First impressions from The Morning Star
There’s potential here – but will it go anywhere?
It was Derek Wall who best summed up the Convention of the Left’s opening session, and he did it by quoting Chumbawamba. ‘Even though we disagree,’ they sang, ‘we share a common enemy’.
It was a call for non-sectarianism that echoed through almost every contribution, whether from the speakers or from the floor.
‘The convention is a brilliant idea because sectarianism gets you nowhere,’ was how Tony Benn put it. ‘Socialism should be a mosaic, not a monolith.’
‘How do they control us? They keep us divided, they keep us demoralised, they keep us cynical. We have to be more confident – when people understand the world they have the confidence to change it.’
‘When history comes to be written it will look on this conference as very important.’
Benn wasn’t the only one to speak in such terms. John McDonnell called the convention ‘an opportunity to refound the left that we haven’t had for a generation’.
Of course, there were some discordant notes. Speakers from the floor were given lots of time to speak in between the ‘big names’, and they made the most of it.
Workers’ Power called on McDonnell to ‘break with the Labour Party and create a new party with all the trends here represented’, right there and then (and no, McDonnell didn’t). The Socialist Party’s Campaign for a New Workers’ Party made a similar call for a complete break with Labour and a few sideswipes at each speaker, while seeming a little mystified at why the left would set up this convention when it could be joining their fine organisation.
A contributor from Permanent Revolution caused even more consternation when he said: ‘the elephant in the room ... [pause for dramatic effect] ... is Respect. It collapsed, that’s the truth of the matter. And before that we had the Socialist Alliance.’
‘Why did they fail? We need to ask the question or we risk repeating their mistakes.’
Then Lindsey German was up, doing a decent job of tranquilising that elephant. ‘We can all put our hands up to what we’ve done wrong,’ she said, ‘but there’s no point in sitting here and saying 20 years ago we fell out over this question or two years ago we fell out over that question. We have to find a method of working that unites us and doesn’t divide us.’
Nick Wrack, from the other wing of Respect, shared the sentiment. ‘I’m prepared to debate and discuss what went wrong,’ he said, ‘but what is far more important is that there is more that unites us than separates us.’
‘The working class out there is facing a terrible situation and it’s going to worsen. We don’t need to make differences over tactical issues a dividing line at this moment.’
So despite the occasional spanner in the works, the left was on its best behaviour – speakers seemed to be genuinely looking to agree with each other instead of starting pointless sectarian bun-fights. At this rate, the good mood might even last the full five days.
Monday, 22 September 2008
Friday, 19 September 2008
HUNGER STRIKE IN MAYO - SEPTEMBER
Hunger Strike in Erris as Shell's Pipe Laying Ship Arrives.
On September 9th the world's largest pipe-laying vessel, The Solitaire,
arrived off the coast of Mayo, Ireland. Local fishermen are worried about
contamination of the waters they depend on, and many local people who are
concerned that the offshore section of the Shell scheme is being put in
place while no planning permission exists for the onshore section. The
ship is supported by a number of Shell support craft, the Irish Police
Water Unit and part of the Irish Navy. In recent weeks there have been 29
separate arrests in thee area around Glengad beach, where the pipe is due
to make landfall.
A local school principal has vowed to refuse food until the ship leaves
the area. She has parked her car in front of the Shell compound. The Irish
government, including Green Party Ministers of the Environment and Natural
Resources, have backed Shell's scheme. Last month the Garda released
figures showing that 11 million euro had been spent policing the project
since 2006, more than half the amount the force spent on fighting
organised crime. Activists on the ground in Mayo have asked for
assistance. Those not in a position to travel to Mayo can hold solidarity
protests at the Irish embassy or Shell petrol stations.
For more info see
www.indymedia.ie/mayo, http://earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/node/21448,
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/09/408913.html or contact
rossportsolidaritycamp@gmail.com
On September 9th the world's largest pipe-laying vessel, The Solitaire,
arrived off the coast of Mayo, Ireland. Local fishermen are worried about
contamination of the waters they depend on, and many local people who are
concerned that the offshore section of the Shell scheme is being put in
place while no planning permission exists for the onshore section. The
ship is supported by a number of Shell support craft, the Irish Police
Water Unit and part of the Irish Navy. In recent weeks there have been 29
separate arrests in thee area around Glengad beach, where the pipe is due
to make landfall.
A local school principal has vowed to refuse food until the ship leaves
the area. She has parked her car in front of the Shell compound. The Irish
government, including Green Party Ministers of the Environment and Natural
Resources, have backed Shell's scheme. Last month the Garda released
figures showing that 11 million euro had been spent policing the project
since 2006, more than half the amount the force spent on fighting
organised crime. Activists on the ground in Mayo have asked for
assistance. Those not in a position to travel to Mayo can hold solidarity
protests at the Irish embassy or Shell petrol stations.
For more info see
www.indymedia.ie/mayo, http://earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/node/21448,
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/09/408913.html or contact
rossportsolidaritycamp@gmail.com
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
Greens and the UK Left by Sean Thompson
This is a slightly revised version of a talk I gave to the Green Left Summer Meeting in Headcorn in August 2008. My central argument was (is) that in order to build the mass movement that is necessary to make the fundamental changes that are necessary to respond to the threats that face humanity, the Left as a whole, including the Green Party, has to be renewed and unified. While the Green Party by itself is not capable of being the vehicle for change that is needed, it (and especially socialists within it) can make a unique contribution to the daunting task of renewing the Left in Britain.
The Left in Britain (by which I mean the organisations to the left of the NuLab and the neo liberal consensus that it is part of) has never been weaker or more fragmented in my lifetime.
Many Greens, including many explicitly socialist Greens, don’t see that as a problem. After all, it could be argued that the ever changing permutations of the decreasing memberships of the seemingly ever increasing number of left sects is simply evidence of their political irrelevance and ideological bankruptcy, and that we can and should distance ourselves from them. As my old mentor Jim Higgins wrote:
“The communist tradition has, over the decades, acquired such an accretion of dross that its founders would be hard pressed to recognise it as their creation, and where they reject the child, we should be most careful not to adopt the bastard.” 1
If the traditional Far Left is becoming less and less significant as a political pole of attraction then surely (some would argue) that merely creates a bigger vacuum on the left – a larger space for the Green Party to fill. In other words, the decline of the Old Left is an opportunity for us. Indeed, last year I wrote that
“We should argue that the Party should have as its central strategic ambition to replace the Labour Party as the 'natural' home for dissidents in Britain. This sounds like a grandiose ambition, and indeed it is when we consider our incredibly narrow existing base, our very limited resources and the political limitations of much of our membership. However, it is a necessary ambition if we are to mount a challenge against the heights of the state…” 2
However, I went on to point out that such an ambition must lead to two strategic imperatives; First that we must continuously remind ourselves and our fellow Greens that we are but a part of a wider movement and that we should always put the interests of that wider movement before our own short term sectarian interests and second, we must be concerned with the issues and struggles of those in that wider movement rather than our own particular obsessions – a weakness Greens are prone to, and one which we share with the sects of the old far left.
At the moment, the Green Party is not capable of filling the vacuum on the left created by the Labour Party’s capitulation to neoliberalism and the decline of the left sects because we are a sect ourselves, a rather unusual one, but sect we are. Our Party is a sect because as an entity it suffers the delusion that it has discovered a new politics, shiny and freshly minted, that has no organic relationship to any previous or existing tradition. We see ourselves alone in a political universe of our own creation. We, as a party, haven't noticed that there is a wider movement than ourselves out there with which we are broadly in tune. On the whole, the Green Party tends just not to notice the tens, hundreds, or thousands of activists who share our basic political values (and in large measure, the same political positions on key issues) but who inexplicably won’t join our organisation.
We have to recognise that the Green Party, as it currently exists, will not become a mass party capable of taking State power (certainly not on the basis of ad hoc recruitment of largely non-active members and incremental electoral growth) any more than the SWP or SPEW or the AWL are going to become the British Bolsheviks, leading millions of revolutionary workers. We all have to learn from each other and we all have to abandon our illusions (whether implicit or explicit) that any of us hold sole copyright on the Way, the Truth and the Correct Line and we have to realise that we need to work together to build a new left.
Left regroupment
Ever since the great exodus from the Communist Party in 1956 the idea of a refoundation of a popular movement of the anti capitalist left, or more narrowly, a realignment of the increasingly fragmented far left has been (from time to time) the Holly Grail for many, if not most, of the Left. The list of failed ‘unity projects’ since then is depressingly long.
Following the failed initiative of the New Left Clubs at the end of the fifties/beginning of the sixties, Raymond Williams, EP Thompson, Ralph Milliband and others launched the Mayday Manifesto and Convention of the Left in the spring of 1968 – an initiative that was stillborn because of the sectarianism and lack of nerve of most of the groups involved, in particular the CP.
In the mid-eighties, following the defeat of the miners in 1984-5, a series of large annual meetings in Sheffield and Manchester but mainly in Chesterfield, became known as the Socialist Conference. These meetings, which were organised by the Socialist Society, the loose network around the authors of Beyond the Fragments and the group around Tony Benn in the Labour Party, gave birth to the Socialist Movement, which in turn gave birth to Red Pepper – a rare positive outcome.
In 1996, the Socialist Labour Party was launched by Arthur Scargill as a reaction to the dropping of Clause Four by NuLab, but his flawed personality and authoritarian politics effectively destroyed it within eighteen months.
