Joel Stephen Kovel (August 27, 1936 – April 30, 2018) was an American psychiatrist, scholar, human rights activist, and author known as a founder of eco-socialism. Kovel became a psychoanalyst, but he abandoned psychoanalysis in 1985.
Background Kovel was born on August 27, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, immigrant Jews, were Louis Kovel (an accountant known for the "Kovel Rule") and Rose Farber. He attended Baldwin Senior High School (New York) in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York. In 1957, he received his B.S. summa cum laude from Yale University. In 1961, he received his M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and in 1977 was a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Institute, Downstate Medical Center Institute, Brooklyn, New York.
Career Academic From 1977 until 1983, he was Director of Residency Training, Department of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he was also Professor of Psychiatry from 1979 to 1986. From 1980 to 1985, he was an adjunct professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, as well as a frequent contributor to Dialectical Anthropology, a journal founded by his colleague Stanley Diamond. Much of his work during this period focused on Marxism and Sigmund Freud.
In 1986, Kovel abandoned the field of psychiatry. From 1986 to 1987, he was a visiting professor of Political Science and Communications, University of California, San Diego. He also held short-term positions as a Visiting Lecturer at San Diego State University in the spring of 1990 and another visiting professor position at UCSD in Winter 1993.
In 1988, Kovel was appointed Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies, a non-tenured position, at Bard College. In February 2009, he was informed that his position would not be renewed after the contract ended on June 20, 2009, and that he would be moved to emeritus status at that time. Kovel argued in a letter sent to the faculty of Bard College that his contract was not renewed due to his political views. He reiterated his argument in a statement posted on his official website that the "termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism". The college president Leon Botstein responded in a letter sent directly to Kovel by arguing that his termination was not political but part of a larger move by Bard to reduce part-time faculty. Botstein stated: "To take what is self-evidently a result of economic constraint and turn it into a trumped-up case of prejudice and political victimization insults not only your intelligence but the intelligence of your readers." While Kovel called his dismissal illegitimate and vowed to fight the decision, he left Bard permanently per the university's decision in 2009.
Political Kovel became involved in political activism in the 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War. He began to study Karl Marx which created a "conflict with his identity as a Freudian psychoanalyst", and led him to characterize himself as a "Marxist psychoanalyst", two categories which he described as "contrary" to each other. He would eventually abandon medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in 1985. He also worked in defense of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.
By the late 1980s, he became involved with the environmental movement. He then had a brief career with the Green Party of the United States, under which he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1998 and "sought the party's presidential nomination in Denver in 2000."
Kovel was an advisory editor of Socialist Resistance.
Personal life and death Kovel married Virginia Ryan, a nurse, with whom he had a daughter and a son before they divorced. He then married DeeDee Halleck, with whom he had a daughter.
Kovel died age 81 on April 30, 2018, in New York City from pneumonia and autoimmune encephalitis.
Views
Eco-socialism In 2001, Kovel and Michael Löwy, an anthropologist and member of the Trotskyist Fourth International, released An Ecosocialist Manifesto. which set out to define eco-socialism.
Critique of capitalist expansion and globalization Kovel was anti-capitalist and anti-globalization, seeing globalization as a force driven by capitalism; in turn, the rapid economic growth encouraged by globalization causes acute ecological crises.Kovel, J., The Enemy of Nature, 2002. He believed that capitalist firms have to continue to generate profit through a combination of continually intensifying exploitation and selling to new markets, meaning that capitalism must grow indefinitely to exist, which seems impossible on a planet of finite resources.
In the eco-socialist manifesto, Kovel and Löwy suggested that capitalist expansion causes both "crises of ecology" through "rampant industrialization" and "societal breakdown" that springs "from the form of imperialism known as globalization", and that capitalism's expansion "exposes ecosystems" to pollutants, habitat destruction, and resource depletion, "reducing the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital", while submerging "the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power", as it penetrates communities through "consumerism and depoliticization". Furthermore, Kovel saw the form of neoliberal globalization as "a return to the pure logic of capital" that "has effectively swept away measures which had inhibited capital's aggressivity, replacing them with naked exploitation of humanity and nature"; for Kovel, this "tearing down of boundaries", which was "a deliberate response to a serious accumulation crisis" in the 1970s, has become the definition of modern globalization.Joel Kovel: Why Ecosocialism Today?
