Political Ecology

[Mark Jones]

If political ecology had not become the preserve of students of
divinity and anthropologists, instead of being the embracing
and essential discipline it ought to be, I would think of
renaming L-I the Political Ecology List and indeed have
suggested as much to Hans Ehrbar. But as things are it
would be misunderstood. The critique of political ecology
can never be the world-historical task which Marx's critique
of political economy was. 

Yet capitalist crisis is entwined with eco-crisis, and the 
latter has perhaps become the determining last instance of the 
former. Eco-catastrophe may mark the final punctuation-mark in 
capitalism's brief and disequilibrated existence. The critique 
of political ecology ought therefore a matter of concern not 
just to Marxists or self-professed revolutionaries, but to 
anyone with an attention span greater than a goldfish's.

We need to focus on the central issues and not be sidetracked.
My own checklist includes not only the usual suspects: anthropogenic 
climate change, loss of biodiversity and the invasive and irreversible 
(though little-quantified) impact on Nature of the life-engineering 
sciences -- nor should we be confined to related issues of capitalist 
economy and its material and energetic substrates. We need to cast 
the net wider, especially since (surprisingly), the centrality of 
the relationship between political economy and political ecology 
has not fully registered on the Left. 

We need also to document and also to reconstruct, domains of theory 
whose relations to these themes has also been less well understood, such 
as the hypostatisation of the state, the metapsychology of the social 
contract in the possible absence or atrophy of civil society, and related so-
called pomo themes which may prefigure post-capitalism. 

These topics are also intimately connected with the all-important question 
of political organisation and the constitution of political pluralities 
committed to the necessary kinds of all-embracing social change, change 
profound enough to merit the term social revolution, but undoubtedly 
the minimum necessary to ensure the survival of functional human civilisation 
in an era of tectonic social-systemic transformation, eco-collapse and 
perhaps climate catastrophe. The Left in its obsessional need to romanticise
revolution has never grasped the point which the paleo-right easily sees,
namely that mass support for revolutionary regimes has always in real
historical practice depended upon the mobilisation of *post-revolutionary*
state power as the indispensable prerequisite of 'proletarian' ideo-political
and hence social hegemony. Support for revolutionary coups d'etat in reality
was thus never more than an uneasy amalgam of rejection of the insupportable
oppression which actually exists, and dreams by the masses of a different 
but unrealisable future.

How, then, can mass support be mobilised *in the necessary absence of the 
proletarian state*, since that is the inevitable correlative of World 
Revolution (as Lenin foresaw in State and Revolution) and since no 
other kind of revolution is possible nowadays? The era of socialist 
state building has passed. This is the crucial impasse facing the 
masses in their attempts to oppose imperialism in every country 
from Indonesia to Russia where the capitalist regime has fallen into 
irreversible crisis (as it already has in most of Africa) and where
capitalist social relations continue to subsist in societies which
slip back to feudal production conditions, only because of the complete
political immobilisation of the masses.

This is not a mere theoretical issue, either, but a literal matter
of life and death to tens of millions now freezing in Russia
or starving and homeless in Asia. And more: this issue and how
it is resolved is perhaps the central issue of the whole era of 
transition, as the crises of the peripheries generalise, deepen
and encroach on the metropoles. The deconstruction of the state
into the technologies of surveillance and mass thought control is
in any case already an advanced, material strategy of postmodern 
imperialism, as ideo-fragmentation and the techno-panopticon replace
the fetishised absolutism of the totalised Enlightenment state with
the greater obscurantism of the totalised individual qua hero of
anti-history (thus in celebrating the general victory of the Anglo-Saxon 
ethnos, we also must celebrate the victory of Bentham over Hegel). 

The critique of the state-form is thus also a metacritique of the
entire tradition of socialist state-building, from the construction 
of the soviet state to the researches into social renewal of the modern
Blairistas. The sources of such a critique are richly present within
the marxist corpus, of course, but they need to be mobilised, the more
especially since the Greens have only a black hole in their heads where
the State should be. 