From 1992 local Socialist Alliances began to be established in a number of areas by grass roots activists with the support of a number of left groups – in particular SPEW – and in 1999 these local Socialist Alliances coalesced into the Network of Socialist Alliances. The Network joined with London Socialist Alliance to establish the Socialist Alliance as a national organisation and the SWP, the ISG and a number of other grouplets joined it. In 2001, it was changed from a network to a one member one vote party (giving the SWP effective control) and thus SPEW walked out. In 2003, the SWP and the ISG decided to support the Respect initiative (which had been the brainchild of Salma Yaqoob) and killed off the Socialist Alliance. And of course, in 2007 Respect was effectively killed off as a national organisation - although fragments remain in a few localities - by the self destructive sectarianism of the SWP.
Given the almost certain slaughter of NuLab by Dave and the Cameroons the year after next, the ever more urgent need for an organised opposition to neoliberalism and the fragmentation and marginalisation of the Left, a multiplicity of ‘unity’ projects have been launched over the past year and a half or so – each by a different sect or group of sects and each with little or no success. The Labour Representation Committee failed even to get John McDonnell on the NuLab leadership ballot paper last year, while SPEW has been failing to get its Campaign for a New Workers Party anywhere for some time and the CPGB’ Campaign for a Marxist Party has the feel of a reject sketch from The Life of Brian.
The latest runner to join the list is the recent ISG proposal for a new revolutionary socialist organisation. The people involved are a decent bunch, including not only the ISG (who are involved in a serious way in developing a new ecosocialist praxis) but many of the SWP members who walked as a result of the insane behaviour of their leadership over Respect. However, their manifesto is largely just another repetition of some of the tired language and program points of most of the failed unity projects listed above. And of course, they are mainly concerned with establishing an organised but non sectarian left within the rump of Respect, which, with the best will in the world probably doesn’t have much mileage left in it.
The proposed Convention of the Left in Manchester (20-25 September, the duration of NuLab’s conference) seems like it could be a really useful and positive event. The organisers, who include independent socialists like John Nicholson and individual members of most of the left groups in Manchester (including the Green Party). The event now has sponsorship from a wide range of well known leftists, from Tariq Ali, through Ken Loach and Jenny Jones to our own dear Derek Wall. Its conscious inclusivity, its determinedly open and non prescriptive approach to discussion (big name speakers’ roles will explicitly be to introduce discussions, not dominate them) and its ambition to be a genuine forum rather than the launch pad for yet another doomed unity project, all bode well for it making a real – if modest - contribution to the development of a healthier left.
Beyond left regroupment
The reason why so many previous attempts at regroupment have failed and why all the current ones appear to be non starters, is not just because of the psychopathology of some of the movement’s would-be leaders or of the closed mindsets of some of the dedicated party patriots who inhabit the sects (though these are certainly contributory factors). At the heart of the failure of regroupment is the fact that the organised left has become more and more irrelevant as it has become ossified by slavish adherence to form without reference to content or context. So just as the CPB soldiers on with its blinkered commitment to The British Road to Socialism – a programme hardly changed since it received the personal imprimatur of Stalin himself in 1951, the SWP continues to imagine that it is building the British Bolshevik Party and God knows how many groups, basing themselves just as rigidly on what they too see as the Bolshevik template are rebuilding, reconstructing, organising for, or just proclaiming, the Fourth International.
Harry Braverman, wrote that:
“Every movement develops its own style, rhetoric, way of making itself heard. Socialism was cradled in the intolerable conditions of the primitive working class, and flamed with the barricades spirit of the revolutions of 1848 into which it was launched at its infancy. Instead of evolving with changed conditions, this tone and approach survived in frozen rigidity which sometimes even outbid Marx. One of the main reasons was that the first of the long-awaited revolutions broke out in a country whose condition was more appropriate to the Europe of the early nineteenth century than the early twentieth, and whose social struggles reflected that fact. Then, to compound the difficulty, that revolution got ossified and bureaucratized at the top, and insisted on imposing its every prejudice and dogma on the world socialist movement. The result was a Communist formation, the recognized repository of ‘Marxism,’ with a Zeitgeist from another century and a paralyzed mentality. Is it any wonder that the work of digging out Marxism and restoring it to usable form is so difficult?” 3
As a result, insofar as ordinary working people are aware of the far left at all, they mainly find its arcane ideology and the shrill slogan ridden language it uses either incomprehensible or just laughable. The obscurantism of the far left – which has in part been the product of the left’s isolation – has led to endless hermeneutic debates, usually carried on in language apparently borrowing its abusive style from the Foreign Languages Publishing House translations of Lenin’s Collected Works. It is extraordinary that there are still those in almost every left group whose idea of theoretical analysis is to trawl through the collected works of VI Lenin or LD Trotsky to find an appropriate quotation in order to deal with today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. Trotsky died sixty eight years ago, Lenin eighty four – to imagine that their writings could produce detailed answers to today’s problems is to ascribe to them a measure of posthumous infallibility that both of they would both certainly have indignantly rejected when alive.
To quote Jim Higgins again:
“If the Bolsheviks took over the Smolny as their headquarters will the only begetters of British Bolshevism have to take over Cheltenham Ladies College? What is the British equivalent of storming the Winter Palace? Balmoral I suppose, although how we are going to get the battleship Aurora up there God alone knows.” 4
Without a recognition that the world has moved on and that our theory and practice must do so as well, all attempts at regroupment based simply upon a coming together of existing far left groups (or their former members) are likely to continue to end up as squabbles about who is going to wear the captain’s cap on the Titanic.
In order to be renewed, the Left (and I include the Green Party in this) must be prepared to abandon its current theoretical obsessions, language and organisational fetishes. It needs to reassemble itself from the most healthy and vital elements of its political DNA like a butterfly, leaving the dry withered shell of its old form behind it.
The role of Greens
Greens can contribute to that process in three ways. First, by practising unity in action at a grass roots level. In every locality, trade unionists, tenants, minority ethnic communities and anyone else currently finding themselves up against the state should be able to look to local Greens as reliable and honest allies who do not have a hidden agenda. We should never ever find ourselves standing off from a struggle because this or that left group is involved. At the moment, many on the left who have few, if any, significant differences with us are deeply suspicious of us, often partly for reasons of their sectarianism and sometimes partly with justification. We must always remind ourselves and our fellow Greens that we are part of a wider movement and that we should always put the interests of that wider movement before our own short term interests.
Second, we can contribute to the vital task of analysis and the development of new strategies for action that are relevant to the current situation. As Braverman puts it,
“the job is not to see where ‘Marx was wrong’ so much as to make a fresh application of his theory to the world around us as it is, not as it once was. To borrow a comparison from the field of physics, we need socialist Faradays and Maxwells or if we are lucky, Einsteins and Plancks, not people who confine themselves to knocking Isaac Newton.” 5
I think that there are four areas in particular that we can make particularly useful contributions to the development of a socialism for the 21st century: understanding the environmental crisis; renewing our awareness of how production, consumption and work are related and distorted in modern capitalist society; reassessing how the working class can be the agency of social transformation at a national and global level and developing new ways of organising ourselves and new democratic ways of working.
The environmental crisis
Obviously, we have an informed and detailed awareness of the scale and urgency of the environmental crisis and the role that capitalism is playing in the rapid worsening of that crisis. Ironically, it is in this area where the Left as a whole has most got its act together over the last few years. The need to organise against the threats of global warming and environmental degradation is now largely received wisdom on the left. However, how to do it is something that the Left as a whole has given little thought to – and arguably, the Green Party hasn’t either, apart from standing candidates in elections. We need to find ways to relate the crisis to the day to day experience of working people, to raise demands that challenge the crisis and while making sense to ordinary people – and to help them find ways to organise practically.
The current huge price increases in energy charges are a case in point. They bring the reality of peak oil and global commodities speculation sharply home to people who have never heard of the concepts. Energy conservation changes from being an abstract demand rather priggishly raised by middle class or déclassé environmentalists to a practical and urgent necessity for the large majority of the population. To raise demands for the public ownership of the energy monopolies and for subsidies for the old and sick are fine as far as they go, but they need to be paired with proposals for practical activity within communities which can promote the self confidence of those communities as well as encouraging the development of a culture of grass roots self organisation. Greens, with a strong voluntarist element part of their heterodox political culture, are in a good position to play an active role in this, unhindered by the residual traditions of paternalism and statism still lurking on the left. Thus we can transform one of our weaknesses into a strength – if a double edged one.
In reality, a modern understanding of the dynamics of capitalism's inevitable exploitation of the natural world, including humankind, that ecosocialists are developing needs to explained to Greens even more urgently than the need for Greens to explain to the rest of the Left that the environment is in crisis.
Production, consumption and work
Socialism is still often accused of being inherently productivist. There is a grain of truth in this, despite the fact that no one has surpassed Marx in analysing and condemning the relentless capitalist process of production for production’s sake, as well as the accumulation of capital and commodities as goals in themselves. For Marx, the central core of socialism was the domination of use value over exchange value – for ‘being’ rather than ‘having’. However, he was, of course, a man of the nineteenth century and was affected by the explosion of technology and the productive forces of Britain, Germany and the USA in particular. So Marx (and very much more so, later and cruder Marxists) tended to identify the development of the forces of production as the key factor in human progress. Marx never foresaw that through its inevitable dynamic of constant expansion capitalism will destroy its own conditions – starting with the natural environment
Michael Lowey made our task clear when he wrote that:
“The ecological issue is, in my opinion, the greatest challenge for a renewal of Marxist thought at the threshold of the twenty first century. It requires that Marxists undertake a deep critical revision of their traditional conception of ‘productive forces’, and that they break radically with the ideology of linear progress and with the technological and economic paradigm of modern industrial civilisation.” 6
I believe that socialist Greens, who see themselves as in the tradition of William Morris, are well placed to undertake such a task and develop EP Thompson’s concept of the ‘moral economy’ (an economic policy based on non-monetary and extra–economic criteria) as an alternative to the obsessive and all consuming commodity fetishism of modern capitalist society. We do not have quite as much ideological baggage to leave behind as our comrades in groups which find it hard to loosen their grip on one or more of the holy books or this or that ideological comfort blanket. We can help lead the way and light the path.
