Iran. Presently, the whole
planet vibrates with instability and the rise of contesting power relations, all
of which need to be taken into account in the ecological crisis as well as in the
foreign relations of nation-states.
Capitalism is anything but simple. Nonetheless, the secret to its compul-
sion to grow and enmity to nature lies in a peculiar degree of abstraction that
introduces and advances money into the center of social relations and, as
the center of its social power grew, to the domination of quality by quantity.
Eventually, this led to the elevation of finance capital to the dominant posi-
tion in the capitalist hierarchy. Spurred by chattel slavery of Africans in North
America and the Judaeo-Christian identity, it also brought about ideological
emergence of Whiteness as the conquering force over nature, organized by
the concepts of Puritanism and White Racism."”!
Capitalist ideology considers the capitalist mode of production to be inher-
ently neutral; therefore, what goes wrong is supposedly the result of abuses that
can be overcome with regulation and reform. The view advanced here is radically
different, and finds capitalism to be the “Enemy of Nature”—not merely an eco-
nomic system, but a societally enforced mode of being that requires a specific kind
of economy that becomes the agent of imperial expansion and the “Destroyer of
Worlds” —to cite the Bhagavad-Gita. The destabilization of ecosystems comprises
the fabric of the ecological crisis, even as it produces people who conceive capital-
ism as “natural” and even “progressive” rather than the enemy of nature.

Much of The Enemy of Nature is given over to such an account of capi-
talism. It develops the notion of money as the abstraction observed as ex-
change value in the production of commodities. This becomes capital as
labor becomes a commodity meted out in terms of time; similarly money
also becomes Value, the source of commodity fetishism and the false God
of this World. Ecosocialism describes how ecosystems are to be put together
in contrast to capitalism, where money-as-value enters into and destabilizes
ecosystems, causing them to disintegrate on an expanding and chaotic scale.
The argument is uncompromising, and concludes that the success of capi-
tal is the ruin of nature, whereas the provision of a livable and worthwhile
world depends on overcoming capital and restoring nature to the degree of
signification such as appeared in indigenous society, where nature and spirit
flowed together. This necessarily becomes obliterated under capital’s yoke,
where society is a zone of endless innovation, celebrating modernity and post-
modernity, in other words, tooled to provide the turning of all entities into
commodities. As spirit is degraded, addiction becomes the generic type of
behavior under capitalism.!
Generalization of commodity production and addictiveness are core
properties of capitalism; in contrast, the core of ecosocialism’s mode of pro-
duction is the making of integral ecosystems to decenter commodity pro-
duction, and with it, to free humanity from the enslavement of society to
the money power. The term we apply to this is “freely associated labor”: it
signifies a change beyond alteration of workplace conditions or wages and is
the actual overcoming of alienation, thereby freeing us to develop our natural
creative powers.
Socialism arose in its “first epoch” of a nineteenth century setting, while
the present epoch now links the integrity of nature to the freedom of the hu-
man portion of nature. Therefore, the realization of socialism is inseparable
to the freeing of nature from its enemy, capital. Thus socialism today is neces-
sarily ecosocialism: Increasing numbers of people across the world are arriving
at this conclusion.
The threat to life is global, with specific differentiation according to local
circumstances. The general motion of ecosocialist development is the coming
together of spontaneous focal uprisings over a great range of settings, at times
in response to exploitation of labor or specific injustices, and fundamentally
responding to a threat to life. This is associated with a profoundly structural
characteristic of ecosocialism,.that at its foundation it is an ecofeminist res-
toration of the power of women, power usurped at the origins of society by
male hunting bands who imposed what Engels called the “world-historical

defeat of the female sex.” Patriarchal and class-based society was built on this
ground.
At present, we observe the capitalist system in the throes of a protracted
accumulation crisis the general response to which has been the imposition
of “neoliberalism,” a forty year reign of impo$ed scarcity, shipping ofjobs
to poor countries, hyper-exploitation of nature as well as labor, along with
increased power of finance capital— the most corrupt and alienating possibil-
ity within the system
— resulting in growing division between rich and poor
such as has never been seen before, dissolving the very notion of society in
the process. In the United States the level of crisis approaches that of the era
just before the Civil War; its manifestation has been the election of Donald
Trump as the 45th President, a man no better than a gangster, a despiser of
women and people of color, virtually illiterate, contemptuously blind to eco-
logical concerns, a compulsive liar, grandiose and thin-skinned. He is quite
capable of launching a nuclear war without reckoning its implications, and is
in any case hell-bent on undoing even the pathetic half-steps taken so far to
mitigate or inhibit the damages wrought by the ecological crisis.
Such is bourgeois democracy, U.S. Style, facing up to The Enemy of Na-
ture. But there is more to consider. The first editions of the The Enemy of
Nature called attention to the possibility of a fascist outcome if capitalism
were not checked and overcome. Something of the sort seems to be in the
cards today; indeed, Trump’s most influential advisor, a man named Stephen
Bannon, is a Nazi in all but name: an explicit White Supremacist, part of a
movement increasingly active in the Western Democracies. Bannon has struck
fear bordering on terror in the once confident American Jewish community,
even though his explicit Enemy— and that of Trump—is Islam.
All is in flux as of this writing in March, 2017. More people than ever
before have taken to the streets in protest of the state of affairs, and also in re-
sponse to the severe collapse of the established political parties in the United
States. The situation is highly charged and full of possibility
— including that
of ecosocialism. For is this not a collapse of capital —along with a collapse of
nature? Today in the heartland of empire, the “Water Protectors,” are coming
together to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline," and, in an authentic ecosocial-
ist way, are freely building a human ecosystem on the prairie: a prefigured!”!
model of future society to face and overcome the corrupt death-dealing soci-
ety of capital.
It is a vital lesson for the future facing the existing death culture. And it
involves the indigenous, who have been able to live with and within nature,
and are presently standing up once more: not just the Sioux whose land this

is, but many nature-rooted societies, with vigorous, integral spiritualties. At
the height of agitation in 2016 there were representatives of approximately
200 tribes at Standing Rock along with folk from elsewhere. It is doubtful
that anything of the kind has happened before, and necessary to say that this
is what ecosocialism, in its early stages, looks like.
The Latin American pathway

THE REALIZATION OF ECOSOCIALISM flourishes in proportion to the degree
of contact with nature as an original source of power. It is also fair to say, how-
ever, that the degree of mobilization by First Peoples is greater south of the
U.S. Mexico border than north. One major source lies in the indigenous, or
First People societies of Latin America. This correlates with the greater degree
of suppression of indigenous life in the lands that became the United States
compared with the collection of aboriginal nations that became the States
of Latin America. I in no way intend to suppress awareness of the mas-
sacres and other hardships and afflictions that took place on Latin American
indigenous land, and continue to do so. The point, however, is that a signifi-
cant distinction exists overall in the two zones, manifest as greater resistance
against White “civilization,” accompanied by aptitude for an ecosocialist path
“South of the Border.”
We can see this in distinct developments that deserve to be called “ecoso-
cialist prefigurations.” The following is for purpose of illustration and neither
intended to be a comprehensive account nor in any particular order:
= =Mexico: The Zapatista Army of National Liberation and their civil-
ian bases of support in Chiapas—the bellwether of indigeneity and
revolutionary politics in contemporary times, still going strong after
twenty-three years;
= Brazil: The place where the word ‘ecosocialism, was first embodied
in the 1980s; the brief accession of Marina Silva, disciple of Chico
Mendes, who became Environment Minister under Presidente Lula,
and supported the Ecosocialist International Network, including at
Brazil’s National Environmental Congress in 2008;
® Bolivia: The Cochabamba water war at the turn of the millennium,
leading to Evo Morales becoming first Indigenous President of Bo-
livia in 2006; presses for rights of “Mother Nature” and convenes a
world summit on climate change;

