Managing The Planet?

The great devaluation of Nature and People.

“Ecology without class struggle is gardening…” Chico Mendez, Brazilian environmentalist.

Ruling abstractions are necessary for the appropriation, colonization and domination of the entire world and all possible aspects of Nature. A set of abstractions and imaginaries that frame our worldview and relationship with Nature. Climate, biosphere, ecosystems, creatures and critters or the entire “web of life” are situated within the ruling supervision of “World-Ecology”. What we know as “Planetary Management” or “Stewardship” has a long history, based on a ‘Promethean logic’. One that emerged from Europe a long while back. “Man versus Nature” or worse “Man above all” (Descartes). The dialectic extends into the entire world, as master over slave, male over female, civilized over barbarian, white over black, rich over poor, urban over rural, literate over illiterate etc. A set of binaries, actors of an ongoing historical project extending hundreds of years.

And what is a real abstraction? The best example would be the myth of “Cheap Nature”. Perpetuated by the very system and ruling class, entire networks of cheap energy, cheap labor, cheap food and cheap work, accumulating and growing upon the “web of life” (Jason Moore). Orchestrating forms of bourgeois exploitation upon billions of people, tied to a given race, class, gender, ethnicity etc. A devaluation of epic proportions. The management, exploitation, abuse, contamination and destruction of the biosphere is also continuous, as a devaluation of the same. We get rich as we devalue Nature. They tell us that “humans are a geological force”. Better “Man versus Nature” is understood as an imposed duality of “Capital versus Earth” (Nancy Fraser).

Simply put, planetary management, environmentalism, renewable energy, green technology and forms of Earth activism add up as components, or as John Bellamy Foster says “the bright green abstractions of Capitalism”. Wherever one may be situated, the ruling abstractions and presence of the modernized world is not so much about the Anthropocene but the “Capitalocene” (Donna Haraway). To demystify certain ruling abstractions, the following story is about planetary management and the “organization of Nature” through the Capitalocene.

One way or another, the “biosphere crisis” or call it “planetary inferno” is felt by humans and non-humans, albeit the experts point to a range of escalations including global warming, pollution, overpopulation, emissions, mass extinction, threat of nuclear meltdown, economic decline, pandemics, extreme climate events etc etc. The overwhelming forces of Nature and a huge “surplus population” must be contained, to ensure a continuous outflow (and consumption) of cheap energy, labor, food and cheap new lives. Hence, planetary management and most interventions have to concur with the above agreement, always following the “Green Arithmetic” of Capitalism. Is the very reason, when we are told about the ‘Great Polycrisis’ that has besieged modern civilization, never mentions the root cause, capitalism as the final form of modern “planetary organization”.

What merits a quick reflection, is how modern human beings came about to such a state of exuberance (for the few) as well as states of depravity (for the many). A type of super-organization which controls class, capital and Nature. The tremendous cost of the “Biopower” which is necessary to keep current civilization going and it’s exhausted “empires of extraction” (Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt). The “Civilizing Project” which represented all the axioms of progress, could only be delivered to the slaves, peasants, workers, indigenous, savages, vagrants and illiterates, if they surrendered to the chosen “enlightened ones”. In that spirit, we are constantly reminded by many experts to “listen to the science”.

Within western environmentalism what goes unquestioned or brushed aside is the reality of class struggle and the the history of Capitalist violence. Never addressed by the influential experts, like Bill Mckibben (350.org) or James Hansen (Climatologist) or Johan Rockström (Scientist) or Jörgen Randers (Club Of Rome) or David Suzuki (Science Broadcaster) or Grace Kimaru (UN Climate Justice) or Ilyess Korbi (Activist). Be it racial, political, social or technological, the legacy of exploitation and oppression that is fundamental to Capitalism, is also “embedded within planetary reform, climate justice, environmentalism and the corresponding regimes of salvation” (Jason Moore). Clearly misleading is James Hansen’s evaluation of climate change and global warming as a “Man made crisis” which in reality is a catastrophe of Capitalism, albeit an existential threat especially for those who benefit from it’s continuity.

“In a historic context, the worst ecological offenders, that include multinational corporations, the military industrial complex, Big Ag, mining and big distributed industries can carry on with the extraction and devaluation, without any real ecological accountability at a national or global level. A section of the population that is situated within rich nations, including progressives and new greens behave with a similar sense of impunity.” Brian Michael Napolitano (Ecologist).

