The heart wants a vision
https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/v03sb-02.pdf
“We must institute diminishing resource caps which put strict limits on national resource flows. This would incentivize the efficient use of resources, disincentivize waste, and lead to degrowth in ecological impacts. Eco-socialists would argue that reducing societal material and energy flows will require significant nationalization of key industries for stability during the planned contraction.”
Until a couple of years ago the Green Party in this country had never said that (“require significant nationalization”). The Greens were rightfully wary of the socialist paradigm. Green politics had arisen during the 1970s on the basis of a desire for a new alternative to all the old ideologies, including socialism. All the old ideologies had such lousy track records.
More specifically, the policy of nationalization never quite seemed to work out very satisfactorily. The idea that society’s major productive assets should not be owned privately, not be treated as private property, had a lot of resonance. But when countries nationalized their airlines, their steel companies, their auto industries, resource production industries, etc. the resultant government-run entities were hardly any less bureaucratic, technocratic, impersonal, remote, opaque, alienation-inducing, and ecologically irresponsible.
It was argued that they were less efficient. That was debatable. But the fact that there was so little love for them, and so much potential profit at stake, generated forces for re-privatization.
The idea, originally, had been that Air France would belong to the French people. But the people didn’t much feel that way. The history of that kind of thing, in country after country, shows that if nobody much cares, the oligarchs inevitably will move in and enclose the commons. Air France is now a private enterprise (a subsidiary of the Air France-KLM Group; anybody can buy its shares; the French government owns a small, not controlling, percentage).
So one way that Greens tried to distinguish themselves from socialists was in advocating an alternative to nationalization. But the alternative was kind of fuzzy, denoted as “community-based economics.” It was subject to a variety of interpretations. When, after the Great Recession, millennials turned anti-capitalist, there was a renewal of interest in socialism. That was a factor in the resonance of the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the growth of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). The “new New Left” wave influenced the Green Party to embrace eco-socialism in its platform and in its 2020 national campaign. Howie Hawkins advocated socializing some key industries.
I’m still wary. There’s a chance nationalization of Leviathan-scale industries is, on balance, no better for the populace, and that the paradigm in toto is worse due to concentrating even more wealth and power in the hands of the state. For sure, a centralized, socialized, nationally planned economy (per the stipulations of traditional socialism) should not be conceived of as the ultimate goal of our social transformation endeavors.
But capitalism is ruinous. And as unappealing as a program of nationalizations sounds, there may not be any better program. Maybe we should throw in our lot with the eco-socialists; with the idea that taking the mega-corporations out of private hands will be necessary to de-fang the system in general; and thus enable the opening of pathways toward our more ultimate, long-range, bioregionalist vision for greening the society.
If you think otherwise, pray tell me what the better alternative might be.
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Similar thoughts re: the socialist idea of “redistributive justice.” Like nationalizations, it, also, doesn’t seem to work out so well within the context of mass society.
It’s one thing to be willing to sacrifice a little for the sake of the general welfare when the domain of the general welfare is communitarian. When the context is millions and millions of strangers, my sacrifice is a tiny drop in a vast pool that I have no control over, get nothing out of, witness no specific benefit from (re: enhanced thriving for my neighbors or my neighborhood), might or might not be used wisely/efficiently, etc.
Yet it, too, probably must be part of the near-term program.
This is all to say: Maybe there ought to be a socialist phase in order to effectuate, as Samuel Alexander says, “post-capitalism by design rather than disaster.”
I find myself still a little skeptical and a little reticent. I voted for Howie Hawkins. So I guess I’ll vote for eco-socialism using my head, while my heart is with the greener movement that prioritizes building the new society at the ground level within the shell of the old. The two types of strategies are not, of course, mutually exclusive.
Meanwhile, anyway, I just can’t love the the socialist movement. Marx lacked soul. Howie’s campaign lacked soul. Being anti-capitalist should just be a first step. The heart wants a vision . . .
An entirely new kind of politics, a far more profound response, is needed, something Rudolf Bahro (in his book, Building the Green Movement) called “an anti-investment and a deconcentration strategy, an emergency brake against any further ‘progress’ in the fateful direction which the accumulation of capital, driven by the world market, is taking.”
Such a response would have to move beyond socialism or simple environmentalism. It would need to create a movement that recognizes the myriad connections between global capital, nation-state empires, industrial growth, the disabling impact of mass technics on human culture, and the social and ecological chaos which result; a social movement which begins by elaborating a profound critique of the global urban-industrial megamachine and which bases its praxis on this outlook.
Neither a reform environmentalism that leaves the capitalist economy in place, nor an eco-leftism that leaves industrial civilization intact by placing it under the direction of some spurious form of socialist commonwealth can be enough; we must challenge not only the motor forces of urban-industrial expansion presently fraying the very tissue of life, but their technological and cultural content as well.
We are witnessing the stirrings of a genuine desire to turn things back, to stop the runaway colossus from sending all of human society and several hundred million years of evolutionary development hurtling into the abyss for which it is surely headed. The movement must link the large questions of militarism, social oppression, ecological destruction, megatechnics, and alienation into a vibrant radical response.
And then: what would an authentic Earth Day look like? Wouldn’t it look like a moratorium on production, a reduction of mechanical movement, and with it of the industrial noise that drowns out the wind; when all of the former cogs of the megamachine take a long look at the world, perhaps for the first time, and begin the process of becoming living subjects once more? Wouldn’t they engage one another, face-to-face, taking stock of hands and feet and head and heart as the real material bases for a new society? Wouldn’t they begin to retrace their steps, back away from the edge of the precipice, turning things off and beginning to rely on their communities and their own human powers to meet their few essential needs so as to get on with the real adventure of living, of singing, of dreaming?
And that first night — wouldn’t the sky be dark and beauteous and studded with stars for the first time in memory? Wouldn’t a different language, spangled with eternity, find its way into daily discourse as the conditioning of industrialism and manufactured values began to be shed?
Shouldn’t Earth Day be, rather than one more social spectacle, a festival of the oppressed — capable of bursting its limits and calling a new culture into being?
Let us be clear to those who propose only negotiated half-measures and “practical politics” for fear that anything more will be too radical, too “utopian.” Collaboration with the wide array of the forces of extermination now facing us will bring only extermination, whether it be in a general conflagration or in small graduated doses. Surely a new outlook starting with what might seem impossible for this world can lead us to those measures necessary to realize our hopes and desires.
(excerpted from David Watson’s “Earth Day? We Want a Festival of the Oppressed!” which appeared in the Spring 1990 issue of Fifth Estate)
