 |
| Politics & The Planet - to the left, Haiti under Duvalier deregulated land use and developers destroyed the lush forests once shared with more conservationally minded Dominica on the right. |
Where are we now and why?
Our world
now is faced with several major crises, each of them existential in their
nature. Any one of them has the potential to overwhelm human civilisation and
even the means for humanity to continue to exist in any meaningful way on our
planet.
We face:
-
Climate change in the form of global warming: 98%
of scientists agree that this is a result of human activity and, as things
stand today, at the end of what is likely to have been the warmest year in
history, we are on target for a climate increase on 1990 levels of between 4
and 5 degrees centigrade by the end of this century. To put this in context,
long before 5 degrees, we would face the collapse of much of the agriculture
that feeds all of us, along with hundreds of millions, even billions, of climate refugees and all the attendant conflict and misery you might expect.
-
Resource depletion: especially in respect of carbon fuels,
where we are around now at the Peak Oil point, where the majority of the oil on
the planet has already been extracted. Water and food resources are similarly under
intense strain.
-
Mass extinctions: human activity is now destroying
other species at a record level. WWF estimates the extinction rate to be
somewhere between one and ten thousand times the natural rate.
-
Gross record levels of human
inequality: earlier this year, we saw this powerfully illustrated by the
Oxfam double-decker bus demonstrating that if the 85 richest people of the planet got on board, the passengers on that one bus would own more than than the poorest 3.5 billion people combined; and later on we heard about how just 5
families in the UK are wealthier than the poorest 12.6 million people put together.
Wealth is concentrated in the hands not of the top 1%, but about one tenth of the
1%. This is infinitely greater than at any time in human history – even in the
feudal age
These
crises, from an ecosocialist perspective, as from the perspective of all socialists I imagine,
are very much driven by capitalism. As we know, capitalism is predicated on:
-
Theoretical infinity of supply and
demand, with the
ever-changing equilibrium point between these two forces setting the temporarily prevailing exchange value, or price.
-
Scarcity is inherent in this model, so the prospect of a resource
crisis which would concern most humans leaves the Lords of the Universe rubbing
their hands at the prospect of higher and higher profits. This is because anything that is scarce, anything that is not freely available (such as, for now, air) can be commodified - in other words, it can be owned and sold. The scarcer any commodity is relative to demand, the higher the price that can be expected to be paid by the consumer to the supplier and the greater the profit made. For example, if water is scarce, whoever owns it can make far more money out of this essential for our life than if it were in abundance.
Left to
continue as it is, we face a future of environmental degradation and growing human
conflict over things as basic as water and food. One prediction by John
Beddington, UK Chief Scientist in 2009, sees a “Perfect storm” of population
growth resource depletion and climate change as early as 2030. As the world's
population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food
prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the
worst-affected regions.
As the
ecosocialist thinker Joel Kovel has written:
“Having beaten back the
spectre of communism, the ideologues of capital even proclaimed that not just
Marxism, but history itself had come to an end. A generation later, the tables
appear to be reversed. We are now compelled to recognize the distinct
possibility that history may indeed come to an end thanks to capitalism–not in
triumph, however, but through the generalized ecological decay it causes.”
Why Ecosocialism?
So what is
ecosocialism, how is it different to socialism and why does it matter now?
There has
long been significant co-operation between greens and socialists given a shared
agenda in many areas – in the peace movement, in some aspects of social justice
and civil rights. We have seen Red-green coalitions in some European states and
it was a Green Left/Left Socialist coalition that delivered Iceland from the
bankers’ crisis of 2009 in a radically different way to the rest of the world,
refusing to pay all debts and jailing bankers and financiers as opposed to
underwriting their bonuses.
But significant
differences remain.
Among greens,
so-called deep ecologists do not always see markets as inherently hostile; some talk of
reforming and even saving capitalism from itself; to my mind a bit like hoping
to talk sense to Hitler, but there you are.
Among socialists,
on the hand the environmental agenda has often been viewed as separate from the
human. We can see in the works of some
who acted in the name of Soviet socialism a view of the environment as a
resource for use and consumption pretty much in a similar way to capitalism.
Stalin’s geo-engineering of central Asian waterways and the longterm
destruction of the Aral Sea, now barely a twentieth of its original surface
area, amply demonstrate that it is not just capitalism that kills nature.
 |
| Then & Now - the death of the Aral Sea |
Similarly, Trotsky, had this to say.
“The present distribution of mountains and
rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and seashores, cannot be
considered final… Through the machine, man is Socialist society will command
nature in its entirety, with its grouse and sturgeons. He will point out places
for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he
will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this
will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons.” (Wall, Rise of the Green Left, p80)
In the west
at the same time, Fabian Social Democracy’s rejection of revolution saw it
needing to compromise with capitalism. All it could offer was to somehow
outperform capitalism, but on capitalism’s own terms of maximising material
output. Sustainability was not a consideration.
The impact
of human industry has become more and more evident in recent decades and so the
evidence that an approach that is not purely human-focussed is vital has become overwhelmingly obvious from the ecosocialist perspective. But it isn’t
simply about the damage and danger of existing capitalist practices.
Dr Derek Wall,
a key ecosocialist thinker and former Principal Speaker for the Green Party,
has put it this way:
“The ecocentric element of green
philosophy stresses that other species – and even the Earth itself – have moral
standing; they cannot just be used without regards merely as instruments to
benefit humanity. This means that even if…severe environmental problems… did
not threaten human society, greens would still seek to combat them, because
they would threaten the diversity and beauty of our planet. In essence, greens
argue that the rest of nature has ethical status and cannot be used for human
gain without thought.” (Wall, The
No-Nonsense Guide to Green Politics, p47)
 |
| Dr Derek Wall |
So how
distinctive is this analysis? Is ecosocialism a distinctive philosophy or do we
simply allow labels to obscure an inherent commonality among all socialist
viewpoints?
Origins and Evolution of Ecosocialism
There is a
long history of thought which sets human harmony alongside harmony with nature.
At the heart of this thinking is the concept of The Commons where resources are shared between contemporaries and
fostered for future generations. This feature of resource ownership and use
goes back millennia – a simple example would be the right to graze cattle and
collect firewood on common land which was often seen in feudal society.
Modern
examples persist though – for example the harvesting of the Amazon by rubber
tappers who extract only small amounts from trees so that they will replenish
themselves by the following year, or the sustainable fishing methods of west
African communities, sharing the fruits of the sea.
The concept
of the Commons is central to most ecosocialist thinking, from ancient forms of
land use to modern car clubs. And there is a close linkage between early
radical movements from the Peasants Revolt of 1381, through the Diggers, Levellers and
Luddites to contemporary ecosocialist thinking.
But it is
the more recent thinkers and advocates of socialism that I would like to look
at. Long before the term ecosocialism or the tenets that however loosely
structure ecosocialist thought were formulated, we can see a concerns for
nature and humanity’s relationship with it informing the development of
socialist thought.
Ecosocialism and thinkers
Some of
ecosocialism’s earliest modern expressions can be traced back to the Romantic
movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This
moved on from the Enlightenment which had broken down so many old shibboleths
and created new ideas about human rights and equality.
The Romantic
thinkers were a reaction of sorts to the extreme rationalism of the
Enlightenment – they did not reject the Enlightenment but sought a reconnection
with nature, drawing on the ideals of a lost Eden, of a humane past informing
the future. They stressed not only the importance of human nature but also the importance of
humanity’s relationship with Nature itself.
Goethe
The German
writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe was linked to the “Sturm und Drang”
(Storm and Stress) movement which sought to express the extremes of emotion and
nature. His most famous work is like an ecosocialist nightmare – "Faust" tells of
a man who sells his soul to Satan in return for temporary possession of the
world.
And what
does he do with the world?
He builds and builds and builds. His motives though
are not necessarily founded on the evil which Satan represents – Faust wishes
to drive tragedy from the world, eliminate human struggle by conquering nature
and replacing it with a landscape forged in his own image. Only one small patch
of land remains resistant, a sand dune where an elderly couple live by a chapel
with a little bell and a garden full of linden trees. In spite of bribes and
threats, they refuse to give up their home.
 |
| Faust plays for his soul & the world |
Faust,
driven by the need to overcome nature itself, laments their resistance:
“That aged couple should have yielded
I want their lindens in my grip
Since these few trees are denied me
Undo my worldwide ownership
Hence is our soul upon the wrack
To feel, amid plenty, what we lack.”
