PASSAGE TO INDIA

By Joel Kovel

Fireflies

Dawn comes slowly to the Fireflies Ashram, the birdsong mingling with the reedy call from the Mosque in the village. It is six o'clock, time to stir and listen. There is more devotional singing; and on days when Sam stops here in the course of his duties as a driver, we hear the sound of his flute. Then, if inclined, one can tramp down the hill to where the water is being heated in a big iron vat over a wood fire, and haul some back in a plastic bucket for the morning's ablutions.

It is January, 2002, we are near Bangalore, in Karnataka State, in Southern Indian, far from the Pakistan border and Kashmir. The rattling of sabres in the latest war scare does not penetrate this far. Fireflies also seems a lot further, in its deep calm, than the thirty dusty kilometers separating it from Bangalore, which is India's fifth-largest city, and, as its high-tech center and flagship of a booming software industry, the nation's largest earner of foreign exchange in the regime known as globalization. 1

Bangalore may be the cockpit of Indian modernity, but nobody will mistake it for Los Angeles. It is, rather, a typical city of the South, and suffers a similar transportation purgatory as a thousand others, of crumbling roads and a great welter of smaller conveyances charging across the virtual center line into each other's path and chaotically inching their way along the edge of doom. There are few cars, but no end of medium-sized trucks brightly painted with Hindu motifs, along with the open-air Indian bus, legions of the cute but perilous three-wheeled Auto- Rickshaws that remind me of the amusement park bumper-cars of boyhood visits to Coney Island, a vast number of motor scooters, bicycles, men pushing carts laden with coconuts and other produce, strollers, and, yes, the proverbial sacred Indian cow or ox-some pulling carts, others on their own lolling on the narrow centerstrips--plus donkeys and the generic dogs of the South, and even, if one is lucky, as we were one day in Tivandrum, the capital of Kerala state, an elephant. Colorful it is, but since the first five categories of vehicle spew forth vile fumes, and all bray their horns and constantly start, stop and lurch, pleasant it is not; and it must be said that there is scarce a greater contrast in the world than that between the immemorial placidity of the Indian countryside and the noisome swarm of its towns.

Contrast and continuity are essential categories of human existence, which in India force themselves upon consciousness to an especially profound degree. No doubt this is because there is so much there that strikes the senses and challenges the mind. I was only in India for three weeks, which confers the credentials of a flea crawling on an elephant's back to judge of its host. But how much more would a stay of three months bring, measured against Indian immensity? To say, I visited India, is like claiming one visits Europe, nay, more, for India has as great a linguistic variety as Europe, with fifteen major languages that divide its various states, along with more than twice as many people as Europe. But it has another distinction which offsets this vastness and heterogeneity, a certain unity-in-difference denied to the West, and stirring to behold.

With its relatively unbroken land mass, India is more of a piece than Europe, with its peninsulas and internally dividing mountains. This helps explain why, despite having had countless political jurisdictions congeal upon its surface for the past four thousand years, there has been little in the way of fixed boundary within the country. More then fifty years after independence, the lines between Indian states are still being redrawn. Associated with the lack of sharp physical boundaries is an overarching continuity within its culture, which extends deeply into time and across linguistic differences. As A.L. Basham wrote in his magisterial study, "the ancient civilization of India differs from those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece in that its traditions have been preserved without a break down to the present day."2

Thus the past lives within India, preserved, but scarcely unchanged. Change has come, however, through inclusion, incorporation and accretion rather than by a beginning anew- -as with the West's Christian mythos of the Fall and Redemption, which we carry over into modernity's mystique of self-transformation. The Hinduism that defines Indian culture registers this not just in the proliferation of gods-concerning which the term, polytheism, offers only a dim suggestion-but also in the range of behaviors included in its prescriptions, from asceticism to unbridled eroticism, with all dimensions of the practical conduct of society in between. From another angle, Indian religion and culture are remarkable for a lack of persecutory and crusading spirit, and its world-view, for an absence of dualism. There was no Hindu Inquisition, nor is there a Hindu Church as such, with Hindu Mullahs, nor the possibility of a jihad; and this lack of centralization finds expression in a sense of continuity and recognition that frames the faith's deep mystical excursions. This does not prevent, needless to add, any number of barbarisms, including the recent lurch toward Hindu nationalism, with its atrocities and nascent fascism-of which more later-but it does suggest that India's current crisis ###########

On our first day at Fireflies, there were tree-planting ceremonies to honor the dead-a lovely idea, as explained by our host, Siddhartha, since the trees would take substance from the deceased and thereby acquire equivalent honor. If generalized, the practice could add millions of trees to India's stressed forest ecology. Two peasant families participated, each commemorating a recently deceased parent whose ashes had been unceremoniously lying in a field. The service was both humble and dignified, with lovely red and yellow Marigold displays and matching tumeric paste. The trees-sapling Pipals, the species under which the Buddha sat as he achieved Enlightenment-were set into place and watered. But the ritual was incomplete. Prayers and chants were needed, the skills for which were lacking among the peasants. A kind of priest was required; and we were fortunate to have just such a person at Fireflies on a permanent basis: Jean Letschert, from Poland by way of Belgium and into India as a scholar, artist, once-communist and spiritual seeker of the sixties. Thirty-five years on, after long sojourn in various Ashrams of Kerala and Karnataka, Jean has achieved the status of Swami Ascharyacharya-he who walks among the wonders. As such he obliged the people and offered a prayer in Sanskrit, the ancient language that was never theirs, for they are of outcaste status, hence of Dravidian origin, and speak Kannadu, the tongue of Karnataka state, largely unrelated to the Indo-European family of languages for which Sanskrit is a root. Yet as Jean's words rang out, the mourners became rapt, and the children's eyes gleamed at the connection.

The fact of outcaste status-comprising, in general, a mixture of Dalits (a successor name to the now-taboo term, Untouchable) and the so-called Adivasis, or tribal peoples-hovers spectrally over Indian history and culture. Dalits may be hypothesized (there being an impenetrable barrier to an accurate reconstruction of ancient India) as descendants of the conquered slaves and otherwise bonded labor of ancient Indian society3; while tribals represent those who remained outside the emerging state structures and lived in the forests. What deserves bearing in mind is that Dalits still comprise about 25% of India, and tribals another 7%, which means we are dealing with the astounding number of some 320,000,000 impoverished people who remain "cast out" of the circuits of wealth, modernity and progress, the largest discrete group of oppressed people on earth outside of the Chinese peasantry.