= Ecuador: Accién Ecolégica in Ecuador negotiates the Yasuni reserva-
tion in the Amazonan forest as a National Park. Introduces concept
of Ecological Debt;
= Peru: People’s struggles against mining and in the defense of water

continue to coalesce and converge, as chronicled by co-founder of
the Ecosocialist International Network Hugo Blanco in “Lucha In-
digena’;
= Cuba: Becomes the leading developer of organic agriculture and ur-
ban gardens on a national scale after collapse of U.S.S.R.; and
= Venezuela: During the presidency of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela be-
comes the first country to declare itself an Ecosocialist Republic-to-
be. A ministry of ecosocialism is founded, the first national anti-
GMO and anti-patent seed law is passed, and communes are calling
for the convocation of the First Ecosocialist International.
Not a single one of these developments (and there are more) has been free
of contradictions and moments of defeat. Consider only Accién Ecolégica,
where the Yasuni reservation, considered to be greatest source of biodiversity
on Earth, had to submit to the oil drill for “economic reasons.” Presently, the
organization itself is threatened with being shut down by order of President
Correa.
One can go on and on as to the difficulties of building ecosocialism in
a world of transnational capitalism and capitalist nation-states. But that is
no argument at all when set against the collapse of the global system and
the challenge posed by the ecological crisis. The task before reason now is to
find the best pathway for building a livable society along ecosocialist lines.
Considering the evidence of the superlative degree of mobilization in Latin
America, it becomes plain, then, that this part of the earth, for all its prob-
lems, offers by far the best chances for developing a conversation among eco-
socialists to advance movement toward the new world in this critical time.
One could say that a line has been drawn along the whole of the spine of
the Western Hemisphere—from the water wars in Bolivia to the defenders of
lagoons in Peru to the water protectors in North Dakota— with a continuous
reminder of what once was and could be again. @
[Ecosocialist Horizons, March 2, 2017]

NOTES
Prime Minister Nehru of India is reputed to have replied when asked his opinion of
Western civilization that he looked forward to the day when he would see some of this.
See Joel Kovel, White Racism. 2d edition 1984. New York, Columbia University Press.
The work discusses the greatest novel in the North American tradition, Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick, which is about a White Whale, the hunting of which ends in bringing down
the whaling ship, symbolic of nature rebelling against and bringing down capitalism.
Stated with genius and amazing foresight in the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Bourgeois
society “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor . . . in the icy water
of egotistical calculation.”
The pipeline will run underneath the Missouri River, source of water to 8 million people.
And of course, the fossil fuel will accelerate climate change, despite being obsolete inas-
much as the technology of renewable energy is rapidly outstripping carbon based fuels
— not fast enough, however, for the fossil fuel oligarchs.
A core ecosocialist concept: the visionary guidance toward making an ecologically integral
future starting with the immediacy of the present.
For purposes of argument we would set aside Canada here, though it would be reasonable
to assume it occupies an intermediate zone.

es ‘ AA ; X
&” YY ~~ w7Twer~
—~ _ a a 7
; atk
TRIBUTES
Joel Kovel, In Memoriam
by Michael Lowy
THE PASSING AWAY OF JOEL KOVEL is a great loss not only for us, his friends
and collaborators, but for the broad international ecosocialist movement, of
which he was a towering pioneer.
I first met Joel at an International Marxist Conference at the University
of Nanterre (Paris), convened in 2001 by my friends of the Journal Actuel
Marx. We immediately sympathized, and found a common interest: the ur-
gent need to bring together the “Red” and the “Green,” under the aegis of a
new concept: Ecosocialism. We felt that most of the Left had not yet under-
stood the need for an ecological turn, and we believed one should attempt to
contribute to such a reorientation. The Fourth International, to which I was
associated, had just decided to adopt an ecosocialist program, and Joel felt
encouraged by this decision.
Joel tells the story of our meeting in The Lost Traveller’s Dream, but, in
his unassuming and modest attitude, does not tell that the idea of writing an
International Ecosocialist Manifesto was his... |immediately agreed with the
proposition and we worked out the document together, after several drafts. As
he says, it was as sending a message in a bottle thrown into the sea...
Curiously enough some people picked the bottle, and we were able to
gather a meeting at Montreuil (outskirts of Paris) in 2007, with the help of
Ian Angus, and the support of the well known Peruvian indigenous leader
Hugo Blanco, who explained to us: “We, the indigenous communities in Lat-
in America, have been practising ecosocialism for centuries.” At this meeting,
which was enlivened by Joel’s enthusiasm and energy, it was decided to found
an Ecosocialist International Network (EIN) —a short-lived experiment, but

which had one great success: the Belem Manifesto. This Second International
Ecosocialist Manifesto, written in 2008 by Joel, Ian and myself, was signed
by hundreds of ecosocialists from forty countries, and distributed— with the
help of our Brazilian ecosocialist comrades—in Portuguese and English to
the participants of the World Social Forum in the Amazonian town of Belem
do Para (North of Brazil, 2009).
By that time Joel had already published his masterpiece, The Enemy of
Nature (2002), one of the most powerful ecological condemnations of capi-
talism ever written, a classic of ecosocialism for the generations to come. Dur-
ing all these years we remained in contact, by mail, but also by occasional
meetings, in Paris, in Brazil or in New York. A real friendship developed,
based on mutual understanding, and a common desire to build ecosocialism
as a network of ideas and action. During the last years he invested his gener-
ous energy in developing ecosocialism in the U.S.; his decision to convert to
Christianity brought us together in the interest for liberation theology. I re-
member one of the last times we met: it was when he organized, in a Church,
a projection of a film on Monsignor Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador,
murdered by paramilitary gangs for denouncing the brutal repression of the
popular movements.
I owe a great debt towards Joel, I learned much from his writings and was
inspired by his inflexible anti-capitalist commitment. When he wrote his au-
tobiography, I sent him a short notice for the back cover, which summarizes
the importance of his contribution to our movement:
“Bringing together radical spirituality, Marxist socialism
and an ecological cosmovision, Joel Kovel is an unrepentant
fighter against ‘the Enemy of Nature’ —and of Humanity:
Capitalism. By his thought and action, he is a pioneer of the
ecosocialist international movement. His dreams are open
windows on a different future.”
In an inscription in the copy of the book, which he sent me in 2017, he

called me “a companion for those insane times,” and signed “Joel the Dream-
er.” The times are insane indeed, but with the help of Joel’s Red and Green
message, the hope for a sane future is not lost.
If Life in the planet Earth is saved from the ecological catastrophe pro-
duced by capitalist insanity, Joel Kovel will be remembered as one of the first
who raised a prophetic call for radical change, a rational and spirited call for
ecosocialism. @
’

Joel Kovel Versus The New York Times
by Quincy Saul
“Drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead”
—William Blake
I] LIKE TO IMAGINE JOEL'S SPIRIT, in triumphant benevolence on the arc of

history, looking with the mercy of a good Christian upon the wretched and
irredeemable soul of The New York Times, when it too gives up its ghost in
the oncoming apocalypse which he prophesied and it prepares. “One is, after
all, known by one’s enemies,” he wrote about the NY Review," and so it
makes sense to re-read his recent obituary in this same light.
One close friend, John Clark, commented after reading the obituary: “I
remember talking to Joel years ago right after he canceled his subscription to
The New York Times. He said ‘I can’t take that much hegemony.” And his
daughter Molly wrote in a post on Facebook, “I can only imagine the mingled
response of pride and disdain with which my dear departed father would greet
his own obituary in 7he New York Times, an institution he had critiqued a
thousand times over his life.” And so it is owed to Kovel’s memory to reflect
upon what this central organ of empire has to say about its lifelong antagonist.
I imagine Joel speaking to the 7imes in the words of William Blake, whose
Proverbs of Hell are placed throughout this text as guideposts to navigate the
liberal inferno: “He who has suffer'd you to impose on him knows you.”
I remember one of the first things I learned from Joel Kovel, in a series of
study groups at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem: that you can measure the power of
ideas by the energy spent suppressing them. By that standard, his recent obituary

by Sam Roberts in the Times is testament to a life well lived, as it suppresses and/
or silences his most powerful contributions to humanity, even under the pretext
of honoring them. His obituary on first read seems not so bad; indeed isn’t it the
goal of all good citizens to lead a life fit for printing in this unparalleled paper of
record? But if we read between the lines, or if'we suffer from the lonely affliction
of actually reading books and/ot knowing history, then The New York Times
reminds us of the haunting quote by Walter Benjamin, that “not even the dead
will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”
Yet this essay isn’t written to rescue Joel Kovel’s memory; for that, I be-
lieve, is secure. His own words are recorded in a dozen books, including his
own memoir.” But for our own sakes, not only for Joel’s respect but for our
own — because the bell tolls for all of us—we should reflect on the fight he
waged over the course of his lifetime with this bourgeois institution par excel-
lence, and settle the score.
Part 1: From White Racism to Red Hunting in the Promised Land

