Ecology and fascism

[Bernie Gunther]

I've actually owned a copy of that for about 20 years, but keep bouncing off. Although I read a bunch of it on powerful drugs once and it seemed to make sense until they wore off. I found Guattari's "Molecular Revolution" a bit more accessible and very interesting.

 

[Good Intentions]

It took me months to work through the 400-odd pages - I got an academic translation, which meant that it had maximised the meaning inside each sentence at the cost of readability, since only post-grad phil students would possibly want to read it . But it was worth it, but it is vital to keep track of terminology as it gets introduced, especially the 'body without organs' vs 'the molecular body' and 'desiring machines'.

I'll check out that Guattari, thanks.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Going back to what you were saying about attacking the encoding. Maybe a good place to start (and I've sort of started groping towards this a bit) is an analysis of Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" and "Lifeboat Ethics" which takes account of concepts like primitive accumulation, historical accounts of what actually happened to the 'commons' and stuff like that.

 

[Good Intentions]

I've never read Hardin, but whereever people have tried to use "Tragedy of the Commons" against me they've tended to talk nonsense. Seems these people don't actually know anything about the foreclosures...

Is there a good book on the question as a whole, or am I going to have to get it from the horses mouth and attack it from there? All this 'tragedy of the commons' stuff seems to be concidered the undisputed truth in the mainstream.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Best reference on the actual enclosures that I know of is Joan Thirsk's stuff. She wrote a couple of volumes of the 'Cambridge Agrarian History of England and Wales' and a bunch of other interesting books on UK agricultural history.

I don't actually know of a book that takes on Hardin directly, but it seems to me that something could be developed on the basis of an analysis of primitive accumulation.

Primitive accumulation is something that various people in the autonomist tradition have been getting interested in again, at least to judge from articles appearing in:

http://www.commoner.org.uk/

The article by Sylvia Federici (thanks davgraham) is particularly interesting, because it's talking about subsistence movements in the developing world.

 

[where to]

Interesting. Can you recall the title of the article? I don't see anything obvious in the english web edition.

it was about the internet, i'll try and get back to you on it. it was in the french version however, not sure about the english one.

 

[Good Intentions]

Thanks. I'll take a look

 

[laptop]

I also highly recommend Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari,

Bernie's view on this seconded:

Editor of a major newsweekly: You've read the Anti-Oedipus? How did you get through it?

Laptop: About an eighth...

 

[oi2002]

That's a tricky one. You're probably right about that on many specific issues oi2002, but there's always going to be a fundamental point of contention around where you draw the line of who gets to be sustainable or live well...

You could argue that the general association of Envronmentalism with the Left in the Anglo world is rather strange, it may be a symptom of the fragmentation and weakness of the Left there rather than a natural alliance. Afterall the hard Left was mostly a movement obsessed with urban proletariat and is the rockiest ground whereas it was the hard Right that tended to be agrarian fantacists and getting them to hug trees not much of an ideological jump.

And this is a fundamental issue that Green politics needs to address. As a lifelong Lefty I'm afraid I've come to the conclusion that at bottom no movement that fails to appeal to peoples self interest or vanity has a future. There's a danger that the ecological movement becomes a refuge for politically ineffectual bien-pensant folk rather than spreading its appeal as it did in the Germanic countries were traditional ideas of tidy social piety provided fertile ground.

If you look at the Swiss Green movement in highly consevative areas like the Toggenburg you'll certainly find the lifeboat ethic, being anti-immigration, isolationist, and favoring protectionism in trade. This is common if not the rule in the German Green base as well. On the otherhand they are also obsessed with sustainability and adopt a strong anti-car/consumerist/American stance. They are very interested in maintaining the communal quality of life but embrace the pious public sacrifice of creature comforts for the greater communities good and at least in rhetoric for the good of the planet. It's a position that Swiss Lefties of my aquaintance find infuriating.

It's not coincidetal that these same communities have spawned cranky groups like the Amish for centuries.

The Nazis had part of their base in the cultural traditions of Protestant Bavaria and it should not be surprising that this quasi-religous movement had some similar tendencies.

It's a mistake to dismiss this deep tradition as entirely malign because of that dark association, its a large factor in the emotional power of the German Green movement that it can draw upon völkisch instincts of those who would otherwise be selfishly devoted to Kinder, Kuchen und Kirche. Societies change very slowly and political movements must take advantage of the existing cultural infrastructure.

