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Title: When Capitalism Goes Green
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: December 28, 2007
Language: en
Topics: green capitalism, situationist, climate change, environment, reformism, technology
Source: Retrieved on 26th October 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/when-capitalism-goes-green-miguel-amoros
Notes: Presentation delivered at La Mistelera (Dènia) and Casa els Flares (Alcoy) on December 28 and 29, 2007. Translated from the Spanish source at: http://www.nodo50.org/tortuga/Cuando-el-capitalismo-se-vuelve

Miguel Amorós

When Capitalism Goes Green

Ever since capitalism made its appearance on this planet it has done

nothing but destroy the natural environment in order to forge its own

environment where it has evolved and forced individuals to adapt to it.

Science and technology acquired a decisive impulse and were fully

developed thanks to the resistance offered to this adaptation, so that

capitalism not only has been able to overcome all obstacles but these

obstacles have been systematically transformed into opportunities for

its own expansion. Growth, deeply ingrained in its nature, will not

cease as long as exploitable humanity exists, and that is precisely the

new challenge that capitalism is facing. As the productive system

expands it becomes more and more destructive. The colonization by the

commodity of land and life, of space and time, cannot be stopped without

a questioning of its fundamental principles, nor can it continue without

endangering the existence of the human species itself. As a result, the

ecological crisis leads to the social crisis. Capitalism must continue

to grow to prevent this from happening, but must do so without allowing

the degradation that accompanies this growth from penetrating the

consciousness of those affected by it. To accomplish this it must

improvise economic, technological and political measures that

simultaneously dissimulate its outrages and allow people to live with

and make the best of them. Production and consumption, as the experts

would say, face a “paradigm shift”. Consumption habits, along with

business and political activity, must be carried out in a different way,

not, obviously, to save nature, or even to preserve the species, but to

save capitalism itself. This is why the politicians’ hearts have turned

green. This is why capitalism is going environmental.

The first awakening of ecological consciousness took place long ago.

Already in 1955, Murray Bookchin warned against the health hazards of

food additives, and in 1962 he and Rachel Carson exposed the harmful

effect of pesticides. The abundance promised by capitalism was revealed

to be a poisonous abundance. “The crisis is being heightened by massive

increases in air and water pollution; by a mounting accumulation of

nondegradable wastes, lead residues, pesticide residues and toxic

additives in food; by the expansion of cities into vast urban belts; by

increasing stresses due to congestion, noise and mass living; and by the

wanton scarring of the earth as a result of mining operations,

lumbering, and real estate speculation. As a result, the earth has been

despoiled in a few decades on a scale that is unprecedented in the

entire history of human habitation of the planet. Socially, bourgeois

exploitation and manipulation have brought everyday life to the most

excruciating point of vacuity and boredom. As society has been converted

into a factory and a marketplace, the very rationale of life has been

reduced to production for its own sake—and consumption for its own

sake.” (Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Second Edition, Black Rose Books,

Montreal, 1986, p. 58.) The depopulation of the countryside, the food

industry, the chemicalization of life and the urban leprosy imposed a

consumerist, brutalizing, egotistical and neurotic model of life,

immersed in an artificial and atomizing environment. Summarizing an era

of revolts—the black ghetto in America, the British pacifist movement,

the Dutch Provos, the German youth movement, May ’68, etc.—Guy Debord

pointed out that: “Pollution and the proletariat are now the two

concrete sides of the critique of political economy. The universal

development of the commodity has been verified entirely as the

accomplishment of political economy, that is to say as the ‘renunciation

of life’. At the moment when everything has entered the sphere of

economic goods, even the water of springs and the air of towns,

everything has become economic evil. The simple immediate sensation of

the “nuisances” and the dangers, more oppressing every quarter, which

attack first of all and principally the great majority, that is to say

the poor, already constitutes an immense factor of revolt, a vital

exigency of the exploited, just as materialist as was the struggle of

the workers in the nineteenth century for the means to eat. Already the

remedies for the ensemble of ills which production creates, at this

stage of its commodity wealth, are too expansive for it. Production

relations and productive forces have at last reached a point of radical

incompatibility, for the existing social system has bound its fate to

the pursuit of a literally insupportable deterioration of all the

conditions of life.” (“Theses on the Situationist International and Its

Time”, in The Veritable Split in the International, B.M. Chronos,

London, 1990. Originally published in French in 1972 by Ed. Champ Libre,

Paris.)