In the half century since India's liberation from British colonialism, a great deal of fuss has been made over improving the lot of outcastes, with many affirmative action laws and visible gestures such as having the President of the Republic be a Dalit. Yet according to Jean Letschert, the actual force of hierarchical stratification in India has worsened during the 35 years of his residence. As I was told on another occasion, the Dalit president, K.R. Narayanan, while greeting an illustrious assembly of musicians, was refused the courtesy of a handshake from them. I observed a similar phenomenon on a smaller scale during a birthday celebration at Fireflies for Siddhartha's son, Ananda, when the grandmother of one of his classmates, an extremely dignified lady with whom we had been having a spirited chat, visibly blanched upon seeing that, in the emancipatory and egalitarian spirit of the ashram, some of the peasant women/kitchen-workers had joined us for their afternoon meal. Her animated and handsome features froze, and with scarcely a word she interrupted her conversation, rose, and departed as soon as they sat down.

The term for caste and that for color are the same in Sanskrit: varna; and indeed the outcastes tend to be darker than the dominant-caste peoples, just as Dravidians from the South are substantially darker than the people of the North. However, there are many counter-examples, and the mediation of caste exclusion essentially takes a different path from that of the white racism of the Western nations. Both are carried out in the name of purification. However, what has been in the West a tormented flight from dominated and once possessed black bodies,4 emerged in India within the context of religious ritual. What tore apart American society because of its direct infusion of desire, guilt and rapaciousness retained in India a moment of social stabilization and cohesion. As Madeleine Biardeau has written of the Hindu epics, the Mahabaratha and Ramayana:

From another perspective, India's caste system is a marker of a very old, substantially feudal arrangement, with its mutual recognition and reciprocal obligation; while our racism is embedded within a modernizing capitalism, with its ethos of restless change, deterritorialisation and aggrandizing accumulation. In the Indian case, recognition and obligation became inscribed in the doctrine of karma and the transmigration of souls, extending logically to the souls of animals and all beings, and developed within a context of non-rationalising inclusion. Dualistic Western notions of exclusion and hierarchy, by contrast, have been tied to abstraction, the postulation of superior, split-off realities and personal entities, and the fragmentation-- along with the potent dynamism--of society grounded in the quests of individualized selves. With the Western penetration of India, these two patterns have become dialectically interwoven.

The schema needs to be appreciated in the context of India's present squalor, marked by illiteracy of roughly half the population, horrid poverty extending to pockets of starvation, communal violence, suicides of whole families,6 atavisms like human sacrifice (reports of which appeared in the press during my stay), dowry murders of brides (see below), and Suttee (where the widow is compelled to throw herself on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband). Nor can we overlook in this assessment the large scale changes that now afflict the subcontinent: nuclear-tipped militarism, rising jingoism, and a severely threatened ecology, which extends from nightmarishly filthy streets to soils and waterways ravaged by the "Green Revolution" and other wonders of modern technology.

Invasion

The lushness of India has long proven attractive to outsiders, whose comings and goings have become incorporated into its history. Some episodes, like that of the "Aryan conquests," lie shrouded in obscurity. Others, like the incursions of Alexander the Great, fizzled at the gates to the subcontinent. Numberless others moved inward by trade and/or conquest, only to become absorbed into Indian identity: of these, the chief example was the protracted and elaborate inclusion of a powerful Islamic minority. The Portugese and French had their shot at Europeanizing India, but it was the British who finally took charge and brought almost the entire landmass under their control. Barely 40 years after successfully expelling the European colonists, an even more formidable invasion began. This time the agent is capital; and India's future as well as our own depends on the outcome of the struggle. As Arundhati Roy has written:

Nehru and the Congress Party, tilting toward the Soviets and having to contend with appalling poverty and illiteracy as a legacy of colonialism, valiantly attempted a degree of autarky in the period immediately following independence. A series of five-year plans succeeded in implementing a modest degree of land reform and industrialisation, while foreign capital was permitted so long as it played by the rules of the Indian state.8 Moreover, though Nehru's socialist model prevailed, a portion of the Gandhian tradition was allowed to grow within the interstices of the industrial system, with some 400 products reserved for small-scale and decentralized cottage-industrial production. A certain motion toward women's rights was encouraged, and the harsh edges were taken off the caste system, without, however, altering its foundations.

This arrangement, in which a strong state regulated accumulation, survived in a global environment defined by superpower contestation and the relative lack of coordination between capitalist powers. However, signs of severe difficulty began to appear in the 1960s, with a fiscal crisis stemming from weak tax collections, failures in land reform, and an inability to realize enough wealth from agriculture for primary accumulation. In addition, too little was being earned from exports, while a chronic trade deficit set in to further aggravate matters. In 1966, this reached a flash point, with shortfalls in basic food production requiring the import of 11 million tons of grain.

These tribulations forced the Indian government to turn to the United States and various international agencies, and through them, to adopt the Green Revolution. This brought in its wake the twin spectres of ecological degradation and dependency on foreign sources of seed, fertilizers and pesticides.9 Initially, these somber implications lay down the road, as agricultural production surged to stunning proportions: a fourfold increase since independence, more than enough to feed the ominous and astounding tripling of population in the same interval; thus, more than one billion people are currently fed, with 50 million tons of grain left over for export.10

Throughout, the python embrace of capital tightened. We cannot here detail the incremental changes that softened the resistance of the Indian state and strengthened the hand of the transnational bourgeoisie: the persistent deficits and shortages; the IMF packages succeeding one another, leaving behind the residual bondage of "Structural Adjustment Programs"; the "export-oriented zones," without regulations on labor or the environment; all in contect of a global shift defined by a rapidly weakening socialist ideal as the Soviet model collapsed,11 along with the coordinated restructuring of global capital.

With India approaching default in the wake of the Gulf War, a denouement of sorts came in June of 1991 with the "reforms" instituted by then PM Narasimha Rao. These constituted a major breach in India's defenses against the Market, and comprise one of those moments that deserve to be called a transition of quantity into quality. They opened the door to privatisation, gave access to foreign stock markets, and greatly enhanced the opportunities for foreign capital to enter India. "Growth" shot up to an average rate of 6.5% over the next decade. The invasion was underway

Four kinds of effects may be singled from the welter of influences this has brought about.