The state's identity/unity, its mystificatory function as pole of social
universality and constitutor and guarantor of the universal grounds of 
social existence which are encapsulated in the tables of rights and 
obligations which define the social being of each citizen, springs 
from its nature as mirror inverse of the social diversity of the 
division of labour and the psychic fragmentation of labour 
immersed/chained within it. The collapse pf socialist state-building 
means the definitive ending of the era of bipolar worlds, of a 
'socialist' enclave within and competing with world capitalism: 
thus the overthrow of capitalism entails/is predicated on, the 
overthrow or supersession of the social division of labour itself,
a truly colossal undertaking and one very uncertain of success. Yet without
attempting it, humankind is doomed to remain entrapped within environmentally-
suicidal (ecocidal) capitalism, and the clock is relentlessly ticking. 

Who can doubt that the litany of eco-disaster will be so clamant within
another decade that to continue with unsustainable capitalism
will be ever more widely perceived as simply no longer an option?
But the option of 'sustainable' capitalism is also no option at
all. Nothing can prevent the veils being torn away from imperialism.
Its spiral into global crisis is its only visible trajectory,
and the fantasy of development has long been revealed as the 
truth of mass immiseration. Meanwhile US and European industry 
will still spew 60% of the carbon out, as the solemn pledges of 
Kyoto suffocate in colossal increases in metropolitan greenhouse 
emission. This is a kind of epochal, ecocidal lawlessness by the
West. It simply cannot and will not continue. 

The utter lack of popular legitimacy among the client regimes of the
periphery helps paralyse opposition, but the question of sovereignty
is opaque even where states, such as Russia now, begin inching their
way into quasi-opposition.

How to win trust? -- as Russian premier Primakov has just been lamenting
to the World Economic Forum session in Moscow, as if his people ought
to trust him, sold as he already is to his comprador-banker mafia. But in 
any case, there will not and there cannot be another strong Russian 
state in the absence of a world revolution which of itself will dissolve 
states, yet without such a strong state it is impossible to mobilise 
the Russian working class. The power of the Russian state has always
depended on its strong bond with the popular masses, amounting to
a quasi-mystical dyadism of Russian absolutism and Russan national
exceptionalism. The paradox of the leninist state-building project
in the space of the former tsarist empire was its dynamic combination
of these disparate elements: the archaic iconography of state-power
uneasily subsisting throughout the entirety of Soviet history, with 
the leninist nostrums about internationalism and World Revolution which
radically undercut state-building ab initio and prefigure wholly different
futures. This anomalous but dynamic dualism existed not just in
historical reality but in the heads of Soviet people themselves, and its
loss occasioned much bewilderment and bitterness: even young entrepreneurs --
even mafiosi! -- complained that 'the government has abandoned us'.

We should not be surprised by this.

In his novel The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, the Soviet dissident 
writer Yury Dombrovsky wrote with savage intensity about the terror and 
dislocation of the Stalinist machine: the fear that locks people inside 
themselves forever; the third person present at every conversation 
"without bodily presence, spawned by the very air of the year 1937, dense 
and pregnant with terrors, listening in to every word, remembering all, 
saying nothing and misinterpreting what he has heard, after his own 
fashion, the most fearful fashion, one not compatible with life".
Even the prosecutors - inscrutable, deadly and terminally wretched - are 
endearing with their talk of swimming, drinking, film-shows and family 
squabbles. Neiman discusses with his cousin the family tragedy he is 
writing about "the spiritual regeneration of the saboteur under the humane 
methods of Soviet interrogation" but he is tormented by the search for 
love and poetry'.

Neiman would be differently tormented in modern Russia. And is not the 
case that most of us secretly yearn for an inscrutable, omniscient being to 
watch our doings and overhear our thoughts? This desire for a secret 
interlocutor/judge is just what Calvinist elders horrified and delighted 
children with. 