Although the approach to the class struggle was posed in exact

historical terms, capitalism’s ability to survive its catastrophes was

underestimated, while the capacity of historical consciousness to become

a subversive force was overestimated. Thus, while the works of Mumford,

Charbonneau, Russell, Ellul and Bookchin went almost totally unnoticed,

and ecological awareness remained trapped in mysticism or reformism, far

removed from an indifferent proletariat, capitalism overcame its

quantitative contradictions with a bold leap forward, developing a

nuclear power industry, expanding automobile production, creating a new

generation of more dangerous pesticides, flooding the market with lethal

chemical products and spewing thousands of tons of gaseous pollutants

into the atmosphere. When, during the following decade, these solutions

led to catastrophes like Chernobyl, Seveso, Bophal, the Toxic Oil

Syndrome—produced by organophosphates but attributed to rapeseed oil—the

hole in the ozone layer and global climate change, not to speak of the

destruction of much of the earth’s surface due to urbanization and

tourism, there was hardly any opposition and the environmentalist

movement that emerged soon became an accomplice of capitalism and the

renovator of its politics. The leaders of the economy and the State,

reflecting upon the catastrophic consequences of their management, were

undaunted and chose to become champions of the struggle against the

disaster and, with the help of experts and ecologists, proclaimed an

ecological state of emergency, that is, a war economy mobilizing all

resources, both natural and manmade, and placed them at the service of

global economic development, incorporating the environmental cost, or

the price of rebuilding the landscape and the necessary expenses to

establish a bearable level of degradation. The Encyclopédie des

Nuisances based its activities on the exposure of this facelift to give

domination an ecological alibi:

“Ecologism is the principle agent of censorship of the social critique

latent in the struggle against harmful phenomena1, that is, of the

illusion according to which the results of alienated labor can be

condemned without attacking alienated labor itself and the society based

upon the exploitation of labor. Now that all the politicians have become

ecologists, the ecologists do not hesitate to declare themselves

supporters of the State....

“The ecologists play the same role, on the terrain of the struggle

against harmful phenomena, that the trade unionists play on the terrain

of workers struggles: mere intermediaries interested in the preservation

of the contradictions whose regulation they assure; smooth-tongued

negotiators adept at haggling (in this case the for the revision of the

rules and rates of environmental damage replace the percentages of wage

increases); mere defenders of the quantitative at the very moment when

the economic calculus is extended to new domains (air, water, human

embryos, synthetic sociability); they are, ultimately, the new

commissars of submission to the economy, whose price must now include

the cost of “a quality environment”. One can already discern the

outlines of a redistribution of territory between sacrificed zones and

protected zones, jointly administered by “green” experts, a spatial

division that will regulate the hierarchical access to the commodity

called nature.” (Address to Those who would rather Abolish Harmful

Phenomena than Manage Them)

The effort to optimize global resources materialized in things like

genetic engineering in agriculture, mad cow disease and the avian flu;

in fact, the ecological state of emergency exposed by the EdN

transformed the planet into an immense laboratory for technological and

scientific experimentation, and its entire population into guinea pigs.

The catastrophe lost its national character and with globalization

escaped from the framework of the State. The ecological crisis could not

be restricted to certain super-industrialized zones and called for a

global response. This led to the convening of the various environmental

summits which, between 1988 and 1997, established guidelines for

capitalist development for the years to come: Toronto, Río de Janeiro,

Copenhagen and Kyoto. From these summits creative formulas emerged for

salvaging development and fighting climate change without changing the

prevailing system: Agenda 21, sustainable development, social

development, local development.... Pure contradictions in terms, since

development is never local, social or sustainable, because capitalism

never functions in the interest of any locality, of the oppressed or of

nature. But what the leaders of the world economy did make clear was

that no developmentalist euphemism, even if it is based on modern

technologies, can function without political and social measures capable

of reeducating the population in the new habits of consumption that will

make them profitable, since it is the massive adoption of these

technologies that will reduce the costs of their application and

stimulate private economic interests to invest accordingly. The fight

against climate change could be objectively favored by the unstoppable

rise in the price of oil and other fossil fuels, but it is up to the

“public powers”, that is, the politicians, at least during the first

stage, to promote environmentally-friendly business by forcing the

population to consume products and services that are certified as

“environmentally-friendly”, or by imposing a “new tax policy” that

reconciles “the culture of private enterprise” with nature and which

punishes the old polluting habits and the squandering of energy, which

were normal until now, but are now punishable for the good of the

economy. In this way, the State, the parties, international

institutions, and to a lesser extent the “social forums”, the NGOs and

the sustainability “think-tanks”, play the role of regulatory

mechanisms, auxiliaries of the world market, a role which they had lost

during the early stages of globalization. At one stroke, the control

over the production of cement, fertilizers or synthetic fibers, the

recycling of wastes, the construction of new nuclear power plants,

desalinization plants or golf courses, investments in renewable energy

or the cultivation of crops for bio-fuel production, become political

decisions. At the same time, all economic and political leaders discover

they are ecologists. Insulation, energy-saving light bulbs, new

guidelines for manufacturing automobile engines and, in general, the

restructuring of every kind of activity, require enormous financial

commitments not accompanied by the requisite profitable returns, for

which the market therefore cannot assume responsibility. It then becomes

the job of the State and the political bureaucracy to lend a hand.

