Beyond "green capitalism"

Monthly Review

Volumn 61, Issue 9, 2010, Pages 32-48

  Wallis, Victor ^a  

^a BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC   (United States)

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EID: 77950139209     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-061-09-2010-02_3     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. Speaking respectively of "large-scale industry" and "industrially pursued large-scale agriculture," Marx wrote, "the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil." Capital, vol.3, tr. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 950.
2. Communist Manifesto, section I.
3. Rick Wolff, "Economic Crisis from a Socialist Perspective," Socialism and Democracy, no.50 (July 2009), 3.
4. This section is drawn from my report written for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (www.rosalux.de), entitled The "Green Capitalist Agenda in the United States: Theory, Structure, Alternatives," published in English in Stephan Kaufmann & Tadzio Müller, Grüner Kapitalismus: Krise, Klimawandel und kein Ende des Wachstums (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2009) and to be posted on the foundation's Web site.
5. For a more extensive treatment see Victor Wallis, "Capitalist and Socialist Responses to the Ecological Crisis," Monthly Review 60, no.6 (November 2008).
6. Kenny Bruno and Joshua Karliner, earthsummit. biz: The Corporate Takeover of Sustainable Development (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2002), 30.
7. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), 192.
8. Alvin Powell, "Mining Exec: Coal Vital to Energy Mix," Harvard University Gazette, February 9, 2009.
9. For an introductory overview of this technology, see Craig Rubens, "Carbon Capture & Sequestration," earth2tech, January 2008, http://earth2tech.com/2008/01/07/faqcarbon-capture-sequestration/CCS. Apart from its unpredictable dangers (including suffocation by massive carbon dioxide inhalation in the event of a sudden accidental release), such still undeveloped technology is very costly and energy-intensive. For detailed study and discussion, based on the Dutch experience,
10. see Philip Vergragt CCS in the Netherlands (Boston: Tellus Institute, 2008).
11. The summary that follows is based, in part on Tom Blees, Prescription for the Planet The Painless Remedy for Our Energy and Environmental Crises (selfpublished, www.booksurge.com, 2008), 63-86, and, for solar power, on calculations presented in
12. Gregory Meyerson and Michael Joseph Roberto, "Obama's New New Deal and the Irreversible Crisis," Socialism and Democracy, no.50 (July 2009), 64n. Blees's critical summary is useful irrespective of whether or not one shares his view that what must therefore be pursued is an updated version of nuclear power.
13. Blees's Prescription for the Planet argues that the new Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) have solved the technical problems of safety and waste associated with earlier generations of nuclear power plants. Even in the absence of severe mishaps, however, the underlying risk of accumulated radiation effects on workers and, through them, on the wider population, remains. See John W. Gofman and Arthur R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power: The Case Against Nuclear Power Plants Before and After Three MileIsland(1979),http://www.ratical.org/ radiation/CNR/PP/.
14. An influential expression of this tradition is Herman E. Daly and Jonathan B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994);
15. see also Clive Ponting. A New Green History of the World(New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
16. John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000);
17. Yrjō Haila and Richard Levins, Humanity and Nature (London: Pluto Press, 1992), chapter 5 ("Agricultural Ecology").
18. Victor Wallis,"Toward Ecological Socialism," Capitalism Nature Socialism 12, no.1 (March 2001), 132-33;
19. see also Michael Löwy, "Eco-Socialism and Democratic Planning," Socialist Register 2007 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
20. Numerous cases from Latin America are analyzed in Nacla Report on the Americas 42, no.5 (Sept-Oct 2009)
21. and in Gerardo Rénique, ed., "Latin America: The New Neoliberalism and Popular Mobilization,' in Socialism and Democracy, no. 51 (November 2009).
22. See also the Joseph Bedinger's 2009 documentary film on the struggle in Ecuador, Crude: The Real Price of Oil (http://www.crudefilm.com/).
