A critique of political ecology (1987)

From the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last January's German elections Die Grünen — the Greens — increased their representation in the Bundestag from the 27 seats they had won in 1983 to 42. This makes them the envy of "ecology" parties in the rest of Europe. Compare their success with, for instance, the performance of the Green Party in Britain in recent by-elections: 264 votes in Greenwich and 403 in Truro.

Even though ecology is a politically-neutral scientific discipline its particular field of study — the relationships of living organisms to each other and to their non-living environment — makes it one that has an important relevance for human social activity. This is because humans too are natural organisms, in fact the only ones, due to their particular biological make-up, capable of regulating and changing their relations with the rest of nature.

Ecological research has shown the present relationship of human society to the rest of nature to be damaging — both to the rest of nature and so in the end to humans themselves as part of nature. It seems reasonable that an ecologically-inspired movement should have arisen calling for social and political action to change this relationship. The German Greens present the argument for this in their Federal Programme in the following way:

A prerequisite of an ecologically oriented political view is the recognition of the interdependence between the balance of nature and life cycles, and an awareness of the consequences of human interference in nature. Our highest aim is therefore the enlightenment of the population concerning these relationships. The urgently needed communal approach to an ecologically oriented form of politics is still obstructed by powerful economic interests. An economically informed political policy which looks towards the future must replace our present profit-oriented mode of thinking. We must put a stop to the violation of nature in order to guarantee her survival and ours.

In the future economic goals should only be realised within a framework of ecological necessities. Our greatest imperative must be the least possible alteration of natural processes.

We can fully endorse both the ecologically-based criticism of present-day human society — capitalism, in its private form in the West and its state form in the East — and its conclusion that humans must take action to change it. Where we differ from the various Green and "ecology" parties and groups is over what action should be taken.

Briefly, we hold that what is required is a fundamental social revolution, to be carried out by democratic political action, to make the natural and industrial resources of the world the common property of all humanity. Only on this basis — the abolition of all property rights over nature and what is produced from it — can production be re-oriented from its present aim of profit-making and unlimited capital accumulation towards the satisfaction of human needs in an ecologically acceptable way.

Very few political ecologists see the establishment of a property-less society as the only way in which humans can consciously regulate their relations with the rest of nature so as to respect ecological imperatives. The vast majority of them see what the German Greens call “an ecologically informed political policy" as involving little more than trying to limit the damage the present economic and social system causes to nature. When they enter into the details of the "ecologically oriented" economic system they would like to see eventually replace the present one, it turns out to be a system which retains property, money, markets, banks, taxes and so on. In other words, they imagine that they can re-orient the wages-prices-profits system that is capitalism along ecological lines. But this is an illusion: capitalism can no more be reformed to respect ecological imperatives than it can be reformed to serve the interests of the wage and salary working class.

Green parties may be very good at criticising present-day society from an ecological point of view and in identifying what productive practices would have to be adopted to respect the balance of nature (such as maximum use of renewable resources, recycling of materials, interchangeable spare parts and energy conservation) but they go completely off the rails when they imagine that ecologically-acceptable productive methods could be imposed on the present economic system by public pressure, government intervention, laws and tax reforms. In other words, they are wrong when they claim that the present capitalist economy could be gradually transformed into an ecologically-oriented one.

Most Greens would probably object to being told that they stand for reforming capitalism in a Green direction. Petra Kelly, one of the more prominent of the Greens in Germany, has even claimed that almost all German Greens hold, with regard to the East-West conflict, that "there is a form of capitalism on both sides, state capitalism on the one side and private capitalism on the other" (Green Politics by Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra. Paladin, p.62). And the German Greens' Federal Programme identifies clearly enough the link between capitalism and ecological damage:

People in the Federal Republic of Germany are also affected by the ecological and economic crisis threatening industrial societies. This crisis is characterised by the increasing destruction of the biological basis of life for human beings and the exploitation of one human by another. The ruthless plundering of nature causes long-term damage which is in part irreparable. This damage is seen merely as an unfortunate side effect in the search for short-term profits. The biological basis of life is endangered by nuclear power plants, by air. water and ground pollution. by the storage of hazardous wastes, and by the spendthrift waste of natural resources. The ruthless plundering of human resources is even worse. The physical and psychological burdens experienced at work mount up as industry develops and utilises technology without regard for human beings. Production is not oriented towards the needs of people, but towards the interests of investors. The ecological balance of nature is sacrificed on the altars of economic growth and profit-winning competition.

