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Envisioning Ecological Revolution

The goal of ecological revolution, as I shall present it here, has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of
such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and
with it the future of civilization.
This is no longer a very controversial proposition. To be sure, there
are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that this raises.
At one extreme, there are those who believe that since these are human
problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need
is ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme, there are those who
believe that the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control, giving rise to the gloomiest forebodings.
Although often seen as polar opposites, these views nonetheless share
a common basis. As Paul Sweezy observed, they each reflect the belief
that if present trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the
human species irredeemably fouls its own nest.1

WA R N I N G B E L L S

The more we learn about current environmental trends, the more the
unsustainability of our present course is brought home to us. Among the
warning signs:

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There is now a virtual certainty that the critical threshold of a 2

C (3.6 F) increase in average world temperature above the preindustrial level will soon be crossed due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists believe that climate
change at this level will have portentous implications for the
worlds ecosystems. The question is no longer whether significant
climate change will occur but how great it will be.2
There are growing worries in the scientific community that the
estimates of the rate of global warming provided by the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
which in its worst case scenario projected increases in average
global temperature of up to 5.8 C (10.4 F) by 2100, may prove
to be too low. For example, results from the worlds largest climate
modeling experiment, based in Oxford University in Britain, indicate that global warming could increase almost twice as fast as the
IPCC has estimated.3
Experiments at the International Rice Institute and elsewhere
have led scientists to conclude that with each 1C (1.8F)
increase in temperature, rice, wheat, and corn yields could drop
10 percent.
It is now increasingly believed that the world is approaching peak
crude oil production. The world economy is, therefore, confronting more constrained oil supplies, despite a rapidly increasing demand. All of this points to a growing world energy crisis and
mounting resource wars.4
The planet is facing global water shortages due to the drawing
down of irreplaceable aquifers, which make up the bulk of the
worlds fresh water supplies. This poses a threat to global agriculture, which has become a bubble economy based on the unsustainable exploitation of groundwater. One in four people in the
world today do not have access to safe water.5

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Two thirds of the worlds major fish stocks are currently being
fished at or above their capacity. Over the last half-century 90
percent of large predatory fish in the worlds oceans have been
eliminated.6
The species extinction rate is the highest in sixty-five million years
with the prospect of cascading extinctions, as the last remnants of
intact ecosystems are removed. Already the extinction rate is in
some cases (as in the case of bird species) one hundred times the
benchmark or natural rate. Scientists have pinpointed twenty-five hot spots on land that account for 44 percent of all vascular
plant species and 35 percent of all species in four vertebrate
groups, while taking up only 1.4 percent of the worlds land surface. All of these hot spots are now threatened with rapid annihilation due to human causes. According to Stephen Pimm and
Clinton Jenkins, writing in Scientific American: Substantial
tracts of intact wilderness remain: humid tropical forests such as
the Amazon and Congo, drier woodlands of Africa, and coniferous forests of Canada and Russia. If deforestation in these wilderness forests continues at current rates, the combined extinction
rate in them and in the hot [spots around the world] will soon be
1,000 times higher than the benchmark one in a million.7
According to a study published by the National Academy of
Sciences in 2002, the world economy exceeded the earths regenerative capacity in 1980 and by 1999 had gone beyond it by as
much as 20 percent. This means, according to the studys authors,
that it would require 1.2 earths, or one earth for 1.2 years, to
regenerate what humanity used in 1999.8
The question of the ecological collapse of past civilizations from
Easter Island to the Mayans is now increasingly seen as extending
to todays world capitalist system. This view, long held by environmentalists, has been popularized by Jared Diamond in his
book Collapse.9

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These and other warning bells indicate that the present human relation to the environment is no longer supportable. The most developed
capitalist countries have the largest per capita ecological footprints,
demonstrating that the entire course of world capitalist development at
present represents a dead end.
The main response of the ruling capitalist class, when confronted
with the growing environmental challenge, is to fiddle while Rome burns.
To the extent that it has a strategy, it is to rely on revolutionizing the forces
of production, i.e., on technical change, while keeping the existing system
of social relations intact. It was Karl Marx who first pointed in The
Communist Manifesto to the constant revolutionizing of production as
a distinguishing feature of capitalist society. Todays vested interests are
counting on this built-in process of revolutionary technological change
coupled with the proverbial magic of the market to solve the environmental problem when and where this becomes necessary.
In stark contrast, many environmentalists now believe that technological revolution alone will be insufficient to solve the problem and that a
more far-reaching social revolution aimed at transforming the present
mode of production is required.

