Human Liberation, Planetary Salvation w/ Alyssa Battistoni

This book has a whole sort of second major argument that I want to turn to for this episode, which is, or it begins with the argument that capitalism's treatment of nature is related to limits on human freedom.

You write, quote, capitalism limits our ability to treat non-human nature as something other than a free gift.

it constrains our ability individually and collectively to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the non-human world and to take responsibility for those decisions put simply capitalism limits our freedom Trevor Burrus, Jr.: That includes the power to dominate in the workplace.

It's also the concentrated power over investment and thus the power to remake the world, indeed to remake the material world, the environment itself.

And then two, there's market rule, which fundamentally limits human freedom, including the freedom of capitalists, because under capitalism, we are all subject to the law of value.

Lay out these two forms of capitalist domination, class rule and market rule.

What are they? And how do they distinctly but collaboratively operate as part of an overall architecture of capitalist rule? And then also, why this question of freedom? It's not what you might expect to encounter in a book about the environment.

Absolutely.

I'll start with that second piece because I think it is sort of not necessarily intuitive to make an argument about capitalism and nature and sort of the problem with capitalism's treatment of nature is rooted in capitalism's limitation of human freedom.

In fact, I think we often have almost the opposite argument that it's human freedom that has led to the destruction of nature or that human freedom is somehow purchased at nature's expense and So I wanted to counter or challenge the argument, and I try to do that in a few places in the book.

But it really also stems from sort of a dissatisfaction with some of the ways that we tend to talk about what's wrong with capitalism and environmental and ecological and eco-socialist discourses, which are usually some version of capitalism.

Capitalism destroys nature.

Capitalism has opened up this metabolic rift between humanity and non-human nature.

It sort of deteriorates the soil.

Capitalism undermines its background conditions, that capitalism is maybe self-destructive even in some kind of eco-crisis theories.

Capitalism robs worker and the soil.

It doesn't pay its ecological costs, all of these kinds of things.

And I think those are all true, basically, insofar as I do think capitalism is destructive to nature.

in some very general sense.

I think they sort of speak to some intuition we have about, you know, something is clearly very wrong with the way we're living on our planet.

There are all of these ecological crises, climate change being only the most immediate and severe, perhaps, that I think we can and should link to capitalism.

But I think the problem is that it's quite difficult to sort of actually answer that question.

Like, what does it actually mean to destroy nature without indicting a lot of other kinds of human social systems and relationships to the more than human world.

It sort of takes the foundations of nature itself for granted.

It assumes that we know what nature is, what it should be, that it should be sort of the stable thing.