Eco-Socialism

From Deep Ecology to Social Justice

David Pepper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134861873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

First Published in 2004. Capitalism continues to degrade ecosystems and create social injustice. The 1992 Earth Summit demonstrated that the powerful vested interests behind Western capitalism have no intention of radically changing their goals and methods to help create an environmentally sound or socially just global society. In order to confront this, the green movement must now develop coherent eco-socialist politics. People must control their own lives and their relationship with the environment. Drawing on Marx, Morris, Kropotkin and anarcho-syndicalism, David Pepper presents an anthropocentric analysis of the way forward for green politics and environmental movements. Establishing the elements of a radical eco-socialism, this study rejects biocentrism, simplistic limits to growth and over-population theses, whilst exposing the deficiencies and contradictions of green approaches to post-modern politics and deep ecology. Eco-socialism should provide students of ecology, politics and the environment with a thorough introduction to the ideologies of Marxism, anarchism and deep ecology, and the ways these can be synthesized into a radical green politics.

1
RED AND GREEN: OLD OR NEW POLITICS?

1.1 THE RED—GREEN DEBATE

Ten years ago, a friend asked me to address a local Friends of the Earth meeting which he was organising. My interest was in the historical roots of green philosophy, so I regaled my audience with accounts of William Morris, Peter Kropotkin and the like. Naively, I mentally prepared myself to receive accolades in the ensuing discussion for drawing such historical links. Instead I sensed antipathy mingled with hostility from some. They were disappointed. Had I not realised that what the greens were saying had never been said before? Did I not appreciate its distinctiveness from conventional politics?

I had offended a fundamental aspect of green psyche, which holds that ecologism really is about a new world order, and a new ‘politics of life’ (to use the Green Party slogan). I compounded this crime by suggesting, in Roots of Modern Environmentalism, that greens needed to assimilate Marxist perspectives into their analysis. This was a red rag in the face of a green bull, being dismissed as ‘just so much angry spluttering from wornout ideologues who have lost touch with the real world’ (Porritt and Winner 1988, 256).

Notwithstanding this familiar criticism, I, a clapped-out ideologue and aspiring member of that ‘malign force’, the Marxist left (Porritt and Winner, p. 220), intend to splutter on unabashed. I will try, in the following pages, to extend and deepen the recent debate between the red and green positions on our ‘ecological crisis’. This is because I do not accept Adrian Atkinson’s dismissal of this debate as a mere ‘argument’ between two views that, in practice, display no fundamental contradiction.

True, there are many conjunctions between red-greens and green-greens (these terms both describe radical ecologists, or ‘ecocentrics’ as opposed to ‘light’ greens or ‘environmentalists’, i.e. technocentrics, who are not the subject of this book—see Chapter 2). If red-greens make much use of Marxism, however, green-greens are more indebted to anarchism. And although the two often conflate in the anarcho-communism of the likes of Kropotkin, elements of which form a template for modern ecotopias, and for the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, there are also significant—potentially irreconcilable—differences between them.

This is important, in these days of tentative radical alliances and red-green networks, for reasons which Tony Benn gave (cited in Porritt and Winner, p. 69):

Until the basic principles of socialism are re-established (equity, democracy, accountability, internationalism and morality), one cannot build non-opportunistic, genuine relations with movements which are themselves divided over the primacy of these principles.

I think it is time we had the whole thing out, and this book intends to contribute to that process—a process which is of more than just academic importance. For Western capitalism is yet again in crisis, and more than ever before the effects of the crisis extend across the world. At the same time that recession and retrenchment have decimated manufacturing industry in the old heartlands, and people stubbornly refuse to consume their way out of slump, capitalism’s response has been to reach ever deeper into second and third worlds for markets and sources of cheap labour and materials.

The current search for a new, more ‘liberal’ General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) signifies an attempt to bring everyone unambiguously into the global capitalist economy. This threatens a further mushrooming of what neither socialists nor greens want—the hedonistic consumer society with a high throughput of goods but a low output of human fulfilment. In it, disenfranchised and underprivileged groups are increasingly economically marginalised and the environmental costs of the search for profits mount. But these twin evils of social injustice and environmental degradation will continue to grow, even though most people recognise them as evils, for there is no prospect that their present root causes in the economics and politics of capitalism will be radically examined and tackled. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro made this plain. For while some third world leaders and other eminent public figures correctly identified the problems and their causes, Western leaders staunchly defended the ‘right’ of multinational capital to continue operating in the same old way and resurrected old Malthusian (third world) ‘overpopulation’ canards for their explanations of causes. Faced with draft global accords, conventions and other agreements to take fundamental action on social and environmental problems they watered them down, prevaricated and even refused point blank to sign them. Or, more dishonestly, they did so and then went home and carried on with the same old policies.

It is at times like these that the left and the greens anticipate that they will make their mark most effectively. Yet this has not happened. The almost world-wide disarray of the left in the 1980s is well documented. But the greens, who promised us a ‘new polities’ to replace both socialism and capitalism, have also been on the retreat. Electoral gains made in Europe in the early 1980s have been substantially relinquished—indeed the British Green Party faces crisis at the very time of writing, with the resignation of half its executive council and a fall in membership from nearly 20,000 in 1990 to 10,000 in 1992 (The Times, 28 August 1992).

Since, then, the pragmatic, ‘realist’, but anodyne politics of social democracy, democratic socialism and green reformism have failed to mount a serious threat to the status quo; more radical socialists and greens argue afresh that what is needed is the much more fundamental politics of eco-socialism. And yet, for all the exploratory red-green ‘networking’ that goes on, no very potent, effective and coherent eco-socialism has emerged. I think that this is because of the fact that to bring together red and green you have, effectively, to unite socialism with anarchism—the traditional political philosophy which more than any other informs the green movement. This is not as easy as it sounds, because, contrary to popular misconception, it is not always possible to regard anarchism as just another form of socialism. This book tries to help the cause of eco-socialist politics by describing and explaining the forms of socialism—particularly Marxist socialism—and anarchism on which they must be based. It highlights and clarifies many of the differences between socialism and anarchism in order to suggest the agenda for any future political discourse which wants to close the gap and create eco-socialism as a more vital force. It does this by suggesting that greens should make more of an accommodation with reds by dropping those aspects of their anarchism that are more akin to liberal and postmodern politics. At the same time reds should accommodate with greens by reviving those traditions in socialism which I describe and review here—including traditions of decentralism and of the society-nature dialectic, along with some resuscitation of orthodox Marxism’s materialism and emphasis on rediscovering our power as producers.

The main part of the book maintains, in Chapter 3, that Marxist perspectives have more to offer greens than just an incisive analysis of capitalism, important as this is. Marxism suggests a dialectical view of the society-nature relationship, which is not like that of ecocentrics or technocentrics, and challenges both of them. It has a historical materialist approach to social change, which ought to inform green strategy. And it is committed to socialism, as Benn defines it above. And, yes, it is, and I am, anthropocentric enough to insist that nature’s rights (biological egalitarianism) are meaningless without human rights (socialism). Eco-socialism says that we should proceed to ecology from social justice and not the other way around.

Many greens (e.g. Schumacher 1973) have said that Marxism is rigid, inflexible, deterministic, mechanistic (rather than organic), overly ‘scientific’ (in the positivist sense) about history, lacking humanism and a spiritual dimension, a ‘bible’ consisting of a set of prophecies which are mostly wrong, and totalitarian in outlook and implications.

What I have read about Marxism suggests that these criticisms are often partly or wholly inaccurate. What follows may illustrate this, although it is not intended as an apologia for Marxism’s shortcomings. As Sarkar (1983, 164) says: The point is not to find out the authentic Marx…the purpose is not to save Marxism, but to find out the truth…’, and, citing Ullrich (1979, 95):

it is now time that the senseless game of substituting endless quotations from the ‘holy scriptures’ for the analysis of new phenomena and one’s own thinking is finally given up…. It is, moreover, unmarxist. Marx himself did not like to be called a Marxist. Today he would certainly not be a Marxist in the sense of uncritical adherence to the contents of his over one hundred years old writings.

My second contribution, in Chapter 4, is to outline the tenets of anarchism and how much they at present inform the position of what I call ‘mainstream’ greens (ecocentrics) as well as those who openly call themselves ‘green anarchists’. While I will not argue in the conclusion (Chapter 5) that anarchism must be abandoned, I will highlight the distinctiveness of socialism and its debt to Marxism and suggest a shift in emphasis for ecocentrics towards this latter. Some greens may say that this shift is already occurring, but I wonder if they realise its full implications; such as possibly abandoning the idea of a money-driven economy, or that of biocentrism?

Before all this, I want to set the context of the debate, in Chapters 1 and 2. Some academics, like Atkinson (1991), Bramwell (1989) or Dobson (1990, 205–6) maintain that ecologism is ‘a political ideology in its own right’ because ‘the descriptive and prescriptive elements in the political ecology programme cannot be accommodated within other political ideologies (such as socialism) without substantially changing them…’. For Dobson, this distinctiveness hinges particularly upon ecologism’s acceptance of limits to growth and on the bioethic (advocating respect and reverence for the intrinsic value of ‘nonhuman’ nature—in its own right and regardless of its usefulness to humans). For Atkinson (p. 19) it is ecologism’s utopianism (after, particularly, utopian socialists) which makes it

a coherent political paradigm quite distinct from the conservatism, liberalism and socialism which today are commonly seen as defining the limits of the political spectrum.

All of this is arguable. For one, few greens nowadays propose no forms of economic growth for the future, while the argument itself that ‘resources’ are finite is intellectually problematic (see Chapter 3.5). Secondly, there are all sorts of objections to intrinsic value theory for nature—its theoretical and practical implications, its indebtedness to intuition rather than rational argument, its impossibility (we cannot know if nature values itself: we, as humans, can only approach nature from an anthropocentric standpoint) (Fox 1990, 184–96) and its tendency to set up a society-nature dualism (see Chapter 3.6). Thirdly, to suggest that modern politics have no utopianism may be true in the narrow sense; but their roots do. Marxism and anarchism themselves are utopian in the sense of having a vision of at least the principles of an ideal (anarcho-socialist) society. But the former is not utopian in terms of how we go about changing society, and it justly criticises anarchists, utopian socialists and greens for being so (Chapter 3.9).

However, I do not want to pursue these objections here, and I do want to concede that the green political claim to distinctiveness, even newness, in its descriptive elements, may be accurate. Nonetheless, I consider that in their prescriptive elements: in how they propose to change and organise society, then they are often rehashing some old solutions to some very old and basic political questions. There is nothing wrong in this, but the rehash does need to be coherent, and greens widely recognise that such coherence is presently lacking. I propose that some attention to the perspectives of Marxism could lend ecologism a coherence that is appropriate for a forward, not a backward looking politics. This, together with the progressive elements of anarchism, might present green socialism as a form of socialism which is less prone to totalitarianism than some previous ‘socialisms’, though it will still entail sacrifice of some extant liberal ‘freedoms’, as is recognised in the conclusion; but this may be no bad thing.

To illustrate and emphasise that

The political meanings attributed to ‘social ecology’ or ‘the ecological paradigm’ really derive from, and can only be discussed in terms of, traditions and debates (individualism versus collectivism, competition versus mutuality, authority and hierarchy versus liberty and equality) which long predate the emergence of ecology as a scientific discipline.

(Ryle 1988, 12).

I shall begin by outlining briefly what some of these debates are about (see Table 1.1). They still largely set the fundamental political agenda for the twenty-first century, and the arrival of a green consciousness does not alter this: they form the context in which green politics are inescapably set. Marxism and anarchism have much to say about these debates.

It should be understood that the discussion in the following section, 1.2, is illustrative only. It does not purport to be an exhaustive list of all of the most important questions underlying the ‘old’ politics. Thus I do not debate in the abstract Ryle’s authority/hierarchy versus liberty/equality dualism, or issues to do with technology (should it be ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, ‘high’ or ‘appropriate’, and does it determine social development or vice versa?) or scale (economies of scale versus small-is-beautiful) or whether the approach to politics should be reformist or radical. It may be argued that I should have done, for these questions figure centrally in modern discussions about ecology and so they inevitably figure in the anarchist as well as the Marxist discourses of Chapters 4 and 3. However, to limit the size of this chapter I have chosen some issues that do not so openly appear in green debates as such, but which, I think, ought to. I should also qualify the discussion by acknowledging that although much of it is presented in terms of conflicting dualisms, the issues are usually more

Table 1.1 Some fundamental social questions that underlie traditional and green political debates

Questions dealt with in Chapter 1:

HUMAN NATURE:

Is there such a thing? Is it shaped by environment or genetic inheritance? Is it greedy, aggressive and competitive or the reverse?

DETERMINISM or
FREE WILL:

Are individuals and society rhe product of external forces – God, environment, economics - or do they have freedom to shape the world how they want it to be?

IDEALISM or
MATERIALISM:

Are societies and economics shaped and changed as a result of new ideas and arguments which persuade people to act differently? Or are material, especially economic, structures and events, the main influences on behaviour and ideas?

INDIVIDUALISM or
COLLECTIVISM:

Will social change be triggered by the actions of individuals changing their lifestyles and thoughts (often as consumers) or by groups taking collective action for political effect (often as producers)?

GEMEINSCHAFT or
GESELLSCHAFT:

Is society merely a collection of individuals supporting each other for mutual gain? Or is there more to society than the sum of the parts - is it an entity to which individual interests are largely subordinate?

CONSENSUS or
CONFLICT:

Which of rhese constitute the main motor of social change? Is society a genuine democracy whose state represents an equilibrium between the interests of all groups. Or is it dominated by elites (economic or otherwise) whose interests conflict with the majority?

STRUCTURALISM:

Are social events and individual or group behaviour (surface structure) a product of deep subconscious or hidden underlying structures in the human mind or in cultural or economic organisation? Or is what we easily recognise around us the full extent of social reality?

DEVELOPMENT:

Is the social and economic development of regions and nations best described by models of environmental determinism, or structural functionalism, or structural Marxism, or modernisation or dependent development or a mix of several of those? Which development model is most ecologically preferable - independent development (bioregionalism), or socialism?

EGALITARIANISM:

Should we support economic development that produces gross maldistribution of wealth and then put up with or mitigate these effects? Or should we promore a model which does not allow inequalities to develop in the first place? Should all living species be equally respected and treated?

FREE MARKET or
INTERVENTION:

Which produces most benefit for most people? Can social and environmental need be met without planning and intervention in the free market? Do the latter stifle innovation and produce inefficiencies?

Some other questions, that arise in Chapters 3 and 4:

AUTHORITY or
LIBERTARIANISM:

Is a peaceful, just, fulfilling and pleasant society more likely to result from one that is highly ordered and controlled through hierarchies dominated by the state or by elite groups? Or are the lack of hierarchies and a state, and the promotion of democratic self-organisation the keys to such a society?

SMALL or
LARGE SCALE:

Is large-scale urban, industrial and politicaUeconomic organisation the most efficient way to achieve the desired society, or is small beautiful?

TECHNOLOGY -
DETERMINED BY
or DETERMINING:

Does society, or specific elements in it, control and determine technological developoment? Or does the latter have a life of its own, which substantially influences the shape of society?

TECHNOLOGY - HIGH
or INTERMEDIATE:

Which serves the interests of a socially just and ecologically sound society? Can the former express and be part of democratic social relationships? Can the latter provide large populations with basic needs?

MODERNISM -
POSTMODERNISM:

Is rhe Enlightenment project of seeking universal good through understanding and establishing general rational principles (including an absolute morality) still feasible? Or should life be lived according to hedonistic principles celebrating the here and now, images rather than reality and the equal validity of all views and perspectives?

complicated than that. Some greens may object that the very process of polarising issues in this w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables and Figure
• Foreword
• 1 Red and Green: Old or New Politics?
• 2 Political Economy and Political Ideology: Where Greens, Marxists and Anarchists Fit in
• 3 The Marxist Perspective on Nature and Environmentalism
• 4 Anarchism and the Green Society
• 5 Conclusion: Socialism and the Environment
• References