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

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"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.

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.

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.

For Joel Kovel the revolution is only a matter of time. Marx was right: Capitalism cannot help but prepare the stew in which it will roast. But Old Whiskers got one thing wrong. The crucial antagonist of capital is not labor but nature. If Marx made a fetish of capital's propensity to generate too much wealth to be profitably re-invested, Kovel does the same in regard to planetary ecosystem crackup. Instead of periodic economic downturn catapulting the proletariat into History, it's the shattering of life-essential natural processes that's destined to set off socialist (make that ecosocialist) revolution.

Professor Kovel, who ran to the left of Ralph Nader for the Green Party nod in 2000, wastes no time making the case that capitalism, by its very nature, cannot help but destroy the integrity and well-being of what we call "nature." No need for yet another inventory of disturbances in the environment, our bodies, and our psychic balance (though Kovel does provide a lot of data in this regard). The enemy of nature is not oil or pesticides or factories or bulldozers but capital, "that ubiquitous, all-powerful and greatly misunderstood dynamo that drives our society."

While traditionally the marketplace is a means of exchanging goods for money so as to purchase other goods, under capitalism it becomes a way for those who already have money to accumulate more. Reversing the natural order, the merchant starts off with money and buys the product of someone else's labor, then turns around and sells it at a markup. As long as the laborer is poor and the buyer rich, the trader makes a profit.

What gives a commodity its value is not what we do with it, like using bricks to build houses or shoes to walk home in, but the price it commands in trade. In contrast to "use value"-- a quality that belongs to any given item intrinsically-- "exchange value" is an abstraction that must be expressed quantitatively. When you buy a pair of shoes (or better yet a thousand pairs) only to sell them for profit, their entire value is a number.

As the basis of economics becomes the trade itself and not the tangible thing exchanged, money is transformed into an all-consuming monster. No longer bound up with the limitations of actual land, people, and resources, it springs to life, an abstraction with a will of its own. "Pure quantity," says Kovel, "can swell infinitely without reference to the external world."

There lies the source of our ecological crisis.

Despite its reputation as the very acme of rational economic exchange, capitalism follows its own imperatives, quite apart from the needs of humans and ecosystems. In its compulsion to grow and multiply, capital "constantly tries to violate" whatever limit is set before it. Success means only one thing: surpassing yesterday's mark. No matter how big the beast gets, to cease growing further is to die. Yet the one thing we know for sure is that it can't grow forever. Sooner or later abstraction runs up against reality.

Does that mean capitalism is setting the stage for ecosocialist uprising? "If the argument that capital is incorrigibly ecodestructive and expansive proves to be true, then it is only a question of time before the issues raised here achieve explosive urgency." True enough, but that doesn't mean the Revolution is just over the horizon. What Kovel overlooks is the likelihood that worsening environmental conditions will exacerbate the scarcity that already pits us against each other. While the rich compete to survive as rich people, the poor compete to survive, period. If it's the money-driven struggle of all-against-all that's pushing us, inexorably, to the edge of the cliff, shouldn't we expect rising insecurity and the resulting intensification of this struggle to push us right over the edge? Precisely when, between now and doomsday, do the masses finally revolt?

As Kovel himself points out, capitalists are perfectly willing to perpetuate eco-destabilization as long as they can insulate themselves and perhaps even profit from the meltdown all around them. He cites an article in London's Guardian Weekly purporting to show a shift in elite opinion since the early 70s, when the Club of Rome called for "limits to growth." These days, digging our own grave is simply the ultimate business opportunity.

Taking Kovel to task in the September, 2002 issue of Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster noted, "We should not underestimate capitalism's capacity to accumulate in the midst of the most blatant ecological destruction, to profit from environmental degradation... and to continue to destroy the earth to the point of no return-- both for human society and for most of the world's living species."

Times are tough? How about a liquidation sale? Like Marx before him, Kovel finds a silver lining where none exists. There's just no pulling the socialist rabbit out of the capitalist hat.

