14 Jan 2008

OPTIONS FOR ECOSOCIALISTS IN 2008 by Sean Thompson


Given that Rosa Luxemburg’s description of the choice before us being socialism or barbarism has never been more stark it would be easy to surmise from the above that my view is that that there is no future for the left nor possibility of humanity’s self emancipation – in short that we are all fucked. I admit that any sober assessment of our situation must lead to the conclusion that at the moment the odds seem to be heavily on barbarism (but then, when weren’t they?), but there are a few glimmers of hope to be seen and there remains no alternative for us to but continue to work against the odds.


I have been working in my little way on lots of international campaigning from the Australian general election to biofuels in Papua New Guinea to Debal Deb's work in West Bengal...and even copying lots of posts on Venezuela and observation of Serbian workers control.

So what about ecosocialists and green activists here in the UK....well here is an excellent paper on strategy from Sean Thompson.

Sean is a long term socialist activist, ex-Respect and Socialist Alliance...I first met him at a Camden Green Party meeting where Sian Berry had encouraged him to come along and talk about RESPECT...he joined the Greens and works hard. He is a Party rep on Stop the War Coalition, a mainstay of Green Left (the ecosocialist anti-capitalist part of the Green Party of England and Wales) and was at the Paris ecosocialist meeting.



Like William Morris he makes things...is a craftsman as you can see from his website here.

Just our of hospital he told us on sunday that each paragraph 'felt as if it was chisled out of stone'....a pretty heroic piece of material practice...enjoy and learn and debate.

OPTIONS FOR ECOSOCIALISTS IN 2008 by Sean Thompson
I woke up on New Years Day with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I had just survived an medical emergency, so I was mightily pleased to be waking up at all. On the other, the situation facing the Left in Britain has seldom seemed bleaker. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, the erosion of civil liberties grinds on relentlessly, the privatisation of our education and health services gathers pace, as does the rate of global warming - and as I write, the government has announced a new nuclear power programme. I have been politically engaged since the early sixties, and during that time the left has never been weaker or more fragmented than it is today.

Given that Rosa Luxemburg’s description of the choice before us being socialism or barbarism has never been more stark it would be easy to surmise from the above that my view is that that there is no future for the left nor possibility of humanity’s self emancipation – in short that we are all fucked. I admit that any sober assessment of our situation must lead to the conclusion that at the moment the odds seem to be heavily on barbarism (but then, when weren’t they?), but there are a few glimmers of hope to be seen and there remains no alternative for us to but continue to work against the odds. So in the short dark days of January 2008, we ecosocialists (or green socialists or socialist greens or whatever) need to plan a course of action for the coming year.

Vacuum on the left

Ever since the mid seventies I have believed that a regroupment and refoundation of the left in Britain was a necessary precondition for the building of a mass party of humanist and environmentally aware socialism based within the working class and its institutions. I remain convinced that such a project must remain the central task for us today, in parallel with and informed by our activities as trade unionists, anti war activists or in whatever areas of day to day resistance to capitalism we are jointly and severally able to engage.

The leverage for such a refoundation could conceivably be based on one (at least) of three main agencies; the Left in the Labour Party and the Trade Unions, a regroupment of the far left sects or the developing social movements, in particular the green movement. 2007 wasn’t a good year for any of those three potential routes to progress.

Despite the trajectory of the Labour Party since the mid eighties, from a notionally social democratic party to Blair’s corrupt, neo liberal election machine, there was always a residual organised left within it, with a real, if declining, base within the trade union movement and among elements of the trade unions bureaucracies. Socialists within the Labour Party had a good(ish) case when they argued that all attempts to build an alternative to Labour to its left by small groups recruiting in ones and twos had failed in the past and that the natural home for socialists was within the Party in order to fight for its rebirth. However, last summer, the remnants of the Left in the Labour Party failed even to get to the starting line in NuLab’s leadership race and at its conference in September the Trade Union bureaucracy gave away the last tenuous ribbons of democratic control by party members. NuLab is now explicitly and irreversibly a party of the right.

However, while the vast majority of the Trade Union bureaucracy appears to be welded immovably to the apparatus of NuLab, there is growing dissent and disillusionment with the whole Blairite/Brownite project on the part of growing numbers of trade union activists, including a minority of the bureaucracy. Thus, despite the steady erosion of membership, the traditional ‘official’ sections of the Labour Movement remain a key battle ground for socialist ideas.

