A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #353 - CAPABLE OF TURNING GOLD INTO SHIT: EELV's New Alchemists (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

According to EELV[1], ecology is good for everything! Including waging 
war. Not a class war, of course! No, a real war like the one in 1939-40, 
which the Green Party doesn't spit on. But the one they really prefer is 
the future ecology of war. It's so good for the planet! Basically, 
ecology of war means: by insulating your attic and riding a bike, you 
contribute to the war effort by weakening our enemies, who have us by 
the balls because of our excessive need for gas and electricity, which 
they supply us and which fatten them.

Before addressing the question of ecology of war, we must focus on the 
concept of war economy, on which it is explicitly based and whose 
definition is deliberately left vague.

Maintained Obscurity
After the 2020 speech in which President Macron's "We are at war" 
justified strict travel restrictions due to the enemy called the 
coronavirus, it was another enemy, this time Russian, who was targeted 
on June 13, 2022, with the declaration that France, like the European 
Union, had entered "a war economy in which (...) we will have to 
organize ourselves for the long term." Confirmation in March 2025: 
"Russia has become, as I speak and for years to come, a threat to France 
and to Europe."»
Each of these statements capitalizes on the continued vagueness of the 
definition of the concept of a war economy, used primarily to cultivate 
fears of the threat of an external enemy (virus, Russian or otherwise), 
in order to mask the fact that the true war economy is illustrated by 
the measures taken by employers against an internal enemy: the vast 
majority of ordinary people, bled dry by austerity measures and the 
constant erosion of social gains and repression against those who protest.

The concept emerged in the years preceding the First World War. It is 
defined by the requisition of all industrial tools, labor, and even 
capital if necessary. It is the absolute subordination of the productive 
apparatus to the military effort. Production and consumption are 
organized by the state, whose administration controls all sectors of the 
economy. This was the case, for example, in France during the First 
World War, in Germany from 1935 onwards, and in the United States during 
World War II: they devoted a combined 40% of their GDP to the war 
effort, and much more even at the federal level.
It should be noted that at the time, the proponents of this new concept 
also saw the advantage of emerging from "capitalist anarchy" by bringing 
some order to unbridled liberalism. In short, a takeover by the state 
for the greater good of capitalist development, for whom ultraliberalism 
has never been anything more than an ideological lure to showcase 
freedom in the eyes of the naive.

Yet, currently in the conflicts that concern us, according to these 
criteria, only Ukraine, which devoted 37% of its GDP in 2023 to defense, 
is truly in a war economy. Its enemy, Russia, devotes only 6%! What is 
currently being discussed in France has nothing to do with the classic 
definition of a war economy. It involves increasing a budget of EUR50 
billion to over EUR90 billion in the coming years, i.e., increasing 
spending to 3% of GDP, from the current 2%, to rearm France in the 
context of "new conflicts" by producing more and faster.

For the record, throughout the Cold War, from 1947 to 1991, France 
devoted 7% to 3% (a gradual decline) of its GDP to defense. And at that 
time, we weren't talking about a war economy. Overall, in France, as in 
the rest of the world, military spending is steadily declining. It's not 
that wars are disappearing, but the means of controlling and 
annihilating "enemy" populations have expanded considerably and do not 
fall under the heading of "military spending." Having become 
"civilized," wars rely on new technologies, but that's another question 
(see CA 349 - April 2025).

Green politicians:
an old warrior tradition
It is in this context of a return to war rhetoric that the so-called 
political greens (EELV) have rushed to don the militarist garb by 
endorsing the "necessity of a war effort" championed by all political 
parties.

Sandrine Rousseau, an icon of ecofeminism, stated two years ago that 
"the strike force is today a pillar of our national defense" that she 
"wants to develop (...) towards a Franco-German agreement and a truly 
European army." Cyrielle Chatelain, president of the Green Party group 
in the National Assembly and member of the National Defense and Armed 
Forces Committee, declared during a debate on March 3, 2025, in the 
National Assembly: "The European Union must assert itself as a political 
force, which today, in this context, implies asserting itself as a 
military force."

A few days later, Marine Tondelier, national secretary of EELV, drove 
the point home by outlining what she saw as a wartime ecology: 
"Environmental spending contributes to our independence from the fossil 
fuel imperialisms of Russia and the United States." The debate she 
proposes on this issue is not at all about the relevance and substance 
of this militaristic orientation, but rather about the sole question of 
how to finance this war effort to revive the military-industrial complex 
and ensure "interoperability between European armies."
This is in line with the ideas that the ideologue-philosopher Pierre 
Charbonnier has been defending for several years, and on which the 
Greens now rely to justify their new positions without appearing to turn 
their backs on their ecological roots.
This analysis is based on an assertion by the philosopher (in Towards 
the Ecology of War, 2024): fossil fuels-gas, coal, and oil-have become 
weapons as dangerous as nuclear warheads during the Cold War, during 
which, on the contrary, they were tools of peace. A Western petty 
bourgeois vision.

Indeed, in contrast to the horrors committed on European soil in the 
first half of the 20th century, the relative absence of war for seventy 
years has allowed an image of peace to be attached to this long period, 
which our philosopher attributes to the development of fossil fuels, 
which forced the great powers to maintain a balance among themselves. 
But this is an angelic view of what he calls the "carbon peace" of the 
post-war period. A self-centered view of the Western world, Western 
Europe, and the United States, which ignores the fact that this peace 
was based solely on wars and massacres everywhere else: colonialism, 
post-fascist regimes in Latin America, dictatorships everywhere, etc.