Enhancement of export-oriented industries, especially software. This is the big success story for modernizing India and, unsurprisingly, draws the attention of the liberal media. Along with the $2.25 billion exports of the giant "Bollywood" film industry to Africa and Asia,12 the software industries of Bangalore and Hyderabad are supposed to lead the ancient nation into globalization's Promised Land. With 16% of world population, but only 2% of its economic output and 1% of its trade, there is plenty of room for expansion. Software produced by untold thousands of young techno-whizzes and exported to the First World has gone in the last three years from $2.7 to $4 to $6.2 billion. In the heated discourse of globalization, this is predicted to rise to the level of $50 bn by 2008, at which point it will account for 40% of India's trade with the first world-under the large assumptions that the world economy rebounds, and that the brain drain of India's technical elites does not upset the applecart.13

Direct undercutting of domestic production. Meanwhile, wholesale looting of public assets rages throughout India. The ancient port of Cochin, in Kerala, for example, is due to lose its thriving and profitable shipyards, which just happen to be on shorefront land coveted by transnational developers, who will most likely install a resort complex on the site. In the decade since the breakthrough, some 700,000 indigenous firms have gone under, viz., an entire flourishing soft-drink industry, replaced by Coke and Pepsi. Still more devastating has been the effect on agricultural commodities under the impact of "free trade," i.e., the removal of protective tariffs on some 1400 commodities. In the past several years, producers in Kerala have seen the prices of their coconuts tumble from 8 rupees/kg to 2; while that of coffee (which costs them 30 rupees/kg to produce) has gone from 130 to 24; and pepper from 240 to 130. A rubber plantation that could earn 8000 rupees/hectare three years ago now brings in 2400. It is most bizarre that in this tropical paradise with its numberless millions of coconut palms, the brutal laws of economics should decree the importation of said staple from places like Indonesia and China. But the fact is paradigmatic of the demoralisation of an entire economy. The remarkable state of Kerala with its vaunted reputation of having been the demonstration case for peacefully electing Communist governments over the years, now endures a crushing burden of debt, a wave of bankruptcies, the emptying out of governmental treasuries, the unemployment of 4.7m of the 37m population, widespread hunger (13 deaths of tribals by starvation having been reported in Wayanand district, Kerala, during the three weeks prior to my visit), and the grim reaping of suicides of whole families, about 100 of these in the past year in the state. Indeed, this proud people, with the highest literacy rate and the lowest infant mortality in India, now adds the distinction of having the nation's highest suicide rate as well, a phenomenon undoubtedly aggravated by the gap between their dignity as radicals and the reality of global capital's triumph over them.14

Corruption of the political process. The breakthrough into globalization signalled also a breakdown of the 50 year hegemony of Nehru's Congress Party, and the rise of the BJP, a coalition group fostering Hindu nationalism and a regressive fundamentalism in the context of globalization and privatization. We may link these phenomena as poles of a contradiction in which the loss of sovereignty to an alien power is compensated with an outburst of chauvinism and a rallying about the cause of traditional religion. In this respect the regime of globalization--which would be more accurately called the imperialism of capital in itself, detached from the boundedness of nation-states--also becomes an epoch of political reaction, marked by heightened nationalism, fundamentalism, and the violent assertion of identity in the face of its incipient dissolution. Just so does the party of Big Business in the United States assiduously promote the "family values" it is busily destroying. In India, this is called "communalism," which may fairly be seen as the perversion of the deeply rooted diversification inherent to Hindu culture; thus fluidity and inclusiveness turns to chaotic unreason and authoritarian reaction. In the process, a whole range of localisms and decentralizations are fostered just so long as they do not extend very far into the dimension of popular control. Indeed, decentralized enterprises are that much more easily picked off by larger capitals once democratic forms of resistance are vitiated. Meanwhile, inter-religious hostility is encouraged, in a classic diversionary pattern. Thus Hindu-Muslim violence, having diminished since the surge after partition in 1947, flared again in 1992, directly following the major invasion by capital, with the sacking of the great Mosque in Ayodyha by Hindu mobs holding the delusional scheme to build a Hindu temple to the God Ram on the site. The recent wave of killings came about as the time for the construction of this edifice approached, and was egged on by the national government and directly abetted by the state government of Gujarat, one of the last strongholds of a collapsing BJP. To a considerable degree, the recent surge in hostility along the border with Pakistan follows the same logic, combined with that of militarism and the projection of state power. As in the Cold War, two pathological state formations try to build legitimacy through demonization of the other.

The odd concatenation of globalisation and communalist particularism also augments the vast and parasitical bureaucracy inherited from the British Raj. This now becomes even more of a class in itself, which functions at one level as an impediment to liberalisation, at another, as a means of preserving local elites, and throughout, as a tenacious brake on getting anything done. For example, 40 separate inspections a year are imposed on small enterprises, along with 18 separate clearances for public projects.15 A common thread running through all of this is immense corruption, greatly aggravated by the inroads of transnational corporations.

The chief miscreant in this respect has been the rascally Enron corporation, with its infamous Dabhol power plant inflicted on the people of Maharashtra state. Beginning in 1992, with the ink scarcely dry on the liberalisation agreement, the Texas energy giant furiously set about (with the energetic support of the Clinton administration, which saw India as a huge market it could wrest from Japan) to vastly augment and dominate Indian electrical generation. A book-length treatment would be required to do justice to this, the greatest swindle in Indian, indeed, perhaps in world history, marked by prodigious cost-overruns, and bribes of both Congress--which overruled its own experts and even the World Bank's findings on the non-feasibility of the plant--and the BJP, which took over Maharashtra state in 1995 (and the national government the next year) to a great extent on the basis of protesting Dabhol, only to undergo a mysterious conversion as soon as it took office and had a chat with Enron. In the process the entire revenues of the Indian government were pledged to indemnify Enron for its $3bn investment and to guarantee it $30bn in profits over the life of the plant.

However, Dabhol, just South of Bombay, never went on line, chiefly because of the exorbitant cost of its energy supply.16 The giant plant presently sits as a cold monument to reckless globalization, but its maleficient shadow is a long one, in both the US and India. This includes serious human rights violations committed in the course of defending the plant from protestors, and which have had the effect of further delegitimising an Indian state already perceived as submitting to imperialism.17

Cultural destabilization.

Globalization reinforces the emancipatory moment of modernity for those Indians, especially women, who are able to benefit from membership in the 250 million-strong elite granted unprecedented access to the goods of the world. For the 750 million remaining, however, the effects have largely been the opposite. Class differences will widen under the influence of capital, but the hegemonic ideology descends on all, and places the powerless in the grip of a mania for money that can never be had in sufficiency. This chiefly affects those in the middle strata. In contrast to the great mass of the poor who are cast out of capital's social compact and have no hope of attaining the magic stuff in the first place, those within its range are in a state of chronic want, humiliation, envy, and rage.

