The ultimate vision is bioregionalist rather than socialist

Here are the “Ten Key Values” of the US Green politics movement:

Ecological Wisdom
Social Justice
Grassroots Democracy
Nonviolence
Decentralization
Community-based Economics
Feminism
Respect for Diversity
Personal and Global Responsibility
Future Focus/Sustainability

I believe that the ideology reflected in those values has more affinity with the communitarian left than with the socialist left — Gandhi rather than Marx; Mumford rather than Harrington. I view the Green Party as the electoral expression of an eco-communitarian movement for a new society. The end-goal of that movement is not socialism, but rather a decentralized society characterized by bioregionalism and diversity.

The capitalist system is anathema to the bioregionalist vision. But the idea that the “main contradiction” is between capitalism and socialism is simplistic. First of all, a distinction needs to be made between corporate capitalism and local private enterprise. Also: we should recognize that a problem with socialism is how it misguidedly tends to advocate universalistic prescriptions.

At a fundamental level, traditional socialist theory was deficient in regard to its interpretation of history, its delusion about the proletariat being the agency of social change, and its vision of a “democratically owned and controlled” large-scale planned economy. Nonetheless it’s possible that a green-oriented type of ecosocialism might have a role to play in our strategizing about how to get “from here to there.”

Why the Greens should embrace bioregionalism

Regarding the special key value Ecological Wisdom, it’s a credit to our patient explication over the last forty years that it’s now widely embraced. But three other of the values, in particular, distinguish us — and have the potential to transform the left: Decentralization, Community-based Economics, and Respect for Diversity.

With a broad interpretation, I think Respect for Diversity implies bioregionalism. In fact, a deep meaning of that concept goes to the very essence of the distinctiveness of the Green paradigm. It can, and should, imply more than just respect for racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. In a world of humanly-scaled, decentralized polities, a realistic and healthy vision would include diversity in regard to all the solutions adopted to address the myriad issues and challenges of human lifeways — education of the young, sexual relations, dealing with sociopathology, healthcare provision, etc. So in a Green world we would expect to see bioregional communities handling just about all issues, including the issue of economic relations, in diverse ways.

A problem with socialism is that it prescribes one way — collective ownership of means of production — a supposedly best system, advocated for universal application. Such was typical of the modernist ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They anticipated that the “end of history” would be characterized by universal agreement about and adoption of one or another best way, either Keynesian liberalism or socialism or free market capitalism. Relative to this unwarranted expectation, Green politics is post-modern, recognizing that it’s unnatural, and even unhealthy, to envision universalism in regard to systems, institutions, and lifeways. Moreover, that’s why post-modern should mean post-socialist — in the sense of rejecting the idea that socialism is a panacea or an end-goal.

But: perhaps a reconceptualized ecosocialism could open the pathway to a bioregionalist society

The immediate reality we face is that the extant globalized industrial-capitalist system is socially and ecologically ruinous. And an immediate question we face is: how to de-fang it?

In trying to answer that question, progressives debate about whether the dominant multinational corporations should be tightly regulated or socialized. Greens have tended to be wary of the bureaucratic monstrosities that can result from the latter prescription. But it’s apparent that mere regulation could prove to be inadequate. For that reason, some are proposing that the transition to a decentralized Green society may initially require socializing some or many of the large corporations.

With that in mind, could socialism be viewed as an interim historical stage? What we ultimately should be striving for is liberation from the distortions, dependencies, and bureaucracies of the industrial state, recognizing how it is problematic in both its private-ownership and public-ownership manifestations. We ultimately want to re-allocate social resources away from it, back toward local communities and regional economies. But we should consider the possibility that socializing its “major means of production” (the paramount productive assets of society) may be the key to enabling the eventual decentralization process.

Or not. It should be acknowledged that attempts to implement socialism have, to date, been disappointing. After two hundred years of theorizing and experimenting, it still remains to be seen whether an extensively socialized economy can be viable. It may be that capitalism will simply implode before any “next system” is able to replace it (thus forcing the issue of re-localization).

We can’t know, but we have to try to conjecture the most promising road forward. It’s difficult, to say the least — because human history has arrived at an unprecedented state of crisis. What’s clear is that the establishment parties and ideologies have no idea how to address it. Ecosocialists are proposing a two-pronged strategy of striving to collectivize the extant economy “at the top” while replacing it from below. This updated conception could be concordant with the advancement of a communitarian left, a bioregionalist society, and an ultimate vision of a diverse and decentralized Green world.