Chris Marsh, 4/2/06

On this web site I’ve been parking the findings of my exploration into how to ‘design for revolution’, how to bring about a socially just and sustainable world society. I came at the task from two angles: a ‘red’ angle and a ‘deep green’ angle. ‘Red’ is revolutionary socialism or communism, with anarchism soon added. ‘Deep green’ started by meaning deep ecology, but I have reservations with respect to the anti-humankind tendency of that ideology, so I’ve slid more in the direction of permaculture, eco-villages, and alternative lifestyles focussed on sustainability and self-reliance. I was convinced from the start that these two trends in human thought and action need to be brought together in some way, despite their being like chalk and cheese: the red trend being critical, rational, theoretical, somewhat utopian, and atheistic, active only in Trades Unionism and party-political campaigning; in contrast, the deep green trend has some theory and ideology but is largely practical, living its experiments and dreams, experiential and spiritual.

It must be over 15 years ago that I discovered the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, because it was in 1991 that I was a student on a five-week course he led at Schumacher College in Devon. I quit the course early, disgruntled that I was the only student to have read his books and so had to listen in to hours of him expounding ideas I was already very familiar with. He kissed me goodbye with regret, I think, for not having met my expectation of the course being an opportunity for discussing how his ideas could be applied to urgently needed world change. Since then I’ve met him a couple of times at lectures he was giving, and he has recognised me and apologised for giving a lecture I’d heard before – he is witty and entertaining, so I didn’t mind. Apart from that, the Sheldrake ideas have slid to the back of my mind. I was far from clear back then how they could be used, but recently, I came across the text of an interview with Sheldrake and it occurred to me that I now know what his ideas could be for.

If I look back even further in my life than that course – over 20 years ago now – I come to a period when I was active in a Marxist socialist political party called the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). I learnt a lot then about the marxist critique of capitalism, but we weren’t allowed to speculate on what the future, post-Revolution, society would be like, apart from generalities like: ‘from each according to his/her means, to each according to her/his self-determined needs’. ‘Drawing up a blueprint for Socialism’ was thought unnecessary, misleading and sure to be wrong. A few members fought against this ban, arguing that people wouldn’t be interested in the Party unless we could give them some ideas of how the future society might be. An SPGB pamphlet on the subject was written, against much resistance from the diehards. Today – judging from discussions on the internet – there is more openness towards that topic. However, the kinds of models of future society put forward seem to me to be directly inherited from capitalism, are top-down in their organisation – what I would call ‘statist’ – and based on the mechanistic paradigm. For example, socialists seem to like the idea of taking over supermarket stock control and replenishment systems; the very automaticity of these appeals. But to me this seems dangerous because such systems perpetuate the alienation of people from the land they depend on, and risk continuing to be unsustainable.

Research into the history of land use – again many years ago – got me interested in how conventional monocrop agriculture to supply cities has been destructive for millennia (causing soil erosion, salinisation, desertification), whereas some groups of surviving peasant communities have much to teach us in the West about local self-reliance, despite their often having to make do with marginal land, the best land having been taken for cash crop plantations. My involvement in the permaculture movement in Britain led to my becoming aware of applications of permaculture in the Third World which build on traditional expertise, adding appropriate new technology and the teaching of permaculture design. Post Peak Oil, we’re all going to have to learn how to survive – and thrive, and be creative and sociable – on the land we inhabit. My recent reading and research on India has made me aware that both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore envisaged India as a vast network of villages, rather than the European model of the urbanised nation state, and this led me to the idea that the ‘cell’ of a future society will be perhaps 25 households living and working together. Putting this forward on the socialist discussion forums, provoked the challenge ‘how do you see the provision of needs which cannot be met at the local level being organised’ – with the insistence that some system or mechanism would be essential. ‘Surely you don’t envisage people will engage in trade!’ they say, shocked. But why not? There need be nothing wrong with real live markets, with people exchanging surpluses and artefacts – by means of a form of currency, even, as long as the trade uses the old ‘C-M-C’ model, not capitalism’s ‘M-C-M’ (Marx, Chapter 1: ‘The Commodity’, Capital, Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), p.249). The currency, ‘M’, could be conkers rather than coins, to ensure they do not have any intrinsic value.

But what has this to do with the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake?

Socialists need to recognise how attached they are to the old, Newtonian, mechanistic, deterministic paradigm, which is still dominant in Western society, despite the New Science of the past century having overturned the concept of an objective universe, driven by eternal laws of physics. Sheldrake is not an orthodox New Scientist, involved in quantum mechanics, theoretical physics or whatever. He is a ‘feral scientist’, a visionary, a skeptic (sic) – quite beyond the pale – and as such has been adopted by New Agers, Greens and Spirituality folk, and probably glad of that, for how else would he sell his books? And yet – sadly, it seems to me – he is obsessed with proving his ideas experimentally – using some strange phenomena as exemplars – seemingly not recognising that proof through repeatable experiments belongs with the orthodox paradigm. Another feral scientist is James Lovelock, whose Gaia Hypothesis has also been latched onto by New Agers etc. Lovelock has upset these alternative followers by claiming to favour nuclear energy – that is perhaps his way of clinging on to the old scientific community. What is interesting about these two particular feral scientists is that they point to an organic model of the world. Despite the wacky following, their ideas are actually entirely rational and sensible, and could be perfectly acceptable to socialists. And if socialists were able to get their minds around these ideas, they would, I believe, be more open to the ‘culturist’ model of future society (for a definition and exposition of ‘culturism’ as opposed to ‘statism’ see Ashis Nandy, ‘Culture, State, and the Rediscovery of Indian Politics’ in Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism and Culture, ed. by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), pp.255-274).

My next task, though, is to suggest what is actually irrational and contrary to common sense, about the mechanistic paradigm, so try this thought experiment.

See also my open letter to Rupert Shelrake, 23/2/06

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