Green Fades - a fond farewell to the party I love

(Written on 14 March)
This is, for a change, a personal piece - I rarely write here in the first person or about my own life or experiences, but today I make a possibly self-indulgent exception. Because this week, for the first time since either May 1977 or possibly 1978 - it's a while ago either way! - I am not a member of a political party, a state that, after all these years, seems mildly odd (when in truth, set against the population as a whole, it is membership of a party that is odd - fewer than one in ten people join one in their entire lifetimes).

After nearly 14 years, I have said goodbye to the Green Party of England & Wales. It may seem to some of my former colleagues and comrades a strange time to take such a step - after all, when have politics been as fascinatingly volatile as this frenetic week of Brexititis at Westminster? A hung Parliament has figuratively hung a Prime Minister, hoist on her own hubris and peculiar school-prefect-like mix of duty and disdain for lesser mortals. And of course the Opposition is little better - fracturing parties, policy changes by the day, while Brexiteers warn ominously of treason and Remainers of apocalypse. An election could be weeks away, or a referendum - or just a meltdown.

Great days for active politicos of any and all stripes in any and all capacities.

And as historic days pass by and our electorate scan the horizon for some hope, this could have been the time for Greens to have offered a new way forward - while still open to the world we care so much about, we could have been majoring on our core policies of fostering local economies and bringing manufacturing closer to home to create a fairer, more sustainable way of doing things. But instead we have been enthusiastically adding to the centrist narrative of almost any form of Brexit being the reality version of The Walking Dead.

I voted and campaigned for Remain, but the Greens' drive for a second vote from as soon as the results of the first one were declared completely ignored the reasons for the Leave victory - and fails to consider the possibly dire consequences to our politics if a second vote reversed the first by anything less than an overwhelming margin, something no polling evidence suggests even remotely likely. What better shot in the arm to Farage's Brexit Party than if say 47% still voted Leave and, as the centrists popped open the post-referendum champagne, his new party scooped up even just 35% of the vote at the next General Election? That same figure gave Tony Blair an outright majority in 2005.

But it is not only in Brexit that strange days have fallen on the Greens. After a record-breaking vote in 2015 under Natalie Bennett and a second-best ever result in 2017 in spite of fewer candidates and the Corbyn surge, a narrative took hold across the national echelons of the party that, in truth, these two amazing results were actually abject failures caused by the promotion of a far-left, almost bolshevist agenda. Apparently, there had been too much emphasis on the NHS, on renationalising the railways and energy sectors and tackling inequality. Time to turn back to talking simply about ecology and climate change - so now the strategy passed by the party last spring commits it to a path described in the document as "social liberalism".

What is "social liberalism"? Well, aside from it being the title of a vaguely social democratic group within the Lib Dems, it is usually used to describe a combination of mildly regulated free market economics with promotion of individual freedom. While it sees the role of government including ameliorating poverty and providing some level of social support, it does not fundamentally change capitalist economics nor challenge ownership of resources or concentration of wealth - at its heart is a policy of growth and managed/ prompted trickle down of wealth, a sort of kinder, gentler neoliberalism. How would ot could this ever provide the social and economic transformations needed so urgently to stop environmental catastrophe?

This is quite a contrast to the party I joined after hearing Caroline Lucas argue passionately on a panel about economic and social justice and about the ills of capitalism in 2005. It is a peculiar path to take and unnecessarily exclusionary for those of us who hold to ecosocialism or simply to breaking up capitalist monopolies to create new forms of economics focused on sustainable sharing of resources. The rest of the strategy explains why - social liberalism hopefully appeals to some voters from other parties, crucially including the apparent abundance of green-minded Tories who would have voted Green if only we hadn't been calling for a public NHS or for a fairer distribution of wealth.

So, sure, if you represent a party as a candidate, as I have done at local and parliamentary level, you need to be at least comfortable with what it is doing - though would the words "social liberalism" either win over or deter anyone on the doorsteps? Or for that matter, the party's current decision to abolish its formal trade union links? Nope, of course not. It is a case of activist-world problems, dear perhaps to me and others who fuss over such matters, but how crucial really in the wider scheme of things when our planet is burning up, literally, before our eyes?