Agency
Marx described capitalism as its own grave digger, not because of its inherent instability and its tendency towards cyclical crises, but because in building itself it created a class – the proletariat – which was forced into conflict with it and which was forced to act collectively and search for collective solutions. Of course we still live in a class society and the mass of us have to sell our labour value to live, so the majority in society is still working class. However, much has changed since the rise of mass trade unionism a bit over a century ago. When the Labour Party was formed, the bulk of organised workers were male, unskilled or semi skilled, and worked in large concentrations in heavy or manufacturing industries, mining and the railways. As the long boom after the Second World War started to stutter and fade, the traditional industries started to decline, a process that was hugely accelerated in the eighties by Thatcher’s programme of deindustrialisation and the moves towards globalisation kick started by the IMF. Today, the TUC’s affiliates have fewer than seven million members, and the only the public sector is largely unionised. The workforce has changed out of all recognition it is now made up of both men and women in white collar or service occupations rather than manual work in manufacturing industries. But while the combined effects of neo-liberal government policies and globalisation has eroded the traditional institutions of the British working class – and to some degree, its consciousness, the globalised economy has created a global working class. According to Paul Mason;
Industrialisation in the global south, together with marketisation in the East has doubled the size of the global working class. A billion waged workers in the less developed countries, together with 1.47 billion in India, China and the former Comecon states now dwarf the 460 million workers of the developed world. And their lives are articulated together as never before. Globalisation has stretched the manufacturing process across continents and time zones. Digital communications allow the lives of workers in different countries to be massively more transparent to each other – and more similar. 7
Clearly the Left’s traditional and rather romanticised view of the working class has to be brought up to date, taking into account the great changes in the modes of production over the past decades, the effects of the communications revolution the domination of consumerist ideology and the rise in awareness of individual, as opposed to collective, rights. However, in my view we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater and start to see social movements, such as those represented by the European or World Social Forums, as a alternative to a self organised and self conscious movement of working people as the key agent of social change.
Democracy and organisation
One of the least attractive features of the Old Left is the its obsession with various buttock clenching variations on the theme of democratic centralism. While such an approach to democracy and organisation may well have been the most appropriate for revolutionary organisation in Russia over ninety years ago (although I happen to largely agree with Rosa Luxemburg’s criticisms of Lenin on this issue) the fact is that our circumstances today are vastly different, so our approach to organisation has to be different too.
Despite the current trends within the Green Party towards a more centralised social democratic model of organisation, Greens have a healthy tradition of commitment to decentralised, non hierarchical styles of organisation. While this can, and sometimes does, lead to a ‘lets do it right here in the barn’ voluntarism, it is a welcome antidote to the Old Left’s aping of how it imagines the Bolsheviks operated after 1903, complete with Central Committees, Politbureaux and Control Commissions.
Greens certainly do not have a fully developed model of democratic organisation, but our lack of hang ups about historical purity and our interest in prefigurative approaches to organisation and activity is capable of making a valuable contribution to establishing how the left should operate today. One thing is certain – if we want to build a new, environmentally aware Left then we are going to have to develop new ways of organising and behaving.
Finally, we must counter the demoralisation amongst individual activists (and ex-activists) caused by the fragmentation and marginalisation of the Old Left and the obsession with electoralism and the trend towards centralism in the Green Party. We can and must provide a shelter and pole of attraction for isolated ecosocialists (whether they identify themselves as such or not) to prevent the already reduced forces of the left eroding further.
Therefore I suggest that we should take the lead in establishing an Ecosocialist Network to promote the ideas being developed within the Ecosocialist International Network. Such a network should explicitly not have ambitions to rival or replace any existing organisations, but rather to complement and support them by establishing as forum, open to all, for the discussion and development of ecosocialist politics while providing a base for individual ecosocialists who would otherwise risk isolation. Apart from the ISG, there appears to be little interest in the development of such a network from any of the far left groups, so the first step will need to be making contact with individual socialists and greens, most of whom are not members of any group.
1Jim Higgins: Speak One More Time, 2004
2Sean Thompson: Paper for GL Summer meeting, 2007
3Harry Braverman: Marx in the Modern World, in American Socialist, 1958
4Jim Higgins: Op. cit.
5Harry Braverman: Op. cit
6Michael Lowy: What is Ecosocialism?, in Capitalism Nature Socialism 2005
7Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting, 2007
The Left in Britain (by which I mean the organisations to the left of the NuLab and the neo liberal consensus that it is part of) has never been weaker or more fragmented in my lifetime.
Many Greens, including many explicitly socialist Greens, don’t see that as a problem. After all, it could be argued that the ever changing permutations of the decreasing memberships of the seemingly ever increasing number of left sects is simply evidence of their political irrelevance and ideological bankruptcy, and that we can and should distance ourselves from them. As my old mentor Jim Higgins wrote:
“The communist tradition has, over the decades, acquired such an accretion of dross that its founders would be hard pressed to recognise it as their creation, and where they reject the child, we should be most careful not to adopt the bastard.” 1
If the traditional Far Left is becoming less and less significant as a political pole of attraction then surely (some would argue) that merely creates a bigger vacuum on the left – a larger space for the Green Party to fill. In other words, the decline of the Old Left is an opportunity for us. Indeed, last year I wrote that
“We should argue that the Party should have as its central strategic ambition to replace the Labour Party as the 'natural' home for dissidents in Britain. This sounds like a grandiose ambition, and indeed it is when we consider our incredibly narrow existing base, our very limited resources and the political limitations of much of our membership. However, it is a necessary ambition if we are to mount a challenge against the heights of the state…” 2
However, I went on to point out that such an ambition must lead to two strategic imperatives; First that we must continuously remind ourselves and our fellow Greens that we are but a part of a wider movement and that we should always put the interests of that wider movement before our own short term sectarian interests and second, we must be concerned with the issues and struggles of those in that wider movement rather than our own particular obsessions – a weakness Greens are prone to, and one which we share with the sects of the old far left.
At the moment, the Green Party is not capable of filling the vacuum on the left created by the Labour Party’s capitulation to neoliberalism and the decline of the left sects because we are a sect ourselves, a rather unusual one, but sect we are. Our Party is a sect because as an entity it suffers the delusion that it has discovered a new politics, shiny and freshly minted, that has no organic relationship to any previous or existing tradition. We see ourselves alone in a political universe of our own creation. We, as a party, haven't noticed that there is a wider movement than ourselves out there with which we are broadly in tune. On the whole, the Green Party tends just not to notice the tens, hundreds, or thousands of activists who share our basic political values (and in large measure, the same political positions on key issues) but who inexplicably won’t join our organisation.
We have to recognise that the Green Party, as it currently exists, will not become a mass party capable of taking State power (certainly not on the basis of ad hoc recruitment of largely non-active members and incremental electoral growth) any more than the SWP or SPEW or the AWL are going to become the British Bolsheviks, leading millions of revolutionary workers. We all have to learn from each other and we all have to abandon our illusions (whether implicit or explicit) that any of us hold sole copyright on the Way, the Truth and the Correct Line and we have to realise that we need to work together to build a new left.
Left regroupment
Ever since the great exodus from the Communist Party in 1956 the idea of a refoundation of a popular movement of the anti capitalist left, or more narrowly, a realignment of the increasingly fragmented far left has been (from time to time) the Holly Grail for many, if not most, of the Left. The list of failed ‘unity projects’ since then is depressingly long.
Following the failed initiative of the New Left Clubs at the end of the fifties/beginning of the sixties, Raymond Williams, EP Thompson, Ralph Milliband and others launched the Mayday Manifesto and Convention of the Left in the spring of 1968 – an initiative that was stillborn because of the sectarianism and lack of nerve of most of the groups involved, in particular the CP.
In the mid-eighties, following the defeat of the miners in 1984-5, a series of large annual meetings in Sheffield and Manchester but mainly in Chesterfield, became known as the Socialist Conference. These meetings, which were organised by the Socialist Society, the loose network around the authors of Beyond the Fragments and the group around Tony Benn in the Labour Party, gave birth to the Socialist Movement, which in turn gave birth to Red Pepper – a rare positive outcome.
In 1996, the Socialist Labour Party was launched by Arthur Scargill as a reaction to the dropping of Clause Four by NuLab, but his flawed personality and authoritarian politics effectively destroyed it within eighteen months.
From 1992 local Socialist Alliances began to be established in a number of areas by grass roots activists with the support of a number of left groups – in particular SPEW – and in 1999 these local Socialist Alliances coalesced into the Network of Socialist Alliances. The Network joined with London Socialist Alliance to establish the Socialist Alliance as a national organisation and the SWP, the ISG and a number of other grouplets joined it. In 2001, it was changed from a network to a one member one vote party (giving the SWP effective control) and thus SPEW walked out. In 2003, the SWP and the ISG decided to support the Respect initiative (which had been the brainchild of Salma Yaqoob) and killed off the Socialist Alliance. And of course, in 2007 Respect was effectively killed off as a national organisation - although fragments remain in a few localities - by the self destructive sectarianism of the SWP.