G R E AT T R A N S I T I O N S C E N A R I O S

Historically, addressing this question of the ecological transformation

of society means that we need to ascertain: (1) where the world capitalist system is heading at present; (2) the extent to which it can alter its
course by technological or other means in response to todays converging ecological and social crises; and (3) the historical alternatives to the
existing system. The most ambitious attempt thus far to carry out such
a broad assessment has come from the Global Scenario Group, a project launched in 1995 by the Stockholm Environmental Institute to
examine the transition to global sustainability. The Global Scenario
Group has issued three reportsBranch Points (1997), Bending the
Curve (1998), and their culminating study, Great Transition (2002). In
what follows, I will focus on the last of these reports, the Great
Transition.10

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257

As its name suggests, the Global Scenario Group employs alternative

scenarios to explore possible paths that society caught in a crisis of ecological sustainability might take. Their culminating report presents three
classes of scenarios: Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great
Transitions. Each of these contains two variants. Conventional Worlds
consists of Market Forces and Policy Reform. Barbarization manifests
itself in the forms of Breakdown and Fortress World. Great Transitions is
broken down into Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability
Paradigm. Each scenario is associated with different thinkers: Market
Forces with Adam Smith; Policy Reform with John Maynard Keynes and
the authors of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report; Breakdown with
Thomas Malthus; Fortress World with Thomas Hobbes; Eco-communalism with William Morris, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. F. Schumacher; and
the New Sustainability Paradigm with John Stuart Mill.11
Within the Conventional Worlds scenarios, Market Forces stands for
naked capitalism or neoliberalism. It represents, in the words of the Great
Transition report, the firestorm of capitalist expansion.12 Market
Forces is an unfettered capitalist world order geared to the accumulation
of capital and rapid economic growth without regard to social or ecological costs. The principal problem raised by this scenario is its rapacious
relation to humanity and the earth.
The drive to amass capital that is central to a Market Forces regime is
best captured by Marxs general formula of capital (though not referred to
in the Great Transition report itself). In a society of simple commodity
production (an abstract conception referring to pre-capitalist economic
formations in which money and the market play a subsidiary role), the circuit of commodities and money exists in a form, CMC, in which distinct commodities or use-values constitute the end points of the economic process. A commodity (C) embodying a definite use-value is sold for
money (M) which is used to purchase a different commodity (C). Each
such circuit is completed with the consumption of a use-value.
In the case of capitalism, or generalized commodity production, however, the circuit of money and commodities begins and ends with money,
or MCM. Moreover, since money is merely a quantitative relationship
such an exchange would have no meaning if the same amount of money
was acquired at the end of the process as exchanged in the beginning, so

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the general formula for capital, in reality, takes the form of MCM,
where M equals M + Um or surplus-value. What stands out, when contrasted with simple commodity production, is that there is no real end to
the process, since the object is not final use but the accumulation of surplus-value or capital. MCM in one year, therefore, results in the Um
being reinvested, leading to MCM in the next year and MCM
the year after that, ad infinitum. In other words, capital by its nature is
self-expanding value.13
The motor force behind this drive to accumulation is competition.
The competitive struggle ensures that each capital or firm must grow and,
hence, must reinvest its earnings in order to survive.
Such a system tends toward exponential growth punctuated by crises
or temporary interruptions in the accumulation process. The pressures
placed on the natural environment are immense and will lessen only with
the weakening and cessation of capitalism itself. During the last half-century the world economy has grown more than seven-fold while the biospheres capacity to support such expansion has, if anything, diminished
due to human ecological depredations.14
The main assumption of those who advocate a Market Forces solution
to the environmental problem is that it will lead to increasing efficiency in
the consumption of environmental inputs by means of technological revolution and continual market adjustments. Use of energy, water, and other
natural resources will decrease per unit of economic output. This is often
referred to as dematerialization. However, the central implication of this
argument is false. Dematerialization, to the extent that it can be said to
exist, has been shown to be a much weaker tendency than MCM. As
the Global Transition report puts it, The growth effect outpaces the
efficiency effect. 15
This can be understood concretely in terms of what has been called
the Jevons Paradox, named after William Stanley Jevons, who published
The Coal Question in 1865. Jevons, one of the founders of neoclassical
economics, explained that improvements in steam engines that decreased
the use of coal per unit of output also served to increase the scale of production as more and bigger factories were built. Hence, increased efficiency in the use of coal had the paradoxical effect of expanding aggregate
coal consumption.16

