Creating an Ecological Socialist Future

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Creating an ecological socialist future
Arran Gare
To cite this Article Gare, Arran(2000) 'Creating an ecological socialist future', Capitalism Nature Socialism, 11: 2, 23 — 40
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just
one who
appreciates this made substance,
or to any
other point
in
the plenum
of the
universe
— and,
critically,
to do so as a
social actor,
a member
not
simply
of
neighborhoods,
or
ethnicities,
or
nation-states,
but
of the
human community,
and of the
natural order
in
which this
community participates.
The
actual sense
of the
"whole" consists
of the
ensemble
of
such integrated structures
as
arise
in the
course
of
this
process
and of
their unlimited extension outward.
The
moment
of
ecosocialist transformation
is
constituted when this reaches
a
degree
of
development such that
the
filiations with capital dissolve.
At
each
point, capital's grip
is to be
challenged;
and to the
extent that each
point
is
achieved,
so
will that grip
be
weakened.
At
some point,
therefore,
it
will give
way, not
simply objectivistically,
in
terms
of the
apparatus
of
indoctrination
and
control,
but
also subjectively,
in
terms
of
its
internalized colonies
of
desire
and
rationalization.
But the
exact
specification
of
that point,
and
what leads
up to it, is a
matter
for
another essay.
Creating an Ecological Socialist Future
By Arran Gare
1.
Introduction
The growth
of
transnational corporations
and
financial institutions
together with developments
in
communication, information, transport
and manufacturing technologies, have metamorphozed capitalism.
It is
now more aggressive, more powerful
and
more unmanageable than ever
before.
The
global
web of
information
and
communication
has
annulled
temporal/spatial distance
for a new
class
of
managers
and
speculators,
emancipating them from territorial constraints.
As
Zygmunt Bauman
observed:
Elites travel
in
space,
and
travel faster than ever
before,
but the
spread
and
density
of the
power
web
they weave
is not
dependent
on
that travel. Thanks
to
the
new
"body-less-ness"
of
power
in its
mainly
financial form,
the
power-holders become truly
ex-
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territorial even if, bodily, they happen to stay uin
place/91
As such people gain the power to move out of their locality at will,
"others watch helplessly as the locality they inhabit moves out from
under their feet."2 This system is not only oppressing more people than
ever, it is driving civilization inexorably towards global ecological
destruction.3 As the most advanced studies of the greenhouse effect
show,
Large swaths of the planet will be plunged into
misery by climate change in the next 50 years, with
many millions ravaged by hunger, water shortages
and flooding....[P]arts of the Amazon rainforest will
turn into desert by 2050, threatening the world with
an unstoppable greenhouse effect....Land temperatures
will go up 6C by the end of the next century.4
Just when alternatives to capitalism are required most desperately,
socialism has lost its credibility. Why? Did the partial implementation
of socialism prove its inadequacy? Has critical consciousness been
dissolved by capitalist hyperculture? Has the new de-territorialized
power of the network society outflanked socialism? Or is something
more complex involved? This situation calls for a reassessment of the
socialist ideas which once inspired people to long and heroic straggle. If
the socially and environmentally destructive imperatives of globalized
capitalism are to be overcome and global ecological destruction avoided,
it is first necessary to understand what we have lost and why. With this
understanding we must then forge a new path into the future.
l Zygmunt Bauman, "Time and Class," Arena Journal, New Series, 10, 1988,
p.
77. This is the subject of Manuel Castells' monumental three volume
study, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Oxford:
Blackwells, 1996-98), esp. Volume 1, The Rise of the Network Society.
2 Bauman, op. cit.
3 For an analysis of this, see Stephen G. Bunker in Underdeveloping the
Amazon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and the essays in
Martin O'Connor, ed., Is Capitalism Sustainable? (New York: Guilford
Press,
1994).
4 Paul Brown, The Guardian Weekly, 159, 19, November 8, p. 1, reporting
on "Climate Change and its Impacts: Some Highlights from the Ongoing
UK Research Programme: A First Look at Results from the Hadley Centre's
new Climate Model."
24
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2*
Utopias and the Significance of Their Loss
While there were clearly differences between socialist movements,
in retrospect we can see they had far more in common than was once
believed. Their proponents were inspired by a vision of the future in
which improvements in the means of production generated by
capitalism would be utilized to benefit all humanity. This was
combined with a coherent interpretation of history to account for how
society had arrived at its present state and some idea of what kinds of
action and struggle would be necessary to realize their visions of the
future. We can see that people were living one of several versions of a
grand narrative. They experienced themselves as participants in an
unfinished story defining the past and the present state of affairs and
projecting a future, a future, which while building on past
achievements, would overcome present problems — a future they were
participating in creating.
That is, people were inspired by Utopias. A Utopia transcends the
present, putting the existing social order into question and forcing
people to experience its contingency. It is a dream; but contrary to
prejudice, it is a dream that wants to be realized. As Paul Ricoeur noted,
"A Utopia shatters a given order and it is only when it starts shattering
order that it is a Utopia. A Utopia is then always in the process of being
realized."5 It was such Utopian visions which inspired people in the past
to their heroic efforts to create a better world.
As participants in realizing a Utopia, people were provided with a
totalizing perspective to grasp the past and the present. With the loss of
the Utopian dream we are losing this totalizing perspective and thereby
the ability to understand ourselves. We are left living through an ever
recurring present with at best a fading nostalgia for a past which seemed
to have a future. It is from the perspective of a society which had not
yet completely lost its Utopian visions and corresponding perspectives,
but anticipating this loss, that this ever recurring present becomes
comprehensible. In a passage which reads like an account of the
postmodern condition, Karl Mannheim wrote in 1929:
Whenever the Utopia disappears, history ceases to be a
process leading to an ultimate end. The frame of
reference according to which we evaluate facts
vanishes and we are left with a series of events all
equal as far as their inner significance is concerned.
5 Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), p. 273.
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The concept of historical time which led to qualitative
different epochs disappears, and history becomes more
and more like undifferentiated space. All those
elements of thought which are rooted in Utopias are
now viewed from a sceptical relativist point of view.6
Mannheim speculated on the effect of a future condition utterly devoid
of Utopian elements: u[T]he complete elimination of reality-
transcending elements from our world would lead us to a
'matter-of-
factness' which ultimately would mean the decay of the human will."7
Ricoeur, reviving Mannheim's insights, has argued that the death
of Utopia would be the death of society, since society would no longer
have any project, any prospective goals.8 Society is not entirely dead.
There is still the Utopia of the economic rationalists, a world
completely dominated by consumer sovereignty as expressed through
free markets, with the realm of politics as well as economics,
consumers as well as natural resources, workers, managers and
entrepreneurs, constrained by competition to function as raw material
and efficient components of the world economy. When realized, this
will not only maximize the available quantity of goods and range of
choices available to consumers, but continually generate new products
and new choices to titillate people's appetites — or at least the
appetites of those who have not yet been rendered redundant by
technological progress. Since welfare institutions and institutions
protecting national economies have not yet been totally dismantled, this
vision still retains a Utopian distance from reality and still inspires
people. But the community of people who previously were inspired by
socialism, at least for the time being, is dead.
3.
Why the Old Socialist Utopias Failed
Why is this so? The strengths and weaknesses of socialism are
most clearly revealed in the ideas of Marx and the Marxists. Marx spoke
of a future society in which the dehumanizing processes of capitalism
had been overcome, where I would be able "to hunt in the morning, fish
in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as
I have a mind."9 But he also pointed out that capitalist society tends to
6 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, trans.
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1936), p. 253.
7
Ibid.
p. 262.
8 Ricoeur, op. cit., p. xxi.
9 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The German Ideology," The Marx-Engels
Reader, second edition (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 160.
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pervert
the
thinking
of
even those opposed
to it. In
characterizing
the
first phase
of
communism, crude communism,
he
wrote:
The category
of
labourer
is not
done away with,
but
extended
to all
men...Just
as the
woman passes from
marriage
to
general prostitution,
so the
entire world
of wealth...passes from
the
relationship
of
exclusive
marriage with
the
owner
of
private property
to a
state
of universal prostitution with
the
community.
In
negating
the
personality
of man in
every sphere, this
type
of
communism
is
really nothing
but the
logical
expression
of
private property, which
is
this
negation. General envy constituting itself
as a
power
is
the
disguise
in
which avarice re-establishes itself
and satisfies
itself,
only
in
another way....The crude
communism
is
only
the
consummation
of
this envy
and
of
this levelling down proceeding from
the
preconceived minimum....How little this annulment
of private property
is
really
an
appropriation
is in
fact
proved
by the
abstract negation
of the
entire world
of
culture
and
civilization,
the
regression
of the
unnatural simplicity
of the
poor
and
undemanding
man
who has not
only failed
to go
beyond private
property,
but has not yet
even attained
to it.10
While Marx never abandoned
his
Utopian vision,
it
became
the
esoteric content
of his
work.
In The
Communist Manifesto
and
most
of
his subsequent works,
he
addressed himself first
of all to
oppressed
workers,
the
proletariat.
The
proletariat were portrayed
as the
only
significant actors
in
realizing socialism
— as
though socialism
expressed only their interests rather than being
of
universal interest.
Marx spoke
of the
future
as a
state
in
which
the
fetters
on
productive
forces have been removed, where
"the
proletariat will
use its
political
supremacy to...centralize
all
instruments
of
production
in the
hands
of
the State,
i.e., of the
proletariat organised
as the
ruling class;
and to
increase
the
total productive forces
as
quickly
as
possible."11 Here
the
proletariat, instead
of
being dissolved along with
the
capitalist mode
of
production which constitutes them
as the
laboring class, replace
the
bourgeoisie
as
organizers
of
production. They
are
portrayed
as an
alternative ruling class.
The
ultimate goal
of
society
is
represented
as
10 Karl Marx, "Economic
and
Philosophic Manuscipts
of
1844,"
ibid., p.
82f.
11
Marx
and
Engels, "Manifesto
of the
Communist Party,"
ibid., p. 490.
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the same
as the
ultimate goal
by
capitalist society
— to
increase
indefinitely
the
production
of
goods
for
consumption. Although
it was
opposed
by
such Marxists
as
Aleksandr Bogdanov, lurii Lunacharsky,
Ernst Bloch
and
Herbert Marcuse,
the
promotion
of
this vision
of the
future
by
communists,
and
attempts
to
realize
it in the
former Soviet
Union
and
other supposedly communist countries, severely repressed
the deeper Utopian dimension
of
Marx's thought. While striving
to
overcome oppression
and
defending themselves from outside attack,
communists
in
turn created oppressive societies which matched
the
ecological destructiveness
of
capitalism.
The
identification
of
such
societies with socialism
has
seriously weakened
not
only Marxism,
but
all socialist opposition
to
capitalism.
Focusing exclusively
on the
proletariat (while dismissing
all
people
who are
neither proletarians
nor
bourgeois
as
"petty bourgeois")
also vitiated
the
orthodox Marxist analysis
of
history.
If
crude
communism
is a
defective vision
of the
future,
it is
defective largely
because
it is the
vision
of
people
who are an
integral component
of
capitalist society, people
who
conceived
the
whole
of
history
in
relation
to
the
existing social form.
As
Marx himself noted: "What
is
called
historical evolution depends
in
general
on the
fact that
the
latest form
regards earlier ones
as
stages
in the
development
of itself..."12 But
history
is
much more complex,
and the
future
is
always open,
and
those
who fundamentally change society
are
those
who are
able
to
create
new
social forms.
The
proletariat
are the
equivalent
of the
slaves
in
Ancient
society
or the
serfs
in
medieval society. Although slaves
and
serfs often
rebelled
and in
doing
so
weakened
the
order they were rebelling against,
they
did not
establish radically
new
social forms.
The
impetus
for
creating
new
social forms came from people
who had
escaped from
the
dominant mode
of
production, people whose consciousness developed
with
new
modes
of
production which they
had
been able
to
establish
within
the
niches provided
by the
dominant mode.
The
backbone
of
feudal society
was
provided
by the
Christian monasteries which
had
been able
to
establish
new
social forms within
the
niches provided
by
the Roman Empire.
The
bourgeoisie,
as an
effective class,
was
made
possible
by the
towns
and
cities, originally based
on
craft industries
and
commerce, which
had
formed, slowly developed
and
then increased their
power throughout
the
Middle Ages. Providing refuge
for
people fleeing
feudal relations
of
production these towns generated
an
economy
and
culture
on
which members
of the old
ruling class became increasingly
12 Karl Marx,
A
Contribution
to the
Critique
of
Political Economy,
S.W.
Ryazaskaya, trans. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970),
p. 211.
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dependent. The commercial capitalism of these towns generated the
conditions for the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it was
through the extension of commerce organized through towns and cities
that the bourgeoisie was able to challenge and then dominate other
classes, including the peasantry, and impose a capitalist mode of
production on the whole of society, reforming all the institutions which
had developed under feudalism to function within this new mode of
production.13
4.
An Ecological Socialist Utopia
What these analyses suggest is that a socialist engagement with the
ecological crisis under present circumstances, to be effective, must
combine a critical analysis of the socially and environmentally
destructive imperatives of globalizing capitalism with the reconstruc-
tion of a Utopian vision of the future, a vision within which the
problems and class divisions of the present have been resolved, and to
reveal how to begin creating this new mode of production from within
capitalism. This vision of the future should be much more radical than
orthodox socialists have been prepared to consider, a vision which not
merely calls for more of what we presently have but which affirms
values for the whole of humanity unrealizable under the present regime.
If environmental destruction is to be overcome it is not only necessary
to expose and attack the exploitation and destruction of the existing
social order. It is necessary to provide a compelling alternative to the
consumerism of the affluent to which most people in the world now
aspire, and justify this alternative.14 It is necessary to justify, affirm
and celebrate the value of human creativity, sociality, sensitivity and
cultural life, and beyond this, of all life, practically and theoretically in
a way barely imaginable, at least under normal circumstances, within a
capitalist regime.
What kind of socio-economic order could replace capitalism? The
market, which reduces everything and everyone to instruments and
mystifies the relationships between people and between humanity and
nature, not only does not provide the feedback necessary to preserve the
environment, but steers economic activity towards its destruction. It
must be severely constrained by any future socio-economic formation.15
13 On this, see Stewart R. Clegg, Frameworks of Power (London: Sage,
1989),
p.
242ff.
14 The best analysis of this consumerism and its insatiability is provided by
Baudrillard. See Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
15 This is the "second contradiction" of capitalism.
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However, there is more to environmental destruction than the
imperatives of the market as such. What has facilitated such destruction
has been the structures of power associated with financial,
organizational and regional differentiation, both within and between
nations, created by this market. These power structures have stunted the
development of, or subverted, the institutions which could have
controlled the market's destructive tendencies.16 The greatest
environmental destruction occurs with regional exploitation, where
those whose lives are adversely affected by such destruction, the poor of
the peripheries of the world economy, have been rendered powerless
against it. More fundamentally, people are now dominated by a
mechanistic cosmology according to which life can be nothing but a
struggle for survival and domination; nature and people when not
viewed as threats, can only be construed as resources to be used
efficiently, and the only value to which anyone can aspire is to have
more power to satisfy their appetites. With this cosmology people have
been blinded to the natural and social destruction wrought by capitalism
and rendered incapable of even imagining that there could be a better
form of society.
To augment the environmental conditions of human life will
require the creation of a socio-economic formation which eliminates or
controls the destructive imperatives of the market, a formation free of
present hierarchies of power between regions, nations and classes and
free from the division between organizers and organized. This will be
possible only if the mechanistic world-view is replaced by a new;
cosmology according to which the ends of social life can be redefined
from maximizing the production and consumption of commodities to
the development of the potentialities of each individual to participate as
fully as possible in the creative becoming of nature, society and culture.
Then, as Marx put it, "[w]e shall have an association in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all."17
While much work is required to fully develop this alternative
vision of the future, it is sufficiently specified to begin thinking about
how we could begin to realize it. The present state of global capitalism
makes it unlikely that a class struggle led by the proletariat could
realize this vision of the future. Overcoming the present order must be
reconceived on the basis of a more complex understanding of the history
of civilization and of present societies. If the way feudalism was
replaced by capitalism is any guide, capitalism will be undermined by
16
Bunker,
in op. cit., shows how this has occurred.
17 "Manifesto of the Communist Party," op. cit., p. 491.
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those people who are able to develop new socio-economic forms within
the environment it has created, forms which once established can be
developed and strengthened to provide the foundation from which the
capitalist mode of production and its corresponding social forms can be
overwhelmed. The problem for eco-socialists is then how to establish
the requisite social forms within the environment created by the
existing global economy.
So The State of Anglophone Nations
The possibilities open to people to act against the destructive
imperatives of the global market vary tremendously throughout the
world. What steps and paths might be open to people in Africa or India
might not be open to people in South America or Eastern Europe.
Western Europe, with the exception of Great Britain, already appears to
be responding differently to the new phase of capitalism than the U.S.,
Canada, New Zealand or Australia.18 It is in Anglophone countries, in
which industrial capitalism originated and has been most deeply
entrenched, that the last phase of capitalism has been most fully
embraced and alternative visions most fully eliminated. These countries,
where each individual consumes more resources and produces more
pollution than anywhere else on earth, are also doing most to power the
globalization of the world economy, to undermine anti-systemic
movements, and to undermine the conditions for addressing
environmental problems. For this reason I will focus on the prospects
for socialist action in such countries.
As noted, the integration at a global level of transnational
organizations and the decentralization of capital accumulation have
profoundly disrupted local societies, and this is particularly true in
Anglophone nations. Here, as John Ralston Saul noted, "we are now in
the midst of a coup d'etat in slow motion."19 The managerial
revolution, described by James Burnham in 1942,20 is completing itself
in a new form and is now unravelling all the democratic advances that
18 Some idea of the creative response to globalization coming from Europe
can be gained from Hans-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, The Global
Trap: Globalization and the Assault on Democracy and Prosperity [1996],
Peter Carmiller, trans. (London: Zed Books, 1997).
19 John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1997), p. 94.
20 See James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution [1942] (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1962). The new phase of the managerial revolution involves
managers using their positions to become capitalists rather than simply
replacing capitalists.
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were made following the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Under pressure from these managers and their ideologues, the
economists, all major political parties in these countries have embraced
aneo-liberalism," dismantling trade barriers and controls over financial
institutions, freeing trasnational corporations to move capital around
the world without constraint, and reducing the cost of labor and
increasing the financial incentives to business. The wages and salaries
and conditions of most of the non-managerial workforce have declined,
security of employment has disappeared, tax revenues required to fund
social services have plummeted and social security nets are being
dismantled. In a world in which between 1960 and 1991 the top 20
percent of the world's population increased its share of world-wide
income from 30 percent to 60 percent between 1973 and 1990,21 real
hourly wages in the U.S. (leaving aside benefits) in the private business
economy fell by 12 percent and failed to rise at all between 1990 and
1997.22
Such changes are associated with the economic decline and
depopulation of whole regions, the north-west of England and the mid-
west of the United States being the most obvious examples. Most
dramatically affected are rural communities. The growing control by
agribusinesses over the methods of agriculture, over prices of both
agricultural inputs and produce has been steadily reducing margins to
farmers, driving increasing numbers off their farms and forcing the
remainder to overexploit their land to avoid bankruptcy.23 As the
farmers have left, the towns which had been the centers of rural life
have decayed.
All Anglophone societies are moving towards (and beyond) the
kind of society which emerged in Britain under the reign of Thatcher, a
society in which 30 percent of the population are marginalized and
excluded from the economy, 30 percent of the population have
structurally insecure employment, and only 40 percent of the
population have secure incomes.24 For governments of these countries,
the marginalized are not an economic problem but a law and order
21 Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 134,
188.
22 Robert Brenner, "The Economics of Global Turbulence," New Left
Review, 229, May/June 1998, p. 3. While there are occasional increases in
wages associated with upswings in the business cycle, these are more than
offset by declines during the regular, eight yearly recessions.
23 For a description of this see "Exporting Recession: The USA Pays the
Price," Jon Bennett with Susan George, The Hunger Machine (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1987), Ch. 6.
24
W.
Button, The State We're In (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 105.
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problem. In the U.S., five million people are now in prison, on
probation or on parole. Poverty is being simultaneously created and
criminalized. Above those excluded from the economy are the growing
army of part-time, casualized, contract and self-employed workers,
including professionals of all kinds, often having been sacked and then
rehired on a temporary, part-time basis. Global competition pits
members of this middle sector against one another both within and
between nations, destroys their craftsmanship and professionalism and
continually threatens to drop them out of the economy altogether.
Those above this class include the growing ranks of managers and
people living on speculative investments in property, shares and
currencies. The power of these managers is manifest in their incomes.
In 1978 corporate chief executives in the U.S. earned 60 times as much
as the average worker; in 1989 this had increased to 122 times, and in
1995 to 173 times.25 But even corporate executives are in constant fear
of losing their jobs. Politicians of both the right and purported left have
used and continue to use the full legislative and executive power of the
state to augment the power of transnational corporations and the new
globalized managerial class and to undermine all points of opposition to
them. There has been a massive concentration of media ownership, the
autonomy of educational and research institutions is being destroyed and
in politics, opposition to neo-liberalism has been taken off the agenda.
There is no end in sight. With further subordination of these economies
to the global economy, as wage, salary and contract workers face
unfettered competition for employment from both further advances in
labor-saving technology and the global reserve of unemployed and semi-
employed, it is inevitable that even greater proportions of the
populations of these countries will be excluded or marginalized by the
economy, and the careers of those still employed will become more
precarious.
What all this would suggest is that in the countries which are most
environmentally destructive and which are doing most to create the
conditions which will make addressing environmental problems
impossible, people in these countries are being forced into struggles for
economic survival which render them virtually powerless.
25 Dorothy Zinberg, The Australian, January 21, 1998, p. 41
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But is this the case? The new class of globally oriented managers
and speculators and their servants have created a political and
communication system which has not merely enabled them to ignore or
deny the destructive effects of their actions, but has rendered them
incapable of acknowledging the problems they are creating. This is a
classic instance of what Kent Flannery called "hypercoherence," the
situation in which complex institutions become increasingly
self-
serving to the detriment of the ecological and social systems from
which they emerged and upon which, ultimately, they are dependent.26
It is in such circumstances, precisely when these institutions appear all
powerful, that the whole system is most likely to fall apart. The
collapse of the Soviet Union illustrated this. In Anglophone countries,
as in the last days of the Soviet Union, figures are published showing
that life has never been better, economic output is increasing, share
prices are close to record heights, there is almost full employment and
environmental and other such problems are being addressed. But people
know that their own conditions are deteriorating. They are losing what
is left of their economic security and if they are not unemployed, they
are having to work harder than ever to retain what they have. And more
people are becoming aware at some level that an economy
exponentially expanding its use of reserves, destroying its resources and
increasing its rate of pollution cannot survive indefinitely.
Globalization means the previously privileged working and middle
classes of core zones of the world economy are beginning to be excluded
from the spoils of capitalist exploitation of semi-peripheries and
peripheries and are coming to experience the downside of capitalism
which had previously been borne by the impoverished of these exploited
regions. Reflecting on this, U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence
Summers was obliged to acknowledge, "a child bom today in New York
is less likely to live to the age of five than a child born in Shanghai."27
In effect, the Third World, previously controlled and exploited from the
core zones of the world economy from a distance, is being created
within the borders of the countries containing the core zones.
It is this, along with various technological developments, which
make new directions possible, and perhaps, inevitable. Jonathan
26 Kent V. Flannery, "The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations," Annual
Review of Ecology and Systematics, 3, 1972. Flannery's work has been
developed by Bunker to characterize the relationship between the core zones
and the peripheries of the global economy in Bunker, op. cit., esp. p. 248.
27 Cited by Brenner, op. cit., p. 4.
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Friedman concluded on the basis of his study of the effects of
globalization, "[disorder in the system produces simultaneously an era
of cultural creativity and of social reorganization. It includes economic
and personal depression as a triggering condition which may lead to the
exhilaration of newfound selfhood..."28 The proliferation of radical
movements, whether religious fundamentalist, right-wing
communitarian or whatever, is indicative of this. The problem with
such movements is that they do not properly confront what is causing
people's immediate and humanity's long-term problems; nor do they
provide real solutions.
Ecological socialism, which identifies the ultimate cause of social
and environmental destruction in the dynamics of global capitalism and
is able to reveal its effects on regions, nations, individuals and the
environment, has a clear advantage in this regard. It has the potential to
align people's anxieties, fears and concerns with problems confronting
all humanity by showing their common source. In this way it has the
potential to reveal the common interest of not only oppressed
individuals, classes and communities, but the whole of humanity in
overcoming these dynamics.
New ways of thinking and proposals for new kinds of organization,
to be effective, must first capture people's imaginations. As I have
argued, this involves revealing the relationship between their own lives,
the problems they are facing, and the broader problems of society with a
vision of the future. It involves showing them how to act now, from
within the present situation, to overcome these problems. The question
is,
what kind of action can be taken now, by people living in
Anglophone nations, against the prevailing order to create a new future?
It appears there is no hope, at least in the short term, of deflecting
national politics in these countries away from neo-liberalism with the
commitment to subordinating national economies to the global
economy (although this does not mean that environmentalists should
give up their efforts to create and advance green political parties). What
then can be done? One option is to work towards creating new socio-
economic forms at local levels. The dissolution of local communities
by ex-territorial powers should be fought, thereby providing
somewhere, other than right-wing communitarian movements, for
people to escape to.
28 Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage,
1994),
p. 252.
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7*
Eco-Socialism at the Local Level
The challenge is to create a network of mutually supporting,
partially autonomous alternative local economic systems which can
function as stepping stones for transforming the whole of society and
eventually for participating in the creation of an ecologically
sustainable world civilization. Such local economies have already begun
to emerge, and there is now a considerable body of work showing what
is required to establish and develop them.29 The central problem of
declining regions is a downward spiral during which wealth and
resources are drained off because the region is in decline. Individuals,
acting according to their own immediate interests, for instance banking
with national or transnational banks which never lend to locals, or
shopping outside the local community, destroy the economic
foundations of these communities. The solution involves reversing this
process, generating an upward spiral. There are a number of steps which
need to be taken. To begin with, it is necessary to control the flow of
money by establishing local credit societies or banks, and even local
currencies which oblige people to spend what they earn in the local
community. To reduce dependence on the outside economy it is
necessary to become more self-reliant. It is necessary to develop local
sources of energy, to reduce the consumption of energy and in rural
areas,
to develop organic and other low-external-input types of
agriculture.
Because there can be little competition and because people must be
satisfied as much as possible with what is locally available or
producable, a new orientation to work and consumption is required. To
inspire people to work efficiently and to free them from insatiable greed
of consumer society it is necessary to foster an economy where people
are able to gain fulfillment through their work.30 This means
promoting craftsmanship and professionalism and a new aesthetic
sensitivity to the world and the products of craftsmanship, and allowing
people to achieve the satisfaction which comes from working for the
good of society. It is necessary to create educational institutions,
29 Richard Douthwaite, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for
Security in an Unstable World (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1996), provides
an excellent review of work and achievements towards this end.
30 Hannah Arendt noted of people whose work had been reduced to
unfulfilling labor that spare time "is never spent on anything but
consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving
his appetites." (The Human Condition [Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press,
1958], p. 133.)
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newspapers, printing presses and radio stations to cultivate this new
orientation to life and the potentialities of people in the local region.
Crucially, it is necessary for people to utilize and develop the new
electronic forms of communication. What is required to achieve all
these things is the development of cooperatives, essentially worker
owned and controlled enterprises, which can ensure continued control
and employment, even when enterprises are not making profits.
All these steps, which when taken have simultaneously created
local economic stability and full employment, are also creating
economies which promote environmental sustainability and are
withdrawing people from the environmentally destructive juggernaut of
the global economy. While the Mondragon experiment is the most well
known of these, it is only one among many.31 Such measures have
been successfully implemented throughout the world. While many of
the localities involved have been rural communities or small towns,
parts of major cities in decline have revived their economies through
taking such measures. What this means is that ecologically viable
proto-socialist modes of production are being established within
advanced capitalist countries as the only effective response to
developments which are intensifying and will continue to intensify.
More and more people will need to embrace and commit themselves to
such forms if they are not to lose their livelihoods. What is required is,
firstly, to further such developments along these lines. But then it will
be necessary to consider what will be required for the continued success
and flourishing of such local economies.
To begin with, there is likely to be little resistance from the
mainstream economy and political institutions. After all, such local
economies are likely to reduce demands on social security and police
forces. But with their further development, as they become more
numerous, link up to support each other and become more prosperous,
and become power bases for forays into national and international
politics, they are bound to provoke aggression from the mainstream
economy. They will be seen both as a threat and as a new frontier for
exploitation. Increasingly, their members will have to consider the field
of power and how they can sustain themselves and expand within it.
Threats to these communities will require more radical developments to
sustain their autonomy. To begin with, it will be necessary to consider
more carefully what kind of economic relations need to be developed to
31 See Henck Thomas and Chris Logan, Mondragon: An Economic Analysis
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982). See also Douthwaite, op. cit., p.
161ff.
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avoid collapsing back into a capitalist mode of production. This will
involve working out how to maintain democratic control within
economic enterprises as these become larger and more complex and how
to organize exchanges with other local economies based on similar
principles and with the capitalist economy.32 It will be necessary to
work out, in an increasingly hostile environment, how to organize
politically to sustain these communities and, more broadly, to
neutralize hostility from, and then to take over and transform, existing
local, national and international political institutions. Much creative
work will be required to develop genuinely democratic political forms.33
Such developments will necessitate an increasing cultural differentiation
and then a concerted effort to develop an alternative culture from
mainstream society, utilizing the new forms of media as radicals in the
past succeeded by using the printing press.
Ultimately, the struggle to create an ecological socialist economy
will be determined by the ability of its proponents to create a culture
superior to the culture of capitalist societies. The development of local
economies in order to preserve people's livelihoods requires a
transcendence of the prevailing economic categories, the "forms of
existence" of capitalist economy. While capitalism, particularly in its
latest stage of development, is awesomely efficient at mass production
of goods, it undermines all non-instrumental values. It debases or
destroys everything through which people have gained a sense of their
identity, whether this be the work they engage in, the products of such
work or the 'services9 they provide. Furthermore, the logic of profit
maximization imposes defective forms of technology. This has become
particularly evident in information technology where a sequence of
Microsoft operating systems, increasingly bug-ridden and demanding
continual updating of software and computer hardware, have been
imposed on people — up until the introduction of Linux, a far superior
operating system developed in the public domain based on a gift
economy. To the extent that local economies have to enter into trade
with the capitalist economy, it is by offering what an economy
dominated by commodity fetishism cannot provide that such ecological
32André Gorz offers some preliminary thoughts on these issues in Paths to
Paradise [1983], Malcolm Imrie, trans. (London: Pluto Press, 1985).
33 In Arran Gare, Nihilism Inc.: Ecological Destruction and the Metaphysics
of Sustainability (Sydney: Eco-Logical Press, 1996), Chs. 15 and 16 I have
argued for a multi-leveled federated system as the most likely to achieve this
result.
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socialist economies will have an advantage. In other words, not only is
it necessary to overcome commodity fetishism and to treat work as
creative social expression in order to gain independence for and
democratic control over local economies and to utilize more efficient
forms of technology. The cultivation of such work will be the
condition for their continuing economic success.
This is an important start. However, the preservation and further
development of these economies will require the cultivation of values
and a vibrancy which inspires commitment. It will require the
development of people's organizational abilities to run democratically
complex economic enterprises and to create and participate in genuinely
democratic political organization, and a complex understanding of the
economic, social, political and psychological dynamics of both their
own and capitalist society. It will also require the cultivation and
maintenance of a work ethic which insulates people from the attractions
of a consumer culture and the associated tendency to commodity
fetishism. To achieve these ends, it will be necessary to develop a new
culture, a new understanding of humanity and its place in the cosmos in
practice and in theory. In particular, it will be necessary to produce new
historical narratives, including a new grand narratives, to reorient
people. This is necessary to provide individuals, cooperatives and
communities with identities as actors in the struggle to overcome the
global ecological crisis and to create the new future.
The development of such a culture should not be as difficult as
might first appear. As advances in philosophy and science have
undermined the mechanistic and social Darwinist cosmology which at
present legitimates capitalism, and as they have begun to justify and
develop a conception of humans as social, creative beings within a
dynamic nature, the autonomy of educational and research institutions
has been severely curtailed.34 At the same time, through their
domination by market imperatives, art, music, the writing of history
and literature have been trivialized. Capitalism no longer provides the
conditions for the further advancement of philosophy, science and the
arts,
or even the best forms of technology. What is required for the
development of the requisite cosmology and a revival of the arts is the
creation of the conditions under which people have the means and are
free of external constraints to advance intellectual and artistic inquiry.35
34On this, see David Dickson, The Politics of Science (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
35See Gare, op. cit., Chs. 13 and 14.
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To create and develop this new culture a far greater effort will be
required to develop the potentialities of people than occurs within a
capitalist society. This will involve creating educational institutions,
from kindergartens to universities, which socialize people into a culture
of creativity and sensitivity in which all people will become
simultaneously workers, horticulturists, engineers, computer
programmers, managers, historians, philosophers, scientists, poets,
musicians and artists, and will take the development of people's
potentialities to participate in this culture of creativity as the ultimate
end of society. Only in this way will such eco-socialist socio-economic
forms be able to survive, challenge, prevail over and then subordinate
the social mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production.
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