Unity Or Separation? -- Did The Scots decide Sensibly?

In the three days between the 18^th and the 21^st September, the media reported on two major events that, taken together, ought to give rise to some new concerns about the state of the world.

    On the 18^th the Scots took a vote on the question whether Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom (UK) and become an independent state. The majority of the voters (55%) said no. The so-called unionists, the no-voters, of course initially rejoiced at the outcome of the referendum. Later, however, many of them expressed worry about it, because it was found that a very large minority, 45 percent of the voters, wanted Scotland to leave the Union. This is too high a percentage to return to business-as-usual.

    Indeed, shortly before the referendum, after an opinion poll had predicted a majority for the yes-voters, the government in London and all the leaders of the three major parties had panicked. This was followed by big promises of reform and more autonomy for Scotland. For the English majority of the UK, and also the Scottish unionists, feared that exit of Scotland from the union would have unforeseeable negative economic and political consequences for all parts of the UK.

    The yes-voters had no such fear. They were totally confident that an independent Scotland would not only be economically viable but also be a success story. When asked about this, they said an independent Scotland with its only 5.3 million inhabitants (in a total population of nearly 64 million) would be a rich country. The main reason for this confidence was the North Sea oil. For about 90 percent of the deposits belonging to the United Kingdom would, in the case of secession, belong to Scotland.

    The other major event was a global day of action. On 21^st September, in each of over 150 cities around the world thousands of people (in New York three hundred thousand) demonstrated in order to give voice to their demand that the presidents and prime ministers of the states of the world finally take concrete and effective measures for climate protection. Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who had invited the latter to New York for a consultation on climate change, marched with the demonstrators.

Hardly convincing arguments

What I found disconcerting in the independence movement of the Scots was their argumentation. They did not say that they were being oppressed or somehow disadvantaged by the English majority. The laws of the UK were equally valid for all its member peoples – the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish. The Scots even enjoy for now several years a certain degree of autonomy. They even have their own government. They of course say they are Scots, not Britons. But how strong and how widespread is this sense of identity? All Scots speak and write English as their main language, Scottish-Gaelic is spoken by only 1 percent. They are all white (except for immigrants from South Asia and Africa), and they are all Christians. A person has after all, usually, several identities!

    One can of course say, to want to be independent is very human, both for individuals and for a people. A disappointed yes-voter said after the referendum, he could not understand that a people does not want its independence. But, in the real world, neither individuals nor a people can follow only their feelings. All must also weigh advantages against disadvantages of possible decisions. The majority of Scots, on both sides, have done that. During their campaign, the independence advocates repeatedly emphasized that secession from the United Kingdom would bring no economic disadvantages for the Scots. When the no-voters argued that the oil wealth would not last long, the yes-voters simply asserted that there is still a lot of oil under the seabed. They also wanted, for practical reasons, to both continue after independence to use the pound sterling as their currency and let the British Monarch function as their Head of state.

Not willing to share the wealth

There can be several motives for an action. Just wanting to be independent has certainly been a strong motive for the Scots. Anyhow, among them, there was a lot of antipathy toward the central government dominated by English Tories and their policies, especially toward their economic policies favorable to the rich and hostile to the poor. And the Labor Party has also been quite strong there. So, many Scots thought they could pursue a better policy for themselves if Scotland could secede from the United Kingdom. Moreover, a people cannot forget its history totally. Scotland's union with England 307 years ago was not really a voluntary one. The Scots remember they were compelled to accept it because of an economic crisis and military superiority of the English kingdom that was threatening to invade their country. However, I suspect that in the present independence movement a different motive played the main role. As mentioned above, independence advocates think there still is a lot of oil in the oil fields in their part of the North Sea. This oil wealth, the income from it, they do not want to share any longer with the other British peoples.

    Not being any longer prepared to share “their” wealth with the poorer peoples in the same state is a motive that plays the main role in other (though not all) separatist movements too. This also works in states in which large deposits of valuable minerals do not play any role. Thus Catalonia is, even without oil and other such valuable natural resources, the economically strongest province of Spain. Although it is true that Catalans have a developed language of their own, which they also use for all purposes, and although it is true that they, therefore, strongly feel a Catalan identity, it may be that not wanting any more to share the wealth produced in their province may be the unspoken main motive for their current independence movement. This can also be said about the separatism of the Flemish people (in northern Belgium) and that of the northern Italians. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the rich provinces – Bavaria, Baden Wurttemberg, and Hessen – are of course not trying to secede, but since about ten years ago they are unwilling to pay large sums of money to the poorer provinces, which they are obliged to do according to the present constitution.

