The ecologists play the same role, on the terrain of the struggle against harmful phenomena, that the trade unionists play on the terrain of workers struggles: mere intermediaries interested in the preservation of the contradictions whose regulation they assure; smooth-tongued negotiators adept at haggling (in this case the for the revision of the rules and rates of environmental damage replace the percentages of wage increases); mere defenders of the quantitative at the very moment when the economic calculus is extended to new domains (air, water, human embryos, synthetic sociability); they are, ultimately, the new commissars of submission to the economy, whose price must now include the cost of “a quality environment”. One can already discern the outlines of a redistribution of territory between sacrificed zones and protected zones, jointly administered by “green” experts, a spatial division that will regulate the hierarchical access to the commodity called nature. Radioactivity, however, will be for everyone.
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The movement against harmful phenomena will triumph as a movement of anti-economic and anti-statist emancipation or it will not triumph at all.
With this post, an address to those who would prefer to create worlds which they could continue to create and recreate, rather than those who would but manage the catastrophe of generalised alienation, we close our celebration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the magazine Encyclopédie des Nuisances.
And without any idea of intellectual thraldom, it is our conviction that the Encyclopédie remains powerfully relevant.
To conclude then, a final post … on this occasion.
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Miguel Amorós: Anti-developmentalism: what it is and what it wants
A 2014 restatement of the meaning of “anti-developmentalism” by the Spanish activist and author, Miguel Amorós, which he defines as the new form of the “modern class struggle”.
Anti-developmentalism: What It Is and What It Wants
In one respect, anti-developmentalism emerged from the critical re-evaluation of the period that ended with the failure of the old autonomous workers movement and with the global restructuring of capitalism; it was thus born during the seventies and eighties of the last century. In another respect, it arose amidst the incipient attempts at ruralization that had taken place during that same period and in the popular mobilizations against the presence of factories emitting pollutants in the core urban areas and against urbanization projects and the construction of nuclear power plants, highways and dams. It is simultaneously a theoretical analysis of the new social conditions that takes the contributions of ecology into account, and a struggle against the consequences of capitalist development, although those two aspects do not always proceed in tandem. We may define it as a form of critical thinking and an antagonistic practice born from the conflicts provoked by development during the last stage of the capitalist regime, which corresponds to the merger of the economy and politics, Capital and the State, industry and life. Due to its novelty, and also as a result of the spread of submission and resignation among the de-classed masses, reflection and combativity do not always proceed hand in hand; one postulates goals that the other does not always want to fight for: anti-developmentalist thought envisions a global strategy of confrontation, while the struggle is often reduced to tactical considerations, which only benefit domination and its supporters. The forces mobilized are almost never conscious of their historical task, while the lucidity of critique is likewise not always capable of contributing to the development of consciousness in these campaigns.
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