With the Yank Right beginning to make some conservationist noises those in the Ecology movement perhaps may aquire some very strange bedfellows. It may even happen with the Chrisitian Right in the US. It's an opportunity that should not be missed, getting Peebs type folk onside would be a major victory.

Oh and then there are these eco-fascists who may well discredit the whole movement and of course that's how the fascism suffix is normally used, a lazy smear. I've eaten orgainic Raclette with some fanatical Rightwing tree huggers but never met a Green Adolf so I'm not sure if they are an urban legend or not.

 

[Good Intentions]

I think what happens with the identification of green politics with either the left or right is that we have different currents within all three these movements, each of these compatible to the others in a greater or lesser extent. Green politics is concerned with a lot more than enviromentalism - saving the animals is merely the aspect easiest to sell to suburbia (where your money is likely to come from) without scaring them unduly, and suburbia. Green politics is the politics of living standards in one's enviroment, one's street is as relevant as the Amazon, as can be seen with a more astute greenie like Bernie. That is why the right have also latched on to it (outside of the religious right - using the otherworldly as one's compass doesn't encourage self-interest, it's charm to politicians I'd say), because green politics is the politics of self-interest, as is all politics. An enormous amount of effort that has been made to hide the link between enviromentalism and one's own standard of life (and the way enviromentalists do it themselves, through advancing and supporting easily sold causes, ie ones that do not run against 'conventional wisdom', meaning capitalism), which we really shouldn't aid in any way ,especially not in an attempt to gain a wider following. If green politics does not survive on a campaign of self-interest, it never will, and if we remove self-interest out of the equation (like the bleeding-heart enviromentalists, especially the double-edged sword Greenpeace) we render the movement toothless and ultimately meaningless.

 

[Idris2002]

Following on from oi2002's post, it's revealing that the Euro countries that don't have large, electorally successful green parties are the ones that have radical left parties that stand to the left of the main social democratic parties.

 

[oi2002]

Following on from oi2002's post, it's revealing that the Euro countries that don't have large, electorally successful green parties are the ones that have radical left parties that stand to the left of the main social democratic parties.

There are exceptions but that's certainly true in France where both the extreme Left and Right are forces to be reckoned with. The Greens in Germany did absorb the political energy of much of the Left and many on the Left have no love for them as a result.

That article I posted up suggests the German far-Right where cynically exploiting Green politics to broaden their street appeal; this is rather a different angle than the ecologically minded coming to unpleasantly Authoritarian/Malthusian positions. Mainstream parties in the UK often pay lip service to Green issues. Any sign of this with the BNP?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I think that with Janet Biehl it's worth keeping in mind that she's probably got a bit of an agenda of her own going on, although it's one I'm not entirely unsympathetic towards. She's probably like to prove that 'mystical' ecology, i.e. the deep greens, people like Dave Foreman and Arne Naess, and their progenitors, most obviously Martin Heidegger, are dangerously prone to leaning to the right, sometimes *all* the way to the right.

Whereas "social" ecologists, i.e. her bunch (she's Murray Bookchin's mrs I think), because their approach is grounded in an (anarchist) class analysis, are not susceptible to these leanings. The social ecologists have an interesting take on malthusianism, which I generally share. That is, to say that it makes no sense to talk about population as an undifferentiated variable, but that you need something like a class analysis in order to talk sense about that stuff.

Without that class analysis, you can't get past the 'lifeboat ethics' position that seems to be where most right-leaning and even some liberal greens tend to end up if they they follow Malthus's logic through to its 'obvious' conclusion.

Now I don't particularly share her desire to paint the deep greens with swastikas, but I do think there is a lot of sense in the idea that the way past the 'lifeboat ethics' position, as well as the various other malthusian nastinesses, lies in some sort of class analysis, which is why I've spent the past few months plowing through a lot of gruesome old marxist stuff trying to get a better handle on what that might look like when applied to ecology.

 

[kyser_soze]

But there are also plenty of right wing environmentalists in Britain Jonathan Porritt, Anita Roddick, David Bellamy etc etc.

And the BNP...anyone who's read their manifesto will know that they espouse a very primitive form of community ecology (for example an insistence that building materials be 'sourced locally').

