Ecologism approaches a theory of the whole by reducing “the economy,” the only thing that “the people” are said to care about in our exceptional democracy, to a scientific experiment whose implications lethally undermine its own rationale. For that reason, which is a material as well as an ideological reason, the libertarian, conservative, and capitalist paranoia regarding superficially “market-oriented” or market-imitating measures like cap-and-trade is not paranoia at all. Cap-and-trade would be backdoor socialism to the precise (if likely small) extent it succeeded in achieving its higher purpose, a progressively self-totalizing industrial policy in deteriorating free market costume. Even the premonition of its success would have been as problematic for free economism as the system catastrophe the proposal was intended to help avert. By the same logic, the defenders of 18th Century liberty must remain absolutely – politically, professionally, intellectually, philosophically – committed to a refusal of the absolute concept, to the point of being prepared to annihilate the whole rather than submit to it. In advanced capitalism, we have learned, “the whole is false”; the system produces “rationality of the part processes, irrationality of the whole”: To qualify as an ideologue of the system, or true believing patriot of the nation of production, one must refrain from thinking of the whole, which means refrain from thinking ecologically, from understanding how my freedom eventually costs us all our lives: “Give us liberty, and with it death.” Ecologism and economism must negate each other (as one totality meets another in the respective etymons logos and nomos, perhaps as becoming/what-must-become vs being/what-is): Their absolute if not necessarily remainderless contradiction is equivalent to the absolute if not necessarily remainderless danger: nihilism realized as process of annihilation, as realization finally of nothing. In this way ecologism comes as close to dialectical materialism as positive or bourgeois science can while still remaining positive science, somewhat in the same manner as cognitive science and physics at their limits, where they approach each other asymptotically, but on the level of lived history. Nature itself finally envelops human nature. Proletarian Earth, the working world itself, reveals that it has already staked out the revolutionary absence we workers of the world have never quite managed to occupy.
). Go to our My pleasure. It was a discussion you initiated at the LoOG that got me started. My only request is that, if you do something with it, you let me know!
This is exactly right, and I’m sure I’ll appropriate this explanation of ecologism for my own discussions. Thanks for putting in the legwork, CK.