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Peter Critchley

Remembering Joel Kovel - pioneer eco-socialist, visionary traveller and friend


Joel Kovel tribute


It was so sad to read of the passing of Joel Kovel (30 April 2018). I’ve been trying to find the right words to convey not merely the respect I have for the man and his works, but the love. But I can’t. So I’ll just write as the words come. All I can say is that, having read Joel's works over the years, I have complete trust in the man and his warm and profoundly humane vision. I have been an avid reader of his books for a long time. I found his arguments pertinent, perceptive, and challenging. I loved his inquiring spirit, his ability to draw on many sources and weave so many seemingly divergent threads together. He is eclectic in his sources, but there is a constant and consistent thread in his work that is woven around the theme of emancipation. I loved his concern with the integral life and with recovering personality, interconnection, and community - showing us the path to health and happiness beyond the deadening of humanity and nature. I loved his concern with the integral life and with recovering personality, interconnection, and community. I loved his concern to recover the spiritual dimension, the fact that he was unafraid to recover the religious reality at the heart of the world, whilst being critical of the way that this reality is often expressed. He was an ecosocialist. So am I. And he was to become a Christian. As I, too, returned, retaining the marxism, but adding the transcendent source of truth and hope that keeps us questing .... 'for God so loved the world ...' Joel made sense to me, and made sense of my own direction. And I was honoured to have found connection with him on FB and to have counted him as a friend I never met in person. Through his words, I knew him as a kindred spirit, a ‘lost traveler’ who knew there was a home for us to go to. And he showed us the way home.


I loved Joel’s inquiring spirit, his ability to draw on many sources and weave so many seemingly divergent threads together. He is eclectic in his sources, but there is a constant and consistent thread in his work that is woven around the theme of emancipation. He is open to all things in the cause of advancing the liberatory vision. I loved his concern to recover the spiritual dimension, the fact that he was unafraid to recover the religious reality at the heart of the world, whilst being critical of the way that that reality is often expressed. His awareness of the unliveability of the destinationless voyage are profound. His book History and Spirit, An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation is beautiful in every respect, calling upon us to resdiscover the spirit, shedding new light on what Marx described as the ‘soulless conditions’ of capitalism. That despiritualisation lies at the heart of capitalism’s disenchantment of the world, the robbing of value, meaning and purpose from our existence.


I first came across him in the book "The Radical Spirit." I found the writing and the ideas in this book so lively, so pertinent and so fresh, turning all that I thought I knew around and pointing it in the right direction. He made me rethink my old views and think anew. I devoured his other works. I'll given special mention to "History and Spirit" as an outstanding work which everyone ought to read.


I would urge people to investigate further Joel’s writings on socialism, psychology, ecology, spirituality and community. The man was warm and wise, he had intelligence and integrity. I loved his questing spirit, his awareness that the ecological crisis of the age is also a spiritual crisis, the way in which he sought to recover a sense of true, qualitative, wealth against the endless accumulation of material quantities: “Pure quantity,” Joel wrote, “can swell infinitely without reference to the external world.” That economic expansion in indifference to true wealth is at the source of our problems.


Let me take the opportunity to quote from three of Joel’s works. These give us some pertinent words on the key theme of our age, identifying the nature of the problem and indicating the solution in all its depth. To those who are inclined to proceed immediately to strategies and technologies when it comes to solutions, I say these things are clearly important, but an enduring solution goes into the true depths of humanity – Joel goes to those depths:


The first is from the preface to the 2nd edition of Joel’s “The Enemy of Nature” published in 2007.


"There is now a widespread assumption, which was much more limited five years ago, that the problem is not this corporation or that, or 'industrialization,' technology, or just plain bad luck, but all-devouring capital. This is a salubrious truth, a truth that sharpens the mind and can be worked with and built upon. The human intelligence can be daunted, but it cannot be erased. As the ecological crisis grinds on irrespective of capital's propaganda system and its massive apparatus for fixing the environment, so does capital's legitimacy begin to fray. With this, the possibility of new thinking emerges and begins to flower. On one side, a predictable inevitability, that the system will collapse; on the other, no more than a hope, grounded however in reality, that a new form of society may emerge no longer dependent upon accumulation and its progressive breakdown of ecosystems. Hence the mandate for this second edition of The Enemy of Nature, for the paramount goal of this work will always be to hasten the disintegration of capital's system-logic and to help bring forth a way of being worthy of our human nature."


