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English
> Theory > Ecology
Ecosocialism, democracy and planification
LOWY
Michael
2007
The exponential growth of attacks on the environment and the increasing
threat of the breakdown of the ecological balance point towards a catastrophic
scenario that puts in danger the survival itself of the human species. We are facing a crisis of
civilization that demands radical change.
If capitalism
can’t be reformed to subordinate profit to human survival, what alternative is
there but to move to some sort of nationally and globally planed economy?
Problems like climate change require the ’visible hand’ of direct planning...
Our corporate capitalist leaders can’t help themselves, have no choice but systematically
make wrong, irrational and ultimately - given the technology they command -
globally suicidal decisions about the economy and the environment. So then,
what other choice do we have than to consider a true socialist alternative?
Richard Smith
Ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical civilizational alternative, based on the basic arguments of
the ecological movement, and of the Marxist critique of political economy. It
opposes what Marx called the capitalist destructive progress [1] an economic
policy founded on non-monetary and extra-economic criteria :
the social needs and the ecological equilibrium. This dialectical synthesis,
attempted by a broad spectrum of authors, from James O’Connor to Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster, and from André Gorz (in his early writings) to Elmar
Altvater, is at the same time a critique of “market
ecology”, which does not challenge the capitalist system, and of “productivist socialism”, which ignores the issue of natural
limits.
According to
James O’Connor, the aim of ecological socialism is a new society based on
ecological rationality, democratic control, social equality, and the
predominance of use-value over exchange-value. [2] I would add that this aims
require: a) collective ownership of the means of production, - “collective”
here meaning public, cooperative or comunitarian property ; b) democratic planning that makes it possible for
society to define the goals of investment and production, and c) a new
technological structure of the productive forces. In other terms
: a revolutionary social and economic transformation. [3]
For ecosocialists, the problem with the main currents of
political ecology, represented by most Green Parties, is that they do not seem
to take into account the intrinsic contradiction between the capitalist
dynamics of illimited expansion of capital and
accumulation of profits, and the preservation of the environment. Hence a critique of productivism, which
is often relevant, but does not lead beyond an ecologically-reformed “market
economy”. The result has been that many Green Parties have become the
ecological alibi of center-of-left social-liberal governments. [4]
As Richard Smith
recently observed : “the logic of insatiable growth is
built into the nature of the system, the requirements of capitalist production.
(…) Each corporation, acting rationally from the standpoint of the owners and
employees seeking to maximize their own self-interest, makes individually
rational capitalist decisions. But the result is that in the aggregate, these
individual rational decisions are massively irrational, indeed ultimately
catastrophic, and they are driving us down the road to collective suicide”. [5]
On the other
hand, the problem with the dominant trends of the left during the 20th century
- social-democracy and the Soviet-inspired communist movement - is their
acceptance of the really existing pattern of productive forces. While the first
limited themselves to a reformed - at best keynesian – version of the capitalist system, the second
ones developed a collectivist - or state-capitalist – form of productivism. In both cases, environmental issues remained
out of sight, or were marginalised.
Marx and Engels
themselves were not unaware of the environmental-destructive consequences of
the capitalist mode of production : there are several
passages in Capital and other writings that point to this understanding.
[6] Moreover, they believed that the aim of socialism is not to produce more
and more commodities, but to give human beings free time to fully develop their
potentialities. In so far, they have little in common with “productivism”,
i.e. with the idea that the unlimited expansion of production is an aim in
itself.
However, there
are some passages in their writings who seem to
suggest that socialism will permit the development of productive forces beyond
the limits imposed on them by the capitalist system. According to this
approach, the socialist transformation concerns only the capitalist relations
of production, which have become an obstacle - “chains” is the term often used
- to the free development of the existing productive forces; socialism would
mean above all the social appropriation of these productive capacities,
putting them at the service of the workers. To quote a passage from Anti-Dühring, a canonical work for many generations of Marxists : in socialism “society takes possession openly and
without detours of the productive forces that have become too large” for the
existing system. [7]
The experience
of the
A critique of
the productivist ideology of “progress” and of the
idea of a “socialist” exploitation of Nature appeared already in the writings
of some dissident marxists
of the 1930’s, such as Walter Benjamin. But it is mainly ecosocialism
which has developed, during the last few decades, a challenge to the thesis of
the neutrality of productive forces, which was predominant in the main
tendencies of the left during the 20th century :
social-democracy and the Soviet communism.
