2007 Socialist Register, Coming to Terms with Nature (edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys wth Barbara HarrissWhite, Elmar Altvater and Greg Albo) Reviwed by Sarah Parker
The editors and authors of this year's Socialist Register have produced an excellent collection whose aim is "contributing to the development of a better ecosocialist understanding of contemporary capitalism, and the kind of politics that could lead to an ecologically sustainable as well as a democratic socialism". This book is a fantastic resource which I strongly recommend.
The wide-ranging essays deal with most aspects of the capitalism's creation of the environmental crisis, so its impossible to do justice to the different insights that they provide: I look at just a few of the articles, but I hope that readers will look at the whole book.
Several of the essays start from historical discussions on the relationship of humanity and capitalism to nature, pointing to the previous insights of Marxism into these relations, which have unfortunately been denied by people hostile to Marxism, and largely forgotten or never known by much of the far left until recently, and conclude with suggestions for transforming the situation. In The Environment of fossil Capitalism', Elmar Altvater argues that the significance of the Neolithic revolution was that it enabled humanity to increase productivity through harnessing solar energy (which comes from outside the earth's finite system) more intensively, leading to the birth of agriculture. Because of the limits of technology as applied to solar and other fuel, ecoHAS •NO EXITS and financialization which radically deepens the penetration of nature by capital.?, citing the products of carbon sequestration programmes as the best known type of ecological commodities.
He observes that this process 'is ... an integral element of a much larger project of neo-liberalism' and that The neo-liberalization of nature is far from complete, not without its obstacles, and anything but a smooth process."
He analyses a key concept, the capitalist production of nature: naturally provided use-values, whether iron ore or labour power or services such as the ability to transport, are plucked for productive consumption and in turn alter the form of nature: the earth is gouged, soil is colonized, workers are transformed by work... and transport technology shortens the temporal distance between spatially separate places., and that '..the universal production of nature was written into the DNA of capitalist ambition from the start; neo-liberalism only its latest incarnation. while the production of nature under capitalism generates its own distinct ideologies.
Returning to the present, he asserts that the market has now retaken and recolonized environmental practices... This represents a sweeping political co-optation and victory for capital and a defeat for environmental-cum-socialist politics?
Finally he cites Donna Haraway's conclusions from her research into genetically transformed organisms in the 1990s that the body now represented an accumulation strategy for capital, and comments that *Cindy Katz has broadened this into a suggestion that 'nature per se may now represent an accumulation strategy for capital?
He concludes that today 'the increasing appropriation of nature as an accumulation strategy.. promises to provide the nervous system of a new phase of capitalist accumulation.'
Finally he outlines a response: "While struggles over GM organisms, technology ... are of central importance ... it is just as vital to have a longer-term eye on the constitutive social relations. and asking: if the production of nature is a historical reality, what would a truly democratic production of nature look like?'
Again starting with history, in "Socialist Metabolism and Environmental Conflicts" Joan Martinez-Alier outlines the long tradition of "Ecological economics, which views the economy as a 'metabolic system of materials and energy flows.
He reminds us that we should be aware of social forces, mainly 'peripheral' peoples, whose lands, resources and lives have been plundered by imperialism, and who contest this plunder and the conventional methods of classical economics for measuring (or more usually ignoring) the unequal exchanges involved.
Then he looks at Marx and Engel's interest in the patterns of 'energy and material flows' within the economy, and at subsequent developments of this discussion. He describes modern attempts of political ecologists and of states to measure these energy flows, describing a system known as Eurostat run by the EU which can show the overall inputs and outputs of material and energy for national economies, providing information which could be used to help demonstrate the distortions that capitalism imposes on poor countries and on the planet as a whole.
In 'Garbage Capitalism's Green Commerce', Heather Rogers discusses the US waste management industry. She looks at the origins of the concept of "litter", which turns out to have been the result of a slick PR campaign in the 50s designed to blame individuals for the new problem of huge amounts of waste packaging, and to deflect criticism from the companies and the manufacturing processes from which the new packaging emanated.
Back to the present, in *Unsustainable Capitalism and Renewable Energy, Barbara Harriss-White and Elinor Harris shed light into many corners of British energy policy, concluding that a mix of market-driven politics and state capitulation has undermined the framework of systematic regulation and stripped the state of its capacity to make the longterm plans necessary for capital to invest?
They believe that Marketdriven politics have ensured that renewable energy remains far from starting to form any kind of technological base, obviously an obstacle in the struggle for transforming society around renewables. Their article poses serious questions for green socialists.
The last three essays look towards solutions. First *Eco-Socialism and Democratic Planning' by Michael Löwy looks at how an ecosocialist alternative can be built, while in *Party-building for Ecosocialists, Otto Frieder Wolf writes on lessons to be drawn from the failure of the German Greens to build a radical alternative to social democracy, or recently, to neo-liberalism, that could have successfully challenged the existing order.