The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? [Paperback]

Joel Kovel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2002

In this revolutionary indictment of capitalism, Joel Kovel criticizes its unrelenting pressure to expand, and its destructiveness toward ecology. Kovel also criticizes existing ecological politics for their evasion of capital, and advances a vision of ecological production as the successor to capitalist production.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The ultimate antagonist of capital is not labor but nature...is capitalism setting the state for ecosocialist uprising?"--Ted Dace, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org

About the Author

Joel Kovel challenged Ralph Nader for the last US presidential election.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Zed Books (May 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842770810
• ISBN-13: 978-1842770818
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,639,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Eco-socialist Idea - from William Morris to Joel Kovel, May 21, 2002

By 

Walter R. Sheasby (Sierra Madre, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (Paperback)

"I feel sure," William Morris told his fellow socialists gathered at Kelmscott House in 1884, "that the time will come when people will find it difficult to believe that a rich community such as ours, having such command over external Nature, could have submitted to live with a mean, shabby, dirty life as we do." One hundred eighteen years ago Morris was imagining a time "when no one was allowed to injure the public by defiling the natural beauty of the earth."
As Joel Kovel spells out in this book, we are further from that goal today than when the dedicated radical penned his novel of the future, News from Nowhere, perhaps the first ecosocialist vision. The world today is far shabbier and the public injured far more than when Morris wrote, and Kovel is dealing with a level of ecodestruction many magnitudes worse. In fact, given the trajectory he outlines, the biosphere itself, not simply the
appearance of the human habitat, is what is threatened: "Put more formally, the current stage of history can be characterized by structural forces that systematically degrade and finally exceed the buffering capacity of nature with respect to humman production, thereby setting into motion an unpredictable yet interacting and expanding set of ecosystemic breakdowns."
Kovel's task in The Enemy of Nature is to "understand the social dynamics of the crisis, and to see whether anything can be done about them" (p. 21).
Part of that task involves learning the emprirical dimensions of the ecological crisis, and how the various perils and problems that come to public attention in a very fragmentary way are actually part of one process of ecodestruction with one cancerous dynamic driving it: the Grow or Die logic of capital accumulation.
Another aspect of this work is the articulation of the ecosocialist idea in a way that has only been forshadowed in the past. Like William Morris, Joel Kovel is a close student of Karl Marx's 1867 classic, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.
Morris desired to be also a "practical socialist" and not "a mere railer against 'progress'." Likewise, Kovel is an active leader within Green politics, even to the point of seeking the Party's Presidential nomination in 2000. And as Morris struggled against Fabianism as an inadequate theory of change, Kovel does battle against Populism, the idea that the system can be reformed without disturbing the drive for profit and accumulation.
Kovel, however, also brings to the ecosocialist project a long and distinguished career as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has made a close study of racism, greed, and other aspects of human alienation. He is no stranger to the natural sciences and is especially well-versed in the life sciences that inform the vast field of ecology.
His theoretical depth makes Kovel an excellent critic of many of the fashionable currents that claim a following in the movement, such as Deep Ecology, Bioregionalism, and Natural Capitalism. But he is a fair judge of these rival forms of ecopolitics, and he is careful to avoid any hint of sectarian or dogmatic thinking.
The Greens, like other left movements, have been afflicted with sectarianism, sometimes reaching the point of refusing to work together. Kovel, however, is part of a Green alliance that functions more like a caucus within the movement and the party than as a rival.
Kovel has been a Professor of Social Studies at Bard College in Annandale, New York, since 1988. He is a prolific writer and is associated with the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism founded by Santa Cruz economist James O'Connor.
Through that journal and conferences and internet discussions he has been working to bring activists and writers together, and he
recently published an Ecosocialist Manifesto signed by a number of others who agree with William Morris that a "Great Change" in the way we treat 'nature' is long overdue.
In the system of commodity production, Morris once said, people had tried to make 'nature' their slave, "since they thought 'nature' was something outside them." In liberating nature, we are, of course, freeing ourselves.

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Ecosocialist Manifesto, September 25, 2002

By 

Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (Paperback)

Joel Kovel's "The Enemy of Nature" offers a powerful and unflinching eco-Marxist critique of the capitalist system. Concluding that the path of accumulation must inevitably lead to a world wide ecological crisis, the author theorizes about the type of "ecosocialist" system that must supplant capitalism in order to ensure humanity's survival.

