Ecosocialism: Putting on the Brakes Before Going Over the Cliff

[xchrom]

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22323-ecosocialism-putting-on-the-brakes-before-going-over-the-cliff

Ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical, civilizational alternative to capitalism, rooted in the basic arguments of the ecological movement, and in the Marxist critique of political economy. It opposes to capitalism's destructive progress (Marx) an economic policy founded on non-monetary and extra-economic criteria: social needs and ecological equilibrium. This dialectical synthesis, attempted by a broad spectrum of authors, from James O'Connor to Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster, and from André Gorz (in his early writings) to Elmar Altvater, is at the same time a critique of "market ecology," which does not challenge the capitalist system, as well as of "productivist socialism," which ignores the issue of natural limits.

Marx and Engels themselves were not unaware of the environmental-destructive consequences of the capitalist mode of production: there are several passages in Capital and other writings that point to this understanding.1 Moreover, they believed that the aim of socialism was not to produce more and more commodities, but to give human beings free time to fully develop their potentialities. They have little in common with "productivism," i.e. with the idea that the unlimited expansion of production is an aim in itself.

However, there are some passages in their writings which seem to suggest that socialism will permit the development of productive forces beyond the limits imposed on them by the capitalist system. According to this approach, the socialist transformation concerns only the capitalist relations of production, which have become an obstacle—"chains" is the term often used—to the free development of the existing productive forces; socialism would mean above all the social appropriation of these productive capacities, putting them at the service of the workers. To quote a passage from Anti-Dühring, a canonical work for many generations of Marxists, under socialism "society takes possession openly and without detours of the productive forces that have become too large" for the existing system.2

The experience of the Soviet Union illustrates the problems that result from a collectivist appropriation of the capitalist productive apparatus: from the beginning, the thesis of the socialization of the existing productive forces predominated. It is true that during the first years after the October Revolution an ecological current was able to develop, and certain (limited) measures to protect the environment were taken by the Soviet authorities. However, with the process of Stalinist bureaucratization, the productivist tendencies, both in industry and agriculture, were imposed with totalitarian methods, while the ecologists were marginalized or eliminated. The catastrophe of Chernobyl is an extreme example of the disastrous consequences of this imitation of Western productive technologies. A change in the forms of property that is not accompanied by democratic management and a reorganization of the productive system can only lead to a dead end.

[handmade34]

1. K&R

"...under capitalism use-value is only a means—often a trick—at the service of exchange-value and profit—which explains, by the way, why so many products in the present society are substantially useless...

...There is no reason for optimism: the entrenched ruling elites of the system are incredibly powerful, and the forces of radical opposition are still small..."

good read albeit with no real answers...