Political-ecological criticisms against the destruction of nature caused by capitalism in the world began to develop especially since the 1970s. It was the period in which neoliberal policies were dominated by the commercialization of all public services (from education to health), urban and natural commons (from parks to water resources) to capital reproduction. Ecological movements that advocate life and nature have developed all over the world against the neoliberal policies that encompass all life as a symbolic expression in the commercialization of water, the basis of life. One of the main issues of global politics today is how to fight the ecological crisis and its phenomena, the climate, food and water crisis.
In Turkey and Kurdistan, the AKP advocates of neoliberalism, spread ecological destruction. Against this destruction-plundering policy, environmental and ecological resistances emerged everywhere in different names and forms. The greatest rebellion of our recent history, the Gezi Insurrection began with the “three or five tees issue, transformed into a insurgency of millions of freedom against fascism.
The debates of ecological crisis and the crisis of capitalism coincide all over the world. Debates are bifurcated between ecosocialist, communalist and Marxist critiques of ‘green capitalism’, which is defined as a liberal, reformist ‘green new order’.
The main character of the capital is to get the most profit in the shortest time with minimum cost. While capital accomplishes this goal with the technologies it develops, it treats nature and human beings only as “resources or raw materials. At every stage of the industrial revolution, which capitalism emerged as a global system, capital colonized more forests, land and countries in order to achieve its expanded reproduction. The colonization of America, the robbing of Africa to the bone marrow, the sharing of the Middle East by inches and making South Asia and China a source of “cheap nature / people; all these aspects of the development of the capitalist world system are also the history of great ecological destruction.
This history is a century in which the twentieth-century modern states consolidate their regulatory power over societies, while also regulating the space within the boundaries of the capitalist mode of production, and on the other hand taking on the political responsibility of “economic growth / development zat. Modern state technocrats, trying to find solutions to the contradictions of capital on many different levels, have produced power effects that break the power of knowledge production from social needs or instrumentalize them for the needs of capital. Therefore, in relation to the logic of capital’s accumulation, the radical critique of the information and planning technocrats of modern states appears as an inevitable necessity. It is necessary to think about how the conditions of knowledge production and planning power that can be reintroduced into society are possible in the state institutions.
The main energy sources of industrial production are petroleum, coal and derivatives of fossil fuels. Therefore, securing dominance over energy resources has become the main parameter of the world system. Domination over energy resources has been the cause of global and regional wars, arms race, alliances and campings, imperialist intervention and civil wars.
“Green capitalism”, “Green New Order”, “sustainable development”, “clean energy”… Capital cannot be painted “green.. Capital comes to the world from head to toe, spilling blood and dirt from every pore. Capital, like vampire, is dead labor and dead nature that survive by absorbing and further absorbing living labor and nature. There is no struggle against the ecological crisis with the search for “alternative” where the logic of the capital, which is separated from social needs and the boundaries of nature, is not questioned.
The problem of “energy needs”, which is one of the most important sources of the ecological crisis, is the need for more production of the capital, which is severed from social needs and the boundaries of nature. The need for energy means more weapons, more cars, more industrial food production. But more production in capitalism brings wealth to a handful of capital, more exploitation of millions of people, more impoverishment, more plunder of nature, and millions of children starving to death. In order for poverty to come to an end and for everyone to have an equal, fair and free life, more production, not more energy, but the capitalist system of production, which allows all wealth to accumulate in the hands of a few capitalists, must be destroyed.
The ecological crisis is not the result of natural human activity, but the result of direct capitalist relations of production. The fact that the cause of the ecological crisis is generally portrayed as abstract “human activities” is an ideological explanation that frees the capitalist imperialist system, companies and governments from their responsibilities, implying that the problem stems from the wrong choices of individuals. This liberal ideology leads us to think of the end of the world instead of thinking of the end of capitalism. But what we need to do is think about the end of capitalism.
The effects of ecological crises are experienced in differentiating ways due to the pyramid of class, national and ethnic, sexual inequality in existing social relations. The effects of the climate crisis are different in different huts in palaces. Women, children and elderly people from the oppressed, colonial peoples of the world are most affected by the destruction caused by the climate and food crisis.
The climate and food crisis mean only new profitable investment areas for companies. New technologies, new medicine, new artificial foods, even traveling to Mars, building colonies in space… Therefore, the struggle against the ecological crisis cannot be considered as a separate area separate from the struggles against other inequalities and injustices in society. On the contrary, as long as partnerships and joint ventures can be developed with these areas, permanent results will be obtained.
The struggle against the ecological crisis cannot be sustained by reactionary reconciliation, confined to the ideological and political boundaries confined to “civil society” activism, “return to nature” or “lifestyle” and the “green capitalism ”program. At the same time, the struggle for ecology cannot be sustained only with singular, localist and cutist approaches. These limits, which are caused by multiple subjectivities of local / sectional movements and urgency of problems, are not criteria for struggle; These are the deficiencies that can be overcome by ideological and political struggle.
The struggle against the ecological crisis is the essence of the struggle for social liberation from capitalism. As a process of transition from capitalism to communism, the development of ecological consciousness and point of view in the light of past experiences, new philosophies and scientific developments should be turned into the basic paradigm of organized life by questioning the aims and means at every stage of this struggle. At the same time, the struggle against the aspects of the ecological crisis in one or another area / locale should be dealt with from this perspective of global struggle. The development of holistic and founding policies and partnerships, including the political needs of the movements, is the most fundamental need of ecological struggle.
Turkey and Kurdistan as well as in the world in various regions, raise claims against ecological destruction program, and it is possible to organize a fight with multiple formats. If a single tree, even a single stream can be saved, these struggles are extremely valuable and important. But of course it is not a matter of “three or five trees”. More and more people are becoming aware of this fact. The idea that capitalism is needed to get rid of the ecological crisis is becoming more common denominator day by day. However, the anticapitalism is not yet at an organized level in the struggle for ecology. It continues as abstract, literary and individual activism.
Today, while the apocalypse is happening for the oppressed, we need Marxism more than ever in the struggle to bring the end of capitalism before the end of the world. We need not only Capital, the Communist Manifesto, the French Trilogy, What to Do, the State and the Revolution. The Marxist policy of ecology should not be created at the levels of strategy, tactics, program, organization, but an abstract critique of capitalism. We are faced with the task of developing the social freedom struggle and organizing the struggle for ecology by learning from the new forms of organization and languages created by the new subjects in the world, especially the women’s struggle for freedom.
POLEN Ecology sets out from a Marxist point of view to contribute to the development of Marxist ecology awareness in the ecological movement and in the socialist movement.
POLEN Ecology aims to promote international Marxist ecology literature and to develop partnerships with movements in other countries. In line with the needs of the struggle, it aims to develop new organizations, platforms and to create an ecological movement in which rural and urban laborers and oppressed are the subject / leader of women and young people.
As POLEN Ecology, we invite everyone who considers that the ecological struggle should be part of the struggle for social liberation against capitalism and that it should be organized in a way that will spread to all of it, and who wish to make a companion in the development and implementation of a new program and strategy in this direction.