As eco-socialists disagree with the elite theories of capitalism, which tend to label a specific class or social group as conspirators who construct a system that satisfies their greed and personal desires, Kovel suggested that the capitalist system itself is self-perpetuating, fuelled by extra-human or impersonal forces. He used the Bhopal Union-Carbide industrial disaster as an example. Many anti-corporation observers would blame the avarice of those at the top of many multi-national corporations. Conversely, Kovel traced systemic impulses. Union Carbide were experiencing a decrease in sales that led to falling profits which, due to stock market conditions, translated into a drop in share values. The depreciation of share value made many shareholders sell their stock, weakening the company, and leading to cost-cutting measures that eroded the safety procedures and mechanisms at the Bhopal site. Though this did not make Bhopal inevitable in Kovel's mind, it showed the effect market forces can have on increasing the likelihood of ecological and social problems.
Use and exchange value Kovel followed Marx's theories about the contradiction between use values and exchange values. As he wrote in The Enemy of Nature, within a market economy goods are not produced to meet needs but are produced to be exchanged for money that we then use to acquire other goods. As we have to keep selling in order to keep buying, we must persuade others to buy our goods just to ensure our survival, which leads to the production of goods with no previous use that can be sold to sustain our ability to buy other goods. Kovel stressed that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities, such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence, are unrewarded, while unnecessary economic activities earn certain individuals huge fortunes.
Role of the state and transnational organisations Capitalist expansion was seen by Kovel as being "hand in glove" with "corrupt and subservient client states" that repress dissent against the system, governed by international organisations "under the overall supervision of the Western powers and the superpower United States", which subordinate peripheral nations economically and militarily. Kovel further said that capitalism itself spurs conflict and ultimately war. Kovel stated that the war on terror between Islamist extremists and the United States is caused by "oil imperialism", whereby the capitalist nations require control over sources of energy, especially oil, which are necessary to continue intensive industrial growth"; in the quest for control of such resources, Kovel argued that the capitalist nations, specifically the United States, have come into conflict with the predominantly Muslim nations where oil is often found.
Kovel believed that state or self-regulation of markets does not solve the crisis "because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation", which is "unacceptable" for a growth-orientated system, and that terrorism and revolutionary impulses cannot be tackled properly "because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of empire". Eco-socialists feel that increasing repressive counter-terrorism increases alienation and causes further terrorism and believe that state counter-terrorist methods are, in Kovel and Löwy's words, "evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism", echoing Rosa Luxemburg's "stark choice" between "socialism or barbarism", which was believed to be a prediction of the coming of fascism and further forms of destructive capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. Luxemburg was in fact murdered by proto-fascist Freikorps in the revolutionary atmosphere of Germany in 1919.
Critique of other forms of green politics and socialism Kovel criticized many within the green movement for not being overtly anti-capitalist, for working within the existing capitalist, statist system, for voluntarism, or for reliance on technological fixes. He suggested that eco-socialism differs from green politics at the most fundamental level because the four pillars of green politics and the "Ten Key Values" of the Green Party of the United States do not include the demand for the emancipation of labor and the end of the separation between producers and the means of production.
Opposition to within-system approaches, voluntarism, and technological fixes Kovel was highly critical of those within the green movement who favour "working within the system"; while he recognized the ability of within-system approaches to raise awareness, and the belief that "the struggle for an ecologically rational world must include a struggle for the state", he believed that the mainstream green movement is too easily co-opted by the current powerful socio-political forces as it "passes from citizen-based activism to ponderous bureaucracies scuffling for 'a seat at the table'". For Kovel, capitalism is "happy to enlist" the Green movement for "convenience", "control over popular dissent", and "rationalization", and further attacked within-system green initiatives like carbon trading, which he saw as a "capitalist shell game" that turns pollution "into a fresh source of profit".
Kovel criticized the "defeatism" of voluntarism in some local forms of environmentalism that do not connect. He suggested that they can be "drawn off into individualism" or co-opted to the demands of capitalism, as in the case of certain recycling projects, where citizens are "induced to provide free labor" to waste management industries who are involved in the "capitalization of nature". He labelled the notion of voluntarism "ecopolitics without struggle".