In her book ‘Caliban And The Witch’ Silvia Federici unpacks the early history of Capitalism and the corresponding disembodiment of western Europe’s feudal class and more precisely the woman’s body. The “transition” from feudalism to capitalism (14th-16th century) was also an imposition upon all women, by Catholicism, the ruling class and later by advocates of the Enlightenment. Women as a “category within Nature” best understood as a source of “primitive accumulation” (Marx, Capital Vol.1). “A systematic devaluation of women following the demonization… The role that women had in the crisis of feudalism and why their power had to be destroyed for capitalism to develop.” (Caliban And The Witch).

According to Federici,“the female body was reoriented as a resource, into a site of regeneration akin to Nature.. exploitation of women played a central function in the process of early capitalist accumulation within Europe.” Resistance and non-conformity equated to punishment, exile or death. Still confined within the darker history of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, England, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Switzerland and Holland, known as “Trail by fire” is a legacy of persecution, torture and executions “of hundreds of thousands of ‘witches’ at the beginning of the modern era, and it’s corresponding relationship to the rise of capitalism and colonialism.. historic shifts that were coeval with a war against Women” (Caliban And The Witch). A set of horrific practices including witch hunting, spilled over into European colonies, targeting the native women of the “New World” in America, Haiti, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, Congo, Ivory Coast, Papua’ New Guinea, Madagascar, Bengal and parts of South Asia. The “colonization of the female body” would be integrated in myriad ways within the economy, education, science and industry of the “modern era”.

Did Women Have A Renaissance? (Joan Kelly Gadol). Centuries later, even higher number of women across the world are battling for equal rights, still disempowered by patriarchy, capitalist accumulation, sexual exploitation, unfair practices and laws. By no means can one negate the success achieved by women across the world, as emancipation or liberation throughout the Capitalocene. The feminist view of Capitalism is equally prescient because “it equates to a gradual redefinition, of understanding and making visible the hidden structures of domination and exploitation.” (Silvia Federici).

Such domination makes it almost impossible to transcend the dichotomy between gender and class. Also between Nature and human beings. Inequality and separation that was injected by ruling Europeans into the “New World” and eventually everywhere else, also ensured that no modern human being would be exempt from such binaries. Tremendously powerful abstractions, made of cheap Nature, cheap work and cheap energy that fostered the proliferation of Capitalism, also gave way to the systems of planetary-scale exploitation and management. In context, these systems of control and conversion are also responsible for ecocide and genocide. Cheap Nature and the disposable human population devoted to the “making of civilization” over the last 500 years of the Capitalocene. From the “slaveships” of the pre-modern era to the “spaceships” of the atomic-age, a continuous devaluation of Nature, people and work was absolutely necessary, for the global victory of Capitalism.

European “laws of Nature” combined with the bourgeois logic of “primitive accumulation” can be traced within every corresponding project of early Capitalism. A “world-praxis” - Nature is external, time is linear and space flat. The old world projects that included colonization, slave trade, plantations, mining and maritime trade gave way to the Industrial Revolution which directed a vast number of human beings towards new abstractions, new promises of modernity.

For all of us living within big cities, symbolic of modernity, exists a remarkable form of shared ignorance. “What describes an unremarkable day in the lives of hundreds of millions of the world’s urbanites, a day you have experienced year in and year out without much thought, is actually a miracle produced not least by the stunning expansion of commodity frontiers over the past 600 years.” (AEON).

Abstractions that include nation building, economic growth, military power and technological superiority. Capitalist imaginaries like endless accumulation of wealth and property. Steam-power gave way to coal-power which was supplanted with the energy of oil and gas. “Ecosystems, labor and land had never been orchestrated at this scale, in the entire history of ancient civilizations and medieval empires” (Ecology Of Freedom, Murray Bookchin). 20th century Capitalism can best be visualized as the “the great acceleration”. A “hockey stick” rise of everything that is symbolic of a limitless civilization and current technological society. One that is still trying to manage a “devalued planet”. The economy and the environment are not independent of each other. A grounded ecological dialect insists that “Capitalism is not just an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing Nature” (Jason Moore, Capitalism And The Web Of Life).

Environmental justice and reform does not confront the brutality of class and Capitalism. Instead it prefers to reform common people, invent regenerative practices, transition to green colored energy, try cut emissions, make less babies and conserve what remains of Nature. Is the overall preoccupation of anthropogenic climate science, a facet of elite reform situated within modern Capitalism and it’s management of the planet. But the to-fix-list is forever.

