Ideology that considers the main historical contradiction to be Humanity-Nature, or in certain versions, capitalism-Nature, proposing as an alternative a range of "reforms" that go from "green capitalism" to "degrowth".
Environmentalism as the ideology of green technological change
On one side of the environmentalist spectrum we would have all the tendencies that present the overcoming of the contradiction between the natural environment and capitalism as the product of a technological change that can be carried out within the system. The problem is that there is no technological change outside social relations, and therefore none that does not unequally affect the situation of the classes that define society. By making the centrality of the class struggle invisible in order to put environmental damage in its place, environmentalism forgets the necessarily reactionary meaning of every ecological reform under capitalism.
The change of model in energy, transport and agricultural production implies setting in motion a technological change. But it is important to understand that it is not technology that would magically give new impetus to accumulation, but the transfer of income from labor to capital. Technology is purely instrumental and is developed not by the genius of solitary researchers but by the demand and investment of interested capital. That is why the new, supposedly more "sustainable" technologies are required to be, above all, more productive. This does not refer to physical productivity, to the quantity of product obtained per hour of average labor, but to productivity for capital: the amount of profit produced by each hour of labor hired. That is why global state regulation is central to the "ecological transition": taxes and rules do not change physical productive capacity, but they do change the expected profit per hour of exploited social labor.
That is the logic of every "technological revolution" in capitalism. It is not that capitalism "adapts to new technologies"; it is that technologies are not considered viable unless they increase productivity from the perspective of profit, that is, unless they serve to increase the share of capital's income in total production.
Capitalism is a system of exploitation of one class by another. Its aim is not to produce cars, much less to safeguard the climate. Its only aim is to produce and to increase exploitation with each cycle, increasing capital. Beneath the promise of green and utopian digitally modeled urban landscapes, of silent non-polluting electric cars, lies, as always, the sharp reality of the class struggle. All that global renewal of energy, transport and industrial production infrastructures which they imagine capable of restarting the global cycle of capital is nothing but the greatest transfer of income from labor to capital since the Second World War.
"Against the Climate Sacred Union", communiqué by Emancipación.
Degrowth environmentalism as a contemporary form of Malthusianism
Another wing of environmentalism, the so-called extinctionist, degrowth or deep ecology wing, heir to the Club of Rome and to neo-Malthusianism, with recognized stars such as Hardin and his very famous tragedy of the commons (originally written as a racist pamphlet), will insist again and again on the finite character of natural resources in order to assert a contradiction between them and the current volume of world population. Humanity would be nothing more than an uncontrollable predatory species, a plague to be contained or eradicated, as in the simplistic models of ecology classes.
The only alternative for this environmentalism would be catastrophe or degrowth, the latter implying a reduction that its own spokespeople estimate at 7/8 of the population. Unlike Malthus, they will try to explain their "sustainability" ratios, and in doing so they will fall into all kinds of fallacies. The best known: repeatedly forecasting an energy collapse for lack of sufficient oil on at least two occasions in the 2000s, and projecting from global warming data an extinction of the species in 2050.
But the main fallacy of this increasingly numerous and media-promoted wing of environmentalism is that it equates industrialization with capitalism in order to reaffirm bourgeois morality in its crudest terms, those used by Malthus.
Malthus and bourgeois morality
The United Kingdom of the late 18th century was not the most favorable place for industrial enterprise. From the landed and mercantile aristocracy to the peasants, whose communal morality had not yet been shattered by the most wretched poverty, they were an obstacle for the industrial bourgeoisie and the liberal luminaries. At the end of the century the Elizabethan "Poor Laws" were still in force; they imposed forced labor, but also provided food and basic support to the great masses of poor people driven off the land by the mercantilist greed of primitive accumulation.