OUR STORY BEGINS WITH Kovel’s first book, White Racism, which was celebrat-
ed by The New York Times, and nominated for a national book award.") To date
this is his most popular book, often the only book by Joel folks have heard of,
probably because he wasn’t a full-fledged revolutionary when he wrote it. But
it contains radical and uncomfortable truths which bear repeating, especially
those which were not acknowledged by the obituary. For instance, let’s recall
this passage written in 1984, which carries new gravity after Barack Obama's
eight years in power on the throne of U.S. empire:
“[O]ne might wonder whether the system will find some
way .... to muddle through the crisis without undergoing
any basic change. This would mean a removal to yet another
stage of abstraction and would signal the full triumph
of metaracism—a step in which the cultural superego,
capitalizing once more on strife, will incorporate strife
into itself, make structural what had been dynamic, turn
it out again in a new symbolic attenuation, and sublimate
the selves of men into still further reaches of technocratic
banality. This possibility, scarcely less unhappy than that of
fascism, would bear with it even more of that extroverted
aggression upon nature and other peoples...” (228)
Thus not only is white racism “built into the very character of Western Civi-
lization,”
: . >
as the Times
.
obituary deems fit for print, but something more too:
: ’ . .

it is capable of overcoming its own contradictions via a victory of metara-
cism... Metaracism attains victory by sublimating its internal antagonistic
contradictions into greater violence against nature and other peoples. I can
think of no better analysis or epitaph of the Obama administration, which
overcame white racism in the United States at the expense of a kill list, off-
shore drilling, record deportations, the invasion and destruction of Libya, the
entrenchment of the surveillance state, etc.
The publication of White Racism got Kovel invited into the lofty inner
circles of the New York intelligentsia, a role which he tried out but ultimately
could not abide by. He knew from Blake to “expect poison from the standing
water. As described in his memoir, The Lost Traveller’s Dream:
“T produced a dozen reviews for [The Sunday Book Review]
over the next decade... This was no more than a reaping
of the harvest of Psy to which many intellectuals of liberal
society are addicted. All it requires is an antenna for the
angst-ridden seams of our culture, a facility with the jargon of
subjectivism, and above all, the propensity to defer or blunt
any clear answer to our dilemmas. ...In other words, keep it
complicated, keep it vague and fuzzy, do not let the mind,
especially of the young, seize upon any clear understanding
of the world such as might conduce to a transformative
course of action.” (162)
He wrote one other popular book, A Complete Guide to Therapy, which
The New York Times reviewed positively, with one interesting twist that he re-
counts in his memoir.) But as Kovel became increasingly involved in the anti-
war movement and the radical psychoanalytic community, he gradually and
then suddenly moved away from his spot in the limelight. This culminated in
his next book— The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst—a
both daringly personal and audaciously “transhistorical” work, in which he
ruthlessly attacked the bourgeois assumptions of the mental health industry,
and ‘came out’ as a radical seeking a synthesis of Marx and Freud. Needless to
say, this didn’t endear him to the central organ of the Empire State:
“As the celebrated psychoanalytic culture-critic stopped

being satisfied with laying out contradictions but insisted on
fundamental
— even revolutionary
— change, the invitations
from The New York Times Book Review faded like morning
dew, and the copious praise that had accompanied the arrival
of my first two books swiftly evaporated...” (167)
»

Not content to be merely ignored, Joel continued his diagnosis of the
deep personality structures and character types of the country and city he
lived in. One book which the Times obituary doesn’t mention at all is Red
Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making ofAmerica,
published in 1994, and it’s no mistake. This book identified the most salient
feature in U.S. history as anti-cOmmunism, and traced its roots to the Puri-
tan genocide of indigenous peoples of North America. It ended his career as
a member of the respected New York intellectual elite. This book was pre-
emptively “shredded” in The New York Times Sunday Book Review which
managed to miss the point entirely; and like his obituary, made him out to
be mistaken, confused, and even “obsessive,” since it could not deal with the
prophetic visionary he was becoming. As Kovel remembers:
“The Times took it seriously enough to run a second-page

review in the Sunday book section.... actually making up
some content in order to smear the work, the three years
of work embedded in it dutifully sinking like the proverbial
stone. ...its ruin was secured by the one-two punch of a sav-
age review.... followed by immediate removal from circula-
tion by publisher Harper Collins, prop., Rupert Murdoch. [5]
But as consolation, if the capitol of capitalism rejected that book, it was wel-
comed warmly in Havana by Fidel Castro himself, to whom Joel personally
presented a copy.
Part 2: From Nicaragua to Ecosocialism

THREE OTHER BOOKS which get no mention by the Times include In Nica-
ragua, Against the State of Nuclear Terror, and History and Spirit. Each are
path-breaking in their own right, on very different themes and in very dif-
ferent styles, and each deserves much greater attention than I can give them
here. And yet a thread runs through them, one which would find culmination
in the political world-view and movement to which Kovel would dedicate
decades of his life: Ecosocialism.
The author of Kovel’s obituary describes him as a “zealot” for the causes he
believed in, “even if, as in the case of ecosocialism, its very definition and the col-
lateral demand for an appealing alternative to capitalism were not self-evident.”
“Funny how it comes down to taste,” as Kovel wrote in The Age ofDesire.
) For such is the prevailing pathology at The New York Times that an alterna-
tive to capitalism will never appeal to them. (Perhaps it will be appealing to
them, as the saying goes, once all the rivers rin dry and they realize that they
cannot drink money.) If The New York. Times was able to acknowledge Kovel

as a founding father of ecoscialism, they missed a much bigger point— that
the future will be ecosocialist, or there will be no future!"*! Or as the subtitle of
Kovel’s book on ecosocialism has it: “The end of capitalism or the end of the
world?” If mass extinction and perpetual war are not enough, if world-record-
breaking inequality, ocean acidification, methafie plumes, and melting poles
do not add up to the need for an alternative, then nothing will. No matter
that radical anti-capitalist mass movements are present on every continent.
We really shouldn't expect The New York Times research staff to find evidence
of an appealing anti-capitalist alternative—after all they are still too busy
finding evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Meanwhile the allegation that Joel didn’t clearly define ecosocialism is
rather laughable. | am reminded of Shakespeare; “Bring in the crows to peck
the eagles!””! Where does mockery end and defamation of character begin?
Time will tell: Zhe Enemy ofNature has been translated into Turkish, Japanese,
Spanish and Chinese. While it’s tempting to shame the author of his obituary
by repeating his fantastically garbled “definition” of ecosocialism (which is
probably a hasty regurgitation of what the author skimmed on Wikipedia),
tempting to mock it word by word, it would be a lousy point of departure,
unworthy of Kovel’s vision. “Eagles don't hunt mosquitoes,” as Hugo Chavez
insisted. Curious readers are encouraged to return to the source.
Part 3: Overcoming Zionism

WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT in Kovel’s obituary is the silence. He dedicated
over a decade of his life to criticizing the state of Israel and its founding
ideology, Zionism. About this, the obituary says not a single word, except
to grudgingly acknowledge the title of his book on his subject, Overcoming
Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. The imperial
hubris of The New York Times may not recognize its own gravedigger in the
doctrine of ecosocialism. But it does acknowledge a mortal enemy in Kovel’s
anti-Zionism, about which it is wisely silent. And I would like to thank Sam
Roberts and The New York Times for helping me to understand this; that
Kovel’s most powerful contribution has been to strike at the heart of the set-
tler colonial pathology around which the New World Order turns. To say
what no one else dares: that racist states don’t have the right to exist.
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! did far better than The New York
Times in commemorating Kovel’s life, by quoting him on her show about this
most taboo of subjects:
“And I feel that the notion of Zionism, as that there is this
kind of destiny of the Jewish people to have their own state,

is just a wrong idea. And it’s an idea that requires signing
on to imperialism. It means signing on to ethnic cleansing.
It means—despite everything that has been said about it,
it means basically becoming a racist situation, where you're
oppressing an indigenous population and depriving them
of their right to existence,.and then thinking that somehow
you can go ahead and have a decent life on that basis. And
you can't, in my view. And I join hands with those people
who feel that the time has come to basically think of Israel
in the same category as South Africa, as a state that just has
gone wrong and needs replacement.”
Of course this cannot be said in modern, polite and liberal Western society.
Kovel lost his endowed faculty position in the Alger Hiss chair at Bard Col-
lege for this, a story he recounts in his memoir and in more detail in an essay
titled “Sacked by Bard.” We can imagine Blake counseling Kovel through
his tough times with Leon Botstein and Michael Lerner: “Always be ready
to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.” In addition to losing
his job, Overcoming Zionism was banned by its distributor, and to this day
it only circulates thanks to publishers in the U.K. and Canada. Talk about a
rave review! :
In the light of this censorship, and in the darkness of the ongoing
atrocities carried out by what Max Blumenthal calls the “Jewish State in Israel
and the Levant” (JSIL), it is very much worthwhile to reprint and reread
Kovel’s “Theses on Anti-Zionism” (198-208):
1. The most basic principle is respect for the inherent dignity of each
and every person....
2. “Basic principles” incorporate the categories of responsibility and
justice...
3. No group of people is inherently better than any other, or “special”

in any way....
4. Noamount of previous suffering can legitimate present injustice. .. .

