on egalitarianism, leftism, and socialism
Let’s think about what happened to egalitarianism . . .
[see: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-brief-global-history-of-the-left/55047003/item/56817945/]
With the Enlightenment came the aspiration for social equality. Equality before the law. But at first only propertied males could vote.
Then: Political equality. Everyone should have the franchise, an equal vote. Yet there was recognition that disparities of wealth and income vitiate equality of power and influence.
Then: The idea of general and meaningful egalitarianism … social, political, and economic.
So: An aspiration to address the class division of society.
The left said the root cause of class division is private ownership of the “major means of production” (the bulk of society’s productive assets) by a small social layer of wealth/power elites. It advocated for socialist transformation: Eliminate the class division of society by socializing ownership and control of the major means of production.
Such was proposed during the nineteenth century. Implementations were attempted during the twentieth century.
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Egalitarianism had been the essence of leftism. There was a crisis for the left when attempts to implement the socialist vision proved disappointing. By the end of the twentieth century the Soviet Union had collapsed. Reagan and Thatcher said that socialism had failed and “There Is No Alternative” to capitalism (TINA). No country that still claimed to be socialist was widely viewed as an appealing model. And by that point most variants of “socialism” in the West were nothing but a tepid form of social democracy — characterized by a social safety net plus limited amounts of socialization and decommodification, but continuation of class division and considerable inequality.
In crisis, the left stagnated into post-modernist musings and an identity politics that hardly broached systemic transformation. Or it put forward a “democracy at work” concept of turning capitalist enterprises into worker cooperatives [https://www.democracyatwork.info/]. None of these currents have inspired mass movements.
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For the sake of its revival the left needs to face up to facts that should, by now, be obvious. Its egalitarian aspirations are simply chimerical under hypermodern conditions of industrial mass society. Concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the mega-states is hardly any better than concentrating them in the hands of the mega-corporations. It might even be worse.
Through the middle of the twentieth century the left had represented progressivism. When its influence faded masses of people reverted to a nostalgic kind of nationalism and/or religious fundamentalism (the central elements of the current right-wing populism). Others descended into a sad and bereft nihilism. Or an electronic daze. Such has been our social reality for the last five or six decades.
But . . . amidst it all, there have been green shoots (!). The emergence of “very new paradigm” thinking dates to certain deep re-theorizings following the ferment of “the Sixties.” For example: The 1970s saw the emergence of Green politics. Less recognized, but I think related, were the early explorations of the bioregionalist concept. The latter is based on a very alternative vision of transformation. Communitarian, decentralist, and devolutionary, it’s radically alternative vis-a-vis the progressivism of all the old ideologies. It suggests that our eco-socialism should be regarded not so much as a new system in itself but rather as a post-capitalist remediation that can heal and at the same time open pathways toward what can ultimately be socially and ecologically sustainable.
Bioregionalism could enable a participatory form of democracy. It argues against trying to implement any universalistic economic system because it acknowledges that decentralized bioregional sovereignties are bound to be diverse in regard to all aspects of life, including economic relations.
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The point is that the “greening of society” concept involves a lot of letting go of old mindsets and mystiques . . . even for many on the left.
