Philobiblon

Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Is a book that’s been recommended to me from several Green quarters recently, so being on holidays and fortified by that (having suffered several weeks of depression after reading Lovelock‘s Revenge of Gaia recently), I decided to take the plunge.

And, possibly more than I was expected, I found quite a lot with which I agreed, and learnt some new ways of looking at things that I haven’t encountered before. I entirely agreed with him about the suspicion with which Heidegger should be regarded in view of his Nazism, found his definition of the dialectical as “the bringing together of different points of view for the purposes of argument” (rather than the Hegelian binary of thesis and antithesis), and found him very interesting on the scientific aspects of entropy: “the struggle of life against entropy does not deny the Second Law because living creatures are anything but closed systems. … life is constantly taking in low-entropy energy to sustain its form.” (p. 103.)

And I liked his focus on sufficiency and realisation: “We should not seek to become larger… but more realized. Bach did not quantitatively expand music, making it louder and more insistent like forms of techno-rock music that mirror capitalist relations… Sufficiency makes more sense, building a world where nobody is hungry or cold or lacks healthcare or succour in old age.” (p. 228)

But there are two things that he really, to my mind, doesn’t get. One is gender. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t try very, very hard on that – his heart is in the right place as he quotes Rosa Luxemburg in prison watching a buffalo being beaten and feeling its pain, and notes that this is a traditional female approach, but one available to all, and one greatly downgraded in our society.

But what he doesn’t get — and he left me feeling very philosophically radical feminist here — is the place of the family as a source of repression. He runs, without any evidence at all, the foundation of patriarchy and all subsequent repressions, in the age of the hunter gatherer (drawing all sorts of conclusion about the division of labour in societies tens of thousands of years ago on which we have no evidence at all). But after that there was apparently some golden age…

So he blames 21st century capitalism for a supposed explosion in the sex trade, and “the general rise of rape and spousal abuse as concomitants of a disintegrating social order so far gone that a recent UNICEF report indicates that nearly half the world’s women come under attack by those closest to them”.

Why is it that so many men (and some women) don’t get that there’s noting new about any of this? It was ever thus (if you read between the lines of women’s memoirs and fiction through the ages) – it is only now that at least (and you have to give the current conditions some credit here) that these things are being recognised as crimes, being given pejorative labels that women can apply to them.

He also greatly romanticises China and India as somehow living more in harmony with nature than the Christian West – certainly not the case in regard to China, which regarded nature as savage and something to be tamed, rather more if anything than did the West through most of the current millennium.

And then there’s the socialism. I’m not a socialist, in part because I think it makes no sense at all to adopt such a tainted word. True, as he might say, pretty well everywhere to which that label has been applied has been nothing of the sort, but tainted it still is.

But more fundamentally, if you hand over the means of production to the workers, what happens to those who fall, in one way or another outside that definition? You have to make the definition very, very broad indeed to cover everyone, and somehow I doubt that would happen. Producing children is undoubtedly work, but you can’t “own” them. And even among the workers, some will do well, some badly…would you prefer to “own” a garbage truck or a spa? I can’t see any way that you don’t slide into corruption and disadvantage.

But I do like his return to the term usufructuary – potentially a much more useful concept than ownership. “A usufructuary relationship is where one uses, enjoys and through that improves — another’s property, as for instance, community groups would use, enjoy and improve an abandoned city lot by turning it into a garden.” (p.268)

(Or, I add, the way allotments in England are let for a peppercorn rent on the condition that they are productively used.) A much better idea than ownership – access and productive enjoyment that simply ends when the individual moves on to other things or other places.

And he pretty thoroughly fudges, in a couple of pages, how we get from where we are now, with capitalism destroying the world’s ecosystem, to where he wants to be. He points to Gaviotas, the Zapatistas, the adoption by the ANC of the world’s most advanced constitution, and pretty well leaves it at that. Not that I have any answers here – except that really I’m with the discussion at the Green Party conference – all we can do now is work very hard to rein in and control capitalism, since we don’t know how to get to anything better and less damaging.