an attempt to summarize: “From Red to Green”
Many Marxists these days recognize what was retrograde in their guru’s 19th-century worldview, and so there are a bunch of neo-Marxist revisions or reinterpretations or “amplifications” … but I just believe that too much of it — the most fundamental parts — are theoretically deficient and have led the left into a cul-de-sac of disorientation and marginalization.
So one theme of this blog has reflected my hope that the left will transition from a “Red” worldview (heavily influenced by Marxism) to a very alternative “Green” worldview (influenced by un-Marxist ideas like decentralism, bioregionalism, and communitarianism).
I think the fate of the left depends upon letting go of the timeworn . . .
Arise ye pris’ners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world’s in birth!
No more tradition’s chains shall bind us
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall;
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We have been naught we shall be all.
’Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in their place
The international working class
Shall become the human race.
(from the former anthem of the movement: “The Internationale”)
It was impassioned and it was romantic. The struggle would supposedly result in the people collectively owning and democratically running the economy.
Not.
Raising expectations and being so wrong — in analysis and praxis — has been an albatross around the neck of the collective left. Take Bernie: His hero was Eugene Debs. Bernie used to put out a very Debsian message. So little came of it that now, a hundred years after the death of his hero, Bernie’s messaging has been reduced to tepid welfare-statism. Why? Because the analysis and the praxis were theoretically deficient.
Leftism has terribly suffered over the span of that hundred years. The erroneousness of the “Red” perspective — in regard to: interpretation of human history, agency of social change, end-goal of social transformation — led the whole movement astray.
The alternative starts from a very different general worldview. I hope to see the left follow the lead of the Greens and eventually embrace the general perspective of an alternative informed by ecology and communitarianism. I’m deeply anti-capitalist, but I think we need to reconceptualize ecosocialism. Instead of conjecturing that our goal should be a universalized “new system” (characterized by social ownership of the means of production everywhere) we should think in terms of an ameliorative historical period committed to a thoroughgoing re-direction of misguided civilizational trajectories.
Yes, defanging capitalism will figure to involve quite a bit of socialization of the monstrous multinational corporations, the goal being to extirpate all empire-like formations. Economic and political. Break up the mega-corporations and mega-states, while simultaneously undermining the capitalist system by building up human-scale, localist alternatives. Obviously that does not sound like Marxism. It won’t come about via working-class revolution. It doesn’t represent a “next higher stage of progressive development of the forces of production” or an “unfolding of the historical dialectic.” It will come about because the current, long-standing trajectories of growth of population, production, consumption, pollution, and depletion are utterly unsustainable.
An inevitable pending collapse of our developmentalist lifeways is sure to lead to a long crucible of crisis. It’s now unavoidable. “Devolution” might sound problematic, but devolution of power should actually be a Green aspiration. It would enable a more participatory form of democracy.
When considering an end-goal of the transformational process, I, personally, think in terms of a chastened humanity settling back into bioregional lifeways. Living more simply, more lightly, and more locally could be welcomed as our liberation. Existence within the modern Leviathan is stressful for people and for “the planet.” Bioregionalism was the norm for all of our species history until the relatively recent Wrong Turn. It’s now time to remember why it makes sense, why it’s conducive to lifeways adhering to ecological limits and balances.
The misguided trajectories have led us to a hypermodern era characterized by ruinous industrial capitalism. So I’m a socialist, but one who rejects Marxism. I understand that alliances among all anti-capitalists who espouse a notion that A Better World Is Possible are key. But I think history will be heading in a Green direction no matter what ideological variations activists individually espouse. If, “on the ground,” we build up communitarian alternatives while doing all we can to elect ecosocialists and change policies at the macro level, the movement as a whole could be socially salvational and personally satisfying … while the sorry historical experiment of growth, expansionism, developmentalism, and industrial modernity that Marx considered liberatory … falls apart all around us.