The second is from Joel’s "The Radical Spirit: Essays on Psychology and Society", chapter entitled Human Nature, Freedom and Spirit


“It follows that the mark of a genuine spiritual quest (which need not, it seems to me, be along mystical lines) - as against the perverted specimens alluded to above - is, to use the phrase of liberation theology, an option for the poor and oppressed. If Spirit is to be freed from second nature, then the domination embedded in second nature needs to be overcome. And this cannot be begun except through concrete practice. Indeed, one of the few certainties of the human predicament is that personal fulfilment cannot take place without general emancipation. This may mean that it cannot take place at all, which would be another tragic fact about our species. Such is idle speculation, however. As a practical matter, what we mean is that for a spiritual practice to be authentic, it must be on the side of emancipation, and actively so. The tragic character of human experience means at bottom that we are thrown into being and given the chance to be free. And since no one can be free until everyone is free, the realization of our 'nature', and the redifferentiation with nature implied in the relation of Spirit, draws us back once again to society and its transformation.”


The third is from Joel's "The Enemy of Nature."


"Growing numbers of people are beginning to realize that capitalism is the uncontrollable force driving our ecological crisis only to become frozen in their tracks by the awesome implications of the insight. Perhaps optimism is appropriate. There is a difference between the impossible and the merely difficult. In fact, the very notion of sensual use rather than an economics based on enslaving accountancy values has a seductive charm. I am not one to minimise the importance of strategy and the difficult debates we need to have about moving to a qualitatively different kind of society but nonetheless the implications of sustainability are to be enjoyed."


The words in these passages are all very pertinent. But please read Joel at length and in depth, because the man is worthy of nothing less. His work is profound.


Derek Wall describes Joel's "The Enemy of Nature" as "perhaps the best book I have read on green economics in my quarter century of activism."



Derek continues:

"It needs to be read, reread, its message repeated, networked and acted upon. It is beautifully written. The core message is simple but of great importance: our economic system wrecks the environment, thrives on injustice and allows abstract and alien process to control human life. It shows in some detail why we are destroying the world and how we can stop. Above all, it provides a course of practical therapy to get to ecology, justice and liberation."


I agree very much.


There are many more words in these previous posts of mine on Joel Kovel. These go deeper into the qualities of the man and his work.


https://www.facebook.com/peter.critchley.754/posts/1890564414514512


https://www.facebook.com/peter.critchley.754/posts/1837762416461379


I can strongly recommend the books of Joel Kovel for his vision of the integral life and personality, interconnection, health and happiness. Pertinent, perceptive, I like his inquiring spirit, his ability to draw on many sources and weave many seemingly divergent threads together. He takes us to the core. In my view.


Please, if you ever get time to read .... read Joel Kovel on:


History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (1991), a book about spirituality, community, and how we can go beyond the deadening of nature, the loss of the sacred and the fracturing of organic wholes. He shows that it is profoundly wrong to set human spirit and nature against each other, identifying the social relations that do this, arguing that human spirit is an indivisible part of human nature and our connection to all life and that we need social relationships that recognise that link.



'Our communities are vanishing and the natural world is dying. Religious institutions falter, and even progressive ideologies prove inadequate. Where are we to turn for answers? In this unique, far-reaching book, Joel Kovel says we must turn back, back to the notion of spirit and the realm of spirituality. Kovel argues that only a radical rediscovery of spirit can offer a solution to the profound spiritual crisis of our modern age.'


'[Kovel's] eyes were opened to how profoundly mistaken he had been about religion. His observations about its oppressive side were not refuted; he had simply failed to see the emancipatory side. Several experiences moved him to such depths that he could not fathom them. He flirted with joining the Catholic Church, but finally was unable to stomach a religion that had slaughtered so many of his ancestors. Kovel could see that communism was falling apart, and tried to excavate deeper to the roots of both its failure and the continuing evil that it had attempted to address. This study is the result. Its significance lies in its relentless pursuit of the Hegelian dialectic through Marxism and out the other side in a new synthesis that recovers the Hegelian spirit in a Marxian matrix of concrete material things. Kovel has, thus, produced a new intellectual synthesis that recovers spirituality, not by making an end run around Marx and Freud, but by going right straight through them to recover religious reality in the heart of the world. Marx argued that the “self is the ensemble of social relations.” This proposition, true and necessary as far as it goes, is insufficient, says Kovel. Those social relations and the self that enters them are both precipitates of a primordium that comes before social causation and is the ground of our wish to be free. We come from a place before society, even if we are always directed toward society.'


'The despiritualized worldview of Descartes and the despiritualized society of capitalism radically alienate us from each other and from our own selves. “No one is actually told not to have a soul. By soulless conditions is simply meant that those ways of being which are conducive to soul are not rewarded with worldly success.” Spirituality is replaced by self-maximization, which means the minimization of everyone else. Power is a condition of being-over in which the dominator extracts being from the dominated. Domination is the expropriation of being. Sin (here he seizes a term calculated to make many of his secular leftist friends squirm) is the propensity to commit violence, with violence defined as a violation or disruption of the integrity of another being. Spiritual being thus requires nonviolent practice: the overcoming of violent desire.'




