Beyond Capitalism

book review by Dave Zink

The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
by Joel Kovel
Fernwood Publishing 2002

The choice that Joel Kovel offers in the title of this book is a gaunt one. He clearly lays out the indicting evidence against capitalism. It was never intended to be a steady-state system. Corporations are established for one purpose--to make money for shareholders by converting nature and labor into capital. Corporate managers are legally required to maximize profit for the investors. If they place the interests of workers, community, or environmental ahead of the profit interests of shareholders, they can (and probably will) be sued for breach of fiduciary duty. Trying to graft environmental ethics onto capitalism is like trying to mix oil and water: it takes considerable agitation, and then doesn't hold together very long.

Kovel makes the case that capitalism exhibits a compulsive, unrelenting, grow-or-die expansion and over-consumption of resources at non-sustainable rates. Growth so conceived means the destabilization and destruction of the natural foundation of society.

"Corporations have major incentives to 'externalize' their costs--to dump toxic materials into our air and water, to take inadequate steps to promote the health and dignity of workers and to oppose regulation and policy that enhances social justice or protect the environment, but might interfere with profits."

Attempting to halt and repair damage to nature without addressing the ongoing root cause is a no-win situation. Try as we might to work for ecological sanity, the logic of capitalism brings about a deadly set of inter-locking assaults on the life-sustaining natural processes and resources all of us depend upon.

Depletion of non-renewable resources, disruption of natural cycles, waste, and pollution aren't accidents. They are the result of business as usual. Wetlands provide essential services in flood control and wildlife habitat, yet are filled in to make way for shopping malls and housing developments. Prime agricultural land is paved over by urban sprawl.

The logic of growth translates into increased wealth for the few, but increasing stress and misery for the majority and mounting violence to the planet.

Kovel asks, in the face of all this mounting evidence, where is the rational discussion of the systemic assault on nature? If an individual behaved like a corporation, he would soon be arrested, put on trial, found guilty of crimes against humanity, and either locked up or committed to an institution for the criminally insane. Where is the discussion to address the underlying causes of so much damage and lay out a policy to remedy them?

Federal and state environmental protection agencies like the Washington State Department of Ecology are the first to feel the budgetary pinch caused by military spending, tax breaks and handouts for the corporate aristocracy. The result: these agencies become financially crippled and less able to carry out their mandated duties. Corporations want to "get government off the back of business!" For them, regulation is just another annoyance. "Each capitalist must constantly search to expand markets and profits", Kovel says, "or lose his position in the hierarchy. Under such a regime, nature is continually devalued."

Kovel feels that we need a new system. He challenges the commonly held notion that there is no realistic alternative. If capitalism is inevitable and innate in human nature, he asks, then why has it only occupied the last couple hundred years out of a human history that goes back for hundreds of thousands of years? "Why did it have to be imposed through violence wherever it set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually maintained through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each generation through an enormous apparatus of indoctrination?"

Kovel surveys the possibilities for turning things around. Many innovations that could help restore environmental health aren't adopted because they're not profitable enough to bother with. Recycling, use of unleaded gasoline, and other good ideas can't bring about an ecologically sane society as long as capitalism remains in the driver's seat. These are patches over a senile system overdue for replacement.

If cooperatives became dominant, and if the entire economy was in cooperative hands, we could build a sane, sustainable society. But cooperatives and "green capitalism" are tolerated so long as they stay out of the way of the dominant players. A few years ago, the banking industry went on the offensive against a modest expansion of credit unions into services that the banks claim.

As long as capitalism is dominant, cooperatives, credit unions, and other forms of economic democracy are forced to either play the game according to the aggressive rules of capital, or go bankrupt. Capital hems them in and, through unrelenting competitive pressure, forces them to behave like capitalist businesses.

There are several paths out of the worsening environmental morass. I found Kovel's comparison and critique of the major Green tendencies--Populism, Green Capitalism, Bioregionalism, Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology as advanced by Edward Abbey, and Social Ecology as advanced by Murray Bookchin--quite interesting.

Kovel feels that Ecosocialism offers a superior analysis and winning strategy. He defines Ecosocialism as "A society that is:
1. Socialist, in that the working class is reunited with the means of production in a robust flowering of democracy, and
2. Ecological, in that the "limits to growth" are finally respected, and nature is recognized as having intrinsic value and not simply cared for, but allowed to resume its inherently formative path."

The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that "We can have a democratic society, or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both." Kovel's book inspired me to update this axiom: "We can have an ecologically sustainable society, or we can have labor and natural resources treated as commodities. We cannot have both."

WWW Washington Free Press