Creating an Ecological Society. Chris Williams
a factor, of course, but what is required in this situation is a speeding up of the process of social transformation and thereby the creation of new integrative levels of social existence. The movement toward socialism, that is, toward a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality, will have to proceed much faster: by big steps, if not leaps. We can no longer depend—if we ever could—on a process of gradual evolution. Power must be wrested from the 1 percent. The expropriators must be expropriated. Our primarily quantitative society, geared always to more, and enforcing a perpetual deprivation in the population, must give way to an emphasis on qualitative human relations and a more sustainable relation to the environment.
Creating an Ecological Society presents a forward-looking perspective, which derives from three qualities that characterize their analysis: (1) the unification of all the major social-ecological problems, so as to transcend the contradictions of the usual reductionist ways of seeing; (2) a pedagogical approach in which the goal is to map out the social and ecological terrain of struggle for mass popular movements; and (3) the ability to project concrete, meaningful, and practical solutions to problems that are insoluble within the confines of the present system—but only if we are willing to be revolutionary enough to break with the present. Thus oppressions of class, race, and gender are not afterthoughts in an ecological analysis; they are the very nodes of struggle in which an ecosocialist society will be built.
Along the way Magdoff and Williams teach us many things: About Marx’s metabolic rift and the “three rifts” in the soil-nutrient cycle. About the relation of soil to climate change—where they provide a real scientific basis for understanding the importance of the soil’s potential impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. About the growth of epigenetics and its relation to the “triple helix” of gene, organism, and environment, pointing to the breakdown in genetic determinism.24 About how race and gender are tied into environmental injustices. About the construction of healthy cities. All of this is presented in terms as clear as crystal, and crystallized in proposals for revolutionary ecological and social change.
Marx once wrote that humanity “inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”25 One cannot read Magdoff and Williams’s book without recognizing that the dire crises associated with our present globalized (and at the same time localized) problems are capable of solution—since the material and human resources for doing so already exist. Never before in human history has the need for change been so great. Yet, it is a struggle, they tell us, that can only be won by “revolution” as a “continuous process”—unceasing radical change.
“After more than two and a half millennia,” Seaford writes, “money remains isolating, unlimited and homogenizing. Unlike us, who either do not see this or take it for granted, the Greeks were struck and sometimes horrified by it. Aristotle maintained that using money to make money is—in contrast to other forms of economic activity—unlimited and unnatural.”26 Marx strongly seconded Aristotle’s critique in this respect.27 And yet today we live in a highly financialized system where we are frequently offered carbon markets as the only solution to global warming—as if accumulation and financialization were the answers to Earth system crisis. For such a capitalist society, in which each expansion is only the basis for the next expansion ad infinitum, everything is turned into a commodity to be sold for the highest profit: the tape by which efficiency is measured. The end prospect of the continuation of capitalist business as usual is thus the fate of Erysichthon:
But when at last his illness had consumed
all that she brought him, and he still craved more,
the wretched man began to tear his limbs
asunder, mangling them in his maw,
and fed his body as he shrank away.28
None of this is foreordained, as in a Greek tragedy. Rather, the challenge before us, Magdoff and Williams declare, is to join the struggle to create an ecological society: a revolutionary transformation of the present.
—OCTOBER 14, 2016
EUGENE, OREGON
Preface
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things;
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “OZYMANDIAS”
AT SOME TIME IN THE FUTURE archaeologists may look at the rubble of a large twenty-first century city or other physical remnants of today’s world and wonder, as Shelley’s traveler surely would, what cataclysm struck that civilization. What caused such utter destruction, as occurred in the land of the “king of kings”? Without sweeping, systemic changes, the ominous trends in the world—ecologically the most momentous being global climate change, but additionally pollution of the seas, fresh water, soils, air, and people; soil erosion; biodiversity loss; use of renewable resources occurring faster than replenishment; and the depletion of nonrenewable resources—are unstoppable. The “business as usual” approach takes us on a clear pathway to planetary destruction.
A few years ago, Fred was speaking to a professor of environmental studies at a liberal arts college in the midwestern United States. The professor agreed with Fred’s contention that a whole new system, having new ways of relating to one another and the environment, was needed. But the environmental studies professor went on to explain that he did not talk to his students about it because any such change was so far off that he felt it was more important to talk about what might be done within the system in the near future to make things better. Finding out that systemic change was necessary, his students might become discouraged and immobilized by the enormity and long-term nature of the project. Fred’s response was that if we don’t begin thinking about what a new society might look like, how it might be organized, how it might work, and how it might be brought into existence—and start talking it over with others, especially young people—it will put the project off to the indefinite future. Any other response is counterproductive: it guarantees delaying precisely the kind of change the professor agreed was vital. If young people don’t fully comprehend the depth of the crisis, its systemic nature, and the magnitude of the required changes, they will not be in the struggle as a lifelong commitment. Knowing the extent of change required can help avoid demoralization or getting sucked back into the realities of simply trying to survive in an unjust and unhealthy system.
This is the crux of the issue: if we can’t even imagine a different way of interacting with one another, the economy, and the resources we use and depend upon, then the struggle for a just and ecologically sound world recedes into the realm of utopian fantasy. And without a vision for a plausible, genuine alternative, people understandably set their sights on reforms that will never add up to the immense changes that are needed.
But what could replace our current system? What