Can you be a Marxist and an environmentalist?

Here’s an idle thought. A Marxist is committed to the overcoming of capitalism. This isn’t going to happen any time soon. The world’s rainforests have a high chance of being destroyed by 2060. So if you want to save the rainforests you have to advocate for the modification of capitalism rather than its overthrow; namely, that rainforests be given a higher monetary value as they exist than as the raw materials and products that deforestation produces. (Possible objection: that this modification would spell the end of capitalism. Possible but unlikely). I know this uses market mechanisms to overcome political problems but maybe that’s the best chance we have at the moment.

Northcott on Carbon Emissions Trading

Michael Northcott gave an interesting seminar at Durham yesterday in which he critiqued CET for relying on market mechanisms to solve political problems. He thinks this reliance on the market for everything, which neoliberalism has fostered for the last 30 years, has deformed us in that it has shaped us as agents who are less able to co-operate, partly because we don’t believe in it. This means when politicians get together to try to hash out deals (e.g. at Copenhagen) they a) think of market solutions first, b) are less able to govern by face-to-face agreement and negotiation, trusting instead to ‘government by algorithm’.