    A convincing example of how far this kind of separatism can go is the tragic break up of the former socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia. It was accomplished through a brutal civil war resulting from the selfish separatism of the Slovenes and Croats. Misha Glenny, British journalist and expert on the Balkans, summarized in 1992 a conversation on this topic that he had with Mate Babic, former Deputy Prime Minister of the Croatian government, as follows:

"[T] he imbalance between Slovene sophistication and the developing-world conditions prevailing in Kosovo, southern Serbia and Macedonia could only be rectified by massive state control of the economy. This created resentment in the prosperous north, the fruits of whose productivity were transferred to the dusty climates of the south where they rotted in the sun. Above all, a taut mistrust grew up between Slovenia and Croatia [on the one side], where a more industrious work ethic was the tradition, and Serbia [on the other], the borderland of the Ottoman empire’s corrupt economic values. Being inextricably involved with the Serbian economy, which appears to be fuelled by lotus leaves, had a damaging long-term effect on the Croat and Slovene economies. When the political decay in Yugoslavia accelerated, following the multi-party elections in the republics, the economic tensions ensured that this mistrust would deepen.” (Glenny 1996: 63f.)

Cooperation is needed, not separation

But this is a very short-sighted policy. The oil age is gradually but surely nearing its end. The old oil fields and deposits of other important raw materials are rapidly getting exhausted. Who has not heard of peak oil, peak everything? With the progressive rise in the price of crude oil – this main lubricant of the world economy – the industrial countries that are still rich but are not themselves oil producers, are losing the foundation of their prosperity. That also is the main reason for the crisis (and/or stagnation) that is plaguing the world economy for the last 6 years (see Sarkar 2011 & 2012). And even if the oil age is not going to come to an end soon, global consumption of fossil fuels must be reduced rapidly in order to protect humanity from increasingly adverse climatic disasters. Humanity is in a pincer-grip crisis.

    A solution to this crisis is not in sight. One international climate summit is failing after the other. And it is totally uncertain whether at all and, if yes, to what extent, the so-called renewable energy sources can one day replace the non-renewable fossil and nuclear energy sources (see Sarkar 1999 & 2008).

    Actually, in such a situation, the peoples of the world should rather pull together. They should cooperate and jointly seek solutions to the great problems humanity is facing today. The movements for splitting up existing states are therefore a very deplorable and reprehensible development, especially since they involve the risk of violent conflict, even civil war. All peoples including minorities that live in multiracial (multiethnic), multi-religious or multilingual countries should rather fight for human rights, minority rights, and the right to equal treatment, within the existing state. Only when these rights have no chance of being accepted by the powers that be, can, in my view, a separatist movement be justified. And a violent separatist movement can only be justified, if the dominant people or the majority exercises a ruthless or brutal rule over the others. In the world today, in most countries, even small cities and towns are populated by different racial, ethnic, religious and language groups. In India, even after the country was divided up in 1947 on the basis of religion, villages have Muslim areas and Hindu areas. Should also such villages be split up?

    It has also to be considered that in today's globalized neoliberal capitalism, it is the large transnational corporations with their global alliances that are the most powerful rulers of the world. It is a truism that today's states have lost much of their former power. They are actually no longer fully sovereign. Today, in the ultimate analysis, the main opponent of all political activists, no matter what their great cause is, are these transnational corporations and their alliances. In this situation, we can say: the smaller a country is, the more powerless it is, the more it is at the mercy of large corporations, the less sovereign it is, and the more it is reduced to a stooge of the corporations.

    Eco-socialists and like-minded people know that for various reasons, in the long-term, political and economic affairs of societies must be managed in small, largely self-sufficient and largely autonomous units. But that situation is still far away. In the period of transition to our goal, we must follow the motto “unity is strength”. It is by now abundantly clear that only strong states and political unions like the USA and the EU can to some extent control large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Deutsche Bank, UBS etc. Today, separatist movements are extremely counterproductive. They only distract us from our original goal.

Literature
Glenny, Misha (1996) The Fall of Yugoslavia. London: Penguin.

Sarkar, Saral (1999) Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? – A Critical Analysis of Humanity’s Fundamental Choices. London: Zed Books.

Sarkar, Saral & Bruno Kern (2008) Eco-Socialism or Barbarism – An Up-to-date Critique of Capitalism. Mainz, Cologne: Initiative Eco-Socialism.

http://www.oekosozialismus.net/en_oekosoz_en_rz.pdf

Sarkar, Saral (2011) Understanding the Present-day World Economic Crisis – An Eco-Socialist Approach.

http://eco-socialist.blogspot.de/search?q=understanding

Sarkar, Saral (2012) The Crises of Capitalism – A Different Study of Political Economy. Berkeley (USA): Counterpoint.