The curse of indebtedness, the effects of which embrace many suicides of farmers and small tradespeople, is one kind of outcome. Another, more spectacularly destructive, has been the recent plague of dowry-murders. As I was informed on a number of occasions, the surge in these killings (which at times takes the form of hounding the young wife into suicide) is largely a contemporary phenomenon. It is compounded from, first, an enhanced pressure toward arranged marriage as a hedge against the alienation of capitalist anomie; secondly, from the destabilizing desires foisted by Western mass culture; and finally, from the bitter avarice that is one of the invader's chief legacies. As a result, an increasing number of brides are seen chiefly as a dehumanized bearer of wealth from their family to that of the groom. If for any reason that wealth is seen as inadequate to the latter's needs, there will be a pressure to get rid of her, the way one liquidates a bad investment on the stock market. As shocking as the murders themselves has been the virtual inability of the authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice. 18

India Fights Back These grim developments bring to mind Karl Polanyi's astute insight that to "allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society"19 Certainly any serious look at India, whether it be at the choked and fouled streets, the signs of hunger and mutilation, the rivers bubbling with an unholy yellow-green froth, the lurch toward nuclear militarism, or the charred bodies of the victims of Suttee or religious massacre-would raise this possibliity quite seriously. And yet the visceral impression made upon at least one visitor is not such at all, but rather, the sense of a liveliness that, without transcending the tendency toward annihilation, grows up between its tentacles, like flowers springing forth in a rubble-strewn lot that turn the rubble into background.

The spirit of capitalism sits uneasily on the back of the Indian soul, and is forever sliding off. Perhaps this stems from the healthy distrust engendered by centuries of exposure to the British East India Company and its successors. However, this would not have taken such a shape unless there had been a receptivity at the core of India's historical identity. At the risk of making a facile generalization, let me say that it may have something to do with the Indian/Hindu way of inclusion, which incorporates things without placing them into an abstract and systematising hierarchy. Thus the concrete and the sensuous is always getting in the way of developing the thoroughgoing sense of exchangeability necessary for the proper function of the reigning mode of production.

For whatever reason, there remains a deep unease about capital in India. Children, I have read, are traditionally warned that if they don't study hard, they will grow up to become businessmen. And for those who do grow up to be so, it seems as though things are always getting in the way of the efficient carrying forth of their role. Consider a flyer handed to me in the streets of Bangalore, the English side of which reads in part as follows:

This is not scrupulousness so much as the unwillingness to set things aside, combined, no doubt, with humiliation at having been forced into the abovementioned predicament. Try to imagine a comparable merchant in New York going into so detailed an explanation, or being so ill-at-ease with the context and background of a business dilemma--or is it so curious and fascinated by it?--that he must share the information with prospective clients instead of beating them over the head with the coarse facts of how much money they are going to be saving.

If this lack of synchrony with capital were limited to the lower levels of the bourgeoisie, then one would simply expect their orderly replacement by more finely tooled instruments of accumulation. However, the same disposition can also be put in the service of resistance to capital and globalization, where it can be empowering instead of dysfunctional. This can be seen in the spectacular development of oppositional movements in India.

The struggle between forces of life and death, of wholeness and disintegration, is everywhere present, but in different proportions and contours that lend to each historical moment a distinct political profile. One sees a considerable amount of what is worst in human existence in the Indian subcontinent. This has led many to despair about it and, considering the vast size of Indian society and its strategic importance, about the fate of humanity itself. But one also sees a great deal of what is most hopeful and life- giving in India, which lends an aura of high drama to its affairs.

The ordinary Indian knows very well that s/he is being invaded. "What do you think of globalization?," we asked one man. "It is killing us," came the swift reply. When a doctor in a Kerala clinic learned that I, an American, was against globalization, his face lit up and he called over his associates to spread the news of this remarkable fact. There is relatively little in the way of "civil society" in the Western sense in India, but a great web of personal ties, along which such an attitude propagates. Here the deep organicity of Indian culture, and its unwillingness to be fit into any mold, becomes an organizing influence for spontaneity and resistance.

The ordinary Indian knows very well that s/he is being invaded. "What do you think of globalization?," we asked one man. "It is killing us," came the swift reply. When a doctor in a Kerala clinic learned that I, an American, was against globalization, his face lit up and he called over his associates to spread the news of this remarkable fact. There is relatively little in the way of "civil society" in the Western sense in India, but a great web of personal ties, along which such an attitude propagates. Here the deep organicity of Indian culture, and its unwillingness to be fit into any mold, becomes an organizing influence for spontaneity and resistance.

Thus it is that even as India falls apart it is being put back together. Space does not permit a listing of the networks of activism, nor am I prepared to take up detailed points of distinction between Indian and Western models. Much of the former is non-violent and neo-Gandhian-which is to say, it uses direct action expressive of core Hindu values in the context of the invasion by capital, as against the preceding one, by Britain. But there are also armed bands of Naxalite Marxist-Leninists who roam the state of Madya Pradesh in the center of the country and attack landlords on behalf of desperate peasants; and there remains a strong alternative legal Marxist presence in West Bengal and Kerala, and a significant one elsewhere.

A great deal of contemporary Indian resistance is ecologically directed. There are activists who impede biotechnology through direct actions in the fields, and others who build organic peasant agriculture; and activists who defend women's rights; and activists who organize fisherpeople, an especially successful group being in Kerala under the direction of an ex-Catholic priest named Thomas Kocherry21; and others who work on behalf of forest people. It was the relentless militancy of hundreds of groups that forced Enron to corrupt the police around Dabhol; and the relentless militancy of other hundreds of group that stand doggedly in the way year after year stopping the ecologically devastating Narmada Dam project. Everywhere, women play a leading role, from high-profile activists like Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva and Medha Patkar, to the anonymous ones who hold up the movement and bear much of the burden of its repression.22 It is important to recognize that the movement towards ecological integrity and that of women's liberation are two aspects of the same life-giving force;23 and, moreover, that India, bastion of brutal male supremacy as it undoubtedly is, is also a culture whose ancient tradition and mythology is rich in examples of female power.