23. Cuba's special significance as an ecological model, including its shift to 80 percent organic agriculture with largescale urban gardening, is well brought out in the 2006 documentary film, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php).
24. See, for example, materials on the 4th Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples (May 2009) in Puno, Peru, which drew 6500 delegates from 22 countries (http://cumbrecontinentalindigena. - wordpress.com/).
25. UN interventions culminated in 2007 with the General Assembly's overwhelming ratification of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unplii/en/declaration.html), which includes in its Preamble a clause, "Recognizing that respect for indigenous knowledge, cultures and traditional practices contributes to sustainable and equitable development and proper management of the environment"
26. http://www.indigenousportal.com/News/Declaration-of-lndigenousPeoples-at- the-World-Social-ForumBel%C3%A9m-Amazon-Brazil.html.
27. In many countries experiencing large-scale urban migration, one cannot draw a sharp distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous populations. People who have left their original territories may preserve much of their culture, as in the city of El Alto, Bolivia (see Adolfo Gilly, "Bolivia: A 21st-century Revolution," Socialism and Democracy, no.39, November 2005). The global figure of 300 million indigenous could, in this respect be viewed as an underestimate. In addition, the communication boundaries between indigenous and non-indigenous may sometimes be more porous than this apparent dichotomy suggests.
28. See Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World (London: Verso, 1997).
29. For a suggestive example of such impact see Héctor Peda Jr., "Grassroots Mobilization against US Military Intervention in El Salvador,'' Socialism and Democracy, no. 48 (November 2008).
30. On Argentina, see Laura Meyer and Maria Chaves, "Winds of Freedom: An Argentine Factory under Workers' Control," Socialism and Democracy, no.51 (November 2009).
31. On the United States, see Immanuel Ness and Stacy Warner Maddern, "Worker Direct Action Grows In Wake of Financial Meltdown,'' Dollars & Sense, no. 284 (Sept.-Oct. 2009),
32. and also Michael Moore's documentary film, Capitalism: A Love Story (2009).
33. A useful general analysis is lain Bruce, The Real Venezuela (London: Pluto Press, 2008), esp.ch. 4.
34. Although I here emphasize what indigenous peoples can teach us, the theoretical dialogue will need to go in both directions, inasmuch as certain spokespersons for the indigenous (e.g., Ward Churchill) and for a "subsistence" approach (e.g., Maria Mies) have popularized a severe misreading of Marx, ascribing to him the very notion of value-as excluding nature-that Marx had identified as a major fault of capital (which confuses value with real wealth). For a critique of such misreadings, see John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction," Monthly Review 61, no. 6 (November 2009), 7-10.
35. For detailed discussion, see Victor Wallis, "Socialism and Technology: A Sectoral Overview," Capitalism Nature Socialism 17, no.2 (June 2006).
36. The Economics of Climate Change: The Stem Review (Cambridge University Press, 2006), a British government report prepared under the direction of Nicholas Stern, is perhaps the most comprehensive formulation of the ''green capitalist" perspective. For a critique,
37. see the Introduction by John Bellamy Foster et al. to Monthly Review 60, no. 3 (July-August 2008), 3-6.
38. For a fuller exposition of this point, see my essay, "Vision and Strategy: Questioning the Subsistence Perspective,'' Capitalism Nature Socialism 17, no. 4 (December 2006).
39. Where they do attain such representation, as in Bolivia with Evo Morales, the government is inescapably subjected to conflicting pressures (in particular, over the exploitation of energy resources), as a result of which tensions arise between it and its indigenous base.
40. This does not mean that workingclass movements necessarily have progressive positions on ecological issues; what it does mean is that only when they do have progressive positions do the latter carry significant weight
41. For an initial attempt at itemizing categories of wasteful expenditure, see Wallis, Toward Ecological Socialism,'' 135-137
42. I noted such a desideratum in an earlier article-"Progress' or Progress? Defining a Socialist Technology," Socialism and Democracy, no.27 (2000), 56-but at that time the political forces that might be able to embody its approach were not known to me.