Abstract
1. Green Politics
It is the summer of 2010, and as I write this review the BP oil disaster is wreaking ecological and social havoc throughout the Gulf Coast of the United States. Hemorrhaging oil is grounding shrimping fleets, fouling oystering beds, and bankrupting businesses. The disaster presents an acute threat to the cultural life-ways of indigenous groups who for centuries have been forced to negotiate the impacts of capitalist development and cultural imperialism. The stress caused by such social upheaval and insecurity cannot be underestimated and has already resulted in at least one suicide (Mitchell 2010), adding to the deaths of the 11 workers killed in the initial explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. With revised and worsening estimates of leakage-rates and with no end in sight, concerns over ecological and social outcomes are extending well beyond the Gulf Coast and well into the future.
Of course, the disaster is not merely an accident that showcases the dangers intrinsic to an industrialized, dirty-energy economy. Nor should it be understood as simply the result of a disturbing lack of government oversight over a particularly egregious corporate actor. Rather, the disaster asks us to consider the conditions that produce such a perilous project and implores us to respond.
For a complacent U.S. public, the BP disaster resounds a call for the creation of a new sustainable and green economy, a vision and discourse that has gained considerable purchase across divergent political projects in recent years. In Western Massachusetts where I live, for example, the social landscape is increasingly washed with a green hue: such endeavors as university-campus initiatives, insurance companies, realtors, and banks market themselves through claiming their commitments to “green” initiatives. Even a local TacoBell, invested in factory farming and mass production, encourages customers to go green by eating in its LEED certified building. And of course environmentalists and green movements have long histories of internal political diversity and dissonance reflecting racialized class differences and divergent cultural and political traditions.
At a recent local sustainability conference, I was reminded of the breadth of projects coming from the left that a green economy might accommodate. The event itself was hosted by Co-op Power, a social justice organization committed to sustainable and community-owned energy and was held on the grounds of Nuestras Raices, a grassroots organization involved in multiple community and economic development initiatives such as urban gardens, environmental justice projects, and youth programs. Participants included a local permaculture expert, a worker-owned cooperative specializing in retrofits, retailers hawking “green” products and information sessions, a university recruiting for a program in sustainability, a family-owned maple syrup business utilizing solar powered harvesting techniques, massage therapists, a company that converts diesel cars to run on vegetable oil, and a non-profit clean energy utility.
This multifarious political terrain suggests numerous theoretical and practical challenges for social transformation. How do we work towards a sustainable future that is not co-opted by the entrenched interests and investments of the capitalist class and elites? Moreover, how do we assess, negotiate, and/or reconcile the range of initiatives that are staking claims to a green economic future? Two recent publications directed towards U.S. audiences can help us think through some of these questions and dilemmas. Van Jones’s The Green Collar Economy and John Bellamy Foster’s The Ecological Revolution at first glance might be understood as conflicting left perspectives. Taken together, they might be able to point to a way forward.
2. The Green Collar Economy
Part manifesto and part policy playbook, Jones’s clarion call sounded in near concert with the election of the Obama presidency in 2008, a time of hopeful possibility for the left in the United States; throughout his book, Jones embodies this optimistic spirit, advocating for cooperation and solutions over opposition and critique. Jones begins by outlining what he refers to as the dual crisis of our times: “rampant environmental destruction” and “radical socio-economic inequality.” For Jones these crises mark an opportunity for political-economic transformation. Jones sees on the horizon the makings of a “green new deal” that would leverage government monies to spur and support a market-led transition to a new green economy. This “green wave” of investment would then create new markets and new jobs through low-tech opportunities like retrofits, green technological innovation, and new green industries.
Jones contrasts the environmental project at hand with two earlier eras of environmental activism: conservation and regulation. These previous movements, Jones tells the reader, while leading to increased environmental awareness and important protections, excluded the interests and contributions of poor people and people of color and consequently largely excluded them from the benefits. Echoing the tenets of the environmental justice movement that rose in response to conventional environmentalism, Jones insists that a green collar economy must be characterized by eco-equity; in other words, equal protection and opportunity across axes of race and class.