The ancient ways of India live on in the greater depth of resistance evinced by its radical movements. As bizarre as Indian spirituality can at times be, it also provides an anchor that keeps the mind from drifting off into the swamps of capitalist rationalization, along with an active imagination and a disregard for this-worldly hardships and dangers. Thus the climate breeds radicalism. As Jaggi Singh writes, citing Sanjay Gopal, the co-ordinator of India's National Alliance of People's Movements, which represents some 125 grassroots groups, the "analysis emanating from diverse sources in the Third World . . . revolves around the 'Three Aunties.'" These are not "a kindly trio of female relatives who pamper their nephews and nieces,24 but an analysis of the WTO and related institutions that is 'anti- imperialist,' anti-colonial' and 'anti-capitalist,' phrases which are seemingly alien to most mainstream antiglobalization movements in the North." As put by Medha Patkar, the Narmada Valley activist leader, "The ultimate goal is [not just] to say no to the WTO. We're against the whole capitalist system. "25

To the Indian activist, then, there can be an alternative to capital; and since her/his civilization is grounded in inclusivity and differentiation, the alternative needn't be relegated to an transcendant beyond but can exist in this world as a set of intermediate forms directed toward social transformation. This constitutes a radical difference from the position of anti-globalization activists in the Northern countries, less because the latter are affluent than because they tend to have internalized the ways of thought integral to the dominant order. Thus they cannot envision one beyond it and often rest content with tepid reformism when the situation cries out for radical change.

We may conclude that the time has arrived for the North to allow the South to take the lead in changing the world. The framework for this should not be left unstated: that the hope for overcoming global capital lies in building global resistance. And this should be seen as the germ of a new planetary society in which the terms "North" and "South" no longer refer to parties in a dialectic of domination but return to being points on the compass, orienting the free peoples of the earth.

1 This study arose from a trip studying grassroots Indian resistance to globalization, jointly sponsored by Pipal Tree, the NGO that administers Fireflies, and The Other Economic Summit. I am indebted to Siddhartha, Director of Pipal Tree, and Trent Schroyer, of T.O.E.S., for making it possible.

2 A.L. Basham, The Wonder that was India (NY:Grove Evergreen, 1954), 4.

3 The origins of Indian society remain quite obscure and controversial, with two main schools of opinion. One maintains, on the basis largely of linguistic evidence, that an "Aryan"invasion from the Northwest some 3500 years ago set into motion the main axes of stratification; while the other argues that as there is no real evidence for an invasion, the caste system evolved from within Indian society. I am not competent to judge on the merits of these theses, though it is worth pointing out that an incipient Dalit liberation movement argues for the former interpretation, while the dominant Brahmanic scholarship holds to the latter view.

4 See my White Racism, 2d ed. NY: Columbia University Press, 1984)

5 Madeleine Biardeau, Hinduism: The Anthropology of a Civilization, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994, 12.

6 From the Deccan Herald of Jan. 22, 2002, dateline Bangalore: "A young couple and their one-and-a-half-year-old son who consumed poisoned food three days ago were found dead in their residence in Sarakki Garden, J.P. Nagar 6th phase in the City this morning. The bodies were recovered by the police when neighbours complained of foul smell emanating from their locked house. Police broke open the door and recovered the bodies of Ravi (28), Kumari (21) and Mahesh (one-and-a-half years). According to J.P. Nagar police, the deceased belong to Lambani settlement in Kanakapura. Police said the couple could first have fed the baby with poisoned food before consuming the food themselves. Poverty drove the couple to take this extreme step, they said. The bodies have been kept at Kempe Gowda Hospital. The family lived in a rented house belonging to one Sanjeevappa, the police added."

7 Internet

8 I am indebted to Duarte Barreto, personal communication, for much of the material in this section. Other facts from personal communications with Indian activists and scholars. I am particularly grateful to my colleague at Bard College, Sanjib Baruah, for sharing his knowledge of Indian society.

9 In addition, direct foreign investment enabled some of these inputs to be produced domestically. There were some gruesome consequences, most infamously, the World Bank- sponsored building of Union Carbide's pesticide factory at Bhopal, scene in 1984 of history's worst industrial accident. For a summary, see my The Enemy of Nature (London:Zed, 2002).

10 Even as hunger and pockets of starvation persist in the poorer areas such as Bihar State, as well as amongst the forest-living tribals. For the dynamics of this, see Francis Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, World Hunger: Twelve Myths 2d ed. (NY: Grove Press, 1998).

11 The delegitimation of the Nehru model was further accelerated by the authoritarian turn taken by Indira Gandhi from 1975-77.

12 Now the world's largest, turning out some 800 splashy films a year to Hollywood's 600.

13 Kaushik Basu, "India and the Global Economy," Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), 6 October, 2001, 3837-42. In the late 1980s, Bangladesh had more Foreign Direct Investment than India. The government is desperately trying to hold onto its technological elites, in some cases providing them with westernized enclaves in which to live.

14 See Richard Francke and Barbara Chasin, "Power to the Malayalee People," Z, February 1998, 16-20, for a sympathetic account of Keralan direct democracy with forebodings on the reversals now taking place. See also, Govindan Paryil, ed., Kerala: The Development Experience (London: Zed, 1998).

15 There are 24 million pending lawsuits in India, and it takes on the average 20 years for each case to be resolved. Even if there were no new cases, it would take 324 years to clear the backlog of the existing ones. Meanwhile the public sector is swollen with vast numbers of unproductive workers whose days are spent in picking things up and putting them down, or performing redundant inspections, as any trip to the airport will confirm.

16 Costs ran twice as high as the nearest competitor and seven times the cheapest electricity sold in Maharashtra. The plant runs on liquefied natural gas, which had to be shipped from Qatar. A story with enormous geostrategic implications that draw in the US's "war on terror" concerns the prospect of getting LNG more cheaply from Caspian Sea fields, using the proposed pipeline to run through Afghanistan and on into Pakistan and India.

17 Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued extensive reports on these scandalous developments (viz. their websites), which consisted of numerous abuses by local police who, it turned out, were not only in league with Enron, but actually paid by it. See below for more about the protests. As Human Rights Watch cogently argued, this cuts to the heart of a commonly held rationale for globalization, that it fosters democratisation. After observing that "India is the world's largest democracy, with a vigorous civil society, a general culture of human rights, legal protections, an active judiciary, and an acceptance of free expression and peaceful assembly," the report asks rhetorically, "If increased investment necessarily leads to improvements in human rights and respect for the rule of law, then how can the human rights violations as a result of the Dabhol Power project be explained?"

18 In Pakistan and elsewhere in regional Muslim communities, a similar situation obtains in terms of the "honor" of the groom's family, and the woman's perceived sexual independence. Once again, the murders are carried out with impunity.

19 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957) 73.

20 The word, lakh, refers to the number, 100,000.

21 Among other spiritual badges of honor, India can lay claim to hosting one of the world's oldest continuously functioning Christian sects, the "Syrian Catholic Church," founded in South India by the "doubting apostle," Thomas, some sixty years into the Common Era. Our host, Siddhartha, is a product of this tradition.