'No need for yet another inventory of disturbances in the environment, our bodies, and our psychic balance. The enemy of nature is not oil or pesticides or factories or bulldozers but capital, “that ubiquitous, all-powerful and greatly misunderstood dynamo that drives our society.”


While traditionally the marketplace is a means of exchanging goods for money so as to purchase other goods, under capitalism it becomes a way of accumulating money.'


“Pure quantity,” says Kovel, “can swell infinitely without reference to the external world.”


There lies the source of our ecological crisis.


Joel was one of the liveliest, deepest, passionate thinkers of recent times, one whose investigations never lost sight of the ‘what’s the point’ question, setting the quest for knowledge and human self-understanding within the cosmic longing for meaning. He understood well the spiritual emptiness of the destinationless voyage. His work was motivated by the concern to recover personal and planetary health and from within the concomitant material and spiritual devaluation, degradation and devastation of the capital system. He was an ecosocialist. Many may be surprised to find that he also became a Christian. There’s no surprise in that for me. He was a very particular kind of socialist, Marxist and Christian, a Blakean kind. The title of his memoirs, 'lost traveller,' came from Blake. I read Joel’s writings on William Blake years ago, and it was his arguments there that played a big role in setting me off in the direction I took. I'll be forever grateful to Joel for the way he encouraged me to rediscover Blake, and see that Blake was not hopelessly confused and obscure after all, but crystal clear in keeping the divine vision in a time of trouble. Joel did that too, which is quite some achievement in these despiritualized times. Call it “Spirit Reason” with Winstanley; call it “Imagination” with Blake. And with Marx refer to that powerful self-transformative process by which human beings make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing …Joel Kovel was aware that that emancipatory force, this revolutionary-practical incursion of human beings as creative, knowledge subjects into the fetishised and alienated 'matter' of the capital system was as spiritual as it was material, a force that is our best, last and only hope for humanity in the face of eco-catastrophe. That catastrophe, Joel knew well, had its roots in the capital system’s false materialism. It’s not that capital is materialistic, but that it is not materialist enough, not in the right way. And a genuine materialism entails a respiritualization. Joel’s affirmation of spirituality is a concrete emancipation that is incarnated in communities of practice and solidarity the world over, involving a commitment to realize the most profound truths of human existence in a material reality that is personal, communal and spiritual. In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel argued: 'Man is essentially here and now.' Joel Kovel never lost sight of the immediacy of the key questions of social and environmental justice. He was an ecosocialist who understood that to be effective environmentalism needed a solid foundation in people’s practical concerns and interests, something more than an abstract concern for planetary health in the distant future. He never lost sight of that future, though, and understood that struggles in the present only gain their meaning in relation to something greater than self-, sectional and material interest. He had the future health of the planet in mind at all times. And he had the spiritual health of humanity in mind too. He was a seeker with a spirit set on eternity.


Joel will be well and lovingly remembered. We need his words and his example and his inspiration today and in the years to come.


There are few things more admirable than the figure of a man who, in the midst of an arrogant, people- and planet-hating hubris, continued to stand and speak up for all of humanity, for the earth and for the respect of its living force, called back the spirit in the cause of liberation, and brought a psychic depth and moral seriousness to the cause of socialist transformation. Joel often found himself a lone voice as a result of his independent mind. But, to me, he is the voice of the true America, the voice of truth, exposing egoism, greed, and power, and the system that aggressively promotes them, to be the wretched deceits they are. Joel understood that to identify and realize the possibilities for liberation that exist, it was necessary to engage politically with the power structures of the world, while never losing sight of the ultimate emancipatory concern. And he understood well how deep that ultimate concern went. He was willing to embrace all emancipatory movements who sought to realize the unmet needs and unrecognised dignity of all human beings, irrespective of race, nation, class or creed – and he taught us how to embrace spirit out of an undogmatic humanist conviction, emphasising what unites us rather than what divides us, seeking unity around the core principle, as against division through adherence to the symbol. Joel was unafraid to take the radical stances his undogmatic investigations demanded of him. He was courageous, a leader who, in being prepared to go alone if need be, established a trail for others to follow. His example shows that whilst the possibilities of radical transformation may always seem slight, our world is too valuable to surrender to the organised forces of money and might. At a global level, millions now share that view.


I thank Joel for his inspiring words and example, which we will assuredly need in the difficult times that lie before us. Joel, ‘lost traveler’ as he was, showed us that there is indeed a destination, a true home awaiting us, so long as we are prepared to undertake the voyage.


And that is all I have to say. And I shall miss him.


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