Well, humans are social creatures. We affiliate to many communities and groups. Our friends, colleagues and comrades are our tribe. Like families, we might fall out, but in the end, we make up. Or do we?

British politics and society, just like pretty much everywhere else now, are divided and fractious beyond belief. The Greens are no exception.

I won't dwell over-much or break confidences here, but in 2017 I was co-chair of the Green Party Regional Council for 8 months. This is one of two bodies - the other being the Party Executive - that oversee the party's functioning. For me, previously working in my naivete with fairly harmonious and certainly positive, friendly local and regional parties, it was an unwelcome revelation: GPEW has a significant hinterland of caustic complaint, legal threats and mean-spirited, personalised dispute utterly astonishing in a party that claims - in the vast majority of cases, I believe, genuinely - to seek a better, happier world for all.

These disputes covered all manner of issues, many at core quite trivial until fermented in sometimes truly alarming vitriol. One repeating theme, mostly after my time on GPRC ended has been around transgender issues. There is certainly discussion to be had for many to understand transgender issues better - and there has also at times been some pretty harsh and inappropriate behaviour by individual transmen and transwomen in the party. But when have Greens of all people held that the actions of an individual justify pre-determined views of a whole group? And if some statements by some transactivists invite questions from others, why can't these questions be advanced in a culture of inquisitive acceptance as opposed to rejectionist hostility?

Those who complain about transactivists being overly hostile to others' viewpoints ignore the fact that these viewpoints often deny the validity of transmen and transwomen's identities, for some reason often presuming them to be lightly worn. Not rarely are these complaints themselves delivered with pretty full-on anger. Referencing the worst of US Republicans, sometimes lewd and often bizarre concerns are raised about men supposedly using women's toilets or the apparent indoctrination of children to transgenderism at school - how Clause 28 is that? It seems the history of fighting oppression has been somewhat set aside by some when it comes to transgender rights.

For me this came to a head with the posting on a party noticeboard of a lengthy diatribe in the form of a pantomime script filled with crude references to transpeople in the name of supposedly supporting feminism. Though written by a woman, it was posted by a man who described it as "hilarious" - sure, very funny if you like lots of references to f*cks and d*cks, but hardly conducive to either inviting serious discussion or fostering a culture of respect. It remained posted for several days, a veritable paean to a new sectarianism.

At the end of my time on GPRC, I organised some interviews for the chair of a commission the party conference had voted to set up to review its workings. An interviewee asked the panel what success would look like. A senior party member responded that, among other things, it would be good if Greens were kinder to each other.

So, my former Green colleagues, I hope you can learn not just to be kinder but even to love each other again. However, you will only succeed if you acquire that generosity of spirit where, even if you truly can't agree or understand, you can at least accept one another for who you are. Enquire, seek to understand, but no more exclusion, no more pejorative complaints forms or abusive social media tirades.

Because after this warmest of winters, as you well know, the world doesn't have the time any more.

The Twin Pillars of Survival: What is the Green Party For?

"We cannot tackle climate change unless we address the system that has caused it,"
 John McDonnell, now Labour Shadow Chancellor, writing in Another World Is Possible - A Manifesto for 21st Century Socialism in 2007.

Ten years on, there was the same man, just yesterday, on the BBC Marr Programme, doing his best to reassure the audience that a Labour Government would prevent any post-election run on the Pound by working hard with the City to keep the confidence of the financial speculators, something he has already been busy doing. Marr himself signed off laconically with the observation, "I do like the picture of John McDonnell sitting down with asset managers all the time."

McDonnell's caution is understandable - the precarious situation of the Tory-DUP pact makes a further election far from an impossibility in the coming months. Labour's vulnerability to the fury of the capitalist media and quite inaccurate but well-embedded psychological fiction that greedy Tories are better with public money has lost them more than one election.

Yet, for all Labour's exuberant return to its programme remains inherently social democratic rather than socialist. And for all Mr McDonnell talked about tackling climate change yesterday, his economic plans remain fully anchored in 1940s style Keynesianism, with continued growth at their heart. It may be a welcome shift in emphasis from the grasping privatisation of the Tories (and discredited New Labour), but it is avowedly not a Manifesto for 21st Century Socialism, nor indeed for 21st Century Survival. For, with the climate emergency threatening to overtake us and deep scarcity looming across a range of vital resources in barely a decade from now, traditional economics are no longer fit for purpose, whether touted by the Tories or by Labour.