22 From the Amnesty International report on Enron and Dabhol: "Women, who have been at the forefront of local agitation, appear to have been a particular target. A People's Union for Civil Liberties fact-finding team that investigated the arrest of 26 women and 13 men on 3 June, 1997, concluded: 'The police targeted mainly women, some of whom were minors, and the arrests were made violently, in violation of the legal, constitutional and humanitarian principles.'"

23 Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective (London: Zed, 1999); Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature op.cit.

24 Such a mode of address is common in India outside the family.

25 Jaggi Singh, "Resisting global capitalism in India," in Eddie Yuen, George Katsiaficas and Daniel Burton Rose, eds., The Battle for Seattle (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001), 47-50.

1. BEYOND THE DEADLY DANCE

How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there's such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am-- like most Americans, I just can't believe it because I know how good we are.

George W.Bush, October 11, 2001

Press Conference

As America deals with the crisis posed by fundamentalism, it is well to recall that we, too, were founded as a fundamentalist society. Religious war raged in colonial New England, where Quakers were hung in the seventeenth century and witch trials continued well after they died down in Europe. This was associated with the idea that the new society was on a special mission from God, to redeem the world and bring light to the heathen. We were to be ³as a city upon the hill,² in the famous phrase of John Winthrop. Thus America was to be a carrying forward of the Covenant between Israel and the Lord whereby the Jews became anointed as the Chosen People.

Centuries of enlightenment and capitalist materialism have pretty well eroded the divine wrappings of this belief, leaving behind the core conviction, expressed by Bush and widely resonant in our national culture, that we are an inherently good nation. This is a curious notion altogether. From a purely logical standpoint, the idea that any particular people would be special, or good, or chosen by a higher power, is a pathetically childish illusion, with no greater claim on the truth than a four year-old¹s belief that his mommy prefers him over all others. Yet one can make this interpretation until the end of time, and nothing will change. This is because the idea has too much practical importance. From the standpoint of the oppressed or outcast, the idea of a special destiny helps to forge a vigorous identity and gives meaning and purpose to an otherwise harsh life. For powerful and dominant nations, the notion serves as a justification and a shield. It enables a people not only to avoid taking responsibility for what they are doing, but to experience their violence as a benediction. In all cases, the notion of specialness reduces others to moral ciphers, blinding the perpetrator and costing us that mutual reciprocity and recognition which is the only real ground of virtue.

Terror, by whichever side, is the logical outcome of this estrangement. It is the logic of revenge when all dialogue and recognition have been erased. For the oppressed, terror is the restitution of identity through violence against the oppressor; while for the latter, it becomes a ³collateral damage.² In this respect the suicide bomber striking on behalf of a ravaged people has a certain moral advantage over the powerful nation who impersonally bombs a helpless population. The former may falsely deny that he is doing evil, but at least he knows he is being violent, and that he is willing to take violence to the limit of giving his own life. This terrorism from below is undoubtedly evil, because it strikes at innocents to get back at an oppressor; but its evil is refracted through the objective reality of that oppressor. The terror from above, on the other hand, is nakedly of the oppressor himself, hurled down from the great heights of the Command and Control Center while its perpetrator looks forward to an evening at the mall, or thinks, if he is the President and has to give a press conference, of how good we are.

Fundamentalists and the imperial superpower are locked into a deadly dance, the righteousness of each cueing from the perceived evil of the other‹a dance, moreover, that can neither be undertaken alone nor in an ensemble but is strictly a pas de deux. This is choreographed in relation to the idea of modernity. Fundamentalism, we know, is driven by hatred of modernity, with its movement toward gender equality and orientation towards progress. In the metropolitan society, by contrast, modernity and progress are core values. When one frames this contrast in terms, say, of the respect accorded to women, or of the ideals of democratic governance, then the ways of the metropolis appear to have a distinct advantage over those of fundamentalism. But there is more to modernity than that. The total package is defined by increasing technological mastery over nature. The helicopter gunships, therefore, are part of modernity, as are the ³Daisy-cutter² bombs now employed by Uncle Sam in Afghanistan, bombs more powerful than the least of nuclear weapons, each capable of levelling a square kilometer of the earth, with all the creatures upon it.

And then there is the question of what lies beneath the earth. As organized by the capitalist-industrial economy, progress and modernity require the limitless exploitation of energy resources: in a word, oil; and in another word, imperialist control over the oil-soaked parts of the earth, the chief parts of which happen to be inhabited by Islamic peoples. Thus the fundamentalists do not hate us because of our free life-style. They hate us because of the ruin brought upon their societies in order to fuel that life-style.

Nor does the ruin end with the direct effects of imperialism on the peoples of one region. The whole of terrestrial nature is afflicted with the by-products of capitalist expansion. The same process that brings corrupt dictatorships and violence from the skies also gives us global warming, indeed, the entire ecological crisis, that destabilization of the natural ground of society which puts the very idea of a future at risk.

The planes that slammed into the World Trade Center brought down more than great buildings and thousands of lives. They brought us up against the unfaced contradictions of our civilization. It is time‹it is past time‹to take responsibility for our history.

2. The Yo-yo theory of just war

What better time to revisit the question of a Just War than when the war is virtually won? While there is no particular end in sight to the Afghanistan war as this is being written, no one doubts that victory is in America¹s hands. Our forces roam freely, the Taliban have been shovelled into the dustbin of history, Al Qaeda is reeling, and chief war-meister Donald Rumsfeld resembles Teddy Roosevelt more every day. God must have listened to all that singing, and decided to bless America. A great majority of the citizenry concludes that the war has been eminently worthwhile; and this opinion has been taken to the next level by the eminent scholar of international jurisprudence, Richard Falk, who has argued in liberal journals that it is a just war as well.

Falk¹s great authority is evinced by his having published no fewer than three articles in The Nation on the subject of just war since the outbreak of hostilities. In the latest, December 24, 2001, he corrects an earlier correction. At first, Falk held the war to be just. He then reversed judgement when it seemed that US policy makers were using disproportonate force to achieve their goals. Now, however, with the ³unexpectedly rapid collapse of the Taliban regime and the obvious impact on the operational nexus of Al Qaeda, there seems, at least temporarily, to be a restored sense of proportionality between means and ends.² And so the war is once more just.

But there¹s something wrong here. Call me out of step, but I thought that justice had to do with whether something was right or wrong, not with whether it works. That¹s pragmatism, not justice. What¹s just has to have an enduring quality. It should not be dependant on whether force achieves its goal, but upon what the force is all about. Falk¹s view, instead, has as much constancy as a weather report: the war is just one week, unjust the next because too much force is used, then turns just once again when the force achieves its goal. And he threatens to make it unjust again whenever force is ³used excessively or vindictively.²

Falk¹s concept of a just war behaves like a yo-yo because it reduces the war to those terms defined by the state, namely, that it¹s all about stamping out terrorism. This sets aside any deeper or larger purpose. From another angle, it mystifies what the state is really all about, as would be revealed in the history of United States foreign policy over, say, the past half-century.