5. No state has an absolute right to exist; hence all states are to a degree,
illegitimate...
6. States may either be relatively or absolutely illegitimate. . . .

7. A racist state is absolutely illegitimate. . . .
‘
8. Israel, as a Jewish state, is a racist state... .

9. ‘The problem, then, is with Zionism and the Jewish state as such, and
not its illegal occupation of the West Bank. . . .
10. Israel does not have the right to exist. . . .
11. The point, however, is to change it, which is to say, to dissolve the
Jewishness of the state. For this, one does not smash or trample Zi-
onism; one overcomes it, and frees people from its chains.
Today, Kovel’s theses have acquired a historic and moral weight almost
akin to Lenin’s April Theses, and share a symmetrical history. When first
advanced, they were ridiculed by enemies, scorned by moderates, and
repressed even by allies.'"° 'In time these theses are becoming clear and dear to
friends, common sense to moderates, and in need of urgent discussion even
by enemies.''"! First impossible, then inevitable: Today as The New York Times
blames the Palestinians for being massacred, and as the Israeli cabinet meets
in an underground bunker, Kovel’s theses urge us to turn a genocidal massacre
into revolutionary transformation. This Bolshevik of Anti-Zionism counsels:
A Single Democratic State and Revolution! “Zionist power, like any other,
evolves and devolves. Victory depends on understanding its ways and seizing
the emergent moment to actively intervene in order to hasten downfall.” (322)
A postscript is necessary however, underscoring the urgency of these theses
and elevating them to a new level of explanatory power. Kovel finished writing
Overcoming Zionism while living and working in South Africa, and this
historical comparison between the racist states of Israel and apartheid South
Africa anchors his analysis, as expressed in his interview with Amy Goodman.
But as the years went by, his perspective changed, along with that of many
others. Like Lenin he also aspired to be “as radical as reality itself” Because
while apartheid South Africa depended absolutely on black labor, Israel has
no more use for Palestinians, who have been replaced long ago by African and
Asian labor. Thus the most relevant historical parallel to modern Israel has
become not apartheid South Africa, but something else. Gaza is a concentration
camp, and this is no longer a metaphor but a reality which The New York
Times celebrates in a way that would make Goebbels proud—by blaming it
on the Palestinians. “The world now demands that Jerusalem account for every
bullet fired at the demonstrators,” writes Bret Stephens for the Times, “without
offering a single practical alternative for dealing with the crisis.”""” And so the
only just alternative becomes more practical with every passing day. “One of
my fondest wishes,” wrote Kovel in his memoir, “has been to live long enough
to see the collapse of Israel. I don’t see this happening in my lifetime, but the
freedom to dream is itself life-giving...” (322)
»

Part 4: From Psychohistory to Prophecy
“DR. KOVEL CAME IN LAST WITH THREE.” The Times obituary ends on this
note as if to say that Kovel’s life ended in failure; as if his career could be
summarized and concluded with the fact that he lost to Ralph Nader in
the Green Party nomination for President in 2000. But if Joel Kovel died
at eighty-one, he is alive and well in 2018. In 2001, he wrote with Michael
Léwy an Ecosocialist Manifesto in which they posed the question of the
possibility of “an ecosocialist international.” In the fall of 2017, over one
hundred delegates from nineteen countries came together in the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela and launched the First Ecosocialist International. The
imperial bourgeois intelligentsia has no awards or recognitions to offer for
this kind of world-historic accomplishment. So much the better. In the last
six months, the seeds of this new International have been sown from coast to
coast; from New York City to Los Angeles, and from New Orleans to Jackson,
Mississippi.
For the truth is that the mind which has passed from this world was one
of the most important ever produced by New York City. That surely sounds
like an exaggeration. But this psychohistorian knew how the world turns. In
comparing Joel’s life and legacy to those of his more-famous contemporaries
(for instance Woody Allen), and in reflecting upon how they are remembered
in this capitalist city, we may recall the words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra:
“[W]here the market-place begins, there begins also the
noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-
flies. In the world even the best things are worthless without
those who make a side-show of them: these showmen, the
people call great men. Little do the people understand what
is great— that is to say, the creator. But they have a taste for
all showmen and actors of great things. Around the creators
of new values revolves the world: — invisibly it revolves.”
The New York Times celebrates the showmen of the end of the world. And woe
unto them, for they have their consolation! (Luke 6:24) Beside them, Kovel
moves invisibly, a creator of new values. Stanley Diamond called him “one of
the few contemporary theorists who is capable of the grand synthesis of Marx
and Freud.” In ecosocialism, he is not only the co-founder of an international
movement, but his insight and exposition of the intrinsic value of nature is a
keystone to an arch connecting the revolutionary ideologies of the industrial-
ized world and the cosmovisions of indigenous peoples. In Israel-Palestine,
that tumor at the heart of the world’s soul, he is a doctor whose diagnosis of

cancer and praxis of care will only grow more powerful over time; not only for
One State and Revolution, but for healing both history and spirit.
Around such new values may a new world system be founded; so may
an ecosocialist mode of production emerge from the ruins of this patriarchal,
white supremacist, capitalist empire which The New York Times represents. If
humanity survives the gauntlet of mass extinction and world war, it will look
back upon Kovel as one of the greatest minds before the fall, a “genius activist
[who] only comes around every 500 years” as his friend Colia Clark wrote.
To this illustrious heritage, one can only add the snide and smug obituary in
The New York Times as further proof that he was a man ahead of his times; a
prophet without honor in his own country. Joel’s stature as a giant was clear
to those who spoke at his memorial at St. Mary’s church in Harlem. He has
been canonized by Reverend Billy, baptized by Reverend Earl Kooperkamp,
and eulogized as a prophet by Reverend Jim Forbes. As Blake knew and Kovel
too, “what is now proved, was once only imagined.”
To be honest, I had hoped that 7he Times wouldn't write him an obituary.
Then he could have joined the illustrious company of his favorite American
author, Herman Melville, who never got an obituary in the paper of record
of the city he was born in. Like Melville, Kovel wrote too close to the truth.
Captain Ahab is still at the helm of the Empire State; “his means are sane, his
motive and his object mad.” And so we conclude with another fond dream, that
The New York Times may go down like the Pequod, representative of capitalist
society, drowned in the rising tides it brought upon itself in a hopeless war
against nature—and the final sick soul of liberalism will, before drowning,
nail the wings of the sky-hawk of Zionism to the masthead, “his imperial beak
thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab,” to be
swallowed up forever by the all-forgiving oceanic agape.''*) Amazing grace!
P. S. Not that we should leave our dreams to chance. His daughter Molly told me a story that
once, many years ago, she got into an argument with her father about the timetable of revolu-
tion. She believed that it was right around the corner, while Joel was less optimistic, insisting
it was still a ways off. He cautioned her with patience, but hedged his bets, requesting that just
in case he was wrong, she save him a bomb for The New York Times. William Blake insisted
that “a dead body, revenges not injuries,” but he also reminded us that “the busy bee has not
time for sorrow.”
[Counterpunch, June 2018]
NOTES
1. “No paranoia, this. I once had a patient close to the directorate of the New York Review
who reported after attending a dinner amongst them that my name had come up,

