Joel Kovel (1936–2018)

This is a hard book to read and recommend (or not recommend), so some explanation is required. If you (a) realize that the environmental crisis is really, really serious, "end of civilization" type stuff, and are wrestling with the problem of the social adjustments necessary to deal with the environmental crisis, and (b) have some background in Marxist thinking, and (c) find Marx attractive without necessarily buying everything he says, then you will like this book and should definitely read it. If you don't fulfill either (b) or (c) you are going to have problems with this book. You'll probably get bogged down somewhere after page 50, if you make it that far, and give up. I'd suggest looking at chapters 2, 7, and 9, though. I started out somewhat predisposed to give it 3 stars on the basis that the basic idea of the book is good but the rhetoric was off-putting. Then it became clear that you couldn't just breeze through this book, you had to go through paragraph by paragraph, and by the middle of the book I almost put it down. But I kept reading, and then towards the end of the book the author seems to regain his sense of mission. And if you're a Marxist: please consider this a five-star review, because the main negative in my mind is excessive reliance on Marxist rhetoric. I was a Trotskyist in my younger days so I am used to this sort of thing. I remember laughing at one of Lenin's titles, "Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder," because the title itself seemed "over the top." What turned me off to Marxism was not a sudden embrace of liberal capitalism but the perception that the movement was being propelled forward by constant anger, and hoped to increase and exacerbate this anger as a way of getting things done. This anger had a debilitating effect on the movement. In the end people's anger turned on each other and so you had all these complicated divisions and nothing got done. The premise of this book is that capitalism is the enemy of nature. But here's the first problem: this is something which cannot really be "demonstrated," because it requires a paradigm shift. This is something I wish Kovel had acknowledged in a more straightforward way. Kovel talks about the Bhopal disaster. If you're really hell-bent on justifying capitalism, this event in itself is not a problem. It's bad, but it's because the people involved were corrupt, the governments' policies lax, and so forth -- not capitalism itself. What about other capitalist environmental disasters, mountain-top removal, global warming, or peak oil? Well, obviously we have a problem. Major critical reforms are necessary. But is the problem capitalism, or something else? Sure, capitalism is implicated, but isn't socialism implicated too? Did Marx actually say anything about this? Kovel rightly addresses these very questions. He is an advocate of eco-socialism, and he doesn't mean we'll worry about the environment after the revolution. It's an integral part of his platform, and he dislikes the opportunistic way of approaching this problem that says that "socialism will solve all our problems." I think that Kovel could have addressed this issue -- of paradigm change vs. reform, "proof" vs. "seeing" -- in a more straightforward way. The second problem is all the Marxist rhetoric. One of the more intriguing chapters in the book is "critique of actually existing eco-politics." He discusses ecological economics, and I've read such people as Herman Daly (Ecological Economics, with Joshua Farley) and Jack Manno (Privileged Goods). I have to say that I don't see any place where he specifically refutes something intrinsic to the position of ecological economics. As I understand it, E. E. would argue for social control of the size of the economy and distribution of goods, but allowing a free market to handle the allocation and price. So, what does Kovel think? Is this actually good enough to call eco-socialism, regardless of the what Daly et. al. say? It's not clear. So I wish Kovel had written a book for people who aren't necessarily Marxists at all.There's a problem with ecological economics as well. They are concerned to show that their ideas are not radical so as to increase its academic respectability. So they emphasize that they are keeping some aspects of the free market. They have some of the same problems as Kovel: being caught up in rhetoric (in their case academic instead of Marxist) in trying to communicate their positions.My take on this is that if you got behind the rhetoric and said, "this is what we need," that it would turn out that ecological economics and Kovel are actually pretty close together. You could make a case that it is, or is not, socialism. The case for calling it socialism is that all this government control, if actually implemented, is certainly going to look and feel like socialism, even though the free market remains. We need the "eco" part too -- government control, in and of itself, will not solve the problem, and may in fact make the situation worse. So socialism is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of dealing with the environmental crisis.Bottom line, and this is why I am giving the book a relatively high recommendation: almost no one else is talking about this. The people who are talking about it, namely ecological economists, also have difficulty with the rhetoric (of academic rhetoric, not Marxist rhetoric). The reason for this is, I think, that this is a difficult subject and we are exploring things for which language is not yet quite adequate. So Kovel is worth reading. Thanks for writing the book.… (más)

Joel Kovel's, Distinguished Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, who ran for Senate in 1998 with the Greens, and sought their presidential nomination in 2000. This book reflects Kovel's obvious willingness to get his hands dirty in actual politics (an uncommon quality amongst academics), the final chapters dealing with actual measures for confronting capital's eco-destructive power and paths by which transition to an "ecosocialist" society might be pursued.

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism is inherently destructive of nature, or ecosystems, and that humans, not being inherently destructive of nature (pace certain trends in deep ecology) can and must find ways to live in ways that promote healthy ecosystems rather than "split" or unhealthy ones. The book is well-argued and wide-ranging, though if you tend to be pessimistic about human nature (a category Kovel is not afraid to throw around, though with an anti-essentialist stipulation) you may not be convinced. On the question of capital being an absolute "enemy of nature", the other main claim of the book as I see it, Kovel is also persuasive, arguing that the "accumulation for its own sake" that constitutes in unavoidable core of capitalism is an inevitably anti-ecological principle. The final merit of Kovel's book I should mention is that he is not naive about the potential for green movements to drift into fascism, nor does he think that socialism will automatically be eco-socialism, holding that the "eco" needs to be intentionally pursued by leftists and progressives as a goal in its own right.… (más)