ABSTRACT
As Marx acknowledges, every phase of capitalist advancement depends on the reconsolidation of the nature-labor dynamic. Accordingly, I argue in this chapter that the rise of the green capitalist complex in the post-1968 period symbolizes an effort by the capitalist class to manage the crisis of biocentric collapse alongside counterrevolutionary mechanisms to subvert any challenge to its hegemonic redesign. My argument here runs counter to the ways scholars have interpreted the “environmental decade” by locating the mechanisms of continuing dispossession and control in the very regulatory policies that were thought to protect nature itself. Rather, this top-down management of nature parallels the counterrevolutionary repression, which smashed residual radical movements in the post-1968 period. The green capitalist complex emerges out of the crises of the 1970s during which we also see the blossoming of neoliberalism as the predominant socioeconomic order. By understanding the history of the green capitalist complex and its effects, we can also gauge the response by eco-militant groups like Earth First! that sought to move beyond the dominant paradigm of eco-political consensus, and by doing so, challenged the reformist outlook championed by mainstream environmentalism.