In a touching, if slightly embarrassing, example of the triumph of hope over experience, I have been involved in many of the attempts at regroupment of the left, from the Socialist Movement and the Chesterfield Conferences, through the SLP and the Socialist Alliance to Respect. All of these initiatives have failed, most recently last autumn, when the SWP leadership’s hysterical reaction to their erstwhile greatest ally, George Galloway’s, rather modest criticisms of their incompetence and autocracy led to the implosion of Respect. So now we have the absurd spectacle of two ‘Respects’. The SWP’s version of Respect now effectively consists just of the SWP – a ‘united front of a special type’ indeed. Respect Renewal contains the best elements of the original initiative, including Ken Loach, the impressive Salma Yaqoob and the ISG/Socialist Resistance group (and, for better and/or worse, the Gorgeous One). Sadly however, it seems unlikely that RR will be able to become a viable national organisation with a real popular base.

Finally, and most ludicrously, in November the Green Party’s electoral obsessives’ wing overwhelmingly won the day in a referendum aimed at making the Green Party look like a miniscule copy of the three ‘grown-up parties’ for PR purposes. On first sight, the modest growth of the Green Party seems like good news for the left. With over seven thousand members, over a hundred local councillors and two MEPs, and with policy positions that place it well to the left of the three neo-liberal parties, the Green Party would seem to be naturally a major player in the development of a mass movement of the left. However, in reality it has an active membership of probably less than 1500, its political composition is an extraordinarily eclectic (and incompatible) mish-mash ranging from reactionary Neo Malthusians, through hippy lifestylists to socialists trying to develop a modern environmentally aware praxis. The dominant politics of the organisation is a narrow obsession with ‘environmental’ issues largely divorced from their social and political context, married to an exclusively electoralist practice with not one whit of analysis of the nature of the state or structure of society.

As it currently operates, the Green Party is likely to remain within the comfortable minority niche it has established for itself, unable – and to a large extent unwilling – to develop a base among working class communities and organisations.

So there is a vacuum on the left and, with the exception of activism within the trade unions, no consensus among socialists on which way to move forwards organisationally.

This situation cannot just be willed away, it is only through activity and over a period of time, that the issues willed be clarified. It is possible that our comrades in Socialist Resistance might be right and there is a realistic chance for Respect Renewal to consolidate and begin to grow as a core of a genuinely broad based socialist party. It is possible that a significant group of left trade unions and trade union bureaucrats will definitively break from NuLab and form the basis for a new party of labour. It is even possible that we in Green Left will succeed in moving the Green Party away from the electoralist anoraks and towards a more explicit understanding of the socialist implications of its egalitarian, environmentalist and fuzzily anti-capitalist program and recognition of the role it could play in rebuilding the left. All of the above are possible, but unfortunately I don’t think any of them are likely.

What next for Green Left

We have to move Green Left on from being little more than an internal email discussion group to being an activist group that has clear (if minimal) strategic objectives. As socialists who recognise the scale and urgency of the crises that capitalism brought upon mankind, our aims and objectives have to be more ambitious than maintaining a left discussion group in the Green party. Ian Angus has written that ‘It is far easier to write socialist essays about climate change than to actively build movements against it. But, as Marx wrote, interpreting the world is not enough — the point is to change it. The time is ripe for ecosocialists to move beyond criticizing capitalism, into supporting, building, and learning from real movements for change. If we don’t do so, all of our words and theories will be irrelevant.’ He has also described the role of ecosocialists as ‘making the greens redder and the reds greener’. I think that what this all means for us in Green Left is that we need to have a twin track strategy over the next year.
Our internal strategy
We have to work within the Green Party to spread a wider understanding that, as Ian says ‘ecological destruction is not an accidental feature of capitalism, it is built into the system’s DNA.’ We need to be developing an understanding among fellow party members that the system’s insatiable need to increase profits – ‘the ecological tyranny of the bottom line’ - cannot be reformed away.
We are not going to do that by endless abstract discussions – although formal debate does have its place. And we are certainly not going to do it by getting bogged down in endless navel gazing and inward looking arguments about abstruse points of internal organisation.
Firstly, we need to do it by involving Green Party members in real world campaigns and day-to-day agitational, rather than simply propaganda activity in the wider movement; for example getting our local parties working with local CND or StWC branches, with tenants involved in DCH, with local community groups and civil rights activists in the defence of refugees and with trade unionists in local campaigns to organize low paid workers – and continually explaining the commonality of these and the environmental concerns of the membership.
Secondly, we need to be making proposals within the Party for action that promote debate and raise awareness among rank and file party members that chime with their level of consciousness but which move them to begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions of bourgeois ideology and which raise demands that cannot be met within the limitations of a capitalist state. In other words, we should be developing transitional demands.
For example, the Justice for Palestinians motion at our Spring Conference in a few weeks (modesty forbids me from mentioning its author) is not dramatically different from the rather anodyne motion on Israel and Palestine from Richard Lawson – except that while the latter merely states opinions that I broadly share (except for the issue of the Two State Solution) the former commits the party to campaigning for the release of Hamas MPs and to supporting the boycott campaign against Israel. In other words it challenges Greens to move from sentiment to action on the side of the oppressed. Similarly, the proposed amendment to the MfSS section on Income and Economic Security (oh dear, I’m blushing) doesn’t make a stirring – and to most GP members incomprehensible – call to ‘expropriate the expropriators’. Instead it calls for a minimum wage to be based on a widely recognized benchmark of decency – and calls for a maximum wage tied to it. Such a call widely resonates with Greens’ (and very many non Greens’) sense of justice, but at the same time it challenges the structure of capitalism and the state. If the Old Man was with us today he would probably agree that this was an example of transitional politics (although obviously he would condemn it as he hadn’t thought of it himself).

As a continuation of this strategy I suggest that at the Autumn Conference we should press for the GP to affiliate to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and the Cuba Organic Support Group (COSG is an organisation which supports the organic movement in Cuba through speakers, publicity and the promotion of Gardening Brigades to Cuba). In addition, if the vote goes with us at Reading, we should perhaps move for affiliation to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Thirdly, as a continuation of the approach described above, we should be making a consistent attempt to develop the consciousness of our activists by organising debates and discussions, whether within the context of ‘official’ political education programmes as we are starting to do in London, or independently as Green Left.

Fourthly, we should be seeking to challenge the electoralist anoraks and amateur bonapartists within the structure of the party at every opportunity. We should try to ensure that we have as many left candidates as possible for GPEX in the Autumn – to let posts on our leading committee go uncontested is unforgivable.
Our external strategy

But working within the Green Party is not enough. The second track of our strategy must be to work, as an organised group of independent ecosocialists, within the broader movement. In other words, if our work within the Green Party is fundamentally about ‘making greens redder’, then our external work must be about ‘making reds greener’. Central to this, I think, is the establishment of a network of green socialists (or whatever) in Britain.

One of the high points of 2007 for me was the meeting in Paris which established the fledgling Ecosocialist International Network. At that meeting were twenty comrades from Britain, including members of Green Left, the Red-Green Study Group, Socialist Resistance and the Alliance for Green Socialism, along with two SWP members who play a leading part in the Campaign Against Climate Change. While it was heartening to see that among the thirteen countries represented at the meeting, the largest contingent was from Britain, but it was salutary to note that among the British groups there had previously been an absolute minimum of contact and even less collaboration.

Consequently, on leaving hospital just before Christmas, I wrote on behalf of Green Left to all the British participant in the Paris ecosocialist meeting, to suggest that all the groups and/or individuals who were at the Paris event have an initial meeting to exchange experiences and to explore potential areas of practical joint activity. I immediately received a positive response from Edward Maltby, a Paris based AWL member who was at the initial meeting and in the last day or two have received expressions of support from Alan Thornett of Socialist Resistance and Richard Kuper of the Red-Green Study Group. I propose that we should now get moving on organising the meeting as soon as possible, but leaving ourselves with a bit of space in order to give us time to cast the net wider than the original participants. If we can establish a formal (though necessarily loose) network by late Spring I believe that it should be the focus of Green Left’s external orientation in the coming year.

While we obviously shouldn’t approach the initial meeting in a prescriptive way, I think that we should have a couple of modest proposals for practical joint activity by members of the network. At the same time I think that we should be very open to any suggestions from any of the other participants.

In addition a modest programme of activity aimed, I would have thought, at providing a socialist alternative to SERA, we should consider two slightly longer term projects. The first is to either assist the Greeks in setting up a European network meeting in the summer or early autumn or to do it ourselves. I think it very important that at this stage we, either as Green Left alone or a wider British ecosocialist network, make contact with the constituent members of the Nordic Green Left, Groen Links and perhaps the Dutch Socialist Party with a view to involving them in a European meeting.

The second project is that we (as part of a wider network) should organise an ecosocialist delegation to Cuba next winter. Such an initiative could support and promote our work within the Green Party and be a useful promotional gambit in spreading the key concepts of ecosocialism with the wider labour movement.

While there may or may not be a long term possibility for socialists to transform the Green Party, or for Respect Renewal to develop a real popular base, or for socialist to build any meaningful opposition in NuLab, or for the AGS to achieve whatever it is trying to achieve, I believe that the establishment of an ecosocialist network will make a positive – and, I believe essential, contribution to the rebuilding of our movement. An emphasis on the fact that our joint commitment to developing a dynamic ecosocialist praxis is far more significant than the varying tactical choices we have individually made about membership of this or that organisation is vital for building the network. And our explicit recognition that none of us hold sole copyright on the Way, the Truth and the Correct Line can help us to start to develop new ways and areas of joint work that can prefigure not just a renewed socialist politics but a renewed socialist movement.


Sean Thompson
January 2008

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, I didn't think this was going to see the light of day beyond the Green Left list. Fingers crossed not too many London voters see it before May 1st - we would like to keep our London Assembly seats and preferably win one or two more. I read this with disbelief and horror and will stick to being an electoralist anorak!

Anonymous said...

Well this paper takes the patronising tone that Marxists always tend to take ie: if Greens don't have a marxist analysis of the world they don't have any analysis at all.

However, there doesn't seem to be anything new in this strategy that the myriad of hard left gruops haven't been proposing for years:

- "transitional demands" to bring about the overthrow capitalism
- working in campaign groups to try and build up a mass movement of the working class
-trips to Cuba
- a half-hearted enthususiastic commitment to winning elections

So what's new exactly? Same old, same old with a bit of a green spin

RealGreenLeft said...

As you say same old, same old, except Marxists have fewer holiday destinations these days. Ah for the Black Sea and a dacha in Odessa.

Chris Hyland said...

Couple of thoughts:

While the idea of ecoscocialism that you explain in various places including your post the other day about the commons will probably be very plalatable to party members what is generally understood by a socialist society ie big centralised possibly one-party government probably isn't. So before you start talking about making the party more left-wing and more anticapitalist you need to explain exactly what you mean by that otherwise you are going to put a lot of people off to start with. I think the big problem people have with labeling themselves anti-capitalist is that it means different things to different people. For example one person might call themselves anti-capitalist because they oppose neo-liberalism and large corporations, and another might be opposed to any privately owned business whatsoever.

Statements like:
"Fourthly, we should be seeking to challenge the electoralist anoraks and amateur bonapartists within the structure of the party at every opportunity"
and
"It is even possible that we in Green Left will succeed in moving the Green Party away from the electoralist anoraks and towards a more explicit understanding of the socialist implications of its egalitarian, environmentalist and fuzzily anti-capitalist program and recognition of the role it could play in rebuilding the left."
suggest that the people who supported the leadership either want to 'de-radicalise' the party or move it in a rightwing direction, and I don't think that's particularly the case, and I think many other statements in the piece give the impression that there's a much bigger rift in the party than there is. Also I don't think many socialist ideas are nessecarily antithetical to the party doing better electorally, for example I imagine ideas such as fetishism and use/exchange values to explain some of the problems with modern society is probably a good idea. However what will put people off is if various unfaimiliar yet pretensious sounding socialist terms start appearing in party policy documents and press releases.

I don't think that the problem with engaging the party with the wider left movement is that members don't "question some of the fundamental assumptions of bourgeois ideology and which raise demands that cannot be met within the limitations of a capitalist state" because I think a great deal of them do they just wouldn't phrase it that way. A big problem is that many socialists I've spoken too don't trust us because apparently we're mostly middle class and the fact that phrases like 'fundamental assumptions of bourgeois ideology' don't appear anywhere in our philosophical basis or policy.

Derek Wall said...

Well Chris I personally would agree with much of what you say and I nice to get some thoughtful response to Sean's paper.

It would be very nice to get some more papers looking critical at green political strategy...if we
d't get it right we are 'fucked' as Sean so poetically puts.



I think left jargon and culture can put people off as you say.

And socialism has to be about commons not central control.


Fancy writing some more and it can go up as a blog post!

Anonymous said...

Sean Thompson says "I have been politically engaged since the early sixties, and during that time the left has never been weaker or more fragmented than it is today."
And on a close reading of the article he doesn't even seem to have asked himself the question why!!!! He just assumes it must be an organisational problem.
Maybe the British left made serious political errors in those forty years. Maybe reality didn't match its analysis of what was happening in the real world to any degree at all. I don't agree with all of it (particularly on the issue of Iraq) but I would recommend a reading of "What's left" by Nick Cohen

Dave Riley said...

I find Sean Thompson's piece very useful because it places green left politics sharply on a trajectory that matters.

It's not so much ideological -- as others seem to assume -- as practical.

It's about what needs doing.

To my mind thats' a very refreshing approach to politics and I'd wish there was more of it -- at least here in Australia. It also locates that activity in a broader context that transcends the everyday limitations of anyone's preferred party.

Anonymous said...

Chris - I think you're right about the terminology being alienating to many, myself included. We probably agree on most areas of policy; it's on the best route to implement them where we appear to differ. BTW, Matt Sellwood has posted something he's written up on the Green Talk Forum which Green Party members may like to look at(keeping it as an internal discussion for now).

Derek Wall said...

I enjoying these comments, I think Sue you are right some of the language is alienating...but I think some of the frustration that I have and Sean has is that we don't debate strategy.

Graeme...fair point but I think for another day....yes the British left don't seem to have got it right...Nick Cohen isn't he the guy who want to invade Iran or am I mixing him up with some one else.

I am not sure if people have heard but Sean is sadly back in hospital in the Royal Free and is quite ill.

Matt Sellwood said...

Derek,

I'm very sorry to hear that. Please give my best wishes to Sean should you see him. :(

Matt

Anonymous said...

Sue
you seem to have fallen hook, line and sinker for what a younger (and much more radical) certain Kenneth Livingstone once noted:
"If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it"

Saving the planet in a period of potentially apocalyptic climate change won't be relieved in any consistently strong way by voting, unfortunately. You have confused voting as a TACTIC to get Green opinion into the world with the harsh real politik of overwhelming evidence that life after oil on a planet for humans with no visa to another planet has to be planned for now. A Marxist analyis has never been needed more. As Marx states in Capital: "Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as good heads of the household."

weggis said...

Anon 10:50

The quotation you give from Marx “Capital” is in fact a notion that predates Marx and can be found throughout Human history all around the world. Eg Ancient Kenyan proverb “The earth was not given to you by your parents, it has been loaned to you by your children.” It is a notion that even crops up in traditional Conservatism [out of which the Green Party was born BTW].

It is the notion itself that is important, not where it came from or which prophet repeated it. There will always be differences between people. The trick is to focus on what we have in common – it is the only way to achieve progress.

If that is “falling hook line and sinker” then I am with Sue, in particular on the subject of language. Rather it is the “left” that has been sunk by its own failure to recognise its own inability to engage or communicate outside its own closed and limited circle of comrades.

Chris Hyland said...

Derek: Ill have a think about writing it up, though Ill be busy over the next couple of days promoting your talk on Wednesday. Although it's quite hard for me to do a thorough analysis at the moment as I haven't been in the party very long, so my comment was more of a preliminary reaction to the piece and I look forward to talking to people about these issues at the conference.

I guess my point basically is that if Green Left is planning to argue to include a marxist/anti-capitalist analysis in policy making, argue for policies related to the Commons etc, and engage with other left wing groups then that's great. On the other hand if the idea is to make the party "officially" marxist/socialist then I can only see that as a disadvantage and alienating to potential voters who wouldn't describe themselves as such but would otherwise agree with the policies, especially as people associate socialism with something quite different than what I think is being proposed.

Paul said...

Got here just following links - oh and met Derek @ Malvern '86 (was it '86?).

I lapsed some 20 years ago. 10 years ago I was put off getting re-acquainted with the Green Party because of refugees from the Labour Party joining the Green Party.

Not really interested in active political engagement these days but I'll never re-join whilst socialists exist in the Green Party.

Actually that's not quite true! If the pull of wanting to be a member of Norwich planning committee again gets to strong then maybe I'll re-join (this would only work as long as Norwich Greens remain successful as they are!)

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