Notes

1. Editorial, “Let Them Eat Pollution,” Economist (February 8, 1992).

2. Richard Smith, “The Engine of Eco Collapse,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16(4) (2005): 35.

3. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960), 529–30. For a remarkable analysis of the destructive logic of capital, see Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York: Zed Books, 2002).

4. James O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 278, 331.

5. John Bellamy Foster uses the concept of “ecological revolution,” but he argues that “a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a larger social—and I would insist, socialist—revolution. Such a revolution . . . would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated producers rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. . . . It must take its inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and materialist figures, including Marx himself, stretching as far back as Epicurus.” Foster, “Organizing Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review, 57(5) (2005): 9–10.

6. For an ecosocialist critique of “actually existing ecopolitics”—green economics, deep ecology, bioregionalism, etc.—see Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2007), chapter 7.

7. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

8. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1950), 318.

9. Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 3 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), 828, and vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), 92. One can find similar problems in contemporary Marxism; for instance, Ernest Mandel argued for a “democratic-centralist planning under a national congress of workers’ councils made up in its large majority of real workers” (Ernest Mandel, “Economics of the Transition Period,” in 50 Years of World Revolution, edited by Ernest Mandel (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 286. In later writings, he refers rather to “producers/consumers.” I often quote from the writings of Ernest Mandel, because he is the most articulate socialist theoretician of democratic planning, but it should be said that until the late 1980s he did not include the ecological issue as a central aspect of his economic arguments.

10. Ernest Mandel defined planning in the following terms: “An economy governed by a plan implies . . . that society’s relatively scarce resources are not apportioned blindly (‘behind the backs of the producer-consumer’) by the play of the law of value but that they are consciously allocated according to previously established priorities. In a transitional economy where socialist democracy prevails, the mass of the working people democratically determine this choice of priorities” (“Economics of the Transition Period,” 282).

11. “From the point of view of the mass of workers, sacrifices imposed by bureaucratic arbitrariness are neither more nor less ‘acceptable’ than sacrifices imposed by the blind mechanisms of the market. These represent only two different forms of the same alienation” (ibid., 285).

12. In his remarkable recent book on socialism, the Argentinian Marxist economist Claudio Katz emphasized that democratic planning, supervised from below by the majority of the population, “is not identical with absolute centralisation, total statisation, war communism or command economy. The transition requires the primacy of planning over the market, but not the suppression of the market variables. The combination between both instances should be adapted to each situation and each country.’ However, ‘the aim of the socialist process is not to keep an unchanged equilibrium between the plan and the market, but to promote a progressive loss of the market positions” (El porvenir del socialismo, Buenos Aires: Herramienta/Imago Mundi, 2004, 47–48).

13. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 349.

14. Kovel, Enemy of Nature, 215.

15. Ernest Mandel, Power and Money (London: Verso, 1991), 209.

16. Mandel observed: “We do not believe that the ‘majority is always right.’ . . . Everybody does make mistakes. This will certainly be true of the majority of citizens, of the majority of the producers, and of the majority of the consumers alike. But there will be one basic difference between them and their predecessors. In any system of unequal power . . . those who make the wrong decisions about the allocation of resources are rarely those who pay for the consequences of their mistakes. . . . Provided there exists real political democracy, real cultural choice and information, it is hard to believe that the majority would prefer to see their woods die . . . or their hospitals understaffed, rather than rapidly to correct their mistaken allocations” (Ernest Mandel, “In Defense of Socialist Planning,” New Left Review 1/159, 1986, 31).

17. Mandel, Power and Money, 204.

18. Michael Albert, Participatory Economics: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso, 2003), 154.

19. For a selection of “negative growth” texts, see Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree, eds., The Post-Development Reader (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1997), and Michel Bernard et al., eds., Objectif Décroissance: vers une société harmonieuse (Lyon: Éditions Parangon, 2004). The main French theorist of décroissance is Serge Latour, author of La planète des naufragés, essai sur l’après-dévéloppement (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991).

20. Ernest Mandel was skeptical of rapid changes in consumer habits, such as the private car: “If, in spite of every environmental and other argument, they [the producers and consumers] wanted to maintain the dominance of the private motor car and to continue polluting their cities, that would be their right. Changes in long-standing consumer orientations are generally slow—there can be few who believe that workers in the United States would abandon their attachment to the automobile the day after a socialist revolution” (“In Defense of Socialist Planning,” 30). While Mandel is right in insisting that changes in consumption patterns are not to be imposed, he seriously underestimates the impact that a system of extensive and free-of-charge public transports would have, as well as the assent of the majority of the citizens—already existing today in several great European cities—for measures restricting automobile circulation.

21. Mandel, Power and Money, 206.

22. Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 259–60.

23. See S. Baierle, “The Porto Alegre Thermidor,” in Socialist Register 2003, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Pontypool, Wales: Merlin Press, 2003).

24. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1/3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1232.

25. Patrick Le Lay, quoted in L’Espress, July 9, 2004.

26. Chico Mendes, quoted by Ailton Krenak, coordinator of the União das Nações Indígenas (Union of Indigenous Nations) of Brazil. In Chico Mendes (São Paulo: Sindicato dos Trabalhadores de Xapuri, Central Unica dos Trabalhadores, 1989).

27. Ibid.

28. Chico Mendes, Chico Mendes por êle mesmo (Rio de Janeiro: FASE, 1989), 24.

29. Krenak, Chico Mendes, 21.

30. Mendes, Chico Mendes, 57.

31. Traven, B., The White Rose (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1979).

32. Information in this section is extracted from a 2012 issue of the Peruvian journal Lucha Indígena, edited by the Peruvian indigenous leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco.

33. Achim Brunnengräber, “Crise de l’environnement ou crise de société? De l’économie politique du changement climatique” (Environmental Crisis or Social Crisis? The Political Economy of Climate Change), in Globalisation et crise écologique. Une critique de l’économie politique par des écologistes allemands (Globalization and Ecological Crisis: A Critique of Political Economy by German Ecologists), edited by Ulrich Brand and Michael Löwy (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 243–62.

34. Matthieu Le Quang, Laissons le pétrole sous terre. L’initiative Yasuní ITT en Équateur (Leave the Petroleum in the Ground: the Yasuní ITT Initiative in Ecuador) (Paris: Éditions Omniscience, 2012).

35. World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, “People’s Agreement of Cochabamba,” adopted April 22, 2010, http://pwccc.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/peoples-agreement.

36. Denis Chartier and Nathalie Blanc, “Les développements durables de l’Amazonie” (Sustainable Development in the Amazon), in Grands barrages et habitants. Les risques sociaux du développement (Large Dams and Populations: The Social Risks of Development), edited by N. Blanc and S. Bonin (Paris: Éditions QAUE, 2008), 169–89; A. Hall and S. Brandford, “Development, Dams and Dilma: The Saga of Belo Monte,” Critical Sociology 38 (2012): 851–62.