Extract from ‘Contours of green thought’ by Jack Conrad, Weekly Worker 620 Thursday April 13 2006

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/620/ecology.htm

Greenism is hobbled by two fundamental faults. It cannot tame capitalism, nor does it offer a realistic way of superseding capitalism. Jack Conrad explores its limitations.

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Critiques

Prostituted apologetics of the type coming from the Forum for the Future notwithstanding, there are those greens who offer forthright critiques of monopoly capitalism. Overconsumption, third world indebtedness, advertising and the degradation of nature are all subjected to snarling polemic and on occasion biting analysis. Many radical ecological theorists fondly cite Gerald Winstanley, William Morris and Peter Kropotkin and their spicy inspiration. Others prefer the milder flavours of St Francis of Assisi, Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.

Obviously, anti-capitalism is a many-headed beast. Before examining the deep greens, I shall briefly discuss Ernst Schumacher, George Monbiot and Murray Bookchin. Between the three of them they cover the spectrum of ecological thought that stretches from green christianity by way of neo-Proudhonism to social anarchism. Besides a burning desire for global change, the thread that joins them is that small is beautiful.

The future must be non-capitalist, but also decentralised, self-reliant and non-hierarchical. However, the social agent capable of bringing about such an outcome remains totally unconvincing in each account. For Schumacher it is enlightened aid workers and third world bureaucrats. Monbiot talks of collective action by “poor countries”, while Bookchin looks to “libertarian municipalism”. All shrink from the necessary task of organising the working class into a revolutionary party.

Ernst Schumacher (1911-1977) considered unrestrained industrialisation to be the cause of “unlimited sorrows”, especially in the former colonial countries. Schumacher advocated ‘appropriate technology’ and criticised the ‘bigger is better’ ethos characteristic of the 1950s-60s long boom. He located this ethos not in the concentration of capital enforced under circumstances of a declining system, rather in six leading ideas inherited from the 19th century.

These were: Darwinism and “natural selection”; the “idea of competition” and “the survival of the fittest”; Marx’s observation that all “higher manifestations” of human life – religion, philosophy, art, etc – are nothing but “necessary supplements of the material life process”; the “Freudian interpretation which reduces human life to “the dark stirrings of the human subconscious”; relativism and “denying all absolutes”; positivism and the claim that “no knowledge is valid unless it is based on generally observable facts” and therefore denies the possibility of objective knowledge of purpose and meaning.8 These ideas, which “claimed to do away with metaphysics,” were in fact, intoned Schumacher, “bad metaphysics and bad ethics”.9

Bundling together natural selection and historical materialism with positivism and scientism is not as absurd as might first appear. Ideologically the post-World War II period was under the hypnotic spell of positivism – the official ‘Marxism’ of the Stalinites on the one side and social democracy and mainstream liberalism on the other. In both cold war camps the seductive promise was made that technological Promethianism would soon shrink necessary working time to somewhere near zero, while simultaneously delivering unimaginable abundance. During the 1950s both John Kenneth Galbraith and Nikita Khrushchev heralded the leisure society. As it turned out, a permanently delayed utopia.

Though manifestly failing to locate the real causes, Schumacher exposed the anti-ecological results of both capitalist and Stalinite development to full public gaze. As an alternative he famously opted for what he called ‘buddhist economics’ (though he himself converted to catholicism). His model was post-independence Burma. Enough said.

A regular columnist on The Guardian, George Monbiot has issued a bold rallying cry for a “democratic revolution.” His case is fully elaborated in The age of consent (2003), which skilfully reveals the inner workings of the “global dictatorship of vested interests”. Clearly a welcome revolt against 21st century capitalism; but just as clearly a reinvention of pre-Marxist utopian socialism.

Monbiot wants to “harness” globalisation in order to eventually extinguish capitalism. Down the road of his democratic revolution, when at last some preset programmatic milepost is reached, the transnationals will finally be broken up and production radically decentralised. Once a confirmed localist, he now espouses globalism – at least in terms of strategy. His democratic revolution begins at the global level.

Anarchism and green capitalism are rightly rejected. But Monbiot suffers from what can only be described as a Pavlovian reaction when it comes to Karl Marx. To use a phrase, he sees red. The merest mention of Marxism sends his brain into delirium. Monbiot runs around in ridiculous circles, yappingly blaming Marx for Stalin’s gulags, Maoism and Pol Pot. Bureaucratic socialism is put down to the Communist manifesto. His “pathological” Stowe public school education seems to have conditioned him all too well.10

Monbiot has generously gone to the trouble of drawing up a detailed blueprint for tomorrow’s world. There will be a 600-seat global parliament – one MP for every 10 million people. Parliamentary voting will be weighed according to a sliding democratic scale – once again courtesy of our clever friend. However, the authority of his body would be purely moral. National states continue to exist. It is just that they would now be under pressure to do the right thing. The world ‘government’ would have no law courts, no army. Nonetheless, a fair trade organisation ensures that transnationals retract the claws of exploitation and bend to popular environmental causes.

How such a one person-one vote global institution is supposed to arise while national states and the transnationals still constitute the ruling global power is lightly skated over. Does anyone really expect the US administration to facilitate its citizenry voting in Monbiot’s elections? Would Washington shoulder the considerable costs involved? And what of China, Iran and North Korea? Though Monbiot gives a passing nod in the direction of existing campaigning organisations, his elaborate schema is built on nothing more substantial than the clouds of fantasy.

Bookchin presents a much more rigorous, far more satisfying account. Describing himself as a libertarian communist – a former official communist and former Trotskyite – he has always taken theory seriously. His impressive body of work contains much that is valuable.

Bookchin particularly targets domination and hierarchy in class society. This has produced humanity’s imbalance with nature. He has no time for pro-capitalist greenism, overpopulation panics or technophobia – all have inbuilt reactionary implications. A progressive social revolution is needed.

Bookchin’s unwillingness to embrace the means, the revolutionary party, is perfectly understandable, especially given his location in the US radical milieu. The leftwing sects which commonly pass themselves off as parties, even those which more modestly say they aspire to that aim, pathetically reproduce the structures and much of the attending egotism of capitalism itself. Central committees behave as boards of directors, the rank and file are treated as mere speaking tools. Then there are the proprietorial general secretaries.

Fleeing from this madness, Bookchin finds refuge in little communes, municipalities, which consist to begin with of a putative hardcore cadre. Somehow these bacillus survive within the decaying body of capitalist society and steadily grow into organs of dual power.

Momentarily suspending our disbelief at the chances of this happening, we are still left with a fundamental problem. If for some reason these households managed not to succumb to the antibodies of coercion, the pressures and the lures of capitalist society, no matter how powerful they became, would mean they still come to grief. By their very nature they would articulate sectional, not universal, interests and therefore quickly fall into bickering rivalry. The fate of soviets as soviets. Without the coordination, discipline and theory provided by the highest form of working class organisation, that is bound to happen.

Deep greens

Schumacher, Monbiot and Bookchin are clearly motivated by a heartfelt desire to improve the lot of the world’s population. That cannot be so readily said of deep greens. Yes, they savage consumerism, industrial effluent, monocrop agriculture and the whole cult of economic growth. However, for them, the adverse effects all of this has on humanity is secondary. Nature comes first. We have many responsibilities to nature, but few definite claims on it.

Arne Naess, the Norwegian mountineer and sage, began laying the theoretical foundations as far back as the early 1950s – at least to the degree that deep greenism can be considered a theory. He attacked the short-termism, the irrationality of neo-classical economics and sought to displace anthropocentric modes of thinking with what he and his followers call biocentrism.

Anthropocentrism – which I take as meaning that humans alone have intrinsic value – dates back, he argues, to the Neolithic revolution, around 10,000 years ago. The adoption of anthropocentric modes of thought is collectively remembered in the story of Yehovah’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden and other such myths.

The long and the short of it is that once human beings stopped venerating nature and started to treat it as a thing to be subdued, fit only for exploitation, then they fell from grace and condemned themselves to the endless drudgery of labour. Civilization thereby becomes a terrible mistake, a dangerous detour. Suffice to say, deep greenism lacks anything resembling an adequate account of history.

Deep greenism amounts to a retrogressive plea for humanity to adapt to nature, to give up on all hope of progressive social change and return to a lost innocence of childhood. But just as no adult can perform such a feat, nor can the human species. The door to the past is permanently closed. The only door open to us is to the future.

According to Naess there is no moral hierarchy of life. He rejected all paradigms whereby species are ranked according to whether they have a soul or posses consciousness. Naess says, “the right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species”.11

This is not the self-denying ordinance it might first appear to be. Despite the insistence on non-hierarchy, elementary biological necessities have to be recognised. “Except to satisfy vital human needs” there is no sanction to kill. But there is a “vital human need” for food that must be constantly satisfied. People have to consume fellow life forms … and thankfully they can do so with the sanction of the deep greens. In point of fact there is a deep green macho minority which actually revels in hunting, shooting and fishing as a means of rediscovering their natural human essence – nature being red in tooth and claw.

Meanwhile, socially orientated deep greens energetically campaign against third world debt, motorways, waste incinerators, nuclear power, climate change … and blood sports. A direct action aristocracy live out the ideal as eco-warriors, travelling from squat to squat and from protest to protest.

Nor is Aids viewed neutrally, as another wonderful addition to life’s rich tapestry. It should be fought, and if at all possible, eliminated. Yet sadly, revealingly, there are a few prominent deep greens who gleefully welcome the HIV/Aids virus. Celebrating authenticity, fragility and destiny, these ecobrutalists decry anti-Aids drugs and the entire health infrastruture. Nature knows best. Via the Aids pandemic, alienated humanity is being culled. When that task is finally completed deep green survivalists inherit the earth.

Almost in the same culpable spirit one finds green thinkers of the stature of James Lovelock expressing a scornful disregard for fellow human beings: “Our humanist solicitude towards the poor living in the impoverished suburbs of the big cities of the third world, and our almost obscene obsession with death, suffering and pain – as if these were harmful in themselves – all these thoughts deflect our attention from the problem of our harsh and excessive domination of the natural world”.12

Most deep greens disavow such overt examples of misanthorphy. They simply refuse to put humans above nature, both being accorded equal rights. Either way, paradoxically, all such viewpoints smack of anthropomorphism. Nature is given human attibutes. Hence we find the American naturalist Aldo Leonard telling us to “think like a mountain” and Christopher Stone asking “do trees have rights?” A rhetorical question. Forests, mountains and other natural objects should be given the same legal status as corporations, he suggests.13

Nature exists objectively, but right, like politics, art and morality, is obviously a human construct. Nor does nature, as nature, have interests. Human beings have an interest in nature, its preservation, its variety, its health – because nature supports human life and enhances humanity materially, culturally and spiritually.

Biocentrism, to state another obvious truth, is a human-created ideology. If it means recognising that humans are part of nature – the uniquely conscious part – that human society should cease fetishistically worshipping production, that we should start looking after nature by first reordering arrangements between ourselves, then no communist would disagree. We call it Marxism. On the other hand, if biocentrism means placing the interests of humanity against nature, diminishing the human and depicting it as a malignant cancer, then we must disagree.

Deep greenism comes ‘unencumbered’ by a fully debated and democratically agreed programme. It is a loose conglomeration and ideologically very pick and mix. Deep greenism often blurs over into New Ageism and its self-realisation and lifestyle obsessions. Consequentially deep greens are prone to navel-gazing individualism and to falling under the spell of charismatic charlatans. Exponents frequently hold completely juxtaposed positions and easily lurch from elation to despair and vice-versa.

One celebrated exponent of deep green irrationalism is the physicist Fritjof Capra, founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, USA. According to his official website, he “frequently gives management seminars for top executives”.14 After touring Germany in the early 1980s, Capra co-authored Green politics (1984) with ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak. In The tao of physics (1975) and later books such as The web of life (1996) and The hidden connections (2002) he details why he believes physics and metaphysics are both inexorably leading to the same stunning conclusion: “there are hidden connections between everything”.15

As is standard deep green fare, Capra dismisses as outdated the mechanical ‘Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm’; in justification he cites 20th century developments in sub-atomic physics and systems theory. But instead of taking on board the scientific theory of Marxism, he calls for a delving back to the truths that can be discovered in the ancient eastern outlook – ie, hinduism, buddhism and taoism – which maintain a mystical holism. Of course, the truths Capra finds in these religions/philosophies are a primitive form of dialectics.

Take Loa Tzu, the 6th century BC Chinese teacher and thinker. Brilliantly, he grasped the fact that all things are changing and changing into their opposites; they do so by following their own natural way (toa). Loa Tzu eschewed the gods and instead emphasised the unity of nature. Humanity must learn to quietly accept its laws. Other deep greens find similar truths in classical Greece. Heraclitus (circa 544-483 BC) also said that there is nothing certain in the world except change. He too concluded that things turn into their opposites. Properties of the real world were captured in the minds of these outstanding philosophers and turned into various modes of dialectical expression.

Deep greens believe they have discovered the highway to social transformation through mentally shunning western scientism and embracing what they consider to be the esoteric secrets of ancient wisdom. Others, society at large, are urged to follow their individual path to enlightenment.

Primitive dialectics is one-sided. Developed by members of the exploiting classes, specifically those isolated intellectuals who possessed the free time needed to study, contemplate and debate. However, their dialectics were quietist, a means of interpreting, not decisively engaging with the world. That was the great advance brought about by the Marx-Engels team.

Marxism is the world outlook of the revolutionary working class. Taking the best from previous philosophies, Marxism continues, but leaves behind, philosophy. Marxism is quintessentially practice; investigation is for the purposes of overthrowing all existing social conditions through uninterruptedly pursuing the class war.

The political economy of the working class points far beyond the narrow confines of mere trade unionism. It is based on need. A few hours off the working week here, a bit more pay at the end of the month there, cannot remotely satisfy the constantly expanding needs of the working class. The working class needs to become fully human. That necessitates establishing genuinely human relationships within society and, through that, a human relationship with nature.

So the only consistent defender of nature is the working class. Every other social agent is illusory. Nothing else can conceivably organise itself into an alternative material force capable of positively transcending capital. To be ecological, therefore, requires more than being anti-capitalist. It is necessary to be a partisan of the working class, an undiluted red, a Marxist.

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