In the face of a critical need for an ecologically sustainable and socially
egalitarian society, too often many greens and much of the socialist left seem
at loggerheads with each other, regularly drawing their respective ideological
wagons into a defensive circle, with parody, caricature and straw opponents in
great abundance during the ensuing polemic. What are the prospects for a
red-green dialogue and joint effort in promoting progressive social,
environmental and political change?
The woodchipping issue is a good example of the issues which usually divide,
but could unite, red and green.
Eighty per cent of the population opposed woodchipping of the old-growth,
native hardwood forests, but they lost out to the timber industry bosses. Most
of the woodchipping debate centred on the "environment versus jobs"
beat-up. When the timber industry bosses, fearing the threat to their easy
woodchip profits from a virtually free resource, wept about "jobs, jobs,
jobs", this was camouflage for "profits, profits, profits".
The green analysis of the woodchipping industry made all the right arguments
to this effect. A generous public subsidy keeps the industry afloat on windfall
profits at the expense of investment in renewable plantations. The woodchipping
industry is capital intensive, employing only some 600-800 workers nationally,
and only 2% of job losses in the timber industry are due to conservation
measures, compared with 98% arising from increased mechanisation and the
shrinkage of forest due to over-logging. There should be compensation and
retraining for timber workers in the shift to plantation timber. Both jobs and
the old-growth forests could be preserved if export woodchipping were to cease.
Most timber workers, however, were not receptive to these arguments. Their
immediate interests were tied to earning their next wage packet (or paying off
their expensive rigs), but their union leaders in the CFMEU did nothing to
develop a policy or a campaign for the medium term transition to plantations and
medium term job security. They demonstrated myopic tunnel-vision by playing the
companies' game, spreading the lies about greens costing jobs. This was the
negative reflex response of vulgar labourism which will cost timber workers
dearly in the not-too-distant long run.
The interface between the environment movement and the labour movement, which
was so prominent during the woodchipping debate, raises a fundamental issue for
greens and socialists. Clearly, workers are crucial in the environmental
equation. If timber workers did not cut down trees, then the forests would be
saved. If uranium miners did not mine yellowcake, there would be no genetic
malformations or nuclear bombs. If car workers built bicycles or public
transport vehicles, global warming would abate.
But workers in such environmentally harmful industries do not control their
labour. Workers sell their labour power and thus cede to the capitalist class
the power to determine the shape of industrial activity through investment
decisions.
Thus it is politically wrong to blame workers for the environmental damage of
their jobs. The responsibility lies not with those members of the working class
forced to earn their livelihood in environmentally damaging industries; it lies
with those with economic power, the capitalist class who profit from their
control of such industries.
Getting rid of environmentally harmful jobs, without sacrificing the workers
in those jobs, is in most cases insoluble under capitalism. Environmentally
harmful jobs can be ended only under socialism, when the working class,
including the loggers, uranium miners, car and oil workers of today, has
political power and can manage productive activity in the interests of both
workers and the environment.
The defeats of the environment movement over woodchipping exposed the
weaknesses of green political strategies, particularly the focus on parliament.
In NSW, some green groups took advantage of the state election in 1995 to dip
into the spring of bourgeois democratic illusion by campaigning for a
(right-wing) Carr ALP government in the hope of preserving native forests in
that state, as if the entire history of broken promises and the record of past
ALP governments was of no moment.
The recent federal election saw all the usual parliamentary dross on display,
with each establishment party hiding its own wretched performance behind scare
stories about how much worse the other lot would be, and the offering of 30
pieces of Telstra silver to buy support from the greens.
The difference between Labor and the Coalition on green issues, as on
anything else, is largely symbolic, with the Liberals tending to get stuck into
workers and the environment a little harder.
On the environment, both parties are motivated merely by controlling possible
damage to the health of the capitalist economy (the measure of all things to
Labor and Liberal). The ALP in 1990, for example, made a big song and dance
about pumping millions into soil rehabilitation programs but this policy was
undertaken only because land degradation was visibly harming rural productivity;
the federal Coalition is pursuing a similar policy for the same reasons.
Neither establishment party is doing anything (other than making the
situation worse) on the greenhouse effect, public transport, uranium mining or a
host of other environmental issues which are not yet hitting the capitalist
balance-sheet.