sparking a general outburst of hostility. One is, after all, known by one's enemies.” See
Kovel, The Lost Traveller's Dream: A Memoir (New York: Autonomedia, 2017), 176.
Quoted extensively in this essay. In form or content there is not another book quite
like it. A lesser man would have made himself look better; a great man shines humbly
and invincibly through its pages. Blake again: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the
crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”
Even today it remains probably his most appreciated book in the mainstream, to Joel's
expressed confusion. “To this day I remain amazed the book was so well-received, given
the shabbiness ofits theoretical framework.” See Kovel, The Lost Traveller’s Dream, 63.
“Praised by The New York Times, A Complete Guide to Therapy was the most successful
of my works in terms of sales and foreign editions — and the only one written with
commercial success in mind, the goal being to raise funds to send Jonathan and Erin
to college. There was one catch. The original title, A Critical Guide to Therapy, was
nixed by the Book of the Month Club, which otherwise loved the book and wanted to
buy 25,000 copies — provided I changed one and only one word: 'Critical.' This had to
go, since no book ever sold in the United States with that word in the title. So it was to
be a Complete Guide, or no deal. How dare they! I moped and groused, I cursed the
damnable pragmatism that defiled our culture, and concluded in about half an hour...
well, everyone has his price, has to choose his proper battlefield, etc, and gave in. Happily,
the Germans would only take it for translation in the original version, giving me the
satisfaction of seeing Kritische Leitfaden zur Psychoterapie published by the culture that
gave humanity the Third Reich.” See Kovel, The Lost Traveller's Dream, 148.
The Lost Traveller's Dream, 67, 271.
Sam Roberts, “Dr Kovel, A Founder of Ecosocialism, is Dead at 81,” The New “York
Times, May 4, 2018.
“Why fret at all, considering that I had it, as they said, made? No, that was out of the
question, less for political, moral, or intellectual reasons than because I found it disgusting.
Funny how it comes down to taste, which is about as concrete as one can get.” See Kovel,
The Age ofDesire: Case Histories ofa Radical Psychoanalyst (New York: Pantheon, 1981),
31;
Joel Kovel, “The Future Will be Ecosocialist — Because Without Ecosocialism there will
be No Future,” Ecosocialist Horizons, November 27, 2011, http://ecosocialisthorizons.
com/2011/11/the-future-is-ecosocialist/, accessed January 14, 2019.
Coriolanus, Act 3, Scene 1
“For when Overcoming Zionism was published in 2007, I would guess that no more
than 1% of Americans would have affirmed the argument for One State put forth by that
book. All kinds of peoples, friends as well as foes, were advising me that the doggedness
mentioned just above amounted in this case to a barking at the moon of an endlessly
remote desire. Nobody, that is ‘really’ wanted anything other than two separate states.
But what is real about 'really'? I regarded this then, and still do, as a manifestation of
what Sartre called the 'practico-inert,’ that sedimentation of thought in order not to
confront either the nightmare or the hope of history, thought unable to see beyond
the dead-end of a Jewish State (which by the way, Sartre, reeling from the Holocaust,
endorsed.) But there is a dustbin for really bad ideas, and more and more people are
ready to add one of the worst, Zionism, to it.” (326) There is even a notable symmetry
between those who counseled unity of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in early 1917, and

those who counseled unity with liberal Zionists in 2007, at the very moment when a clear
break was most necessary; and more — when what was necessary was the foundation of
a new kind of state altogether, based on a radical praxis rooted in the most sophisticated
philosophical inquiry and expressed in the most practical direct action. Kovel explains:
“...the argument that was used against publication of Overcoming Zionism by liberals,
namely, that putting forth radical views such as minewould undercut efforts by such as
Rabbi Lerner to build coalitions of well-meaning ‘spiritual progressives.’ To this I would
say, that such undercutting was exactly my intention insofar as such coalitions included
a dominant strand of 'soft anti-Zionism,’ which means, logically, soft Zionism as well,
the kind of wishy-washy 'I feel your pain’ pabulum that blunts the ruthless criticism
necessary to do the job and benefits the Jewish State. With declining support for Israel
across the world, the validity of an unrelenting critique of Zionism can no longer be
doubted. The history of Israel's conquest of Palestine is a harsh, blood stained history, and
the more people realize this, the more ready we will be to bring a just end to all forms of
racism.” See Kovel, The Lost Traveller’s Dream, 328.
it, “To be sure, the wealth and power commanded by the Zionist power structure remains
immense, and extends across the entire range of state and civil society. But the times are
definitely, and structurally, changing. It was sheer joy to see my good friend Phil Weiss’
web-zine, MondoWeiss, reporting in 2014 the results of aBrookings Poll that 34 percent
of a sample of more than one thousand Americans in 2013 now affirm a One State
Solution for Israel/Palestine, a rise from 24 percent over the past year, while 39 percent
affirm the Two State Solution, unchanged from the last year. No less remarkable, fully 71
percent of respondents affirm a One State Solution in the event that a Two State Solution
is not possible — which Overcoming Zionism among other works, argues is precisely the
case.” See Kovel, The Lost Traveller’s Dream, 326.
12, Bret Stephens, “Gaza's Miseries Have Palestinian Authors,” The New York Times, May
16, 2018.
Se “But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the
Indian at the mainmast leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with
long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over
the destroying billows they almost touched; — at that instant, a red arm and a hammer
hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet
faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck
downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding
Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the
hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged
savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of
heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole
captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan,
would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and
helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a
sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the
sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” (Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, as
quoted by Kovel, “Suffering a Sea-change” in Capitalism Nature Socialism (June 2010).

Welcome to Golgonooza!!
Joel Stephen Kovel
(27 August 1936-30 April 2018)
by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro
LOSING A DEAR FRIEND is scarring and leaves an unfillable void. Joel was (or,
rather, is, for he will live among us in other ways) an open, thorough, and in-
dependent thinker; an ecosocialist luminary; a fountain of practicable political
ideas; a committed Marxist Christian revolutionary; an anti-Zionist activist;
and among the most sensitive, understanding, perspicacious, and generous
people I have ever had the good fortune of knowing. Joel met me at the Marx-
ism 2000 conference, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, organized
by the Rethinking Marxism Editorial Board. That is to say, he actively sought
out my session and witnessed my paper presentation. He must have thought
me worthwhile meeting because he introduced himself in what I came to know
as his usual unassuming, benevolence-radiating manner. He invited me to join
the New York Editorial Group of Capitalism Nature Socialism, as recounted
elsewhere (Engel-Di Mauro 2014, 3; as a corrigendum, it was in November
2000). I had just completed my PhD and had begun consciously embarking
on the arduous road of recovery from a process of manufacturing competitive,
marketable subjects reduced to abstruse scholasticism, unable to communicate
even the plainest ideas to an audience wider than a handful of experts. His
invitation to a project much larger—and definitely more meaningful—than
an academic undertaking was therefore irresistible. He had not yet taken up
1. Golgonooza was poet William Blake's mythical city of art and science. I fancy Joel residing in such a
place of marvel and intellectual fulfillment, alongside Los, the prophet city-smith.

editorial responsibility for Capitalism Nature Socialism, but since the early
1990s, he had become a prominent contributor in the development and re-
finement of, among other things, red-green perspectives, re-assessments of
Marx relative to ecological perspectives, and dialectics in terms of praxis.
Joel was a prolific writer with a capacious mind and with an unquenchable
thirst for learning. Intellectual complacency could not have been further from
his state of being. As he put it in his own words, “Nothing, you see, will ever be
good enough for this unquiet soul” (Kovel 2017, 35). And an unquiet soul he
certainly was. Emerging from a background in the biophysical sciences, he de-
veloped a sophisticated command of social theory and his work encompassed
the most disparate range of questions and fields of knowledge. From Freudian
psychiatry, he had by the 1960s redirected his attention increasingly to issues
of white racism intrinsic to western societies, and then to the issues of milita-
rism and nuclear armament development, Sandinista Nicaragua, and the po-
litical persecution of leftists in the U.S. However, a major change, aside from
his later religious epiphany, occurred that shaped his political commitment
until his departure from this world. By 1988 and coinciding with the found-
ing of this journal, he had arrived at a moment of “Climate Revelation” upon
reading of human-induced global warming in the scientific literature (Kovel
2017, 255). It was only a matter of time before he would reach out to Capital-
ism Nature Socialism. He did so by the early 1990s, and this journal became
a main platform for his work on Marxism and ecology (e.g. Kovel 1995). In
Capitalism Nature Socialism, he had found a (temporary) home, after a much
vexed intellectual journey that had eventually led him away from the com-
modified, alienating, and sometimes even life-destroying world of institutional
psychiatry and medicine. Through the journal, he would engage in frank and
constructive debate with authors and thereby also develop and articulate such
key concepts and theories as prefiguration (drawing from anarchism; Kovel
2001), Marxist ecology (Kovel 2011), and intrinsic value (Kovel 2014).
Over seventeen years of sometimes intense collaboration followed our
first encounter, punctuated by life-changing discussions and joint political
actions. Much of our work initially focused on the management of this jour-
nal, especially when Joel assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief in 2003, due
to James O’Connor’s deteriorating health. Our temporary physical distance
from each other (I had taken up a post in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, un-
til 2005) proved to be immaterial and I felt honoured when he asked me
to mind the journal during his South African sojourn. It was the start of a
gradual preparatory process culminating in my current role in the journal,
after my eventual return to the U.S. Northeast. During the period of his