Kovel is part of a growing "Red/Green" movement that also includes the outstanding Marxist scholar James O'Connor. Kovel's arguments seem to build upon and indeed are closely aligned with many of the ideas in O'Connor's excellent book "Natural Causes," but I personally find Kovel's writing to be a bit more accessible than O'Connor's. Perhaps this pragmatism can be attributed to Kovel's political sensibilities, as he was a candidate for the Green Party Presidential nomination in 2000.

Kovel believes that various forms of so-called "Green economics" are doomed to failure because they do not address what he sees as the root problem driving the ecological crisis: namely, capital's need to continuously expand. He points out that whatever gains might be realized from the introduction of environmentally-friendly technology will be quickly outweighed by the expansion of the economy. For example, fuel cells might be less harmful than internal combustion engines, but if the technology merely enables the manufacture of hundreds of millions of new automobiles, the planet will ultimately be much worse off.

But Kovel acknowledges that the current Green movement is in fact helping to lay the groundwork for what is yet to come. The Green's emphasis on local democratic control of the means of production will help free labor from its bondage with capital, which is essential for socialism to succeed.

Of course, Kovel devotes a section to readers who may need to be reminded that really existing socialism as practiced in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what Marx intended. Kovel shows that these countries actually substituted the state for the market, in the end merely proving that markets were superior to centralized planning. The ruined environments left behind by the Communist states were testaments to a failed attempt at accumulation, in much the same way that the West is currently degrading the air, land and sea in its ongoing frenzy of accumulation.

Kovel speculates on how collapse might occur in the capitalist nations. He understands that a breakdown of the financial system could easily lead to fascism, or possibly "ecofascism", as capital seeks to hold on to power. But Kovel thinks it may be plausible that the pockets of production growing outside the bounds of capital may be strong enough to resist the counter-revolution. Indeed, Kovel points out that up to 20 percent of the world economy already exists in the "informal" sector, although most of this is comprised of criminal activity and much less of the positive kind (such as the Bruderhof communities of the U.S.).

This latter part of Kovel's analysis bears similarity to Nick Dyer-Witheford's "Cyber-Marx", although Kovel does not appear to be aware of this book nor is it referenced in his bibliography. In short, Dyer-Witheford theorizes that technophiles will appropriate the means of production in order to empower a society that eventually achieves autonomy by existing outside the bounds of capitalist control. Like Kovel, Dyer-Witheford envisions that the post-capitalist society will choose to apply its surplus value to the cause of freeing labor and restoring its ravaged social, physical and natural environments. In my view, the convergence of these two authors' thoughts -- albeit arrived at from different angles, but perhaps more compelling because of this -- bolsters both of their arguments and suggests that the possibility of radical change may not be as elusive as one might suppose.

I strongly recommend Kovel's book for anyone who may be concerned about the future of our society or for those who may be contemplating how a more humane world might come about.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A penetrating indictment of capitalism, June 21, 2002

By 

Peter Webster "salience" (Nice France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (Hardcover)

After having read and greatly appreciated Professor Kovel's previous book, "Red Hunting in the Promised Land", I was somewhat surprised to see his entry into the ecological debate with "Enemy of Nature." But scepticism soon gave way to great insight about the fundamentals of our current ecological situation, an impending catastrophe threatening survival itself as Kovel makes clear.
Whereas other writers have examined ecological crises and misdeeds as isolated and independent manifestations of similarly discrete abuses by global and regional players, Kovel shows that the root cause of ecological ills is the capitalistic system itself, in effect the very nature of capital or "money-in-motion." What follows from this accusation is the even more unsettling demonstration that no amount of "corrections" of given abuses nor mere simple changes and "controls" applied to the basic rules of the game will suffice to reverse the dangerous nature- and life-threatening trends now evident world-wide. The Enemy of Nature is the capitalistic system itself, and if readers of such a statement should be tempted to dismiss the claim as mere Marxian doomsday-saying and thus forego a reading of it on the basis of our current celebrations that capitalism is the sole surviving economic system and therefore MUST be the best, such potential readers will be ignoring not only essential information, but be contributing to the continuation of processes which must surely end in chaos and anarchy.
For anyone who even pretends to have a passing interest in the future of Western civilisation and the questions concerning its health and survival now discussed with every passing ecological abuse and catastrophe, this book is a must. Ignoring it may well constitute a breach of morality. However, there is a great probability that the book may well be ignored because its arguments and conclusions are fairly well unanswerable and would require outright revolution in all spheres of human activity were it to be taken seriously. As such, it is hard to conclude anything else but that we are indeed approaching global meltdown and the end of history, not for the reasons that Francis Fukuyama laid out in his famous tome, but because the Panglossian continuation of our current ecological mania must soon end not only history but the means even to write it, and possibly even the species which writes.