This conundrum much occupied the agenda of the Green Party conference last week. For the Greens, the General Election was a bitter-sweet outcome: their decision to stand down in upwards of 35 constituencies may have made sufficient of a difference to deprive the Tories of their outright majority, but equally the party saw its vote halve from its 2015 record over over 1.1 million votes and in spite of huge efforts in several seats it failed to advance on its solitary MP, the Co-Leader, Caroline Lucas - though it is worth bearing in mind that this was still its second best-ever General Election performance, both in terms of its national aggregate poll and votes-by-seat.

Under the circumstances, some degree of reflection was both to be expected and very necessary. Corbyn's manifesto had swept up a wide range of Green proposals from 2015 and with them had taken several hundred thousand Green voters - where now, then, for their twin pillars of environmental sustainability and social justice? Time, some suggested, to return to their verdant roots and focus on being an ecological party. Two motions proposed that climate change should be included in every conceivable message. Another called for all talk of alliances with Labour to be closed down. A workshop on campaigning heard demands for the Greens to focus on winning Tory votes and to drop calls for taxing the rich or taking resources into public ownership.

Fortunately, all these were voted down - the Greens were not, after all, so ready to stop highlighting their commitment to social justice alongside tackling environmental sustainability. Indeed, many questioned why anyone would doubt the interdependency of the one with the other - as even a longstanding ecologist argued, a steady-state economy would not be feasible without massive redistribution of wealth.

Yet by itself, this reaffirmation of the twin pillars of their values is far from enough to give the Greens' continued resonance and purpose in the political arena. The ecologists were right to argue that the party needs to highlight its differences with the Labour Party rather than appear like a willing subset of Momentum. The need to campaign on climate change in these days of Trumpian America and a British Government with Brexititis is daily more evidently critical - but far, far beyond raising the threat of global warming, the party needs to focus on what is central to defeating it: economics and ownership.

The cruel fact is this - Labour's social democracy will fail. For all their inspiration and well-meaning, Corbyn and McDonnell inevitably are dragged down by the bureaucracy and incumbency and even conservatism that comes with leading the Official Opposition. Hence the Marxist lamb sits down with the Asset-stripping lions and cautiously pushes change within the contradiction of consistency - a word McDonnell repeatedly used in his interview with Andrew Marr. 

Sooner or later, in a world of systemic collapse, it will not be enough. In a time when politics has never been more volatile, with voters earnestly or even desperately searching for new answers to increasingly challenging questions, only a party or movement convincingly embracing genuine radical change, far, far beyond building new roads and stopping PPI hospital contracts, can offer a positive way forward. All else leads ultimately to ever more pain and chaos.

As we face a world slipping week by week further towards climate chaos, the challenge to the Greens is whether it is they who can fashion a clear, radical and egalitarian economics - one founded on a steady-state economy that brings nearly all resources into common ownership, that embraces the bounty that new technology can bring in freeing people from labour and that stewards our limited resources fairly and sustainably. To do this, they need to address how to remove the market system from large swathes of economic activity and so reduce waste and inequity. They need to develop a clear narrative of how localised economies can work for the benefit of all.

Then they need to show how all of these things would work, day by day, for citizens, for families and communities. In a Green society, how would you get a house, or an education? What sort of jobs would exist and what would your working conditions be like? How would you travel about and would it still cost anything? What would you be able to do with the free time gained from a shorter working week? What new possibilities might open up post-capitalism, post-scarcity, post-rat race?

They also need to get angry: they need to bare their teeth not just to the frackers and tree-cutters, which so many Greens and their allies have very bravely done so well of late, but to all the vested corporate interests that are commodifying everything on our planet - even, it turns out, our individual DNA. Such behemoths will not go gently into the night; Greens need to gird themselves for a harder and longer struggle than Mr McDonnell seems willing to contemplate as he sups with the Futures traders, regardless of the length of his spoon.

And with the imbalance of wealth, nationally and globally, at historically obscene and environmentally unsustainable levels, yes, they need to take on the rich because the rich are not the friends of humanity nor of our planet. They never were, they are not now and, no matter how much charity a few of them dole out, they never will be.