If the green wave of investment is to be transformative and redistributive, however, a movement will have to emerge that has the capacity to overcome entrenched interest bound up in what Jones describes as the “military-petroleum complex” (83). Jones calls for a multi-class and multi-racial populist alliance founded on and organized around a set of moral principles—equal protection for all, equal opportunity for all, and reverence for all creation—in order to create an inclusive, broad-based movement. Jones lays out what his Green Growth Alliance looks like: students, social justice activists, environmentalists, labor, and faith organizations in partnership with business. The alliance would then engage with government at every level in order to create favorable policies.
Jones highlights actually existing examples of “green pathways to prosperity” (115) in the areas of “energy, food, waste, water and transportation” (115). These examples include the development of wind farms on Native American land; urban agriculture projects that provide health food, jobs, and job training; policies that provide financial incentives for recycling; a non-profit and a worker-owned co-op that salvages and resells building materials; and the creation of water capture systems in Los Angeles.
Finally, Jones proposes a broad policy agenda at the national and local levels that could help to create an inclusive green economy. This sweeping agenda would include cap and trade legislation; worker training and employment; increased fuel and energy efficiencies; renewable energy legislation; investment in mass transportation; funding and support for sustainable agriculture; a number of innovative investment, conservation, and efficiency measures; and taking a leadership role in international climate change negotiations and efforts.
3. Ecological Revolution
While Jones tells us that a move towards a green economy offers a solution to both environmental and economic crises, Foster argues that this economy has to be by definition a socialist one. Foster’s 2009 book consists of a collection of reworked and expanded essays written over the course of more than a decade. These essays, comprising chapters in the book, are organized into three sections that, taken together, make the case for revolutionary transformation that is at once ecological and socialist.
Foster builds his analysis in opposition to what he identifies as the dominant, mainstream response towards ecological crisis in the United States, a “green industrial revolution” that relies on technological invention and technocratic intervention to remediate and provide solutions to ecological and social problems. For Foster, green industrialism is doomed from the start, as it exists within a global capitalist order that necessarily produces ecological destruction. In the first section, The Planetary Crisis, Foster discusses some of the major ecological contradictions of global, industrial capitalism including environmental pollution, peak oil, and climate change. Most salient to his argument, Foster attests that growing awareness around, and the material consequences of, these contradictions have not led to any significant, let alone fundamental, transformation in social-environmental practices on a global scale or, most especially, by the United States which Foster understands as the “hegemonic power of the capitalist system” (130). On the contrary, Foster posits that the logics and processes associated with capital accumulation ultimately win out over ecological concerns. Rachel Carson’s ecological critique and the social awareness and action it propelled has not prevented the proliferation of antibiotics in factory farms, pesticides in fruits and vegetable production, or government complicity with businesses who benefit from the production of synthetic chemicals in the United States. The energy crisis portended by peak oil has led to imperialist machinations to secure oil and more intensive extraction rather than conservation or significant investment in renewable energies. And, despite the overwhelming evidence that climate change will result in catastrophic social and ecological changes, the U.S. government has refused to comply with even the most modest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions proposed through international agreements.
In the second section, Marx’s Ecology, Foster makes the case that Marx’s original works provide fundamental and critical insights towards understanding and responding to ecological crisis. Foster asserts that Marx was “deeply concerned with issues of ecological limits and sustainability” (183), and shows how both political events—like the “disconnection of Soviet thought from ecological issues” (192)—and constructed scholarly historicities have obfuscated Marx’s ecological contributions. Throughout the section, Foster elaborates on Marx’s development of the biological theory of metabolic rift, a concept which helps to explain the dialectical relationship between nature and society through the labor process. Human beings labor and produce, which changes nature, which in turn changes the nature of the relationship and the conditions under which labor is conducted. With capitalist relations of production, which commodifies nature, human beings become alienated from nature; and the process of capital accumulation leads to a “constant intensification and enlargement of the metabolic rift between human beings and the earth” (148).