"Economic growth" (capital accumulation) and "profit-winning competition", however, are not seen as inevitable consequences of the system of buying and selling, wages and profits but as a result of this system being dominated by big private and state enterprises whose size orients them to pursue these particular goals.

This mistaken economic analysis leads the Greens in a quite different direction from socialists. While we advocate an end to the wages-prices-profits system through the establishment of a world of common ownership and democratic control, they advocate that "large corporations should be split up into manageable units and administered democratically by the people who actually work there" and that these "smaller, more medium-size", self-managed units should practise ecological, as well as financial, accounting. In other words, they advocate that the wages-prices-profits system should be run by smaller, worker-controlled and ecologically-oriented businesses. This, however. is no solution to current ecological problems because it is completely unrealistic.

It is not decentralisation, smaller productive units and democratic control of work in themselves that are unrealistic (as defenders of the economic status quo would claim) , but their achievement within the framework of the wages-prices-profits system. In other words, they could be achieved but not within this system. As Karl Marx was the first to show clearly, in a situation where everything is produced with a view to being sold, where everything including human mental and physical energies is subject to buying and selling, economic forces come into operation which impose profit-seeking and capital accumulation on economic decision-makers whether these be individual property-owners, private corporations, state industries or workers’ cooperatives. It is not the internal structure of an enterprise that is important in this respect but the fact that it is an institution producing goods for sale on a market. These same economic forces also lead to the concentration and centralisation of the control of industry and to the short-term economic goals that result in monetary profits taking priority over longer-term ecological considerations.

We are aware that most Greens are suspicious of Marxian economics due to its association with the self-styled socialist regimes in the East which represent all that they reject in economics (productivism, gigantism, pursuit of unlimited economic growth) but these regimes are in no way socialist; rather they are examples of what Marx would have called state capitalism.

If the Greens can overcome this prejudice they would find that Marx’s analysis of the wages-prices-profits system of capitalism explains both why the ecological laws that ought to govern the relationship between human society and the rest of nature are not respected at the moment and how there is no way of this happening as long as this economic system, whose very essence is the externally-imposed pursuit of profits and unlimited capital accumulation, is allowed to continue.

Reinforced with such a knowledge of the economic laws of capitalism, the Greens’ understanding of the ecological laws of nature would lead them to realise that the political action demanded by the findings of ecological research is one aimed at replacing private and state property by common ownership and democratic control — replacing production for sale and profit by production solely for use. Socialism alone provides for the decentralised, non-hierarchical and non-exploitative society in harmony with nature that the Greens are searching for.

Adam Buick

Hitler was a vegetarian (1996)

Book Review from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Janet Biehl & Peter Staudenmaier
 (AK Press, Edinburgh & San Francisco 1995, 
£5.00)

Since the 1970s the Green movement world-wide has been dominated by anarchist and left-wing tendencies; but this has obscured the movement's more diverse ancestry. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s there were right-wing expressions of concern for the environment, combining a mystical conception of nature with the myths of race and nation. The epitome of this outlook came with the Nazis, whose whole political ideology can be described as "ecofascist". (It is to be regretted, however, since this term blurs some important distinctions between Italian fascism and German “National Socialism".) Hitler was a vegetarian, opposed to vivisection and loved his dogs. He was an enthusiast for renewable energy sources. Himmler saw to it that the SS had it own supply of organic farm produce. The Nazis introduced the first nature reserve in Europe and began a programme of extensive reforestation.

That was then and this is now. But the resurgence of Nazism shows the futility of supposing that it (and environmental problems) could be reformed out of existence within capitalism. The darling of the left-wing of the German Greens in the 1970s and 1980s used to be Rudolf Bahro; but not any more, for he has revealed himself to be an ecofascist, calling for a new “Green Adolf'. What is important here is that Bahro claims that he is only making explicit what was always in his Green political thought. For instance, he is quoted in the early 1980s, as a leading member of the German Greens, stating that "if we want to build an ecological decentralised Germany, we have to first free German territory” (From Red to Green). Bahro is currently Professor of Social Ecology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Social Ecology is a concept usually associated with the American anarchist Murray Bookchin, and in November 1990 he was invited by Bahro to a seminar on the question: "Is the alternative to ecological destruction freedom from domination or an 'ecological' dictatorship?" Bahro argued that, because there is a "dark side” to human nature, we need a Nazi-style dictatorship to save the environment and ourselves. Bookchin replied that the “dark side" is to be found in the sort of society we live in; whereupon Bahro told him that he would not be invited again.

