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to which the combined power of capitalist production relations and
productive forces self-destruct by impairing or destroying rather than
reproducing their own conditions (O Connor, 1996, p. 206). Examples
of such impairment, says O Connor, are global warming, acid rain,
salinization and pesticide poisoning, all of which, he avers, threaten
profit-making. This second contradiction, like the first, gives rise to
opposition, not this time in the form of the labour movement, but in the
form of the new social movements which harbour the potential for
transcending the contradictions that give rise to them. The second
contradiction thesis has given rise to a great deal of comment, particu-
larly in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (and see Benton
(1996, Part 3) for an extended discussion), and in our context it illus-
trates the yawning gap between greens, who argue that industrialism is
the root of environmental degradation, and ecological Marxists, who
affirm that capitalism is both the cause of the environmental crisis and
the horizon that needs to be transcended if we are to deal with it.
Radical greens will probably accept that a fundamental break with
capitalism is indeed a necessary condition for restoring environmental
integrity, but they do not see it as a sufficient condition, particularly
when they point to former communist countries which had some of the
168 Green Political Thought
worst environmental records in the entire world. Socialists respond by
pointing out that none of these countries were socialist in the sense they
want to ascribe to the word (Miliband, 1994), and that this is because
they have developed the same form of demand for material goods as
the capitalist nations, in competition with them. In this sense, capitalism
permeates the whole globe (Weston, 1986, p. 4). As Bahro wrote:
We have precisely learned that the Russian revolution did not
manage to break with the capitalist horizon of development of pro-
ductive forces. We have seen how right round the globe it is one and
the same technology that has triumphed.
(Bahro, 1982, p. 131)
In this way socialists side-step the green invitation to consider the
environmental problems suffered by socialist countries and to draw the
conclusion that there is little to choose between socialist and capitalist
management of industry (from the environment s point of view). They
then suggest that a truly socialist society would produce for need and
not for profit, and that consideration of the environment would be
integral to policy formation because the traditional humanist concerns
of socialism inevitably involve consideration of human/non-human
nature interaction (Pepper, 1993a, p. 438).
However, in one important respect (from a socialist point of view) the
issue is not over what a socialist society might or might not do, but that
the green refusal to recognize capitalism as the root of the problem
renders ecology incapable of fighting its battles in the right places. If
from an environmental perspective the socialist view of capitalism is
correct, then ecologism s best way forward is to confront the capitalist
manifestation of industrialism rather than the many-headed hydra:
industrialism itself.
Joe Weston reminds us that this would involve the restatement of
traditional socialist principles and practices, on the basis that what we
find is that behind virtually all environmental problems, both physical
and social, is poverty (1986, p. 4). Pepper makes a similar point: [A]s
the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio showed, the most fundamental issues
in global environmental politics revolve around social justice, wealth
distribution and ownership and control of the means of production,
particularly land (1993a, p. 429). Many socialists will then analyse
phenomena such as deforestation from just this point of view the
fundamental problem is much more one of inequitable land distribu-
tion (which produces the slash-and-burn farmers) and structural pov-
erty (which produces periodic but highly damaging jungle gold rushes),
Ecologism and other ideologies 169
than it is one of an insatiable and environmentally insensitive desire to
eat hamburgers. From this point of view, environmentalist (or even
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