Here is what Falk has to say on this subject. The United States, he claims, has a special responsibility to ³achieve a maximally effective response and generate the widest possible popular support [because of] its leadership in world society, as well as its linchpin role with respect to global security, however flawed its execution has been in several past instances (including Vietnam, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the post cold-war abandonment of Afghanistan and the follow-up to the Gulf War).²

To call Vietnam, etc, instances of ³flawed execution² is most kind of Falk. One may wonder, what would have been a flawless conduct of the Vietnam war? And what about some of the other behaviors of the world leader? Consider the toppling of Iranian democracy in the 1950s when Mossadegh tried to nationalize the nation¹s oil, which prepared the way for Islamic fundamentalism; or the cold-war dismemberment of Afghanistan, before it was abandoned, also creating Islamic fundamentalism; or the nurturing of Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War, as a weapon against socialism; or the corruption of Saudi Arabia on behalf of Big Oil; and all the other topplings and sponsorings of terror in other parts of the world: Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Indonesia, Chile, Panama, East Timor . . . to draw the list out to its full extent would take us over the whole terrain of the last fifty years, because our country has indeed exerted ³leadership in world society,² though not, it needs to be said, according to the precepts of justice.

The pattern has been only too consistent. Administrations and leaders come and go, but US foreign policy remains as fixed as the North Star. It has one supreme goal, and that is to make the world a reliable source of profit for our propertied classes and their allies in other nations. That is what global security is about; and to believe that the underlying motives are any different now that terrorism is in the sights of the superpower is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy.

We have to be blunt here, else the question of a just war disappears in a fog of propaganda. There is an expression suppressed in the standard discourse, but required given the above record. We would say that the United States exerts that form of ³leadership in world society,² which can be summed up in the word, imperialism: the forceful, violent if necessary, projection of power over other nations, to control them for our own interest. An imperialist power need not always be violent, and its violence can at times serve a useful purpose, as in repressing the monsters of terror it has raised, the way police may usefully deal with criminals generated by a society of inequality and exploitation. But it can never raise itself to the level of justice, because its essential being is to sow injustice in the world. Thus present triumphs will become the occasion for future terrors.

The following is a transcript of Joel Kovel's presentation at the Congres Marx International IIIóParis, 9/29/01 On Ecology and Socialism