I completely agree with the political agenda of this book. I am glad it was written. Kovel is RIGHT ON TARGET.
But the book was dreadful to plow/bore through. Talk about OBTUSE VERBIAGE. There is still this awful tradition out there that if you wor dsomething so that it "sounds" brilliant -- it must be. I hate that tradition. We need plain language and simple articulation. This book is just the opposite. Here are but a couple of random examples to give you some idea: "Capital's invasion takes place across an ecosystemic manifold encompassing both culture and nature, with points of commodity formation arising everywhere" (p.55) -- got that? or "If 'entropy' is a logarithmic measure of the probabilistic disorder of a given physical system, the Second Law states that for such a system, whether it be the air in a room, a living body, or the earth as a whole, so long as neither energy nor matter is added to said system -- that is, so long as the system is 'closed' -- then its entropy will rise with time" (p.93) -- got that?
Look, there were many times in this book where I wrote "right on!" in the margins. There were also many times whene I wrote "blah blah blah"...I was going to assign this to my students of social theory -- I teach at a small liberal arts college. No way. Very few people can plow through this dense stuff.

Anyone who considers themselves an environmentalist should read this book. Kovel makes the case the environmental destruction is inherent to the capitalist system and for the most part, reforms are little more than band-aids for a system that is, by its very nature, out of control.

Kovel focuses less on the environmental problems we face today (which you can find in any other book); and focuses more of the book lies in describing how the nuts and bolts of the capitalist economy works (which is what sets this book apart from all others).

He makes the case that actions like voluntarism, isolated cooperatives, bioregionalism, and so forth will eventually get rolled over by the immense power that capital has and are not long-term solutions.

My only problem with the book is that, while Kovel accurately describes the underlying environmental problem as having its root in capitalism itself, he doesn't present a coherent solution except an extremely vague "eco-socialism" (that's why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5). You can tell by this last chapter that he is groping for some sort of answer - going off in many directions.

If you want a cutting analysis of the problem human beings face today, get this book! If you want a revolutionary solution, this book is only a start.

As a socialist with relatively unfocused environmental concerns, I had long looked forward to reading Joel Kovel's 'ecosocialist manifesto' "The Enemy of Nature". I had hoped that the book would help me clarify and organize my ecological thinking and its relation to socialism.

Although I very much wanted to appreciate "The Enemy of Nature", I was largely, though not completely, disappointed. For the most part, I found the writing overly abstract, weighed down by unnecessarily abstruse academese and excessive Marxian verbiage. I got little out of it, and feel there is little to get out of it in the first place.

"The Enemy of Nature" is divided into three parts: "The Culprit", on capital and capitalism; "The Domination of Nature", on the relationships between capitalism and nature; and "Towards Ecosocialism", on green politics and where to go from here. Of the three, I found only the last worthwhile, in part because it had to touch on the "real world" in its discussions of current political issues, in part because Kovel was able to at least partially articulate some inspiring conclusions and visions for the future.

The first part, "The Culprit", presents a pretty standard modern Marxist discussion of capital and capitalism, with emphasis on the "early Marx" and Marx's relatively few remarks on ecology and the environment. Although decent at times, these chapters include quite a bit of phrase-dropping of notions like "ecosystemic manifolds", "the prime desideratum of the capitalist" and the "First Contradiction" and "Second Contradiction of Capital" (complete with the capital letters), that did little but aggravate me.

This pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo only worsens in the second part, "The Domination of Nature". Far too much of the discussion of "The Domination of Nature" is dominated by an extended, unclear, and so far as I can tell utterly irrelevant expostulation of the second law of thermodynamics, and its supposed relationships with Hobbes, "Social-Darwinism", "God", evolution, the "Gaia principle", and the meaning of life itself. All of this fully activated my bull detector, and I remain highly skeptical of whatever it is exactly that Kovel is arguing in this section of the book.

In the end, after reading "The Enemy of Nature", I remain a socialist with relatively unfocused environmental concerns. I still hope someday to find a clear, powerful, inspiring ecosocialist manifesto that will help synthesize my conceptions of socialism and ecology, but after this decidedly mixed bag, I'm far less eager to search it out.