For a long while now “World-Ecology” has negated class conflict and the “overall devaluation of human life in favor of greater economic growth.” (John Bellamy Foster). Encapsulated by Jason Moore as “the final devaluation of the web of life, orchestrated by neoliberal Capitalism.” Is prescient to outline the real crisis of ever cheapening Nature and environmentalism that eventually serves the “interests of the powerful”. We must decipher the big abstractions and myths, which redefine and sustain the above legacy and planetary domination. The “planned Utopia” of the ruling class, and why it fails time and again.

Born at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Robert Malthus believed population growth was “inevitable whenever conditions improved, thereby precluding real progress towards an utopian society”. As an Anglican Cleric, Malthus was convinced about “divine imposition to teach virtuous behavior”. He was also an employee of the East India Company, an imperial maritime power in service of the British empire. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” (The Principle of Population). But Malthus was wrong. His perception of overpopulation and Man’s failure to achieve “utopian society” remained tacitly loyal to Capitalism, colonization, slavery, extraction and systemic devaluation of the vast proletariat. The impoverished “lumpen proletariat” of Karl Marx.

Yet Robert Malthus, as well meaning, was driven by the logic of “Man versus Nature” that is actually “Capital versus Earth” (Nancy Fraser). Whereby the new bourgeois class and imperial power freely exploited the underclass, be it native, slave or foreign, under the worst possible conditions and as fast as possible in favor of “modern accumulation”. This abstraction would evolve over time, with powerful new theories and bourgeois reforms, better framed as “responsible and democratized accumulation”.

“Earth visionaries” of the 1970s and 80s could foresee the biosphere crisis of the 21st century. Key figures like William Vogt (Road To Survival), Rachel Carson (Man’s War Against Nature), Jay Forrester (World 2.0), James Lovelock (Gaia), Buckminster Fuller (Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth) , Paul Ehlrich (The Population Bomb), William R Catton (Overshoot & Revolutionary Ecology), Murray Bookchin (Ecology Of Freedom), E.O. Wilson (Half Earth) and the most influential (and controversial) ‘Limits To Growth’ by the MIT group lead by Donella Meadows - together symbolized a great prepping and calls for global reformation. Blueprints of planetary management and “ecological reorientation” aimed at a vast proletariat. From which came about a wellspring of motivated individuals and institutions, environmental experts and leaders, earth scientists, ecologists, biologists, urban planners, engineers, wildlife protectors, sustainability advocates, green gurus, etc etc. Many destined to become future“managers of the planet”.

Did environmentalism and “responsible and democratized accumulation” succeed in it’s missions of restoration and regeneration? Broadly speaking, no. While it is a never ending project, remaining with the abstraction of “Capital versus Earth” the set of strategies to control the wider “web of life” did not manifest as envisioned. Worse reality of many people, being slaughtered, being rendered homeless, struck down by disease, those who are on the brink of collapse or economic destitution. Alas the “Limits To Growth” should have included the impact of Capitalism and the imperial “feedback loops” which orchestrate unprecedented accumulation of wealth, as well as suffering and continuous devaluation of Nature.

The unprecedented centralization of economic (and political) power that actually orchestrates democracy has also hollowed out the planet, while creating abject and horrific living standards. People numbering billions have been excluded from the benefits of infinite Capitalist growth. Those who are labelled as the “underdeveloped” are cast out of the tremendous “overshoot” of wealth and material prosperity. “A Brave New World for the top 10% and a 1984 for everyone else” (Jason Moore).

John Bellamy Foster goes deeper into the relationship between the biosphere crisis and global class struggle, in his book “Naked Imperialism (the U.S. pursuit for global dominance)” . Foster makes it sufficiently clear that “the objective of the imperial system today as in the past, is to open peripheral economies in favor of exploitation by the core capitalist interests… thus ensuring both a continuous supply of raw material at the cheapest possible price and outflow of economic surplus from the peripheries to the center of the world system”. Is perhaps why less than 40 billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom 3.6 billion people. Albeit the period is a tiny part of human history and ecology, that stretches for at least 2.5 million years. And did we achieve the “right standard of living yet”? At least for the right amount of people? That too is a never ending project of the Capitalocene. But, a wicked messianic philanthropist like Bill Gates continues to insist that “our world is overpopulated”.

Future intelligent life will know we were here because some humans have filled the fossil record with such marvels as radiation from atomic bombs, plastics from the oil industry, forever chemicals and chicken bones.” (History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things).

What Jason Moore and Raj Patel are warning us about is the outcome of “Cheap Nature” and eventually “turning Nature into a political category”. They challenge the dominant narratives of planetary salvation and mainstream environmentalism, as misleading and dangerous. The Capitalocene is converging into “a turning point in the planet’s history” (Columbia University 2021). Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point, as a “state shift”. What happens next is unpredictable at one level and entirely predictable at another. Regardless of what humans decide to do, the 21st century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the “web of life”. The imaginaries of collapse are now in motion. 43% Americans are “prepping for catastrophe” (Washington Post 2022). Visit the ‘Doomsday Campus’ if you are rich and paranoid enough.

