growing Greens pose challenge settle for minimal concessions. remains sadly still true today. commitment of the US and Soviet troops meet up on the River Elbe up plant committees and establish workers" control. Red flags were boisted over most of As we now know, Stalin's response, and that of the Red Army, was wherever possible the expropriation of capitalism in much of the East European "buffer zone', the overtums tion designed to exclude any possbility of the factories and in working class housing es- to repress and destroy these independent working class when eventually Moscow decided to proceed with took place not from such grass roots level, but Frum above, by burcaucratic and military ac- genuine workers' democracy or workers' con- While Stalinism demobilised the workers of the East and created only a bureaucratised parody of the potential workeis" states, mass Communist Parties also played a key role in demobilising armed working class resistance fighters who potentially threatened capitalist cule in post-war Italy and France, In Britain, in a much less radicalised situation, amid gloomy capitalist expectations of a wave of working class militancy, it was the Labour Party that mobilisations of the : in Vienna and sectors of Ber- lin, the first reaction of the workers was to Magdebourg.. areas liberated by the advancing Red Army in nationul, Emest Germain wrote the following *In Czechoslovakia the approach of the Red Army launched a general revolutionary ment of plant committees to run the factories. creation of Councils (a kind of Soviet) which authority, concentration of all arms in the In Yugoslavia and Albania the civil war (the struggle between the Chetniks and Par- tees of workers and peasants as organisations of power and to a workers" and peasants" was marked by a succession of clearly revolu fionary movements on the part of the working workers began by seizing the factories, setting up Councils, introducing workers" contmol, and In Romania and Bulgaria the approach of gigantic demonstrations of workers followed Easter Europe. For the post-war Fourth Inter- upsurge: occupation of the factories, establish- tisans) raged from 1942 on. From its very beginning the civil war gave birth to commil- In Poland, the approach of the Red Army class, while the peasantry, sharply differen- the Red Army started a real revolutionary up- surge. August 23 1944 in Romania and Sep- tember 9 1944 in Bulgaria were marked by by an uninterrupted succession of strikes, mass demonstrations, etc., until the Red Army Finally in East Germany and Austria, the here or there running the plant themseives. ... tiated, maintained a waiting attitude. arrived in Bucharest and Sofia... their hands bands of the workers' militia... gathered into
Page 29 porters of the Social and Liberal Democrats gained by a Green Party in Europe, have con- The overwhelming majority of the (SLD) and David Owen's rump Social Democratic Party, joined by ex-Tories exer- cised by issues such as water privatisation or the Channel Tonnel rail link. It is true also that the Greens" largest support came from the more prosperous south. But to use these factors to belittle the Greens' breakthrough is Greens* support came from disillusioned sup the height of sectarianism. founded the analysis. peace movement and the Greenham Common women, it is suspicious and even hostile to an issue that can politically mobilise the centre portant factor, its political impact would be negligible. The political factors which fuelled the growth of the German Grunen would pass through the Labour Party, many thought. But turing two and a quarter million votes in Britain - the highest proportion of votes ever Many on the left theorised that while the environmental movement would be an im- the Greens' rerults in the Euro-elections, cap- to the left ground of British politics. Britain's Greens have rewritten the political agenda. The environmental issue is now set to dominate the perspec- able future. The Tory Party has launched Labour has declared that it will be a red- vinced As with its initial reaction to the tives of the major parties for the foresee- an all-out attack on the Greens, describ- "deliberately misinforming the public But the far left remains stolidly uncon ing them as an 'extreme socialist party' SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 18, October 1989 green party by the next election.