But beyond them, beyond their fetish for accumulation and alienation, the rest of us, the vast, overwhelming majority of homo sapiens can transform our world and share it equitably.

Of all the parties capable of producing a first blueprint of that new world, perhaps only the Greens have the space to dream it into being, to fashion it into something real, meaningful and genuinely transformative. Many good policies are already in place covering everything from citizens' income to a maximum wage to employee ownership - but they have still to be joined up and given a compelling narrative, a true vision of tomorrow. 

It must be one they are open to sharing with other radicals on the left as the dynamics of our politics remain as potently fluid as they are now. They need to stand ready to work with those with shared values from other parties, transcending the tribalist barriers that all too often have frustrated the popular will - and one of these parties, for the foreseeable future by far and away the largest, will be Labour, or at least part of Labour.

Unencumbered by the Establishment weights increasingly affixed to McDonnell and Corbyn, the Greens can be the forge to generate the ideas and build a movement to create the conditions for deep, radical cultural change. Through this we can then finally unleash, in the words of the ecosocialist Murray Bookchin, "the basic sense of decency, sympathy and mutual aid (which) lies at the core of human behaviour."

Murray Bookchin, ecosocialist

Keep Left

Over the last three weekends, I have taken a tour of the left landscape of England. First a weekend on the south coast at Bournemouth for the Green Party's first conference since its moderate advances at the General Election and, of course, Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader. The following weekend it was the People's Assembly co-ordinated Anti-Austerity march outside the Conservative conference in Manchester, complete with eggs and pig masks. And last Saturday afternoon, at a smaller gathering in Leeds, a couple of highly insightful lectures on Marxism from Red Flag, a new leftwing grouping in the Labour Party.

There was an underlying theme at all three - change is in the air. As covered here a number of times before, the last few years have seen a gathering ferment of unpredictable change, from the BNP bubble and the rise of UKIP, to Cleggmania, the Green Surge, the remarkable Scottish independence referendum and the backwash that swept away the once unassailable Scottish Labour Party; and now to the rise of Corbyn. These developments are seemingly mirrored elsewhere in the western world - whether on the populist right such as the USA's Trumpism or Greece's Golden Dawn fascists; or on the left by the Hellenic Syriza and Hispanic Podemos or, across the Pond, by the insurgency of socialist Democrat Bernie Sandars as he challenges for the Democrat nomination.

Police outside "1984: the Musical" at the Manchester protest

The Establishment is under assault in a way it hasn't had to handle since the Depression Era. In growing numbers, tens of millions of people are searching for alternatives to the desperate inequality and insipid greed of de-regulated capitalism as it destroys the lives of individuals and communities, turns its own nostrums on their heads and bares it rapacious teeth so nakedly that it threatens to devour our entire habitat within a generation.

And yet, while there is progressive hope as not for sometime, with the stakes so high, the decision-point grows ever sharper. Especially when the so-called centre-ground is actually far to the right of the political graph, the time for compromise is over. If there ever was a chance of some "moderate" resolution to the conflict in our society, a dubious proposition at the best of times, it is long gone as we encounter a sea of existential threats - just this week, the IMF predicted a high chance of  serious recession within 18 months, much deeper and more persistent that the 2008/9 crash. And beyond, with resource depletion accompanied by exponential demand, capitalism's response to the growing range of crises will not be to support people and conserve what we can - rather it will be to seek out ever more obscene forms of money-making.

Where then is the response on the Left? And what is it?

Pigs need justice from the Tories too!

Jeremy Corbyn and the leftwing movement supporting him in the Labour Party launched on a platform of opposing austerity and tackling inequality. Labour under his stewardship and the economics of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell seems set to move towards a more socialist take on solutions to the current crisis and on developing a future society that is fairer and kinder. After years of "Nu-Labour" dissimulation, this is a powerfully refreshing change and one that finally offers real hope of genuine, radical reform of how our society works and what its values are.

Yet, while socialism potentially offers a more responsible use of resources and Corbyn's environmental platform was powerfully akin to the Green Party's own proposals back in May, there remains a commitment to an economy based as much on growth as on egalitarianism. Similarly, while the plans to extend public ownership over railways are welcome, it does not take the capitalist bull by the horns and wrestle down the inherent threat of a system that is not and can never be sustainable.

