Green Politics and the Idea of Liberation through “Building the New within the Shell of the Old”

Premise: Concentrated capital is a social asset and it should be socialized. But that should be viewed as a systemic reform; the idea it will end class division is short-sighted. The key to liberation involves a deep green transformation of society.

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We know that for millions of years humans (referring to genus homo, which dates from two million years ago) lived in stateless, classless groupings. About five thousand years ago there started to be a transition toward the kind of society we know now, characterized by states, empires, urbanization, private ownership of land, wealth accumulation, complex division of labor, and class division. In the Communist Manifesto (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles . . . oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”) Marx is referring to the history of the last five thousand years.

Oppressors and oppressed, the high and the low, owners and non-owners. For most of what Marx calls “history” the principal criteria of class distinction was land ownership. Aristocracy depended upon land ownership. Later, for some time, voting rights were dependent upon land ownership. Owners lived in a “higher” world in many respects; they and they alone were able to participate in politics, literacy, high culture. The vast majority of people lived a vernacular existence; they lived in villages and they worked the land without owning it. They lived with local focus most of the time but were subject to the vagaries of the upper-class machinations going on “above them” such that, in addition to the regular ongoing tithing and taxing, commoners occasionally got conscripted into work projects or military expeditions.

In our time there has been something of a “Great Transformation”, to quote Polanyi, such that belonging to the upper class is more dependent upon capital ownership than land ownership. That motivated Marx to write Das Kapital; and it has motivated the Left toward a certain social change orientation: socialization of capital could end class division. I want to make the case that, for the sake of liberation, we need to think in different terms than just ending the dichotomy between “oppressed and oppressors,” between working class and bourgeoisie. There is a deeper and more fundamental dichotomy. We need to recognize how there have essentially been two different human lifeways. We now live within an aberrant socio-economic complex where class division is just one oppressive characteristic.

The Left has not been getting very far because it has been operating under a theoretically misguided approach to social change—under delusory rubrics such as Mao Zedong’s “resolving the primary contradiction.” Class division is not the primary contradiction. Liberation depends upon transforming the whole “modern” complex more fundamentally. This argues for a post-capitalist perspective of “building the new society within the shell of the old.”

That’s not to denigrate leftist reformism. Every reform that ameliorates suffering, domination, or oppression and/or fosters environmental restoration is of great value. But our liberation depends upon understanding how misdirected has been the dynamic of what has been viewed, even by Marxists, as progressive development. “History” has been going in a socially and ecologically problematic (ruinous) direction for millennia.

We are rightfully appalled at the extant inequality, imperialism, militarism, class division. But we find ourselves continually frustrated by our inability to “turn the ship of state,” to make significant strides toward liberation. We would be less frustrated if we recognized the political platforms of the socialists and the Greens (and even those of the “revolutionary communists”) are reformist.

Again, we certainly should endeavor for reforms. But we should have no illusions about where they lead. Socialization of egregiously concentrated capital (i.e., that of the mega-corporations that so dominate the current globalized economy) is a reform, but concentrating capital in the hands of the state is no panacea. It should be done selectively and considered a temporary transitional measure. What ecosocialist system change could accomplish is a facet of a profound transformational process that should be our ultimate focus, should be the goal of our guiding “greening of society” ideology. Ecosocialism could foster efforts to build the new within the shell of the old. The latter process is an essentially countercultural phenomenon.

So: It’s not a question of “working class to power.” The Left is sounding irrelevant adhering to that messaging. Rather, our movement must gradually bring people around to revaluing communitarian-supportive lifeways via scaling down, slowing down, decentralizing, relocalizing, and democratizing. The Green politics movement, coming out of the 1960s originally had something of that orientation. It originally was more communitarian than socialist. We quickly found out how challenging it is to take such a visionary orientation into the electoral arena. But for the sake of ultimate liberation we must discover how to meet that challenge.