Anti-capitalism and environmentalism can and must go together, but the analysis needs to understand capitalism and class, which Nature for Sale fails to do

Capitalism’s cycles of accumulation relentlessly transform everything within their reach into commodities. Human beings become the commodity labour power, while our environment features simply as a source of natural resources through which labour creates commodities. Many mainstream ‘environmentalist’ schemes are built around mechanisms for transforming natural ecosystems into commodities as, it is argued, only then will there be a motivation within capitalism for preserving them. Yet, as Marx showed in Capital, it is these processes which create a ‘metabolic rift’ in what we would now call ecology, and thus leads to capitalism’s inherent environmental destructiveness (see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology). Marx recognised that within capitalist relations, nature has no value in itself, value coming from the labour applied to nature (Bellamy Foster, p.167). This constituted, for Marx, an alienation of nature which is importantly connected to the alienation of labour. Both processes of alienation need to be abolished.

As capitalism has globalised even beyond its considerable reach in Marx’s time, the metabolic rift has come to encompass the very atmosphere on which (almost) all life depends. Thus there can be no question that the struggle against capitalism is a struggle for planetary ecology, as a precondition for human liberation worldwide. The ecological dimension puts paid to any illusions that socialism could be anything other than thoroughly international in character. There are really no reformist compromises with such a rapacious and destructive system. The commodity form at the heart of capitalism thus unites environmental issues with the struggles of labour; for the latter to be liberated from commodification, the former must be also. Equally, any environmental ‘solutions’ which ignore class issues, and the logic of the capitalist system, will find themselves, at best, running up a down escalator.

All of this is therefore not an abstract analysis, but a reality across the world where it is invariably working people and the poor who suffer the consequences of environmental destruction. It is the same people who see their traditional resources corporatised, or indeed more modern social goods, such as water infrastructure, being privatised. From Bolivia to Bangladesh, environmental issues and problems have become demonstrably part of the global class struggle.

This all lies in contrast to a well-worn pessimistic argument that people in developing nations will want the same kind of development as has happened in imperial capitalist nations, and that this will lead to further ecological disaster. The logic of this argument starts from an assumption that the extent of prosperity is automatically a problem of scarcity, and that therefore a population’s consumption must always be constrained. In other words that the living standards of the global working class must be forced down in order to save the environment. Perhaps, however, the human aspiration to live lives free of exploitation and poverty is not the source of the problem; rather the logic of commodities, and the capitalist need to create scarcity in order to produce profit. In that case, a different social system of production could quite easily achieve what appears impossible under capitalism: sustainably decent lives for all.

The pessimistic, neo-Malthusian, argument of scarcity and constraint is contradicted by the experience of struggles in the neo-liberal era, where community-based movements against the encroachments of globalised capital have often encompassed an understanding of the need for sustainability, in developed and developing economies alike. Struggles to defend communal use values, against attempts to commodify them, are the central issue of Giovanna Ricoveri’s Nature For Sale: The Commons Versus Commodities. The subject is itself certainly a vital one, which has important consequences if a global class struggle for liberation and sustainability is to emerge.

Ricoveri dismisses one of the classic neo-Malthusian arguments, Garrett Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ theory (p.50), and is quite right to do so. The ‘tragedy’ argument makes the assumption that each individual in a communal system of resource-holding will over-exploit the available resources, and all will compete against each other. Thus the common land will be destroyed because it is not in the interest of any one individual to maintain it. Now, under certain historical conditions this can occur, but in fact communal use of resources has been sustainable in many societies across the globe world-wide over extended lengths of time.

Where the thesis does apply is under the particular historical circumstances where capitalist social relations have already begun to break up the solidarities and social mechanisms by which communities regulated their existence. It is only possible to assert that ‘the tragedy of the commons’ is universal if it is assumed that there is no real human history; that the basic principles of human social production are eternal. This is the assumption made by bourgeois economics, but which Marx demolished some while ago, showing bourgeois relations to have been historical, and therefore neither natural nor necessary for all future time. It is possible to rebuild systems of social solidarity, but not simply on the basis which they existed before capitalism. This is why both class-based and political organisation must remain central to any viable opposition to capitalist accumulation.

Unfortunately, Ricoveri adopts the same bourgeois assumptions that underlie the Hardin thesis, so that, despite dismissing the ‘tragedy of the commons’, she is unable, in fact, to offer any argument against it, apart from the assertion that the soil had been managed by ‘village communities for centuries,’ in England, ‘in the process of original accumulation’ (p.50). It is not clear quite what period Ricoveri is referring to here with the phrase ‘original accumulation’, but it was certainly the period of the growth of capitalism that pressure on common land became an issue, enough to sustain Hardin’s original argument. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis can be refuted, but not without a careful, historical analysis.