Still, Greens could carp too much, though so far only a few have done so. Corbyn's slightly bizarre suggestion that some Welsh coalmines might be reopened if carbon-capture technology can be developed to effectively nullify emissions (something pretty much from the realms of sci fi) has been seized upon to denigrate him as some sort of climate change denier.

Karl Marx saw capitalism as a threat to the planet.

Similarly, a handful have growled hostilely at any Labour plans to grow the economy, forgetting that just a few months ago, Greens were arguing for just that, with massive investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency and public transport at the core of our manifesto. And for all that Corbyn may have work to do on taming the capitalist monster, Greens are on the whole still committed to some sort of undefined market system, albeit localised and regulated by as yet unclarified means.

Both these strands, of Corbyn's Labour and the Greens, are clearly of the Left. If, in the finest traditions of the Left, there was to be any sinking into tribalism, calling out every policy difference as a fundamental point of departure, it would be a tragedy. The ground would be left open not only for the Tory incumbents to continue their dire project, but also for populists like UKIP to monopolise any pseudo-challenge to the status quo.

Sectarian division over what to the wider electorate can be quite opaque differences is a dangerous tendency. It is sometimes seemingly inherent among progressives who, perhaps because our politics are rooted far more deeply in principle rather than the pragmatism of the right, can struggle to compromise. Often that is not a bad thing and the Greens' role may well be to act as the ecological conscience of the Left as a whole, constantly reminding the materialists of Momentum (the Corbynistas' new grouping) that social justice and environmental sustainability are inevitably and irrevocably co-dependent.

But Corbyn faces a big enough challenge seeing off the Blairite remnants who still occupy most of the Labour Parliamentary benches as well as a number of other key roles. As we have seen by the behaviour of some of them this last week over the Fiscal Charter debate, the Blairite rump is quite happy to trundle into TV studios and bare their "souls" to journalists if they think it will wound the new leader's attempts to transform his party and the wider political landscape. Sniping at him from a platform of verdant moral superiority will do nothing to help foster real change. Greens can assert a confident identity by positively advancing our beliefs without any need to join in the chorus of ill intended media barons and neoliberals keen to stop any effective challenge to the Establishment in its tracks.

The Green Left meeting in Bournemouth took the general view that Greens must work in a genuinely plural way; as indeed Jeremy Corbyn has a track record of doing with Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett, both of whom have welcomed his election and expressed hope for a wider alliance. This will be vital both to infuse the progressive movement with a genuinely green outlook and also, in the event Corbyn fails inside Labour, to ensure there is a viable political machine able to carry on the struggle for a fairer, more egalitarian society. A Green Party with a generous stance towards kindred spirits in the Labour movement might be where Corbyn supporters will feel able to come if their current party turns on them, although possibly the rather meagre scale of the much touted Labour MPs' "revolt" last Tuesday perhaps makes this scenario a little less likely.

A wide movement looking for change outside the Tory Conference

A society based on the twin pillars of social justice and environmental sustainability will be vital for the survival of both people and planet. Ecosocialism, the synthesis of ecology and socialism that is espoused by leftwing activists across several Left parties, provides a sound philosophical basis for this. It is a rationale explored by Green Party International Co-ordinator Dr Derek Wall in his new book, "Economics After Capitalism", which is well worth a read by anyone interested in what sort of longterm society we can and must develop.

And so, as we face a winter of continuing austerity, of further war in the Middle East and the continued dominance of the media by an increasingly unbound Conservative regime, it is vital more than ever that those on the progressive left put relatively small policy differences aside and work together. As the mantra said, it's For the Common Good.

Greens on the march in Manchester

Reaching for the Future

Reaching for the Future - Glasgow, Saturday 13 September 2014
(author's photo)

January is named after the Roman deity Janus, god of endings and beginnings. And so on this first day of January, I thought I'd look back a little at the last year and forward into what promise to be, in the words of the ancient curse, "interesting times".

2014 opened with a sense of foreboding for many progressives - not least because of the challenges that lay ahead in a Europe littered with discredited "mainstream" governments unpopular with demoralised, austerity-abused publics. The far right was on the rise in election after election; even in Britain, although the extremist BNP was largely gone, the UK Independence Party, lampooned by some as fascists-in-suits and certainly adopting a range of beggar-thy-neighbour tactics in its divisive politics, seemed to be gaining ground with the endless encouragement of the media.