Joel Kovel argues that if we love this planet, we ought to work to abolish capitalism, because capitalism is destroying the ecosystems of the planet. The idea that capitalism is the culprit in global warming, species loss, habitat destruction, pollution and overpopulation will be hard for many to accept, due to the 24/7 propaganda we are subjected to in the capitalist media, but the thesis is given cogency by Kovel, an academic, writer, and member of the Green Party. Kovel does not want to engage in vague criticisms or mendacious thinking that leaves the fundamental institutions behind our ecological crisis unscathed. But by taking aim at capitalism, rather than, say, patriarchal values, or scientific materialism, Kovel is sure to court controversy with environmentalists, most of whom are pro-capitalist. Indeed, the Green Party itself, of which he is a member, is not anti-capitalist.

Increasing numbers of the intelligentsia in the US and abroad are aware that something is profoundly wrong with global weather patterns. Tornadoes are more intense than they have been in recorded history, as are hurricanes. For those with access to the Internet and some ability to search around, there are ample reports, in those sectors of the media that still have a semblance of honesty, of the devastating effects of global climate change. Kovel reports that seven of the ten most destructive storms in recorded history had occurred between 1992 and 2002.

Our concern for the earth, our sense that it is now threatened, is not new. Kovel begins by revisiting the heady origins of the environmental movement, forty-one years ago on Earth Day 1970. The alarmed citizens' concerns were soon echoed by a report issued by the Club of Rome, called `The Limits to Growth', in 1972. Earth Day became an annual day for environmentalists to mark the threats to the planet's ecosystems from such things as pollution, habitat destruction, species extinction and desertification. Thirty years after the first Earth Day, Kovel surveys of the results of three decades of `limiting growth':

* human population had increased from 3.7 billion to 6 billion;
* oil consumption had increased from 46 million barrels a day to 73 million;
* natural gas extraction increased from 34 trillion cubic feet per year to 95 trillion;
* human carbon emissions had increased from 3.9 million metric tons annually to an estimated 6.4 million;
* fish were being harvested from the oceans at twice the rate as in 1970;
* species were going extinct at a rate unseen for 65 million years . . .

And on and on and on. The catalog of gloomy statistics illustrate a simple point: that in spite of a massive populist movement in the developed world for environmental reforms to mitigate the impact of industrial civilization upon our global ecosystems, by virtually every metric, things had in 2002 gotten much worse, and in 2011 there is no evidence of a turnaround in the trajectory. Moreover, "Third World debt increased by a factor of eight" while "the gap between rich and poor nations went from 3:1 in 1820 to 44:1 in 1973 to 72:1 in 2002.

Kovel's point is not that all hope is lost. His point is that environmentalism has not only failed abjectly to limit growth, but that "even the idea of limiting growth has been banished from official discourse." (5) Kovel's thesis is that because global capitalism is the source of these depredations against the planet's ecosystems, the efforts toward ameliorating the crisis have failed because they have not addressed the source of the problem. He shows how capitalism is a system built upon unrestrained growth of capital. Since growth is the very sine qua non of capitalism, any serious attempt to limit capital's expansion will throw the system into crisis. Capital's motto is "Grow or Die!" and, no matter how irrational this may be from an ecological standpoint, that remains the in-built nature of capitalism, and it cannot be reformed: "it either rules and destroys us, or is destroyed..." (6 The usual retorts to claims such as this--that the problem is a few "bad apple" corporations or "corporate personhood" or a lack of "regulation" Kovel addresses later on.

Since some form of democratic socialism is the only viable alternative to capitalism, Kovel spends considerable time addressing what socialism is and what he is advocating. He is not advocating a recrudescence of the former Soviet Union or Mao's China, both of which were not "socialist" in any Marxian sense. Marx advocated for democratic, worker-controlled industries, a situation which never happened in the USSR or China. The USSR and China exemplified, rather, state-run capitalism. Kovel has criticisms of the limitations of nominally socialist governments more generally, arguing that no nominally socialist state was particularly ecologically minded. He traces this to socialism's origins at the height of the Industrial Revolution, a time when optimism about industry and technology were naively high, for the simple reason that the most negative ecological consequences of each had yet to be widely perceived when Marx was writing.