In time,
they are eliminated by his obliging agents without him needing to instruct
them.
The late Marshall
Berman, the American Marxist academic, wrote that the couple “are the first embodiments in literature of
a category of people that is going to be very large in modern history: people
who are in the way – in the way of history, of progress, of development; people
who are classified, and disposed of, as obsolete.” (Berman, All That Is Solid Melts
Into Air, p67)
 |
| Left behind - if you don't move, we will surround you |
|
Between 1986
and 1996 alone, the academic Joel Kovel, of whom more later, notes that over three million
people were displaced by "conservation projects"; and at an earlier point, some three
hundred Shoshone Indians were killed in the development of Yosemite National Park in the United States.
Marx
Berman cited
Goethe’s Faust in his work, “All That Is
Solid Melts Into Air”, paraphrasing Karl Marx paraphrasing William
Shakespeare. The Faust story predated Marx, but it is a telling illustration of
the process Marx identified as “innovative
self-destruction”.
“All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to
face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations
with their fellow men.”
 |
| Karl Marx |
Capitalism’s
very nature requires anything predating it to ultimately be commodified,
consumed and reconstituted into something new, which will soon enough go
through the same process again and again, constantly reinventing itself in the
name of supposed progress.
It is a
progress born solely of the need for profit, the driver of capitalism. Engels was scandalised that housing in
the 1840s was being constructed with a maximum 40 year lifespan – even the
houses of the rich were to be pulled down again within a generation.
So even if
there is material progress, it is at a terrible cost:
“All that is solid – from the clothes
on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who
work the machines, to the houses and neighbourhoods the workers live in, to the
firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and
whole regions and even nations that embrace them all – all these are made to be
broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so that they
can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again
and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms.” (Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,
p99)
Marx called
this “a metabolic rift” between humanity and nature and although he did not
write directly about the environment, John Bellamy Foster in “Marx’s Ecology” argues
that ecological themes were a constant part of his thinking: in Capital, he describes
the origins of wealth as “labour is its father, and the earth its
mother”, as fine a definition of ecosocialist values as you could get.
Engels
 |
| Friedrich Engels |
Marx's friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels took
these themes further.
“Let us not, however, flatter
ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature, For each such
victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first
place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places
it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the
first…
Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature
like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature –
but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its
midst, and all out mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the
advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply
them correctly.” (Wall, Rise of the Green
Left, p73-74)
Morris
But perhaps
the first real emergence of a distinctively ecological Marxist view point came
in the form of William Morris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although
starting out as a poet, designer and artist very much rooted in the traditions
of the Romantic movement, he grew more political and eventually worked with
Eleanor Marx and with Engels himself in the Social Democratic Federation, Britain's first socialist party, and
authored numerous tracts on socialist change.
His best
known work is "News from Nowhere", not
a political tract as such, but a mix of science fiction, political fantasy and
polemic. In it, a time traveller goes far into a future England where an
egalitarian society lives in a sort of pastoral idyll. Gone are the great
smokestacks of Victorian London and in their place people live with nature.
 |
| William Morris |
This ideal
world is striking in a number of ways – gender equality has been achieved and
social class is absent. But Morris’ future society is also one of material
sufficiency – where people have adopted the
concept of enough. In the absence of the enduring competitiveness and
acquisition at the heart of capitalism, his vision of a socialist society is
one where humans draw wealth from an inner life of learning and creativity,
where there is still competition, but it is around intellectual and physical
achievement, not material gain.
These were
themes also taken up by John Ruskin and in Sheffield by Edward Carpenter.
Bogdanov & Proletkult
As we move
into the 20th century, harmony between humans and their environment
featured among many on the Russian Left in the years up to the October revolution.
The Social Revolutionary Party under Chernov, was rooted in peasant culture and
sought land reform as its primary aim
Feudalism
was abolished late in Russia but paradoxically this often led to a decline in
the peasants’ condition rather than any improvement. Although small by western
standards too, the rise of an industrial proletariat within the larger cities
followed the same patterns of exploitation in the factories and overcrowded
housing as elsewhere: but with many workers fairly newly arrived and driven to
the cities by the endemic poverty of the countryside, nostalgia for a better
past however idealised paralleled Morris in England. All that was solid had
indeed melted around them and this dislocation was fundamental to fostering the
conditions for eventual revolution.
Among the
Bolsheviks, Lenin’s rival for leader, Aleksander Bogdanov, advocated a less determinist
route for the party and identified environmental science as an important factor
in a revolutionary state. Interestingly, paralleling Morris, he used science
fiction to advocate some of his views, including a novel about a socialist
society on Mars. (Lenin was not impressed.)
 |
| Eco-Bolshevik Bogdanov |
Although he
left the party in 1913, Bogdanov resurfaced in 1917 to lead the Proletkult, an
independent body that promoted ideas to "integrate
production with natural laws and limits”, but was shut down in 1920 and the
Narkompros, the Education Ministry. Subsequently,
under Stalin, the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko was put in charge of
Soviet policy on agriculture and the environment and although he did improve
crop yields, his work was very much directed to support Stalinism. Ironically
echoing Trotsky, Lysenko "set about
to rearrange the Russian map” and conquer environmental limitations.
Kovel
In the latter part of the 20th century, ecosocialist thinking was developed
by the American psychologist and academic Joel Kovel. He was involved for a
time with the Green Party of the USA and was an unsuccessful rival to Ralph
Nader for the party’s Presidential nomination for the 2000 election. He is now
an advisory editor of Socialist Resistance.
In 2001, Kovel
and Michael Lowy, a member of the Fourth International, issued “An Ecosocialist Manifesto”, which
attempts to set out ecosocialist ideology.
In this, Kovel and
Löwy suggest that capitalist expansion causes both "crises of ecology" through "rampant
industrialization" and "societal breakdown" that springs
"from the form of imperialism known as globalization". They believe
that capitalism "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". (Wikipedia)
Kovel is
generally very critical of the idea of working within existing political
structures. He argues that especially where they do not acknowledge the values
of socialism, Greens are easily drawn into and neutralised by the establishment
– for him "that which does not
confront the system becomes its instrument".
He argues that
a truly green transformation of society cannot be achieved by technology and
regulation: drawing on Marx, he sees patterns of production and social
organisation as central to a sustainable society and planet. So Greens need to
be concerned about social change and social justice more than technology alone.
Equally
though he is critical of the development of socialism during the 20th
century –the Soviet Union’s rejection of Bogdanov and the Bolshevik
environmentalists was to him a perversion of true socialism. He sees a
continuity rather than a breach between Lenin, Trostsky and Stalin where
Lenin’s productivist outlook and Trotsky’s concept of a Communist Superman
moving rivers and mountains came into a devastating reality under Stalinist
bureaucracy.
 |
| Kovel rejected Trotsky's Soviet Superman |
So his
solutions sit in what he and Lowy called “first
epoch socialism”. In this, there is a return to the original socialist
concept of a free association of
producers and the recreation of the
Commons. As opposed to the concentration on the sale or exchange value of
products and services in capitalism, the focus is on use-value.
Use-value
would eliminate the built-in obsolescence of goods that sits at the heart of
capitalism. The pressure on resources would be greatly decreased if everyone shared
vehicles and free public transport eliminated the need for car ownership.
Similarly with any other product or service that could be shared; so Kovel sees
the development of things like Opensource software on the internet,
crowdsourcing projects like Wikimedia and public libraries as central to a
process he calls prefiguration.
Prefiguration
is the mental and psychological preparation of people for the great change from
the ethos and values of capitalism to a society where much more is shared and
held in common ownership. Where personal material gain is no longer the main
objective in life and where concepts of co-operation and sufficiency become the
norms of human development rather than viewed as wildly idealistic nonsense.
 |
| Joel Kovel |
To advance
this, he seeks the development of an ecosocialist party rooted in what he calls
communities of resistance – this is not a vanguard party like the Bolsheviks, but it
isn’t a parliamentary party either. Rather it is a vehicle for expressing the
intention to end capitalism through a transformation of social values. It
should participate in elections but not engage in power sharing with
established parties because here, he believes, it would be fatally compromised
and undermined.
Instead, he
wants ecosocialists to work through community organisations and trade unions to
establish the new outlook needed for a peaceful
ecosocialist revolution where, as attitudes change even among agents of the state such as the police, there will be a
spontaneous move to a new paradigm.
Post-revolution,
Kovel foresees an assembly of revolutionaries overseeing the transfer of
capital into the hands of various self-governing communities – some
geographical but others self-governing functional communities, such as health
care or education. Money would continue but would be heavily regulated to
support user value rather than be a commodity in its own right. An
international trade body, democratically selected, would set an ecological
value on goods to encourage things like organic agriculture and penalise
production that damaged people or planet.
Worker
ownership would be a major feature, but so too would be the valuing of
activities such as child-rearing and care which are devalued under capitalism.
Creativity could be more valued and Kovel foresees a time when many activities
currently viewed as hobbies become valued activities in their own right. As
people refocus on intrinsic human values, the understanding and acceptance of
ecological limits would become a given and society would embrace social justice
within a sustainable environment.
Ostrom, Wall and Angus
More
recently, ecosocialism has been advocated by writers and activists like Derek
Wall in the Green Party and Ian Angus, who heads up the Canadian based
Climate & Capitalism web journal. Wall in particular develops on from the works of the
American economist and Nobel Prize Winner, Elinor Ostrom. She drew heavily on the examples of Latin
American indigenous people in sharing and conserving their environment and its
resources as possible examples for wider sustainable living.
 |
| Elinor Ostrom |
Ecosocialists
are present now in a number of political parties and independently. We
collaborate and exchange ideas through various bodies such as the Ecosocialist International Network and
social media forums like Ecosocialists Unite and Green Left and web journals like Climate and Capitalism.
Many came together a few years ago to sign the Belem Declaration, which sets out a manifesto for change and the
principles underlying our thinking.
Ecosocialism In Practice
Cuba
Is any of
this possible?
Ecosocialists
say yes – and look as a practical example to Cuba as well as to many other
examples particularly from Latin America.
Throughout
the Soviet period, Cuba was subsidised with food and oil from the USSR, both
essential given the longterm economic blockade of the Communist island by the
USA. So when the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba was left reeling as it faced both an
energy and food crisis. Washington must have been rubbing its hands in glee at
the prospect of the fall of yet another socialist state. But it was not to be.
Instead of decay and final collapse, Cuba
embraced a full-on transformation of its society. It carried out a revolution
in agriculture, using sustainable low-emissions permaculture to maximise land
use in an organic way. It adopted widespread use of renewable energy, fostered local
shops and services to reduce the need to travel and promoted public transport. Cuba
is the only country in the world recognised by the WWF as having achieved
sustainable development.
And this
shows in some striking ways – in spite of being blockaded since 1961, Cubans
live longer and are measurably happier than citizens of the United States of
America.
Now and Tomorrow: The Hope of
Ecosocialism
So we face
now both crises and opportunity. Even at the height of the Cold War, the existential nature of possible nuclear war was not as
pervasive or seemingly certain as the degradation of our biosphere and the exhaustion of our resources
we now face.
But just as
the threat is potentially so overwhelming, so too the opportunities have never been greater. We can
transform our world by shedding not only the patterns of capitalist society but
its mindset as well. With greater equality, co-operation and social justice, our planet can
sustain our species and all the others that inhabit it. We can transition to a
world where people have enough and where each of us can find the self-fulfilment and happiness central to the needs of every human being. Ecosocialism signposts the way forward to that.
To close,
I’d cite the romantic poet William Blake’s poem “The Auguries of Innocence”.
A robin redbreast
in a cage
Puts all
heaven in a rage
A dove-house
fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell
thro’ all religions
A dog starv’d
at his master’s gate
Predicts the
ruin of the state.
 |
| William Morris' "News from Nowhere" described a better, happier world. |
NB This piece originally was the basis of a contribution to a discussion on Ecosocialist Ideas at the Wakefield Socialist History Club in December 2014.