A SOCIALISM FOR THE NEXT EPOCH by Joel Kovel

We are all the playthings of the history into which we are thrown; and never was Marx's insight that we do not make history as we please more acute than at the present, in the wake of the events of September 11. I was prepared to present to this Congress a fairly straightforward, if rather utopian, vision of an ecological socialism drawn from a forthcoming study, called THE ENEMY OF NATURE, on which I have been working for some years. The writing of this took place during that span of capitalist expansion which has now ground to a halt and gone into free fall; and its thesis was simple, brutally so, to a degree that has prevented many from coming to terms with its stark implications. The heart of the argument is that capitalist production and ecological integrity exist in an absolute contradiction, so that the vaunted market mechanisms invoked to recuperate the situation can do no more, ultimately, than throw a few coats of paint over the decay of the structures within. There is no apocalyptic end as such in this scenario, rather, the continual erosion of ecosystems, a kind of fraying and unwinding, as a moth-eaten sweater comes apart at many places at once. The pathogen is the endlessly invasive and expansive force of capital, gnawing away at the threads of ecological integrity, and exceeding, with its inexorable pressure to expand, the earth's capacity to buffer ecological destabilization. The practical implication of this reasoning is a return to the dictum of Rosa Luxemburg, that it is either socialism or barbarism, except that to the latter term we now add the additional meaning of ecocatastrophe, from which it follows that the former now becomes an ìecosocialism,î and assumes the objective of restoring ecological integrity, along with the familiar "first epoch" socialist aims, to do justice and enable the self-determination of producers. As to what this may mean, more below. Here we must deal with the abrupt new turn in the argument that history has thrown in our face since September 11, 2001. What I originally wrote laid out in broad terms the approaching denouement between capitalís ecological catastrophe and ecosocialismís restoration of integrity, without taking up in any detail the particular pathways toward the great struggle between the forces of life and death, in short, the messy actuality and its configuration of actors. But that was before September 11. Few who have felt the impact of that awful day would deny that it opens on a new, and highly ominous, period of history. Typically, the catastrophe caught us with eyes half closed; and when the dustóa physical dust far more dangerous, I fear, than we have been led to believe--settled, we opened them upon a new configuration. We necessarily set aside here the particulars of who did what, and what is to be the response in the immediate situation by individuals, social movements and nation-states. It is worth pointing out, however, that the United States will have to contend with the destruction, not just of life and property, but of that peculiar illusion of invulnerability which entered into so many myths, shaped the national character, and formed as well an integral component of US capitalism. As we know, capital is far more than an economic arrangement, rather, a whole way of being that subordinates everything in its path to the economy of value expansion. Capitalisms emerge as vehicles for realizing capital and are, in the process, shaped by national characteristics as well as by geostrategic factors, even as it shapes them and the whole configuration of the social self. By saying that capital is the enemy of nature, we mean that value-expansion is intrinsically ecodestructive, hence that the capitalist societies that emerge in order to realize capital will be driven by this imperative in varying ways. This is according to certain tendencies, one of which is that capitalís ecological destabilization is an exponential function of its magnitude; hence, the larger the capital, the worse it behaves in overall respect, or, to place the matter into another frame of reference, the more imperialistic. This relationship encompasses and brings together the well-known facts of globalization, along with the superpower status of the US and its imperial implications. Empire is now deployed according to the effects of an advanced dissolution of boundary, even as it is administered according to well-defined nodes of state and military power on behalf of a transnational bourgeoisie. This ìdeterritorializationî is from one angle the latest stage in the long process of dissolving "all that is solid into air" announced by Marx; while from another it is the specfic matrix of two conjoined developments that belong to the present time alone, however deep their roots may extend into history. The first is the aformentioned ecological crisis, to which the argument of THE ENEMY OF NATURE is specifically applied. And the second, which we need to introduce here, is the more acute crisis posed by the eruption of terror, which in the present case is an expression of Islamic fundamentalism in the context of a rage against Western imperialism. All these phenomena are intertwined, with a complexity that can be no more than dimly suggested within the limits of this presentation. Islamic fundamentalism is patently a reaction against modernity, not in the abstract, but as an aspect of Western imperial expansion into the homelands of Islam. The specific character of the penetration bears emphasis. For whether manifested by Zionism, with its US backing; or by the Gulf War, with its genocidal consequences for the Iraqis, again engineered by the superpower; or by the corruption of the Saudi state, home to US military bases; or by the Iranian revolution, carried out in reaction to the US's imposition of the Shah; or, indeed, by the Afghani war against the Soviets, in the course of which the US did so much to create bin Laden and the Taliban. Wherever, in short, the seeds of fundamentalist terror have been sown, we find the presence of empire associated with the geological fact that its terrain sits atop by far the world's largest oil reserves, either directly or in the sense of strategic access. The primacy exercized by the control of petroleum over the world situation remains the dominant fact of this crisis, and is given even greater significance through its densely articulated relationship to the ecological crisis. The hand of terror has been shaped by capital's deterritorialization, in the double meaning of loss of territory and loss of coherent tradition. But that hand also acts through deterritorialization. The dissolution of boundary inherent to capital's expansion creates the ground for successful terrorist action on an expanding scale. Consider how freely the agents moved through the flexible job markets of the US, how much they were able to do with credit cards, cell phones and the internet, how easily they slipped under the eyes of the ponderous surveillance apparatus thanks to means of advanced communications such as fiber-optics, how readily they could disappear into the pores of everyday life while yet being able to control colossal technical means of destruction, the exercise of which was granted them by the simple expedient of willingness to die for their cause. We need not moralize here, yet it needs to be said that the acts of September 11 reveal to the fullest extent the radical schism between self and other, with the aggrandizement of the self (given immortality after immolation through terror) and the reduction of the other to mere instrumentality, that marks all evil. The chief lesson to be learned is that all aspects of this terror, from its nihilism, to its restoration of the spiritual willingness of self-sacrifice, to its ready access to advanced technology, are embedded in the present conjuncture of deterritorialized imperialism. Thus these acts, unspeakable at one level, have an awful and understandable logic at another, and one, moreover, that drives toward repetition. I frankly do not think that this situation can be remedied within the terms of the present world order. The expected, and dreadfully predictable, reaction of the Bush adminstration seeks to restore the status quo ante by marshalling all the capacities of the modern capitalist state, from its powers of surveillance and repression, to those of propaganda, to its awful military capabilities. Yet these essentially violent means only reproduce and expand the conditions that germinate terror. Thus surveillance increases social alienation; propaganda increases jingoism and leads to the discourse of the Crusades; while military violence only further destabilizes existing societies, drives more millions into despair, and increases the quotient of desperate hatred that produced the unspeakable acts of September 11. Furthermore, the means of controlling the eruptions of terror run contrary to the normal processes of accumulation that drive the system. One of the first reactions of the US to the crashes, for example, was to close the Mexican border--understandable in terms of the logic of an imperialism trying to protect itself, but precisely contrary to NAFTA, a key element of capital accumulation. In short, the normal workings of the system drive toward reproducing the problem of terror on an expanding scale even as it strives to stamp terrorism out. And as the world capitalist system cannot solve its crisis of terror, then the overcoming of the present world order is given a new urgency This is not to counsel surrender to the terrorists, whose terrible crimes demand that they be brought to justice. It is to insist, however, that the notion of justice be expanded so that the conditions of terror are overcome. And this in turn requires that a world beyond capital be envisioned--which leads to a reconsideration of the linkages between the crisis posed by terror, and that of the global ecology. The most obvious, if radically underappreciated, linkage concerns petroleum. There is no rational way of dealing with this problem so long as the regime of oil imperialism persists. Does anyone expect the USóthe superpower on the ground todayóto give up its military bases in Saudi Arabia, when doing so places the energy resources that drives its industrial system at grave risk? A far more likely US ambition in dealing with this crisis would be to further solidify its control over oil, even if such means direct military occupation of the Arabianóand Iraqióoil fields, with all that portends for the increase of terror. The insanity of such a goal is perfectly logical given the calculations of great capitalist powers, and cannot be liquidated until society is released from its dependancy on fossil fuels. But this is a revolutionary goal. Simple conversion to renewable energy, however desirable in its own right, will not suffice. A radical restructuring of the industrial system itself is needed, which in turn points toward a radical restructuring of human needs, and the transforming of commodity relations so that concrete use-values would overcome the regime of exchange--in sum, to the social transformation named ecosocialism. The project of ecosocialism does not stand in opposition to ìfirst-epochî socialism. It is, rather, its realization. In this respect, ecosocialism is neither more nor less than the original announcement of the Communist Manifesto, that it be ìan association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.î This way of being can be translated into the language of ecosystems, where it appears as their integrity. An integral ecosystem is one whose interrelated elements exist in a state that might be called one of fruitful, or differentiated contact. In this way, wholes are created in which the parts remain themselves, yet exist in complex and multifaceted interaction. This state exists across the boundary between human and non-human nature. Insofar as the human world is involved, it entails the phenomenon of mutual recognition between self and other, whether the other be another human or an aspect of non-human nature. Thus the free development of which Marx spoke encompasses non-human nature as well as society, where the ìindividualsî have ecosystemic properties and the potential for universalizationóthe free development of all. In fact, one may amend the Manifesto here: just as the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, so can no individual be truly free until all are free, that is, until universal justice is done. The work of ecosocialism is the promotion of ecosystemic integrity, while capital splits ecosystems apart for the purpose of value expansion. The integrity of the human world implies the free development of peoples and their culture; conversely, the fundamentalisms and their violent, terroristic offspring are the products of a tortured, dissociated, anti-universalizing cultural development, the ultimate responsibility for which must lie squarely with the imperial masters, whose overcoming now becomes more than ever the prime collective task of humanity. A world beyond terrorism implies neither the closing and autarchy of societies, nor capitalís deterritorialization, across whose chaotic boundaries fester despair and desperation. It is rather a reclamation of spaces for ecosystemic integrity. For the purposes of dealing with the present crisis, this implies the maximum mobilizing of all forces capable of applying pressure to the mirror-imaged monsters of terror and empire. Each feeds from the other, and both will have to be overcome if either is to be overcome. The further specification of this is not possible here, except to say that the movement would extend transnationally, across civil society and states, in novel and hopeful configurations. It may be, that the tremendous jolt given to the global consciousness by the events of September 11 will shake loose the congealed inertia which has long held that there is no alternative to capitalís empire. Certainly, the days of comfortable assurance are over, and the time has come to rethink basic assumptions.