Hands up who’s heard of Georgism? Me neither until yesterday at the Campaign Against Climate Change conference. It turns out that Henry George was the second most famous man in the United States in the nineteenth century and that he developed “a philosophy and economic ideology that holds that everyone owns what they create, however everything found in nature, most importantly land belongs equally to all humanity.” Henry does not have many adherents but one of them spent five minutes trying to enlighten me about him while I was innocently tending the Respect stall. This was nothing compared to the fifteen minute lecture that poor Fred got at the Socialist Resistance stall. We were both a bit surprised to discover that environmentalism has a cranky fringe because we’ve never encountered one on the far left. One character said that the problem with socialism was that it was not sufficiently inclusive because it excluded capitalists. An original insight.
By my consistently unreliable estimation there were probably about 350 at the conference which is a bit down on last year. The far left did not have a big presence – this can be proved by the fact that SR was the second largest group there after the SWP.
The only session on which I can pretend to give a halfway useful report was the one on ecosocialism with Derek Wall of the Green Party and SR’s advisory editorial board, Jonathan Neale of the SWP and SR’s Alan Thornett making a late substitution for George Galloway. I’ll assume that Derek will post something soon on his contribution but I’ll follow his example and put in a plug for The Corner House.
Jonathan opened his contribution by remarking that he wanted more socialists to get involved in the movement against climate change and observing that at the moment they are a bit of a rarity. Lobbying does not work on an issue of this magnitude and what is required is an international mass movement involving tens of millions of people. As an aside – one of the noticeable things about the earlier workshop I sat through with Tony Juniper from Friends of the Earth, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party and Michael Meacher while containing a lot of interesting information was weak on which agencies were going to act. This contributes to the feeling of helplessness that many people feel in the face of climate change which Jonathan described. Noting that bourgeois politicians like Obama, Cameron and Blair know the science and are now talking about action on climate change he added that because they are the rich owners of the world they have an interest in maintaining it. Their dilemma is that the sort of rational planning that is required to meet human needs on a global scale potentially opens the gates to socialism by challenging the market.
Now we get onto some of the prefigurative stuff. Looking at what socialists have to bring to the movement against climate change Jonathan emphasised more than once the need for a vision of socialism that is for human need and is democratic. He explicitly rejected the Chinese and Soviet versions saying that our model of socialism has to allow for the election of bosses at every level and collective decision making on how human labour is used to meet human needs rather than making profits.
Alan’s most controversial remark was to describe himself as an ecosocialist, something he explained by saying that it is no longer enough for socialists to bolt on a bit of ecology to what they normally do. The immensity of the catastrophe which the science is predicting means that ecology has to be integral to all our activity. The scale of the crisis has huge implications for the socialist project because the combination of its economic and environmental impact is going to show hundreds of millions of people that capitalism is unsustainable.
Referring back to his time in the car factory Alan observed that no one at that time in the labour movement eve questioned what they were making. All that mattered was job security, pay and working conditions. The questions were never asked about how socially harmful are these machines, what is their long term effect on the environment, can society do without them? This was one of the ways in which the capitalist need to produce and make profit infected the workers’ movement. Now we have to start challenging the idea that productivism and growth are ends in themselves.
Much of the subsequent discussion swung around two points. The first was the degree to which one’s own lifestyle should be amended to reflect our new ecological understanding. There was one strand which thought that this is largely irrelevant. All that matters is movements, unions, and demonstrations and that what individuals do is of no great significance. The other strand, supported by Derek and Alan is that political action is the most important thing but that we also need to start prefiguring what a sustainable socialist society might look like. The example I threw into the discussion was that socialist men live in a world with a lot of sexism and while we know that our impact on this is pretty small we try as best we can to avoid being sexist.
The other contentious issue was whether or not the “eco” prefix is necessary for modern socialists. A strongly represented view was that what we do is more important than how we label ourselves and that it’s entirely possible for socialists to develop theory and activities on climate change without changing how they view themselves. Again Derek and Alan dissented from this reminding the audience that the impact of climate change on the world’s population obliges socialist to rethink all their basic ideas inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Liam redux 
Leave a reply to Phil Cancel reply