The ecological concerns of the world’s leaders conform to the total

commodification of the planet provoked by capital’s constant need for

expansion. The devastation caused by the expansion of production is of

such a magnitude that regulatory control is required not only for the

means of production and the productive forces, but also for the land,

culture and history, flora and fauna, water and air, light and heat, all

of which are now “resources”, that is, raw materials for tertiary

activities and productive forces of a new kind. The institutional

revitalization that is required by the transformation of the production

process and “energy security” have rejuvenated the fortunes of the State

party, that is, the political administrative bureaucracy, and this term

includes more than just the conglomeration of social democrats,

neo-stalinists, greens and civil society groups. An open reformism is

being constructed as a fashionable doctrine that is accepted even by the

conservatives and rightists, because the whole world understands that

the delayers and foot-draggers must be forced into line, the onset of

the catastrophe must be postponed and a breathing space must be created

for the economy. As opposed to a negative capitalism that does not want

to freeze development by way of emissions controls, a suspiciously

altruistic capitalism presents the human face of destruction, speaking

of sustainability and education for civic responsibility, of responsible

consumption and energy efficiency, rooftop solar panels and green taxes,

without restricting highway construction, high speed rail development or

urban depredations. Traditional development vs. environmentalist

development. Evidently, the costs of domination have skyrocketed with

pollution, global warming and peak oil, a predicament that the market

cannot solve the way it did in the past. Nor is the expansion of the

environmental remediation sector of the economy sufficient. The survival

of capitalism requires a general mobilization on a local, national and

international scale, of all the leaders in favor of a conversion of

social and labor exploitation, and in favor of a lifestyle subordinated

to the imperatives of the new style of consumption; the State as a

mechanism of coercion again becomes profitable. That is the charter of

eco-capitalism and its leftist and rightist servants. It is entirely

possible that the reconversion process may encounter serious resistance

from the population that will suffer its effects, for which reason

appropriate forms of social control will have to be designed, beginning

with the schools, the communications media, social welfare programs,

etc., as well as the police and the army. Capitalism and the bureaucracy

have no ideals to realize, but an order to defend, on the local and

global scale. For them the problems of foreign policy and social

conflict are directly security issues, which must ultimately be resolved

manu militari. Eco-fascism will most likely be the political form of the

new ecological reign of the commodity.

In the absence of serious struggles, or, which amounts to the same

thing, in the absence of historical consciousness, alongside the

pseudo-reformists who sell us their “pragmatism” and their “small

victories” in the matter of institutional politics and the capitalist

model, real utopians are making their appearance who speak to us of

“conviviality”, because for them the remedy for so much evil must not

come by way of a liberation struggle but through the peaceful

application of a miraculous formula, in this case “curtailment of

economic growth”. The means to this end will not result from a conflict

generated by the antagonism of one sector of the population with

industrial and consumer society as a whole, but from a series of

particular convivial initiatives, with good vibes, wherever possible

institutionally encouraged and defended by parties, “networks” or NGOs,

which will have the virtue of convincing people of the advantages of

seceding from the economy. The proponents of “curtailing economic

growth” distrust revolutionary methods: above all, this is so that

nothing will happen. And nothing can happen since capitalism tolerates a

certain degree of self-exclusion in the society it colonizes, because a

good part of the world population is in fact excluded from the market

and lives on the margin of economic laws. It can even derive profits

from this voluntary exclusion through mutual aid programs, alternative

tourism and subsidies. This is what the experts call the economy of the

“third sector”. What is at stake, however, is not the gradual

modification of the margins of capitalist society, but the creation of a

new society. The transformation of the world, not taking refuge in

isolated pockets. And for this to happen conflict must emerge with force

and spread, so that society splits into two irreconcilable factions. One

faction wants to abolish the relations of production and consumption,

put an end to the exploitation of labor and liberate everyday life,

preserve the land and return to a state of equilibrium with nature. The

other faction seeks to defend the industrial and developmentalist status

quo at any price. No convivial program can solve the problems that

capitalism brings in its wake, because a commitment to peaceful methods

prevents the ecological crisis from becoming a social crisis, when just

the opposite is required, that is, the rope of oppression that holds

together the various social sectors must be stretched to its limit in

order to provoke an irreparable social breach. When the victims of

capitalism decide to adapt life to human conditions controlled by all

and set up their counter-institutions, then the time will come for

transformative programs and the real autonomous experiences that will

restore social and natural equilibriums and reestablish communities on

free foundations. A libertarian society can only be created by way of a

libertarian revolution.