International Socialists

While most of New Zealand's media still worries about the state of Nandor Tanczos' haircut, John Ryan explores some of the fundamental contradictions crippling the modern environmentalist movement, and proposes a Marxist approach to the current crisis.

 

 

When poet Gary Snyder wrote that "the most revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most revolutionary classes: animals, trees, water, air and grasses" he identified one of the key issues of our age - the distinction between the politics of the radical left and the emergence of the Green movement.

 

"Green" has been used since the 1950s as a term to indicate sympathy for environmental issues or projects, and since the late 1970s has been adopted by a growing number of environmental parties, the New Zealand Greens amongst them (first formed in 1972 as the Values Party).

 

Since that time, however, more specific definitions have emerged within the movement which seek to draw a line between "shallow" environmentalism and the "econcentric" politics of "deep" ecology.

 

Briefly stated, the ecological position is one which radically calls into question a whole series of political, economic and social practices in a way that environmentalism does not. Pure conservationism, for example, is characteristic of a "shallow" approach insofar as it assumes that present crises can be resolved without demanding the widespread social changes deep Greens argue are essential for a sustainable planet.

 

Ecologism envisages a post-industrial society critical of economic growth and technology and suggests that the Good Life will involve more work and fewer material objects. The concept of environmental limits to expansion is taken for granted by Green theorists, and is a point that brings Green politics to a fundamental confrontation with capitalist activity.

 

Because of the great diversity of opinion within the ranks of ecologism this contradiction is not always acknowledged and some thinkers retain a guarded tolerance for the capitalist system. A generally agreed upon point, however, is that the root cause of environmental degradation is not capitalism at all, but a culture of industrialisation.

 

It is this assertion that gives rise to the Green claim to be beyond the old divisions of Left and Right, on the grounds that both ideological perspectives are caught up in a common theme of economic expansion. This is to be traced to a philosophical obsession with the concerns of modernism - namely, the idea that the natural world can be thought of as a machine to be manipulated, and a belief in measuring progress through development and domination.

 

Green critics of industrialism have gone so far as to characterise socialism as "fair shares in extinction," pointing out that there is supposedly nothing in socialist theory that gives any emphasis to sustainability. Greens couple this with a case for econcentrism, a perspective that seeks to empathise with the natural world. The politics of socialism are considered to be human-focused to the point of excluding any environmental concern, and critics have frequently used the example of the former "socialist" bloc to illustrate the "industrial cult" of Marxist theory.

 

The revolutionary socialist response to this is that none of these states were socialistic, having developed the same form of demand for material goods as capitalist nations, in competition with them. Capitalism has permeated the globe, regardless of illusory political boundaries.

 

Socialists agree with supporters of ecologism that environmental decay is clearly very much with us, but make the case that the Green movement should focus against the fundamental cause of this - capitalism - instead of raging against industrialisation of all forms.

 

Marx, writing in Capital stated that "capitalist production develops technology and the combining together of various processes into a social whole...only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer."

 

At the same time, resource conservation, recycling and pollution control are actively discouraged as they both decrease productivity (by reducing consumption) and by decreasing profits - unless of course the capitalist can throw the cost of environmental rehabilitation off onto society.

 

This "slash and burn" system of economics began in Medieval Europe with forest destruction and wetland drainage, and acquired global dimensions from the 16th Century onwards, culminating in dustbowls, deserts and the colonial imposition of land use patterns geared to foreign markets.

 

The 20th Century development of "agribusiness" was characterised by Marx as the irrational, degrading search for quick gains - "all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art of robbing the soil."

 

A refusal to recognise capital control as the central issue renders ecology incapable of fighting battles in the right places - in the workforce, among the jobless (victims of the structural unemployment demanded by capitalist markets) and inside the marginalised sectors that are denied political power within the Green movement because of an excessively narrow definition of "environment."

