An essay I wrote in a great hurry... it's quite muddled and doesn't really address many issues I had in mind. The most important difference that I never got around to analysing is that environmentalists generally propose extremely autocratic solutions to many ecological problems, such as the Kyoto Protocol, progressive taxation, making various environmentally damaging activities illegal, and so on. In other words, though environmentalism takes capitalism to task for the destructive heirarchies it creates and sustains, practitioners of the ideology also often support hierarchical solutions. Only those on the fringe of the movement, such as green anarchists and eco anarchists, maintain a principled opposition to such solutions.

The second interesting difference is that environmentalists, especially deep ecologists, place an emphasis on the values and virtues of ecological balance, and of life in all of its forms. Though environmentalism generally opposes hierarchy it does so not as an a priori principle, but because of the consequences of hierarchy. Anarchism, on the other hand, tends to assign the question of hierarchy a more central normative role.

Compare and contrast the anarchist and environmentalist critique of capitalism

That the anarchist and environmentalist critiques of capitalism are extremely similar is not a coincidence. Environmentalism as an ideology grew out of anarchism, and so shares many themes and much analysis with the classical anarchist critique of capitalism. However, environmentalists hold different normative values, and the solutions implied by the critiques of some of the more mainstream environmentalists are incompatible with anarchism.

The anarchist critique of capitalism begins with an attack on the division that is not dissimilar to Marxism. There are three main components to this critique: that property is theft, that wage labour is slavery and that profits are a form of exploitation. They rely on an understanding of the division of labour under capitalism that produces two distinct classes, the workers and the capitalists. Workers are those who are forced through economic necessity to sell their labour to the capitalists, whilst capitalists own and make money from their property, and their employment of the workers. They also rely on a labour-based theory of value, according to which objects only have value insofar as they are products of our labour

Proudhon, the first writer to provide a coherent account of anarchist political theory, famously wrote that “property ... is robbery” (Proudhon 1840). He distinguished between private property – that which the capitalists own and earn money from – and personal property – that which is occupied for its immediate utility. Anarchists acknowledge the right to personal property such as clothing and land upon which one can perform self-sustaining work, including the right to exclude others from the property, so long as one makes use of it personally. This is understood both as a natural right and a political necessity to avoid a tragedy of the commons, whereby too many people using common property may overuse it and thereby diminish its use value. Private property, on the other hand, is condemned because the owner contributes no labour to it, yet claims exclusive rights to it and to the money earned from it.

Property also creates coercive hierarchies that violate the positive values of freedom and equality. A worker who owns his house and the tools of his trade can perform his work freely, whereas a worker who rents his accommodation and uses tools owned by his employer is forced into a submissive relationship. The relationship is a microcosm of the coercive relationship between citizen and state. Furthermore, private property will tend to consolidate in the hands of a minority of owners, as they will be born into a society with an uneven distribution of resources and so will be able to exploit their advantage against those worse off. Without any political or financial equality, universal participation, ownership and franchise become impossible.

In an anarchist society, all would have the right to personal property, but private property would be abolished, leaving the means of production and public utilities in the commons, where society could collectively and equitably allocate its use without abridging individual liberty (Anarchist FAQ, section B.3).

An inevitable consequence of private property is that the division of labour will be characterised by wage labour relationships, which anarchists believe constitute slavery. Workers will sell their labour to capitalists and receive only a proportion of its market value in return leading to exploitation and alienation. The worker is exploited because the capitalist steals the product and then returns only a proportion in return, and is able to do so through coercion. Alienation is a far more complex issue, but it can be most succinctly described as an unhealthy relationship between the worker and his labour, his products, his fellow workers and his species essence. It constitutes a loss of reality, such that workers are unable to realise themselves through their labour as free, conscious, productive individuals in communities, a result of the coercive division of labour. It is an objective condition in the individual that produces subjective feelings of misery and lack of fulfilment (Marx 1992, Ollman 1980). Both exploitation and alienation can only be overcome when workers exchange products directly with each other in a market system, rather than selling their labour to capitalists. Artisanship would replace employment as the mode of production. Workers would keep control of the products and their labour, and would be able to direct their labour towards personal development as well as social needs.

The distorted relations found under capitalism constitute a “perverted hierarchy of values... that places humanity below [private] property” (Anarchist FAQ, section B.1.3). By valuing everything only in terms of its capital potential, and ignoring use and interpersonal values, capitalism forces an unnatural hierarchy upon people that both directly represses individuals and gives coercive actors such as the state a mechanism to further repress them.

Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx, developed Proudhon's largely individualistic critique of capitalism, and its positive components, by adding a communal perspective. It is, he said, necessary to account for productive communities in order to protect liberty in a social context, because society will inevitably exist and revolve for the most part around relations of production (Wikipedia entry on Anarchism). So if capitalism creates unethical relationships of domination and exploitation, then anarchism must offer a positive alternative. He emphasised the critical role of workers engaging in self-managed organs of production and distribution that would be radically participative, decentralised and that would respect liberty and equality. This was in part a reflection on the capitalist state, which centralises coercive power and forces management upon workers.

