What's Left?
Environmentalists and Radical Politics
Rick Williams
Dramatic changes are afoot on the world stage, and it seems that
they have precipitated the political left in developed countries
like Canada into a state of crisis and transformation. No dominant
thinkers have come forward to define what it is we are now experiencing,
or to give voice and coherence to the new aspirations which events
are forcing us to search for. This doesn't mean that we are simply
sliding into chaos, although it may often feel that way to many
of us: as Marx observed of his own revolutionary epoch, you can't
judge an age by its consciousness of itself.
Traditionally, left politics in the West has tried to raise social
awareness of the root causes of exploitation and oppression and
lead the struggle to democratize economic and social life. The goal
of socialist political activity has been to redirect the use of
the immense productive capabilities of a modern industrial society
towards socially useful and rational purposes.
One major task of the left has been to challenge the dominance
of those elite groups that perpetuate the status quo to protect
their own positions of power and privilege. It has also tried to
mobilize and educate social movements in order to expand popular
control in key areas of social and economic life to build a new
society “within the shell of the old.”
Throughout the post-war era, this mixture of analysis and practical
political instincts has supplied the Canadian left with its basic
goals and strategies. During the long economic boom that stretched
into the early '70s, social democratic politics had a particularly
clear focus: the massive wealth generated at the centre of the economy
had to be redistributed. Workers would increase their share of the
pie through unionization and collective bargaining. A continually
expanding welfare state would meet the needs of the poor, the disabled
and the elderly. Poorer regions would be helped along through public
enterprises, and the community at large would benefit from a vast
system of publicly funded services and cultural resources. A strong
centralized state, an instrument of popular will, was seen as an
essential counterbalance to what remained the driving force of the
economy, private corporate capital.
While sharing many of the same basic values, the more radical among
us rejected this “redistributionist” politics. Some
saw the state as the principal enemy of workers and other oppressed
groups, and so opted to work, not to influence or capture state
power, but rather to undermine it. The welfare state in particular
was attacked as a pervasive machine of social control.
Those with a strong grounding in Marxist theory tended to focus
on the “accumulation process” those basic mechanisms
of capitalist economic growth that were seen to produce ever more
social, regional and international inequality even as the total
amount of wealth produced grew. This radical tradition of political
economy has, within the left, always provided the strongest challenge
to the redistributionist politics of the NDP, supporting both the
struggle to defend the “social wage” (that is, the public
sector), and the vision of a strong, progressive and democratic
state.
Through its critical analysis of capitalist economic growth, radical
political economy has also provided some potentially important theoretical
bridges to the environmental movement. But its great weakness, perhaps,
has been its failure to put forward a practical political vision
of how we might structure and manage an alternative economic system.
Despite wide differences on many issues, social democrats and more
radical thinkers of the left have implicitly shared one fundamental
perspective the certainly of future economic growth. Whether we
were for redistribution or for radical restructuring, we have all
assumed that expanding economic activity would generate new productive
forces which could, if used rationally, provide full employment
and raise living standards in the poorer regions of Canada, and
even in the most impoverished nations of the world. In this region,
for example. There is implicit support on the left for what a friend
calls “Stalinist economics” the view that new steel
mills and automobile plants are the only real antidote to our economic
marginality.
All of those ideas are part of a more or less unified ideology that
is now in crisis as a result of contemporary intellectual and political
upheaval. Without going into great detail, I would identify three
principle trends in recent history that have given rise to the crisis
of the left.
The first, obviously, is the dramatic breakdown of the hegemony
of the communist parties in Eastern Europe, a collapse brought on
both by the failure of the system in practical economic terms and
the popular struggles for democratic rights. Although few on the
Canadian left have identified with the bureaucratic centralism of
the Soviet model, it has always seemed significant to us that so
many nations continued to reject the capitalist way of life. As
these states now endeavour to restructure their political economies,
there seems a strong possibility that the socialist baby may get
thrown out with the Stalinist bath water. Until the real shape of
“post-communism” eventually emerges, events in Eastern
Europe will be a continuing public relations embarrassment for Western
radicals.
The second trend leading the left to its current dilemma has been
the restructuring, led by the Thatcher-Reagan-Mulroney political
agenda, of the Western capitalist economies. Traditional working-class
political strength has been seriously undermined by free-trade arrangements,
technological change and job de-skilling, policies of high unemployment,
cuts to social programmes, freezes on hiring and wages, union busting
strategies and the increasing mobility of international capital.
Left-wing political parties with their base in the working class
have been on the defensive everywhere as capital becomes more and
more unfettered and better able to set its own rules.
The third, and perhaps most interesting trend, has been the dramatic
shift in the sources of creative political action and opposition
in the West. Over the past decade or so, the most profound challenges
to the dominant order have come not from class conflict in traditional
Marxist terms clashes between industrial workers and factory owners
but from struggles of groups that Marxist have often depicted as
“marginal” or “unproductive”: racial and
linguistic minorities, women and independent producers. Oppositional
political action has also come from recently forged “single
issue” political movements, most importantly the peace and
environmental crusades.
The women's movement in particular has created a new ideological
and practical base for political action. It has challenged the left
with new values, issues, strategies and methods. Traditional working
class organizations are being reformed and revitalized by the expanding
presence of women, both in the workplace and the union hall. Slowly
but surely, the labour movement is being revitalized by a new set
of concerns and priorities that encompass personal and social issues
in the community as well as in the workplace. Many old-line leftists
will be dragged kicking and screaming into a non-sexist environment,
but it seems clear most will get there one way or another.