Riots over the price of bread broke out periodically, and the situation in France caused great concern among the British elites. Following in the footsteps of Adam Smith and closing the Smithian moral treatise from below, Thomas Malthus proposed, at the most opportune moment, a new moral order that broke with everything before it. Where Smith points out that free-trade laissez faire leads to the best of results thanks to accumulation, Malthus orders the setting in motion of what he himself calls the social "machine", cutting off the Speenhamland system of relief and forcing the poor to work at any price in order to survive.
Life is activity, and this activity can only be guaranteed by the threat of the evil of scarcity. All of Malthus' statistical work on the need to control population, whose famous ratios he never demonstrates, serves as a justification for the moral argument that takes up the last two chapters of the treatise.
Malthus began his theodicy with a critical analysis of human nature. As in the Aristotelian theory of motion, the natural state of mankind was rest. Men were "inert, sluggish and averse to labor"; it was motion that needed explaining. Some push was needed "to awaken inert and chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul; to elicit an ethereal spark from the lump of clay". This push was the physical and moral evils caused by the law of population. To avoid pain, men went into activity.
To avoid evil, and to pursue good, seems to be the great duty and business of man; and this world seems peculiarly calculated to afford opportunities for the greatest exertions of this kind; and it is by this exercise, by these stimulants, that mind is formed.
Men were by nature passive; the discomforts of life caused motion. Evil was the driving force of the human realm. It was therefore the force behind civilization. Malthus confronted this potentially embarrassing problem by turning it into a theory of incentives. At the lowest level, hunger or cold forced men to seek food and to form a society of cultivators; at the highest levels, some of the noblest exertions of the human mind have been set in motion by the necessity of satisfying human wants.
D. L. LeMahieu, "Malthus and the Theology of Scarcity"
To the horror of some of his contemporaries -and the delight of others-, Malthus not only tolerates but celebrates evil and scarcity as creative forces. Scarcity, as a guarantee of hunger and torment for the workers, must be artificially maintained to ensure the functioning of the great hydraulic machine of accumulation: capitalism.
And thus it appears, that a society constituted according to the most beautiful form that imagination can conceive, with benevolence for its moving principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short period degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers, and with self-love the main-spring of the great machine.
Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population 1798
Malthus would succeed in getting extensions of poor relief rejected and would become a major figure of his time, influencing politicians in the British Isles and training the officials of the Indies who would apply his principles of population control to the British colonies. The morality of Malthus and Bentham would underpin all the discussions on the poor laws and on the formation of the new independent proletariat, "free to sell its labor power":
The Poor Law Report of 1834, which summed up the findings of the Royal Commission, was replete with Malthusian language: We have seen that one of the objects attempted by the present administration of the Poor Laws is to repeal pro tanto that law of nature by which the effects of each man's improvidence or misconduct are borne by himself and his family. The effect of that attempt has been to repeal pro tanto the law by which each man and his family enjoy the benefit of his own prudence and virtue.
One of the main objects of the new regime, the report stated, was "the diminution of improvident and wretched marriages, thereby checking the increase of population". By abolishing relief to able-bodied men and their families, the New Poor Law, Dean states, revealed its Malthusian aim of making the... independent laborer solely responsible for the welfare of his wife and children.
James P. Huzel, "The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth Century England"
Blaming the workers and millenarianism
In the degrowth and extinctionist discourse that predominates in environmentalism, individual improvidence has been replaced by collective improvidence. The development bequeathed by rising capitalism, from mass vaccination to the growth of agricultural production, not to mention industrialization, would supposedly have fed a population growth beyond our means, unsustainable. The only possible horizon would be to degrow, that is, the mass destruction of productive forces with the consequent misery and genocide. They generously offer us, mind you, to do it little by little, through transition economies, so that the responsibility of each family prevails and, in the face of scarcity, the birth rate falls drastically.
As in Malthus, the line of argument of environmentalism always begins with the prospect of an inescapable catastrophe produced by the growth of consumption. Consumption that would supposedly have grown wildly in response to the permanent dissatisfaction of the great social majorities. It is a technique of shock and sectarian guilt-tripping applied to social communication.