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259

The perils of the Market Forces model are clearly visible in the environmental depredations during the two centuries since the advent of
industrial capitalism, and especially in the last half-century. Rather
than abating under a Market Forces regime, the Great Transition
report declares, the unsustainable process of environmental degradation that we observe in todays world would [continue to] intensify. The
danger of crossing critical thresholds in global systems would increase,
triggering events that would radically transform the planets climate and
ecosystems. Although it is the tacit ideology of most international
institutions, Market Forces leads inexorably to ecological and social disaster and even collapse. The continuation of business-as-usual is a
utopian fantasy.17
A far more rational basis for hope, the report contends, is found in the
Policy Reform scenario. The essence of the scenario is the emergence of
the political will for gradually bending the curve of development toward
a comprehensive set of sustainability targets, including peace, human
rights, economic development, and environmental quality.18 This is
essentially the Global Keynesian strategy advocated by the Brundtland
Commission Report in the late 1980san expansion of the welfare state,
now conceived as an environmental welfare state, to the entire world. It
represents the promise of what environmental sociologists call ecological modernization.
The Policy Reform approach is prefigured in various international
agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the
environmental reform measures advanced by the Earth Summits in Rio
in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. Policy Reform would seek to
decrease world inequality and poverty through foreign aid programs
emanating from the rich countries and international institutions. It
would promote environmental best practices through state-induced
market incentives. Yet, despite the potential for limited ecological
modernization, the realities of capitalism, the Great Transition report
contends, would collide with Policy Reform. This is because Policy
Reform remains a Conventional Worlds scenarioone in which the
underlying values, lifestyles, and structures of the capitalist system
endure. The logic of sustainability and the logic of the global market
are in tension. The correlation between the accumulation of wealth

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and the concentration of power erodes the political basis for a transition. Under these circumstances the lure of the God of Mammon and
the Almighty dollar will prevail.19
The failure of both of the Conventional Worlds scenarios to alleviate
the problem of ecological decline means that Barbarization threatens:
either Breakdown or the Fortress World. Breakdown is self-explanatory
and to be avoided at all costs. The Fortress World emerges when powerful regional and international actors comprehend the perilous forces
leading to Breakdown and are able to guard their own interests sufficiently to create protected enclaves.20 Fortress World is a planetary
apartheid system, gated and maintained by force, in which the gap
between global rich and global poor constantly widens and the differential access to environmental resources and amenities increases sharply. It
consists of bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery. . . . The elite[s]
have halted barbarism at their gates and enforced a kind of environmental management and uneasy stability.21 The general state of the planetary environment, however, would continue to deteriorate in this scenario leading either to a complete ecological Breakdown or to the
achievement through revolutionary struggle of a more egalitarian society, such as Eco-communalism.
This description of the Fortress World is remarkably similar to the
scenario released in the 2003 Pentagon report, Abrupt Climate Change
and Its Implications for United States National Security.22 The Pentagon
report envisioned a possible shutdown due to global warming of the thermohaline circulation warming the North Atlantic, throwing Europe and
North America into Siberia-like conditions. Under such unlikely but
plausible circumstances, relatively well-off populations, including those
in the United States, are pictured as building defensive fortresses
around themselves to keep masses of would-be immigrants out. Military
confrontations over scarce resources intensify.
Arguably naked capitalism and resource wars are already propelling
the world in this direction at present, though without a cause as immediately earth-shaking as abrupt climate change. With the advent of the War
on Terror, unleashed by the United States against one country after
another since September 11, 2001, an Empire of Barbarism is making
its presence felt.23

