Toward a communitarian rather than socialist leftism
This would constitute a major shift for historical leftism.
In its formative years, during the nineteenth century, leftism was influenced by the concurrent rise of the movement for labor rights. From that, Marx and other theorists projected the class-conscious, politically-conscious proletariat as the agency of social transformation to the “next higher stage” of human progressive development.
Marx’s system was powerful in its scope, idealism, and audacity, but it did not correspond with the reality of social or historical dynamics. The movement suffered accordingly, and thus has faced frustration after frustration: a phase of Social Democracy during the late nineteenth century, a new wave based on Leninism during the early part of the twentieth, the labor upsurge of the 1930s, the countercultural New Left of the 1960s, etc. — wave after wave of “re-grouping,” re-starting, re-strategizing — but, to date, always under the encumbrance of the Red-leftist faulty paradigm of social change and a deluded ideology regarding where humanity has been and where it’s going.
The latest re-thinking is being done under the rubric of “ecosocialism.” The “eco” part is great, but the left still can’t get away from its preoccupation with the working class:
https://howiehawkins.us/read-the-case-for-an-independent-party/
In Andrew Dobson’s The Green Reader there’s an item “Ecosocialism” (page 138) based on an excerpt from Martin Ryle’s Ecology and Socialism (1988):
Social interests, ecological interests and the general interest
The fundamental tension between socialist and ecological perspectives lies in the fact that, while political ecology starts from the relation of humanity to nature, and with the general interest in ensuring that this relation is sustainable, socialism has concerned itself primarily with the distribution of power and wealth within societies, and specifically with the interests of a particular class, the working class, under capitalism. The socialist analysis of the relations of capitalist production discloses who benefits and who is oppressed, and envisages the ending of that oppression. The ecological critique, by contrast, focuses on the impact of a given level and pattern of material production on the ecosystem: changes which affect only the internal relations between classes are irrelevant from this point of view. This disparity of perspectives can amount to a directly contradictory diagnosis, and give rise to opposed political and economic programs, when — as has usually been the historical case — socialist parties and administrations have made the objective of higher overall productivity a key part of their project, and have regarded capitalist social relations as an obstacle to the achievement of a more rationally ordered because more productive economy.
I have argued that green politics cannot adopt a ‘purely ecological’ approach: relations between people and classes are at stake the moment one begins to talk about structural economic and social change, even if change is originally advocated because of ‘ecological’ desires and fears. Moreover, as the green movement develops out of eco-protest and formulates comprehensive programmes, it finds itself asking not just what kinds of social relations are ecologically viable, but what kinds are good; and so confronts the questions about justice, autonomy and hierarchy, public and private spheres which have constituted political discourse since antiquity. It does so, what is more, in societies where many means and forces exist for the expression and mediation of social interests: trade unions, military-industrial lobbies, legal and financial institutions, elected assemblies, political parties.
Ecological politics cannot fail to recognize that we are social/political animals as well as denizens of an organic biosphere. Its historical importance, and the tensions which it embodies and to which it gives rise in politics generally, derive from the ‘double vision’ which this dual realization [ecological and social] entails.
This reflects the mistake the Red-leftists keep making re: viewing the ‘social realization’ through a class-struggle lens with the objective being a classless society on the basis of socialization of the means of production. Deep Greens should approach the issue of egalitarianism differently, always including scale as a factor, such that we can say our prescription is primarily communitarian rather than primarily socialist. This is suggested by the items in the same book: “Decentralization” (page 73) based on an excerpt from Edward Goldsmith’s A Blueprint for Survival (1972) and “Bioregionalism” (page 77) based on an excerpt from Kirkpatrick Sale’s Schumacher Lecture of 1983. If the latter define our ultimate vision for a Green world, we could still consider the idea that a phase of ecosocialism might be needed in order to de-fang the utterly ruinous globalized industrial capitalist system — and to open pathways toward “the greening of society.” Samuel Alexander makes the case for that, saying the process of downscaling and degrowth should be “by design, not disaster.”