Another sowce of point to the major countries in which, Those who defend ruling burcaneracies on the left the ecologists is that they. countries like the and those sions of greenhouse gases are still rapidly the policies of the for example, emis- Sovict Union 85. post-capitalist increasing hostility China towards FEATURES the ones are on a l no mean achievement for toral scores of 12 per and Scotland respectively was tional appuratus to speak of. Thatcher has done self as a champion of the ecosphere. And yet all the evidence suggests that the environmental vote totally the Greens' largest support came from the south, to record elec- 8 per ceat in the north and a new party with no na- much on the public rela tions front to present her- While
planning decisions in these countries are sensitive to the fact aster. Backwardness of technique in these countrics has meant heavy relinnce on fossil fuels for power and the lack of systematic controls on waste. But, like the marxists, ecologists have also correct- have been carried through in bureaucratic closed session: if the people directly affected by them had been consulted, there would have global ccological dis- ly pointed out that this is not the whole story. Ecologically disastrous : been mass opposition. Marxists must After one hot summer, discharges from factories could make things hotter still! is not controlled in the interests of the many. but is subordinate to the blind pursuit of the the earth beginning with the industrial Yet the advance of technology, which has been part of the industrial revolution and par- ticularly of its accoleration in the twentieth century, enables the devclopment of forms of economic development which are not ecologi- cally harmful. The problem is not industrial socicty, but that the application of technology attracting Green suppon, Labour is if anything losing left wing forces to But the most important factor is that of the state of the environment itself. The warmest five years of this century have all fallen in the sceptical now conclude that this is the result of global warming caused by the greenhouse gases, methane, present decade; Even the previously Greens by Conservative & progrunme on the eno effect*- The greenhouse the furious attack on the Central Office. Lahour's protection us the Tories: far from present decade. philosophy of
ings on ecologically damaging industries, and ticularly in the spheres of energy production and transport. This also means examining critically the patter of foreign trade to ex- Nor should our response stop at the level of economic programme. Friends of the Earth are developing with interested trade wions a "shop-stewards" charter" which would lead to activities by rank and file trade unionists, both in tens of the health of the workers in the workplace, and the effects of the firms" activity on the local, national and programme which does put production ceil alteratives, par- amine the extent to which industrially ad vanced nations despoil and plunder the natural resources of the third world. points to non-damaging monitoring of firs" employment. Much of the left therefore react antagonistically to any proposal to restrict growth, This is despite the fact that Murxists would see much of what counts towands ings in the world stock exchanges; advertising Countries like Britain long ago achieved that level of economic development at which the divisions betwen classes coased to be- come inevitable and necessary. It is not fur- ther economic growth which will librate and resolve the problems of British society, but Marxists, with a few honourable excep tions, have mistakenly adopted the Keynesian growth as being unproductive; financial deal- view of growth as the means to soive un and wastful packaging. of three degrees Celsius by 2050 would. through the melting of the ice caps, raise sea- ing of delta cultures such as Bangladesh. An increased incidence of hurricanes, droughts and fooding producing the devastation seen The 1987 agreement limiting the release of nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) A temperature increase of one degree Cel- sius leads to a 60-100 mile shift in vegetation zones. Trees will die in large numbers and not be replaced rapidly enough to prevent defores tation, and the consequent side-effects of flash flooding and soil erosion. The predicted rise levels hy up to a metre, Icading to the swamp- last year by Hurricane Inan is another conse- and carbon dioxide, gather in the lower atmos phere, trapping heat with catastrophic cifect. quence of the global warming-
the Green programme, while explaining that The starting point for a red-green alliance as far as the Marxist left is concerned, should be a critical acceptance of the major points of the fundamental problem in not industrial society, but the way in which that society is Coupled with this should be the adoption of a practical programme of work within the labour movement to convert the present an- tagonism between our movement and the By Steve Roberts SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 18, October 1989 Greens into an alliance for Eco-socialism: interational community and ecology. controlled and organised. rained the level of growth of the advanced ample, with an annual rate of growth of 8 per growth. Gross pollution and depletion of But, responds the Marxist, what of the un- derdeveloped world? Surely any inhibition of economic growth is a reactionary move from the point of view of those which have not ar- But a critical view of such growth is essen- tial. The success" story of Indonesia, for ex- cent, must be set against the cost of that natural resources, when taken into account, reduce that rate of growth in harely 1 per cent. the abolition of the capitalist system itself. capitalist world? vironmental platform, on the left and right, see the beginning of the large scale daniage to put company with them. Like the nineteenth CFCs into the atmosphere will only have a very limited effect. Carbon emissions as a hy- product of hurning fossil fuels are the greatest and most lethal contributor. The greenhousc effect' poses point-blank the relation between and conventional cconomic It is on this point that those who declare themselves in agreement with the Greens en- century romantic movement, some Greens mour the advent of industrial society. They the ecology Page 30
REVI Carl Taylor