Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | L | Labour/Le Travail

Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds. Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007.

Article Excerpt
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds. Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007 (London: Merlin; New York: Monthly Review Press; Halifax: Fernwood Publishing)

IN THEIR CHARACTERISTICALLY dense and succinct preface to the 2007 edition of the Socialist Register, the editors make two important observations. The first is that socialist theorists have, until recently, not recognized environmental problems as being urgent, potentially irreversible, and "integral" to the socialist project. The second observation is that "mainstream environmentalists" continue to look to a kind of"market ecology" for solutions, "as if markets and technocracy can solve ecological problems without reference to politics and democracy." (xiv) These observations speak to a failure of communication between critical political theorists and the practitioners of ecological science that continues to hobble both political leadership and active citizenship. While the reasons for this failure are complex (and not the primary concern of this collection), socialists can contribute to ecological praxis by improving their own understanding of the relationships between contemporary capitalism and ecological crises. An important aspect of this undertaking is to more clearly conceptualize "the kind of politics that could lead to an ecologically sustainable as well as a democratic socialism." (ix)

Overall, the collection very admirably achieves its objectives. The chapters by Neil Smith, Elmar Altvater, Daniel Buck, and Philip McMichael, in particular, go a long way toward fulfilling the collection's aim of providing a "better ecosocialist understanding of contemporary capitalism." (ix) Smith describes the ways in which nature is increasingly being commodified, socially produced, and financialized. Drawing on Marx, and on the work of the French School of Regulation, he argues that a real subsumption of nature to capital is taking place (like the earlier real subsumption of labour to capital in the intensive regime of accumulation). Nature is now not only being appropriated by capitalism, but also produced by capitalism, in the form of new technologies - in particular, biotechnologies. The eco-Marxist theorist, lames O'Connor, drew attention to the same phenomena, albeit using different terms, in work published in 1988 and 1998. O'Connor viewed capital's drive to "remake nature" as a response to the "liquidity crisis" generated by its own consumption of resources, and as requiring, also, the remaking of...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!