tenure (2003-2012), Joel, in spite of his academic marginalization, expanded
the remit of the journal, moulding it into a forum where ecosocialism could
be expressly developed as a priority. This explicit political positioning was
an important turning point. It is thanks to Joel’s efforts that we now have a
scholarly ecosocialist journal, apparently the orfly of its kind (I hope to be
corrected). But this turn did not entail any narrowing ofscope or perspective.
In fact, and in O'Connor's spirit, it was precisely the opposite. Joel always
insisted on ecumenicalism and he was especially adamant in giving space and
autonomy to ecofeminist scholars and activists as well as the perspectives of
state-free peoples. This was also consistently conveyed in his many writings
regaling the pages of this journal.
The journal was only one aspect of our relationship, though. Joel increas-
ingly became a mentor to me (and many others), intellectually and emotively.
Intellectually, he showed me ways of reconciling disparate socialist and femi-
nist politics and frameworks into the sort of ecumenical ecosocialism that hap-
pily coincided with my proclivities for seeking interconnections and bridges.
Reading his works enlightened me to other lenses through which to read
Marx’s works, lenses that open up possibilities and remain faithful to a histori-
cal materialist dialectics. His insistence on the crucial importance of gendered
and racialized power relations deeply resonated with me. But Joel was also a
superb writer, whose style I can only hope to be able even just to approximate,
one day. One of the many memorable quotes from him is the following:
In capitalism, having masters being: you “are” nothing unless
you “have” something, and if you have everything, like Don-
ald Trump, you can be (and do) anything. (Kovel 1991, 216)
This about Trump, stated so long ago, is now at once bitterly hilari-
ous, inadvertently prescient, and terribly tragic. I miss his wit, his daring,
his sharpness. Emotively, then, aside from giving some brilliant laughs, he
helped me overcome fears of writing (writing was among his predilections) by
his sheer example. I remain in awe at how he could compose widely encom-
passing, deeply thought, eye-opening manuscripts within a few days. More
importantly, he facilitated my gaining more political, not just intellectual self-
confidence. He also helped reopen the doors for me to retrieve spiritual un-
derstandings of the world that I had long suppressed and feared. The process
ironically eventuated into the reinvigoration of my atheism, but endowed
such atheism with greater openness and receptivity towards other ways of be-
ing and understanding, or so I hope, coupled with a sharper, more dialectical
sensibility regarding the self (more on this below).

We had surprisingly much in common, despite the chasm between us in
cultural background and life experiences. Aside from more or less converging
intellectually, we both fouhd it important to widen the modes of expression in
the journal, including by means of poetry. We shared our deep respect for state-
free peoples and just as deep disgust for settler colonialism and its apologist
ideologies, including Zionism. The issue of Zionism was particularly pressing
for Joel as a part of hastening ecosocialism. He viewed, rightly, the Israeli state
as a state gone terribly wrong, with its inherently racist (if not genocidal) for-
mative underpinnings. The solution lay in its replacement with a substantively
democratic one-state solution (Kovel 2007). For this, he was viciously attacked
and castigated, especially in the U.S., where his tireless efforts at combating
Zionism continue to be censured even posthumously (witness his obituary in
The New York Times, where his critiques of Zionism are virtually omitted).
Our substantive overlaps in political philosophy also led to several efforts
that have positively shaped my life irrevocably. This includes involvement in
the, alas, largely defunct Ecosocialist International Network, which enabled
me to understand the limits of what is still much too fashionable in move-
ment organizing (social media networks and horizontality without much ac-
countability), especially in liberal democracies. Then, after a lunch meeting in
Woodstock (NY) ona very sunny summer day, Joel discussed with me the idea
of founding an ecosocialist organization in the U.S. It was to be Ecosocialist
Horizons, officially established in 2011, with the crucial assistance of Deborah
Engel-Di Mauro and the late William Schaap. Quickly afterwards, Quincy
Saul, often with Kanya D’Almeida’s help, became central to raising funds and
organizing ecosocialist convergences that have helped solidify the organization
and diffuse ecosocialist ideas, including Joel’s, far and wide. Thanks to Joel, I
had the great honour of meeting Quincy and Kanya, among many other fine
comrades, when he introduced me to Scientific Soul Sessions, a perspective-ex-
panding, life-affirming Afro-Asian Marxist feminist ecosocialist collective led
by the late Fred Ho and largely concentrated on national self-determination
struggles and the task of freeing U.S. political prisoners.”! Among the major
outcomes were magnifying existing efforts at sensitizing the public on political
prisoners, helping the freeing of some inmates from the blatant torture of soli-
tary confinement, and the adoption by many inmates in Pennsylvania prisons
of Joel's The Enemy of Nature as a primary source of reading. Quincy’s and
Joel's efforts are among those leading to another breakthrough, the founding
2. Out of this came the co-publicationbyEcosocialist Horizons and PM Press of the collected writings—
edited by Fred Ho and Quincy Saul—of Russell Maroon Shoatz, imprisoned Black Liberation Army
General, tortured with solitary confinement for thirty-three years, arrested on spurious charges that would
not have held up in any serious courtroom (Ho and Saul 2013).

of the First Ecosocialist International in Veroes, Yaracuy, Venezuela, in 2017.
We can only wish that Joel could have been there with us on that wonderful,
celebratory moment. And these are only the more salient examples of what
Joel enabled me to accomplish with him.
Joel’s worldview was very close to mine, bét we also had major differ-
ences. It would be odd were this not to be so. One issue was the notion of
intrinsic value, as a way to wrest ourselves away from capitalist logic, which is
based on both use- and exchange-yalue. In Joel’s words,
Values do not exist in nature but in the mind of a natu-
ral creature. Let us add to this mind or, to be more exact,
strengthen it, by recognizing an I-V [intrinsic value] that is
already present and allow it to enter into the interplay be-
tween U-V [use-value] and X-V [exchange-value] ... Iwould
define I-V as an assertion that we should value nature for
itself, irrespective of what we would do to it —value it in-
trinsically and thereby as a function ofits inherent right—a
right which must be fought for and so is established as a
dynamic factor in the struggle to undo the curse of accumu-
lation. (Kovel 2014, 18)
Some might argue against intrinsic value, but this would also miss the
point, in some ways. Joel’s search for an alternative value system needs to be
grounded in an overall attempt to bridge Marx's ideas about the false spiritu-
ality proffered through capitalist relations with the value systems and the sort
of spirituality frequent in state-free (or Indigenous Peoples’) worldviews (or
the wider notion of cosmovisions). Intrinsic value is one way of reconciling
Marxism with spirituality in general and with the myriad cosmovisions of
many peoples worldwide. On account of such major political ramifications,
the question of intrinsic value cannot be brushed aside so easily. Joel is one
of those thinkers we must thank at the very least for insisting on bringing the
problem to our attention.
Another major point of departure from Joel is with respect to my views
on religion, which is shared likely by most leftists, Marxist and otherwise.
The matter, however, has never been terribly simple or resolvable by alluding
to mind-altering substances. As Marxist activist and psychoanalyst Ian Parker
has pointed out, under the keyword “Spirituality,”
The journey [to Christianity, such as Joel’s] does not neces-
sarily lead away from revolutionary struggle, but can deepen
it even where there are some dramatic conversions from one

“religion” to another, conversions that enable the spiritual
suffering to turn into protest. (Parker 2017)
.
Though I do not share (or even really grasp) Joel’s spiritual affinity with Christ
and much less comprehend his conversion to Episcopalian Christianity in
2012, I do, thanks to him, appreciate the role spirituality has in a transition
to ecosocialism. More than this, Joel taught me to fear not my own spiritual-
ity and, rather than repress it, to embrace it as a feeling of being beyond the
self, as a positive way of relating to others (humans or not) and thereby help
build ecosocialist sensibility. After all, the majority of people worldwide show
explicit spiritual inclinations often articulated by way of religion and specifi-
cally monotheism. This is emphatically not to my liking, but the enormous
weight of such a fact must be confronted and addressed constructively, not
dismissively.
But this implies a kind of instrumentalism on my part. Joel felt his con-
version deeply and I could only respect his courageous decision. A major
factor was his resolve to emancipate himself from Judaism, with its tribalism
and its foundational and self-congratulatory notion of chosen people. In this,
Jesus inspired Joel not only as a historical revolutionary but also as a Jew who
was able to overcome his Jewishness. The conversion must be situated in Joel’s
social context, one that was highly damaging to his spirit. It also cannot be
underlined enough that he identified as a Marxist to the end (Kovel 2017,
173). Christianity for him was scarcely oppositional to Marxism. It meant
selfless love, a state of being foundationally inimical to any religious hierar-
chies and apologetics for social inequalities. In the example of Jesus lay, for
Joel, the possibility of dissolving the egoic self into universal humanity, and
thereby the universe, with human nature becoming intimately felt as part of
nature. This is the overcoming of the multiple dimensions of capitalist alien-
ation Marx wrote about, and, Joel would say, the notion of alienation and its
relationship to spirituality is an important and downplayed part of Marx’s
thought. Joel therefore thought such principles should be the basis for redi-
recting Marxism (Kovel 2017, 194), especially as alienation is directly linked
to the destruction of spirit (Kovel 1991, 3).
On a couple of occasions, Joel confided to me his experience of rapture
(an example of which is to some extent recounted in Kovel 2017, 182), of
an extra-corporeal feeling of great intensity inexplicable by standard scientific
accounts. As a psychiatrist, he knew well what such episodes meant and im-
plied. The background to his late-life transition is complex, but it was already
laid out by the late 1970s and concretized by the late 1980s, as he found

