Red
and
Green

Eco-socialism comes of age
The time is right, says
David
Ransom, for socialists and
environmentalists to work together on common ground.

GIL MOTI
/ STILL
PICTURES

In January
1991 the Amazon was in a state of chaos. I had been searching for any trace of
logic in the tangle of rainforest destruction, and was feeling pretty much
defeated, when I arrived at the Manaus office of an American environmental
scientist, Philip Fearnside.

‘It’s a question of who is profiting,’ he said. ‘If that profit,
and the costs, were evenly distributed, it wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t be
worth the candle for anyone individually. The fact is that influential people
are making money and poor people out in the forest are paying the price. It’s
all perfectly logical, from the point of view of the people who are making the
money.’

He was referring to the construction of hydroelectric dams for
smelters and factories exporting aluminium cans. He had done some pretty
conventional ‘cost-benefit’ calculations, and they simply didn’t add up –
unless, that is, you happened to be a member of the oligarchy in Brazil, the
most unequal country on earth. For a cause no greater than beer and soft drinks,
the rainforest had been flooded, disease and displacement had seeped into
thousands of lives, precious indigenous cultures had been trashed. Because
nothing much to the disadvantage of the Brazilian oligarchy has happened since,
it comes as no great surprise to me that the destruction of the Amazon
rainforest has continued apace.

It upsets me to think of this, to recall that the Amazon was at
the time the most fashionable of all environmental causes, and is now all but
forgotten. Radical politics, however, is less interested in fashionable causes
than in the struggles of ordinary people with everyday life. Our extraordinary
stories have a habit of never quite fitting into preordained plots. William
Morris, the nineteenth century revolutionary eco-socialist, gave a brilliant
account of what it feels like. He described how people ‘fight and lose the
battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of the defeat, and
when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and others have to fight for
what they meant under another name.’1 No struggle is ever completely
lost – or indeed completely won.

Without any doubt, the two overarching political issues of our
time are human inequality and environmental destruction, the consequences of
which may be starkly visible in places like the Amazon but apply almost
everywhere. But while passionate advocates of equality or ecology have sometimes
ventured beyond their territory, the bridge between radical Red and Green
politics has lacked the strength to carry much political weight and bring about
lasting change.

It is, nonetheless, increasingly clear that inequality and
destruction are directly linked. Indeed, it would be very much harder to
demonstrate that they are not linked, given that they are both happening at the
same time. They are also interacting in complex ways that accelerate their
growth alarmingly.

This is because global consumer capitalism, unless it is
restrained, grows faster and faster. Anything not devoted exclusively to the
service of its immediate interests it seeks to destroy. The destruction is
compounded because it must either grow or blow: it cannot contain itself. It is
self-destructive, too, shot through with contradictions which make it blow
precisely because it grows, like some force-fed hothouse vegetable.

One such contradiction is that it feeds by inflating profits,
deflating wages and thus increasing inequality. This precipitates a crisis –
because the labour we sell can’t buy all the things it makes – that ultimately
undermines its imperative to grow, producing an almighty bang of the kind that
is ringing in so many ears at this very moment. Successful capitalists have a
name for this – ‘creative destruction’. It’s one of their favourite
pastimes.

Because socialism knows how this works it has lost none of its
explanatory power. But socialists have a few problems of their own, over and
above the baleful legacy of Stalin and ‘actually existing socialism’. Not the
least of these is that they are said to be dead, replaced by smooth but
insubstantial Third Way figures who speak in tongues about ‘social justice’ and
‘equality of opportunity’, the perfect expression of which is a lottery. Nor
does it help very much that Karl Marx has been resurrected in the salons of
orthodoxy, on the strict understanding that although he may have been right
about capitalism he was wrong about communism.2

Socialists’ biggest difficulty, however, is that they’ve been
very much better on the redistribution of wealth than its redefinition. They
longed simply to get their hands on the levers of the capitalist wealth machine,
rather than redesign it. They should have listened to ecologists sooner. There
is, as it turns out, no great theoretical problem with adding a Green
contradiction to a Red analysis of capitalism, because there are environmental
limits to capitalist growth. But it entails accepting also that there can be no
prospect whatever of creating a distinctively ‘socialist’ economy that does not
respond to ecological imperatives as well.3

Lifeworld

Radical philosophers like André Gorz have meanwhile been
conducting a fundamental enquiry into the nature of wealth. They propose the
existence of a ‘Lifeworld’ which encompasses everything we aspire to as
individual and social human beings. ‘The economic’ should rightly occupy just a
small part of it, but has taken over our lives. What, after all, is the point of
material wealth, if it does not enhance our well-being? How is this to be
achieved if we are enslaved to the economic machine?4

There is here an echo of socialist writing at the end of the
nineteenth century, when William Morris was alive. Oscar Wilde argued for the
abolition of private property for the sake of the people who own it, because it
distracts them from more important things – what we are, rather than what we
own. In fact, he advocated socialism for a completely unexpected reason: ‘What
is needed is Individualism. If Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are
Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if,
in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then our last state will be
worse than the first.’5

Gorz is frankly uncertain whether capitalism is capable of being
transformed by gradually pushing back the boundaries of ‘the economic’, and in
particular by reclaiming more free time from work, as he recommends. He remains
a defender of the more dynamic aspects of industrial society, with a largely
European perspective. But he is quite clear that equality, ecology and the
well-being of humanity as a whole can only be advanced if capitalism is
transformed.

By no means all Greens would agree with this, or acknowledge any
kinship at all with Reds. ‘Neither Left nor Right, but Ahead!’ they urge,
anxious as they are to dodge the ‘watermelon’ jibe – green on the outside, red
on the inside. There is also a dash of tyrannical misanthropy to some deeper
shades of Green. But the more thoughtful Greens have no great problem with
socialism.

‘Socialism is based on an enormous insight,’ says Wolfgang
Sachs, for example. ‘Technical progress provides us with a floor under which
nobody has to fall. Scarcity can be removed. The hope of socialism is that all
people can lead a dignified life. Environmentalism adds another dimension. It
says there is not just a lower limit, there is also an upper limit. There is a
threshold beyond which there can be no more justice or democracy because
progress, or wealth creation, takes a form in which not everybody can
participate. There is a ceiling. If you go beyond it, wealth creation becomes
oligarchic in nature.’6

The difficulty for Greens is that although they have influence
they’ve never had political power. Projects and agendas proliferate, but
capitalism adapts, the trees keep falling and inequality deepens. It is
perfectly possible to argue that influence is preferable to political power. But
that, I think, would be to evade the point. For what radical Reds and Greens
must surely both be prepared to commit themselves to is popular
democracy.

MARK MC EVOY /
PANOS
PICTURES

New world disorder
One good
reason to do this, as Oscar Wilde foresaw, is the enormous power of the
modern state. Forget all rhetoric to the contrary – without a powerful
state, capitalism would have foundered a long time ago. Leave aside, if
you will, the state’s role in securing private property, containing
unrest, bailing out private banks, financing unemployment, devising new
forms of Armageddon, fighting extremely profitable wars and creating
‘favourable conditions’ generally so that corporations, the rich and the
powerful can be free to pay no taxes and plunge us into renewed
catastrophe. Consider just this: according to the UN, in the early 1990s
the state subsidized environmentally damaging industrial activities –
energy, water, roads, agriculture – worldwide to the tune of at least $710
billion (thousand million) every year.7 To put this into
perspective, $710 billion is 14 times what is required to eradicate
absolute poverty.

So the state is an active player in the new world disorder. If
we are serious about change then it simply doesn’t make sense to leave it to its
own devices. We can argue about what the state should be doing. We can even
propose that in an ideal world it would cease to exist. We can suggest that
since global consumer capitalism is so good at looking after its own interests
then the proper job of democratic government is to look after ours. But, to get
from here to there, popular democracy must prevail.

We are led to believe, of course, that it already does. Why,
this is the age of democracy, is it not? Latin America is so much better now,
with all those blood-soaked generals confined to barracks! Pity poor Africa –
but salute Nelson Mandela! Papa Doc, Mobutu, Marcos, Suharto – all gone! And the
Berlin Wall!

Ah, the Berlin Wall. A few months ago a little cameo was played
out in Moscow. Bill Clinton, in town for a last tango with Boris Yeltsin,
likened ‘market economies’ to the force of gravity: this, mark you, amid the
ruins of ‘bandit’ capitalism in Russia. One of the laws of gravity, Clinton
should properly have added, is that what goes up must come down. Shortly
afterwards, the legendary speculator George Soros – who is credited with
precipitating the latest Russian collapse – forewarned us that ‘the global
capitalist system... is coming apart at the seams’.8

For many months now the vultures of creative destruction have
been circling the globe, waiting for the force of gravity to fell the next
carcass, while our democratic paragons stand transfixed, boasting that they are
powerless to act. This, as it turns out, is the true meaning of the age of
democracy.

Anyone who lived, as I did, under the Popular Unity Government
in Chile in the early 1970s knows that when democratic push comes to capitalist
shove the General Pinochets of this world are always on hand to ‘save the
country for democracy’ (yes, those were the General’s precise words after the
1973 military coup). But we have also tasted, however fleetingly – like George
Orwell in Republican Barcelona, and perhaps the people of South Africa not so
long ago – the prospect of liberation and self-realization. Whether we have
tasted it or not, I reckon all of us know instinctively that it is there.

But we do not always know how much energy is going into creating
this kind of liberated space all around the world at any given time, because we
have so few means of finding out. ‘Maori march on Wellington to oppose the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment... Thousands of Argentinian teachers go on
hunger strike against World Bank-imposed education cuts... Indian farmers
protest against the World Trade Organization and the take-over of their
agriculture by transnational corporations... Citizens around Europe pull up
genetically modified crops... Reclaim the Streets anti-car protesters come out
in solidarity with sacked Liverpool dockers... Some 50,000 go on a “Cry of the
Excluded” march for four million people who go hungry in Brazil... Around
300,000 protest against globalization in Seoul... The G8 summit in Birmingham is
ringed by 70,000 Jubilee 2000 demonstrators calling for Third World debt to be
scrapped...’ The litany could go on, and had Katharine Ainger not given me this
list by way of an introduction to her article on page 28 I would not have known
a fair bit of it myself, even though it is my day job to keep pace with
events.

These are the forces of creative construction, the harbingers of
a Green Left politics that might eventually achieve what neither Reds nor Greens
can do on their own. Whether we are called ‘social movements’ or ‘civil
society’, whether we think of ourselves as trade unionists or eco-warriors,
whether we are impelled by class division or by the rape of nature, with
capitalism at the crossroads once again we should not underestimate our own
strength nor fail in our responsibility to work together.

Most of us are, I believe, deeply wedded to the notion that the
yearning for popular democracy will in the future, as it has in the past, push
back the boundaries of the merely ‘economic’ and enhance all our lives. Once we
have accepted that this is the objective we can set to work on the details of
how this can best be done.

In the meantime we celebrate what we know: diversity, humanity
and the wonder of the natural world. We venerate human equality because we
resemble each other and because there is no better way to become truly
ourselves. We will strive into the next century to create what is beautiful and
useful, to destroy what is ugly and mean, to protect each other and what can
never be replaced.

Again the Amazon and its people return to me. One day I was
sitting with a group of women on land they had reclaimed from the devastated
forest. Miles from anywhere, surrounded by a wasteland, they had created an
oasis. From time to time, however, hired men with guns came to take possession
of what they had made, saying that it belonged to someone else, who would crush
them with fear.

I did not know quite what to say to them, nor yet why I asked:
‘Do you think it possible that, one day soon, you might govern your own
country?’

There was a pause. I remember feeling like an intruder on secret
thoughts. The animated stillness of the oasis engulfed us, and I began to
suppose that this must be their answer. There was a cry from one of the women:
‘Yes!’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘Yes!’ cried another, and another. Of
course! Of course! Then all of them began to clap. They were applauding
themselves. And then there was laughter, ringing with relief and joy.

1 William Morris, ‘A Dream of John Ball’ (originally
published in 1886/7), in Three Works by William Morris, Lawrence and
Wishart, London, 1986.
2 For example, John Cassidy, ‘The Return of
Karl Marx’, in The New Yorker, 20 and 27 October 1997.
3 The
most interesting, though dense, discussion of this point can be found in the US
magazine Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and especially the work of James
O’Connor.
4 André Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, Verso,
London, 1994.
5 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’
(originally published in 1891), in De Profundis and Other
Writings, Penguin Classics, London, 1986.
6 Personal interview,
February 1998.
7 Human Development Report 1998,
UNDP.
8 The Guardian, 16 September 1998.