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261

Still, from the standpoint of the Global Scenario Group, the

Barbarization scenarios are there simply to warn us of the worst possible
dangers of ecological and social decline. A Great Transition, it is argued,
is necessary if Barbarization is to be avoided.
Theoretically, there are two Great Transitions scenarios envisioned by
the Global Scenario Group: Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability
Paradigm. Yet Eco-communalism is never discussed in any detail, on the
grounds that for this kind of transformation to come about it would be
necessary for world society first to pass through Barbarization. The
Global Scenario Group authors see the social revolution of Eco-communalism as lying on the other side of Jack Londons Iron Heel. The discussion of Great Transition is thus confined to the New Sustainability
Paradigm.
The essence of the New Sustainability Paradigm is that of a radical
ecological transformation that goes against unbridled capitalist hegemony but stops short of full social revolution. It is to be carried out primarily through changes in values and lifestyles rather than the transformation of social structures. Advances in environmental technology and policy that began with the Policy Reform scenario, but that were unable to
propel sufficient environmental change due to the dominance of acquisitive norms, are here supplemented by a lifestyle wedge.24
In the explicitly utopian scenario of the New Sustainability Paradigm,
the United Nations is transformed into the World Union, a true global
federation. Globalization has become civilized. The world market is
fully integrated and harnessed for equality and sustainability not just
wealth generation. The War on Terrorism has resulted in the defeat of the
terrorists. Civil society, represented by non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), plays a leading role in society at both the national and global levels. Voting is electronic. Poverty is eradicated. Typical inequality has
decreased drastically. Dematerialization is real, as is the polluter pays
principle. Advertising is nowhere to be seen. There has been a transition
to a solar economy. The long commute from where people live to where
they work is a thing of the past; instead, there are integrated settlements
that place home, work, retail shops, and leisure outlets in close proximity
to each other. The giant corporations have become forward-looking societal organizations, rather than simply private entities. They are no longer

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concerned exclusively with the economic bottom line, but have revised
this to incorporate environmental sustainability and social ecology as
ends irrespective of profit.
Four agents of change are said to have combined to bring all of this
about: (1) giant transnational corporations; (2) intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary
Fund, and World Trade Organization; (3) civil society acting through
NGOs; and (4) a globally aware, environmentally-conscious, democratically organized world population.25
Underpinning this economically is the notion of a stationary state, as
depicted by Mill in his 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy, and
advanced today by the ecological economist Herman Daly and
Whiteheadian process philosopher John Cobb. Most classical economistsincluding Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and
Karl Marxsaw the specter of a stationary state as presaging the demise
of the bourgeois political economy. In contrast, Mill, who Marx (in the
afterword to the second German edition of Capital) accused of a shallow
syncretism, saw the stationary state as somehow compatible with existing productive relations, requiring only changes in distribution.26 In the
New Sustainability Paradigm scenario, which takes Mills view of the stationary state as its inspiration, the basic institutions of capitalism remain
intact, as do the fundamental relations of power, but a shift in lifestyle and
consumer orientation mean that the economy is no longer geared to economic growth and the enlargement of profits, but to efficiency, equity, and
qualitative improvements in life. A capitalist society formerly driven to
expanded reproduction through investment of surplus product (or surplus-value) has been replaced with a system of simple reproduction
(Mills stationary state), in which the surplus is consumed rather than
invested. The vision is one of a cultural revolution supplementing technological revolution, and radically changing the ecological and social
landscape of capitalist society, without fundamentally altering the productive, property, and power relations that define the system.
In my view, there are both logical and historical problems with this
projection. It combines the weakest elements of utopian thinking (weaving a future out of mere hopes and wishes) with a practical desire to
avoid a sharp break with the existing system.27 The failure of the Global

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263

Scenario Group to address its own scenario of Eco-communalism is part

and parcel of this perspective, which seeks to elude the question of the
more thoroughgoing social transformation that a genuine Great
Transition would require.
The result is a vision of the future that is contradictory to an extreme.
Private corporations are institutions with one and only one purpose: the
pursuit of profit. The idea of turning them to entirely different and opposing social ends is reminiscent of the long-abandoned notions of the soulful corporation that emerged for a short time in the 1950s and then vanished in the harsh light of reality. Many changes associated with the New
Sustainability Paradigm would require a class revolution to bring about.
Yet this is excluded from the scenario itself. Instead, the Global Scenario
Group authors engage in a kind of magical thinkingdenying that fundamental changes in the relations of production must accompany (and
sometimes even precede) changes in values. No less than in the case of the
Policy Reform Scenarioas pointed out in The Great Transition report
itselfthe God of Mammon will inevitably overwhelm a value-based
Great Transition that seeks to escape the challenge of the revolutionary
transformation of the whole society.