Any right thinking person (pun intended) should of course be concerned with what's happening to our environment. It really is a scandal. What the existence of ecofascism, shows, however, is that uninformed concern and “doing something” can have disastrous consequences. For this reason, anyone who has read of the Malthusians with the Green movement blaming overpopulation will have been uneasy about where their line of argument is taking them. We need to understand the social and economic causes of environmental degradation before we can take effective political action. This does not have to be difficult, but it can confound a professor.

Lew Higgins

The coming election in West Germany (1980)

The Briefing Column from the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

This October the voters of West Germany will go to the polls to elect a new Bundestag (or Federal Assembly). There are three parties now represented in the Bundestag: the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats. The present government is a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats but in the past (and still today at regional level), the various other combinations Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats have also existed, thus neatly illustrating that the fight between these parties is largely a sham and that all three basically stand for the same thing: the maintenance of capitalism in West Germany.

The German Social Democratic Party (SDP) was. before the first world war, the biggest “Marxist” party in Europe, the party of Bebel, Liebkneckt, Kautsky, Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg. It had already become a reformist party (as a result of its mistaken policy of trying to advocate both socialism and reforms of capitalism) well before the first World War, but from then on it was downhill all the way. In 1959, at a Congress held in Bad-Godesberg, the SPD finally abandoned all pretence at being in the Marxist tradition and came to reject even the state capitalism which had in the meantime become its longterm aim. It openly proclaimed its acceptance of the “market economy”, the mixture of private and state capitalism that exists in Western countries. And since 1966—until 1969 in coalition with the Christian Democrats and then in coalition with the Free Democrats the SPD has wholeheartedly participated in the administration of West German capitalism, running the capitalist system in the interest of those who live off profits derived from their ownership and control of the means of production. Like the Labour Party in Britain, it has provided a few sinecures for trade union leaders, but has had nothing to offer the working class as a whole.

In fact the SPD has even come to be regarded as the normal governing party for West German capitalism. The opposition Christian Democratic party (CDU) thus enters these elections with a handicap, especially as their leader, Franz-Josef Strauss, a loud-mouthed demagogue from Bavaria (where the party is known as the CSU, the Christian Social Union), has a reputation to live down. Because of his past strident “anti-communism”, he used to be depicted as a possible new post-war Hitler who, if returned to power, would seek to avenge Germany’s defeat in the last war. Strauss however is simply another professional capitalist politician who, if the CDU/CSU wins the elections, will be compelled to run the West German state in much the same way as it always has been since it was set up in 1949. “Rightwing” bogeymen, just as much as “leftwing”, once they come to power, are tamed by being obliged to run capitalism according to its dictates rather than according to their own desires. Whether Strauss or Schmidt ends up as Chancellor should be a matter of complete indifference to German workers.

The Free Democrats (FDP), roughly the equivalent of the Liberals in Britain, will be fighting for their lives in this election. West Germany has a complicated proportional representational system, which gives representation in Parliament to any party which has won at least 5 percent of the vote nationally. The FDP, unable to win in any local constituency, is only represented in the Bundestag on this basis and there is a distinct possibility that this time their national vote will fall below 5 per cent, as it has done already in some recent regional elections.

The main reason this may happen is the intervention of a fourth party, already represented in a few regional parliaments, Die Grünen, the Greens or ecologists, whose main plank is “Kern-kraft—Nein Danke (Nuclear Power—No Thanks). This is the “in" party among leftists in Germany these days, with the support of such names as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Rudolf Bahro (almost the first thing he did on being let out of East Germany last year was to go to the congress of the Green party) and, until his recent death, Rudi Dutschke. The presence of such leaders of the “extra-parliamentary opposition” of a decade or so ago in the ranks of the vote-seeking, not to say vote-catching, Green party shows that, after all, such people are not beyond all hope. Cohn-Bendit has at least learned that, if you want to put your ideas into practice, you have to go through the ballot box (even if his ideas are still as confused as they ever were).