In reality, consumption is the form that the satisfaction of the workers' needs takes in a commodity society. By attacking their consumerism, today's Malthusianism puts the focus on the same place as its predecessors: the voracity and the growth of the working classes are the main enemy of the social order.
And if Malthus set out to channel -by means of liberalism- that drive to growth towards proletarianization under the harshest conditions, the neo-Malthusian environmentalists simply propose self-restraint and an even greater restriction of consumption in order to save a few in a pre-industrial utopia à la Morris... which we would have to start building right now.
What is characteristic of environmentalism and of the original Malthusianism is the absurdity of their premises. Malthus, a parson after all, was flatly opposed to contraception, and for him the fertility of the species was not, but rather had to be, a constant without historical change.
For environmentalism too. The fact is that what is known as the demographic transition, a marked fall in fertility with the economic development of territories, does not fit any of the premises of environmentalism. Humanity does not reproduce like rabbits in the mating season. A large part of the population boom in the semi-colonial countries is due to a fall in infant mortality thanks to a basic medical improvement that is not yet coupled with a fall in the birth rate... because families still live in poverty and need as many working hands as possible (as well as because of restrictions on access to contraceptives).
We humans do not maximize the number of our children regardless of the state of our society. The supposed problem of overpopulation is the problem that a large part of Humanity lives in the most wretched poverty and scarcity because of capitalism, not because of some supposed natural tendency to fill the planet with children.
For Malthus this was an inevitable result of his reasoning, since his economic model foresaw that wages would not rise with accumulation (an error for which he ended up apologizing at the end of his life), so that, according to him, the workers would always suffer great scarcity and would try to reproduce as much as possible. Today the position according to which the workers' consumption -itself the cause of all evils- must be restricted is simply indefensible.
In reality the discourse of environmentalism comes down to three moves: the threat of catastrophe (peak oil, climate change, extinction, etc.), blaming the workers for making the use of resources unsustainable by consuming too much, and the exaltation of pauperization, which should be embraced voluntarily and as soon as possible. Few arguments could better represent what the decadence of a mode of production means.
Because the fact is that every mode of production has generated similar movements in its decadence. In Rome we find a growing popularity of eschatology from the crisis of the Republic onwards: in the mystery cults of Isis, the esoteric -and literally castrating- cults of Ceres and Apis, and even in a Hellenized Jewish sect with strong apocalyptic tendencies known as Christianity, which, once it had become the official and compulsory religion, would still provide the mythological framework for the last sectarian movements of the decomposition of slavery, from the Gnostics to the Priscillianists.
In the crisis of feudalism from the 12th century onwards there would be no shortage of flagellants, Adamites, Joachimites... an endless list of pauperizing, chaste, penitential and increasingly violent sects that already herald the millenarianism of the Valencian Germanías or the English Puritans.
Today environmentalism calls the Apocalypse extinction and renames the City of God as the eco-village, a productive model that, according to its own promoters, could feed no more than a seventh, perhaps an eighth, of the current world population. The bourgeois classes, bound to a system that no longer produces human development, are incapable of imagining a capitalist future with room for the whole species. So they fantasize about an impossible going back for the chosen few, imposed by a catastrophe that would make it compulsory.
Environmentalism is right about one thing: there is no longer a future in which the development of Humanity is compatible with capitalism. The road to abundance lies elsewhere: communism.
Environmentalism as a moral problem
In all forms of environmentalism, including the so-called eco-socialism in all its variants, two characteristics coincide: the denial that the capitalism-proletariat contradiction is central, or even points towards the overcoming of capitalist social relations, and the inability to imagine an abundant, de-commodified society.
That is to say, environmentalism directly attacks the two pillars of communist morality. That is why the result of any opportunist approach -accepting, for example, that the prospect of the extinction of the species through an environmental disaster looms over the coming decades, however much capitalism is blamed for it- besides not being true, can only be demoralizing.
There is no possible common ground between class interests and environmentalism in any of its forms, which does not mean setting aside the environmental problems caused by capitalism.