If you were sure that no conversation was private, you were also sure 
that you have a private hotline with Uncle Joe himself. The fascination 
and appalled desire which writers like Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris 
Pasternak felt for Stalin was shared by millions of their fellow countrymen 
and women (both Pasternak and Bulgakov -- and the latter was in truth 
virulently anti-soviet, in fact a former White counter-revolutionary -- were 
the unexpected recipients of phone calls from Stalin, and both were 
haunted and troubled by the experience to the end of their days: Stalin 
ended his talk with Bulgakov by promising to receive him, and it was a 
festering source of bitterness that the meeting never materialised; this was 
in 1937. As for Pasternak, who nearly fainted when he first heard Stalin's 
strong Georgian accent, he tried to upstage Bulgakov by himself 
proposing such a meeting. 

'What would we discuss?' Stalin asked sceptically.
Struggling for an answer, Pasternak said: 'Life and death,' whereupon 
Stalin abruptly hung up and the two men never spoke again, something 
Pasternak never forgave hismelf for).

As every honest Soviet citizen discovered, even the anti-Soviet among 
them, on the day the Soviet Union ceased to be, the period of 
abandonment began, of neglect, humiliation, of being taunted by the 
depthless cynicism and gered of the New Russians parading their ill-
gotten gains. 

The nexus between individual and state which, in the absence of a civil 
society, constituted Soviet reality, was the culture in which the secret-
police state grew and was nourished. Its destruction traumatised the masses 
(last week the Duma, that delicate sensor of popular moods, voted 
overhwhelmingly to put Feliks Dzerzhinskii back on his pedestal outside 
the Lubyanka). This was also how socialism constructed itself from
the materials which lay to hand. 
 
The Russians will certainly try to reconstruct their state
and they will be obliged to do so in the only possible way, that is,
by seizing the moment of a US-led general economic slump to drive
a still deeper wedge into the unity of the world system. 

------------------------------

The political analysis of the conjuncture is one thing. We need 
also to sharpen our pencils and do more to  understand 
the linkages between economic processes and ecological ones. 
How are the evolutionary crises of capitalist accumulation regimes 
impacted by the growing positive feedbacks of capitalist externalities,
as these are revisited on the accumulation process? How are the 
traditional but not-so-well understood marxist laws of motion, of 
rising organic composition and falling profit rates and of capital 
over-accumulation, theoretically (dynamically) interlinked with the 
entropic disequilibria within global a energy-system still locked 
and increasingly dependent upon fossil (carbon) fuels?

The Capital-Nature-Socialism current, the ecological economists and 
many others have addressed these issues with fragmentary successes, and 
much more needs to be done. This elist may also make a definable 
contribution. To that end, I hope we shall collectively
refine the List Mission to more rigorously thematise discussion.

The politics of class-based revolution, as informed by Marxist theory,
has to be reinvented. We should not abandon the revolutionary, 
anti-imperialist dimension of marxism-leninism but we need to 
re-infuse it with meaning and content. This means drastically
broadening out the political scope of the list.

This is one reason why we need to redefine the list mission and perhaps
rename the list. Another is that the list has to play a 
theoretical/critical role more than an organisational role, so that the
name 'Leninist-International' with its invocation of a storied and very
specific history of struggle and organisation, is no longer
appropriate. In the West, Leninism has generally become synonymous
with the most vacuous, shrill and vitriolic kinds of political
sectarianism. The relentless march of social imperialism, the 
recuperation of metropolitan proletariats financed by the 
phenomenal acceleration of unequal exchange with the semi-colonial
peripheries (which underlies the fantasy of 'globalisation')
and geometric growth in global inequality, and the general crisis
of etatism, have removed the Western left's social basis 
at least temporarily and the revolutionary tradition is now 
a playground for poseurs, cranks and the mentally ill. A different
situation obtains in the peripheries, of course. But everywhere
the revolution remains trapped within archaic and obsolete
horizons, its struggles encapsulated by demands for democracy,
self-determination or sovereignty, none of which can constitute
the basis for successful revolution today.

