This keyword was one of fifty explored and put to work on this site. The notes on the keywords are revised and collected together in Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left, which includes a concluding essay placing them in historical context. The book includes a detailed reading list with web-links so you can more easily follow the links online, a list which is available here.
Author Archives: Ian Parker
What is Ecosocialism?
Manchester branch of Socialist Resistance were actively involved in organising the Climate and Capitalism conferences in Manchester, and produced this introduction to ecosocialism as a contribution to the debates.
Marx explained that at a certain stage in the development of any class society, the old relations of production eventually act as a brake on any further development of the productive forces. This was certainly true of the classical slave-owning and the feudal modes of production. Socialists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expected capitalism to follow a similar path, with economic crises eventually stagnating capitalist production completely. However, things haven’t quite worked out that way. Certainly there are periods of crisis, in which output declines, but these are always interspersed with longer periods of expansion. The crises seem to act on capitalist production in the same was as pruning shears act on a rose bush – they clear away the dead wood and allow for a renewal of growth. And there seems to be no let up in this pattern.
However, the continuation of capitalism has produced a situation that is far more dangerous to the future of humanity than that which arose from any previous form of class society, even in their periods of decline. For rather than acting as a brake on the productive forces, capital, as a consequence of its pursuit of infinite accumulation, is accelerating the transformation of the productive forces of society into destructive forces. And the longer capitalism survives the more dangerous and destructive it becomes. It is in recognition of the qualitative change in the task facing us as socialists that we have coined the term ecosocialism.
Although climate change is probably the most acute manifestation of the ecological crisis, it is not the only one. We also face severe problems of ocean acidification, food-chain contamination (particularly with pesticides and chemical fertilisers, but also with mercury and other metals), soil exhaustion, atmospheric pollution (particularly with particulates), devastating oil spills, destruction of rainforests and depletion of ocean fish stocks, to name but a few. One effect of all this is that biodiversity is being lost at such a rate that we are now on the cusp of the planet’s next mass extinction. Disrupting the intricate web of life in this manner will have severe and unpredictable consequences for us as a species.
The extent of the ecological degradation caused by capitalism has not abated in recent years, despite a growing awareness within the scientific community (and increasingly among the population at large) of the depth of the ecological crisis that we face. On one level, most people are now fully aware that the juggernaut of civilisation is hurtling towards an abyss. Yet as the abyss comes clearer into view, the response of the ruling class is to press harder on the accelerator pedal.
It seems paradoxical that although most people do now recognise the severity of the ecological crisis, at an intellectual level at least, we all nevertheless continue with ‘business as usual’ in our daily lives. For the most part this is a consequence of the alienation engendered and reinforced by capitalism. So deep is our alienation, from ourselves, from each other and from nature, that most of us don’t recognise the harm that is being done by ‘business as usual’. What we do is normality, it is reality, so it is normal to continue with these rhythms, to continue our harmful consumption patterns, our car driving, our flying, our possessive individualism. Not only our daily lives but our entire lifespans are straitjacketed into an alienated rhythm of life – we are schooled and trained instead of being freely educated, we fall into a career rhythm and a rhythm of family life, the alienation of which is evident from the amount of mental distress, alcoholism and drug abuse we see all around us, none of which is true to our nature.
If we are to survive as a species we must take a radical step, we must break once and for all with capitalism. Capital as self expanding value can never stand still. It exists in order to expand, through accumulation, and as it expands it extends itself across the entire globe and into every sphere of life. Capital can therefore never find peace with nature, it must constantly metabolise more and more of nature in order to satisfy its urge to accumulate. This is why all attempts to resolve the ecological crisis within capitalism, by carbon trading for example, have always come to nought.
The only way to ensure a rational metabolism with nature, and therefore to ensure a habitable biosphere, is to overthrow capital, not just locally but globally, in a global ecological revolution. And what is the agency of this overthrow of capital? In extending its rule across the globe, capital has brought into being a global multi-billion strong class of wage workers, of proletarians, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of capital. It is this class, our class, which alone has the social power to overthrow capital. The ecological revolution must therefore be a social revolution, which ushers in a global free association of producers.
But wasn’t there a social revolution in Russia, and didn’t this lead to a totalitarian and ecocidal monstrosity? Yes there was, and it is the historic betrayal of this revolution that strengthens the case for our development as ecosocialists rather than simply as socialists.