Is Man overwhelming Nature or is it the other way around? Either way, the imperialist dialect prevails within every major planetary declaration, decision and policy. A dialectic that has continuously evolved from the late 19th century, through Agenda 21 (1972), to Earth Summit Rio (1992) to The Sustainability Conference (2002) right down to the annual COP summits, not to exclude hundreds of environmental conferences and workshops that take places around the world throughout the year. Ever new frameworks of “just transition” imposed on the women and men, who bear the real burdens of labor, economy, production and exploitation. “Nature conservation is being dealt as a big hand out, whereby we have lost huge swaths of land and forest, native populations evicted… turned over to corporations, because of ‘Carbon Offsets’.. my generation and my parent’s have thrown this country open to all the invasive ways of green imperialism…” (Mordacai Ogada, Kenya)

Yet, the praxis behind the quest for “new frontiers” better “modes of production” and eventually whatever “modes of life” remains as is. The overall devotion to Capitalism, to fossil capital, technological innovation and eventually what does the working class have to offer, for the continuation of current techno-industrial civilization. “The rule of cheap Nature and cheap lives” goes on as is. A range of institutions and experts, continue to “harmonize common people into imperial projects” of climate change, planetary justice, wildlife conservation, energy transition, food sovereignty, Degrowth lifestyle, Gaia spirituality, Eco-consciousness etc. But the underlying relationship of profit, accumulation, surplus and devaluation, remains unchallenged within all sorts of elite reform and individual transition.

In essence, a majority of climatologists, energy transition experts, system analysts and earth scientists have always been most concerned about their “share of Nature” and the conservation of capitalist society. The environment is a “big deal” for the bourgeois ruling class for this very reason. According to these folks “civilization is running out of gas, because human population has reached a scale beyond control and salvation..” Jack Alpert (population expert, Stanford Integration Lab).

An ecological dialectic that combines the biosphere crisis with Capitalism with class struggle and with the “web of life” yet without the ruling old abstractions. The human prospect in the 21st century is not a happy one. A grounded opinion can also be taken as shared reality. “From the outset, our future can be explained at two levels of abstraction. The first is humanity-in-nature. Human engagement with the rest of Nature, over the past 100 years has reached the point where abrupt global environmental change and catastrophes can no longer be excluded. The second is capitalism-in-nature. The unfolding crisis of neoliberal capitalism— the early environmental signals, the crisis of 2008, extreme climate events, and the unpredictable but inevitable onset of international crisis” (Jason Moore).

“The biosphere crisis is directly linked to the dictatorship of the global bourgeois.” (Nancy Fraser). Is no abstraction that we face unprecedented changes, not as an outcome of some “anthropogenic activity” but because of unchecked Capitalist greed and growth. No abstraction as to who the winners of the Capitalocene were and currently are. No abstraction that a “global inquisition” is being orchestrated by a small number of people upon the rest of the world and the planet. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. No nation is exception to this mass depravity of “real Nature”. Finally, no abstraction, that more than 2100 environmental defenders were assassinated during the last 10 years (Global Witness, 2024). A record high of 192 killings in 2023. Wither managing the planet or your private bit of “Gaia” while facing the barrel of a gun or giant bulldozers or jail sentences. Wither climate justice and carbon offsets for millions of people who survive on $3 a day. Wither “World-Ecology”.

I began the story with a famous quote by Chico Mendez, because it goes right to the heart of the crisis. Chico was assassinated in Medicilandia (Capital Of Cocaō) by the land mafia, backed by Cacaō plantation owners who supply the precious cash crop to corporations situated in São Paolo and Switzerland. Mendez also reminded his kin that “We all need to pull up and fight”. Hundreds of thousands of environmental defenders, landless farmers, the indigenous and small tribes are on the front-lines of the biosphere crisis and not the “planetary managers and experts”. What and who we fight for is as important as being aware of who is the real enemy?

The Capitalocene is fraught with multiple impositions of collapse, conflict and abandonment. Nothing that the WEF predicts and plans is about the welfare of common people and the biosphere. Prep we must! Revolution or regime, social or individual, radical or spiritual, we must abandon the oppressive abstractions - of value, cheap Nature and the devious logic of limitless accumulation. Great historical transitions occur because “business as usual” no longer works.

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