According to EELV[1], ecology is good for everything! Including waging
war. Not a class war, of course! No, a real war like the one in 1939-40,which the Green Party doesn't spit on. But the one they really prefer is
the future ecology of war. It's so good for the planet! Basically,
ecology of war means: by insulating your attic and riding a bike, you
contribute to the war effort by weakening our enemies, who have us by
the balls because of our excessive need for gas and electricity, which
they supply us and which fatten them.
Before addressing the question of ecology of war, we must focus on the
concept of war economy, on which it is explicitly based and whose
definition is deliberately left vague.
Maintained Obscurity
After the 2020 speech in which President Macron's "We are at war"
justified strict travel restrictions due to the enemy called the
coronavirus, it was another enemy, this time Russian, who was targeted
on June 13, 2022, with the declaration that France, like the European
Union, had entered "a war economy in which (...) we will have to
organize ourselves for the long term." Confirmation in March 2025:
"Russia has become, as I speak and for years to come, a threat to France
and to Europe."»
Each of these statements capitalizes on the continued vagueness of the
definition of the concept of a war economy, used primarily to cultivate
fears of the threat of an external enemy (virus, Russian or otherwise),
in order to mask the fact that the true war economy is illustrated by
the measures taken by employers against an internal enemy: the vast
majority of ordinary people, bled dry by austerity measures and the
constant erosion of social gains and repression against those who protest.
The concept emerged in the years preceding the First World War. It is
defined by the requisition of all industrial tools, labor, and even
capital if necessary. It is the absolute subordination of the productive
apparatus to the military effort. Production and consumption are
organized by the state, whose administration controls all sectors of the
economy. This was the case, for example, in France during the First
World War, in Germany from 1935 onwards, and in the United States during
World War II: they devoted a combined 40% of their GDP to the war
effort, and much more even at the federal level.
It should be noted that at the time, the proponents of this new concept
also saw the advantage of emerging from "capitalist anarchy" by bringing
some order to unbridled liberalism. In short, a takeover by the state
for the greater good of capitalist development, for whom ultraliberalism
has never been anything more than an ideological lure to showcase
freedom in the eyes of the naive.
Yet, currently in the conflicts that concern us, according to these
criteria, only Ukraine, which devoted 37% of its GDP in 2023 to defense,
is truly in a war economy. Its enemy, Russia, devotes only 6%! What is
currently being discussed in France has nothing to do with the classic
definition of a war economy. It involves increasing a budget of EUR50
billion to over EUR90 billion in the coming years, i.e., increasing
spending to 3% of GDP, from the current 2%, to rearm France in the
context of "new conflicts" by producing more and faster.
For the record, throughout the Cold War, from 1947 to 1991, France
devoted 7% to 3% (a gradual decline) of its GDP to defense. And at that
time, we weren't talking about a war economy. Overall, in France, as in
the rest of the world, military spending is steadily declining. It's not
that wars are disappearing, but the means of controlling and
annihilating "enemy" populations have expanded considerably and do not
fall under the heading of "military spending." Having become
"civilized," wars rely on new technologies, but that's another question
(see CA 349 - April 2025).
Green politicians:
an old warrior tradition
It is in this context of a return to war rhetoric that the so-called
political greens (EELV) have rushed to don the militarist garb by
endorsing the "necessity of a war effort" championed by all political
parties.
Sandrine Rousseau, an icon of ecofeminism, stated two years ago that
"the strike force is today a pillar of our national defense" that she
"wants to develop (...) towards a Franco-German agreement and a truly
European army." Cyrielle Chatelain, president of the Green Party group
in the National Assembly and member of the National Defense and Armed
Forces Committee, declared during a debate on March 3, 2025, in the
National Assembly: "The European Union must assert itself as a political
force, which today, in this context, implies asserting itself as a
military force."
A few days later, Marine Tondelier, national secretary of EELV, drove
the point home by outlining what she saw as a wartime ecology:
"Environmental spending contributes to our independence from the fossil
fuel imperialisms of Russia and the United States." The debate she
proposes on this issue is not at all about the relevance and substance
of this militaristic orientation, but rather about the sole question of
how to finance this war effort to revive the military-industrial complex
and ensure "interoperability between European armies."
This is in line with the ideas that the ideologue-philosopher Pierre
Charbonnier has been defending for several years, and on which the
Greens now rely to justify their new positions without appearing to turn
their backs on their ecological roots.
This analysis is based on an assertion by the philosopher (in Towards
the Ecology of War, 2024): fossil fuels-gas, coal, and oil-have become
weapons as dangerous as nuclear warheads during the Cold War, during
which, on the contrary, they were tools of peace. A Western petty
bourgeois vision.
Indeed, in contrast to the horrors committed on European soil in the
first half of the 20th century, the relative absence of war for seventy
years has allowed an image of peace to be attached to this long period,
which our philosopher attributes to the development of fossil fuels,
which forced the great powers to maintain a balance among themselves.
