Ecofeminism as Politics

Nature, Marx and the Postmodern

Ariel Salleh

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786990426
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Ecofeminism as Politics is now a classic, being the firstwork to offer a joined-up framework for green, socialist, feminist andpostcolonial thinking, showing how these have been held back by conceptual confusionsover gender. Originally published in 1997, it argues that ecofeminism reachesbeyond contemporary social movement ideologies and practices, by prefiguring apolitical synthesis of four-revolutions-in-one: ecology is feminism issocialism is postcolonial struggle. Ariel Salleh addresses discourses on class, science, the body, culture and nature, and her innovative reading of Marxconverges the philosophy of internal relations with the organic materiality ofeveryday life.

This new edition features forewords by Indian ecofeministVandana Shiva and US philosopher John Clark, a new introduction, and a recentconversation between Salleh and younger scholar activists.

PART I

WOMEN AND ECOPOLITICS

1
ECOLOGY REFRAMES HISTORY

THE GREEN CONJUNCTURE

Ecological crisis displaces modernist political analyses – liberalism, socialism, feminism. It provokes us to reframe our history, to inscribe a new understanding of ourselves in relation to Nature, so-called, and to ask how can we get to live this new sensibility in practical ways.¹ That political moment is long due. The bourgeois and proletarian revolutions evaporated before realising their full potential; feminists now fight hegemony from within and backlash without; indigenous peoples, ecologists, anarchists and new movement activists disperse their energies piecemeal. While fashionable postmoderns enjoy this flux, safe in a world of ideas, transnational capital tightens its grip and life is hurting. Against a backdrop of political disorientation and despair, this book argues that most women already live an alternative relation to nature, one that activists engaged in reframing our history and renewing our politics might look to.

Could women, still invisible as a global majority, actually be the missing agents of History, and therefore Nature, in our troubled times? As a radical stance, this ecofeminist proposition dissents from Marx’s premise that the working class owns a special transformative role. Equally, it defies liberal or postmodern claims that there are as many political actors to bring about social change as there are sites of resistance in society. The ecofeminist idea of women’s unique agency in an era of ecological crisis may antagonise readers schooled in these established habits of thought. Some may be tempted to pull ideological rank and wave it off as simplistic. Perhaps at least they will first grapple with the multiple levels of argument that support the thesis.

Even Jacques Derrida has come to concede that ‘Marxism remains at once indispensable and structurally insufficient.’² For with the rise of a tele-pharmo-nuclear complex, we face new material givens. Among them, the concept of property is biologised; and colonisation of wilderness is matched, literally, by the conveyancing of blood, sweat and tears. Sadly, most men’s ongoing desire for acknowledgement by other men is embedded in these new conditions, both in the worried West and for those in a ‘developing world’ who mimic its fraternity. Emerging green movements are a major political intervention in this conjuncture. However, greens assume that since environmental damage impacts on people universally, it is to everyone’s advantage to solve it. In other words, no particular social grouping is seen to be better placed than any other to save the Earth from human excess.

Socialists, by contrast, see this kind of thinking as misguided and utopian; the following passage from the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in which Marx and Engels comment on the utopian socialists of their day, explains why.

[They] consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference to the ruling class … they reject all political, especially revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.³

Andrew Dobson’s well-reasoned account of ‘green political thought’ concedes this utopian tendency within ecologism and affirms Marx’s materialist line that it is conditions, not simply people themselves, that must change.⁴ Of course, from a dialectical point of view, the two elements are interrelated in the formation of a specific revolutionary class.

Utopianism then, is a kind of liberalism by default, but sometimes old-style liberal thinking among greens is explicit. In his Seeing Green, Jonathon Porritt, for example, downplays capitalist responsibility for environmental degradation, recommending that

the post-industrial revolution is likely to be pioneered by middle-class people. The reasons are simple: such people not only have more chance of working out where their own genuine self-interest lies, but they also have the flexibility and security to act upon such insights.⁵

There is a certain plausibility to this, but it does tend to pull ecopolitical strategy back to the ideology of the seventeenth century bourgeoisie who established the Western tradition of urban representative government. Liberalism inevitably celebrates the middle class as political actor. Moreover, removed as that class is from the lessons of physical labour, it treats community transformation much like a religious conversion: as if ideas alone can do the trick.

The spiritual wing of ecopolitics represented by Resurgence magazine or Charles Birch’s Regaining Compassion for Humanity and Nature is a case in point. The deep ecology of Warwick Fox’s Toward a Transpersonal Ecology with its search for another way of being in the world is also tacitly housed within the liberal individualist political tradition.⁶ Criticism of such trends is not intended to deny the importance of empathy and spiritual vitality in a barren, secular age, but to plead that personal readjustments are not enough. Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed very early in the career of green politics that the middle-class character of the ecology movement and its idealist emphasis on change through right thinking are likely to hold up substantive developments.⁷ The middle class is also culturally advantaged by prevailing political practices, not to mention economic arrangements and gender traditions. A light-green middle class can coexist quite comfortably with capitalist despoliation of the world, because it can afford to eat organically grown food and buy houses in unpolluted places. The progressive home-gardening image of British royals illustrates the contradiction nicely, since much of their fortune comes from investment in the environmental crimes of a multinational mining industry.

Yet this claim, in turn, needs amplification. For the middle class, as most people understand it, is made up of distinct economic interests, and is also segmented by gender, ethnicity, age, and ableness.⁸ Small business, on the one hand, and corporate executives, on the other, are two competing fractions of capital. Porritt selects small entrepreneurs as possible catalysts for ecopolitical change, but given the relentless expansion of transnational corporations (TNCs), it is fairly hard to see small businesses remaining ‘secure and flexible’, as Porritt’s agents of change are said to be. In addition, the survival of small businesses largely depends on manufacture of products demanded by the existing consumer system. And, in the name of efficiency, they may well be tempted to cut corners by externalising environmental and human costs.

Beyond this is the middle class of scientists, technocrats, consultants, bureaucrats. Not owners of the means of production, these ‘operatives’ and ‘co-preneurs’ are heavily implicated in preserving the nation-state that services capital. As technicians and service workers, they materially constitute the industrial mode of production through their daily actions, or as white-collar salariat they help legitimate it. Not owners, though occasional shareholders, they are utterly financially dependent for a living wage on the capitalist patriarchal economy. Though technocrats often express genuine concern over green issues, the social position of this sector is inherently anti-ecological. This is why policies of the self-styled Business Council for Sustainable Development, including Agenda 21 devised for the Rio Earth Summit, are so intent on ‘technology transfer’ and ‘capacity enhancement’.⁹ A new trans-ethnic middle class is being cultivated by these transfers. Establishment of this technocratic elite in the South is especially urgent from the point of view of the global expansion of corporate enterprise and its complement of salaried consumers.

The other segment of middle-class wage workers consists of humanist-educated professionals, teachers, welfare workers, journalists. Often poorly paid and relatively low in status, they may have marginally less ego investment in the capitalist order, but they remain economically bound to it. The political attitudes of this humanist middle class tend to be tempered by the presence among its professionals of women, many of whom also work as mothers. Now, it is plain that the concerns of men in an industry-based productive system are quite different from those of women in a daily round of domestic reproductive labours. A handful of women, often liberal feminists, do arrive at high-status positions in the public workforce, but the stakes for them generally become identical with men’s more technocratic commitment. Such women are unlikely to upset the capitalist patriarchal status quo. However, the greater portion of women, middle- or working-class, or peasant, remain unpaid. Rudolf Bahro’s Socialism and Survival is unusual on the left in valuing the longer-term ‘species interest’ of such women – ‘outside’ the system.¹⁰ The tendency on the part of both liberals and socialists has been to suppress gender difference in the name of a greater humanity, community or class. Utopianism in a different guise, perhaps?

The suppression of gender difference is counterproductive, especially if theorists are trying to work out how to facilitate the growth of a mass ecological consciousness. Greens go so far as to acknowledge that their values are typically ‘feminine’ – care, modesty, connectedness – but they do not take the next step by asking: Who in society already acts on these values? If they did, they would encounter the exciting fact that half of the world’s population is already educated into feminine behaviours. True, liberal and socialist women in the feminist movement may want to assert that there are no fundamental differences between women and men, but this does not affect the practical ecofeminist argument being made here. Feminist arguments for an ‘androgynous equality’ come from a statistically unrepresentative grouping of women globally speaking. And second, so far as political action is concerned, it does not matter whether sexed differences are ontological fact or historical accident. The case for women as historical actors in a time of environmental crisis rests not on universal essences but on how the majority of women actually work and think now.

Nor is this an idealist proposition in the sense that social change might come about simply by learning from feminine attitudes and ideas. Those marxists who see feminists as ‘bourgeois individualists’ sometimes toss off this kind of objection. As David Pepper’s book eco-socialism urges, good ideas are not enough; a shift in the economic organisation of society is crucial. The green movement must use a materialist analysis.¹¹ This accords beautifully with an ecofeminist premise for women’s historical agency, because on an international scale women, undertaking 65 per cent of the world’s work for 5 per cent of its pay, effectively are ‘the proletariat’. To bring the logic of historical materialism home to eco-socialism: since the interest of women as a global majority lies in challenging existing productivist structures, women as an economic underclass are astonishingly well placed to bring about the social changes requisite for ecological revolution.

The question is, do ordinary women as domestic labour, factory workers or subsistence farmers have what the Club of Rome describes as a ‘global perspective that extends far into the future’?¹² An ecofeminist response to this is yes, and that claim to intergenerational awareness will be enlarged on in due course. Even so, there is more than a touch of utopian idealism about the Club of Rome’s concern. It is desirable from a humanist perspective for the subject of history to have a big picture, but it may not be strictly necessary structurally speaking. Sociologically, people located at an appropriate place in the system form an aggregate of actors who by carrying out their socially inscribed interests come to constitute a political force. It is actions, not words and ideas, that make change.

SPECIES, GENDERED AND POSTCOLONIAL OTHERS

Ever since the 1930s, marxism has been said to be in crisis because the working class failed to embrace its historical mission of overturning capital. Meanwhile, actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe proved a travesty of Marx’s original vision. Recent efforts to devise an eco-socialism are an implicit acknowledgment of the tragic fate of the socialist ideal. Even so, ecomarxists such as Joe Weston or James O’Connor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism still champion the political agency of trade unions, although O’Connor is open to a possible alliance of labour and new social movements. Weston, meanwhile, wonders about the radical potential of the ‘disenfranchised’, free as they are of party affiliation.¹³ After all, green activists from Jeremy Seabrook to Jonathon Porritt agree that it is working-class people who are most likely to suffer from unhealthy jobs and polluted living environments.

Less often raised as an issue for concern is the situation for people of colour. When it comes to labour, distinctions between class and race are often blurred in the public imagination. Thankfully, a new politics of environmental racism articulated by Robert Bullard and others is sharpening up the debate in North America.¹⁴ But given the feminisation of poverty that follows from capitalist patriarchal economic ‘development’ North and South, where does the impact of class or race end, and gender effect begin? Dobson, who is keen to integrate socialist theoretical insights within ecologism, responds to the question of historical agency by looking out for who in contemporary societies is most thoroughly ‘disengaged’ from the general interest – a grouping that ‘profoundly questions the presuppositions on which present social practices depend’:

it might be argued from a Green perspective that the external limits imposed on the production process by...