That the Greens adhere to this vision of history is obviously not 
surprising. The horizon proposed by Charbonnier is entirely in line with 
the social and cultural identity of the official ecologists when he 
states: "It is difficult to imagine how the reorganization of the 
energy, production, and market system could be initiated without the 
active support[of the great powers], without power, precisely, or the 
desire to provide minimal security for the population, being put at the 
service of such a process." Championing an ecology that has lost all 
ambition to profoundly change the world, they are perfectly in tune with 
the postmodern zeitgeist, which seeks to consign any global project that 
might hold utopia to oblivion. Alongside war ecology, health ecology is 
flourishing, with its attendant themes of organic farming, eating well, 
and speaking well, which, instead of being merely elements that allow us 
to designate the abolition of social classes as a goal (not the ultimate 
one!), are themselves becoming an insurmountable horizon.

The figure of the traitor
serves to mask the responsibility of a system
Yet it would be a case of being silly to believe that this is a barely 
believable about-face by our Greens. Indeed, current militarism has a 
long history. The Greens have always aligned themselves with a 
comfortable Atlanticism by refusing to join the currents favoring 
leaving NATO, in order to further their strategy of integration into the 
political system. We should note their support for the bombing of Kosovo 
in 1999, Sarkozy's war in Libya, and the interventions in Iraq in the 
2010s. They also support Israel's right to defend itself after the Hamas 
attacks of October 7, 2023. In short, they effectively validate the idea 
that we are Westerners and proud of it.

This worldview has been championed since the movement's inception by 
their big brother, the German Greens, following the victory of the 
"Realo" party over the "Fundi"[2]. Joschka Fischer, a historic figure 
and founder of the German Greens along with Cohn-Bendit, who calls for a 
European atomic bomb by 2025, is the same man who, in 1999, supported 
the NATO bombing of Serbia when he was Foreign Minister! It was he who 
inaugurated the transmutation of militarism into virtuous action, like, 
twenty years later, the proponents of war ecology. Western operations in 
Afghanistan or in the Balkans were transformed into "military-humanist" 
interventions! "Arms, arms, and more arms," Anton Hofreiter, former 
chairman of the Green Party in the Bundestag, later squealed, demanding 
the delivery of long-range missiles to Ukraine, a move the SPD had refused.

Let's be clear: traitors only exist in spy novels, not in a materialist 
analysis of historical flows. They only exist in Stalinist or religious 
dialectics (under the name of renegades), which would have us believe 
that evil individuals (e.g., currently a Trump, a Putin, or a Macron) 
are leading the world to where it is. All it would take is eliminating 
them, with a blunderbuss or elections, for everything to be better in 
the best of all capitalist worlds.

The Greens are yellow,
we don't understand anything anymore! Returning to France, it is above 
all on the issue of nuclear power - which, let us remember, is the DNA 
of the French state's militaristic and pro-growth policies - that we 
find the roots of what sometimes appears to be a U-turn by the Greens. 
It has been a long time since Brice Lalonde and then De Rugy, key 
figures in political ecology, proclaimed themselves pro-nuclear; Voynet 
accepted the burial of waste in exchange for the shutdown of 
Superphénix, falsely attributed to the Green leader's fight, but in 
reality planned by the government for a long time because Superphénix 
was unreliable and too expensive. More recently, Yannick Jadot defended 
the maintenance of the existing nuclear fleet during his 2022 
presidential campaign, "until the network is balanced" to exit nuclear 
power. That is to say, never, since renewable energies are only intended 
to produce a portion of the expected increase in "our" electricity needs.

In short, the French Greens in government have been ahead of their time, 
now that nuclear power is considered by a political class united on this 
issue as the essential pillar of any decarbonization policy, in that it 
emits less CO2. The scam is a big one, but it works. Riding the wave of 
the post-1968 rejection of nuclear power, then endorsing it by 
participating in the destruction of the anti-nuclear movement, is just 
about the only track record they can claim. Fortunately, in recent 
years, an ecology linked to territorial control has emerged, opening up 
spaces into which we can plunge, with the aim of rebuilding the natural 
links between ecology and social struggles that Green politicians are 
constantly destroying.

But it must be said that the grassroots anti-nuclear movement itself has 
contributed to its own disappearance from the French political landscape 
by focusing on fears of the health hazard posed by nuclear fission and 
neglecting the "democratic danger" posed by nuclear power. Fear as a 
mobilizing factor has shifted its focus: from fear of radiation, waste, 
and accidents, we have moved on to fear of climate change and CO2. And, 
in both cases, we have set aside the danger to social relations that 
nuclear power and CO2 production entail.
It is high time for social and environmental struggles to come together. 
The September 10th movement, if it has any consequences, should 
encourage us to contribute to this.

JPD

Notes
[1]become THE environmentalists!

[2]The "realists" (realists) defended the idea that it was now necessary 
to participate in state bodies and elections. The "fundi" 
(fundamentalists) intended to maintain the revolutionary and 
anti-electoral foundations of the movement.

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4540
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