The state is, according to anarchists, ultimately coercive and inegalitarian because its primary function is to protect private property and to enforce the will of a subset of the population upon the rest. Given that capitalism creates and exacerbates inequality, he said that the state is effectively a tool of the capitalists leveraged against the working class. The cause of anarchists, therefore, is to overthrow bourgeois as a means to dissolve the state and thereby dissolve the institution of private property.

Carter has criticised this theory for being overly simplistic, and in particular for failing to account both for why the state may not necessarily always be so despotic as Bakunin's description suggests, and for why state actors might be coerced or act so starkly in the interests of one subset of society against another. In contemporary democratic states, for example, governments rely on the electorate to re-elect them and accept constitutional limits to their power that, in some cases, give surprising liberties to society (Carter 1993: 41-42). Though liberal democratic capitalist states are far from their despotic or aristocratic predecessors, one can defend Bakunin by suggesting that the state and those behind its actions use capital flows to repress the working class, which they can control, without recourse to political repression. Where states have acted economically in the interests of the working class, for example by creating a welfare system and levying redistributive taxation on the rich, the states are simply working at odds with capitalism. One can either interpret this as a sign of weakness in the capitalist state, needing to bend to the needs of the working class to stay elected, or as a sign of strength, that it can give a little ground to the working class such that it remains electorally viable and can then otherwise repress them; the poor may have a small handout from the state when unemployed, but the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.

The fact that capitalism requires a state at all is seen as a sign of its unethical nature, according to anarchists. Capital flows need to be controlled, directed and regulated; failing industries that are nonetheless useful to capital overall, such as nuclear power, require state handouts; companies need state regulations to enshrine limited workers rights, and the strong arm of the state to enforce them where workers revolt. Even the most laissez-faire form of capitalism, which many so-called free market anarchists affirm would be coherent with anarchist values, private property requires protection, which requires coercive powers such as the police and army. These relations constitute an irrational authority that is based upon power rather than competence and consent (Anarchist FAQ, section B.1).

At times, capital can coerce states, a fact that backs up Bakunin's assertion of the state being an instrument of the rich. For example, states are unable to radically nationalise industries or promote non-capital based values for fear of capital flight. And through international institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, poor states are forced to accept the laissez-faire prescriptions of rich states, which are themselves acting in the interest of capital growth and accumulation (Graeber 2002, Anarchist FAQ: section D.2.1).

There remains one more aspect of the anarchist critique of capitalism: that of the capitalist portrayal of man as essentially rational and self-interested. This narrow definition of the psychology of man is necessary to explain why society should operate on competitive relationships of production and consumption, and is framed by capitalists as an accurate portrayal of our natural state. The idea finds its most stark advocacy in Social Darwinism, which suggests that Darwin's theory of evolution gives a scientific basis for the evolutionary advantage of competition. Kropotkin, in response to this, wrote a theory of the evolutionary advantage of cooperation. He studies species such as bees and locusts, as well as instances of cooperation in his contemporary societies, to show that cooperation and mutual aid ought to be the basis of economic relations (Kropotkin 2003). This pseudo-scientific view gave weight to the normative claims that competition debases humans and creates relations of hierarchy, and that humans neither wholly self-interested nor wholly benevolent (Lux 1990).

So, to summarise, the classical anarchist critique of capitalism has various components. Anarchists point to the division of labour, which is based upon wage slavery, exploitative profits and a form of property that constitutes robbery. Capitalism centralises power, opposes self- and collective-management and debases workers. It does this based on an unethical normative claim about the value of capital, and on a dubious portrayal of human nature as essentially competitive and self-interested. Capitalist societies are monolithic, repressing opportunities for life to unfold freely (Gorz 1994: 11).

In the 1950s, Murray Bookchin first developed an environmental critique of capitalism from an anarchist standpoint. It can be argued that his work simply brought out the ecological implications of earlier anarchists' work, in particular that of Kropotkin whose theory of the evolutionary advantage of mutual aid and cooperation necessarily involved small self-sustainable communities that fit into the natural world. At the heart of the so-called “eco-anarchist” critique of capitalism is the assertion that a green or ecologically sustainable capitalism is logically impossible, since capitalism is based on the principle of continuous, unfettered growth in production and consumption (Anarchist FAQ, section E). This means that ecosystems will be exploited without consideration for the environmental impact, until that impact becomes a sufficiently significant externality for it to affect their capital value, which will usually be far too late to save the inherent value of the ecosystem. This thought is both a continuation of the anarchist critique of the normative and deterministic value of capital, and a recognition of the need of capital to expand into new lifeworlds. The important point here is that for anarchists, ecological crisis is not caused by overpopulation, unsustainable governance or corporate excess, but rather by deeper, “root” causes in capitalism itself. Only by destroying capitalism and creating an anarchist society, they say, can we hope to avoid future ecological crises.