In order to argue for the abolition of capitalism as the sine qua non of restoring global ecological balance, Kovel takes on what he maintains are essentially false hopes, including "progressivism," a term which has become so vague as to be virtually meaningless. What, after all, is a "progressive"?

"The question is: progressing towards what? Towards a virtuous citizenry placing checks on corporate power, who then stand about until startled by the next head of the hydra? Towards the gratification of an alternative `lifestyle' caught up in capital's consumerist regime? Or does it progress beyond the limits of the given? Our progressivism fails not because of its inability to spell out what the `beyond' may be, but through its indifference to the question, because of which it settles into the ecodestructive system on the ground.(181)"

Kovel contends that progressivism has come to mean simply "populism," which is an inherently insufficient vehicle for social transformation. Although populist movements historically have achieved gains for working people, for example in the movement to abolish child labor and win the gains of Social Security in the US, populism always carries the danger of fragmentation, because it essentially stands for "the people," and not all people are oppressed--"the oppressors are human beings, too." "Populism can itself be no more than a point of entry into the building of movements that address the structures that fragment a people. Unless it is surpassed, everyone will go home to his or her particular problem and things will go no further." Kovel argues that populism personalizes oppression, and thus encourages simplistic ideas, such as the existence of a kind of `golden age' before the Bad Oppressor arrived. He cites the corporation, today, given personhood in 1865 under the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 14th amendment, as one such facile myth, i.e., before 1865, America was in a blissful condition when corporate power and greed were checked.

The racist potential of populism was illustrated not only by Nazism, which used populist socialist rhetoric which later morphed into scapegoating Jews for the country's problems, but Father Coughlin, the demagogic priest in the US who dominated the airwaves in the 1930s, preaching against the evils of capitalism, and then went on a crusade against banks that eventually turned to anti-Semitism and fascism. (183 In agreement with Kovel's critique of populism, I would argue that the populism of the right, which frequently rails against the "New World Order" reveals similar weaknesses inherent in populism itself: the bogeyman of the "New World Order" conspiracists was at one time Communists, later the UN, for some it remains international Jews, for others international bankers, still others assert extraterrestrials are behind this conspiracy. Obviously, not all of them can be right, and one does not have to be dismissive of all conspiracy theories to argue that the so-called "New World Order Conspiracy Theory" reveals very much one of the great weaknesses of populism. If our analysis fails to determine who "we, the people" are, and what or who are the proximate cause(s) of our collective oppression, it is a certainty that any efforts for political redress will fail in the long term.

Kovel critiques liberals like David Korten, arguing that Korten essentially peddles an "upbeat fairy tale" in place of history, a tale that, if true, would make the world much easier to change. Korten has no critique of capital itself, nor does he address issues of class, gender, or any other category of domination. He sees the primary problem in philosophical or religious terms, e.g., a huge mistake such as the `Scientific Revolution' resulted in `materialism' that robbed life of meaning and crushed the spirit of generosity and caring. The consequence, for Korten, wasthat people failed to be responsible to the whole of life and in a mere century destroyed much of the planet's `living natural capital' it had taken years of evolution to create.

"Note [Korten's] reference to `natural capital', as though nature had toiled to put the gift of capital into human hands, who then abused their legacy through false science and materialism. Since capital--or class, or the capitalist state--are no big deal, and even, when nature produces them, are good things, Korten has no difficulty seeing them checked by `globalizing civil society', which will restrain and effectively domesticate the animal, leading to the neo-Smithian Promised Land. (162)"

The Deep Ecology movement, while populated with many "virtuous souls," tends "to keep a measured distance from the messy world of struggle" (171) and tends to over-rely on vague slogans such as that of the Green Party (Europe) that green politics is "neither left no right, but ahead." The slogan fails to define what `ahead' means, and Deep Ecologists forget that "in the real world, that which does not confront the system becomes its instrument."

