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Capitalism Nature Socialism

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Capital's Relentless Ecological

War
Michael Lwy
Published online: 18 Aug 2011.

To cite this article: Michael Lwy (2011): Capital's Relentless Ecological War, Capitalism
Nature Socialism, 22:3, 117-119
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2011.594560

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reduced while the surrounding ecosystem is protected and social well-being is

improved*simply cant be done. (165.)

This is news we have heard before; this excellent examination of efforts thus far to
address sustainable living in Green Gone Wrong cries out for guidance on how to set
green right.

Capitals Relentless Ecological War

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Michael Lowy
John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet,
Monthly Review Press, 2009.
John Bellamy Foster has emerged during the last years as one of the primary
contemporary eco-Marxist authors. His most recent book is an outstanding
contribution to an anti-capitalist ecological reflection. One doesnt have to agree
with all his arguments in order to recognize the importance of his achievements.
The book is composed of essays published on various occasions, partly rewritten
for this publication. In spite of the diversity of the topics discussed, it is a coherent
whole, unified by a Marxist method and by a revolutionary political perspective. It is
divided into three main sections: The Planetary Crisis, Marxs Ecology, and Ecology
and Revolution.
Bellamy Fosters diagnosis of the world ecological crisis is grim but realistic.
Capital is waging a war on the planet, leading to a global ecological devastation that
threatens the survival of life on the earth. How many human beings*or other living
species*will survive if the process of global warming leads, as several scientists
believe, to a rise in temperature of 88C? Time is running out. If the (capitalist) world
continues with business as usual for a few decades more, disaster is inevitable. In
fact, according to James Hansen (2006), chief climatologist of the U.S. National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), we have at most ten years*not ten
years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of
greenhouse gas emissions*if we want to avoid the tipping point of 28C where
climate change could spiral out of control. Hansen said that in 2006.
The responsibility for this dramatic situation is not human action but
capitalism, a juggernaut which knows no limits and behaves with destructive
uncontrollability*a system of incessant accumulation and consumption without
bounds that has appropriated, polluted, and degraded the global commons: oceans,
forests, atmosphere.

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There has been no lack of warnings, since Rachel Carsons 1962 book, Silent
Spring, denounced the chemical warfare on living beings and criticized a system that
worships the god of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit (81).
What has been the answer of the ruling classes to the growing deterioration? The
international conferences in Rio and Johannesburg failed to produce any significant
change, and the Kyoto agreements*based on carbon-trade and market mechanisms*had little or no effectiveness. The (capitalist) governments have concentrated
their efforts in the search for a technological fix to confront climate change:
carbon sequestration, geo-engineering, biofuels, nuclear power and even. . .
building higher seawalls! The result is that today we are in the midst of a global
environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is
threatened.
As a Marxist, Bellamy Foster believes that only an ecological revolution, which is
also a social revolution, can offer an alternative; in other words, the necessary global
ecological revolution, which requires a civilizational shift, can only occur as part of a
larger, socialist revolution. The term ecological revolution, as Bellamy Foster
acknowledges, is also used by partisans of ecological modernization, or a green
industrial revolution, and requires technological but no social changes. Wouldnt it
be preferable to use the term ecosocialism? In any case, Bellamy Foster has no doubt
that the transition to socialism and the transition to an ecological society are one
(227).
For this revolution, Marx is a very important source of inspiration. Far from
being productivist, Marx (1894, 754) was persuaded that the entire spirit of
capitalist production stands in contradiction. . .with the permanent conditions of life
required by the chain of successive generations. As he did in his book Marxs Ecology
(2000), Bellamy Foster shows that Marx diagnosed the metabolic rift between human
societies and the natural environment generated by capitalism and conceived the
socialist alternative as a world where the associate producers rationally regulate the
human metabolic relation with nature. (Im less persuaded by his interpretation of
the passage in the Grundrisse [409
410] where Marx celebrates the great civilizing
role of capitalism in opposition to pre-capitalist nature-idolatry.) According to
Bellamy Foster, Marxs main shortcoming was that he ignored the role of ecology in
the revolt against capitalism. I would add another criticism: Marx, and even more so
Engels, often defined the socialist revolution as the removal of capitalist relations of
production which had become obstacles*fetters*to the unbounded development of the productive forces created by capitalism itself. From a modern ecoMarxist perspective, it is obvious that the social-ecological revolution must transform
both relations and forces of production, as well as the pattern of consumption and, in
fact, the whole capitalist civilization.
One of the chapters of the book is devoted to an interesting discussion of James
OConnors thesis of the second contradiction in capitalism*that between the
forces and the conditions of production. While acknowledging OConnors

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formidable contribution to ecological socialism (209), Bellamy Foster argues that

this could become a too narrow, or economistic, perspective: as global warming
shows, capitalism is not only degrading the conditions of production, but the
preconditions of life itself on the planet. This is a discussion that should of course be
pursued in the pages of Capitalism Nature Socialism.
In the last chapter, Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,
one discovers an author seldom discussed in the Marxist debate on ecology: Hannah
Arendt. Bellamy Foster quotes from her book, The Human Condition, on the
connection between wealth accumulation and the growth of an enormous power of
destruction: we are able to destroy all organic life on earth (Arendt 1958, 248

273). The political conclusion is, however, formulated by Evo Morales, who Bellamy
Foster describes as one the worlds most eloquent defenders of the global
environment and indigenous rights. Morales maintains that there will be no
solution to the global ecological crisis as long as we do not change the capitalist
system for a system based on complementarity, solidarity and harmony between the
people and nature (2008, 769).
In conclusion, this is a book that cannot be ignored by any who believe in the
need to end capitalism before it destroys all organic life on earth.

References
Arendt, H. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Foster, J.B. 2000. Marxs ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Hansen, J. 2006. The threat to the planet. The New York Review of Books, July 13: 12
16.
Marx, K. 1894 Capital, Vol. 3.
Morales, E. 2008. Save the planet from capitalism. Links, Nov. 28: 769.

Money and Empowerment

Robin G. Isserles
Anaya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development,
Routledge, 2010.
In Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, Ananya Roy
adeptly tells the story of millennial development and the creation of Poverty
Capital through the lens of microfinance. Microfinance is a poverty alleviation
program created in 1976 by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist. Yunus
and his Grameen Bank (Grameen meaning village in Bangla) were recipients of
the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for their work lending small amounts of money to the
poor. Borrowers typically use such loans for small-scale enterprises like petty trading,