NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2009
Eco-socialists confront climate change
Oakland, Cal.--On Jan. 10 and 11 we attended a West Coast regional conference on "Climate Catastrophe and Social Change: an Eco-Socialist Perspective" at Laney College. The opening and closing plenaries featured Joel Kovel, a founding member of the Ecosocialist International Network and author of The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World.
The many conference workshops stressed the daunting task facing humans if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change that will wipe out the population centers occupying coastal areas of the world in the next 40 years. It also stressed the rights of the underdeveloped world to a "level of welfare that is beyond basic needs but well short of today's levels of 'affluent' consumption," which can be realized only through a new level of human solidarity on a global scale. The urgency for getting the message out is that even the most heroic efforts for reducing carbon emissions may barely succeed in avoiding the threshold of stopping global warming from exceeding two degrees centigrade.
The strength of this conference was the recognition that the problem of the impending ecological catastrophe cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism. Kovel began by criticizing the back-in-fashion Keynesian economics for its drive to keep capitalistic-style growth going at all cost.
Kovel bases his eco-socialism on Marx's concept of "freely associated labor" and cites Marx's principle that the free development of each is the condition for the freedom of all. Freely associated labor, he said, is fundamentally different from Communism, which leaves out nature and merely takes over capitalism and reproduces its deleterious effects. However, Kovel claims Marx failed to grasp that nature has intrinsic value, claiming that there is still a dichotomy in Marx between labor and nature. This flies in the face of Marx's concept of humans as directly natural beings and the need to overcome alienated labor, which alienates commodity-producing humans from each other and nature.
In our own discussions with participants at the conference, we pointed out that one of the weaknesses of Kovel's presentation of the contradiction in capitalism is that he stopped at the commodity's contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value instead of going immediately, as Marx does, to how that contradiction is merely a reflection of concrete labor and abstract labor. Abstract, alienated labor is the value-producing substance. This drives the idea that what is real is not nature and human natural capacities, but rather socially determined value.
The viability of the global capitalist system has been called into question by its own internal crisis. The issue raised at this conference--capitalism's absolute destructiveness to nature and, in turn, humanity--cannot be ignored by those struggling for a socialist alternative.
--R. K. and H. L.
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