Into this stew, the Conservative-led Coalition Government proclaimed 2014 to be the time to "celebrate" the appalling war of 1914 - 1918. The then-Education Secretary, Michael Gove, proclaimed the conflict to have been a "noble" war seen as "just" by those fighting it. "In Remembrance of Lions" charts the arguments around this - the war was far from the narrative of thse armchair "warriors". At the close of the year, with the likes of Sainburys supermarkets invoking its memory to boost their Christmas sales, my closing blog, "Piping the Peace", sought to expand on the well-known story of the 1914 Christmas Truce to explore how a bitter hatred of a war that was widely held even at the time to be nothing but a power-play between competing elites led to the greatest challenge to authority by ordinary people in all of history.

The parallels between now and then have been constant through the year - and not in the superficial way desired by the likes of Gove and Cameron. The disconnect between rulers and ruled, now as then, is widening as the days pass. In a country where political leaders on the one hand continue to worsen climate change through approving massive expansion of fracking ("Inside the Mind of Ed Davey") ("No Wind Turbines to Spoil the View"), in spite of the evidence of global warming causing flooding across Britain ("When Only the Wellies are Green" ) and the slaughter of over 29,000 Britons every year from pollution-related illnesses ("Take Your Breath Away"), it is little wonder people look for other solutions. This is all the more compounded when the Establishment continue to fall back on scapegoating vulnerable groups such as disabled and unemployed people ("Choosing Poverty"), ("Having a Heart Attack? You Shirker...") while subsidising their rich friends to run public services ("The Coalition of Kleptocracy" ) and making it ever easier for them to hire and fire workers at will ("You're Fired!"). Even the one remaining, highly profitable and popular state railway company, East Coast, has been sold off to private speculators ("Keep East Coast Public") and the NHS, the most successful health service in the world, is being auctioned off piecemeal ("999 for the NHS"), a situation likely to be embedded if the Government's enthusiasm for the TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership is allowed to come to fruition ("Death-Wish Lib Dems"). In response to the disaffection that inevitably has followed, all our current leaders seem capable of coming up with is surreptitious "reforms" to disenfranchise likely opponents, especially younger people ("Bite The Ballot") or threaten to deploy violence in the name of keeping order ("Water Cannon: Doing What It Says On The Tin").

As with the tumult of decades ago, first trailed back in December 2012 ("Weimar Britain"), the void deserted by mainstream politics offers up a variety of opportunities for change - some giving a glimpse of a far happier world, but others giving instead visions of a nightmare future. For myself, much of the first half of 2014 was given up to work as Campaign Manager for the Green Party European election effort in Yorkshire and the the Humber. As with Greens across the country and indeed throughout the EU, we faced a situation where much media attention was focused not on our ideas for a fairer and more sustainable world ("Neither Nick nor Nigel for the Common Good"), but rather on the prospects for rightwing "insurgents" like UKIP in Britain ("Still Nothing Worth Watching... UKIP TV")and the FN in France. In the end, while the Greens polled ahead of the Lib Dems in both votes and seats, UKIP won the election in the UK with just under 27% of the vote and in Yorkshire took 3 of the 6 seats (with barely one-third of the vote) and elsewhere other rightwing parties performed strongly on anti-immigrant, xenophobic platforms.

Echoes of the past sent a chill down the spine of many on the Left, all too aware as we are of where such visceral hatreds ultimately lead ("Don't Let The Lights Be Dimmed"). For the first time since the 1990s, Europe has been the scene of fighting, with conflict in the Ukraine ("Khrushchev's Crimea") ("Balkan Echoes"). Further afield, terror spread with the assault on Gaza by far superior Israeli forces and the kidnapping of women in west Africa by the Islamist Boko Haram ("Bloody Brothers") while self-centred western and Saudi interference in Syria led to the rise of Islamic State in the Middle East. However, in this last instance, women are a key part of the counter-attack in Kurdish areas, forming a third of the Rojavan army that is driving the slavers of ISIS back ("Sisters in Arms - Kobane, Kurdistan and Women Against ISIS").