Given the almost certain slaughter of NuLab by Dave and the Cameroons the year after next, the ever more urgent need for an organised opposition to neoliberalism and the fragmentation and marginalisation of the Left, a multiplicity of ‘unity’ projects have been launched over the past year and a half or so – each by a different sect or group of sects and each with little or no success. The Labour Representation Committee failed even to get John McDonnell on the NuLab leadership ballot paper last year, while SPEW has been failing to get its Campaign for a New Workers Party anywhere for some time and the CPGB’ Campaign for a Marxist Party has the feel of a reject sketch from The Life of Brian.
The latest runner to join the list is the recent ISG proposal for a new revolutionary socialist organisation. The people involved are a decent bunch, including not only the ISG (who are involved in a serious way in developing a new ecosocialist praxis) but many of the SWP members who walked as a result of the insane behaviour of their leadership over Respect. However, their manifesto is largely just another repetition of some of the tired language and program points of most of the failed unity projects listed above. And of course, they are mainly concerned with establishing an organised but non sectarian left within the rump of Respect, which, with the best will in the world probably doesn’t have much mileage left in it.
The proposed Convention of the Left in Manchester (20-25 September, the duration of NuLab’s conference) seems like it could be a really useful and positive event. The organisers, who include independent socialists like John Nicholson and individual members of most of the left groups in Manchester (including the Green Party). The event now has sponsorship from a wide range of well known leftists, from Tariq Ali, through Ken Loach and Jenny Jones to our own dear Derek Wall. Its conscious inclusivity, its determinedly open and non prescriptive approach to discussion (big name speakers’ roles will explicitly be to introduce discussions, not dominate them) and its ambition to be a genuine forum rather than the launch pad for yet another doomed unity project, all bode well for it making a real – if modest - contribution to the development of a healthier left.
Beyond left regroupment
The reason why so many previous attempts at regroupment have failed and why all the current ones appear to be non starters, is not just because of the psychopathology of some of the movement’s would-be leaders or of the closed mindsets of some of the dedicated party patriots who inhabit the sects (though these are certainly contributory factors). At the heart of the failure of regroupment is the fact that the organised left has become more and more irrelevant as it has become ossified by slavish adherence to form without reference to content or context. So just as the CPB soldiers on with its blinkered commitment to The British Road to Socialism – a programme hardly changed since it received the personal imprimatur of Stalin himself in 1951, the SWP continues to imagine that it is building the British Bolshevik Party and God knows how many groups, basing themselves just as rigidly on what they too see as the Bolshevik template are rebuilding, reconstructing, organising for, or just proclaiming, the Fourth International.
Harry Braverman, wrote that:
“Every movement develops its own style, rhetoric, way of making itself heard. Socialism was cradled in the intolerable conditions of the primitive working class, and flamed with the barricades spirit of the revolutions of 1848 into which it was launched at its infancy. Instead of evolving with changed conditions, this tone and approach survived in frozen rigidity which sometimes even outbid Marx. One of the main reasons was that the first of the long-awaited revolutions broke out in a country whose condition was more appropriate to the Europe of the early nineteenth century than the early twentieth, and whose social struggles reflected that fact. Then, to compound the difficulty, that revolution got ossified and bureaucratized at the top, and insisted on imposing its every prejudice and dogma on the world socialist movement. The result was a Communist formation, the recognized repository of ‘Marxism,’ with a Zeitgeist from another century and a paralyzed mentality. Is it any wonder that the work of digging out Marxism and restoring it to usable form is so difficult?” 3
As a result, insofar as ordinary working people are aware of the far left at all, they mainly find its arcane ideology and the shrill slogan ridden language it uses either incomprehensible or just laughable. The obscurantism of the far left – which has in part been the product of the left’s isolation – has led to endless hermeneutic debates, usually carried on in language apparently borrowing its abusive style from the Foreign Languages Publishing House translations of Lenin’s Collected Works. It is extraordinary that there are still those in almost every left group whose idea of theoretical analysis is to trawl through the collected works of VI Lenin or LD Trotsky to find an appropriate quotation in order to deal with today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. Trotsky died sixty eight years ago, Lenin eighty four – to imagine that their writings could produce detailed answers to today’s problems is to ascribe to them a measure of posthumous infallibility that both of they would both certainly have indignantly rejected when alive.
To quote Jim Higgins again:
“If the Bolsheviks took over the Smolny as their headquarters will the only begetters of British Bolshevism have to take over Cheltenham Ladies College? What is the British equivalent of storming the Winter Palace? Balmoral I suppose, although how we are going to get the battleship Aurora up there God alone knows.” 4
Without a recognition that the world has moved on and that our theory and practice must do so as well, all attempts at regroupment based simply upon a coming together of existing far left groups (or their former members) are likely to continue to end up as squabbles about who is going to wear the captain’s cap on the Titanic.
In order to be renewed, the Left (and I include the Green Party in this) must be prepared to abandon its current theoretical obsessions, language and organisational fetishes. It needs to reassemble itself from the most healthy and vital elements of its political DNA like a butterfly, leaving the dry withered shell of its old form behind it.
The role of Greens
Greens can contribute to that process in three ways. First, by practising unity in action at a grass roots level. In every locality, trade unionists, tenants, minority ethnic communities and anyone else currently finding themselves up against the state should be able to look to local Greens as reliable and honest allies who do not have a hidden agenda. We should never ever find ourselves standing off from a struggle because this or that left group is involved. At the moment, many on the left who have few, if any, significant differences with us are deeply suspicious of us, often partly for reasons of their sectarianism and sometimes partly with justification. We must always remind ourselves and our fellow Greens that we are part of a wider movement and that we should always put the interests of that wider movement before our own short term interests.
Second, we can contribute to the vital task of analysis and the development of new strategies for action that are relevant to the current situation. As Braverman puts it,
“the job is not to see where ‘Marx was wrong’ so much as to make a fresh application of his theory to the world around us as it is, not as it once was. To borrow a comparison from the field of physics, we need socialist Faradays and Maxwells or if we are lucky, Einsteins and Plancks, not people who confine themselves to knocking Isaac Newton.” 5
I think that there are four areas in particular that we can make particularly useful contributions to the development of a socialism for the 21st century: understanding the environmental crisis; renewing our awareness of how production, consumption and work are related and distorted in modern capitalist society; reassessing how the working class can be the agency of social transformation at a national and global level and developing new ways of organising ourselves and new democratic ways of working.
The environmental crisis
Obviously, we have an informed and detailed awareness of the scale and urgency of the environmental crisis and the role that capitalism is playing in the rapid worsening of that crisis. Ironically, it is in this area where the Left as a whole has most got its act together over the last few years. The need to organise against the threats of global warming and environmental degradation is now largely received wisdom on the left. However, how to do it is something that the Left as a whole has given little thought to – and arguably, the Green Party hasn’t either, apart from standing candidates in elections. We need to find ways to relate the crisis to the day to day experience of working people, to raise demands that challenge the crisis and while making sense to ordinary people – and to help them find ways to organise practically.
The current huge price increases in energy charges are a case in point. They bring the reality of peak oil and global commodities speculation sharply home to people who have never heard of the concepts. Energy conservation changes from being an abstract demand rather priggishly raised by middle class or déclassé environmentalists to a practical and urgent necessity for the large majority of the population. To raise demands for the public ownership of the energy monopolies and for subsidies for the old and sick are fine as far as they go, but they need to be paired with proposals for practical activity within communities which can promote the self confidence of those communities as well as encouraging the development of a culture of grass roots self organisation. Greens, with a strong voluntarist element part of their heterodox political culture, are in a good position to play an active role in this, unhindered by the residual traditions of paternalism and statism still lurking on the left. Thus we can transform one of our weaknesses into a strength – if a double edged one.
In reality, a modern understanding of the dynamics of capitalism's inevitable exploitation of the natural world, including humankind, that ecosocialists are developing needs to explained to Greens even more urgently than the need for Greens to explain to the rest of the Left that the environment is in crisis.
Production, consumption and work
Socialism is still often accused of being inherently productivist. There is a grain of truth in this, despite the fact that no one has surpassed Marx in analysing and condemning the relentless capitalist process of production for production’s sake, as well as the accumulation of capital and commodities as goals in themselves. For Marx, the central core of socialism was the domination of use value over exchange value – for ‘being’ rather than ‘having’. However, he was, of course, a man of the nineteenth century and was affected by the explosion of technology and the productive forces of Britain, Germany and the USA in particular. So Marx (and very much more so, later and cruder Marxists) tended to identify the development of the forces of production as the key factor in human progress. Marx never foresaw that through its inevitable dynamic of constant expansion capitalism will destroy its own conditions – starting with the natural environment
Michael Lowey made our task clear when he wrote that:
“The ecological issue is, in my opinion, the greatest challenge for a renewal of Marxist thought at the threshold of the twenty first century. It requires that Marxists undertake a deep critical revision of their traditional conception of ‘productive forces’, and that they break radically with the ideology of linear progress and with the technological and economic paradigm of modern industrial civilisation.” 6
I believe that socialist Greens, who see themselves as in the tradition of William Morris, are well placed to undertake such a task and develop EP Thompson’s concept of the ‘moral economy’ (an economic policy based on non-monetary and extra–economic criteria) as an alternative to the obsessive and all consuming commodity fetishism of modern capitalist society. We do not have quite as much ideological baggage to leave behind as our comrades in groups which find it hard to loosen their grip on one or more of the holy books or this or that ideological comfort blanket. We can help lead the way and light the path.