Also on the green bandwagon (but not linked with the above party) is the nine-day-wonder of a few years ago, the neo-Nazi “National Party of Germany” (NDP), one of whose stickers saying “Green is Life" we reproduce here. This is not so illogical as it might seem, since opposition to modern technology on behalf of landed interests has always been a trend of fascist thought. So, “green” voters will be able to vote for a “neo-leftist” or a “neo-fascist” according to their preference. All this should ensure that none of the minority parties, and perhaps the FDP neither, overcomes the 5 per cent barrier.

Any Socialists in West Germany will of course be writing “WELTSOZIALISMUS” across their ballot paper.

Adam Buick

Green politics in Germany (1988)

Book Review from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German Greens. A Social and Political Profile, by Werner Hülsberg, Verso. £9.95

For anyone who has been following the press reports about the on-going debate in the German Green Party between the realos and the fundis, this book will fill in the background. Writing as a Trotskyite infiltrator into the Greens (yes. super-opportunists that they are. they get into any movement of size influence). Hülsberg begins by describing the social and political conditions in West Germany since the war from which the Greens emerged as a political party at national level as recently, it should be recalled, as 1980.

His basic thesis is that Greens are a left wing party that came into being within the framework of the West German electoral system (which allocates seats to any party obtaining at least five per cent of the vote) to occupy the political terrain left vacant by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) when they abandoned even their nominal opposition to capitalism at their conference in Bad Godesberg in 1959. This was the conference at which they called "the social market economy", i.e a market economy plus social reforms, which is the model that Kinnock and Hattersley now want the Labour Party to follow.

Hülsberg is able to produce hard facts to back up this argument. Firstly the Greens' programme shows that it is not a mere single-issue ecology party: the Greens are anti-NATO and pro so-called liberation movements in the Third World; they support feminism (at one time their three parliamentary leaders were all women). Secondly, Hülsberg produces evidence from studies of voting patterns which show that 80 per cent of Green voters used to vote SPD (while most of the rest are new, first-time voters) and that many voters use the two votes they have under the West German electoral system to vote for both the SPD (individual candidate vote) and the Greens (party vote) This means, as Hülsberg rightly points out, that Green local councillors and regional and national MPs are in a very real sense prisoners of their electors who clearly favour a SPD-Green coalition.

This is where the realos, or realists, come in. They are those who favour working with the SPD in government at local and regional and. if the occasion arises, even at national level, to try to achieve realisable reforms. This, in December 1985. one of their more prominent representatives. Joschka Fisher, became Minister for the Environment in the Hesse (Frankfurt are) State government. The fundis, or fundamentalists, are those who argue that the Greens should not take part in government but should campaign, against the Social Democrats and conservative Christian Democrats equally, for their long-term goal of a democratic, ecological society. One of their more prominent representatives was Rudolf Bahro who left the party in 1985. ostensibly because it agreed not to oppose vivisection under some circumstances (for medical research), but in reality because he had become a quasi-religious mystic preaching moral regeneration.

Some of the arguments between the realos and the fundis have been pretty vicious and the press are always speculating about a forthcoming split in the Greens. This has never materialised and probably won't since both wings have an interest in sticking together to stay above the five per cent vote level that enables them to be represented in elected bodies at local, regional and national level

Hülsberg identifies two other currents within the German Greens, which he calls, respectively, "ecolibertarians" and "ecosocialists". The first are those who favour a withdrawal from industrial society and concentration on building up an alternative network of cooperatives, health food shops and communes. The second current (with which Hülsberg identifies himself) consists of ex-Maoists. Trotskyists and others who favour the Greens orientating their activity towards the trade unions and the traditional, manual working class. Ironically. for all their talk of revolution and anti-capitalism, in the internal debate over tactics they line up with the reformist realos against the fundis. This is because they see the SPD as "the party of the working class" to be supported, as Lenin put it and as Hülsberg repeats, in the same way that the rope supports the hanged man.

Hülsberg argues that, at national level, the Greens' tactics, in the event of a SPD-Green parliamentary majority, should be critical support for a minority SPD government. In this way - according to him - workers will soon "learn from experience" that the SPD are no good and turn to the Greens . . .  in which the Trotskyite vanguard will be well entrenched. No wonder many German Greens have doubts about the sincerity of the so-called "ecosocialists". And they are right, since it is clear that they are neither ecologists nor socialists.