 

By concentrating almost exclusively on preservationist matters the role of capitalism in deforming human environments is often ignored, as is the history of labour movements as essentially environmental organisations, fighting for the improvement of shopfloor conditions.

 

Furthermore, socialists insist that there is no such thing as "nature" unmediated and unmodified by human beings. Marx argued that no separation exists between human society and the wider environment, since it is impossible to define one except relation to the other - try it and see.

 

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx wrote that nature "is man's body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse with if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature."

 

In this sense, socialists reject the romantic idealisation of Nature that results from a purely ecological stance, favouring instead a relationship of dialogue that incorporates humanity. Placing the non-human world upon an ideological pedestal serves only to mystify it and thus further alienate humanity.

 

An "eco-Marxism" would unite this position with the realisation that we find behind virtually all environmental problems, both physical and social, is poverty. Economic deprivation is of crucial importance to capitalism and has to be maintained in order to preserve the balance of power in market relations.

 

Related to this is capital's need for sustained growth which depends on the control of raw goods that are increasingly found on the periphery of the world economy. On top of this, the denial of class antagonisms leads ecologism to accept the naive course of legislative change through Parliament. This begins with the assumption that the state  exists as a neutral authority, set up to reconcile conflicting interests. The actual reality is that governmental authorities are not free from the constraints of a system designed to further the interests of capitalism.

 

Genuine environmental concern from mainstream politicians is minimal and borders on absurdity, as was testified to at the initial Earth Summit in 1992 and many times since then.

 

To fight this failure, Greens must acknowledge the basic conservatism of its appeal for unity in the face of crisis and instead present a more accurate portrait of the world today: the reality of an emerging East-West elite converging to appropriate Third World surpluses.

 

A broad agenda addressing human needs in the developing world is desperately needed if Green activists wish in future to avoid the slogans of "Ecologists Go Home" they have in the past met at non-Western environmental conferences.

 

It is not acceptable to take refuge in the standard capitalist myth of overpopulation, a myth that relates closely to Green beliefs about natural limitations. When faced with this question of overpopulation, theorist David Pepper asks what the term actually means: overpopulation in relation to what? How do we know when such a problem exists?

 

We may say that overpopulation is evidenced by the existence of groups who do not have enough to eat (these are presumably the surplus people), which is what resource scarcity implies. It does not, however, necessarily follow that this starvation is produced by natural shortages. Rather, the "surplus"  population may be unable to get enough to eat because it is not profitable for capitalism to supply them food - Africa is a prime example of this, especially when one considers the over-production of food in the United States. This economic inability is a fundamental aspect of capitalism and is vital to the continued operation of capital accumulation.

 

With this in mind, the Green conception of inevitable and natural limits has to be reconsidered. A basic principle of socialism is that the abolition of capitalist production brings with it the ability for a society to change its means of organisation of its technical and cultural appraisals of natures.

 

In any case, the criticism still holds "that whenever a theory of overpopulation seizes hold in a society dominated by an elite, the non-elite invariably experience some form of political, economic and social repression." As Pepper observes "who are the surplus people? Clearly it is not us, so it must be them - migrant workers, racial minorities, the third world's starving masses and so on."

 

This is not to suggest that Green theory fails in its stated commitment to justice and egalitarian practice. However, it does imply a need to modify a world view that may ultimately deflect criticism away from the capitalist culprit and onto the undeserving victims of such exploitation.

 

Ecological politics has unquestionable strengths but much of its present support lies only among those who have the luxury of being able to to care about such abstract issues going on somewhere else - principally, the educated and employed in Western higher tax brackets.

 

In the end, supporters of Green ecologism must consider the fact that one billion of the world's people live today in absolute poverty while developed, industrial nations account for 85% of the global GNP and yet hold only 23% of the population.

 

Because of this, it is not too much to suggest that the big question of Green politics in the 21st Century may be one of choosing sides, or of restating an ideology that ignores the disparate positions of rich and poor.