8 April 2008

A comrade sent me a draft article recently called ‘Capitalism, Technology and the Environment’, saying he thought I would be interested in reading it. The piece is intended for publication in his group’s publication, Internationalist Perspective, next October, so I cannot reproduce it here, but my reply is relevant to a crucial theme of this website, bringing together radicals from the Left and people engaged in world change from other perspectives.

Hi ER,

Thank you for your essay, ‘Capitalism, Technology and the Environment’, which I read with great interest. Receiving this is very timely for me because I needed reminding: ‘Don’t forget the socialist case.’ I would dearly love to have a piece such as this to pass on to those I am currently working with on world change, because some of them are in danger of falling into what I shall call ‘elephant traps’; and I’ll come to those in a bit.

However, I cannot use your piece as it is, and it will be useful to me and perhaps of interest to you if I explain why. This is going to be ‘criticism’, but is not meant antagonistically. I know we have engaged in discussion previously, but forgive me for not remembering what ‘bones of contention’ we gnawed at, and maybe I’ll be repeating things.

What is really great about your piece is that it recognises that socialists have woken up to issues concerned with ‘the environment’ to the extent that the old assumptions about progressing from capitalism to socialism, taking advantage of the technologies developed under capitalism, have to be questioned, if not ditched. (I suppose you’ve read Black Mass by John Gray on where those ideas may derive?) And that there are people working on what kind of future society is possible, and socialists need to engage with them.

What is ‘not good’ – for my purposes anyway – is that you ‘bang on’ about capitalism too much, in the old way, blaming everything on capitalism, and its science and technology, and with the parallel you rather laboriously draw between the exploitation of ‘nature’ and the exploitation of workers. Some of it is right, I’ve no doubt, but the simplistic picture you draw is wrong in some respects – and would annoy the readers I have in mind. Rather than pick your piece apart, I’ll suggest a different take on the subject.

Again, apologies if you know all this because we’ve discussed it before. My long-term interest has been land use and land degradation. (I’ve got an index of my various websites at http://www.homeandlocalfood.co.uk/ which is quite a handy overview of the aspects of world change I’ve been working on.) If in your piece you had been thinking about the land, rather than of ‘the environment’ or ‘nature’, you wouldn’t have got things wrong in the way you have.

‘What have I got wrong, then?’ you’ll say, perhaps indignantly.

Well, it’s useful to get the idea that virtually all the abuse of ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’ can be seen as having impacts on the actual land you could walk on, in your boots, rather than think or read and write about from your place in the city. Urban dwellers – even those living in rural areas but still relying on supermarkets are ‘urban’ – are alienated from the land, but have an impact on land somewhere-or-other, where their plant foods are grown, and the plant foods for the livestock their animal foods come from are grown, and their minerals are mined, their timber is grown – and so on. You may make the exception the carbon dioxide released from fossil fuel burning causing anthropogenic climate change. But for me the damage caused to the land by the machinery powered by those fossil fuels is more serious than the climate change. For over 20 years I’ve been saying that for environmentalists to put the emphasis on ‘future threats’ is a big mistake: invites first of all denial, then promises of technological fixes – as we’re seeing, with nuclear, GM and a rush to biofuels.

‘I don’t disagree!’ you’ll say – maybe. Fine. All I’m saying is try this shift of emphasis, from the ‘issue’ idea to the actual land. Then you may see that capitalism is not the only culprit. I’ll give you two instances. The book which woke me up to this was Topsoil and Civilization by Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1974 (1955)). They quote Plato writing in 350BC about witnessing massive soil erosion going on in Attica after the Greeks settled it (pp.105-6). So cities – long, long before capitalism – caused major land degradation, and the agriculture was ‘organic’, and there was no mechanisation or fossil fuels back then. Marx wrote about the modern manifestation of this, of course: ‘Capitalistic production collects the population together in great centres [with the result that] it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth…’, and he engaged in disputes with Justus von Liebig, inventor of NPK fertiliser. (Capital I, p.637) But this kind of damage is not due to capitalistic production, not really. Another instance is the ‘pioneer agriculture explosion’ in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in 1860-1890, which apparently caused the release of more carbon into the atmosphere in those 30 years from deforestation and loss of organic material from the soils than did 100 years of fossil fuel burning between 1850 and 1950 (John Gribben, Future Weather (Penguin, 1982) p.185). The tree ring evidence for this is disputed, but never mind, it’s believable, and an indication that scientists are resistant to the idea that land use as such, rather than technology, has caused major damage; scientists being as alienated as (most of) the rest of us, and that’s what’s important, for my critique of your piece. It’s more complicated than ‘Capitalistic production’ does this or that.

And the reason that matters – for my purposes anyway – is that the people I work with recognise that ‘Capitalistic production’ or capitalism is the problem – they really do. Just because they are not card carrying revolutionary socialists doesn’t mean they don’t get that ‘it’s capitalism’ – mention this and they say ‘of course’, so you don’t need to ‘bang on’ – but they do need reminding, subtly, and interestingly, because there are these ‘elephant traps’. I’ll explain.

OK, ‘the people I work with’: who are they? They are ‘alternative types’, ‘permies’, vegans (some of them), people who have dropped out of regular society, some of whom have formed communities trying to get permission to live on pieces of land in the Celtic fringes, or living in cities and squatting and ‘skipping’ (living out of supermarket bins), and so on. Some of these people are highly intelligent and skilled, others are rather weird. Amongst them are more level-headed folk, capable of making inroads into the mainstream, getting involved with things like the Local Food Programme, applying for funding for things like SPAN, a community growing scheme. You get the picture.

All that has been going on and developing for 20-30 years, and during that time there’s been much experimentation to do with alternative land use, with living in community, eco-villages, permaculture design, vegan-organic (stock free) horticulture. But it’s tended not to be documented, for instance, yields in edible biomass per unit area of alternative growing methods are not recorded. I plan to do some research which is, in effect, archaeology, to discover what can be learned from these experiments. Socialists such as you and your group should be interested in that.

But I can see a problem emerging. Some of the ‘drop out’ types have got cheesed off with the struggle, and actually pretty fed up with each other, because they tend to fall out majorly – not unlike Lefty groups which are always splitting – and they can leave the communities or groups they belonged to in the lurch. I’ve been involved in picking up the pieces of one called Plants For A Future. I’ve recently managed to arrange the sale of one piece of land this group owned for over £200k – just to give you an idea: this is quite big stuff. But what’s beginning to happen, with ex-PFAF people and others I know, is that these people who have been drop-outs and world changers are deciding that what they need to do is rejoin society and start a business, or apply for funding, or get involved with an NGO and campaign for change. These are the ‘elephant traps’. This is where I could do with a good piece about ‘you can’t reform capitalism’, ‘capitalism has got to go’. I need a piece reminding people of that in a way they can relate to – that doesn’t blame everything on capitalism, doesn’t bang on about the class struggle, treats the reader with respect.

Does this make sense?

I’ll have to stop there because there are other things I have to do. Do get back to me to discuss this further. I would really love to have a version of your piece which I can pass around. I’d want some of the same kind of changes, I think, for a piece to go in Common Voice.

YFS, Chris

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