Marxists could
take their inspiration from Marx’ remarks on the Paris Commune
: workers cannot take possession of the capitalist state apparatus and
put it to function at their service. They have to “break it” and replace it by
a radically different, democratic and non-statist
form of political power. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the
productive apparataus : by its nature, its structure, it is not neutral, but at
the service of capital accumulation and the unlimited expansion of the market.
It is in contradiction with the needs of environment-protection and with the
health of the population. One must therefore “revolutionize” it, in a process
of radical transformation. This may mean, for certain branches of production,
to discontinue them : for instance, nuclear plants,
certain methods of mass/industrial fishing (responsible for the extermination
of several species in the seas), the destructive logging of tropical forests,
etc (the list is very long !). In any case, the productive forces, and not only
the relations of production, have to be deeply changed - to begin with, by a
revolution in the energy-system, with the replacement of the present sources
-essentially fossile - responsible for the pollution
and poisoning of the environment, by renewable ones : water, wind, sun.
Of course, many
scientific and technological achievements of modernity are precious, but the
whole productive system must be transformed, and this can be done only by ecosocialist methods, i.e. through a democratic planning of
the economy which takes into account the preservation of the ecological
equilibrium.
The issue of
energy is decisive for this process of civilizational
change. Fossile energies (oil, coal) are responsible
for much of the planet’s pollution, as well as for the disastrous climate
change; nuclear energy is a false alternative, not only because of the danger
of new Tchernobyls, but also because nobody knows
what to do with the thousands of tons of radioactive waist - toxic for
hundreds, thousands and in some case millions of years - and the gigantic
masses of contaminated obsolete plants.
Solar energy,
which did never arise much interest in capitalist societies, not being
“profitable” nor “competitive”, would become the object of intensive research
and development, and play a key role in the building of an alternative
energetic system. Entire sectors of the productive system are to be suppressed,
or restructured, new ones have to be developed, under the necessary condition
of full employment for all the labour force, in equal conditions of work and
wage. This condition is essential, not only because it is a requirement of
social justice, but in order to assure the workers support for the process of
structural transformation of the productive forces. This process is impossible
without public control over the means of production, and planning, i.e. public
decisions on investment and technological change, which must be taken away from
the banks and capitalist enterprises in order to serve society’s common good.
To quote again
Richard Smith : “If capitalism can’t be reformed to subordinate profit to human
survival, what alternative is there but to move to some sort of nationally and
globally planned economy ? Problems like climate change require the ‘visible
hand’ of direct planning. (…) Our capitalist corporate leaders can’t help
themselves, have no choice but to systematically make wrong, irrational and
ultimately - given the technology they command - globally suicidal decisions
about the economy and the environment. So then, what other choice do we have
than to consider a true ecosocialist alternative ?” [8]
In Capital
vol. III Marx defined socialism as a society were ”
the associated producers rationally organize their exchange (Stoffwechsel) with nature”. Only the producers ? In Capital vol.
I, there is a broader approach : socialism is
conceived as “an association of free human beings (Menschen)
which works with common (gemeinschaftlichen)
means of production “. [9] This second reading is much more appropriate
: the rational organization of production and consumption has to be the
work not only of the “producers”, but also of the consumers; in fact, of the
whole society, with its productive and “non-productive” population, which
includes students, youth, house-wifes, pensioned
people, etc.