Kovel critiques Bioregionalism as having some good ideas insofar as an emphasis on place is essential for an ecological perspective, but finds it hard to see how it could work on planet with 6+ billion people. The Indian peoples could live bioregionally because there were only six to ten million of them in what is now the US. "Today's vastly greater population exists not in simple relation to place but in an interdependent grid." (174)

Ecofeminism also falls under the axe of Kovel's remorseless and convincing critique, even while he envisages some form of it being necessary to the ecosocialist future he envisions. It takes as its foundation the bifurcation between `Man' and `nature', with `nature' reduced to inert resources, and the valorization of cold abstraction and identification of this trait with masculinity and what is truly human. From this it follows that capitalist domination always necessarily involves gender domination. Some ecofeminists are anti-capitalist. But many are not, preferring to take refuge in a nature mysticism of goddess-based spirituality and essentialist feminism. This view keeps them from peopling the "barricades of struggle" and "keeps ecofeminism from becoming a coherent social movement." Here it must be stated that Kovel is not criticizing goddess based spirituality per se but the lack of a class-based analysis of capitalism by many ecofeminists who hold this view.

His analysis of Social Ecology finds its blanket condemnation of all hierarchical relationships problematic, since teacher-student relationships are necessarily hierarchical and that is not a bad or exploitative thing. What makes hierarchy fit for overthrowing is its quality of domination. Social Ecology continues the Anarchist project and criticizes Marxian socialism because of the abuses of authority by nominally socialist states in the 20th century. Kovel argues that anarchists and social ecologists profess to be anti-capitalist but fail to analyze capitalism to its root in the domination of labor. While they correctly wish to avoid the domination by the state, they fail to see the chief function of the state is to secure the class system, so we cannot address one without the other. Only a Marxian perspective gives centrality to the emancipation of labor, and anarchists' exclusive focus on the state and avoidance of the issue of labor tends to weaken the anarchist view of things. He hastens to add that the positions of anarchism and his own are not necessarily in an irresolvable contradiction.

Although Kovel is a member of the Green Party, he finds its platform lacking as well. And here we come to the core of his argument: that Capital is the efficient cause of the global ecological crisis, and that the one feature which defines its dynamic above all others is the commodification of labor power and its reduction to abstract social labor for sale on the market. "If capital is truly the enemy of nature, then we do not overcome it without the liberation of labour. This demand, which is the core of socialism, eco-or otherwise, comes down to the following: undergoing the separation of producers from the means of production." And in this socialist revolution, "labour power would be freed from the chains of capital and human power would become freed from false addictive needs and able to resume its potentials."

Kovel does not foresee a violent revolution to bring this about. He believes there must be much more political education in America, and development of class consciousness. Then there needs to emerge, out of widespread popular education, an ecosocialist party capable of carrying the banner of a democratic socialism rooted in ecological values. Toward that end, institutions are needed that can challenge capitalism's upside-down value system in which exchange value trumps use value. Use value needs to become primary. Such institutions already exist--he cites the Bruderhoff community as one example of a highly productive community based on a communitarian, non-capitalist ethos. There are many more, and the more of them we develop, the greater will be the strength of a growing collective awareness of the need to replace capitalism with a system that is truly compatible with ecological values.

Joel Kovel's book sounds like a college lecture: rambling and with a lot of "sophisticated" intellectual words.

His eco-socialist program is extremely confused.

Apparently, the author believes that a "Green" economy is compatible with high tech, using an obscure Christian community known as the Bruderhof as an example. Kovel's criticism of Murray Bookchin is very weak, perhaps because he and Bookchin are so similar?

Kovel also calls for a centralized planned economy, while claiming it could be run in a democratic fashion. How come no such system ever existed anywhere in the world? Further, one wonders how the eco-socialist program should be implemented, and by whom? Most people don't want to give up their high standard of living, and rightly so!

Frankly, this book was a disappointment.

I bought and read this book several years ago.
I recall that it was horribly written, even though I am entirely sympathetic with the author's message. The book appeared to be written by a professor who does not know how to express himself simply or clearly.

I give it one star because it is written so poorly. I would like to give it zero stars, but I believe that isn't an option in the Amazon ranking system.

If ecosocialists can't write better than this, we're certainly doomed.