Nevertheless, the political destiny of the metropolitan working 
class is still a completely central political preoccupation. The 
world system is octopus with several heads where agglomerate large
scientific-technical social couches. These are ultimately 
proletarian, and they constitute the few percent of the world's
workers (perhaps 200 million from more than 2 billion) who valorise
the social capital. 

The exhaustion of imperialism's material potential does nothing
to diminish the historical significance of these groups, and their
political rivenness and propensity for ideological capture by 
obscurantist neofascist and chauvinist propagandas only makes their
political fate a still more consuming matter of concern. They cannot
be written off, on the contrary.

It is obvious that the theoretically-empty Trotskyite and Stalinoid 
sectarians have nothing whatever to offer in the political rebirth
of western proletariats. So the salvaging of the key social couches
and their reconstitution as a class-for-self must begin as a proletarian
politics de novo. 

--------------

Marx did not have to invent Political Economy in order to 
criticise it. But the apotheosis of economics as the 
representation of bourgeois social relations is largely 
thanks to him. As for ecology, which shares the same etymology, 
a still greater beatification may prove necessary, 
since ecology long ago stumbled and fell and is no longer 
the defining environmental science, perhaps not a science at 
all. But ecology's ambiguous semi-oppositional status has 
always been evident. It has never been respectable. Therefore
we may adopt it as the orphan of degenerate bourgeois science
and make it our own (what taints ecology is its proximity
to philosophy, of course; nowadays science is only a matter
of instrumentalities; evidence of anything more is bound to
raise suspicions). Political Ecology ought to be the study of
social processes embedded within their natural locale. Instead
it is a minor branch of anthropology cross-fertilised with theology
and wracked with Harvard angst.

It should be the keystone discipline of the environmental and life
sciences. The fact that the keystone is probably missing from the
arch ought to alert us to the disarray within those sciences,
which are as radically incoherent as are particle physics and 
quantum mechanics, and perhaps for the same reasons.

Without putting politics in command of ecology there is no 
reason to doubt that calamity will result, perhaps already has,
from the sciences of which it should form (but certainly
does not) a general rubric. There are those who do not
see this and never will, who are convinced that the black hole
at the heart of science is actually a transcendent mystery which 
we better not mess with for fear of turning science into
superstition and magic. But this fear of anthropic conjecture
is misplaced. It is not the pursuit of knowledge which is the
problem, it is the conversion of that pursuit into a general 
social process, and not an unimportant one either, but one 
which defines humankind's metabolism with the external[ised] 
world. Unfortunately  this metabolic exchange is completely 
blind, the result of millions of invisible transactions, 
and it produces not by design, unmeant, a social and natural 
world thereby rendered unknowable and out of control. 

It is useless to talk of capitalist desecration and compare this
with the imagined, desired socialist resacralisation, of nature. 
Useless not merely because of the dismal experience of 'socialist 
construction' and planning generally. Actually, only absurd 
misconceptions of what is at stake and complete ignorance of 
the actual history (or a wilful refusal to confront the 
circumstances in which these things took place)
permits people to think that for example Stalin's planning
of war industry (driven by the imminence of capitalist attack)
bore some other-than-fortuitous relationship to planning
*in the absence of world capitalism*. No, the point is that
we face what are at bottom quite simple problems; only
capitalism (its form of stochastic accumulation) makes them 
practically insoluble. More like good housekeeping than faustian
dilemmas. In fact, safeguarding the physical environment 
would really be very simple, like cleaning a house, if you
could do it your own way, in your own time, but instead what
you have is a slavering beast roaring in the corner the whole 
time and threatening to tear the whole place down unless
you feed its insatiable appetite with every morsel you have,
offering even yourself in lieu of your own children. 

To recapitulate, IMO the List should focus on capitalist crisis, 
imperialism and the accumulation regime, the restructuring 
of the working class, eco-crisis and environmental change, 
and the state.

Mark Jones