Nevertheless, more optimistic vistas appeared as the year wore on: in Scotland, the independence referendum galvanised hundreds of thousands of people into unprecedented levels of political activity. Although a remarkably positive campaign for a separate Scotland ultimately failed under a barrage of vitriol and neoliberal State Power ("Scotland - Trust The Bankers"), the YES vote reached an unimagined 45% and tens of thousands of Scots joined up to the three pro-independence parties (the SNP, Scottish Greens and Scottish Socialists). Support for the SNP in particular has soared with the prospect now of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond potentially brokering who will form the next UK-wide Government. Both in Scotland and more widely, the power evidently wielded by ordinary people in search of social justice rather than the cold hostility at the heart of the UKIP and Tory agendas has found new outlets which promise that things really never will be the same again ("The Last Days of the United Kingdom"). The 999 for the NHS March, Occupy Westminster Green and the Britain Needs A Payrise protests all showed how large numbers of citizens, many previously not involved politically, are now rising to make themselves heard and call for real change.

As the summer moved to autumn, UKIP continued to poll well, but now so did the Green Party throughout Britain, in spite of a much lower level of media attention. By the end of the year, its membership matched UKIP's and its poll ratings had on numerous occasions overtaken the collapsing Lib Dem wing of the Coalition - the final Ipsos-Mori survey of the year put UKIP on 13% of the vote with the Greens just behind on 10% and the Lib Dems on 9%.

In spite of this and a petition from over a quarter of a million people, the Establishment closed ranks to exclude the Greens (and the SNP) from the leaders' debates in the upcoming General Election ("#fairdebate2015"). Yet, given what is at stake if any truly insurgent party challenging the power of Big Money and the Establishment breaks through, it is little surprise that something like UKIP would be employed and promoted as a sort of "licenced" opposition, a bit like the state-sponsored "opposition" parties in Putin's Russia ("The Men in Grey"). (Separately, I wrote a piece for the online Scottish socialist magazine "The Point" on the origins of the Union of 1707, "The Whales of Kirkcaldy", which, while providing me with some fascinating reading, pointed up just how corrupt and brutal Establishments can be in seeking to secure their self-interest and preservation). Smug in its belief of its own right to power, our political class continues to believe that it can get away with a pretence of democracy ("Seeing Through the Illusion of Choice") But, as with others who have thought this would work in the past, their days may now be numbered ("1905 Again").

Of course, for change to come, we must know what the alternatives are; how might a new world work; how can we found a society based on co-operation when all around us is a world formed of conflict and competition? How can we fashion a place where we might find happy people, content with their lives, living in harmony with other species and the biosphere that lets us exist?

It was to this end that it was good to spend time towards the end of the year looking at the history and development of ecosocialism - the green socialist ideas that offer some ways forward to a world where we value sharing rather than accumulation; where we put back what we take out so that our own and future generations will have the resources to thrive; where we learn to live by the idea of "enough" rather than pursuing the illusion of happiness being found in ever "more".

"Stories of Tomorrow - Ecosocialism and The World To Come" came from a talk I gave as part of a debate on ecosocialism. And for me it was an encouraging way to draw the year to an end. A look  forward to what could be if we have the imagination and courage. A way to a very different world, but one which harnesses the co-operative spirit and compassion which are inherent to our species. These are natural human qualities, but ones long twisted and denied by our socio-economic systems, from slavery through feudalism to capitalism. As capitalism stumbles, flailing dangerously in a world of diminishing resources and global warming, only the ever more tenuous and tiny layer at the top stands to benefit from its continuation - a miniscule elite numbering at most a few hundred thousand people ("On The Big Red Bus To Oblivion") while several billions hunger and our entire planet suffers. Humanity can do so very much better than this.


Most of history is neither a beginning nor an end - days simply follow days. Although 2014 is now over, the events that traced its course seem to offer no conclusion and only a vague sense of direction. Still, in the haze and confusion, perhaps some signposts are now dimly perceptible and while the journey is far from ended, in 2015 the time of transition is perhaps that little bit closer.

Another world is possible; and, if we want it enough, it is coming.


Happy New Year and, as this blog approaches its first quarter of a million views, thank you for reading.

Reaching for the Future - Wakefield, Sunday 24th August
(author's photo)

Stories of Tomorrow - Ecosocialism and the World To Come

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 18^th and early 19^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.