One example that Foster returns to in order to help illustrate his theory of metabolic rift is the division of labor created between town and country, both within capitalist centers and between nations in the capitalist system. As industrialization increased and agriculture became more systematized, nutrients in the soil were carried away from agricultural areas and towards urban centers. As production increased, fertilizer was needed to keep the land productive. First massive amounts of guano and then nitrates were exported from peripheral countries to the center, resulting in increased pollution in industrial areas and depletion of soil in agricultural areas. This metabolic rift, Foster suggests, is an underlying problem in ecology and can only be solved through a transformation in the relations of production.
The final section, Ecology and Revolution, is a mere 25 pages. Foster uses this space to summarize his arguments and reiterate that only an ecological revolution can adequately respond to environmental crisis, and that “the transition to socialism and the transition to an ecological society are one” (277).
4. Revolutionary Politics?
When comparing the two projects, it is important to note that Jones’s vision of a green economy does not neatly match up with the mainstream green industrialism that Foster critiques. For example, Jones’s primary referents for green technology are renewables like solar and wind power, technologies that Foster implies might not readily correspond with the green industrial revolution (20, 21). And, more significantly, Jones intends to inspire a grassroots, populist alliance that stands in stark contrast to Foster’s characterization of green industrialism as a “top-down” (28) and elite-led transformation. Moreover, Jones appears to be writing to the heart of the mainstream environmental movement and to mainstream liberals he is hoping to activate; in other words he is writing to the center that he is hoping to inspire to action. In contrast, Foster’s intended audience is at once more scholarly and further to the left. Still, if we read Jones’s call to action against Foster’s theoretical analysis, Jones’s politics might appear naïve, insouciant, and problematic. Jones’s prescription largely takes for granted capitalist social relations. He calls for tax incentives, market-based policies, and policy changes. Rather than revolution, Jones appears to favor policy changes and reform that can help expand the economy and redistribute wealth. If we read Jones against Foster, Jones is doomed from the start.
But if Jones is doomed from the start, Foster provides us little place from which to begin. Foster commits to us a global capitalist system whose structuring logics are unassailable. If we are to heed Foster’s arguments, the only recourse for us—and the only hope for human society—is to transform the relations of production; but how is this possible if our efforts are carried within a “juggernaut” (61) of a system run through a seemingly, near totalizing “inner logic” (61)? The authors J. K. Gibson-Graham (2006) may provide a way forward. In place of a global system or container, they ask us to envision “the economy” as a diverse array of economic practices scattered across a landscape. For example, different arrangements of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution can be viewed as co-existing in different locations. And, rather than a result of an inevitable structuring logic or systemic outcome, class processes and social relations are contingent and overdetermined in place; thus each place can be a location of economic possibility and becoming. With this perspective, Jones’s project (or any!) can take on revolutionary implications. Jones’s politics no longer appear confined to operating within “the system”; instead we can begin to see that a new green economy, even one that is spurred through policy reforms, can and does include different social arrangements around, and dispositions towards, the relations of production. In this context, we can work to amplify efforts to build alternative and local markets that suck capital from multinationals. We can organize and leverage government funds to create community-owned energy companies. We can even work with local elites to fund networks of worker-owned businesses (see the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland for example). Of course, the establishment of new economic practices locally might not immediately constitute a global-ecological revolution. They might not, immediately and in and of themselves, subvert the geo-political calculus of BP Oil and U.S. imperialism—Jones’s military-petroleum complex—but they can be seen as significant counter-hegemonic moves towards an egalitarian and sustainable future. Indeed, as Gramsci tells us, revolution requires an engagement in a war of position, an ongoing, hegemonic struggle carried out in a multiplicity of political and cultural arenas throughout society. In other words, in order to realize an ecological revolution, we need to create the ideological and broader cultural conditions from which a new world might be imagined and created, rather than simply critiquing and/or protesting the deplorable actions of entrenched corporate and elite interests. Establishing non-capitalist class processes locally, and in the process creating non-capitalist practices and dispositions, can help to build and, indeed, enact revolutionary politics “in the here and now” (Gibson-Graham).