Publisher's Synopsis
In The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel indicts capitalism, with its unrelenting pressure to expand, as unreformably destructive to ecologies. He argues against the reigning orthodoxy that there can be no alternative to the capitalist system, on the grounds that submission to it is suicidal as well as unworthy of human beings. Developing a synthesis between marxism, ecofeminism and the philosophy of nature, Kovel criticizes existing ecological politics for their evasion of capital, advances a vision of ecological production as the successor to capitalist production, and prefiguratively develops the principles for realizing this in the context of struggles against global capital, as an 'ecosocialism' of freely associated producers who realize nature's intrinsic value. The Enemy of Nature is frankly revolutionary in its aims. It is written in the spirit of the great radical motto, 'be realistic - demand the impossible!', and dares to think the unthinkable - that for us, it is either capitalist barbarism and ecocatastrophe, or the building of a society worthy of humanity and nature.