Agency
Marx described capitalism as its own grave digger, not because of its inherent instability and its tendency towards cyclical crises, but because in building itself it created a class – the proletariat – which was forced into conflict with it and which was forced to act collectively and search for collective solutions. Of course we still live in a class society and the mass of us have to sell our labour value to live, so the majority in society is still working class. However, much has changed since the rise of mass trade unionism a bit over a century ago. When the Labour Party was formed, the bulk of organised workers were male, unskilled or semi skilled, and worked in large concentrations in heavy or manufacturing industries, mining and the railways. As the long boom after the Second World War started to stutter and fade, the traditional industries started to decline, a process that was hugely accelerated in the eighties by Thatcher’s programme of deindustrialisation and the moves towards globalisation kick started by the IMF. Today, the TUC’s affiliates have fewer than seven million members, and the only the public sector is largely unionised. The workforce has changed out of all recognition it is now made up of both men and women in white collar or service occupations rather than manual work in manufacturing industries. But while the combined effects of neo-liberal government policies and globalisation has eroded the traditional institutions of the British working class – and to some degree, its consciousness, the globalised economy has created a global working class. According to Paul Mason;
Industrialisation in the global south, together with marketisation in the East has doubled the size of the global working class. A billion waged workers in the less developed countries, together with 1.47 billion in India, China and the former Comecon states now dwarf the 460 million workers of the developed world. And their lives are articulated together as never before. Globalisation has stretched the manufacturing process across continents and time zones. Digital communications allow the lives of workers in different countries to be massively more transparent to each other – and more similar. 7
Clearly the Left’s traditional and rather romanticised view of the working class has to be brought up to date, taking into account the great changes in the modes of production over the past decades, the effects of the communications revolution the domination of consumerist ideology and the rise in awareness of individual, as opposed to collective, rights. However, in my view we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater and start to see social movements, such as those represented by the European or World Social Forums, as a alternative to a self organised and self conscious movement of working people as the key agent of social change.
Democracy and organisation
One of the least attractive features of the Old Left is the its obsession with various buttock clenching variations on the theme of democratic centralism. While such an approach to democracy and organisation may well have been the most appropriate for revolutionary organisation in Russia over ninety years ago (although I happen to largely agree with Rosa Luxemburg’s criticisms of Lenin on this issue) the fact is that our circumstances today are vastly different, so our approach to organisation has to be different too.
Despite the current trends within the Green Party towards a more centralised social democratic model of organisation, Greens have a healthy tradition of commitment to decentralised, non hierarchical styles of organisation. While this can, and sometimes does, lead to a ‘lets do it right here in the barn’ voluntarism, it is a welcome antidote to the Old Left’s aping of how it imagines the Bolsheviks operated after 1903, complete with Central Committees, Politbureaux and Control Commissions.
Greens certainly do not have a fully developed model of democratic organisation, but our lack of hang ups about historical purity and our interest in prefigurative approaches to organisation and activity is capable of making a valuable contribution to establishing how the left should operate today. One thing is certain – if we want to build a new, environmentally aware Left then we are going to have to develop new ways of organising and behaving.
Finally, we must counter the demoralisation amongst individual activists (and ex-activists) caused by the fragmentation and marginalisation of the Old Left and the obsession with electoralism and the trend towards centralism in the Green Party. We can and must provide a shelter and pole of attraction for isolated ecosocialists (whether they identify themselves as such or not) to prevent the already reduced forces of the left eroding further.
Therefore I suggest that we should take the lead in establishing an Ecosocialist Network to promote the ideas being developed within the Ecosocialist International Network. Such a network should explicitly not have ambitions to rival or replace any existing organisations, but rather to complement and support them by establishing as forum, open to all, for the discussion and development of ecosocialist politics while providing a base for individual ecosocialists who would otherwise risk isolation. Apart from the ISG, there appears to be little interest in the development of such a network from any of the far left groups, so the first step will need to be making contact with individual socialists and greens, most of whom are not members of any group.
1Jim Higgins: Speak One More Time, 2004
2Sean Thompson: Paper for GL Summer meeting, 2007
3Harry Braverman: Marx in the Modern World, in American Socialist, 1958
4Jim Higgins: Op. cit.
5Harry Braverman: Op. cit
6Michael Lowy: What is Ecosocialism?, in Capitalism Nature Socialism 2005
7Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting, 2007
Friday, 12 September 2008
ABC of Socialism
The word 'socialism' derives from 'social'; from the Latin 'socialis' for companion, partner or ally; later concerned with the mutual relations of humanity as living in an organized, interdependent body or society, e.g., social laws, conscience or relations, social progress, reform or revolution, etc: a political theory and movement for the substitution of collective forms (public, common, municipal, regional or state) over individual ownership and property.
A system without economic divisions approximating to a classless society through social control of major production, distribution and exchange.
Early socialist ideas emerged, mutated and matured within feudal agrarian society, in peasant uprisings across Europe,like England's first Poll Tax rebellion of 1381, in the agitation of the Leveller Jon Lilburn 1615-57, Diggers of Weybridge Hill, emerging as a social force within Cromwell's Model Army at the Putney debates of 1647; among participants in the French revolution of 1789 like Gracchus Babeuf, Charles Fouriet and the Comte de St Simon; in the work of Thomas Payne from 1737-1809 and the European democratic revolutions of 1848/9.
Socialist ideas emerged, mutated and matured within the new vast cities of the industrial age, most notably in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the regional uprisings of the Chartists between 1838 and 1848 in Britain. A philosophical revolution by students of Berlin University produced a radical current of left-wing humanists that culminated in the exile of one of them, Karl Marx, first to Paris and then to Dean Street, Soho.
His theoretical systemof revolutionary ideas was strong in analysis (his 'labour theory of value' is now scarcely contested) but short of practical political advice, failed to convince the First International Workingmen's Association thus creating a rift between socialist and anarchist opinions. The Second 'Socialist' International became a global movement until a major division erupted at the turn of the 20th century of relevance to the world's Green Parties today.
Some, like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, adhered to the transformation of society from capitalism to socialism through a necessary social, political and economic revolution from below. others like Eduard Bernstein, editor of the 'Sozialdemokrat' newspaper and Congress delegate, argued that new advantageous circumstances allowed the abandonment of revolution for a strategy of socialism by piecemeal, Parliamentary, gradual, evolutionary reforms (the reformist road to socialism). The same issue divided the Marxist Social Democratic Federation from the Fabian Society within the founding of the British Labour Party in 1900, and in essence, the split between the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903: the revolutionaries won the argument but lost the vote. The Reformist-Revisionists degenerated rapidly to capitalist convergence, patriotic support for colonial expansion and the fratricidal carnage of the first inter-imperialist world war, and the military suppression of the socialist revolutions that followed it.
The success of Russia's second revolution, Red October 1917, secured "Land, Bread and Peace"; the nationalisation of major landholdings, banks and basic industries; the first unemployment benefit; NHS, equality for women and gays; the right of nations to self-determination; modernism in art and design and a Red Army that defended 1/6th of the
world's land mass from 9 armies of capitalist intervention,etc. Lenin's last struggle failed to halt the rise of the brutal megalomaniac Joseph Stalin to the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1925.
Within 10 years, the Soviet Union degenerated to a stifling and stagnant, bureaucratic police-state employing forced collectivisations and rigged show-trials, assassinations, gulags and slave labour against all dissidents of the one-party state. The Stalinist model of a one-party police-state was exported through its military occupations of Eastern Europe. China developed a similar model.
The division between democratic pro-capitalist Social Democrats and anti-democratic counterrevolutionary Stalinists, eclipsed and betrayed the rise of socialism in the 19th, driving the class struggle towards that between rich and poor nations. A small, scattered International Left Opposition declared the 4th International in 1938. In 1940 its leading advocate, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was assassinated by Stalin's agent Ramon Mercader, The 4th International split in half in 1953, unable to share different European and American post-war perspectives, then further splintered into today's various neo-Trotskyite and eclectic sectarian/opportunist groups. Largely from this political milieu arose an awareness of the ecological crisis and its revolutionary significance, as a challenge to Marx's 19th century assumptions of productivist progress. For example, the American author of the book 'Enemy of Nature' and the Ecosocialist Manifesto, Joel Kovel, inspires Green Left today.
Thus socialism continues to emerge, mutate and mature.
Tim Summers, Green Left Secretary and former GPEx
Campaigns Co-ordinator 020 7737 6289
A system without economic divisions approximating to a classless society through social control of major production, distribution and exchange.
Early socialist ideas emerged, mutated and matured within feudal agrarian society, in peasant uprisings across Europe,like England's first Poll Tax rebellion of 1381, in the agitation of the Leveller Jon Lilburn 1615-57, Diggers of Weybridge Hill, emerging as a social force within Cromwell's Model Army at the Putney debates of 1647; among participants in the French revolution of 1789 like Gracchus Babeuf, Charles Fouriet and the Comte de St Simon; in the work of Thomas Payne from 1737-1809 and the European democratic revolutions of 1848/9.
Socialist ideas emerged, mutated and matured within the new vast cities of the industrial age, most notably in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the regional uprisings of the Chartists between 1838 and 1848 in Britain. A philosophical revolution by students of Berlin University produced a radical current of left-wing humanists that culminated in the exile of one of them, Karl Marx, first to Paris and then to Dean Street, Soho.