Ricoveri does not, however, take a truly historical perspective on these issues, declaring in fact that ‘the market has always existed since the late Stone Age’, following the social-democratic economist Karl Polanyi, who argued that industrialisation saw a process whereby the already existing market became dominant over society. This is a deeply problematic argument since it assumes an identity between simple exchange and this reified, unhistorical ‘market’. With capitalism simplistically equated with ‘the market’, or its dominance over ‘society’, Ricoveri arrives at a mechanical separation of economics from society (pp.58, 66, for example). This separation obscures the real actors in political economy. Capital, and its cycles of accumulation, is no longer the clear problem, instead the less concrete ‘market’ is the villain.

This shift creates a false dichotomy between ‘society’ and ‘economics’ which leads away from a materialist analysis into an appeal for ‘social values’ against ‘economic’ ones. The assertions become untenably generalised: ‘The community is the exact opposite of the market in the sense that it gives no value to the abstract dimension of mercantile relationships’ (p.53). Finally this all leads to the pessimistic notion that: ‘In all countries and in all periods the commons have been eroded’ (p.86). Ricoveri may not mean this statement to be as sweeping as it sounds, but nonetheless the implication is that the ‘commons’ will always be dominated by the ‘market’; that is to say, the neoliberal argument that there is no alternative is essentially correct.

The conclusions on the ability of the global ‘commons’ to effect change are therefore quite limited; Ricoveri envisages solely that ‘the new local communities, if they were given legal recognition and sovereignty over the natural resources located on their territory’ would be able to ‘avoid/limit the ecological damage of the capitalist market and thus contribute to constructing another way of producing and consuming, more sober and satisfying than the consumerist model offered by the market economy’ (p.100). This possible legal sovereignty of the local ‘commons’ is a tricky notion that is not adequately explored here, but in any case, it is hard to see how that alone would be able to withstand the awesome power of the disembodied ‘market’ which has always ‘eroded’ the commons. If ‘local sovereignty’ was to be viable at all, it would need to be part of a much larger, political movement that was challenging the power of capital as such, rather than just making apparently moral assertions about the proper way to produce and consume.

The analysis of ‘the market’ as the problem leads to a focus on ideas and values rather than on class and exploitation by capital. The conclusions, as a result, lead not to the exploration of how a global movement to confront capital could be built, but to the conclusion that people in the developed west, in general, consume too much. This is a Malthusian conclusion, one that transforms the damage done by capitalist production into a moralistic critique that can be turned against working people. Thus, those that go hungry and die are ‘most of them poor peasants in the South, while the number of the obese in the North is rising’ (p.78). The two facts are not actually connected in the sense that the one causes the other. While both issues are surely to do with the nature of capitalist production, moralistic attacks on the consumption of the working class in the ‘North’ are likely only to strengthen those forces whose economic and political power causes ecological destruction and starvation in the ‘South’.

Ricoveri extends her attack on consumption in the developed world by describing car-drivers as being engaged in enclosing the atmosphere; where once communal peasant land was enclosed by capitalist landowners, now car drivers reproduce the same theft. Global warming means that ‘fresh air is no longer granted to everybody; it is instead “appropriated” and privatised by the subjects most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions such as car owners, for example’ (p.72). Whatever one might think about the metaphor, this is not good analysis; in many areas of many countries, the United States for example, owning a car is essential in order to get to work. The effect of a car infrastructure is disastrous, but it is not going to change the world to moralise at working people in the west that they are overweight and drive to work.

The solutions to the ecological crisis suggested by Ricoveri are overwhelmingly about individual lifestyle choices, rather than an attempt to create the collective political strength that could challenge the structures of capitalism; ‘individual actions are decisive’ she explains (p.113). Changes in ‘individual behaviours’ may ‘reach critical mass’, it is suggested, but this is in fact a mainstream, individualised and market orientated strategy (p.112). Indeed, the anti-capitalist premise of the book seems to disappear when it is noted that, in the context of ‘giving value to the local’ as an alternative to globalisation, ‘it is small and medium-sized industries (as in Italy) which, thanks to their flexibility, manage to remain in the market’ in the current crisis (pp.114-15). Here it appears that it is only the ‘concentration and centralisation of decision-making power’ in the great corporations which is the problem, rather than capitalism as such. Yet commodification is a process inherent to capitalism, and great corporations are the product of capitalist development. Championing smaller forms of capitalist business seems to be a puzzlingly mainstream liberal capitalist solution.

