Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? by Joel Kovel

Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?by Anonymous

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May 22, 2002: 'Grow or Die!' That's the sign in the CEO's office. It's the subtitle of every How to Succeed in Business bestseller. And it's the lesson every MBA graduate internalizes, the Do or Die command of the well-adjusted superego. The problem, as Joel Kovel sees it in this fascinating and controversial book, is that this command may just be the ironic epitaph on the tombstone of the late, great planet Earth. Will our addiction to waste lead to the creation of a planetary wasteland? In our loyalty to the idea that what is good for the General Inks is good for all, we have consumed fossil fuels to the point of endangering the earth through global warming, we have destroyed much of the great forests that regulate the oxygen cycle and shelter a myriad of species and resources, we brought many animals and plants close to extinction, polluted and wasted our rivers, lakes, and seas, turned once fertile land into desert, and destroyed indigenous cultures and languages. Kovel writes: 'What is at the root of capital's wanton ecodestructivity? One way of seeing this is in terms of an economy geared to run on the basis of unceasing accumulation. Thus each unit of capital must, as the saying goes, 'grow or die', and each capitalist must constantly search to expand markets and profits or lose his position in the hierarchy.' Kovel is certainly not alone in realizing that the slogan of 'Grow or Die' is the ideology of the cancer cell. But more than any other expert, Kovel has analyzed the mystery of economic growth in relation to the integrity of the ecosytem, evaluated the alternative ecopolitics that have arisen in recent years, and, most importantly, provided a way out of the ecological crisis. Kovel's is not a facile solution. He rejects as 'nostalgic fantasy' the neo-Populist idea that we should shrink the world of mega-corporations down to the size of local, small business. To some the world of Adam Smith in 1776 seems like a lost Golden Age. But Smith regarded capital's drive to accumulate as based on the innate human propensity to truck and barter, and while he may have opposed government-aided monopolies and indeed virtually all government interference in business, his model of the growth of capital is hardly a challenge to the economic theory of big business today. Kovel asks: 'Why should we submit today to the model of small capital, which, however less murderous than large capital, is still based on the exploitation of labour, that most crucial of ecological insults, and is therefore infected with the virus of capital's cancerous growth?' Instead, Kovel insists that the only alternative to ecocide is ecosocialism, by which he means the replacement of capitalism by a society in which the producer is reunited with the conditions of production. This would be in a context of the ecological limits to growth and the human ability to redefine needs to emphasize the quality of life rather than the quantity of consumption. 'Ecosocialism gives production dignity, as part of a full life. As realized individuals are self-governing, so are they free from compulsion, including compulsive producing and consuming,' he says. No reader or reviewer should mistake Kovel's form of ecosocialism for the regimes that called themselves communist but ended in a reign of terror and ecocidal forced industrialization. As Kovel says, 'After Stalin's accession to power in 1927, persistent economic stagnation triggered a second revolution,...