His theoretical systemof revolutionary ideas was strong in analysis (his 'labour theory of value' is now scarcely contested) but short of practical political advice, failed to convince the First International Workingmen's Association thus creating a rift between socialist and anarchist opinions. The Second 'Socialist' International became a global movement until a major division erupted at the turn of the 20th century of relevance to the world's Green Parties today.
Some, like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, adhered to the transformation of society from capitalism to socialism through a necessary social, political and economic revolution from below. others like Eduard Bernstein, editor of the 'Sozialdemokrat' newspaper and Congress delegate, argued that new advantageous circumstances allowed the abandonment of revolution for a strategy of socialism by piecemeal, Parliamentary, gradual, evolutionary reforms (the reformist road to socialism). The same issue divided the Marxist Social Democratic Federation from the Fabian Society within the founding of the British Labour Party in 1900, and in essence, the split between the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903: the revolutionaries won the argument but lost the vote. The Reformist-Revisionists degenerated rapidly to capitalist convergence, patriotic support for colonial expansion and the fratricidal carnage of the first inter-imperialist world war, and the military suppression of the socialist revolutions that followed it.
The success of Russia's second revolution, Red October 1917, secured "Land, Bread and Peace"; the nationalisation of major landholdings, banks and basic industries; the first unemployment benefit; NHS, equality for women and gays; the right of nations to self-determination; modernism in art and design and a Red Army that defended 1/6th of the
world's land mass from 9 armies of capitalist intervention,etc. Lenin's last struggle failed to halt the rise of the brutal megalomaniac Joseph Stalin to the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1925.
Within 10 years, the Soviet Union degenerated to a stifling and stagnant, bureaucratic police-state employing forced collectivisations and rigged show-trials, assassinations, gulags and slave labour against all dissidents of the one-party state. The Stalinist model of a one-party police-state was exported through its military occupations of Eastern Europe. China developed a similar model.
The division between democratic pro-capitalist Social Democrats and anti-democratic counterrevolutionary Stalinists, eclipsed and betrayed the rise of socialism in the 19th, driving the class struggle towards that between rich and poor nations. A small, scattered International Left Opposition declared the 4th International in 1938. In 1940 its leading advocate, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was assassinated by Stalin's agent Ramon Mercader, The 4th International split in half in 1953, unable to share different European and American post-war perspectives, then further splintered into today's various neo-Trotskyite and eclectic sectarian/opportunist groups. Largely from this political milieu arose an awareness of the ecological crisis and its revolutionary significance, as a challenge to Marx's 19th century assumptions of productivist progress. For example, the American author of the book 'Enemy of Nature' and the Ecosocialist Manifesto, Joel Kovel, inspires Green Left today.
Thus socialism continues to emerge, mutate and mature.
Tim Summers, Green Left Secretary and former GPEx
Campaigns Co-ordinator 020 7737 6289
Latin America and The Left
The Latin American left are on the march and they are increasingly moving in a green direction. Climate change and other ecological ills mean that the we need positive political change and such change is occurring most quickly in Latin America.After decades of domination by CIA backed dictators, death squads and racist elites, left governments have won in virtually every state from Chile to Guatemala.
Just a few weeks ago Luego, a former Catholic Bishop, inspired by liberation theology was sworn in as President of Paraguay. The country was a dictatorship for 60 decades and a refuge for Nazi war criminals. The new president has sacked the heads of the armed forces and proclaimed the ‘poor and indigenous will be the privileged now.’
The record of such governments has been varied and imperfect but US dominance in the region has been broken, neoliberal economics has been challenged and an emphasis on participatory democracy has ensued. Although with the exception of Brazil and the example of recently released Ingrid Betancourt, Green Parties are generally small and not well known in the region, green politics is part of the process. One of the most interesting developments has been the rise of the indigenous.
In Bolivia Morales was elected as the first indigenous president in the country's history and is battling the right wing who refuse to cede control over the country. Indigenous people have been at the forefront of campaigns to preserve the rainforests and other habitats from exploitation. Morales has famously called for the defence of ‘mother earth’ and argues that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable. However despite a movement towards socialism most Latin America countries have economies based on resource extraction.
For example, Correa in Ecuador while on the left has attacked some socialmovements for dvocating ‘infantile environmentalism’ because they oppose mining or oil extraction. In Brazil the charismatic environment minister Maria de Silva resigned this year because she lost battles in Lula’s government to preserve the Amazon.
Indigenous people are extremely diverse but across the continent they fear attempts to have their land taken from them for mining or even biofuel plantations. They generally believe in ecological economic structures rather than traditional industrialisation. Indigenous people are at the forefront_of political change and are pushing left governments to be more radical and ecological. I am very lucky to be in touch with Hugo Blanco whose Peru based magazine Lucha Indigena (indigenous struggle) chronicles their actions across the continent.
In August the Peruvian President Alan Garcia (one of the few non left leaders along with Colombia and Mexico) tried to push through laws that would have made it easier for corporations to take land from indigenous people. 12,000 people took direct action to stop the law which would have destroyed large parts of the Amazon in the country. Even threats to mobilise the army did not deter the protesters who protected their land, culture and the forests, the Peruvian congress were forced to back down and repeal the laws. This to me is real green politics,people defending their forests and through their action protecting vital habitats.
Hugo Blanco is an active member of the Ecosocialist International to which Green Left belongs and I am proud of all the work Green Left does to publicise his important activity.
In quite a different context I have been very encouraged by developments in Cuba. During the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the country no longer received cheap oil from Russia. The ‘Special Period’ as most readers know led to much hardship but it also meant that Cuba had to go on a crash course of oil reduction. Non-organic agriculture is heavily dependent on oil, for example, most pesticides and chemical fertilizers are a by-product of petroleum. To survive Cuba had to go organic. Cubans were encouraged to produce as much of their food as possible and to use low impact ecological methods. In Havana highly productive organic allotments can be found between tower blocks and all sorts of land that would be otherwise unused. Cuba has over 7,000 urban allotments know as 'organopinics' nearly 100,000 acres.
I have not been to Cuba but I did visit Venezuela in 2006 and I keep in regular contact with a friend Cesar Aponte in the Ministry of the Environment. Despite being an oil economy, Venezuela is heavily promoting organic agriculture, renewable energy and public transport. While there are plenty of imperfections in the country, for example, Caracas is very polluted, Hugo Chavez’s government are well aware that fossil fuel based economics is ultimatly unsustainable because of climate change. The ministry of the environment has recently won big battles to close gold and coal mines that damage the environments of indigenous people. While many European Green Parties have become gray, I think the coalition government in Ireland where the Irish Greens are in ‘power’ but part of a government that is building a motorway through the prehistoric landscape of Tara, the Latin Americans are generally moving in a greener direction. They give me real hope that we can make history and save the planet. We need to criticise them when they could be doing better but we need to learn from them in a modest spirit, if the human race are going to surive catastrophe it will be because of the best which is occuring in Latin America. I am very lucky to have so many good friends in Cuba, Venezuela and Peru, they inspired me to stick with the politics even when the going gets tough. I would urge all Green Party members to get involved with campaigns like Venezuela Information Centre, Hands off Venezuela and Cuba Solidarity. I am very sad the post of Principal Speaker has gone but I am putting my energies into supporting the greening of Latin America, a very important political process.
Derek Wall, Male Principal Speaker and Writer.
Just a few weeks ago Luego, a former Catholic Bishop, inspired by liberation theology was sworn in as President of Paraguay. The country was a dictatorship for 60 decades and a refuge for Nazi war criminals. The new president has sacked the heads of the armed forces and proclaimed the ‘poor and indigenous will be the privileged now.’
The record of such governments has been varied and imperfect but US dominance in the region has been broken, neoliberal economics has been challenged and an emphasis on participatory democracy has ensued. Although with the exception of Brazil and the example of recently released Ingrid Betancourt, Green Parties are generally small and not well known in the region, green politics is part of the process. One of the most interesting developments has been the rise of the indigenous.
In Bolivia Morales was elected as the first indigenous president in the country's history and is battling the right wing who refuse to cede control over the country. Indigenous people have been at the forefront of campaigns to preserve the rainforests and other habitats from exploitation. Morales has famously called for the defence of ‘mother earth’ and argues that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable. However despite a movement towards socialism most Latin America countries have economies based on resource extraction.
For example, Correa in Ecuador while on the left has attacked some socialmovements for dvocating ‘infantile environmentalism’ because they oppose mining or oil extraction. In Brazil the charismatic environment minister Maria de Silva resigned this year because she lost battles in Lula’s government to preserve the Amazon.
Indigenous people are extremely diverse but across the continent they fear attempts to have their land taken from them for mining or even biofuel plantations. They generally believe in ecological economic structures rather than traditional industrialisation. Indigenous people are at the forefront_of political change and are pushing left governments to be more radical and ecological. I am very lucky to be in touch with Hugo Blanco whose Peru based magazine Lucha Indigena (indigenous struggle) chronicles their actions across the continent.
In August the Peruvian President Alan Garcia (one of the few non left leaders along with Colombia and Mexico) tried to push through laws that would have made it easier for corporations to take land from indigenous people. 12,000 people took direct action to stop the law which would have destroyed large parts of the Amazon in the country. Even threats to mobilise the army did not deter the protesters who protected their land, culture and the forests, the Peruvian congress were forced to back down and repeal the laws. This to me is real green politics,people defending their forests and through their action protecting vital habitats.