his spiritual calling in the Liberation Theology of Sandinista Nicaragua. His
conclusions were formally explicated in 1991 in his History and Spirit, a most
remarkable volume where he attempts to address spirituality and even the
possibility of a supernatural being in ways that avoid degenerating into the-
ocracy or genocidal nationalism. Whether the argument is convincing or not
is beside the point. What needs to be appreciated is that Joel pursued clarity
by “taking an argument to the limit, neither fearing [his] own conclusions
nor any conflict with authority” (Kovel 2017, 133). One may disagree with
his conclusions, but it is nevertheless important to come to terms with the
spirituality that millions of people feel in one way or another, including Joel’s.
Without such a grasp and the development of political strategies to address
spirituality in life-affirming capitalism-overcoming ways, ecosocialist revolu-
tionary potentials will be scuppered.
There is much that I and many others owe Joel and much that can,
should, and doubtless will be written in praise of his exemplary life, filled
with positive contributions to other people’s lives, and with many intellectual
and political accomplishments. Yet, it is impossible not to end my all too
brief homage to Joel without quoting William Blake, Joel’s favorite poet. If
the reader may indulge me, I would then like to celebrate Joel and start heal-
ing my grief over his passing by sharing with you the final two stanzas from
Blake’s On Another’s Sorrow (1789):
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O! He gives to us His joy
That our grief He may destroy;
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
Ecosocialists such as I may have lost the Lost Traveller, but certainly not his
Dream. @
REFERENCES
Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore. “A More than Twenty-Fifth Anniversary for More than a Journal.”
Capitalism Nature Socialism 25, no. 1 (QO) 19).
Ho, Fred, and Quincy Saul, eds. Maroon the Implacable. The Collected Writings of Russell
Maroon Shoatz. Oakland: PM Press and Ecosocialist horizons, 2013.

Kovel, Joel. History and Spirit. An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1991.
Kovel, Joel. “Ecological Marxism and Dialectic.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 6, no. 4 (1995):
Biles, Il,
Kovel, Joel. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London:
Zed Books, 2001.
Kovel, Joel. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine.
London: Pluto Press, 2007.
Kovel, Joel. “On Marx and Ecology.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 22, no. 1 (2011): 4-17.
Kovel, Joel. “Ecosocialism as a Human Phenomenon.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 25, no.
1 (2014): 10-23.
Kovel, Joel. The Lost Traveller’s Dream. A Memoir. New York: Autonomedia, 2017.
Parker, Ian. Revolutionary Keywords

for a New Left. Alresford: Zero Books., 2017.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO:
Altfather
Thomas
Good
JoEL Kovet (1936-2018) was an American scholar and author, and known
as a founder of the worldwide ecosocialist movement. He was the author
of a dozen books, including White Racism (1984), and The Lost Traveller’s
Dream (2017). A former professor at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine
and at Bard College, and a life-long revolutionary activist, Kovel has lectured
on every populated continent, and his writings have been translated into
Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and Chinese. Originally trained as a physician
and psychoanalyst, Kovel played a leading role in the emerging ecosocialist
movement through his book, 7he Enemy of Nature (2002, 2007), editing the
journal Capitalism Nature Socialism (2003-2011), and co-founding organi-
zations such as Ecosocialist Horizons. His other books include History and
Spirit (1991) and Overcoming Zionism (2007). In the 1980s, he began work-
ing with radical priests in Nicaragua, and in 2012 converted to Christianity
through baptism into the Episcopal Church. m

pe ee
ABOUT THE EDITOR
D’Almeida
Kanya
PHOTO:
Quincy Saul, a cofounder of Ecosocialist Horizons with Joel Kovel, is the

co-editor of Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon
Shoatz (2013), the author of Truth and Dare: A Comic Book Curriculum for
the End and the Beginning of the World (2014), and Maroon Comix: Ori-
gins and Destinies (2018). His articles have appeared in Truthout, Telesur,
Counterpunch, The Africa Report, and more. He is also a musician and the
co-producer with Fred Ho of The Music of Cal Massey (2011).

214459 OS
BOOKS PUBLISHED BY
JOEL KOVEL
White Racism: A Psychohistory, New York, Pantheon, 1970,

2nd ed. Columbia University Press, 1984, 3rd ed., London,
Free Association Books. Nominated for National Book
Award in Religion and Philosophy, 1972.
A Complete Guide to Therapy, New York, Pantheon, 1976;

Paper book edition, 1977.
The Age of Desire: Case Histories of a Radical Psychoanalyst,

New York, Pantheon, 1981.
Against the State ofNuclear Terror, London, Pan, 1983. Re-

vised edition, Boston, South End, 1984.
The Radical Spirit: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Society, Free

Association Books, London, 1988. Distributed by Colum-
bia University Press. Selected as a Choice Outstanding Aca-
demic Book for 1989.
In Nicaragua, Free Association Books, London, 1988. Dis-

tributed by Columbia University Press.
History and Spirit, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Red Hunting in the Promised Land, New York: Basic Books,

1994.
The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of

the World? 2002, 2007, Zed Books, London.
Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in

Israel/Palestine, Pluto Press, February 2007.
The Lost Traveller’s Dream: A Memoir, Autonomedia 2017.

OTHER BOOKS BY 2LEAF PRESS
2Leaf Press challenges the status quo by publishing alternative fiction, non-fiction,
poetry and bilingual works by activists, academics, poets and authors dedicated to
diversity and social justice with scholarship that is accessible to the general public. 2Leaf
Press produces high quality and beautifully produced hardcover, paperback and ebook
formats through our series: 2LP Explorations in Diversity, 2LP University Books, 2LP
Classics, 2LP Translations, Nuyorican World Series, and 2LP Current Affairs, Culture
& Politics. Below is a selection of 2Leaf Press’ published titles.
2LP EXPLORATIONS IN DIVERSITY

Substance of Fire: Gender and Race in the College Classroom
by Claire Millikin
Foreword by R. Joseph Rodriguez, Afterword by Richard Delgado
Contributors Riley Blanks, Blake Calhoun, Rox Trujillo
Black Lives Have Always Mattered

A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives
Edited by Abiodun Oyewole
The Beiging ofAmerica:

Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century
Edited by CathyJ.Schlund-Vials, Sean Frederick Forbes, Tara Betts
Afterword by Heidi Durrow
What Does it Mean to be White in America?