The politics of the environmental movement are much more problematic:
it is not yet clear how the “greens” will interact with
the Canadian left and the popular movements which are its natural
constituency. Environmentalism is emerging, almost as a new religion,
bringing light and meaning into the lives of upper-middle class
people who are burnt out after a decade of hyperconsumerism. Within
the movement, with a few important exceptions, there has been little
hard-edge analysis of ways to go about saving the world (the task
that, in their great humility, the greens have taken upon themselves).
Most environmentalists have given little serious thought to the
radical economic, and therefore political, changes that their agenda
is certain to require. Much work remains to be done in this area.
This challenge before the environmental movement clearly relates
to the crisis of the traditional left. Each movement has something
the other needs.
Environmentalist have a head start in their recognition of the
poverty of growth-oriented politics and economics. They are also
leading the defence against impeding ecological disaster. In doing
so they have made some progress in developing a political base for
green politics, mobilizing and inspiring young people and building
links to native people and other threatened communities. They are
clearly riding a wave of public concern and emotion, to the point
where even right-wing governments and big business are finding it
necessary to identify explicitly with “green-ness” and
ecological consciousness.
But immense naivete remains. Veterans of the women's movement and
the New Left of the ‘60s and ‘70s could teach the greens
a lot about the perils of success and co-optation. The language
of change, be it “peace and liberation” or “saving
the planet,” quickly loses its power when it is used to obscure
issues of real political conflict on the one hand, or to sell commodities
on the other.
Building a different kind of economy and a green way of life will
require a radically new way of making decisions in society, and
some powerful vested interests are going to lose out in the deal.
David Suzuki argues that we have about ten years to decide to live
differently: after that we will have few real options because we
will be too busy just responding to accelerating crises. French
ecologist Andre Gorz foresees a new authoritarianism emerging from
environmental breakdown. He sees the possibility of a new ruling
class emerging, made up of scientists and technocrats who fill impose
their solutions on a traumatized and forcefully controlled population.
If the long struggle for human rights and participatory democracy
is not to be abandoned in the face of ecological crisis, the greens
will have to develop a practical politics and build a social base.
To accomplish this, they will have to plug into the socialist and
feminist traditions of popular struggle and leadership through which
the needs and aspirations of particular groups in particular places
get linked to wider organizations and are given coherence and focus.
The greens will have to learn that while seals are important they
don't vote, they don't join in protest marches and they don’t
sit down together to decide how the world is to be “saved”.
Human beings do all those things, and as recent events in Southern
Africa and Eastern Europe so clearly prove, when people get together
they can move mountains. It is time the greens stopped waiting for
the mountain to come them. And when they do go to mountain, they
will need a lot of other people with them if they really want to
make it move.
For its part, the left's great strength has been its commitment
to human freedom and development and its effectiveness in mobilizing
popular movements to fight for those things. Most of what is decent
and progressive about Canadian society can be attributed in one
way or another to political actions that were originally inspired
and led by people on the left. These same instincts and capacities
now have to be focussed on the tasks of imagining and fighting for
a democratic, egalitarian society that isn't dependent on ever-expanding
consumption and destruction of the natural world.
The left simply must come to grips with the limits of growth. Democratization
of the economy and the redistribution of wealth are still fundamental
issues on which to challenge capitalist dominance, but of themselves
they are insufficient. The public imagination has been seized with
both the dream of a clean, healthy and safe environment, and the
fear of ecological disaster. There is a growing confusion on the
left about the goals of popular struggle, given the contradictions
between economic growth and expanding consumerism on the one hand,
and the deterioration of the natural environment and of public health
and well-being on the other.
What this country needs is a new synthesis of ideas. We need to
combine the popular politics and radical humanism of the socialist
left, the creativity and person-to-person effectiveness of feminism,
and the energy and future-mindedness of the greens. Feminism and
socialism have their intellectual roots in the social sciences in
understandings about how people grow, change and are affected by
their social environment. The ecology movement seems to be rooted
more in the natural sciences and in understanding about the strengths
and limits of the bio-system as a whole. To conceive a better world,
to go out and fight for it, and eventually to win it, will require
a merging of all this knowledge and understanding.
I started thinking about all of this at a recent gathering of the
region's labour leaders when David Suzuki addressed the delegates.
At the end his speech, the audience gave him a heartfelt standing
ovation. They were then given an opportunity to ask the speaker
a few questions. The first person to the microphone was Donnie MacRae,
a leader of the coal miners' union in Cape Breton. He said with
obvious emotion that he understood now why coal mining would soon
have to be phased out, but he just didn't know what he was going
to say to his 2,500 union members who had no other way of making
living. Suzuki was unable to offer any real help or advise.
In that questions lies the fundamental challenge facing the environmental
movement how to build a broadly based popular movement for ecological
transformation that does not exclude and alienate the people who
make their livings in industries that pollute and destroy. Environmentalists
will have to get together with the left and others if we are to
find an answer to Donnie MacRae's question, and we will have to
work to make his union members participants in the change rather
than victims of it.
In the audience's warm response to Suzuki, I got a glimpse of a
potential new role for the left in Canada and beyond. What if environmentalism
became a working-class issue, a focus of broadly based popular mobilization
and political action? What if we were able to merge longstanding
struggles for equality, democracy and economy justice with the battle
for a safe and healthy natural environment?
Well, then, number Twenty-one might just become a pretty interesting
century.
This article originally appeared in the March-April 1990 issue
of New Maritimes. Subscriptions are $15 for six issues, from New
Maritimes, Enfield, Nova Scotia B0N 1N0.
(CX4001)
Subject Headings
|