 

A Debate on Socialism and Socialist Revolution

Dear friends,

I recently had a debate with a renowned Marxist scholar about socialism and socialist revolution. His name is Prof. Paresh Chattopadhyay – Indian by birth, teaches political economy at the University of Montreal, Canada. He may not be so well known among political activists; but among Marxist scholars, he is very well known and very highly respected as an authority on the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin etc. The debate has appeared in Frontier, a weekly political journal published (in print and online) from Kolkata, India. I want to make the three texts – two by Chattopadhyay and one by me – available to the readers of this blog:

(1) Chattopadhyay published a short critical comment on an article, the content of which was an adulatory appreciation of the contribution of Che Guevara to socialist revolution. Chattopadhyay opined that Cuban socialism of Che and Fidel Castro was not Marxian socialism.Here is the link.

http://www.frontierweekly.com/articles/vol-47/47-3/47-3-Che%20Guevara.html

(2) I criticized Chattopadhyay for not telling us what revolutionaries like Lenin, Mao and Che should and could have done other than what they did in the absence in their respective countries of an industrial proletariat that formed the majority of the population. I also expressed doubt about the validity of Marxian socialism in the 21^st century. Here is the link.

http://www.frontierweekly.com/articles/vol-47/47-7/47-7-PCs%20Critique%20of%20Socialism.html

(3) Chattopadhyay responded to my criticism. Here is the link.

http://www.frontierweekly.com/views/sep-14/7-9-14-On%20Saral%20Sarkars%20Socialism.html

Below I am reproducing only the second and the third text.

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What is to be done?

PC’s Critique of ‘Socialism’

Saral Sarkar

Paresh Chattopadhyay (PC) is right in almost all points [Frontier, August 3-9, 2014]. The question that must now be asked is: Does it make any sense at all to still try to create socialist society that Marx and Engels had envisioned? I do not know whether PC has somewhere written on this question. If not, then it is essential that he does. For it is too simple to criticize every socialist of the 20th century—from Lenin to Mao and Che Guevara—without saying what they should and could have done to build a socialist society that would have gotten Marx's approval, whom they all regarded as their Guru—something other or more than what they did in order to create a socialist society. Also, PC's awe-inspiring scholarship is of little use unless he presents his conclusion as to the question "what is to be done today".

I think Marx's vision of revolution and socialism was flawed from the very beginning. But it was and it still is too difficult for Lenin and all socialists up until today to say that openly. The monumental analytical and theoretical work of Marx and Engels had achieved such a overwhelming intellectual hegemony among the radical and anti-capitalist educated people that hardly anybody dared to do so. And those few who did dare to criticize Marxist theory, even mildly, was denounced as traitor, deviationist, reformist, revisionist etc. etc. And they never had a chance to get a fair hearing. That is the normal effect of hegemony.

But today it is easier to realize and say without being persecuted or denounced that Marx and Engels had erred on several questions:

(1) The most important of them is the agency question. The great majority of workers did not and still do not have the ability to understand, let alone analyze, the complex ways in which the world functions and the direction in which it is moving (there are of course some exceptions). The majority of them has been and still are totally worn down in the process of earning money to feed themselves and their family. That has been and is the reality. It has therefore always been nonsensical, untruthful and only fashionable to assert that the revolution will happen under the leadership of the proletariat. The leadership necessarily had to come from the educated revolutionary middle class, from people like Lenin, Mao, and Guevara, and they had to be the vanguard.

In the 19th century, maybe, the proletariat formed the majority of the population in England, Germany, and France. But not in Russia (not to speak of China or India). But, in Russia, there were people like Lenin; and in the early 20th century, in China there were people like Mao. Should they have sat back and waited until the industrial proletariat became the majority? If Marx and Engels had lived longer, would they have advised Lenin and Mao to sit back and wait?

(2) Marx and Engels could not have known in their days what we know since after their death, particularly what we know today. That is why they also erred in thinking that the proletariat will be farther revolutionized through their growing impoverishment. The opposite happened in history.

(3) They had little knowledge of human nature. They erred in thinking that the proletariat had no fatherland. The First World War proved them thoroughly wrong. The colonialists and imperialists of Europe and America enabled their own proletariats to enjoy a share in the plunder of the colonies, which they gladly did.

(4) In the 19th century, Marx and Engels, and in the greater part of the 20th century Lenin, Mao, Guevara and all rank and file socialists were justified in believing in eternal development of science and technology, and hence in eternal development of productive forces. We know today that there are limits to growth, limits to the development of science, technology and productive forces. We cannot blame the masters and their followers for not knowing what we know today. But we must severely criticize the die-hard Marxists of our times for still stubbornly refusing to see these limits.

To sum up, the analysis of reality and the vision of socialism we have received from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Guevara etc. have largely become obsolete. But since capitalism will definitely ruin the whole world unless overcome, some newly conceived socialism must become the goal of all radical people's movements of today. This new socialism—which should be called the scientific socialism of the 21st century (the Marxian socialism being the Utopian)—must be based on the knowledge and understanding of the world that we have acquired since the publication of the book Limits to Growth (1972). This knowledge and understanding is a call for a paradigm shift in our thinking and activity.

As for revolution, I would like to quote Walter Benjamin. He wrote:

"Marx says revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is entirely different. Revolutions are perhaps the attempt of humanity travelling in a train to pull the emergency brake."

If it was not true when Benjamin wrote this, it is true roday. In the same sense, another German author, Carl Amery, wrote, in the general sense: Political activists have till now tried to change the world in various ways. The point however is to preserve it.

What is to be done? Our task is to preserve the biosphere and change the world.

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On Saral Sarkar’s Socialism

Paresh Chattopadhyay

We feel greatly honoured that such an eminent individual as Saral Sarkar (SS for short) living far away from India has taken notice of my humble work on socialism appearing in a Kolkata weekly. In the following lines we try to deal with what we consider as the most important points of his important contribution.

First a summary account of what he says. In his view we have criticized every socialist of the twentieth century – most prominently, Lenin,Mao and Che (LMC for short) – for building socialism without the approval of  Karl Marx. SS faults us for not saying what else they should have done. We are asked to show   what  is to be done to-day.

Marx’s vision was flawed from the start, he continues, but LMC were inhibited to declare it openly. Those who differed –the revisionists- had never a chance to do that. Now is the chance to show the errors of Marx.

What errors are these? These are: (1) workers lack the ability to understand and analyse how the world functions. They are too worn down by their effort to earn money and and support their families. It has been always “nonsensical, untruthful, and only fashionable” to assert that revolution will happen under the leadership of the proletariat. The leadership has to come from the educated revolutionary middleclass, people like LMC forming the vanguard. In the backward countries like Russia and China should Lenin and Mao have waited till the workers get the majority?

(2)Mistaken in believing that the proletariat will be further revolutionized through growing impoverishment. The opposite has
happened.

(3) Marx had little knowledge of human nature. The colonialists and imperialists enabled the proletariat a share in the plunder.

(4) Finally he does not spare LMC also, who are faulted for believing in eternal development of science and technology, and productive forces. But there are limits to growth. Due to the then ignorance, these revolutionaries could be exonerated, but not their die-hard Marxist followers. Now is the time for a new socialism, the true scientific socialism - not utopian à la Marx-Engels. This will preserve the biosphere in a desirable way.

We may now be allowed to intervene. In SS’s narrative there are at least two factual problems. First, it is not true that nobody among people like LMC dared to express opposition to the “flawed vision” of Marx. Lenin while declaring that a socialist revolution could begin in a backward land, also said that this idea was outside the vision of Marx and Engels, which in effect meant that their vision was too narrow to envisage the total historical perspective of socialist revolution, (and hence “flawed”).

The second concerns Marx’s perspective of proletarian revolution being propelled by workers’ increasing impoverishment according to the author. This is the thesis of so-called “absolute impoverishment “ of the workers under  capitalism ascribed to Marx. Now, it is undeniable that Marx for a brief period had the tendency to adhere to this idea.The origin of this idea, however, goes back to Engels in his earliest writings on the English workers, as Engels himself wrote many years later. In those early writings on the workers’ situation Engels maintained that workers’ wage, as the exchange value of their labour(power), translated into the absolutely necessary subsistence for the life and reproduction of their labour. Marx, coming later to his study of political economy, followed Engels in this regard. Lassalle took it over and formulated what is called the “iron law of wages”. But this idea of absolute impoverishment had a very short existence in Marx. By the time he started his more mature works, culminating in CAPITAL, it vanished altogether. Already in his 1847 lectures to the German workers, Marx observes that in a period of rapid accumulation of capital wages may  rise, though capital’s profit rises more rapidly. Capitalists will “allow the working class to take a portion of the increasing capitalist wealth, and remain content with forging for itself the golden chain by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train”.   In CAPITAL vol.1, in the chapter on  ‘buying and selling of labour power’ he declares that “labour power contains, from the point of view of value, a moral and historical element, which differentiates it from other commodities”.