Breaking the White Code of Silence, A Collection of Personal Narratives
Edited by Gabrielle David and Sean Frederick Forbes
Introduction by Debby Irving, Afterword by Tara Betts

2LP UNIVERSITY BOOKS
Designs of Blackness, Mappings in the Literature and Culture ofAfrican Americans
by A. Robert Lee
20TH ANNIVERSARY EXPANDED EDITION
2LP CLASSICS
Adventures in Black and White
by Philippa Schuyler
Edited and with a critical introduction by Tara Betts
Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Mathilda

by Mary Shelley, edited by Claire Millikin Raymond
2LP TRANSLATIONS
Birds on the Kiswar Tree
by Odi Gonzales, translated by Lynn Levin
Bilingual: English/Spanish
Incessant Beauty, A Bilingual Anthology

by Ana Rossetti, edited and translated by Carmela Ferradans
NUYORICAN WORLD SERIES

Entre el sol y la nieve: escritos de fin de siglo / Between the Sun and Snow: Writing at the
End of the Century
by Myna Nieves, translated by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
Our Nuyorican Thing, The Birth ofa Self-Made Identity

by Samuel Carrion Diaz, Introduction by Urayoan Noel
Hey Yo! Yo Soy!, 40 Years of Nuyorican Street Poetry, The Collected Works ofJesus
Papoleto Meléndez
LITERARY NONFICTION
No Vacancy; Homeless Women in Paradise
by Michael Reid
The Beauty of Being, A Collection of Fables, Short Stories & Essays

by Abiodun Oyewole
WHEREABOUTS: Stepping Out of Place, An Outside in Literary e Travel

Magazine Anthology
'
Edited by Brandi Dawn Henderson

ESSAYS
The Emergence of Ecosocialism, Collected Essays by Joel Kovel
PLAYS
Rivers of Women, The Play ¢
by Shirley Bradley LeFlore, photographs by Michael J. Bracey
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES/MEMOIRS/BIOGRAPHIES
An Unintentional Accomplice: A Personal Perspective on White Responsibility
by Carolyn L. Baker
Trailblazers, Black Women Who Helped Make America Great

American Firsts/American Icons, Vols.1 and 2
by Gabrielle David, Introduction by Chandra D. L. Waring, Edited by Carolina
Fung Feng
Mother of Orphans
The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Mans Widow
by Dedria Humphries Barker
Introduction by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
Strength of Soul
by Naomi Raquel Enright
Dream of the Water Children:

Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific
by Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd
Foreword by Velina Hasu Houston, Introduction by Gerald Horne
Edited by Karen Chau
The Fourth Moment: Journeys from the Known to the Unknown, A Memoir
by Carole J. Garrison, Introduction by Sarah Willis
POETRY
Ransom Street, Poems by Claire Millikin
Introduction by Kathleen Ellis
Wounds Fragments Derelict, Poems by Carlos Gabriel Kelly

Introduction by Sean Frederick Forbes
PAPOLiTICO, Poems of a Political Persuasion

by Jestis Papoleto Meléndez
with an Introduction by Joel Kovel and DeeDee Halleck

Critics ofMystery Marvel, Collected Poems
by Youssef Alaoui, Introduction by Laila Halaby
shrimp
by jason vasser-elong, Introduction by Michael Castro
The Revlon Slough, New and Selected Poems

by Ray DiZazzo, Introduction by Claire Millikin
A Country Without Borders: Poems and Stories of Kashmir

by Lalita Pandit Hogan, Introduction by Frederick Luis Aldama
2Leaf Press is an imprint owned and operated by the Intercultural Alliance of Artists
& Scholars, Inc. (IAAS), a NY-based nonprofit organization that publishes and
promotes multicultural literature.
. j Ny
FLORIDA @ NEW YORK

www. 2leafpress.org
.
a
THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, COLLECTED ESSAYS is the first book published post-
humously by author, activist and scholar, Joel Kovel, who passed away on April 30, 2018.
In 2001, Kovel co-authored “An Ecosocialist Manifesto,” launching a global movement
with ancient roots and prophetic horizons. Since that time, dozens of books and hundreds
of articles have been published on the subject as global warming, climate change, pollu-
tion, and ecological balance becomes one of the major concerns around the world today.
As a result of this growing awareness, ecosocialist movements and organizations have
emerged on every populated continent. Here for the first time, editor Quincy Saul has
compiled THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, a definitive collection of Kovel’s essays on
ecosocialism, chronicling the emergence of its theory and practice, which informs and
educates. From the original manifestos and declarations, to essays and undelivered
speeches, to classics from Capitalism Nature Socialism, the Journal of Ecosocialism,
which Kovel edited, THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM offers a 360-degree orientation
guide of an ecosocialist praxis written by one of its founding fathers.
“This book of essays, THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM by Joel Kovel, curated by

Quincy Saul, is a great gift during the moment of looming climate crisis and ecological
collapse. Brilliantly and compassionately written, the essays reflect the life work of a giant
among us and addresses the difficult work ahead.”~Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2015)
“In THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, Joel Kovel shows where we stand and
provides the building blocks for the bridge that must be constructed to keep us from plunging
into the precipice. Ecosocialism or barbarism!” -Nnimmo Bassey, director of the Health of
Mother Earth Foundation, author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the
Climate Crisis in Africa (2012) and Oil Politics - Echoes of Ecological Wars (2016)
“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an invaluable collection of essays charting

Joel Kovel’s development of a Marxist perspective on ecology and the simultaneous creation
of an ecosocialist movement. Time and again the essays demonstrate the breadth of Kovel’s
theory and the depth his experience as a psychotherapist gave to his work. Reading this book,
then, you meet not only a movement but a deeply committed, inspiring comrade. Don’t miss
him.” —Silvia Federici, professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University
JOEL KOVEL (1936-2018) was an American scholar and author,

known as a founder of the worldwide ecosocialist movement.
Author of a dozen books, he played a leading role in the
| emerging ecosocialist movement through his book, The Enemy
of Nature (2002, 2007). [PHOTO: Thomas Altfather Good]
QUINCY SAUL, a cofounder of Ecosocialist Horizons with Joel

Kovel, is the co-editor of Maroon the Implacable: The Collected
Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz (2013). His articles have
appeared in Truthout, Telesur, Counterpunch, The Africa Report,
and more. [PHOTO: Kanya D'Almeida]
aif LEAF
tePRESS
ISBN 9781940939957
2leafpress.org
PO Box 4378 ® Grand Central Station
New York, NY 10163-4378 |
9°781940"939957

The Emergence of Ecosocialism Kovel Joel 1936 2018

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Emergence of Ecosocialism Kovel Joel 1936 2018

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM

Collected Essays by Joel Kovel

Edited by Quincy Saul

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an invaluable collection

“This book of essays, THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM by Joel

“En este momento, no solo la supervivencia de la especie humana esta en

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a magnificent collection of

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an essential book for social-

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is the broadest, deepest and

“Prom climate change, to the theology of Bohme; from quantum mechanics,

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an excellent book in

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a must-read to understand

“The “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Second Notice” published

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a remarkable collection

“THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM, divided into two sections,

“The appearance of THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is a highly

“Here we have an astonishing array of essays, deep in analytical power, pro-

“La publicacién de THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM es un acon-

“The publication of THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM is an event.

“La copiosa y emergente compilacién de trabajos, reflexiones, ideas, propu-

“This copious and emergent compilation of works, reflections, ideas,

Edited by Quincy Saul

Introduction by Kanya D'Almeida

FLORIDA @ NEW YORK

2LEAF PRESS INC. isa

Copyright © 2019 Joel Kovel and Quincy Saul

Covert art: Hannah Allen

All royalties are being donated to:

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966492

1 O& © 7 G § “#A B& Bi

Published in the United States of America

First Edition | First Printing

BOGOR oP REPACESS 2 tin emicmccc. gee Met ee eae era ear en ee vv

INTRODUCTION? Falling IntoraDreams. 23 4. ee ecient

Ecological MarxisnrandDialecticoes wae 42 2a te a 13

The Struggle for Use-Value:

AL, ECOSOCIAIISUIMONMCStO wince sa ote eae ne ores tein aa Sy:

iheDialectic of Radical Ecolosies™ « s.2:: ager ter aeenac. 59

RACISHRAINCECOlOS Vasey cause, ohate,caer ers te tetas Wore naett aurea 13

AiMatenalism Worthyor Nature... 2. osc: eke Wise en wc ase 85

Grace Paley and the Dark Lives of Women................ 97 '

THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM

7 Liberties and*Gommions forrAll’ 2... = sie =e tee oe remenes T33

Thinking Like’aniECosocialiStcm. emcee

A Speech That Didn’t.Get Delivered: «5 sa... 22 seme ee 147

The Ecosocialist International Network................. q57

The Belem Ecosocialist, Declaration. . 252-220. .i20sn-6 161

The Ecosocialist International Network,

Dark Satanic Mills:

Sufferinga SCa-CHaNnSer mau ace 2 am eines mareenn er ene eee 203

Five Theses On ECOSOCIaISIMiee sem tat metioh oar 233

The Future Will Be Ecosocialist - Because

’ You Are The Light of the World

Religion, Spirituality and SOCialiSiieemree

‘ Ecosocialism as a Human Phenomenon..............-. 265

The Emergence of Ecosocialisiiine ....snhne eee 281

Joel Kovel Versus The New York Times .............+-.. 295

Welcome to Golgonooza... 2... ee eee cece eee eeeeeee. 307

COLLECTED ESSAYS BY JOEL KOVEL

BOOKS PUBNSHED BYAORL KOVEIA Ac tn. toe tian saue ah 32m

OTHER BOOKS BY ZLEAF PRESS 22.4: Pr Ama we 325

THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSOCIALISM