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Joel Kovel. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World. London: Zed Books, 2002.
Growing numbers of people are beginning to realize that capitalism is the uncontrollable force driving our ecological crisis, only to become frozen in their tracks by the awesome implications of the thought. (p. vii)
Everything depends on making the building of ecosocialism proceed in advance of ecological breakdown, which at some point will bring all our hopes to an end. (p. 253)
Zusammenbruch: n. [G] Breakdown, collapse, depression, disintegration. Not long ago, the term was associated with Marxian theory, seen as an eschatology or prediction of the end of the world or, more precisely, of bourgeois society. The hopes of millions of proletarians rested on the expectation that such a breakdown would lead to a better world.
The end did come in the 20th century, in the form of worldwide economic collapse, fascist takeovers, and bloody wars, but only to be followed by the restoration of more or less stable class rule, albeit with more trappings of populist restraint. It was global tectonics rather than Karl Marx that forced governments in the 20th century to come to grips with the fate of late capitalism: sudden capital blow-offs preceding volcanic meltdowns as mountains of accumulated wealth vanished into smoke. Since those pyroclastic flows, the inevitability of going from boom to bust has often been derided as a spectral theory, as a passe Marxist notion. For more than half a century, the unsteady markets of world capitalism have been tethered by a myriad of regulation and more recently by the bonds of global exchange rules.
Whatever success these efforts have had in staving off another economic breakdown like the Great Depression, there now seems little doubt of the ironic effects of postwar growth on the ecological vitality and long-term viability of this planet known fondly, but perhaps too optimistically, as Terra Firma.
Joel Kovel's new book is a perfectly timed jeremiad. Kovel is a prophet in many senses, but his warnings are not hoarse whispers in the wasteland. They are clear clarion calls to significant popular movements determined to resist and reverse the degradation of the earth. For as Kovel points out, the new eschatology does not...