The largely once-off and hence ritualistic anti-woodchipping mass rallies (
often tardily organised, leaving the forest industry mobilisations with all the
tactical aces) were ineffective. Unfortunately, this has merely served to
reinforce lobbying and electoralism as green strategies. The political problems
with lobbying, for example, include its non-involvement of the mass of people
and its faulty liberal pluralist assumption that governments committed to
maintaining capitalism are open to rational argument rather than being agents of
the pursuit of profit.
With the timber workers seemingly the direct antagonists of the forest
blockaders and protesters, the estrangement of the greens (and leftists looking
for an alternative to "outmoded" class politics) from the union
movement, and from a politics based on class, was reinforced
- "while left politics has learned to live without Marx's
grand narrative of class struggle and the inevitable triumph of the working
class ... dead forests, extinct species and unusable land give external
confirmation of the truth of environmental arguments".1
Green sensibility has seemingly replaced class consciousness
- "green sentiment thus
becomes a condensation of people's gut knowledge of the threat capitalism's
relentless process of commodification continues to pose to human
existence".1
This left analysis of green awareness has the merit of at least naming
capitalism as the source of environmental deterioration, but its political
reading of green awareness is questionable. Forty to sixty per cent of Green
preferences in the most recent ACT Territory elections, for example, went to the
Liberals, whilst the two Greens elected to the ACT Assembly voted for the
Liberals to form a minority government.
Attempting to be all things to all people regardless of class interest has
the potential to compromise the greens' identity as an unambiguous left
progressive force. Neither does a specifically green consciousness embody any
political strategy for change, or identify the agents for such change, beyond
the ineffectual liberal bourgeois democratic framework.
On the other hand, some of the more orthodox left managed to miss the point
of the woodchipping issue whilst being abstractly correct in reducing the issue
to the exploitation of labour by capital.2 We were reminded that the timber
industry makes its profits not from exploiting the trees but by extracting
surplus value from the timber workers and that to argue for the alternative to
logging native hardwood forests - renewable
softwood plantations - is to de facto argue for a higher rate of profit because
plantations have higher productivity from greater exploitation of workers. It
was also pointed out that plantations also receive subsidies, so that government
subsidies for native forest woodchipping are not an argument that carries any
weight for stopping woodchipping.3
However, the fact that there is competition for public subsidies and
government assistance by all sectors of private industry, all of which are costs
borne by the working class, and the fact that labour is the most exploited
resource and therefore crucial to political strategy, does not directly bear on
the practical choice in the issue at hand -
the saving of native forests. If Marxism's contribution to the
woodchipping issue is to explain that calling for a switch to plantations is to
strengthen capitalist relations of production
- then thanks but no thanks.
To assess the prospects for a mutually beneficial interchange between red and
green, it is worth reviewing the history of the environment movement over the
last few decades from the perspective of its relation to the societal fault-line
of class.
One preliminary formality is to note the various shades of political green
that exist. Just as there are different political meanings of the
"left", so there are different meanings of "green".
"Light" greens seek gradualist reforms within capitalism, utilising
bourgeois democratic means. This is the world of carbon-dioxide scrubbers on
industrial smokestacks, CFC-free aerosols and "green" cars fitted with
catalytic converters. "Dark" or " holistic" greens seek a
radical reordering of society, questioning the assumed virtues of material
abundance, unlimited growth and productivist ideology.
Despite the programmatic differences between these two ends of the green
spectrum, however, they both lie on the same strategic plane
- social change which is
"beyond" class. This common renunciation of class struggle and
class-based revolutionary strategies justifies treating the greens as a
relatively homogeneous bloc for the purpose of a consideration of the nature of
green politics.
The environment movement has shown a sensitivity to issues of class in the
past, but there has been a marked shift in green political complexion from the
first wave of environmentalism during the late '60s and '70s to the second wave
during the '80s and '90s. The first wave was an activist-based protest movement
that meshed periodically with a broader anti-capitalist project. The second
wave, despite all the rhetoric about subverting dominant paradigms and opening
up a new path to radical social transformation, is a more bureaucratic, solidly
reformist project that has been willingly incorporated into the de-radicalising
arena of corporate capitalism and its political management structures.
This outcome had a certain inevitability that arose from trying to create a
greener world within capitalism, a seedling that was present in first wave
environmentalism and which bloomed in the second wave. Without a class-based
strategy which consistently challenged the power of the capitalist class, the
green vision suffered, and will suffer, from persistent reformist pressures.
The transformation between the two waves both reflects and is underpinned by
the political decline that all social movements experienced over this period, a
decline predicated on the relative quietude of the trade union movement and the
associated hard times for hopes of radical change during the recent years of
capitalist triumph and reaction.
The decline of the environment movement is to be measured in its de-
radicalisation and not in its still relatively high paper membership or the
annual turnover of the Body Shop. The environment movement bore the seeds of its
own political decline with its middle-class antecedents and political focus, and
its aversion to class-based strategies for change. This process, however, was
fostered by the societal circumstances it found itself in.
The first wave of environmentalism grew from longstanding nature conservation
concerns, which had been almost solely the preserve of a small middle-class
coterie (the "bearded backpacker" stereotype) who had the time and
opportunity to "consume" wilderness areas as a refuge from industrial
capitalism. With the '60s political awakening, this pastoral concern of the
elite broadened out to a concern for urban environmental issues and the prospect
of global ecological crisis. Resource depletion, pollution, pesticide poisoning
(and the much more problematic issue of population growth) became prominent
issues.
The movement at this stage was largely one of protest, prepared to finger
capitalism, entertain the notion of the working class as an important agent of
environmental change and not yet ready necessarily to take the reformist road.
Friends of the Earth (FOE), for example, was founded in the US in 1969 and bore
the democratic, activist, militant and anti- capitalist marks of its New Left
milieu.
In the '70s, the movement's analysis of, and political strategies to stop,
uranium mining and nuclear power had a significant class element. There was, in
Australia, industrial action from pivotal sectors such as rail workers and
wharfies. The BLF's green bans remain a red-green benchmark for protection of
the environment. A general characteristic of first wave environmentalism was the
link with the organised working class and the involvement of socialists and
other anti-capitalist radicals from the earlier cohort of Vietnam War activists.
From the late '70s as economic recession hit, however, the environment
movement (and other social movements) became isolated from the waning industrial
movement -
the force that could win real, immediate environmental victories. The
recession-led ascendancy of a reformist consciousness within the unions allowed
union leaders to sell to their members uranium mining and other environmentally
harmful industrial activity with the old lie that jobs depend on capitalist
growth and investment.
Many environment activists now left the streets to nurse despondency, ceding
control of the movement to the lobbyists and careerists, or to hope for a Labor
victory at the polls to carry out what they, now apparently abandoned by the
unions, could not achieve through their own direct action.
The environment groups underwent a marked change as they progressed through
the '80s. The visionaries, a sometimes ragged but always passionate bunch of
activists, were ousted by streamlining professionals. FOE in the US in 1986, for
example, underwent "corporatisation", turning a grassroots
organisation into a business, involving its members in campaigns, already
decided on without their input, usually by simply asking for money or telling
them who to write or phone, and that merely as an adjunct to the
"real" lobbying by the professionals.4 This business model is now
reflected to varying degrees in most environment groups.
This organisational development was a reassertion of strategies more amenable
to the green middle-class constituency, who were more easily satisfied with
(limited) ends than means, with the actual piecemeal reforms rather than the
process of radicalising and mobilising people through the struggle for those
reforms.
Whilst clean air and water legislation, and regulatory agencies to control
pollution and manage waste disposal, for example, were introduced in Australia
and many other countries, such legislative gains are always precarious within
capitalism. The environment movement, which had been, in part, responsible
through its militancy for the reforms, was now unable to mobilise against the
inadequacies of the laws.
Business ignored, covered up or sidestepped the laws, and governments failed
to administer them out of deference to the need for the national competitive
edge in the profit stakes, as recession limited the economic margin for
regulatory control and for government expenditure on " externalities"
like environmental protection.
The middle-class nature of the environmental movement lies not so much in its
personnel (although its leadership remains largely composed of middle- class
professionals); it rather rests on its universalist ideology (the environment
crisis affects everyone and it is therefore everyone's responsibility). This has
no necessary connection with class interests and so remains, as do all
petty-bourgeois movements, swayed by the relative societal force-fields of the
classes that do matter.
A radical and militant labour movement will pull the greens to the left. A
quiescent labour movement will leave the greens appealing much more to the very
institutions they wish to subvert or reform
- the capitalist class and
the state -
and therefore accepting very narrow rules of political behaviour and
expectations for change.
The second wave of environmentalism, which swelled on the currents of global
threats like greenhouse and ozone, was marked by a low or non- existent level of
mass mobilisation. Despite the emergence of voter- friendly and relatively
successful green parties in the electoral field, it has had correspondingly
fewer results to show. The second wave was much more easily defused and coopted
by offering the movement experts a place in the bureaucratic sun, such as the
ESD (environmentally sustainable development) process.
With the labour movement hunkered down in defensive bunkers resisting, with
more or less, mostly less, success the assaults of a desperate capitalist class
during the '80s recession, green strategies took on a wistful and ineffective
hue. Green self-improvement versions of the biblical injunction to change
thyself (half a brick in the toilet cistern, recycling, etc), elitist Greenpeace
heroics, green consumerism and the perennial ballot box came to dominate the
outlook of most of those with environmental concerns.
Socialists were proscribed or went into self-imposed exile from a movement
that spoke of radical transformation but settled, in practice, for a green
Fabianism and self-improvement. The green retreat from the working class leaves
only the ineffectual methods typical of middle-class liberals:
Strategies which don't upset class power are going to be ineffectual. You
don't have to be a Marxist to recognise that the capitalist class and its
executive in parliament are the fundamental obstacle to environmental health.
But it sure helps.
It will be crucial for the environment movement's success to understand the
realities of corporate power and of the working class as an essential agent of
change. Ultimately, socialist revolution is necessary because real democracy and
popular decision-making power are necessary. But is it enough to leave the
argument here by reasserting such old verities of Marxism?
It is certainly a necessary stage in the argument. Socialism, if it is about
any one thing above all else, is about democracy, a substantive economic and
political democracy based on working-class power, where profit does not
determine the decisions or decision-makers, where the ecological as much as the
human can all be satisfied without any section of the working class losing out
from any decision.
Under socialism, the best ideas, instead of winning over 80% of the
population and then being ignored by capital and its politicians, would
determine policy, whether on woodchipping, uranium mining, abortion, football
competitions or whatever.
The stress on socialism as the highest form of democracy, with its attendant
prospect of informed intellectual exchange, is also necessary to counter the
crudities of traditional socialist attitudes concerning nature, some of which
are uncomfortably close to the Stalinist hubris of " humanity's struggle
against nature", symptomatically captured in the headlines in a Chinese
Communist Party paper which read "Chairman Mao's Thoughts Are Our Guide to
Scoring Victories in the Struggle Against Nature" or "The Desert
Surrenders!".5
These militarist metaphors fly in the face of the ecological awareness that
both Marx and Engels displayed. Engels' justly celebrated "ecological"
passages bear reiteration:
"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 [for
example, desertification following deforestation for agriculture ] ... 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 we with flesh, blood
and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst ..."6
This ecological awareness is denied by the capitalist, who must consider only
"the immediate, the most tangible result"
- profit for the individual
capitalist -
regardless of environmental consequence:
"what cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the
slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for
one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees
- what cared they that the very heavy tropical rainfall
afterwards washed away the unprotected stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare
rock!"6
Marx's ecological awareness, however incidental in his writings, that
capitalist production functions "only by sapping the original sources of
all wealth -
the soil and the labourer" is also clear.7
Engels and Marx, however, also believed that the exploitation of nature is
potentially infinite because of "the fact that we have the advantage over
all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them
correctly".6 So Engels could write, against the execrable Malthus to be
sure, that "the productive power at mankind's disposal is
immeasurable".8 To which the reply "No it isn't, the Earth is
finite" has logical merit if only because of entropy and the second law of
thermodynamics.
The optimistic scientific progressivism, which Marxism inherited as a legacy
of its 19th century origins, was also characteristic of Bolsheviks like Trotsky:
"the proper goal of communism is the domination of nature by technology,
and the domination of technology by planning so that the raw materials of nature
will yield up to mankind all that we need and more besides", an attitude to
nature that led Trotsky to praise nuclear energy and schemes for global climate
modification.9 This may have been understandable because of the appalling state
of underdevelopment in Russia, and the underdevelopment of the science of
ecology, but surely not now.
Ted Trainer has an easy target when he criticises Marxism for being unmindful
of "purely ecological and resource aspects" of development and
economic growth, for its automatic belief in "material abundance"
arising from breaking not only capitalist property relations but the
"resistance" of nature.10
Learning to apply nature's laws correctly, as recommended by Engels, may well
entail recognising resource limits to the infinite expansion of human activity,
that technological advances in the exploitation of nature may involve vicious
cycles of escalating problems and unknown impacts and that many environmental
issues have an autonomous dimension whatever the relations of production.
The issue of which class controls the means of production and thus gets to
exploit nature, must be considered in conjunction with the nature of that
exploitation. Raymond Williams has argued for the recognition by socialists that
there is a central issue to be addressed about the mode of production as well as
its social relations -
questioning the assumption of "an effective infinity of expansion in
a physically finite world" whilst "the orthodox abstraction of
indefinitely expanded production ... has to be considered again, from the
beginning".11
It is true that there is a common heritage between a Romantic, non-
productivist, utopian strain of socialism such as that of William Morris and the
green movement, a heritage which should be invoked with a view to united action
in a common project to win a better world. But it is disingenuous to be
selective about socialism's heritage and argue ( suddenly) that William Morris
is what real socialism is all about.
In many respects, the challenge that the green movement made to the socialist
left for the hegemony of progressive politics has not matured. Green philosophy
and political practice have resulted in just another version of pressure group
politics accepting the limiting framework of capitalism.
The initial enthusiasm for strategies such as green consumerism and social
change through personal change has waned or reached its inherent limits.
Electoralism, and the always peripheral alternative lifestyle experiments, have
likewise probably peaked on the political margins of society. Capitalism remains
the problem.
The Greens are too often fuzzy about power and disdainful about class struggle and revolution, naively moving with gastropod-paced progress along "proper (middle-class) channels" of institutional and personal tinkering, continually grounding on the sandbars of capitalist interests and class power. Socialism remains the solution, albeit one rejuvenated by what is ecologically important in fundamental green concerns. A spirit of intellectual openness is needed by both. Red and green are a little like Fred and Ginger - pretty good on their own but unbeatable together.
1. Judith Brett, "Roots of the Movement", editorial in Arena,
April-May 1995, p. 3.
2. Political reductionism is a strong temptation. Eric Petersen's feisty
book, The Poverty of Dialectical Materialism, at one point oversimplifies
environmental problems to a matter of capitalist class exploitation: "What
some people call a `human war against nature' is in reality a capitalist war
against the working class", whilst "control of nature for human
benefit" plays unproblematic second fiddle to the issue of which class gets
to expropriate nature. Eric Petersen, The Poverty of Dialectical Materialism,
Red Door, Sydney, p. 298.
3. Scott MacWilliam & Michael Rafferty, "Labour: The Most Exploited
Resource", Solidarity, April 1, 1995, p. 5.
4. "Hungry Coyote" (pseud), "The Corporate Takeover of Friends
of the Earth", Chain Reaction, no. 63/64, p. 38; and Lorna Salzman,
"The Decline and Fall of FOE in the United States", Philosophy and
Social Action, July- Sept 1990, cited in Chain Reaction, ibid, p. 38.
5. Cited in John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological
Problems and Western Traditions, Duckworth, London, 1974, p. 157.
6. Frederick Engels, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to
Man, 1876 -
cited in Democratic Socialist Party, Socialism and Human Survival: For a
Green, Democratic and Socialist World!, New Course Publications, Sydney, 1990,
pp. 37-38.
7. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1 - cited in
Democratic Socialist Party, Socialism and Human Survival, p. 39.
8. Frederick Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844
- cited in Howard L. Parsons
(ed), Marx and Engels on Ecology, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1977, p. 202.
9. Cited in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929, Oxford
University Press, London, pp. 177 & 196.
10. F.E. Trainer, Abandon Affluence!, Zed Books, London, p. 269.
11. Raymond Williams, Towards 2000, Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1986 pp. 214-
215.
