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“Revolutionary” ideas are misleading
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“Revolutionary” ideas are misleadingClive L Spash, 2022 (Spash is in the Department of Socioeconomics at the Institute for the Multi-Level Governance & Development at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria “Apologists for growth: passive revolutionaries in a passive revolution” Globalizations, Volume 18, Issue 7, pgs 1123-1148. 2018 https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1080/14747731.2020.1824864///MF) Popular authors and international organizations recommend transformation to a ‘new economy’. However, this is misleadingly interpreted as radical or revolutionary. Two problematic positions are revealed: being pro-growth while seeking to change the current form of capitalism (e.g. Ha-Joon Chang), and being anti-growth on environmental grounds but promoting growth for poverty alleviation and due to agnosticism about growth (e.g. Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth). Both positions involve contradictions and an evident failure to address, or perhaps even a denial of, the actual operations of capital accumulating economies. Thus, economists ostensibly critical of capitalism turn out to be apologists for growth who conform to the requirements of a top-down passive revolution, that leaves power relations undisturbed and the economic structure fundamentally unchanged. The growth economy is shown to include technocracy, productivism associated with eugenics, inequity disguised as meritocracy, competition concealing militarism and imperialism, imposition of development as progress, and financialization and commodification of Nature. 2AC -- AT: Eco-SocialismAlt Fails - Kovel’s Model has many holes (Kovel)Johns 2 [David Johns, School of Government, Portland State University, 2002, "Slaying the Growth Monster," Zed Books, https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1046/j.1523-1739.2003.01735.x, SMarx, JTong] Kovel de-votes one paragraph to human pop-ulation, and his discussion of the re-lationship of technology to hierarchyis extremely limited.Kovel does briefly look into deep time, but his command of the an-thropological literature is poorer than his command of the biological. His understanding of the origins ofhuman hierarchy is archaic andshows no familiarity with the enor-mous literature on the subject. His claim that we are innate gardenersalso is puzzling given horticulture’s relatively recent origin. For most ofour species’ history we have col-lected, gathered, and hunted.Finally, although Kovel speaks of the intrinsic value of nature, it is notat all clear what this means in the face of the priority he gives to the human need to engage nature bytransforming it ( production ). Heclaims for human nature what David Ehrenfeld ( 1978 ) describes as hubrisin the Arrogance of Humanism, a belief that our destiny is to managen ature and that we can manage it successfully. Many biologists ( and there are few of them in Kovel’s bibliography ) would challenge this belief on the evidence that humansmake poor ecosystem dominants.We cannot successfully manage na-ture because it is too complex tomodel adequately. That leaves aside the question of whether we possessthe requisite wisdom to do so. The historical and prehistorical record suggests that we do not. Kovel’secosocialism seems to have no placefor vast areas of self-willed land ( i.e.,wilderness ), something that manywide-ranging species and top preda-tors require for survival. And he sug-gests no criteria for resolving future conflicts between non-alienated hu-mans and the needs of other speciesfor survival.Despite Kovel’s criticism of thoseleftists who have tried to latch on to environmental and conservation is-sues in order to ride the wave of pub-lic interest and concern, seems to be in that tradi-tion. There is no doubt that Kovel isgenuine in his concern for nature,but he tries to fit ecological processesand problems into categories longused to describe human society.Conservation biology, with its fo-cus on direct protection as a re-sponse to the extinction emergency,often fails to look beyond immediate threats, despite an awareness thatthe threats to nature are not recentin origin or superficial in terms ofhuman predispositions. Conserva-tion biologists need to better under-stand the dynamics of human societ-ies and the ways in which these dynamics make direct protection possible or difficult in the near term and the long haul. Conservation is needed to better understand which ob-stacles to conservation are struc-tural, requiring systemic change, and which are matters of individual or group discretion. Kovel offers valuable insight into these matters.Without a good understanding of these issues, successful strategies can-not be crafted and alliances will not succeed. The results of failure are too terrible for most of us to contem-plate. Kovel’s analysis is one with which conservationists should be fa-miliar, and although his answers are wanting in many respects, he is ask-ing many of the right questions Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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