In its early history the Soviet Union was in fact the most ecologically conscious society in history. By applying the materialist methods of Marxism, the early Soviet ecologists made huge advances in our understanding of ecosystems and of sustainability. But these early ecologists were ruthlessly purged by Stalin, who misleadingly libelled ecology as a bourgeois science (an error that has not been entirely abandoned by many on the left even today.) The Stalinist bureaucracy abandoned the strategy of world revolution in favour of the theory and practice of ‘socialism in one country’. Stalin’s strategy was to expand the productive forces in order to compete with the capitalist countries of the West. But in doing so, he abandoned socialism and adopted the alienating, ecocidal practices of capitalism. In doing so, he was defending not the world-historic interests of the proletariat, of humanity, but the narrow interest of a parasitic and privileged bureaucracy.
If we are to learn the lessons of history, and of the historic defeat of the Russian Revolution in particular, we must therefore put ecology at the centre of our Marxism. As ecosocialists we advocate a radical reduction in the working week, to give us as workers the time we need to administer production and distribution without bosses. We aim to redirect production towards the satisfaction of human need, rather than the production of countless useless commodities and gadgets which are designed only to feed our consumerism and to generate profits for the rich. We seek to undo the harmful capitalist division of labour, starting with the sexual division of labour (through the socialisation of domestic labour and childcare) and the artificial division between manual and mental labour. We aim to suppress the means of destruction, including not only fossil fuels, armaments and aerospace, but also advertising, marketing and speculative finance, by advocating a just transition to socially useful production. And we respond to the destructiveness of a transport system based on the motor car, truck and aeroplane by developing a socialised free public transport system.
In seeking to make the social revolution an ecological transformation (and vice versa), we oppose the distortions of Stalinism and are returning to the ecology of authentic revolutionary Marxism. This is a task that needs to happen as a global movement but also on a local level, in Manchester, as something that the Fourth International here is committed to. You can join us in this task by contacting us at climate.and.capitalism@gmail.com
RW
Linking with ecosocialism in Bangladesh
Badrul Alam, our comrade who is President of the Bangladesh Krishok Federation, visited Manchester and spoke at a public meeting in March 2014. When Badrul was in the UK for the Bangladesh tour, an activist and film-maker from Virtual Migrants in Manchester recorded a video interview with him. This article is to give an update about his organisation and what it has been doing for ecosocialism, which is a crucial part of our politics here now. BKF is the largest peasant federation in Bangladesh. Badrul is also a leader of Via Campesina, which is a network of peasant organisations from around the world. The BKF are also involved in activity around the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013 when an eight-story commercial building collapsed in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, leaving 1,129 dead. This was one of many events drawing attention to the appalling labour conditions which enable Western clothing companies to make large profits. The Bangladesh Kishani Sabha, which is the women’s organisation linked to the BKF, has been active in supporting the Rana Plaza workers and those in other clothing factories in Dhaka. BKF has been involved in land occupations.
In November Badrul and BKF and other activists embarked on the Bangladesh-India-Nepal Climate Caravan. There was participation by Bangladesh Kishani Sabha Organizing Secretary Asma Begum, Bangladesh Adivasi Samity President Sree Biswnath Singh, Bangladesh Agricultural Farm Labour Federation General Secretary Abdul Majid and Friends of Bangladesh (Australia) member Emma. Ekattra-An Urban Youth Organization President Meghna Alam spoke in the meeting. Details of the first stages of this Climate Caravan tour are at the Via Campesina Site.
Seminars have been held at many places, for example in Sadhuhati, Jhenaidah with the participation of local communities on climate change and climate migrants. Meetings have focussed on the rights of climate migrants, and argued that these should be protected by the UN convention. Adaptation and support meetings are taking place at different levels in the affected countries but making the argument that the responsible countries should make deep and drastic cuts in their emission levels immediately. The Caravan argues that the rich industrialised countries must pay reparations to the people of the affected country as their historic and ecological dues. The participants asked all South Asian governments to be active in order to realize the reparation for the people affected by climate change. Participants visited the pesticide and chemical free organic vegetable cultivation and harvested eggplant, cauliflower, beans, and other vegetables.