It may seem surprising to arrive at arguments such as these in a book which claims to champion the collective virtue of the ‘commons’ against the insidious power of ‘commodities’. Yet, it follows from the reliance on Polyani rather than Marx, and a reluctance to engage with the class contradictions of capitalism. It is absolutely true that the exploitative relationship of capital to the world’s peasantry needs to be understood in order to build a global movement capable of challenging capitalism and preventing runaway climate change. However, rather than focusing on this issue, Ricoveri retreats to a conceptually vague appeal to ‘communities’. This follows from the entirely catch-all definitions of ‘commons’ and ‘natural-commons’ adopted from the start (pp.2-3).

‘Community’ therefore does not have any class component at all, and suitable ‘community’ based movements can be almost anything; from the peasant organisation, Via Campesina, to the ‘Slow Food movement’, ‘Friends of the Earth International’, or they can be ‘composed of only one person’ (p.16). The long list of people who may take part in ‘social movements’ does include workers and trade unionists, but also ‘people from the business and academic worlds’, so social movements are really being defined against class as an organising principle. The lack of definition here means that the case of Erin Brockovich, made famous by a Hollywood film, counts as a ‘community created in a Californian town’ apparently exemplifying the kind of social-ecological movement that is needed (pp.98-9). It is good that this case was won, but it is hardly a model for anti-capitalist organisation in itself.

This eclecticism is not so much an indication of fuzzy thinking as it is a decided ideological stance against political organisation as such. Indeed it is announced that existing political parties are ‘monolithic, bureaucratic and hierarchical, born and grown up in the context of national states and in an economy and culture that has now been swept away by globalisation’ (p.16). Therefore they should be replaced by these social movements that ‘are plural subjects that work through horizontal methods to form consensus’ (p.17). The overstated generalisations here are characteristic of the book, but even so the one-sided dismissal of political parties in general points to serious weaknesses in the perspective. Ricoveri praises the Indignados movement in Spain for, amongst other things, keeping out of ‘existing political organisations’ (pp.22-3), but it is precisely the lack of developed political perspectives and organisation which has limited the impact of this and movements like it. Spontaneous outrage at injustice and inequality can produce great eruptions of social energy, but political awareness and organisation are needed to create a sustained movement capable of really forcing systemic change of any serious quality.

A perspective which sidelines class, and eschews political orientation, finishes with an idealist antinomy between sustainable ‘cultures’ and the market or ‘consumer mentality’ (pp.47, 90 for example). It seems that it is not social structures, class struggles or other material forces which drive change, but ideas and mentalities. It is these, rather than the logic of capital accumulation, which create ‘a “colonial” attitude towards the Earth’ (pp.47-8). The idealist approach means that Ricoveri tends to identify people in general and their ‘market’ attitudes as the problem rather than locating the material structures which determine people’s realistic choices.

The perspective also means that Ricoveri sees her preferred models of resistance in natural terms; ‘the capacity of natural bodies to self-organise, which underpins the commons, only increases their relevance … they also promote the formation of an autonomous culture in which the species play a role in the cycle of life’ (p.47). There is an assumption here that the devolved, apolitical ‘community’ model of autonomous movements mirror natural processes, and are therefore somehow intrinsically likely to lead to sustainability. Whatever the likelihood of that, the attitude itself could easily lead to activists passively waiting for a properly ‘organic’ movement to emerge before attempting to change the world, handing initiative to the forces of capital.

There is a sustained dismissal of the existing European ‘left’ here, and since it is never explained what parts of the left are meant, this can only be taken as a blanket rejection of everything from social-democracy to the revolutionary left (p.115). Certainly there is much to criticise in existing parties of the left. Yet, without political organisation, without much stronger co-ordination, the ‘social movements’ and communities Ricoveri discusses are, at best, only likely to slow the system’s destructive power. In contrast, the real hope for both human liberation and ecological sustainability lies through the masses worldwide taking conscious, democratic control of the global economy, taking it out of the hands of capital, and organising it for the benefit of common human needs. To even move towards a socially and ecologically responsible system, it will take organisation and co-ordination well beyond what spontaneous or strictly local communities can accomplish. A global movement to break the insidious power of the ‘commodity’ needs politics.