A N E C O LO G I C A L - S O C I A L R EVO LU T I O N

Put simply, my argument is that a global ecological revolution worthy of

the name can only occur as part of a larger socialand I would insist,
socialistrevolution. Such a revolution, were it to generate the conditions
of equality, sustainability, and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great
Transition, would necessarily draw its major impetus from the struggles
of working populations and communities at the bottom of the global capitalist hierarchy. It would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated
producers rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. It
would see wealth and human development in radically different terms
than capitalist society.
In conceiving such a social and ecological revolution, we can derive
inspiration, as Marx did, from the ancient Epicurean concept of natural
wealth. As Epicurus observed in his Principal Doctrines: Natural

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wealth is both limited and easily obtainable; the riches of idle fancies go
on forever. It is the unnatural, unlimited character of such alienated
wealth that is the problem. Similarly, in what has become known as the
Vatican Sayings, Epicurus stated: Poverty, when measured by the natural purpose of life, is great wealth; but unlimited wealth is great poverty.28 Free human development, arising in a climate of natural limitation
and sustainability, is the true basis of wealth, of a rich, many-sided existence; the unbounded pursuit of wealth is the primary source of human
impoverishment and suffering. Needless to say, such a concern with natural well-being, as opposed to artificial needs and stimulants, is the
antithesis of capitalist society and the precondition of a sustainable
human community.
A Great Transition, therefore, must have the characteristics implied by
the Global Scenario Groups neglected scenario: Eco-communalism. 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. The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to the development of human needs and powers, removed
from the all-consuming drive to accumulate wealth (capital).
As Marx wrote, the new system starts with the self-government of the
communities.29 The creation of an ecological civilization requires a
social revolution, one that, as Roy Morrison explains, needs to be organized democratically from below: community by community . . . region by
region. It must put the provision of basic human needsclean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation, social transport, and universal
health care and education, all of which require a sustainable relation to
the earthahead of all other needs and wants. An ecological dialectic
along these lines, Morrison insists, rejects not struggle but the endless
slaughter of industrial negation in the interest of unlimited profits.30
Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable. But the
continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will
prove impossibleif human civilization and the web of life as we know it
are to be sustained.

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29.

Aurora Donoso, No More Looting!: Third World Owed an Ecological Debt,

www.cosmovisiones.com/DeudaEcologica/a_looting.html. The increase is
measured in terms of volume not price because of the tendency of the prices of
goods from the South to decline.
Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American
Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
Donald Worster, Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological
Perspective in History, The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990):
10871106.
Josu de Castro, The Geography of Hunger (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1952), 7, 212.
For a discussion of the commons and struggles to maintain environmental
space free from capitalist intrusion see The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?
Reclaiming the Commons (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993).
Andrew Simms, Aubrey Meyer, and Nick Robins, Who Owes Who? Climate
Change, Debt, Equity and Survival, www.jubilee2000uk.org/ecological_debt/
Reports/Who_owes_who.htm.
John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2002), 21, 64.
Accin Ecolgica, Trade, Climate Change and the Ecological Debt,
www.cosmovisiones.com/DeudaEcologica/a_averdetrade.html; Anil Agarwal
and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of
Environmental Colonialism (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment,
1991). While efficiencies vary between nations, the poorest nations are the
most efficient users of energy in terms of GDP. See Simms, Meyer, and Robins,
Who Owes Who? and Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer, Dead Heat: Global
Justice and Global Warming (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002).
Simms, Meyer, and Robins, Who Owes Who?
See Marten Scheffer, Steve Carpenter, Jonathan A. Foley et al., Catastrophic
Shifts in Ecosystems, Nature 403 (2001): 591596; Roldan Muradian,
Ecological Thresholds: A Survey, Ecological Economics 38 (2001): 724.
A relationship has been established such that $3,000 of GDP produces on average a ton of carbon emissions. See Simms, Meyer, and Robins, Who Owes
Who?; Accin Ecolgica, Trade, Climate Change and the Ecological Debt.
Athanasiou and Baer, Dead Heat, 84. Also see Andrew Simms, An
Environmental War Economy: The Lessons of Ecological Debt and Global
Warming (London: New Economics Foundation, 2001); Accin Ecolgica,
Ecological Debt.
Accin Ecolgica, No More Plunder.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060127223742/http://www.globalclimate.org//

30.
31.

32.
33.

34.

35.
36.

37.
38.

39.

40.

41.
42.

C H A P T E R 1 3 : E N V I S I O N I N G E C O LO G I C A L R EVO LU T I O N

This chapter has been revised and adapted for this book from an article originally published under the title Organizing Ecological Revolution, in Monthly
Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 110. It was based on an address delivered

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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

7.