In mid-November the caravan crossed the Indian border to Kolkata, West Bengal. In a week the caravan travelled around 850 kilometres within Bangladesh, crossed ten districts, stayed in six destinations, and visited a station meeting different community people on the way. Throughout the caravan leaflets and booklets were distributed among the local people to make them aware of the objectives of the caravan and the issue of climate change. The whole week was educational, interactive and experience-sharing for the participants. They have told us that the productivity in terms of lesson-learnt was enormous. The impact of the caravan on the locality will be long lasting. People’s feelings of sustainability in agriculture will bring fruits. It will contribute to the dream of a peasant-based agro-ecology and help the dreams to come true. This activity in the Climate Caravan is part of the intensive work of the BKF.
This is ecosocialism in action, ecosocialism that the Fourth International in Manchester and Socialist Resistance as the Fourth International in Britain has been arguing for. We look forward to seeing him and other comrades from the BKF in Manchester again, and in the meantime we hope that you will visit the Climate Caravan page of the Krishok website and donate funds to support the 2014 caravan and those planned for future years.
Language and Transformation
One thing for sure over recent years is that the ‘left’ has had to learn about new ways of organising itself to take on board the politics of different social movements, and that has also meant changing the way we describe what we are up against and where we are going.
The rapid rise of popularity of Podemos in Spain is one more example of a movement that demands that in order to do politics differently we need to speak differently about it too. The December 2014 meeting in Manchester co-organised by Podemos and Left Unity saw this issue of the link between language and action come to the fore again. One speaker from Podemos rehearsed the line that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ came from the time of the National Assembly during the French Revolution over two hundred years ago, and now we need to move on. Other speakers from the floor argued that they did not want to give up terms like ‘capitalism’ to describe what we face today, and others argued that ‘communism’ was still absolutely relevant to what we are aiming for, including in the new Spanish movements. Even the Podemos activists, and even the speaker questioning the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, agreed that this working class history of struggle was key to our politics today, but that we also need to key into the way people sick of the history of the ‘left’ and its bad practice in many countries spoke about their lives and about transforming the world.
The problem with the transformation of language in our politics really revolves around the conditions in which we work on the link between language and action. There are two ways we are under pressure to change our language. The first way causes anger and anxiety on the left, and rightly so, even if that anger and anxiety also has the effect of isolating us even further. That pressure comes from the defeat of struggle against exploitation and oppression, the marginalisation of alternative ideas and caricatures of socialism and communism in the media. Some of academic language used by ex-left and anti-left writers feeds that marginalisation, and the claims that we now live in some kind of ‘postmodern’ world where the old modern politics that began at the time of the French Revolution are irrelevant make things worse. That kind of pressure is intensified today in neoliberal capitalism; that is the kind of capitalism that rolls back state welfare provision and pretends to set the market free and make each individual responsible for fighting for themselves. Today’s neoliberal language of individual ‘freedom’, fake freedom where we are divided from each other, is poisonous for our collective struggle to make sense of how this world works and how to act to change it.
But there is another way we are under pressure to change our language that also causes anger and anxiety in the leadership of the little old left-wing sects. That second kind of pressure is something we must connect with and respond to, that we must have something to say about ourselves. Every social struggle in history has forced people to rethink how they view the world, and how they speak about it. When the exploited and the oppressed speak about their experience and mobilise to change their conditions of life they always discover that the language of the rulers is not enough, that the dominant language shuts them out. New terms are invented, and there is a transformation of language at the very same time as politics is transformed. That is exactly what has happened with the emergence of feminism, and alongside that feminism the voices of Black feminists. They demand that we change our language, demand that we change, so that we can make this world a place where we can all speak and mobilise. Some of us are even speaking differently now about the relationships we have with each other as part of a system of life in which we are part of the ecology of our planet, and the language of ‘ecosocialism’ helps us do that.