The whole
society in this sens, and not a
small olygarchy property-owners - nor an elite
of techno-bureaucrats - will be able to choose, democratically, which
productive lines are to be privileged, and how much resources are to be
invested in education, health or culture. [10] The prices of goods themselves
would not be left to the “laws of offer and demand” but, to some extent,
determined according to social and political options, as well as ecological
criteria, leading to taxes on certain products, and subsidized prices for
others. Ideally, as the transition to socialism moves forward, more and more
products and services would be distributed free of charge, according to the
will of the citizens.
Far from being
“despotic” in itself, planning is the exercise, by a whole society, of its freedom : freedom of decision, and liberation from the
alienated and reified “economic laws” of the capitalist system, which
determined the individuals’ life and death, and enclosed them in an economic
“iron cage” (Max Weber). Planning and the reduction of labor
time are the two decisive steps of humanity towards what Marx called “the kingdom
of freedom”. A significant increase of free time is in fact a condition for the
democratic participation of the working people in the democratic discussion and
management of economy and of society.
Partisans of the
free market point to the failure of Soviet Planning to reject, out of hand, any
idea of an organized economy. Without entering the discussion on the
achievements and miseries of the Soviet experience, it was obviously a form of dictatorship
over the needs - to use the expression of György
Markus and his friends from the
The failure of
the
Friedrich Engels
already insisted that a socialist society “will have to establish a plan of
production taking into account the means of production, specially
including the labour force. There will be, in last instance, the useful effects
of various use-objects, compared between themselves and in relation to the
quantity of labour necessary for their production, that
will determine the plan”. [13] While in capitalism the use-value is only a
means - often a trick - at the service of exchange-value and profit - which
explains, by the way, why so many products in the present society are
substantially useless - in a planned socialist economy the use-value is the
only criteria for the production of goods and services, with far reaching
economic, social and ecological consequences. As Joel Kovel
observed : “The enhancement of use-values and the
corresponding restructuring of needs becomes now the social regulator of
technology rather than, as under capital, the conversion of time into surplus
value and money”. [14]
In a rationally
organised production, the plan concerns the main economic options, not the
administration of local restaurants, groceries and bakeries, small shops,
artisan enterprises or services. It is important to emphasize that planning is
not contradictory with workers self-management of their productive units : while the decision to transform an auto-plant into
one producing buses and trams is taken by society as a whole, through the plan,
the internal organization and functioning of the plant is to be democratically
managed by its own workers. There has been much discussion on the “centralised”
or “decentralised” character of planning, but it could be argued that the real
issue is democratic control of the plan, on all its levels, local, regional,
national, continental and, hopefully, international : ecological issues such as
global warming are planetary and can be dealt with only on a global scale. One
could call this proposition global democratic planning; it is quite the
opposite of what is usually described as “central planning”, since the economic
and social decisions are not taken by any “center”, but democratically decided
by the concerned population.
Of course, there
will inevitably be tensions and contradictions between self-managed
establishments or local democratic administrations, and broader groups of
“concerned people”. Mechanisms of negotiation can help to solve much of such
conflicts, but ultimately those directly concerned, if they are the majority,
have the right to impose their views. To give an imaginary exemple:
a self-administered factory decides to evacuate its toxic waste in a river. The
population of a whole region is in danger of being polluted :
it can therefore, after a democratic debate, decide that production in this
unit must be discontinued, until a satisfactory solution is found for the waste
control. Hopefully, in an eco-socialist society, the factory workers themselves
will have enough ecological consciouness to avoid
taking decisions which are dangerous to the environment and to the health of
the local population… This does not mean, however, that the issues concerning
the internal management of the factory, or school, or neighborhood,
or hospital, or town, are not to be taken into their hands by the local workers
or inhabitants.
Socialist
planning is therefore grounded on a democratic and pluralist debate, on all the
levels where decisions are to be taken : different
propositions are submitted to the concerned people, in the form of parties,
platforms, or any other political movements, and delegates are accordingly
elected. However, representative democracy must be completed - and corrected -
by direct democracy, where people directly choose - at the local, national and,
later, global level - between major options : should
public transportation be free ? Should the owners of private cars pay special
taxes to subsidize public transportation ? Should
sun-produced energy be subsidized, in order to compete with fossile
energy ? Should the weekly work hours be reduced to
30, 25 or less, even if this means a reduction of production
? The democratic nature of planning is not contradictory with the
existence of experts, but their role is not to decide, but to present
their views - often different, if not contradictory - to the population, and
let it choose the best solution. As Ernest Mandel wrote :
“Governments, parties, planning boards, scientists, technocrats or whoever can
make suggestions, put forward proposals, try to influence people. (…) But under
a multi-party system, such proposals will never be unanimous
: people will have the choice between coherent alternatives. And the
right and power to decide should be in the hands of the majority of
producers/consumers/citizens, not of anybody else. What is paternalistic or
despotic about that ?” [15]
What guarantee
is that the people will make the correct ecological choices, even at the price
of giving up some of its habits of consumption ? There
is no such “guarantee”, other than the wager on the rationality of democratic
decisions, once the power of commodity fetichism is
broken. Of course, errors will be committed by the popular choices, but who
believes that the experts do not make errors themselves ?
One cannot imagine the establishment of such a new society without the majority
of the population having achieved, by their struggles, their self-education,
and their social experience, a high level of socialist/ecological
consciousness, and this makes it reasonable to suppose that errors - including
decisions which are inconsistent with environmental needs - will be corrected.
[16] In any case, are not the proposed alternatives - the blind market, or an
ecological dictatorship of “experts” - much more dangerous than the democratic
process, with all its contradictions ?
It is true that
planning requires the existence of executive/technical bodies, in charge of
putting into practice what has been decided, but if they are under permanent
democratic control from below, they are not necessarily more authoritarian
than, say, the administration of the post-office services. The experience of
participative budgets in
There is no room
here for a detailed discussion of other conceptions of planning, such as
“market socialism”, social ecology (Murray Bookchin),
etc. Just a few words about Michael Albert “participatory
economy” (parecon), which has been the object
of some debate in the Global Justice movement. This conception has some
common features with the one here proposed - eco-socialist planning – such as : opposition to the capitalist market and to bureaucratic
planning, a reliance on worker’s self organisation, anti-authoritarianism.
There are however some serious shortcomings in this proposition
, which seems to ignore ecology, and assimilates “socialism” to the
bureaucratic/centralized Soviet model.
Michael Albert
idea of participatory planning is based on a complex institutional construction : “The participants in participatory planning
are the workers’ councils and federations, the consumers’ councils and
federations, and various Iteration Facilitation Boards (IFBs).
Conceptually, the planning procedure is quite simple. An IFB announces what we
call “indicative prices” for all goods, resources, categories of labor, and capital. Consumers’ councils and federations
respond with consumption proposals taking the indicative prices of final goods
and services as estimates of the social cost of providing them. Workers
councils and federations respond with production proposals listing the outputs
they would make available and the inputs they would need to produce them,
again, taking the indicative prices as estimates of the social benefits of
outputs and true opportunity costs of inputs. An IFB then calculates the excess
demand or supply for each good and adjusts the indicative price for the good
up, or down, in light of the excess demand or supply, and in accord with
socially agreed algorithms. Using the new indicative prices, consumers and
workers councils and federations revise and resubmit their proposals. (…) In
place of rule over workers by capitalists or by coordinators, parecon is an economy in which workers and consumers
together cooperatively determine their economic options and benefit from them
in ways fostering equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management. “ [18]
The main problem
with this conception - which, by the way, is not “quite simple” but extremely
elaborate and sometimes quite obscure – is that it seems to reduce “planning”
to a sort of negotiation between producers and consumers on the issue of
prices, inputs and outputs, supply and demand. For instance, the branch
worker’s council of the car producing industry would meet with the council of
consumers to discuss prices and to adapt supply to demand. What this leaves out
is precisely what constitutes the main issue of ecosocialist
planning : a reorganization of the transport system,
radically reducing the place of the private car. Since ecosocialism requires
entire branches of industry to disappear - nuclear plants, for instance - and
the massive investment in small or almost non-existent branches (e.g. solar
energy) how can this be dealt by “cooperative negotiations” between the
existing units of production and consumer councils on “inputs” and “indicative
prices” ?
Albert’s model
mirrors the existing technological and productive structure, and is too “economistic” to take into account global, socio-political,
and socio-ecological interests of the population, the interests of the
individuals, as citizens and as human beings, which cannot be reduced to their
economic interests as producers and consumers. He leaves out not only the State
as an institution - a respectable option - but politics as the
confrontation, at the level of global societies, of different economic, social,
political, ecological, cultural and civilizational
options.
The passage from
capitalist “destructive progress” to socialism is an historical process, a
permanent revolutionary transformation of society, culture and mentalities -
and politics in the sens just defined cannot
be but central to this process. It is important to emphasize that such a
process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of social and
political structures, and the active support, by the vast majority of the
population, of an ecosocialist program. The
development of socialist consciousness and ecological awareness is a process,
where the decisive factor is peoples own collective experience of struggle,
from local and partial confrontations to the radical change of society.
This transition
would lead not only to a new mode of production and an egalitarian and
democratic society, but also to an alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign of
money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and
beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are useless and/or harmful
to the environment.
Some ecologists
believe that the only alternative to productivism is
to stop growth altogether, or to replace it by negative growth - what
the French call décroissance - and drastically
reduce the excessively high level of consumption of the population by cutting
by half the expenditure of energy, by renouncing to individual houses, to
central heating, to washing machines, etc. Since these and similar measures of
draconian austerity risk being quite unpopular, some of them play with the idea
of a sort of “ecological dictatorship”. [19]
Against such
pessimistic views, socialist optimists believe that technical progress and the
use of renewable sources of energy will permit an unlimited growth and
abundance, so that each can receive “according to his needs”.
It seems to me
that these two schools share a purely quantitative conception of -
positive or negative - “growth”, or of the development of productive forces.
There is a third position, which seems to me more appropriate
: a qualitative transformation of development. This means putting
an end to the monstrous waste of resources by capitalism, based on the
production, in a large scale, of useless and/or harmful products
: the armaments industry is a good example, but a great part of the
“goods” produced in capitalism - with their inbuilt obsolescence - have no
other usefulness but to generate profit for the great corporations. The issue
is not “excessive consumption” in abstract, but the prevalent type of
consumption, based as it is on conspicuous appropriation, massive waste,
mercantile alienation, obsessive accumulation of goods, and the compulsive
acquisition of pseudo-novelties imposed by “fashion”. A new society would
orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, beginning with
those which could be described as “biblical” - water, food, clothing, housing -
but including also the basic services : health,
education, transport, culture.
Obviously, the
countries of the South, were these needs are very far from being satisfied,
will need a much higher level of “development” - building railroads, hospitals,
sewage systems, and other infra-structures - than the advanced industrial ones.
But there is no reason why this cannot be accomplished with a productive system
that is environment-friendly and based on renewable energies. These countries
will need to grow great amounts of food to nourish their hungry population, but
this can be much better achieved - as the peasant movements organised
world-wide in the Via Campesina network have been arguing for years - by a
peasant biological agriculture based of family-units, cooperatives or
collectivist farms, rather than by the destructive and anti-social methods of
industrialised agro-business, based on the intensive use of pesticides,
chemicals and GMOs.
Instead of the
present monstruous debt-system, and the imperialist
exploitations of the resources of the South by the industrial/capitalist
countries, there would be a flow of technical and economic help from the North
to the South, without the need - as some Puritan and ascetic ecologists seem to
believe - for the population in Europe or North America to “reduce their
standard of living” : they will only get rid of the obsessive consumption,
induced by the capitalist system, of useless commodities that do not correspond
to any real need, while redifining the meaning of standart of living to connote a way of life that is
actually richer, while consuming less.
How to
distinguish the authentic from the artificial, false and makeshift needs ? The last ones are induced by mental manipulation,
i.e. advertisement. The advertisement system has invaded all spheres of human
life in modern capitalist societies : not only
nourishment and clothing, but sports, culture, religion and politics are shaped
according to its rules. It has invaded our streets, mail boxes, TV-screens,
newspapers, landscapes, in a permanent, aggressive and insidious way, and it
decisively contributes to habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption.
Moreover, it wastes an astronomic amount of oil, electricity, labor time, paper, chemicals, and other raw materials - all
paid by the consumers – in a branch of “production” which is not only useless,
from a human viewpoint, but directly in contradiction with real social needs.
While
advertisement is an indispensable dimension of the capitalist market economy,
it would have no place in a society in transition to socialism, where it would
be replaced by information on goods and services provided by consumer
associations. The criteria for distinguishing an authentic from an artificial
need, is its persistence after the suppression of advertisement (Coca Cola !). Of course, during some years, old habits of
consumption would persist, and nobody has the right to tell the people what
their needs are. The change in the patterns of consumption is a historical
process, as well as an educational challenge.
Some
commodities, such as the individual car, raise more complex problems. Private
cars are a public nuisance, killing and maiming hundreds of thousand people
yearly on world scale, polluting the air in the great towns - with dire consequences
for the health of children and older people - and significantly contributing to
the climate change. However, they correspond to a real need, by transporting
people to their work, home or leisure. Local experiences in some European towns
with ecologically minded administrations, show that it
is possible - and approved by the majority of the population - to progressively
limit the part of the individual automobile in circulation, to the advantage of
buses and trams. In a process of transition to ecosocialism, where public
transportation - above or underground - would be vastly extended and free of
charge for the users, and where foot-walkers and bicycle-riders will have
protected lanes, the private car would have a much smaller role as in bourgeois
society, where it has become a fetish commodity - promoted by insistent and
aggressive advertisement - a prestige symbol, an identity sign - in the US, the
drivers license is the recognized ID – and the center of personal, social or erotical life. [20]
It will be much
easier, in the transition to a new society, to drastically reduce the
transportation of goods by trucks - responsible for terrible accidents, and
high levels of pollution - replacing it by the train, or by what the French
call ferroutage (trucks transported in trains
from one town to the other) : only the absurd logic of
capitalist “competitivity” explains the dangerous
growth of the truck-system.
Yes, will answer
the pessimists, but individuals are moved by infinite aspirations and desires,
that have to be controlled, checked, contained and if necessary repressed, and
this may need some limitations on democracy. Now, ecosocialism is based on a
wager, which was already Marx’s : the predominance, in a society without
classes and liberated of capitalist alienation, of “being” over “having”, i.e.
of free time for the personal accomplishment by cultural, sportive,
playful, scientific, erotic, artistic and political activities, rather
than the desire for an infinite possession of products. Compulsive acquisitiveness
is induced by the commodity fetishism inherent in the capitalist system, by the
dominant ideology and by advertisement : nothing
proves that its is part of an “eternal human nature”, as the reactionary
discourse wants us to believe.
As Ernest Mandel
emphasized : “The continual accumulation of more and
more goods (with declining “marginal utility”) is by no means a universal and
even predominant feature of human behavior. The
development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of
health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations
(…) all these become major motivations once basic material needs have been
satisfied”. [21]
As we have
insisted, this does not mean that there will not arise
conflicts, particularly during the transitional process, between the
requirements of the environment protection and the social needs, between the
ecological imperatives and the necessity of developing basic infra-structures,
particularly in the poor countries, between popular consumer habits and the
scarcity of resources. A class-less society is not a society without
contradictions and conflicts ! These are inevitable : it will be the task of democratic planning, in
an ecosocialist perspective, liberated from the
imperatives of capital and profit-making, to solve them, by a pluralist and
open discussion, leading to decision-making by society itself. Such a
grass-roots and participative democracy is the only way, not to avoid errors,
but to permit the self-correction, by the social collectivity, of its own
mistakes.
Is this Utopia?
In its etymological sense - “something that exists nowhere” - certainly. But
are not utopias, i.e. visions of an alternative future, wish-images of a
different society, a necessary feature of any movement that wants to challenge
the established order ? As Daniel Singer explained in
his literary and political testament, Whose Millenium ? , in a powerful
chapter entitled “Realistic Utopia”, “if the establishment now looks so solid,
despite the circumstances, and if the labor movement
or the broader left are so crippled, so paralyzed, it is because of the failure
to offer a radical alternative. (…) The basic principle of the game is that you
question neither the fundamentals of the argument nor the foundations of
society. Only a global alternative, breaking with these rules of resignation
and surrender, can give the movement of emancipation genuine scope”. [22]
The socialist
and ecological utopia is only an objective possibility, not the inevitable result
of the contradictions of capitalism, or of the “iron laws of history”. One
cannot predict the future, except in conditional terms :
in the absence of an ecosocialist transformation, of
a radical change in the civilizational paradygm, the logic of capitalism will lead the planet to
dramatic ecological disasters, threatening the health and the life of billions
of human beings, and perhaps even the survival of our species. * * *
To dream, and to
struggle, for a green socialism, or, according to some, a solar communism, does
not mean that one does not fight for concrete and urgent reforms. Without any
illusions on a “clean capitalism”, one must try to win time, and to impose, on
the powers that be, some elementary changes : the banning of the HCFCs that are destroying the ozone layer, a general
moratorium on genetically modified organisms, a drastic reduction in the
emission of the greenhouse gases, the development of public transportation, the
taxation of polluting cars, the progressive replacement of trucks by trains, a
severe regulation of the fishing industry, as well as of the use of pesticides
and chemicals in the agro-industrial production. These, and similar issues, are
at the heart of the agenda of the Global Justice movement, and the World Social
Forums, a decisive new development which has permitted, since Seattle in 1999,
the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle
against the system.
These urgent
eco-social demands can lead to a process of radicalisation, on the condition
that one does not accept to limit one’s aims according to the requirements of
“the [capitalist] market” or of “competitivity”.
According to the logic of what Marxists call “a transitional program”, each
small victory, each partial advance can immediately lead to a higher demand, to
a more radical aim. Such struggles around concrete issues are important, not
only because partial victories are welcome in themselves, but also because they
contribute to raise ecological and socialist consciousness, and because they
promote activity and self-organisation from bellow :
both are decisive and necessary pre-conditions for a radical, i.e.
revolutionary, transformation of the world.
Local
experiences such as car-free areas in several Europen
towns, organic agricultural cooperatives launched by the Brazilian peasant
movement (MST), or the participative budget in Porto Alegre and, for a few
years, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul
(under PT Governor Olivio Dutra), are limited, but
interesting exemples of social/ecological change. By
permitting to local assemblies to decide the priorities of the budget,
There have also
been a few progressive measures taken by some national governments, but on the
whole the experience of Left-Center or “Left/Green” coalitions in Europe or
There will be no
radical transformation unless the forces commited to
a radical socialist and ecological programm become
hegemonic, in the Gramscian sense of the word. Time
is working for change, because the global situation of the environment is
becoming worse and worse, and the threats closer and closer. But time is runing out, because in some years - no one can say how much
- the damage may be irreversible.
