Green politics, self management - and socialism
MOST SOCIALISTS are now used to hearing the question, "do we need to be red to be green?" and to confidently answering "yes". And most greens are used to using their sharp antennae to detect the complacency and patronage which often lies behind that answer, argues Dave Bangs.
Too often, the socialist response makes greens feel like women and gay people and blacks were made to feel so often in the sixties, when socialists responded to their new-found confidence by telling them that they must not break the unity of the class struggle.
Yet, for all the too-common triteness of the socialist claim it is still blindingly obvious that capitalism cannot give us a sustainable society. Capitalism is unplanned. It proceeds by gigantic, chaotic pulses of economic activity, followed by destructive contraction and retreat. It produces only under the imperative of profit. (Not global, long term profit, but present profit for every competing unit of capital).
Everything is a potential object of profit: nature, our bodies, our sky, our air, our earth, our loves, our anguishes, our needs. Capitalism is blind to what it produces: Mars bars, cars, cruise missiles, GM crops, or (for that matter) organic food – provided it is profitable.
Its destructive wastefulness can only be ameliorated post facto. For you cannot anticipate – plan – for problems if the system’s most basic tenets are competition, commercial secrecy, profit maximisation and private appropriation.
But these truisms are not enough. For how can we persuade people that there is a finite limit to what we can consume when we have already passed the sustainable levels of depletion and exploitation of so many resources? There are already too many cars in the richest capitalist states. Our waters, our air, our aquifiers are already too polluted. Biodiversity is already massively depleted, such that many ecosystems are extinct or scarcely viable.
How can we persuade better off workers (and worse off workers who can only dream!) that another car, another foreign holiday, another twist of the ratchet of gross out consumerism just means our children will inherit a polluted wasteland.
Well ... that last question also contains the kernel of the answer we need.
For it is our alienation as workers, as producers, that makes us choose the endless round of consumption. It is the stifling of our creativity, the tedium, the lack of control, the squashing of our personalities, the endless repetition in our working lives, that drives us towards compulsive entertainment, and endless expensive purchases, to satisfy much deeper frustrated needs.
In a world in which driving our car may be the most complex, skilful and powerful thing we do in our lives, then why would we want to use a bus or train?
Capitalism needs to sell to survive. And our alienation drives us to need to purchase in order to feel good. It is a devil’s bargain. As Alan Roberts remarked of the United States (in his wonderful book The Self Managing Environment , 1979) :
"It is a remarkable tribute to the success of the consumerist structure and its dominant values that millions are willing to sacrifice double the time needed for a reasonable livelihood, when the surplus time is rewarded by commodities and services which were not felt as mass needs even a few decades before".
The corollary of this is that "ecological harmony cannot be achieved as long as the producers lack control over their working life, for the substitute satisfactions required to "appease" them will be of an environmentally destructive kind."
The fight in the workplace against the tyranny of capitalist management "the dictatorship of capital" – lies at the root of the fight for a sustainable society. "It is that exploited, alienated and relatively powerless period, the working day, which reduces us to settling for commodity satisfaction in our ‘free time’".
The fight for self-management for all producers lies at the heart of both socialism and green politics. It is not just part of the solution. It is its centre.
But where, in this desperate period of defeat and retreat for the working class movement, can we find the examples to inspire us?
Just recall the famous "Green Bans" which shocked Australian developers and capitalist politicians 25 years ago.
The Builders Labourers Federation, in New South Wales, responding to pleas from threatened communities, instigated a series of Green Bans from 1971 to 1975 against the destruction of bushland and against anti-social building projects which damaged working class areas and destroyed environmental assets.
Led by a militant rank and file communist leadership, the building workers took advantage of full employment and a construction boom to pin the developers to the wall. Over 40 Green Bans were imposed by the BLF alone, and the bulldozer drivers’ union was involved as well. Work on destructive projects was simply and effectively blacked.
Clear rank and file democracy in the union, with rotation of office and frequent mass meetings, held off any counter attack by union bureaucrats for 4 years.
Vital alliances were made with environmentalists, middle class activists, and militant neighbourhood groups. In the end, it was the victory of the right wing federal union leadership over the local rank and file union officials – by brutal force majeure – that caused the dismantling of the green bans – not the direct victory of the employers.
Here in Britain, in 1976, the 13 unions at Lucas Aerospace, organising a 14,000 strong workforce across the country from London and Hertfordshire to Burnley, researched a 1000 page "Combine Plan" which proposed the production of socially responsible products instead of the military and space hardware of the multinational was known.
The unions painstakingly created unity between unskilled workers, craft workers, and professionally trained engineers.
They drew up a list of 150 products that the factories ought to be making, from kidney machines and equipment for spina bifida kids, to a diesel electric, low pollution car, and an energy conserving low pollution heat pump.
They devised products for third world countries, and used appropriate technology.
On each of the 17 Lucas Aerospace sites, proposals were thrashed out by shop stewards’ committees, and later by project groups, and were widely discussed in the workforce.
Like the Sydney builders’ labourers, they were faced not only with the resistance of the employers, but by the bureaucratic trade union leaderships and the Labour Party (then in power), who offered vaguely radical words but refused to endorse or resource their Plan.
The Plan was provoked by the threat of mass redundancies as government orders dried up. As such, it combined the most basic trade union defence function with a far sighted but practical plan to break out of the constraints of the capitalist market and to become accountable to real popular needs and oppressed groups.
It took several years of manoeuvring by government and employers for the power of this huge self-management initiative to be marginalised, and its memory still resonates today.
And we should not forget that the great advances of Taylorism and Fordism in the development of fast, mass production lines, were made only after prolonged and intense struggles with the workforce over many years. Their success, in the end, was only won when massive wage increases were offered with which workers could satisfy consumption dreams. The devil’s bargain was made.
The Green Party ignore the struggle in the workplace, regarding it – in some post-Fordist sense – as no longer a place where the working class has power (if indeed, they accept the notion of class politics at all). But the direct action of the green movement, led by militants of Earth First and Reclaim the Streets, and other groupings, seeks closer and closer links with trade unionists in struggle.
In doing so they move far more consistently towards an understanding that it is capitalism which must be replaced, not some vague anti social phenomenon called industrialism.
Of course, in some final sense, we all – not just workers – suffer from the monstrous effects of consumer capitalism, but – in the real world – many rich and selfish people benefit deeply from pillaging our world, and will wage bloody and genocidal wars rather than give up those privileges.
It is the working class – the class of those of us who produce – whose alienation continuously reinforces the system: but this same class also holds the keys to the new world.
It is in the fight against that alienation and powerlessness in the workplace, the fight for control, and ultimately for self management, that we will build the vision of alternative satisfactions, of human community and creative effort, necessary to break the devil’s bargain of consumer capitalism.
At Seattle, the labour unions joined with third world campaigners, western anti-debt groups and environmental activists in a carnival of revolt against this nightmare world.
That embryonic alliance of working people worldwide is the key to the future of green politics. WE WANT CONTROL! WE WANT OUR WORLD BACK before those bastards turn it into a toxic pig’s trough!