I don't see where the confusion lies with the term eco-facism - just accept that there are some ecologists with pretty unpleasant ideas about how we can help the planet.

 

[laptop]

She's probably like to prove that 'mystical' ecology, i.e. the deep greens, people like Dave Foreman and Arne Naess, and their progenitors, most obviously Martin Heidegger, are dangerously prone to leaning to the right, sometimes *all* the way to the right.

Ah, yes. And this is being deployed much more than by those who would tar "ecologists" with that brush, than by those who are concerned with what ecological politics might actually be.

'Scuse cut'n'paste for the benefit of those who don't have New Scientist subscriptions (and made with the permission of the author). I think it's relevant for those who are concerned with how the debate of the OP is being muddied by anti-environmental forces:

The March of Unreason: Science, democracy and the new fundamentalism by Dick Taverne

* by Dick Taverne, Oxford University Press, £18.99, ISBN 0192804855

LIKE many who are elected to parliament in the UK, Dick Taverne trained as a lawyer.

After he had become an MP, he reports in The March of Unreason, he discovered that "tribalism rules...extreme opposition spokesmen will blame the government of the day for every conceivable mishap". He opted out of the system of competing parties and was twice re-elected as a lone independent.

He now sits in the House of Lords and has reverted to the adversarial tradition that British law shares with its parliament. His book's subtitle is Science, democracy and the new fundamentalism and he describes a world of two tribes. One follows a unified vision, founded on the principles of the 18th-century philosophical Enlightenment, motivated by rationality, liberal reasonableness and optimism for the redeeming power of progress.

And the other tribe? Well, he acknowledges in passing that it is not quite right to describe environmentalists as fundamentalists, as his title implies. Where is their inerrant sacred text? Nevertheless, what Taverne says he is standing against is "a crusading movement with all the attributes of a new religious faith".

Taverne decries a ragbag of irritating irrationalities as though they typify his targets, who are opponents of genetically modified food and proponents of action on climate change. However, what I see is rational atheist Greens arguing fiercely with the homeopathic yoghurt-knitters, not a homogenous sect.

At every opportunity, Taverne reminds us that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was a bit Green and joined the Nazis, and that the mystic Rudolph Steiner, proponent of a kind of organic farming, was well dodgy.

I am reminded of Godwin's law, which states that as an (online) debate continues the probability of someone citing Adolf Hitler as an example approaches certainty - and that the person who does so forfeits the argument.

Taverne is out of date even on law and politics, out of his depth arguing about the nature of science, and when I turned the page and read that he would take on the evils of "postmodernism" a whole London bus-full of people heard me groan.

Call me postmodern if you will, but who is the defence and who the prosecution in Taverne's imagined court?

Environmentalists see themselves as the defenders of human and other life against those who would prosecute the pursuit of profit regardless of the consequences.

Taverne, meanwhile, takes it as a given that the activities of industry are business as usual and do not have to be justified. His self-appointed task is to write the closing speech for their defence. If this is it, the case is lost.

The author informs me that prominent among the acknowledgements in Taverne's book is Bill Durodié, Living Marxism's connection to the "Scientific Alliance".

 

[kyser_soze]

I think one of the problems with some of the environmental movement is that they do see it as a religious quest - whether it's crystal waving Gaia types or Techno-Pagans there are some eco-types who view the whole issue as a religious crusade.

 

[chilango]

Any sign of this with the BNP?

Third Positionists seem quite keen on the whole thing. Even setting up a group called Patriotic Vegan and a dummy ELF thing. (larry o'hara can tell more on this I´m sure)

 

[slaar]

The problem is Bernie that 'natural' (i.e. voluntary rather than involuntary, slightly strange lingo that) population decreases have only yet happened, in societies exposed to capitalist culture (the vast majority now, bar a few tribes in distant corners of the globe), where such societies have gone through primitive accumulation and into mass wealth. Which doesn't promote a strong counter-narrative against the economic growth paradigm even on the 'narrow' subject of population, let alone wider questions of welfare. (On a side note, this view isn't particularly positive with regard to much of the third world where movements towards mass wealth manifestly aren't happening, but it may be that population rises will slow due to other pressures, most notably disease).

Lifeboat ethics are much easier to justify within the system, of course. Which suggests how hard it is to justify locally-sustainable practices within global capitalism, because right now a lot of consumers in the West (see Make Poverty History etc) that Africa's problems are unconnected with their consumption, or at least can be meaningfully dealt with, with little change to their consumption. The converse becoming both true and obvious (neither of which, I would argue, is yet the case or will necessarily be, although many would disagree), as is possible given ongoing trends in the world - resulting in 'lifeboat ethics' type arguments becoming mainstream in the UK - would require a significant change in thoughts amongst 'liberal' western populations.

Interested in the Swiss examples as a manifestation of what such views could look like. The UK has often been a more outward-looking nation, so it would presumably look very different here.

That Taverne book is worryingly bad, incidentally.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I think what happens with the identification of green politics with either the left or right is that we have different currents within all three these movements, each of these compatible to the others in a greater or lesser extent. Green politics is concerned with a lot more than enviromentalism - saving the animals is merely the aspect easiest to sell to suburbia (where your money is likely to come from) without scaring them unduly, and suburbia. Green politics is the politics of living standards in one's enviroment, one's street is as relevant as the Amazon, as can be seen with a more astute greenie like Bernie. That is why the right have also latched on to it (outside of the religious right - using the otherworldly as one's compass doesn't encourage self-interest, it's charm to politicians I'd say), because green politics is the politics of self-interest, as is all politics. An enormous amount of effort that has been made to hide the link between enviromentalism and one's own standard of life (and the way enviromentalists do it themselves, through advancing and supporting easily sold causes, ie ones that do not run against 'conventional wisdom', meaning capitalism), which we really shouldn't aid in any way ,especially not in an attempt to gain a wider following. If green politics does not survive on a campaign of self-interest, it never will, and if we remove self-interest out of the equation (like the bleeding-heart enviromentalists, especially the double-edged sword Greenpeace) we render the movement toothless and ultimately meaningless.

I think this is quite an interesting way of looking at it. You could argue, or at least it appears to me that there are two distinct tendencies in the green movement. There is one tendency, which is what the social ecologists would probably identify with 'mystical' ecology, where one is making an existential committment to something larger than oneself, 'nature' in the case of the deep greens and 'der volk' in those historical cases Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier are talking about.

There's another tendency that I'm rather more sympathetic to, which starts off with the science, tries to analyse how we got into such a horrible mess ecologically. Then tries to propose some pragmatic strategies for cleaning up that mess and ensuring that we can live sustainably, as well as possible.

The problem is though, the science only takes you so far. Someone like Lord May or Sir David King, generally speaking can see what the immediate problems are very clearly, but apparently don't think that these problems are inherent to capitalism and to the various competitors to capitalism, (fascism, soviet style communism etc) that were tried in the 20th century.

There are various ways to analyse societies that have arguably collapsed due to ecological problems of their own creation and those that haven't. I've done a bit of reading in this area and I've got some tentative conclusions.

One factor that seems to crop up an awful lot is the isolation of leaders and other priviledged classes from the bad ecological consequences of their own actions, both through economic priviledge and through ideologies which act to filter out the warning signs and to prevent them from being acted upon.

The centralising and homogenising tendencies of capitalism really, really worry me in that regard.

 

[laptop]

'natural' (i.e. voluntary rather than involuntary, slightly strange lingo that) population decreases have only yet happened, in societies exposed to capitalist culture (the vast majority now, bar a few tribes in distant corners of the globe), where such societies have gone through primitive accumulation and into mass wealth.

Sorry to pick up on just one point, but it's an important one and one I did a lot of reading around...

Working out why population decreases happen is very, very difficult. But one of the stronger candidates is actually girls receiving education, not wealth per se.

You could argue that this is exposure "to capitalist culture"... but it's still not the same thing as an economically determinist argument.

 

[slaar]

Sorry to pick up on just one point, but it's an important one and one I did a lot of reading around...

Working out why population decreases happen is very, very difficult. But one of the stronger candidates is actually girls receiving education, not wealth per se.

You could argue that this is exposure "to capitalist culture"... but it's still not the same thing as an economically determinist argument.

Thanks for the clarification; I'm far from an expert on the topic. (Male or female) Education and wealth are quite tightly correlated though, so I imagine it's hard to parse out the difference.

The basis of my argument, that no society yet to get wealthy has experienced a rapid slowing in population growth as a result in falling fertility (as opposed to rising mortality) I think stands; the correlation is all that matters in terms of a qualitative argument of the type I was considering (i.e. convincing people that primitive accumulation has to stop, rather than go through into mass wealth for fertility levels to fall voluntarily), not the causality.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Thanks for the clarification; I'm far from an expert on the topic. (Male or female) Education and wealth are quite tightly correlated though, so I imagine it's hard to parse out the difference.

The basis of my argument, that no society yet to get wealthy has experienced a rapid slowing in population growth as a result in falling fertility (as opposed to rising mortality) I think stands; the correlation is all that matters in terms of a qualitative argument of the type I was considering (i.e. convincing people that primitive accumulation has to stop, rather than go through into mass wealth for fertility levels to fall voluntarily), not the causality.

You do get ecologically stable pre-capitalist societies in places where there is no readily accessible territory to expand into, like the New Guinea highlands, some Pacific islands etc. Generally they practice some form of infanticide (but *we* know how to provide contraception to any woman who wants to use it)

 

[slaar]

Sure, but when you're comparing closed infanticidal subsistence societies with the West, liberal democratic constituencies are going to take more convincing than that.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Sure, but when you're comparing closed infanticidal subsistence societies with the West, liberal democratic constituencies are going to take more convincing than that.

Well, I'm not offering it as a model, just as a counter-example to the notion that capitalist development is a pre-requisite for a stable population.

 

[Good Intentions]

Without that class analysis, you can't get past the 'lifeboat ethics' position that seems to be where most right-leaning and even some liberal greens tend to end up if they they follow Malthus's logic through to its 'obvious' conclusion.

Now I don't particularly share her desire to paint the deep greens with swastikas, but I do think there is a lot of sense in the idea that the way past the 'lifeboat ethics' position, as well as the various other malthusian nastinesses, lies in some sort of class analysis, which is why I've spent the past few months plowing through a lot of gruesome old marxist stuff trying to get a better handle on what that might look like when applied to ecology.

To illustrate Bernie's point, I looked for a quote out of Thomspon's The Making of the English Working Class (which I couldn't find) of a contemporary response to Malthus, which I'll paraphrase:

What Malthus wishes to tell us is that wages are a natural law which can not be changed by man. He wants to make the payment a man receives an issue between the worker and his sweetheart, rather than issue between the worker and his employer.

Which says all there is to be said about that.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Mind you, it doesn't automatically occur. Generally when some place inaccessible like that gets colonised, the colonists either find a way to live in equilibrium with their environment or they don't. When they don't, they die.

 

[laptop]

The basis of my argument, that no society yet to get wealthy has experienced a rapid slowing in population growth as a result in falling fertility (as opposed to rising mortality) I think stands; the correlation is all that matters... in terms of a qualitative argument of the type I was considering (i.e. convincing people that primitive accumulation has to stop, rather than go through into mass wealth for fertility levels to fall voluntarily), not the causality.

But the (narrative) trouble with the argument that looks at the correlation, ignores the causality, and concludes that it's the wealth is that it's deployed by the Economist tendency of nihilist-capitalist.

Whereas I believe* there are suggestive counter-example: territories at the same level of "developing country" economic activity, with different ecucation policies, in which the birth-rate correlates with the education.

I'd be interested to see how it correlates with the inequality, too.

*If I didn't have a lurgy I'd be off looking for cites...

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Thinking about this, I'd want to suggest that perhaps focussing too hard on population is misguided. There is also the question of the intensity of resource use and the associated ecological damage. Certainly population is a multiplier for that intensity, but most of the concrete measures we can actually take seem to me to be much more about affecting the intensity of resource use.

 

[slaar]

Fair points all.

I'm at the sharp end right now, seeing people dying for lack of vaccines, food and basic hygiene, so I'm biased towards wealth creation but perhaps that's the wrong lesson to take. A village I was in last week had three families, the majority of each were children, and the elders said that if there weren't so many children there'd be nobody to look after them now.

I guess in hindsight, what they wanted was security, which in a stable society they could have at subsistence levels. Right now they don't have either, so in hindsight of the two narratives, mass wealth versus stable subsistence, the latter seems much more likely from where they are.

I guess the question is, given that these processes of colonialisation have been going on for half a millenium, how on earth you start moving in the other direction.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

One thing that particularly bothered me during the reporting of the Niger famine. One camera crew went to the next street and showed a market with plenty of food. The people starving in the back streets couldn't *afford* any.