A Conversation with Joel Kovel

Writer, teacher, and political/social activist, Joel Kovel has authored over 10 books and countless articles on subjects ranging from race to Reich, the role of spirituality in history and the role of fossil fuel interests in the current US “oligarchy”. He was the Green Party candidate for US Senate (NY) in 1998 and ran against Ralph Nader for the 2000 Green Party presidential candidacy. His new book The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) will be available in early February.

I spoke with Prof. Kovel (Alger Hiss Professor of Social Sciences at Bard College) at his home in Willow in late December. —Jason Stern

Chronogram: I first heard about you from my friend Harvey who videotaped a talk you gave at UCCC. I watched the video and I was impressed. You aren’t the doctrinal sort of leftist. Your presentation was creative and original and addressed issues that people aren’t really looking at.

JK: I am positively on the left. Make no mistake. But for various reasons—I had a different kind of background; was trained not just as a physician but as a psychoanalyst. I have a feeling for the inner world, so to speak, and most people on the left don’t really integrate that side into their politics.

C: It seems like people who are involved in politics generally don’t integrate much sensitivity. It’s a very superficial and ideologically oriented world to move around in. It really doesn’t address the inner side.

JK: Right, and the same thing goes for the other side. I mean, there are people who are very attuned to subjective experience, to psychology or spirituality. But they’re not capable of locating that in the external world very well. So from the very beginning, what I’ve done is sort of move back and forth—between subjective and objective, if you will. I wrote a book about it, History and Spirit. I think over the years I’ve focused more and more on economic and political things, less and less on the subjective things, but I’ve never lost that perspective. So when I speak to people I’m capable of bringing it in, and it’s something I consciously try to do.

C: It makes it relatable. Connected to experience.

JK: But I mean, I’m definitely on the left. In fact, in Woodstock right now we have quite a battle with people who are attacking me for being a Communist and calling me a Taliban supporter because I object to US foreign policy.

C: People aren’t really talking about Communists as villains anymore—

JK: (Laughs) Check out Woodstock community access cable. I wish I could say that.

C: In your talk at UCCC you talked about what you see as the inevitable demise of capitalism. How was that message received?

JK: Pretty well. You know, I ran for office twice. In ’98 I ran for the US Senate. Ran through the Green Party. And then last year, I challenged Ralph Nader for the Presidential nomination. I did not expect or really want to win it—he just had it locked up, but I wanted to make a statement. I spent the winter of the year 2000 in California, campaigning around the state, doing the same sort of thing as I was doing at UCCC. It’s a challenge and it’s a calling to reach out and speak to—I use the word ordinary, but, nobody is ordinary—I mean people who are not high-powered or university.

C: Speaking to “regular guys.”

JK: Yeah. And I’ve tried to do that. It’s a little hard for me because anybody who knows me knows my mind and I can be pretty convoluted at times. You should see some of the earlier drafts of what I write. And, my wife is not here—she’s in the city today—but she’s my most active critic. She’s really taken me to task for being obscure and not being more clear, sometimes, in my writing, but it’s a challenge that I accept to try. And also, when I teach students at Bard, I’ll take a class that’s just out of high school and I’ll give them some really sophisticated, very high-powered material. I don’t try to talk down to them, but I try to reach them where they’re at with some very challenging ideas. That’s what I feel a teacher should do. Hopefully the new book will reach people on a widespread basis, although it’s a very radical argument—it’s about as radical an argument as can be made. The subtitle of the book is ‘The End of Capitalism or the End of the World.” This sort of is a slap in the face of the prevailing consensus that the system is rational, it’s all there is, and there is no alternative. One point I make in the book is that you can take the phrase “there is no alternative” and turn it into an acronym: TINA. That’s an actual phrase that Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of England, coined in the ‘70s: ‘There is no alternative to the capitalist system” and this is a mass propaganda apparatus. It extends deep into the school system and into every aspect of life. People do not, in general think that there can be an alternative to the current society.

C: What are some of the fundamental underpinnings of the system—the ideas that people take as axioms?

JK: That human beings are by nature competitive and self-aggrandizing; that the meaning and purpose of life is self-advancement and the creation and enjoyment of wealth—that the United States, our country, is unproblematic, good in the world, we represent ideals of freedom and self-determination. One can go on and on, but these are basically principles that are generated by the capitalist system.

C: Hearing your talk, the thing that really struck me was this idea of the inevitable demise of the capitalist system, and that there are alternatives. What are they?

JK: I don’t want to put what I’m saying at the level of apocalyptic Biblical prophecy—the Book of Revelation—like the angels came and told me this. I’m not at all sure that the system will collapse, that it will go sour one way or another way. I’m only sure of this: that the capitalist system is, in itself, what we call unsustainable, because it is built upon endless expansion. It completely rejects any notion of equilibrium or harmonization with the earth, but is predicated on the constant growth and expansion of its fundamental production, which is of money. Because it’s a system that centers upon money and number, not upon ecologies and reality.

C: Except there’s a limit to the resources that can be rendered into money?

JK: Exactly. That’s called nature. Nature is limited. And we are limited. But the pressure to constantly generate more money and wealth introduces this tremendous destabilization into the world. And the fact that it is constantly expanding, or forced to expand, is to me a presumption that the system cannot be sustained….This whole ecological crisis is, simply speaking, a crisis of capitalist industrialization— pushing the Earth beyond the point where it can recuperate or buffer; beyond the Earth’s buffering mechanisms ability to contain. The result is environmental destabilization. The systems will just break down. Any ecosystem has ways of recuperating, repairing itself, just like the body does. Certainly our bodies are ecosystems. But, you know, if your body is too stressed, it breaks down. And you’re seeing this with the planetary body. In my view, the crisis of terror that we’re going through post –September 11th (which goes back way before that) is the same sort of thing, except that’s in the human world. There’s a human ecology that breaks down.

C: Would you say that the religious fundamentalism is, in a certain way, a reaction to the perception that the expansionist system is doomed and essentially empty, and there’s an urge to try to get back to the traditional roots—

JK: Yes. Yes!

C: —to systems that don’t compel constant expansion.

JK: That’s true. Except there’s a major qualification there. One way to put it is to say fundamentalism is anti-modern. There is something called modernity, which is the sense that the world has to be constantly renewed by something called progress; that progress consists of the progressive technological domination of nature, but also a constant transforming of social relations The past traditions are continually in upheaval, frayed—that’s modernity. But modernity is nothing but the cultural reflex of capitalism. The person who said it best was Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto when he said, “all that is solid melts into air,” talking about the triumph of the bourgeoisie. And that’s what’s been going on – the disintegration of coherent communal relationships. This breakdown is met by many countermeasures, one of which is fundamentalism. I mean, there are other possible countermeasures—people can go with it, people can embrace modernity, people can become postmodern. But they don’t have to. Within the set of possible reactions is religious fundamentalism.

C: My sense is that the answer to the breakdown—to the tearing apart—isn’t to go back and try to put it back together as fundamentalists attempt to do. There is some kind of—not post-modernity, but —”meta” modernity that could coalesce humanity into a coherent structure.

JK: Well, that’s the great challenge of our time—to reconstitute social existence beyond capitalist cancer.

C: There’s a value in the stirring up that’s happened, because it’s torn down all of the archaic, crystallized structures that have become empty and made something that’s incredible possible on a huge scale. Because of the destruction there’s this immense field of possibility right now.

JK: Two things I want to emphasize about that. The fundamentalists become particularly dangerous when they are elaborated in a context of imperialist domination. I mean, there are fundamentalists in the United States that are ‘back to the land,’ you know, like the Hutterites … it’s not fundamentalism per se, (because it’s not based on a literal reading of the Bible) but it’s in the same genus, so to speak, a species in that genus. But nobody worries about such people hijacking planes and driving them into the World Trade Center.

Fundamentalism only becomes this severe problem when it’s hate-filled—when it’s not just a search for images, solace, or integrity, or a re-woven world, if you like. But when it’s full of hate, and when its mental content breaks down—because these people who are running Al-Qaeda or these networks are idiots, really. I have no respect for them at all. I have respect for the basic impulse, which is to try to free people of the domination that’s been imposed upon them, but it’s a kind of thinking born out of desperation and humiliation—terrible humiliation. At some point, they are so desperate that they’ll just become a suicide bomber. And when that happens, it’s a phenomenon, because you can’t deter a suicide bomber with any threat. He wants to die. If you say, “You do that and I’ll shoot you”, he says, “Yeah, okay. Shoot me! I’m gonna do it. I want to be shot.”

You have to see it in a context of that great historical dynamic of the conquest of certain peoples, the breakdown of civilization. That has a lot to do with—of course—capitalism as well; in this particular context, having to do with control over oil and the Middle East and the ways in which all these countries have been knocked apart by that. That’s very important because oil is also the linchpin of the industrial civilization—that is, consuming nature in endless energy transformations. Fundamentalism is a reaction against modernity, but it becomes “terrorism”, in the context of hate, desperation, or imperialism.

C: So why does capitalism thrive on tearing apart existing social structures?

JK: That’s a good question, but there are several definitions of capitalism. Perhaps one of the simplest is what is called generalized commodity production—that is to say, capitalism has to constantly turn the world into things for sale, commodities. These commodities have to be produced, in very specific relations between the people who own the means of production and the people whose labor is used in producing it. The capitalists and the workers. That’s generalized, but that is constantly expanding—what expands is the commodification of the world and of the self. Now, there are a couple of corollaries to that, that have an iron logic to them. One of the things I tell my students that they feel very impressed with is—I ask them, what is the relationship of happiness to capitalism? Can people be happy under capitalism? And the answer is no, because if people were happy under capitalism they wouldn’t be craving these things—

C: The carrot and the stick.

JK: Yeah. They need to be constantly feeling that there is something wrong with them and that the wrong can be cured by purchasing something. Whether you’re too thin or you’re too fat or you snore a bit or you feel your car isn’t big enough or you need an air freshener for your car. It goes on and on. That’s one of the things that drives the system. It’s another way of saying that if the system ever had any kind of equilibrium or harmony to it, it would break down, because it has to keep expanding.

C: So it’s like taking that Buddhist idea that life is suffering and really capitalizing on it, rather than solving it.

JK: Exactly. They convert genuine happiness, which is fulfilling, into stimulation, which leaves a craving for more. More channels on the TV. More everything, and an increasingly emptied-out self that is ravening. That is, of course, the grounds of addiction and the whole addictive society that we have. That’s an iron necessity. If the system didn’t have that, poof! So you can see that there’s a constant reinforcement of anything that destabilizes old arrangements. Tradition tended to contain people in kind of set, organic relationships. Those are antithetical to capitalism.

C: It’s befitting that capitalism really took off in America, where everybody was from somewhere else—

JK:—and looking for something and trying to redefine themselves. Yes. All these feudal relationships that are built on and involve tradition—that’s one level. Another thing, you have to realize that ultimately, profit—capital—is actually made out of labor. It’s made out of what working people do. What’s key in capitalist economies is the markets for labor. You need a very expansive, fluent workforce that can go where labor is needed—here, there, everywhere.

C: In your talk at UCCC you gave some statistics about how fast things are going and rates of growth and how unsustainable that is. Could you say something about that?

JK: It depends on what you want to look at—you can look at the speed of fast food restaurants. That is an amazing thing, where the workers have to turn out a hamburger in ever-lessening time. But this thing about the actual growth in the economy—1997 was the year that the capitalist system seemed to be at peak—now, it’s in terrible shape, but in 1997 they thought that the world would have a four percent per annum growth rate in world domestic products, and there are some stories about that. We’re now in capitalist nirvana, this is paradise, the world is growing at four percent per annum. Well, if you do the math—because that’s compounded; it grows on its base—world output would double in 20 years.

C: You’re talking about a GNP model in which every transaction—whether it’s making the mess or cleaning it up—is counted as growth.

JK: But to just put it more directly: a few years ago it was 55 million cars being sold worldwide, which is a lot of cars. So basically what they’re saying is that in this capitalist paradise, they’ll be selling 110 million cars a year. Can you imagine doubling the number of cars on the road?

C: But the amount of money that is involved in the automobile industry—it seems so obvious that if anybody had the inclination, it would be really easy to create vehicles that use other sources of energy. There’s so much money in that industry that even a small portion of it could go into developing these vehicles but they obviously have a good reason not to develop vehicles that run on alternative energy sources.

JK: Well, there’s two sides to that. One is, in the given system, if you suddenly get free, non-polluting energy, the system would still break down, because all that would mean is there’s an incentive to make more and more cars. “Oh, it’s free to drive a car? We’ll just lower the price of cars and make twice as many!” The one thing they don’t want to do is cut back on the number of cars made. They might want to make the cars more fuel-efficient, which is a good thing, but basically to make more cars. So that’s one serious part of it.

C: What about the oil side of it?

JK: That’s very important. Having said that, the other thing is that capitalism, unfortunately, is tied to short-term profitability. You can’t tell a capitalist, “Why don’t you just liquidate your gigantic oil refineries and pipelines”—in other words, the hundreds of billions of dollars you have invested in the fixed capital to make petroleum and the hundreds of billions of dollars you have invested in your plants to make automobiles that run on that petroleum—you can’t tell a capitalist, “Listen, you’ll have a much better world if you just give up that—we can then build solar-driven cars and hydrogen cells.” A capitalist will take out a gun and shoot you—

C:—and they do.

JK: And they do, or they hire cops to do it, because the system can’t endure any contraction. It’s not capable of a long-term vision. It has to keep turning it out. That means the bigger the capital, or the bigger the capitalist nation, the more invasive and destructive of ecologies it’s going to be. We’re not talking about a linear incremental—we’re talking about an exponential—in other words, the proportion and the size of the capital becomes the determination of the rate of expansion. That accounts for the fact that when you go to Europe, for instance, they’re much more sensible. They consume much less energy per citizen and they’re willing to think of things like the Kyoto Treaty to limit greenhouse gas accumulation, whereas the United States says “you can’t make us do that!” That’s not because the United States is, like, a bad country—it’s just the United States is the biggest capitalist country and they’re behaving according to the laws of the capitalist enterprise—the bigger they are, the more they have to keep expanding, the less capable they are of pulling back. They just have too much invested, so to speak.

C: The way you describe it is very interesting in that there aren’t villains, per se.

JK: There really are, but it’s the system.

C: It’s the system, and it’s lawful. It’s basically following its own rules and it has characters that fill certain positions.

JK: One term I would use is personification—personifications of capital. The Chief Executive Officer, who’s this ruthless, driven son-of-a-bitch, is simply somebody who is selected for those purposes/qualities, and who develops them further on the job because that’s needed, and if he has a change of heart—

C: Get rid of him.

JK: Yeah, there’s a hundred waiting outside his door to take his place. And that’s very important. It’s not like you can appeal to the psychological depths or tenderness of the capitalist. Yeah, some of them will change, or their sons and daughters may be different, but there’s still always somebody out there who’s going to step into another personification.

C: Capitalist materialism really has the qualities of a religion. It’s so dogmatic and so mechanical—people are “believers”.

JK: Especially since it’s so destructive, you have to hide that or mystify it or turn it into its opposite. There’s this vast army of ideologues and people who are beating their drums. Most of them fill universities—that’s what universities are.

C: Indoctrination centers…

JK: The fact of the matter is, we’re in a period of grave crisis. Younger people particularly—I see it in my students—they become more and more questioning over the years because the system is so plainly uncontrollable. People are turning to question it.

C: The thing that seems clear is that we have to develop a willingness to go without the things that we have taken to be essential: everybody has their car, their cell phone, their computer. Everybody has everything. We have to start to value going without to serve a larger purpose. And yet to expect people to do that seems so far away, and what I suspect is people will have to be forced to suffer because they will be forced to go without.

JK: What you’re saying is extremely true—I think you hit the point. It’s not just a matter of lifestyle, it’s a matter of needs, the way you experience yourself in the world. The way in which people are socialized in our time is, like we said, to experience themselves as constantly needing more and more.
What does it take to make those changes? I know what you mean about the suffering part, but if you take the world we live in and people are suddenly removed from their props and things that have kept them going, it would collapse and I think there would just be chaos and worse disorder than we have, and fascism, probably, arising in order to control things, and that’s what I’m afraid might happen.

C: It sort of seems like that’s what’s being set up.

JK: That’s the bad side. And you can even say, “Is this the scenario according to which the human species is going to become extinct?”

For more information, visit www.joelkovel.org