There is. however, no real possibility of the Leninists taking over the Greens since, whatever else can be said about them, the German Greens are organised on a far more democratic basis than other parties, practising time-limits on periods of office and rotation of posts which make it virtually impossible for them to be taken over by an unrepresentative minority. This might stop them becoming Green Leninists but it doesn't stop them being, in a description many of them wouldn't reject, Green reformists.

Adam Buick

Letter From Europe: Enter the green reformists (1982)

The Letter From Europe column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent change of government in West Germany has again focussed attention on the ecologists, die Grünen or the Greens as they are called, who are expected to replace the discredited Free Democratic Party (Liberals) as the third party in the German parliament after next March’s general elections, maybe even to the extent of holding the balance of power.

But the first country in which ecologists have been elected to a national Parliament is in fact Belgium, where since the general elections of November last year they have nine representatives (four deputies and five senators). They also scored a relative success in the Belgium local elections in October, winning 120 seats, and they now take part in running Liège, the largest city in the French-speaking part of the country.

Before going on to examine the programme of these ecologists, we must say something about the word ecology itself. This is a science, a branch of biology which studies the relationship between living organisms and their natural environment. Strictly speaking then an ecologist should be somebody who studies or practices this science, not the partisan of some political movement. It is true that humans are also living organisms and that their relationship to their natural environment is another legitimate field of study for the science of ecology. It is of course because such a study reveals that this relationship is unbalanced that, by extension, those who advocate political, social or economic changes with a view to trying to restore this balance are called, or call themselves, ecologists.

In this sense socialists could also legitimately call themselves ecologists, with much more justice in fact since the change we advocate — production solely for use on the basis of the common ownership of the world’s resources — is the only lasting and effective way of restoring a proper balance between Humanity and Nature. In contrast, as we shall see, those on the political field who call themselves ecologists advocate mere reforms which would either only scratch the surface while leaving the basic problem unchanged or which are quite unrealisable within the framework of capitalism.

For the 1981 general elections the French-speaking section of the Belgian ecologist movement, ECOLO, published a pamphlet called 90 Propositions des Ecologists. Apart from the usual proposals that you would expect to find in the programme of an ecologist party — anti-nuclear, anti-motorways, consumer protection, health food, protection of the environment, anti-blood sports — the pamphlet does also attempt to provide a more global programme, of change from existing “capitalist and productive society” to an “ecological society”.

Instead of a society oriented towards “growth” they want a society in which, among other things, goods would be made to last, materials would be systematically recycled and work shared so that the working day could be considerably reduced. Whether or not these are desirable objectives, reading through the pamphlet it soon becomes clear that ECOLO takes for granted the continuing existence of wages, prices, profits, taxes, banks and so on. In other words, they don’t envisage going outside the framework of capitalism.

But capitalism is precisely a society geared to “growth” or. more accurately, to the accumulation of capital. This is its logic, its dynamic, even if this growth is not in a straight line but in ups and downs (we are currently in the middle of a down period, a state of “zero growth" which the now discredited Club of Rome used to call for). Capitalism is a system of society in which production is oriented towards the accumulation of capital through profits realised on the market. So to want to stop the accumulation of capital (“growth”) and its side effects while preserving the wages-prices-profits system which is capitalism is quite unrealistic. The political ecologists, in Belgium. Germany and elsewhere, are therefore a species of reformist and so subject to the same criticism: that they deal with the effects, not the cause, and that they divert much-needed energies from the struggle to achieve socialism (the only real ecological society possible today).

Capitalism has solved the problem of production; it has built up a stock of means of production capable of eliminating hunger and poverty throughout the world and even of providing plenty for everyone. But what capitalism has not solved, and cannot solve, is the problem of distributing this potential abundance. It is constitutionally incapable of doing this as its economic laws decree that priority has to be given to accumulating capital, or growth, as against consumption. Production under capitalism is geared to making profits, and not to satisfying needs. The only way to solve this problem is to institute production solely for use, but this can only be done on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the earth’s resources, both those made by people and natural resources; in other words, by abolishing capitalism and replacing it by socialism.

Only on the basis of common ownership can the aims of the ecologists be achieved. Only in a society in which goods are no longer produced for profit can the problems of pollution and adulteration be eliminated. Only in a society where goods are no longer produced for sale can high-quality, long-lasting goods be produced. Only, finally, on the basis of the common ownership of the earth’s resources can humans restore the balance which capitalism has upset between them and nature and live in harmony with their natural environment, live ecologically if you like.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg)