Ecology and
Revolution
By Herbert Marcuse
(from Liberation 16 (September 1972):10-12)
Coming from the
United States, I am a little uneasy discussing the ecological movement, which
has already by and large been co-opted [there]. Among militant groups in the
United States, and particularly among young people, the primary commitment is
to fight, with all the means (severely limited means) at their disposal,
against the war crimes being committed against the Vietnamese people. The
student movement – which had been proclaimed to be dead or dying, cynical and
apathetic – is being reborn all over the country. This is not an organized opposition
at all, but rather a spontaneous movement which organizes itself as best it
can, provisionally, on the local level. But the revolt against the war in
Indochina is the only oppositional movement the establishment is unable to
co-opt because neocolonial war is an integral part of that global
counterrevolution which is the most advanced form of monopoly capitalism.
So, why be concerned
about ecology? Because the violation of the earth is a vital aspect of the
counterrevolution. The genocidal war against people is also “ecocide” insofar
as it attacks the sources and resources of life itself. It is no longer enough
to do away with people living now; life must also be denied to those who aren’t
even born yet by burning and poisoning the earth, defoliating the forests,
blowing up the dikes. This bloody insanity will not alter the ultimate course
of the war, but it is a very clear expression of where contemporary capitalism
is at: the cruel waste of productive resources in the imperialist homeland goes
hand in hand with the cruel waste of destructive forces and consumption of
commodities of death manufactured by the war industry.
In a very specific
sense, the genocide and ecocide in Indochina are the capitalist response to the
attempt at revolutionary ecological liberation: the bombs are meant to prevent
the people of North Vietnam from undertaking the economic and social
rehabilitation of the land. But in a broader sense, monopoly capitalism is
waging a war against nature – human nature as well as external nature. For the
demands of ever more intense exploitation come into conflict with nature
itself, since nature is the source and locus of the life-instincts which
struggle against the instincts of aggression and destruction. And the demands
of exploitation progressively reduce and exhaust resources: the more capitalist
productivity increases, the more destructive it becomes. This is one sign of
the internal contradictions of capitalism.