It is significant that activists from another country, our comrades and friends in Podemos, put this question of language and action on the agenda again. When they live here in Manchester, they are very aware that different languages give a different shape to the world, and that experience connects with what they are learning about transformations of language to make politics different in Spain. And now we can learn from that, from a difference of cultural perspective, but only if we also take seriously that there are always real social forces, of the feminist movement, of the movements of the oppressed who are also too often silenced in mainstream left struggle which pretends to maintain what it thinks of as the unity of the ‘working class’ or ‘the left’ or, most often, simply their own organisation. Some organisations are closed off to this and will insist on speaking in the same way they always have, but some, and we have seen the Fourth International sharing the experiences of struggle in different parts of the world slowly do this, have opened themselves to the progressive radical pressure from social movements so that we can better take on the miserable corrupt forces of neoliberalism.
As a key part of the process of linking our radical action with a new radical language that supports it, that helps us to think through what that action involves and what it needs next, we are going to have to spend a bit of time working on some of the new keywords of struggle. We will do that in the next months in the ‘keywords’ section of the FIIMG website. As we link the new keywords of struggle with transformation we can work through what kinds of language demoralise and demobilise us and what kinds of language actually clarify our tasks, connect us with the people coming into politics outside the old ‘left’ and empower us to change the world. The notes on the keywords which were published on this site were revised collected together in Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left, which includes a concluding essay placing them in historical context. The book includes a detailed reading list with web-links so you can more easily follow the links online, a list which is available here.
Podemos in Manchester
Circulo Podemos in Manchester is one of the forces that could re-energise the left here. Podemos is a new radical party in Spain that is saying no to corruption, no to austerity and it is putting the question of radical change on the political agenda. The 8 December 2014 meeting at Friends Meeting House was organised by members of Left Unity together with Podemos, and we built this meeting as a Podemos meeting which aims to connect with the rest of the left in Manchester. There are some opportunities and dangers, and we should not underestimate either of those. There are many reasons why this link between Podemos and Left Unity could be so important. These notes are written before the meeting as a contribution to the debate we will have there and continue as we work together after it.
Podemos has succeeded in building in Spain what Left Unity still aims to build in Britain, a broad left party that could mobilise millions of people who are sick of the austerity programme and who know that there must be an alternative. That alternative would defend public services, make them accountable to people and end the rule of those who have got richer and richer before the crisis and even richer during austerity at the expense of working people. In Spain Podemos is now leading in the polls, and Left Unity should be in that position now, given the failure of the Labour Party here to stand up to the ConDem government. Why is it not? It is not an easy task given the ingrained bureaucracy of the reformist and the revolutionary left.
Supporters of the Fourth International in Manchester have been committed to building Left Unity, but because we insist that this should be a broad inclusive party that mobilises people to work together we are sometimes accused of being to the ‘right’. It is easy for the little old far left groups who spout revolutionary rhetoric to claim that they want to win Left Unity over to a full revolutionary programme, but in the process they threaten to sabotage the attempt to build something more inclusive and wide-ranging. This is not a game, and it is precisely because we are revolutionaries that we are putting our energies into something that can genuinely shake capitalism with a self-organised movement of the exploited and oppressed.
People in Britain are sick of capitalism, and in the absence of a genuine alternative some are turning to right-wing and racist parties like UKIP who will enforce their own version of the austerity programme protecting big business. And those who have been involved in socialist politics are also sick of the traditional far left groups who try to manipulate those who they see as less clued up than themselves in various front organisations. These are groups who abuse the power they hold, sometimes abusing members of their own groups at the same time. It is time for a change in the way we do our politics, and Podemos has made us face that question of how we organise again now.
We also have a particular link with the debates in Podemos because our comrades in Izquierda Anticapitalista, the Fourth International in Spain, have been active in building Podemos. And just as we have here, they have been accused of building something to the ‘right’. Yes, it is true! They have succeeded in working alongside people they have political differences with, and what has emerged now in Podemos is much bigger than them, bigger than the tiny revolutionary organisation that they are. This is something in the organisation of Podemos that we need to discuss, how to keep open a space for the different left traditions while making sure that no one group seizes control, and our group in Spain working in Podemos has made it clear that they will be loyal to Podemos, they will keep building it while still insisting on that discussion.
It is not enough to say that these new organisations like Podemos must learn lessons from the past or that they must use the same terms that we have always used. We too have to learn that simply saying that we are on the ‘left’ or that we are ‘socialist’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ will magically solve the problems we face. The Fourth International, for example, was founded as a revolutionary Marxist world-wide party that would keep alive the authentic democratic spirit of communism, and keep that alive against the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union under Stalin, a bureaucracy that murdered so many revolutionaries to maintain itself in power. But while that history of struggle and that tradition is a revolutionary thread of resistance to capitalism and bureaucracy that we are proud of, we know that those terms ‘communism’ and even ‘revolution’ are for many people associated with dictatorship and repression.