The environmentalist critique of capitalism shares many themes and much analysis with the anarchists. This is unsurprising given that, as I have mentioned, early environmentalist theorists such as Bookchin were anarchists. The values with which the environmental critique begins parallel those in the anarchist school of thought. They value biodiversity, sustainable ecosystems and lifeworlds in which people can “realize their potentialities as members of the human community and the natural world” (Bookchin 1977: 370, Drengson 1999). Though the environmental movement is ideologically diverse, ranging from the eco-anarchists to the mainstream green political parties, all share these values, which necessarily oppose capitalism since they challenge the deterministic value of capital.

The most anarchistic branch of the environmentalist movement is of course eco-anarchism. Their critique of capitalism is based upon the classical anarchist critique I have described so far with one critical addition: that a hierarchy putting humans above the rest of the natural world is wrong, and that societies ought to fit in with the natural world rather than develop or heavily manage it for their own needs. The solution they propose is to destroy civilisation and revert to living in small “eco-villages”, which they say would be compatible with the positive green values I explained above. As a philosophy to direct practical life matters it seems far fetched, especially given that so many people in capitalist societies would have to sacrifice so many material possessions and lifestyle choices. For anarchists, however, the idea of small communities are extremely attractive because of the hugely increased pragmatism of having no hierarchies, respecting individual liberty and of each individual realising their full potentialities.

In response, I would object that it would be extremely difficult to realise your full potential as a social being with productive and creativity capabilities in such a small scale society; your productive power would be extremely limited without a division of labour on a larger scale to provide the tools and materials you may need; your social circle would be small and may not cater for both your creative and social potentials, e.g. as a violinist who would like to play in a full orchestra or as somebody who likes to meet a lot of people. Though none of this would be made impossible in an eco-anarchist society, it would be far more difficult than in a society based around larger communities, a larger-scale division of labour and more ecologically exploitative practices. This seems to weaken the eco-anarchist critique of capitalism.

Alan Carter is one of many theorists who has tried to develop a green political theory that goes beyond the anarchist critique of capitalism. He proposed a model of capitalism that overcomes the problems with the anarchist critique – namely that it places too much emphasis on the power of capital over the state, and that it cannot account for instances where the relationship between capital and the state seems to be benign or at least less antagonistic towards the values of anarchism (Carter 1993: 41-43). According to his model, there are four primary forces in capitalist society, which, when appreciated as a whole, represent a self-sustaining and self-empowering structure that can only be opposed as a whole. In the first place you have the state, or to be more correct the actors that dominate and control political relations (a point I will return to later in this essay). The state manages relations of economic control, directing capital according to its interests. The more prosperous the economy, the greater the forces of production, since they are developed by relations of economic control directing themselves towards the goal of capital creation and accumulation. Strong forces of production can in turn support forces of defence, including the police and the army. And these forces of defence empower and, one might say, embolden the actors dominant within relations of political control (Carter 1993: 43-44).

I would add that strong forces of production also quell disquiet in the electorate, and in societies where repression is more stark, revolt. As can be seen in contemporary capitalist societies, consumerism pacifies voters by making them relatively content, or at least by giving them other worries and goals than liberty, self-realisation and ecologically sustainable lifestyles.

The crucial point about Carter's model is that it constitutes a dynamic circle that cannot be broken by attacking one point, one force. Attempts to temper capitalism by introducing legislation that creates ecological bias would, according to this model, fail because actors within relations of political control would simply revert or route around the legislation according to the dictates of capital. It is also important to recognise, as I mentioned earlier, that these actors are not simply “the state” understood as a monolithic entity serving the needs of capital. In the first place, states aren't so monolithic as anarchists suggests, constituting national governments, parliaments, local governments, the police, the army and other branches besides. Corporations, NGOs and people's associations may also figure prominently in political relations. Given this, it is easy to see how the legislature that lent towards more ecologically friendly legislation may be overruled or persuaded to change its mind.

Carter's model, however, can be interpreted in various different ways. On the one hand it seems to support the anarchist critique of capital, arguing for the negation of every force present in capitalist society and their replacement with ecologically benign forces. On another interpretation it can support mainstream green political parties, who seek to infiltrate the relations of political control whilst transforming forces of economic control, production and defence. Their emphasise on holistic solutions and on the values of biodiversity, liberty and decentralisation seem entirely compatible with Carter's model, but incompatible with the eco-anarchist solutions. Furthermore, many of their solutions, or rather their tactics to achieve long-term solutions, involve radical constraints on human liberty, usually in the form of laws that make illegal ecologically destructive lifestyle choices or modes of production.

In conclusion, then, the anarchist and environmentalist critiques of capitalism share many themes. They both oppose the deterministic value of capital and the forces and modes of production and hierarchy that they create. However, anarchists emphasise the affects on individual liberty more strongly, whilst environmentalists vary between a broadly anarchist critique to fairly establishment critiques that advocate transforming capitalism using capitalism's mechanisms. The implications of these more establishment ideologies are fundamentally incompatible with anarchism.

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