Rise of the Green Left

* Book: The Rise of the Green Left" by Derek Wall.

Review

"Derek Wall contrasts the long term sustainability of the shared Commons, written about extensively by Elinor Ostrom, with the inherent need for capitalism to create goods which become obsolete sooner and sooner, either via technical breakdown or aspirational shifts in fashion. The corollary is the burgeoning waste of resources even at a time of rapidly increasing resource scarcity - something which does not alarm capitalism given that it thrives on scarcity. Capitalism is driven by a mechanism that ignores morality - even superficially "green" initiatives such as growing biofuels for American and European cars in Colombia are shown to have involved armed gangs torturing and murdering local farmers into selling their lands so that traditional, sustainable pastures could be destroyed and replaced with alien, but profitable, biofuel crops. There are echoes here of Joel Bakan's psychological diagnosis of corporate capitalism as essentially psychopathic.

The Commons approach of sharing, in sharp comparison, reduces waste massively and conserves resources, encouraging a socio-economic system based on co-operation and sufficiency as opposed to competition and endless growth. Viewing people as part of Nature rather than either somehow apart from or in dominion over it, ecosocialism seeks to synthesise the most vital aspects of both ecology and socialism, with the inextricable symbiosis between social justice and environmental sustainability emphasised and illustrated again and again.

This is an important document for anyone interested in how green politics can deliver a truly different society and provide an answer to the claim that there is no alternative to capitalism. It challenges socialists to consider the need for sustainability in their thinking about social change. And it challenges the green movement, positing the need for a more coherent ideological narrative to underpin the authentic concerns of many of those involved. Greens who argue for individual or local action alone miss the point that, for example, even if every American citizen took every step argued for by Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth film, this would achieve barely a third of the required reduction in US carbon emissions. "Lifestyle change is not enough; deeper structural change is needed."

Collective, worldwide action is vital - this timely, highly readable and usefully engaging tome sets out some of the paths we can take towards a far happier world. Tracing the thinking behind a sustainable and just human society back as far as Marx and Engels, the book charts the progress of ecosocialism to date. Latin America is a particular example to the world; but the book also looks at developments elsewhere, including the rise of ecosocialism within green and left political parties like Die Linke in Germany, and the establishment of the global Ecosocialist International Network. It highlights practical soldairty between movements in different parts of the world, such as combined action between Peruvian trade unions and British climate change activists following the Bagua massacre in 2009.

Derek Wall argues for an inclusive approach, embracing a diverse range of strategies and tactics and a wide range of thinking. The leap from where we are now to where we need to be is substantial, and so a welcome segment of the book covers possible transitional steps, such as progressive mutualisation of the economy, land reform and conversion of military production to peaceful and renewable purposes. He explicitly rejects the narrow dogmatic purity that so often stymies the Left, though equally cautions that political parties and individuals within them risk being seduced by power and so absorbed into the mainstream, neutralising their capacity to effect real change. Constant self-challenge and renewal within radical movements are important in order to effectively tackle wider societal issues." (http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-manifesto.html)

Excerpts

Why the Commons is Important for the Left

Excerpted from chapter 1, by Derek Wall:

"Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, was co-winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics, in recognition of her work on the commons. She has spent a lifetime researching common property and found that across the globe, indigenous people and peasants have discovered ways of sharing land in ways that are ecologically sustainable and promote real prosperity (Ostrom 1990).

Former Green Party member of the New Zealand Parliament Nandor Tanczos contrasts traditional commons management with capitalist property rights:

- Our concepts of property ownership are vastly different from traditional practices of recognising use rights over various resources. A right to grow or gather food or other resources in a particular place is about meeting needs. Property ownership is about the ability to live on one side of the world and speculate on resources on the other, possibly without ever seeing it, without regard to need or consequence. The ability to ‘own’ property is fundamental to capitalism. Since the first limited liability companies – the Dutch and British East India Companies – were formed, we have seen the kidnapping and enslavement of 20–60 million African people and the rape, murder and exploitation of indigenous people around the world. Colonisation was primarily about mercantile empires, not political ones. It was all about forcing indigenous, communitarian people to accept private individual ownership of resources, which could then be alienated, either by being bought or stolen. (Tanczos in Wall 2005: xiv)

The commons overcomes many of the problems with traditional state socialism because it tends to be flexible and decentralised. It has an inbuilt ecological principle based on the concept of usufruct, that is, access to a resource is granted only if the resource is left in as good a form as it was when first found. By extending this concept of usufruct, we can provide the basis of an ecological economy. By providing access, the commons enables prosperity without growth; if we have access to the resources we need, we can reduce wasteful duplication.

Preserving and extending the commons for forests, seas and other ecological resources is particularly vital. In the world’s rainforests, indigenous people almost universally use communal ownership to prevent ecological destruction of the forests. However, the commons principle can be applied far more widely. In the form of free software and access to the World Wide Web, it has already transformed the knowledge economy and decommodified access to culture and information. This, of course, is still imperfect: people in poorer communities may lack access to the Internet, and free Internet resources are still used to generate sales revenue.

Yet it already has had an extraordinary impact and shows that alternatives to private ownership are possible. It has already redistributed income from media corporations to consumers. The legal theorist Yochai Benkler (2006) has suggested that what he terms ‘social sharing’ can be applied to physical goods: we use a good only some of the time, and sharing allows more access to the good, without increased production. This is already occurring with car clubs.

Roberto Verzola, an environmental activist from the Philippines has argued:

- Perfect cooperation, which leads to more abundance, is as important an economic concept as perfect competition. A properly-managed free commons, like a freely accessible public library of books, CDs and DVDs, can help create more abundance as much as an unregulated free market often leads to artificial scarcity. (Verzola 2009)

Varied forms of social sharing can massively reduce the need to produce physical goods but at the same time improve our access to them; this cuts through the contradiction between ecology and prosperity. Many people in the green movement are aware that economic growth is unsustainable, and socialists are critical of capitalism to a greater or lesser extent, but most people involved in progressive politics are unaware of the importance of the commons as a means of constructing a green and socialist economy. The commons is a solution that combines ecology with free access to resources, it does not abolish individual property but allows us to have greater use of resources with far less waste. Think of taking toys from a toy library, borrowing tools for a day, using a car pool, or even growing food on an allotment. Commons squares the circle, potentially allowing improved standards of living with far less physical impact on the environment. We need to build new commons if we are to survive and prosper as a species. Commons are almost always under assault, and globally, commons have been stolen from people and fenced off. Corporations spend billions lobbying politicians to make it difficult for individuals to access knowledge and culture for free. Corrupt academics produce ‘research’ arguing that commons must be destroyed.

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An economy based on use-values that promote ecology would be based on property rights that protect the environment while providing increasing access to sustainable resources. Ecosocialism is about the battle for the commons, conserving existing commons, and extending and deepening commons."