But this is an angelic view of what he calls the "carbon peace" of the
post-war period. A self-centered view of the Western world, Western
Europe, and the United States, which ignores the fact that this peace
was based solely on wars and massacres everywhere else: colonialism,
post-fascist regimes in Latin America, dictatorships everywhere, etc.
That the Greens adhere to this vision of history is obviously not
surprising. The horizon proposed by Charbonnier is entirely in line with
the social and cultural identity of the official ecologists when he
states: "It is difficult to imagine how the reorganization of the
energy, production, and market system could be initiated without the
active support[of the great powers], without power, precisely, or the
desire to provide minimal security for the population, being put at the
service of such a process." Championing an ecology that has lost all
ambition to profoundly change the world, they are perfectly in tune with
the postmodern zeitgeist, which seeks to consign any global project that
might hold utopia to oblivion. Alongside war ecology, health ecology is
flourishing, with its attendant themes of organic farming, eating well,
and speaking well, which, instead of being merely elements that allow us
to designate the abolition of social classes as a goal (not the ultimate
one!), are themselves becoming an insurmountable horizon.
The figure of the traitor
serves to mask the responsibility of a system
Yet it would be a case of being silly to believe that this is a barely
believable about-face by our Greens. Indeed, current militarism has a
long history. The Greens have always aligned themselves with a
comfortable Atlanticism by refusing to join the currents favoring
leaving NATO, in order to further their strategy of integration into the
political system. We should note their support for the bombing of Kosovo
in 1999, Sarkozy's war in Libya, and the interventions in Iraq in the
2010s. They also support Israel's right to defend itself after the Hamas
attacks of October 7, 2023. In short, they effectively validate the idea
that we are Westerners and proud of it.
This worldview has been championed since the movement's inception by
their big brother, the German Greens, following the victory of the
"Realo" party over the "Fundi"[2]. Joschka Fischer, a historic figure
and founder of the German Greens along with Cohn-Bendit, who calls for a
European atomic bomb by 2025, is the same man who, in 1999, supported
the NATO bombing of Serbia when he was Foreign Minister! It was he who
inaugurated the transmutation of militarism into virtuous action, like,
twenty years later, the proponents of war ecology. Western operations in
Afghanistan or in the Balkans were transformed into "military-humanist"
interventions! "Arms, arms, and more arms," Anton Hofreiter, former
chairman of the Green Party in the Bundestag, later squealed, demanding
the delivery of long-range missiles to Ukraine, a move the SPD had refused.
Let's be clear: traitors only exist in spy novels, not in a materialist
analysis of historical flows. They only exist in Stalinist or religious
dialectics (under the name of renegades), which would have us believe
that evil individuals (e.g., currently a Trump, a Putin, or a Macron)
are leading the world to where it is. All it would take is eliminating
them, with a blunderbuss or elections, for everything to be better in
the best of all capitalist worlds.
The Greens are yellow,
we don't understand anything anymore! Returning to France, it is above
all on the issue of nuclear power - which, let us remember, is the DNA
of the French state's militaristic and pro-growth policies - that we
find the roots of what sometimes appears to be a U-turn by the Greens.
It has been a long time since Brice Lalonde and then De Rugy, key
figures in political ecology, proclaimed themselves pro-nuclear; Voynet
accepted the burial of waste in exchange for the shutdown of
Superphénix, falsely attributed to the Green leader's fight, but in
reality planned by the government for a long time because Superphénix
was unreliable and too expensive. More recently, Yannick Jadot defended
the maintenance of the existing nuclear fleet during his 2022
presidential campaign, "until the network is balanced" to exit nuclear
power. That is to say, never, since renewable energies are only intended
to produce a portion of the expected increase in "our" electricity needs.
In short, the French Greens in government have been ahead of their time,
now that nuclear power is considered by a political class united on this
issue as the essential pillar of any decarbonization policy, in that it
emits less CO2. The scam is a big one, but it works. Riding the wave of
the post-1968 rejection of nuclear power, then endorsing it by
participating in the destruction of the anti-nuclear movement, is just
about the only track record they can claim. Fortunately, in recent
years, an ecology linked to territorial control has emerged, opening up
spaces into which we can plunge, with the aim of rebuilding the natural
links between ecology and social struggles that Green politicians are
constantly destroying.
But it must be said that the grassroots anti-nuclear movement itself has
contributed to its own disappearance from the French political landscape
by focusing on fears of the health hazard posed by nuclear fission and
neglecting the "democratic danger" posed by nuclear power. Fear as a
mobilizing factor has shifted its focus: from fear of radiation, waste,
and accidents, we have moved on to fear of climate change and CO2. And,
in both cases, we have set aside the danger to social relations that
nuclear power and CO2 production entail.
It is high time for social and environmental struggles to come together.
The September 10th movement, if it has any consequences, should
encourage us to contribute to this.
JPD
Notes
[1]become THE environmentalists!
[2]The "realists" (realists) defended the idea that it was now necessary
to participate in state bodies and elections. The "fundi"
(fundamentalists) intended to maintain the revolutionary and
anti-electoral foundations of the movement.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4540
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten