Grünen Kapitalismus - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

water-filtration facilities in Africa (CRSWire 2009), continues to manufacture
and sell dangerous products, notably the herbicide aminopyralid,
which has caused severe contamination in Great Britain (Davies 2008).
A further dimension of corporate-environmental PR is the increasing involvement
of corporations in higher education. Although corporations
in the US – represented by university trustees – have long set the outer
parameters of academic practice, there has been a growing tendency,
in recent years, toward more intimate engagement, both through the
adoption by universities of corporate administrative models (top-heavy
management, bloated salaries for high officials) and through the increased
contracting out of university-based research. Professors, especially
in areas like biology and medical research, are expected to draw an ever
higher portion of their compensation from outside sources (corporate or
governmental), which in turn define an increasingly narrow range of acceptable
research priorities. 180 The marginalization of ecologically inspired
environmental studies – from natural approaches to pest control and
aquifer replenishment to the development of models for radical reorganization
of production and consumption – takes on more and more the
aspect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, given that such studies fail to
attract funding, little serious attention is given (in a university context) to
their potential subject-matter, and, as a result, the proposals they might
generate are considered a priori to lack viability.
Cutting across all corporate insertions into the environmental debate is
the assumption that the basic instruments for responding to ecological
crisis are technology and the market. The technological fixation has been
a constant of capitalist development. Initially focused on maximizing labor
productivity, it is continuously replenished by ever more miraculous
applications, especially in the spheres of communication and of genetic
engineering. The unending proliferation of innovations – a hallmark
of late capitalism (Mandel 1975, 192) – lends credence, in public perception,
to the idea that there is no challenge that technology cannot overcome.
The unstated premise behind such claims is that the selection of
any technology will continue to reflect corporate interests, which in turn
reflect the goals implicit in market competition, i.e., profit-maximization,
growth, and accumulation. While green technologies – e.g., renewable
energy sources – may attract a degree of corporate attention (as a
180 For an overview of this development, see Soley 1995. For a discussion of specific research
partnerships in the area of biotechnology, see Geiger 2004, 213 ff.
241