Hugo Blanco is an active member of the Ecosocialist International to which Green Left belongs and I am proud of all the work Green Left does to publicise his important activity.
In quite a different context I have been very encouraged by developments in Cuba. During the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the country no longer received cheap oil from Russia. The ‘Special Period’ as most readers know led to much hardship but it also meant that Cuba had to go on a crash course of oil reduction. Non-organic agriculture is heavily dependent on oil, for example, most pesticides and chemical fertilizers are a by-product of petroleum. To survive Cuba had to go organic. Cubans were encouraged to produce as much of their food as possible and to use low impact ecological methods. In Havana highly productive organic allotments can be found between tower blocks and all sorts of land that would be otherwise unused. Cuba has over 7,000 urban allotments know as 'organopinics' nearly 100,000 acres.
I have not been to Cuba but I did visit Venezuela in 2006 and I keep in regular contact with a friend Cesar Aponte in the Ministry of the Environment. Despite being an oil economy, Venezuela is heavily promoting organic agriculture, renewable energy and public transport. While there are plenty of imperfections in the country, for example, Caracas is very polluted, Hugo Chavez’s government are well aware that fossil fuel based economics is ultimatly unsustainable because of climate change. The ministry of the environment has recently won big battles to close gold and coal mines that damage the environments of indigenous people. While many European Green Parties have become gray, I think the coalition government in Ireland where the Irish Greens are in ‘power’ but part of a government that is building a motorway through the prehistoric landscape of Tara, the Latin Americans are generally moving in a greener direction. They give me real hope that we can make history and save the planet. We need to criticise them when they could be doing better but we need to learn from them in a modest spirit, if the human race are going to surive catastrophe it will be because of the best which is occuring in Latin America. I am very lucky to have so many good friends in Cuba, Venezuela and Peru, they inspired me to stick with the politics even when the going gets tough. I would urge all Green Party members to get involved with campaigns like Venezuela Information Centre, Hands off Venezuela and Cuba Solidarity. I am very sad the post of Principal Speaker has gone but I am putting my energies into supporting the greening of Latin America, a very important political process.
Derek Wall, Male Principal Speaker and Writer.
Friday, 5 September 2008
Resisting A Centralised 'Professional' Leadership
In the early years of the last century, sociologist Robert Michels showed that all political parties, faced with problems of coordination and organization, create a bureaucracy and develop bases of knowledge, skills, and resources among a relatively small leadership group.
Inevitably, the rank and file are less informed than their leaders, and of course we are all conditioned, to some degree, to look up to those in positions of authority. Therefore the rank and file tend to look to leaders for policy directives and are generally prepared to allow leaders to exercise their judgement on most matters.
The reason why this all matters is that the history of all previous egalitarian parties shows that as they gradually developed a professional bureaucracy and a centralised ‘professional’ leadership they all gradually moved to the right and towards accommodation with the ruling political establishment.
The problems of bureaucracy and the tendency towards the development of hierarchies and a leadership elite are as endemic in our party as they are in any other organisation – and the more successful we are the more powerful those tendencies will become. To counter them we need to do two things.
First, we must continually resist the inevitable tendency towards a professional bureaucracy and the growth of a semi permanent leadership group by ensuring that our constitutional and administrative procedures minimise their tendency to develop. Examples of that trend are the recent suggestions from some leading members that the five year limit on holding a GPEX post
should be abolished and that we should move from two conferences a year to one.
Second, we must continually strive to develop the conditions in which active democracy can thrive. That means above all encouraging discussion and debate at all levels within the party in order to build the capacity of party members to both take an active and informed part in
developing party policy and to effectively hold the leadership of the organisation to account. We need more leadership in the Green Party rather than less, but leadership spreading up from the base rather than down from the top or out from the centre.
As we grow, we will inevitably develop an increasingly professional bureaucracy – and we need to. There is no doubt that we must pay a price to ensure that these hierarchies do not slowly begin to dominate the party, as they inevitably will without the conscious commitment of
the membership to counter that trend. Decision making will inevitably appear cumbersome and will involve apparently endless debate over everything. However, that endless debate is in fact the lifeblood that keeps our politics alive and healthy. Bureaucracy and a centralised leadership is like the clotting agent in that blood – essential if we are to operate, but fatal if not kept continuously in check.
Sean Thompson, Political Education Officer, London
Federation of Green Parties
Latin America
Inevitably, the rank and file are less informed than their leaders, and of course we are all conditioned, to some degree, to look up to those in positions of authority. Therefore the rank and file tend to look to leaders for policy directives and are generally prepared to allow leaders to exercise their judgement on most matters.
The reason why this all matters is that the history of all previous egalitarian parties shows that as they gradually developed a professional bureaucracy and a centralised ‘professional’ leadership they all gradually moved to the right and towards accommodation with the ruling political establishment.
The problems of bureaucracy and the tendency towards the development of hierarchies and a leadership elite are as endemic in our party as they are in any other organisation – and the more successful we are the more powerful those tendencies will become. To counter them we need to do two things.
First, we must continually resist the inevitable tendency towards a professional bureaucracy and the growth of a semi permanent leadership group by ensuring that our constitutional and administrative procedures minimise their tendency to develop. Examples of that trend are the recent suggestions from some leading members that the five year limit on holding a GPEX post
should be abolished and that we should move from two conferences a year to one.
Second, we must continually strive to develop the conditions in which active democracy can thrive. That means above all encouraging discussion and debate at all levels within the party in order to build the capacity of party members to both take an active and informed part in
developing party policy and to effectively hold the leadership of the organisation to account. We need more leadership in the Green Party rather than less, but leadership spreading up from the base rather than down from the top or out from the centre.
As we grow, we will inevitably develop an increasingly professional bureaucracy – and we need to. There is no doubt that we must pay a price to ensure that these hierarchies do not slowly begin to dominate the party, as they inevitably will without the conscious commitment of
the membership to counter that trend. Decision making will inevitably appear cumbersome and will involve apparently endless debate over everything. However, that endless debate is in fact the lifeblood that keeps our politics alive and healthy. Bureaucracy and a centralised leadership is like the clotting agent in that blood – essential if we are to operate, but fatal if not kept continuously in check.
Sean Thompson, Political Education Officer, London
Federation of Green Parties
Latin America
'Greening Latin America' Green Left meeting 4/9/2008
Thursday 4th September 2008, Bolivar Hall: Embassy Of Venezuela Chair: Joseph Healy, Green Party of England and Wales International Secretary Speakers: Roberto Perez, Cuban permaculturalist who launches his British tour . Dr Diana Raby, Lecturer at the Institute of Latin American Studies (University of Liverpool) Oscar Hernan Blanco Dr Derek Wall, Green Party Principal Speaker 'This meeting will show case the progress being made in Latin America with an emphasis on Cuba and Venezuela in dealing with climate change, biodiversity and range of environmental issues. It will examine the lessons in terms of politics and environmental policy that both the Green Movement and the wider left in Britain can learn from the Latin American experience.'Organised by Green Left
The Introductions
Oscar Hernan Blanco speaks about the work of his father Hugo Blanco indigenous politician from Peru.
Dr Diana Raby (part 1)
Dr Diana Raby (part 2)
Roberto Perez (part 1)
Roberto Perez (part 2)
Derek Wall (part 1)
Derek Wall (part 2)
Derek Wall (part 3)
Some questions
Roberto's answer (part1)
Roberto's answer (part2)
Roberto's answer (part3)
Roberto's answer (part4)
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Campaign against Climate Change: Planning Meeting for the National Climate March and Campaign AGM
London, Saturday 4th October, 11.00 am to 5.00 pm Room G2 in SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London
SOAS is off Thornhaugh street, off RusselL Square otherwise approachable from the other side from Malet street. Nearest tube : RusselL Square. G2 is in the main building where the Students Union is, up the stairs from the central courtyard.
The National Climate march is the biggest mobilisation on climate in the UK. But we need to make it bigger. Can you help us ? And plan climate campaigning ahead into 2009 and beyond.
The National Climate March on December 6th is also part of a Global Day of Action on climate,last year more than 70 countries were involved. Help us build this international campaign still bigger- both for the Poznan Climate Talks this year and the all important Copenhagen 2009 Talks next year.
As well as joining other countries around the world to demand urgent action and climate justice from world leaders the National Climate March will be pushing 3 major issue/demands to the government
No New Coal
- No Heathrow / Aviation expansion
- No to Agrofuels
While these negatives are balanced by a positive
Yes to renewable energy, energy efficiency, low carbon transport,deep and rapid emission cuts, green jobs
Help us find effective ways to bring these to the Climate March, and campaign on them through the coming year.
Help us build up the campaign network around the country to build the Climate March ever bigger and campaign effectively through the year.
SOAS is off Thornhaugh street, off RusselL Square otherwise approachable from the other side from Malet street. Nearest tube : RusselL Square. G2 is in the main building where the Students Union is, up the stairs from the central courtyard.
The National Climate march is the biggest mobilisation on climate in the UK. But we need to make it bigger. Can you help us ? And plan climate campaigning ahead into 2009 and beyond.
The National Climate March on December 6th is also part of a Global Day of Action on climate,last year more than 70 countries were involved. Help us build this international campaign still bigger- both for the Poznan Climate Talks this year and the all important Copenhagen 2009 Talks next year.
As well as joining other countries around the world to demand urgent action and climate justice from world leaders the National Climate March will be pushing 3 major issue/demands to the government
No New Coal
- No Heathrow / Aviation expansion
- No to Agrofuels
While these negatives are balanced by a positive
Yes to renewable energy, energy efficiency, low carbon transport,deep and rapid emission cuts, green jobs
Help us find effective ways to bring these to the Climate March, and campaign on them through the coming year.
Help us build up the campaign network around the country to build the Climate March ever bigger and campaign effectively through the year.
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Knife crime, moral panics and social solidarity by JJ Caspell
From http://jamescaspell.blogspot.com/
If there is one place where knife crime and the systemic, material causes behind it needs to be discussed, it’s in schools. News that a poem is to be removed from the GCSE English syllabus because it provides a vignette of somebody who carries a bread knife is the latest overreaction stemming from the moral panic that is clouding a discussion of the real causes of knife crime.
I am not sure what comrades in the NUT think about this decision, but this “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach is surely the wrong one in attempting to deal with an issue which is causing the needless deaths of an increasing number of young people.
Knife related crime is without doubt a serious problem. The shock value of working class teenagers stabbing each other for apparently "no reason" is without doubt a difficult issue for the collective consciousness of British society to digest.
However, the mass media is fuelling collective hysteria by amplifying the extent of the problem and, as a result, demonising all young people in the eyes of society as potential “killers”. The reality is that a young person is still more likely to die crossing the road, driving a car, or indeed committing suicide, than to be stabbed to death by a "gang of youths". Yet we do not see daily hysteria demonising reckless drivers in the way that we do “hooded” youths.
When interviewed, young people who do carry knives nearly always concede to carrying a blade through “fear” rather than as an “aggressive” act, and yet there is no forum or indeed discussion as to where this fear originates from. Given the fact that violence generally is rife in the mass media without discussion, and that material insecurity and inequality is fuelling an emergent generation of alienated teenagers, it is essential that the political and social causes and consequences of all forms of violence are discussed at every opportunity, rather than brushed under the carpet.
We live in a society where the only people (including young people) attributed with “value” are those with wealth and power, or those that can at least represent such traits. Under capitalism, our self-worth is commodified and measured against the manufactured social identities of MTV Cribs, Big Brother and celebrity culture. At the same time, the nature of racial and class cleavages in our society denies many from being able to realise such socially constructed goals, and as children become teenagers, such tensions begin to emerge socially with young people denied of a collective political voice and agency.
As a result, opportunities should not be understood as something that individuals benefit from in a “fairer” or “more progressive society”, but rather as a result of collective resistance to the economic system we live in; a measure of the strength of working class solidarity. In short, opportunities must be taken, not given.
In a capitalist society, it is simply short-termist, pie-eyed reformism to suggest schemes aimed at a certain demographic to improve their "life chances" (which ludicrously implies society is organised by “luck”) are the silver-bullet solution to social problems, and the same applies to young people. The argument that we just need more youth clubs or apprenticeships when in the age of 24-hour mass media the very measure of our self-worth is placed out of the material rich of the vast majority is an example of piecemeal reforms which only scratch the surface of youth alienation. As long as “opportunities” only apply to some, or even only a majority of individuals (though this is far from the case currently) then exploitation, material insecurity and alienation will continue to fuel violence and social insecurity.
It was particularly telling to note that certain parts of the mass media only really took the knife crime issue seriously (and perpetuated the hysteria) once a white teenager had been slain. There is unnerving sociological evidence to suggest that the oppression and suffering inflicted on many black brothers and sisters across the world has led to a desensitisation to issues afflicting black people even within our own city. But such an explanation is superficial. The real underlying issue is one of class.
For example, some argue that violence in South Africa has got worse since Apartheid was overthrown. Whether or not this is true, what is true is that violence existed under Apartheid, not only by the white population in oppressing blacks, but also within the townships where hopelessness and despair saw oppressed groups turn on each other. When such violence amongst an underprivileged working class begins to erupt and puncture bourgeois conceptions of hierarchical material security, the ideological state apparatus begins to sit up and take notice – and fights back.
There is always a tension between moralism, used as a fig leaf to justify class oppression, and materialism, where one can identify the inherent, underlying economic factors which fuel social problems. As a result, media amplification results in moral panics where anything but the underlying issues will be blamed for such violence. We see this in Palestine, Georgia and indeed all over the world.
The reality for the majority of the British population, as with the world as a whole, is to have virtually no control over one's material security. Capitalist globalisation weakens this position further, particularly in a time of economic crisis. The resultant alienation and deprivation will continue to fuel the tragic and needless consequences of knife crime and violence generally as young people feel increasingly alienated.
The alternative can only be solidarity, organisation and activism to eventually overthrow the system which underpins violence, material insecurity and the gross inequality that blights our planet, and is indeed killing it. An alternative, and I believe the only one that guarantees security and respect for all, is eco-socialism.
Whatever the means of ridding the world of capitalism and hierarchy and replacing it with equality, solidarity and sustainability and peace, schools remain a vital forum for teenagers to potentially discuss the issues which affect them on a daily basis. Long may that continue.
Posted by James Caspell
If there is one place where knife crime and the systemic, material causes behind it needs to be discussed, it’s in schools. News that a poem is to be removed from the GCSE English syllabus because it provides a vignette of somebody who carries a bread knife is the latest overreaction stemming from the moral panic that is clouding a discussion of the real causes of knife crime.
I am not sure what comrades in the NUT think about this decision, but this “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach is surely the wrong one in attempting to deal with an issue which is causing the needless deaths of an increasing number of young people.
Knife related crime is without doubt a serious problem. The shock value of working class teenagers stabbing each other for apparently "no reason" is without doubt a difficult issue for the collective consciousness of British society to digest.
However, the mass media is fuelling collective hysteria by amplifying the extent of the problem and, as a result, demonising all young people in the eyes of society as potential “killers”. The reality is that a young person is still more likely to die crossing the road, driving a car, or indeed committing suicide, than to be stabbed to death by a "gang of youths". Yet we do not see daily hysteria demonising reckless drivers in the way that we do “hooded” youths.
When interviewed, young people who do carry knives nearly always concede to carrying a blade through “fear” rather than as an “aggressive” act, and yet there is no forum or indeed discussion as to where this fear originates from. Given the fact that violence generally is rife in the mass media without discussion, and that material insecurity and inequality is fuelling an emergent generation of alienated teenagers, it is essential that the political and social causes and consequences of all forms of violence are discussed at every opportunity, rather than brushed under the carpet.
We live in a society where the only people (including young people) attributed with “value” are those with wealth and power, or those that can at least represent such traits. Under capitalism, our self-worth is commodified and measured against the manufactured social identities of MTV Cribs, Big Brother and celebrity culture. At the same time, the nature of racial and class cleavages in our society denies many from being able to realise such socially constructed goals, and as children become teenagers, such tensions begin to emerge socially with young people denied of a collective political voice and agency.
As a result, opportunities should not be understood as something that individuals benefit from in a “fairer” or “more progressive society”, but rather as a result of collective resistance to the economic system we live in; a measure of the strength of working class solidarity. In short, opportunities must be taken, not given.
In a capitalist society, it is simply short-termist, pie-eyed reformism to suggest schemes aimed at a certain demographic to improve their "life chances" (which ludicrously implies society is organised by “luck”) are the silver-bullet solution to social problems, and the same applies to young people. The argument that we just need more youth clubs or apprenticeships when in the age of 24-hour mass media the very measure of our self-worth is placed out of the material rich of the vast majority is an example of piecemeal reforms which only scratch the surface of youth alienation. As long as “opportunities” only apply to some, or even only a majority of individuals (though this is far from the case currently) then exploitation, material insecurity and alienation will continue to fuel violence and social insecurity.
It was particularly telling to note that certain parts of the mass media only really took the knife crime issue seriously (and perpetuated the hysteria) once a white teenager had been slain. There is unnerving sociological evidence to suggest that the oppression and suffering inflicted on many black brothers and sisters across the world has led to a desensitisation to issues afflicting black people even within our own city. But such an explanation is superficial. The real underlying issue is one of class.
For example, some argue that violence in South Africa has got worse since Apartheid was overthrown. Whether or not this is true, what is true is that violence existed under Apartheid, not only by the white population in oppressing blacks, but also within the townships where hopelessness and despair saw oppressed groups turn on each other. When such violence amongst an underprivileged working class begins to erupt and puncture bourgeois conceptions of hierarchical material security, the ideological state apparatus begins to sit up and take notice – and fights back.
There is always a tension between moralism, used as a fig leaf to justify class oppression, and materialism, where one can identify the inherent, underlying economic factors which fuel social problems. As a result, media amplification results in moral panics where anything but the underlying issues will be blamed for such violence. We see this in Palestine, Georgia and indeed all over the world.
The reality for the majority of the British population, as with the world as a whole, is to have virtually no control over one's material security. Capitalist globalisation weakens this position further, particularly in a time of economic crisis. The resultant alienation and deprivation will continue to fuel the tragic and needless consequences of knife crime and violence generally as young people feel increasingly alienated.
The alternative can only be solidarity, organisation and activism to eventually overthrow the system which underpins violence, material insecurity and the gross inequality that blights our planet, and is indeed killing it. An alternative, and I believe the only one that guarantees security and respect for all, is eco-socialism.
Whatever the means of ridding the world of capitalism and hierarchy and replacing it with equality, solidarity and sustainability and peace, schools remain a vital forum for teenagers to potentially discuss the issues which affect them on a daily basis. Long may that continue.
Posted by James Caspell
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