Leaving this aspect of impoverishment of the workers, this poverty has another and more profound meaning in Marx, ignored by most of Marx’s readers. In his 1857-58 notebooks Marx holds “living labour as the complete denudation of all objectivity, bare, purely subjective existence, labour as absolute poverty, poverty not as shortage, but as  complete exclusion from objective wealth”.(This reminds one of an image which Rabindranath had created in one of his musical compositions which with some modification could be stated thus: seated in front of  a vast sea of nectar these labourers are allowed to drink only poison).  In other words, wage/salaried  labour excluded from the means of production  is as such in  absolute poverty . In his very first 1861-63 manuscript Marx calls wage/salaried labourers (manual or mental) “pauper”, whatever the level of remuneration. The very fact that you have to sell your only ‘property’ labour power in order to survive, is sufficient to qualify you as absolutely poor, a pauper..Very aptly Marx cites Shakespear in his master work:” you take my life when you take the means whereby I live”. This aspect of wage or salaried labour, this wage slavery escapes the notice of most of us. This is a part of mind set imbibed through the capitalist relations. As an illustration, we bring in the justly famous humanist, the economist Amartya Sen, a rare bird in the profession. Sen justly considers market relation, that is,  commodity production playing a liberating  role in a conservative society such as India. But wage labour as a specific form of slavery does not appear in his otherwise  valuable  work on human freedom.Like most of us he seems to accept it  as normal. In ancient Greece, even Aristotle, generally considered to be the greatest thinker of European antiquity, thought human slavery as normal.  He called slave an animated tool. Indeed, as the young Marx and Engels wrote, “the ideas of each epoch are the ideas of the ruling class”.

Now it is clear that SS at least implicitly considers the correctness of the revolutionary undertakings of LMC for building socialism and Marx wrong. As  regards the prototype of these endeavours, the October revolution followed by  the establishment of Russian socialism in a backward land, his views, he should be glad to know,were initially shared by some of the most informed   minds of the last century- E. H. Carr, I. Deutscher and P. M. Sweezy  all of whom pronounced Lenin  right , and  Marx wrong in his prognostication of socialist revolution taking place only in a situation where certain objective and subjective conditions exist , and those conditions can exist only  in advanced capitalist lands. (We return to those conditions in a moment). Then what happened in fact is well known. The evaporation of the house that Lenin built, followed by those who followed him, showed at least one thing: a clear refutation of his position. Marx remains to be tested.

It is clear, here we have two very different notions of socialism, LMC’s and Marx’s, with an unbridgeable gap in between. The first type is a system imposed on the society at large by a hierarchically formed vanguard who claims to know the real interest of the rest of society, mainly the labouring people, better than the affected. The very basis of the second type is exactly the opposite. It  is the self emancipation of the labouring people  : “Emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”  , so Marx (1864). If the working class is incapable of fulfilling this task,so much the worse. “The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing” so Marx in a letter to a friend(1865). Equally, there is irreconcilable difference between the very meaning of socialism held by  the first group and that held by Marx and Engels. Socialism of the first group signifies and has shown in practice  a society ruled by a strong state with standing army and bureaucracy, headed by a single party with central planning, with no individual (private) property in the means of production, but with commodity production and wage labour intact. Because of the continuing production based on wage/salaried labour,(which automatically implies the existence of commodity production) this society as a matter of fact is a form of state capitalism. And politically, in spite of big talks by Lenin about following  the Paris Commune model of free election  and recall of all officials, the very opposite has turned out to be the case. In these single party strictly controlled  societies there is no really free election , not to speak of  recall, and no dissenting political view is tolerated. The opposite is the case with the second meaning of socialism. In this meaning socialism or communism (no distinction in Marx and Engels)signifies,in terms of the new society after capital(ism), a society of free individuals or an association of free and equal individuals with collective ownership of means of production along with the disappearance of all the instruments of exploitation and repression such as state, commodity, wage/salaried labour.

A socialist revolution does not come about by any body’s order, or desire of a Lenin, or even Marx’s. A social revolution like the great French Revolution of 1789-93, which is epochal and not something momentary, requires over a long period, a certain maturity of the social conditions preparing the ground. In Marx’s classic statement, too dismissively abandoned by instant revolutionaries, no social formation ever disappears before having exhausted all the possibilities of development of  its productive forces, and new , higher relations of production  do not appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. In their absence all attempts at social revolution will be Don Quixotism. It would be like trying to ripen a green jackfruit by repeatedly boxing it.  In the absence of such conditions any attempt to change society could only be undertaken by a determined group of ‘professional revolutionaries’ as the self-anointed ‘vanguard’, independently of the will of the society’s great majority, a kind of Blanqui-ism. And indeed all the so-called socialist revolutions of the last century,highly approved by SS, have been minority revolutions.  Towards the end of his life, Engels summed up the past revolutionary experiences: “ All revolutions up till now were minority revolutions. Even when the majority took part , it did so – wittingly or unwittingly – only in the service of a minority; but because of this, or simply because of the passive, unresisting attitude of the majority , this minority  acquired the appearance of being the representative of the whole society.”  Here we are speaking exclusively of socialist revolution followed by socialism since SS’s discourse is on these subjects.

As regards the point raised by SS that workers lack the ability to understand and analyse how the world functions, and that they are too worn down by their effort to earn money and support their families, we can only say that a social revolution is not an every day event.A revolution cannot be summoned at will.Revolutions arise spontaneously in moments of crisis, when the situation becomes unbearable, and the same worn down ordinary people become revolutionaries.   Trotsky in his great “History of the Russian Revolution” vividly describes the spontaneous beginning of the Russian Revolution  in February 1917,initiated not by any party or leader, but by the most downtrodden  and oppressed  section of the proletariat of Petrograd – the women textile workers.

As a matter of fact twentieth century socialism is a great myth. There has been no socialist revolution and no socialism in an emancipatory sense.  Those lands were just not ready at all for the rise of such a society. They were ready only for bourgeois revolution destroying  all the pre-capitalist relations along with freeing themselves from colonialism and imperialism,  and thus preparing for the advent of  a totally new society.The Russian Revolution was the last bourgeois revolution in Europe.

Regarding SS’s hasty dismissal of Marx, let us cite the following lines from  an  eminent Dutch scholar  Mark Blaug:”Marx has been reassessed ,revised, refuted and buried a thousand times but he refuses to be relegated to intellectual history .For better or worse , his ideas have become part of the climate of opinion within which we all think”.

However, Marx is not indispensable for a social revolution. Marx or no Marx, social revolutions have taken place and will take place springing from the very soil of a society divided into antagonistic classes. How many revolutionaries knew even the name of Marx in the Paris Commune, ditto for the uprising of the millions of labouring people in February, 1917 in Russia?

Sep 07 2014

Some Thoughts On Resilience and Transition

My knowledge of the Transition Town Movement (TTM) has until now been meager. So I am very thankful to Esther and Samuel for providing us with so much information on it and pointing out the aspects that require sympathetic criticism. Here is the link:

http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TransitionMovement.pdf

    In the 1980s, I was enabled by the United Nations University (Tokyo) to make a participatory research study of the (at that time) New Social Movements (NSM) in West Germany plus a study of the origin, development and “end” of the German green party Die Grünen.^* I guess it might be useful for all concerned to hear what thoughts went through my head – 30 years later – while and after reading Esther and Samuel’s solid paper.

    I do not want to mention the points with which I concur. So below I am making some other points, only those, which have not been made in the paper and which I consider to be important for developing a strategy for bringing about the changes we want. They are based on my studies as well as experience both in India and Germany, both as an activist and as participant in discussions.

    Problems with the goal

    1. Discussions on strategy presuppose that the participants at least roughly agree on the goals that are to be attained by means of the strategy.

    The goal of the TTM is to make society resilient against the shocks that are coming and are partly ongoing. Specifically mentioned are peak oil, global climate change, and global financial and  economic crisis. Many other less important issues have been mentioned too: localization, social justice, solidarity, inclusiveness etc. They are goals as well as means to attain the main goal. Esther & Sam’s paper shows how problematic the resilience discourse is. The TTM wants to make society resilient, in order that it does not totally break down. The goal is not to change the present social system that not only has caused the shock-like problems the TTM is addressing but is also totally inadequate for the purpose. It is, moreover, an unjust social system. That is too little and too bad. I contend that nothing less than a fundamentally new social system must replace the existing one, so that the shocks in question can be successfully weathered.

    That means, in short, movements like the TTM ought to pursue a greater goal, which, apart from being good in itself, is necessary to attract people and encourage them to join it. We need not set an ideal society as our goal. An ideal will perhaps always remain an ideal. But an acceptably good and peaceful world society is possible and can therefore be our goal. (This naturally requires elaboration and detailed discussion.) Very important here is the term world society. To make Totnes or even one country (England or Germany or Italy) resilient and its society good and peaceful, and to forget the others, would not be a great goal, but a selfish one unworthy of a big social movement. Moreover, the efforts to achieve it would also be a futile one. The wretched of the earth are already storming the gates of these and similar countries in search of a safe haven. Neo-Nazis and xenophobic right reactionary parties are already gaining ground in such countries.

    Despite this criticism, I praise the TTM. It is better than the NSM of Germany of the 1980s. The latter was a conglomeration of several one-point movements. One of it, the ecology movement, was also a conglomeration of various and separate one-point movements: the anti-nuclear-energy movement, the movement against dying of forests, movement for better air quality, movement for protecting endangered species etc. Compared to that, the TTM has a broader spectrum of goals. That is some progress. On the other hand, the TTM is worse than the NSM; for it seems to avoid the subjects of consumption and economic growth, which most activists in the NSM (particularly in the ecology movement as a whole) used to consider as very important. But that was before the mid 1980s, when opportunists of Die Grünen started talking of the possibility of ecologizing industrial society, i.e. capitalist industrial society.

    In Die Grünen, a large number of leftists (including communists)  from various backgrounds had sought to combine ecological goals with their societal goals. Their ultimate vision was some sort of an eco-socialist society (the term was also used). But they were pushed out of the party by the opportunistic majority, who wanted the party to become a governing party.

    2. Another thing to be noted in connection with the goal-question is this: The greatest difficulty in attracting the masses to a genuinely ecological movement is its goal itself. The ecology movement is the only social movement that promises, if successful, a lowering of the standard of living of all, even curtailing to some extent various freedoms: for instance, the freedom to travel, freedom to consume luxury goods and goods imported from far away (e.g. to eat pineapple in Norway), the freedom to publish one’s own newspaper (there will be a scarcity of paper) and, generally speaking, all freedoms which involve a high degree of resource consumption. All other social movements, who assume that economic growth will continue, promise an improvement in these respects. Indeed, for a long time, higher wage demands of the working class movement could regularly be fulfilled. Also their non-material demands can be fulfilled more or less easily. The wishes of the civil rights movement can be granted, women can enjoy more rights, gays can be given the right to marry, immigrants can be given long-term resident permits and even communal voting rights etc. etc.  But the ecology movement opposes economic growth; what is worse, it demands economic contraction. But, although millions of people know about the serious ecological crisis, no one has ever rioted for austerity, as Esther and Sam write. That is also the reason that the trade unions were opponents of die Grünen in the latter’s early years. That is why less developed countries, especially China and India, are vehemently refusing to commit themselves to reducing their CO₂ - emission.  

    3. Of course, this difficulty can be overcome by spreading illusions of sustainable development, green growth, technological solutions to ecological problems (e.g. renewable energies/resources), green capitalism etc. But genuine eco-activists are not (should not be) interested in ephemeral gains in public support based on such illusions. They must tell the ecological truth. So what can they offer to attract more support from people. They can offer the prospect of a peaceful, egalitarian, exploitation- and oppression-free world as compensation for a lower standard of living. They can offer that in their good society nobody will be involuntarily unemployed, nobody will be discriminated against on any grounds, nobody will be tortured by the police. These too are material things. Anybody who has suffered unemployment or insecurity, anybody who has lived in the midst of war or civil war, anybody who has experienced the threat of being evicted from her home or has not been able to take out a medical insurance knows the value of these security guarantees. They will, in such a society, also feel freer to speak out against government policy. Of course, entrepreneur type of people, those who want to produce and sell something, anything, or speculate with stocks and currencies in order to become rich will not be attracted by this vision. We have to ignore them. They are being criticized even in the present system, even by average people.

    I am convinced that for achieving the goals of genuine ecologists capitalism must be overcome and an eco-socialist society must be built up. (For details of my argumentation see my book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?**)

    4. One very important point I missed in the program of the TTM (as summarized by E & S) as well as in the critique thereof  is the population problem. In Europe and other rich countries of the North (including those down under), it is a common blind spot in most discussions on the ecology crises and questions of poverty. The reason for this is evident: Firstly, the problem does not exist any more in these countries. And secondly, they are afraid of mentioning it lest the people of the less developed countries (mostly black and brown to boot), where the population is still growing, get furious. After all, even the ecologists of the rich countries of the North, most of them, enjoy their much higher standard of living and are not doing their best to save the planet. Bu no program for saving the planet is convincing unless also the population problem is addressed.

    Problems with Strategy

    5. I share the TTM’s view that at present not much can be expected from the states and the ruling politicians. The latter are careerists. At present, in a democracy of the kind we have in place, any politician will be voted out of power if she dares to speak of the necessity of stopping economic growth, let alone to advocate economic contraction. Even those who are not in power want to be reelected. Politics is after all their profession. So they too would not stand up against economic growth. The simple truth is that the great majority of the voters are not better than the politicians. And a people gets politicians that it deserves.  But some people must do this, i.e. tell the ecological truth. They may be criticized as imagining themselves to be the avant-garde. But nothing will happen unless an avant-garde takes the initiative. Such people must be free from the temptation and/or requirement of getting their projects funded by established foundations or government agencies, so that they remain truly free to tell the ecological truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The ecological truth and the logical and compelling proposals for solving the problems must be widely disseminated, so that in a few years time the intellectual and journalistic hegemony in the sense of Gramsci can be achieved (Gramsci talked of cultural hegemony). The activists of the TTM do not seem to be doing that, not at the moment at least. They are victims of some illusions that they are themselves spreading. 

    When the intellectual and journalistic hegemony has been achieved, it would be manifested e.g. in sentences like this: Yes, you are right with your ecological truths, but what can I do? I am only an ordinary person. We could then hope that voters would not vote a politician out of parliament if she expresses the views that genuine ecologists hold. Later we might have grounds to hope that no matter which politician and which party comes to power, the parliamentary majority would not be afraid to take measures in the direction of true ecological sustainability. This hope can be compared with the situation today. No matter which politicians and which parties govern a country, the government will continue to pursue neoliberal globalized capitalist policies, because this line of economic thought  gained hegemony in the 1990s and is still holding its ground.

    All this may take too much time, in which case the collapse cannot be prevented. But an armed revolution is not possible, because the well-paid and well-armed professional soldiers and policemen of the ruling classes are ready to kill revolutionaries and ordinary people when ordered. The coming collapse will probably lead to some sort of dictatorship, most probably one of right reactionaries. They will try to tackle the problems in their own way and with their own methods and would not care for the state of the planet, welfare of the future generations etc. etc.

    6. In contrast to my top-down strategy of first achieving intellectual and journalistic hegemony which will hopefully lead an increasing number of parliamentarians of the ruling parties to support our ideas, there are also bottom-up strategies for change.  The TTM’s strategy for building up resilience at the local level is a concrete example thereof. But the TTM’s objective is not any systemic change. That is why it is (it would be) easy to co-opt it. In fact, all reformist movements for change can be easily co-opted. History is full of examples of this process. In Germany, today, both the remnants of the NSM (the big ecological associations) and the Party die Grünen are partners of the ruling classes.

    In the 1980s, in Germany, several communes – both rural and urban – were founded by revolutionary young people. They lived and worked there (in the students’ communes, however, the main activity was discussing theory and psychological issues). Their idea was to anticipate and try out the communist society of the future. The point I want to make here is that most of them soon failed. Moreover, most of them were no examples of a self-reliant, self-organizing grassroots economic unit. They were comfortably embedded in a prosperous welfare state. Many members of the communes received transfer payments from the state. They were not responses to any challenge.

    Ted Trainer’s grassroots, self-organizing, radical-democratic (i.e. anarchistic) communes (or communities) must however be self-reliant, because Ted visualizes them as coming up in response to the (impending) collapse of the state. It seems to me that Ted thinks collapse is unavoidable. I would rather still try to prevent it through my strategy. But it is true, mankind does not have much time left for the purpose. So it is rational to exert ourselves at both ends, at the top as well as at the bottom, simultaneously.

    At least in our times, no commune or community would truly be self-sufficient; we are not living and would not like to live in the Amazon jungle. All communities would need things that they cannot themselves produce, salt for example. So some kind of more or less long-distance exchange must take place, and some state-like organization must regulate exchange and maintain order. It would be good if this organization were a socialist one. For when the collapse is there, it will be necessary to share whatever is available. That is why it would be good to promote an eco- socialist perspective and strengthen egalitarian thinking. These are moreover inspiring ideas, as we know from history. We should prepare ourselves for the collapse and subsequent actions. We must also be ready with a convincing perspective and an activities plan.

    7. One last point: Can individuals as individuals do something, i.e. contribute to the project of saving the planet and making human society better? It has often been suggested that reducing one’s own consumption is an effective means of achieving our goal. The great advantage of this strategy is that to do this the private person does not need a law passed by a majority in the parliament. Nor does she need a lot of money from parents or big donors, as most big bottom-up projects like rural communes, eco-villages etc. do. Many sensitive eco-friendly people are indeed practicing this non-consumption strategy; it can also be called a simple lifestyle strategy. However, there are limits to what even a determined non-consumptionist can do. The compulsions arising from living in a present-day capitalist industrial society are many. For example, one must today have a PC with internet connection in order just to be able to communicate with relatives, friends and comrades. Even the good old telephony inflicts a lot of damage to the environment. A person living in a village must have a car. The one area in which a person has more scope is food and clothing. But to forgo e.g. meat is very difficult for a westerner and to forgo sugary snacks is very difficult for a Bengali. After all, it would not be a happy world if people are unhappy even in such simple matters of life like eating. Having said that, it cannot be denied that a wide-spread non-consumption movement would surely have at least some effect on politics and economy. Eco-activists must however refrain from nagging friends and relatives for their eco-sins. That is the surest way to lose sympathizers. Let everybody do what she can and hope that others would emulate her example.  

*

Green-Alternative Politics in West Germany:

Vol. I. The New Social Movements (1993)

Vol. II, The Greens (1994)

Both published by The United Nations University Press (Tokyo)

**

Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism ?– A Critical Analysis of Humanity’s Fundamental Choices. (1999). London: Zed Books.

Completed  on 13.08.2014