So we understand well the need to find a language, terms of debate that will resonate with peoples experience today, and that is all the more important given that there were aspects of our own ‘socialist’ history that was also problematic. We recognise that today with some of the baggage of that history and language of the ‘left’ there are problems we need to face, even that we are part of the problem. It is not enough, for example, to say that we have a proud record of fighting for women’s rights as some ‘left’ groups still do today. We need to take on board arguments from feminism that point to the way that men in left groups enjoy power as leaders. And we need to expand our sense of what ‘socialism’ is to care for people in a planet in serious ecological crisis. If that means going beyond ‘left’ and ‘right’ as Podemos say, then so be it, if we go beyond that old language to a new genuinely liberating politics together.
If we are to re-energise Left Unity we need to tackle the problem of a top-heavy organisation that spends too much time on developing ‘policy’ on this and that issue, and, like Podemos, we need to target our message to people around a few clear points, a few clear demands that will mobilise people. And we need to be clear that our diversity is not a weakness, working together it is our strength. A top-down old-fashioned ‘party’ is the last thing we need, and our debate with our comrades from Podemos must be in the spirit of active involvement in the ‘circles’. We want to link Left Unity activists, and those who are joining Left Unity now with the Circulo Podemos activists in Manchester in protests and political argument, and to do that in a way that is welcoming to revolutionaries redefining themselves and to all who really want people to take power.
Appeal: Against sexual violence in Indonesia
Our comrade Dian Trisnanti, who is the Coordinator of Radio Marsinah, visited us from Indonesia in Manchester in July 2014. After she returned home she sent us a message and appeal about action her organisation is taking against sexual violence. She reminded us that Indonesia is a developing country with a population of 241 million people. Workers in Indonesia number about 118 million, of which 38% are women. About 60% are informal workers. Most women work in the informal sector, and make up about 41% there because that kind of work does not require a background in higher education. Women workers are paid low salaries. KBN Cakung, for example, is the biggest garment textile industry zone in Jakarta, in North Jakarta, and produces for export garments for Europe and the USA (for GAP, Zara, H & M, Adidas, Kohls, Esprit, for example).
In this sector more than 90% workers are female, and suffer a great deal of violence. They have few rights as workers, they suffer low wages well under the minimum wage, are subject to suspension of wages legalized by the government, and have no rights to maternity leave, miscarriage leave, social security, or unpaid overtime. The violence against female workers is unremitting and there is no response from the government, even though KBN Cakung belongs to the state. The condition of women workers is actually getting worse because they are not only oppressed as workers but also as women. These problems pose big obstacles for them to be involved in labour unions or become active leaders. This is why it is crucial to organise women workers not only as workers but also as women. Radio Marsinah has been involved in advocacy work, it has provided shelter for victims of domestic and sexual workplace violence, and now they have moved on to get more support for this struggle by using film.
Radio Marsinah are beginning with a film on breaking the silence about sexual violence. According to the National Women Commission in 2012, there are 216,156 sexual violence cases, and they know that these figures do not reflect the actual situation of women workers because of the enforced silence about the sexual violence they have experienced. So, sexual violence is also a crime of silence, something that happens in work-place in the midst of the machine noise.This film is a pilot project to break the silence and encourage more victims to speak and become survivors, to speak and organise for themselves, for others. A trailer for the film project is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT6mbJJAY6w&feature=youtu.be
Radio Marsinah needs support for this film project. If you would like to donate, you can transfer funds to BCA (Bank Central Asia) KCP (branch), the address is Kramat Jaya, North Jakarta, 4141796814. The account is in the name of Dian Septi Trisnanti and Kurniati. The Swift Code or Iban number of the BCA is CENAIDJA. FIIMG and activists of the Fourth International in Leeds have sent money already to support this film project, and we are collecting more money now to send. Because of the high bank charges it is more efficient to collect this money and send it all at once, and so if you want to contact us we will ensure that money gets to Dian and the film project team. You can contact us at fiimginfo@gmail.com
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