A critique of political ecology (1987)

From the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last January's German elections Die Grünen — the Greens — increased their representation in the Bundestag from the 27 seats they had won in 1983 to 42. This makes them the envy of "ecology" parties in the rest of Europe. Compare their success with, for instance, the performance of the Green Party in Britain in recent by-elections: 264 votes in Greenwich and 403 in Truro.

Even though ecology is a politically-neutral scientific discipline its particular field of study — the relationships of living organisms to each other and to their non-living environment — makes it one that has an important relevance for human social activity. This is because humans too are natural organisms, in fact the only ones, due to their particular biological make-up, capable of regulating and changing their relations with the rest of nature.

Ecological research has shown the present relationship of human society to the rest of nature to be damaging — both to the rest of nature and so in the end to humans themselves as part of nature. It seems reasonable that an ecologically-inspired movement should have arisen calling for social and political action to change this relationship. The German Greens present the argument for this in their Federal Programme in the following way:

A prerequisite of an ecologically oriented political view is the recognition of the interdependence between the balance of nature and life cycles, and an awareness of the consequences of human interference in nature. Our highest aim is therefore the enlightenment of the population concerning these relationships. The urgently needed communal approach to an ecologically oriented form of politics is still obstructed by powerful economic interests. An economically informed political policy which looks towards the future must replace our present profit-oriented mode of thinking. We must put a stop to the violation of nature in order to guarantee her survival and ours.

In the future economic goals should only be realised within a framework of ecological necessities. Our greatest imperative must be the least possible alteration of natural processes.

We can fully endorse both the ecologically-based criticism of present-day human society — capitalism, in its private form in the West and its state form in the East — and its conclusion that humans must take action to change it. Where we differ from the various Green and "ecology" parties and groups is over what action should be taken.

Briefly, we hold that what is required is a fundamental social revolution, to be carried out by democratic political action, to make the natural and industrial resources of the world the common property of all humanity. Only on this basis — the abolition of all property rights over nature and what is produced from it — can production be re-oriented from its present aim of profit-making and unlimited capital accumulation towards the satisfaction of human needs in an ecologically acceptable way.

Very few political ecologists see the establishment of a property-less society as the only way in which humans can consciously regulate their relations with the rest of nature so as to respect ecological imperatives. The vast majority of them see what the German Greens call “an ecologically informed political policy" as involving little more than trying to limit the damage the present economic and social system causes to nature. When they enter into the details of the "ecologically oriented" economic system they would like to see eventually replace the present one, it turns out to be a system which retains property, money, markets, banks, taxes and so on. In other words, they imagine that they can re-orient the wages-prices-profits system that is capitalism along ecological lines. But this is an illusion: capitalism can no more be reformed to respect ecological imperatives than it can be reformed to serve the interests of the wage and salary working class.

Green parties may be very good at criticising present-day society from an ecological point of view and in identifying what productive practices would have to be adopted to respect the balance of nature (such as maximum use of renewable resources, recycling of materials, interchangeable spare parts and energy conservation) but they go completely off the rails when they imagine that ecologically-acceptable productive methods could be imposed on the present economic system by public pressure, government intervention, laws and tax reforms. In other words, they are wrong when they claim that the present capitalist economy could be gradually transformed into an ecologically-oriented one.

Most Greens would probably object to being told that they stand for reforming capitalism in a Green direction. Petra Kelly, one of the more prominent of the Greens in Germany, has even claimed that almost all German Greens hold, with regard to the East-West conflict, that "there is a form of capitalism on both sides, state capitalism on the one side and private capitalism on the other" (Green Politics by Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra. Paladin, p.62). And the German Greens' Federal Programme identifies clearly enough the link between capitalism and ecological damage:

People in the Federal Republic of Germany are also affected by the ecological and economic crisis threatening industrial societies. This crisis is characterised by the increasing destruction of the biological basis of life for human beings and the exploitation of one human by another. The ruthless plundering of nature causes long-term damage which is in part irreparable. This damage is seen merely as an unfortunate side effect in the search for short-term profits. The biological basis of life is endangered by nuclear power plants, by air. water and ground pollution. by the storage of hazardous wastes, and by the spendthrift waste of natural resources. The ruthless plundering of human resources is even worse. The physical and psychological burdens experienced at work mount up as industry develops and utilises technology without regard for human beings. Production is not oriented towards the needs of people, but towards the interests of investors. The ecological balance of nature is sacrificed on the altars of economic growth and profit-winning competition.

"Economic growth" (capital accumulation) and "profit-winning competition", however, are not seen as inevitable consequences of the system of buying and selling, wages and profits but as a result of this system being dominated by big private and state enterprises whose size orients them to pursue these particular goals.

This mistaken economic analysis leads the Greens in a quite different direction from socialists. While we advocate an end to the wages-prices-profits system through the establishment of a world of common ownership and democratic control, they advocate that "large corporations should be split up into manageable units and administered democratically by the people who actually work there" and that these "smaller, more medium-size", self-managed units should practise ecological, as well as financial, accounting. In other words, they advocate that the wages-prices-profits system should be run by smaller, worker-controlled and ecologically-oriented businesses. This, however. is no solution to current ecological problems because it is completely unrealistic.

It is not decentralisation, smaller productive units and democratic control of work in themselves that are unrealistic (as defenders of the economic status quo would claim) , but their achievement within the framework of the wages-prices-profits system. In other words, they could be achieved but not within this system. As Karl Marx was the first to show clearly, in a situation where everything is produced with a view to being sold, where everything including human mental and physical energies is subject to buying and selling, economic forces come into operation which impose profit-seeking and capital accumulation on economic decision-makers whether these be individual property-owners, private corporations, state industries or workers’ cooperatives. It is not the internal structure of an enterprise that is important in this respect but the fact that it is an institution producing goods for sale on a market. These same economic forces also lead to the concentration and centralisation of the control of industry and to the short-term economic goals that result in monetary profits taking priority over longer-term ecological considerations.

We are aware that most Greens are suspicious of Marxian economics due to its association with the self-styled socialist regimes in the East which represent all that they reject in economics (productivism, gigantism, pursuit of unlimited economic growth) but these regimes are in no way socialist; rather they are examples of what Marx would have called state capitalism.

If the Greens can overcome this prejudice they would find that Marx’s analysis of the wages-prices-profits system of capitalism explains both why the ecological laws that ought to govern the relationship between human society and the rest of nature are not respected at the moment and how there is no way of this happening as long as this economic system, whose very essence is the externally-imposed pursuit of profits and unlimited capital accumulation, is allowed to continue.

Reinforced with such a knowledge of the economic laws of capitalism, the Greens’ understanding of the ecological laws of nature would lead them to realise that the political action demanded by the findings of ecological research is one aimed at replacing private and state property by common ownership and democratic control — replacing production for sale and profit by production solely for use. Socialism alone provides for the decentralised, non-hierarchical and non-exploitative society in harmony with nature that the Greens are searching for.

Adam Buick