Abstract
The journey toward an ecological radicalism will bear little fruit until it is translated into a modern, strategic—ultimately worldwide—form of politics. Revisiting the classic injunction “socialism or barbarism,” the global crisis poses the question of human survival in a world order that is unraveling much faster than all but a few seem prepared to recognize. The environmental challenge has inspired, even forced, new ways of viewing not only economic development but political governance, culture, nature, and social change. A deeply ecological outlook invites radical perspectives on the future of production, consumption, agriculture, and technology, raising new questions about modernity itself as a product of Enlightenment rationality grounded in the utopian promises of science, technology, and material growth. The global crisis reveals the extent to which the classical industrial model has run its course, even as ruling elites scramble to mobilize resources in support of the corporate-growth system over which they preside—a system giving rise to rampant material exploitation, vast inequalities of wealth and power, wasteful use of natural resources, militarism, and warfare not to mention escalating habitat destruction on the road to possible ecological collapse. As Joel Kovel writes, “. . . the current stage of history can be characterized by structural forces that systematically degrade and finally exceed the buffering capacity of nature with respect to human production, thereby setting into motion an unpredictable yet interacting and expanding set of ecosystemic breakdowns.”1
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Notes
Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature (London: Zed Books, 2002), p. 21.
See, for example, John Ely’s prescient analysis in “Green Politics in Europe and the United States,” in Margit Ely and John Mayer, eds., The German Greens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 193–209.
For a general treatment of the relationship between social-movement trajectories and the requirements of political strategy, see Carl Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), ch. 6.
On the spontaneist character of the American New Left, see especially Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1984), pp. 10–63.
On Gramsci’s concept “social bloc” and its larger historical context, see Boggs, The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 282–90.
On the historic emergence of what is often called “transnational counterpublics,” see Francis Shor, Dying Empire (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 210–15.
Seymour Melman, The Demilitarized Society (Montreal: Harvest House, 1988), p. 52.
On the severe limits of liberal environmentalism, see Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010), pp. 184–95.
See Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1971).
Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 2.
Frances Moore Lappe, Eco Mind (New York: Nation Books, 2011), p. 10.
Robert Michels, Political Parties (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999), pp. 238–53.
On the theory of deradicalization as applied to the early European social-democratic experience, see Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York: Collier Books, 1962);
Michels, Political Parties; Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1963);
and Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1955).
See also Carl Boggs, The Socialist Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1995), chs. 1, 2, and 5.
For an overview of developments helping to give rise to Western Marxism, see Roger Gottlieb, Marxism: Origins, Betrayal, Rebirth (New York: Routledge, 1992), ch. 5.
Gramsci here refers to “new initiatives” and “cathartic moments” of popular resistance that challenge the structures of domination, which no longer appear as “external forces” that crush the human spirit. See Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971, pp. 366–67.
See Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), on the binding connection between nationalism and revolution.
On the general impact of capitalist rationalization on American society, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1995);
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974);
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),
and Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 61.
Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989), p. 169.
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© 2012 Carl Boggs
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Boggs, C. (2012). A Global Ecological Revolution?. In: Ecology and Revolution. Environmental Politics and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282262_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282262_6
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