8.

9.

11.
12.
13.

14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

315

to the Critical Management Studies section of the Academy of Management,

Honolulu, Hawaii, August 8, 2005.
Paul M. Sweezy, Capitalism and the Environment, Monthly Review 41, no. 2
(June 1989), 4.
International Climate Change Task Force, Meeting the Climate Challenge,
January 2005, http://www.americanprogress.org.
The Times (London), January 27, 2005.
See chapter 4.
Bill McKibben, Our Thirsty Future, New York Review of Books, September
25, 2003.
Worldwatch, Vital Signs 2005, www.worldwatch.org; Brett Clark and Rebecca
Clausen, The Oceanic Crisis, Monthly Review 60, no. 3 (July-August 2008):
91, 9497.
Stuart L. Pimm and Clinton Jenkins, Sustaining the Variety of Life, Scientific
American, September 2005, 6673; Stuart L. Pimm and Peter Raven,
Extinction by Numbers, Nature, February 24, 2000, 84345.
Mathis Wackernagel et al., Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human
Economy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 14 (July 9,
2002): 9268.
Jared Diamond, Collapse (New York: Viking, 2005),10. Paul Raskin, Tariq
Banuri, Gilberto Gallopn et al., Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the
Times Ahead (Boston: Stockholm Environment Institute, 2002),
http://www.gsg.org.
Raskin et al., The Great Transition, 1718.
Raskin et al., Great Transition, 7.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 24757; Paul M. Sweezy,
Four Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 2636.
Much of Marxs analysis in Capital is concerned with where Um or surplusvalue comes from. To answer this question, he argues, it is necessary to go
beneath the process of exchange and to explore the hidden recesses of capitalist productionwhere it is revealed that the source of surplus-value is to be
found in the process of class exploitation.
Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
Raskin et al., Great Transition, 22.
See chapter 6.
Raskin et al., Great Transition, 2224, 29.
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 41, 77.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 27.
See chapter 5.
John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2006), 14760.
Raskin et al., Great Transition, 47.
Ibid., 7190.

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26.

To be sure, Mill at this time thought of himself as something of a socialist. See

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Longmans, Green,
and Co., 1904), 45255.
See Bertell Ollmans discussion in The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then
and Now), Monthly Review 57, no. 3 (July-August 2005): 78102.
Epicurus, The Extant Remains, translated by Cyril Bailey (New York: Limited
Editions Club, 1947), 161. On Marxs relation to Epicurus see John Bellamy
Foster, Marxs Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers,
1975), 519; Paul Burkett, Marxs Vision of Sustainable Human
Development in Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 3462.
Roy Morrison, Ecological Democracy (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 80, 188.

27.
28.

29.

30.

C H A P T E R 1 4 : E C O LO GY A N D T H E T R A N S I T I O N F R O M
C A P I TA L I S M T O S O C I A L I S M

This concluding chapter is adapted and revised from an article by the same title
that appeared in Monthly Review 60, no. 6 (November 2008): 112. It was
based on an address delivered at the Climate Change, Social Change conference, Sydney, Australia, April 12, 2008, organized by Green Left Weekly.
1.
2.
3.

4.
5.

6.
7.
8.

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), 959.

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 63639; Capital, vol. 3,
754, 911, 94849.
Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1974), 328. Documentation of
Marx and Engelss ecological concerns listed above can be found in the following works: Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martins Press,
1999); John Bellamy Foster, Marxs Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2000); and Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, Metabolism, Energy, and
Entropy in Marxs Critique of Political Economy, Theory & Society 35 (2006):
10956. On the problem of local climate change as it was raised by Engels and
Marx in their time (speculations on temperature changes due to deforestation)
see Engelss notes on Fraas in Marx and Engels, MEGA IV, 31 (Amsterdam:
Akadamie Verlag, 1999), 51215.
Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 911.
On the ecological insights of socialists after Marx see Foster, Marxs Ecology,
23654. On early Soviet ecology see also Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). On Podolinsky see John
Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Ecological Economics and Classical
Marxism, Organization & Environment 17, no. 1 (March 2004): 3260.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 47179; and Capital, vol. 1,
915.
On precarious work see Fatma lk Seluk, Dressing the Wound, Monthly
Review 57, no. 1 (May 2005): 3744.
Joseph Needham, Moulds of Understanding (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1976), 301.