There is no
reason for optimism : the entrenched ruling elites of
the system are incredibly powerful, and the forces of radical opposition are
still small. But they are the only hope that the catastrophic course of
capitalist “growth” will be halted. Walter Benjamin defined revolutions as
being not the locomotive of history, but the humanity reaching for the
emergency breaks of the train, before it goes down the abyss… [24]
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Das
Kapital, Vomume 1,
2. James
O’Connor, Natural Causes. Essays in Ecological Marxism,
3. John Bellamy
Foster uses the concept of “ecological revolution”, but he argues that “a
global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a
larger social - and I would insist, socialist - revolution. Such a revolution
(…) would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated producers rationally
regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. (…) It must take its
inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological
followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and
materialist figures, including Marx himself, stretching as far back as
Epicurus”. (“Organizing Ecological Revolution”, Monthly Review, 57.5,
October 2005, pp. 9-10).
4. For an ecosocialist critique of the “actually existing ecopolitics” - Green economics, Deep ecology,
Bioregionalism, etc - see the above mentioned book by Joel Kovel,
Enemy of Nature ch. 7.
5. Richard
Smith, “The Engine of Eco Collapse”, Capitalism, Nature and Socialism,
vol. 16, n° 4, december 2005, p;p. 31, 33.
6. See John
Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature,
8. R.Smith, Ibid. p. 35.
9. K.Marx, Das Kapital,
Berlin, Dietz Verlag,, 1968,
vol. III, p. 828, vol. I, p. 92. One can find similar problems in contemporary
Marxism; for instance, Ernest Mandel argued for a “democratically-centralist
planning under a national congress of worker’s councils made up in its large
majority of real workers”. ( “Economics of Transition
Period”, in 50 Years of World Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1971, p. 286). In
later writings, he refers rather to “producers/consumers”.
10. Ernest
Mandel defined planning in the following terms : “ An
economy governed by a plan implies…that society’s relatively scarce resources
are not apportioned blindly (“behind the backs of the producer-consumer”) by
the play of the law of value but that they are consciously allocated according
to previously established priorities. In a transitional economy were socialist
democracy prevails, the mass of the working people) democratically determine
this choice of priorities”. (“Economics of Transition
Period”, p. 282).
11. “From the
point of view of the mass of workers, sacrifices imposed by bureaucratic
arbitrariness are neither more nor less ‘acceptable’ than sacrifices imposed by
the blind mechanisms of the market. These represent only two different forms of
the same alienation.” (“Economics of Transition Period”, p.
285). We are often going to quote from the writings of Ernest Mandel,
because he is the most articulate socialist theoretician of democratic
planning. But it should be said that until the late 1980’s he did not include
the ecological issue aa a
central aspect of his economic arguments.
13. Anti-Dühring, p. 349.
14. Joel Kovel, Enemy of Nature, p. 215.
15. E.Mandel, Power and Money, p. 209.
16. Ernest
Mandel observed : “We do not believe that the
‘majority is always right’ (…). Everybody does make mistakes. This will
certainly be true of the majority of citizens, of the majority of the
producers, and of the majority of the consumers alike. But there will be one
basic difference between them and their predecessors. In any system of unequal
power (…) those who make the wrong decisions about the allocation of resources
are rarely those who pay for the consequences of their mistakes (…). Provided
there exists real political democracy, r eal cultural choice and information, it is hard to believe
that the majority would prefer to see their woods die (…) or their hospitals
understaffed, rather than rapidly to correct their mistaken allocations”. (“In defense of socialist planning”, New
Left Review, n° 159, October 1986, p. 31.)
17. E.Mandel, Power and Money, p. 204.
18. Michael
Albert, Participatory Econopmics. Life After Capitalism,
19. Ernest
Mandel was sceptical of rapid changes in consumer habitts , such as the
private car : “If, in spite of every environmental and other argument, they
[the producers and consumers] wanted to maintain the dominance of the private
motor car and to continue polluting their cities, that would be their right.
Changes in long-standing consumer orientations are generally slow - there can
be few who believe that workers in the
20.
Ernest Mandel, Power and Money. A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy,
21. D. Singer, Whose
Millenium
? Theirs or Ours ?
22. See S. Baierle, “The
23. Walter
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften,
Vomume I/3,
* This text
has been published, under a somehow reduced form, by “the Socialist Register