People on the left are sometimes perplexed when I say I am a socialist and ask why then I am not in the Labour Party. This was easier to answer under the pro-austerity pro-neoliberalism previous Labour leadership but Corbyn's victory does raise the possibility of joint work and campaigning.
However, as an ecosocialist and member of Green Left I will still have differences even with Corbyn Labour. Some of the issues are covered in this Guest Blog by Mike Shaughnessy which was first published on the Green Left blog LINK
This is a write up of a talk I gave earlier this week to my
local Green Party meeting in Haringey, north London, on ecosocialism.
Ecosocialism is a green political philosophy - it is an
ecocentric and democratic socialism.
It
is not like twentieth century socialisms, is more like
nineteenth century socialisms and owes a fair amount to anarchist
theory. Twentieth century socialisms had, if anything, an even more
dismal record than capitalism on ecology.
Ecosocialism is anti-capitalist, and sees the capitalist system as the
effective cause of the ecological crisis.
Capitalism
commodifies everything, puts a price on it, which
is exchange value, and uses the earth as a resource for production and
sink for
the dumping of toxic waste from the production process, usually free of
cost. Climate change is the most spectacular aspect of the ecological
crisis, but not the only one. Capitalism releases toxic pollution, into
the air, land and sea.
Capitalism is unable to solve the ecological crisis it has
set going, because the logic of the system is to ‘grow or die’. Growth that is exponential
and the planet is now close to its limit of being able to buffer the damage caused
by this required infinite growth, on a finite planet.
I’m going to say something about the historical lineage of
the philosophy, threads of which can be traced back for as long as human beings
have formed communities, where some elements of ecosocialism can be found in the way
people have lived in balance with nature. And today, many indigenous peoples around
the world still practice some of these forms of social and economic management.
In South America ecosocialism has found its way into government. Venezuela, until the recent right wing election victory, had a
department of ecosocialism. Bolivia still runs forms of ecosocialism in government
and has fought off many capitalist corporations plunder of the country’s
natural resources, in mining and gas extraction on common land.
There is an English line too. The first stories to be told
about Robin Hood, were of a man fighting against crown enclosures of common
land. He has become famous for ‘robbing from the rich to give to the poor’, but
in fact what he was doing, was fighting to stop the rich robbing from the poor.
Then there were the Diggers during the English civil war, who
set up communes on common land and called for a ‘common treasury of the land’.
And William Morris, the nineteenth century socialist and
craft movement champion. If you read his novel News from Nowhere, it describes an ecosocialist utopia.
In the modern age, ecosocialism emerged in the mid 1980s, in
the west, in the United States, although you can argue quite convincingly that
in the US in goes back to Murray Bookchin’s social ecology movement in the mid
1960s. And in the east, in India, where to a lesser extent ecosocialism
emerged but more so in the philosophy of ecofeminism, which is a similar
philosophy to ecosocialism. For example, ecosocialists agree with ecofeminists
that the oppression of women in our society is part and parcel of the system's
domination of nature, reproduction in particular. This is done by the capitalist
system co-opting the prevailing patriarchal practices, to extract extra surplus
value from the workers, in terms of unpaid domestic labour, without which the
system could not function.
And all for free to the system.
Examples of modern day ecosocialism can found be found in
the Kurdish area of northern Syria called Rojava and the Zapatistas in Chiapas the
most southern state in Mexico.
So, what are the component parts of ecosocialism? There are many,
but I’ve selected four of the main ones:
Metabolic Rift
Nature contains billions of ecosystems, all connected in a
finely balanced way, to form what we might call the ‘ecosphere’. Capitalism,
disrupts and eventually completely ruptures this balance, setting off chain
reactions which cannot be cured easily. Human beings are ecosystems too, and
the way the system forces us to live, causes a rupture between us and nature
and leads to illnesses like stress, depression and obesity.
And to those who say the ways of capitalism are ‘human nature’,
then if this is true, why have we only been living this way for a couple of hundred
years? The only thing natural about capitalism, is that it was invented by
creatures of nature, us. And we can just as easily un-invent it – and we should.
Ecosocialist writer James Bellamy Foster has managed to link
this to Karl Marx’s notion of an ‘irreparable rift’ between humans and nature, in volume three of Capital.
The Commons
Historically, in Britain and other western nations, people
were forcibly removed from common land as it was enclosed, with violence employed, to drive the
people off the land and into the capitalist factories in the towns and cities.
And today the same thing is happening in developing countries. By taking away
peoples alternative way of providing for themselves, they are left with no
choice but to move into cities and work often 16 hours a day for meagre pay in
factories, where health and safety is non-existent, and female workers are
routinely harassed and molested.
When I visited Senegal in west Africa a few years ago, one
day I spoke with some fishermen who complained about the factory ships from the
European Union, Russia and Japan that were hoovering up all of the fish, so
much so, that the local fisherman couldn’t catch enough fish anymore to earn a
decent living. Here was a system of managed commons which had fed local people
for thousands of years and provided a livelihood for the fishermen, destroyed
by the capitalist factory boats. Robbing from the poor - to give to the rich.
You have probably heard of the ‘global commons’ on the
internet, peer to peer sharing and free software, which ecosocialists welcome,
with the possibilities it provides for living outside of the capitalist system, to some extent
anyway.
Ecocentric Production
This is a quote from my favourite ecosocialist writer Jovel
Kovel describing our vision of ecosocialism: ‘a society in which production is carried out by freely
associated labour, and by consciously ecocentric means and ends’.
I think this sentence covers the production process under ecosocialism
neatly. The ‘freely associated labour’ bit refers to the absence of surplus
value, profit for capital.
Production would be for ‘use-value’, not ‘exchange value'. It
will require useful work only, doctors, nurses, teachers etc. and there will be
no need for work such as pushing numbers around on a computer in a bank in the
City of London, which is useless to humanity - and indeed harmful.
What is produced will be of the highest quality, and beauty,
and made to last and be repairable. My laptop packed up last week and I put it in
for repair. But they couldn’t fix it because they couldn’t get the replacement
part – this laptop is only a little over a year old, but it is obsolete. Throw it
away, and get another was the advice.
In Green Party circles you hear a lot about sustainability,
or sustainable production, but we ecosocialists prefer the word sufficiency, or
sufficient production. Only as much as is needed will be produced, and no more.
It should go without saying that the production process will be in balance with
nature too.
Radical Democracy
Democracy
in an ecosocialist society will devolve all
decisions down to the lowest possible level. A series of assemblies,
local, town, regional and at least at first, national. The assemblies
will be freely
elected and each assembly will be subject to recall from the level
below, and
assembly members should serve only one term. Eventually, the state will
be dissolved.
All of this must seem like a million miles away – and it is.
But now is not the same thing as the future. The ecological crisis will get
worse, if we carry on like we are, and will present opportunities where radical
solutions are sought. We must be ready to seize these opportunities.
And where does this all leave the Green Party? Well,
interestingly The Guardian newspaper, during last year’s general election
campaign, twice, once by one of its columnists and once in an editorial,
described the Green Party as ecosocialist.
I think what was meant by this, was concern for the
environment and advocating things like nationalising the railways and energy
companies – all of which is to the good, but it is not really ecosocialism.
The
Green Party seems to have some hazy notions which are heading in the right
direction, but for some reason, fails to follow through this thinking to its
logical end – ecosocialism.
We in Green Left, try to push it along a bit, so that the
Green Party fulfils its radical agenda, which logically means parting company
with capitalism and championing ecosocialism.
