In his New Green Horizons article of June 2026, “Nonviolence, Ukraine, and the Greens,” Howie Hawkins wrote: “Greens must ask ourselves: If armed force will stop genocide and nonviolent action cannot, we must use it.”
My response: Howie is mostly correct in a realo sense. Ukrainians in 2022, for example, under the circumstances of the current realities, needed armaments and could not possibly consider the alternative of nonviolent resistance to thwart the Russian invasion of their country.
So it’s appropriate to acknowledge the idea that nonviolence as a generalized principle is impossible given the context of current socio-political realities.
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This article will discuss what’s realo, what’s fundi, what’s possible, and what’s not possible.
. . . what’s not possible given the current reality (re: the egregious, unprecedented-in-history extents of ecological overshoot, militarism, inequality, power elitism, commodification, atomization, alienation, institutional-technological complexity, generalized hypertrophy, withering of community, spiritual impoverishment, psychopathology, cultural malaise, and overall unsustainability).
. . . and how Greens can consider relating to the situation.
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Let’s think about ideas like: progression, advancement, improvement. Technological advancement brings more power. If the valuation schema is such as to strive for dominion over nature, technological advancement fosters that. It also enables productivity improvements and increases in production. Consequential increases in consumption enable increases in population. A thousand years ago there were 300 million humans on the planet; two hundred years ago (just two long lifetimes ago) about a billion; now over eight billion. It’s crowded now, there’s a lot of traffic, and there’s too much in the way of resource depletion and habitat destruction. There are improvements in certain areas, but degradations in other areas, with perhaps no overall net improvement of lifeways. So, has there been progression … progress? It’s debatable.
But surely there’s been progress in regard to our comprehension of the process, in regard to ecological consciousness, and in regard to democratic aspirations. Out of the Enlightenment came a movement for republicanism. After the American and French revolutions some of the most enlightened thinking contended that democracy in the political sphere can be vitiated by wealth/power inequalities. The idea of extending democracy into the economic sphere inaugurated a movement that went beyond republicanism. The word ‘socialism’ was first used in 1827 in the British publication Co-Operative Magazine … almost exactly 200 years ago!
The socialist movement has instigated adoption of reforms: the 8-hour workday, extended suffrage, public education, social welfare measures, labor and civil rights, progressive (ostensibly) taxation. But there has been no enduringly successful implementation of the full socialist transformational vision, being: socialization of the bulk of society’s productive assets. In 1848 The Manifesto said that the specter of communism was haunting Europe (sounded imminent). That was 178 years ago. In 1912 the Appeal to Reason carried a headline: “Indications Are That Truly This Is Our Year” (sounded imminent). That was 114 years ago.
So it might be appropriate to consider the idea that socialism is impossible given the context of current socio-economic realities.
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Green activist John Clark wrote a book in 2013 titled The Impossible Community. The gist of it is that revitalization of local community life is necessary but not possible under the conditions we currently face.
What do we face? I think if we understand it we can explain the frustration we so often encounter in our social-change work and the disappointment associated with the limited achievements of our movement. The implications of Clark’s thesis is that we might need to contemplate the possibility that ecological responsibility, social justice (currently a whack-a-mole endeavor), egalitarianism, extended democracy, and nonviolence are impossible under conditions of mass society and industrial hypermodernity dominated by mega-states and mega-corporations. Under these conditions the realo-reformist orientation to social change makes sense. Reforms can be won. We should struggle for reforms and appreciate every victory.
And it makes sense to be realistic about militarism if nonviolence is impossible.
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Violence, of course, is a horrible thing.
There’s a phenomenon whereby people either romanticize about military combat or they forget how horrible the last war was. They march off to war. Many lives are lost and even more lives are shattered. But people keep doing it. Or, at least, they’ve been doing it during the statist period. Anthropologists tell us that, while aboriginal tribal peoples did skirmish from time to time, they rarely conducted warfare in the way that we’ve been observing during the statist period. Under the Old Ways, borders were not fixed and determinate, so territorial disputes or incursions could arise, followed by some men from each side getting into a rumble and some blood being shed. Wholescale conquest or enslavement or decimation was a rarity prior to when population densities and resource scarcities became widespread factors. That reality constituted ninety-nine percent of our species-history.
States arose starting about five thousand years ago. They’ve tended to be expansionist and conquistadorial. Their standing armies have been trained to be violent. The armies are a horror. But that’s the world we live in—and within that sorry context what Howie Hawkins advocates does make sense from a realistic-exigent perspective.
Nonetheless, it’s discomfiting to hear Howie advocating that the most dominant imperium in world history send armaments into a conflagration that has the potential to develop into a World War. The fundis among us might remember how, in 1967, we demonstrated in front of the Pentagon. With a large and energetic crowd we attempted to levitate the building. Abbie Hoffman had in mind the modest objective of having it turn orange and begin to vibrate, at which time the Vietnam War would end. But some of us were hoping for more. Our objective was to have the Pentagon—the source of military power buttressing the imperium—sail away and disappear entirely.
Silly us, of course, but expressive of our nonviolent ethos at the time. Those of us who still insist upon adhering to that ethos might conjure a disturbing counter-image: It’s 2026 and Howie Hawkins leads a demonstration in front of the Pentagon. He gathers a small crowd. He hands around flyers headlined: “Department of Defense, we are concerned that you’re running low on weaponry.” And: “Department of War, we demand that you build more weaponry and send it to Ukraine!” Some Greens are disconcerted. Howie says they’re not being realistic.
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Ukrainians wish that their case in the court of world opinion would resonate more than it does. They were invaded; Russia ought to be widely sanctioned and diplomatically isolated. A problem is that much of the world sees complexities. Yes, Ukraine was threatened and then invaded. But Russia also was threatened—with the specter of NATO expansion to its border. Yes, Russia is being lethally belligerent. But Ukraine is also attacking and killing. Yes, Russia is an imperialist power (that the left should never support), but the corrupt Ukrainian regime can hardly be championed: Decades of misleadership have gotten that country into the tragic position of acting as a proxy for another set of imperialist powers.
Complexities. Missiles flying. Deaths and destructions. A case can be made that a demonstrative commitment by Ukrainians to nonviolent resistance would have resulted in more sympathy for their cause, more likelihood of international action on their behalf, less ultimate destruction, fewer deaths. Ukraine’s resort to militarism, including counter-attacks into Russian territory, has fostered a perception of two belligerents.
I’m not a pacifist in the “turn the other cheek” sense. Immediate personal self-defense is called for in the circumstance of direct personal aggression. State-based militarism is something else. I think our Nonviolence pillar means that Greens should always take the lead in abjuring militarism. If vociferously promulgated as an ethos, as a commitment, nonviolent resistance could gain widespread recognition as a morally credible alternative. Stop the wars, already. Refuse to tolerate militarism, already.
Movements develop in waves. The socialists were in the forefront of an anti-militarist wave during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The wave dissipated with the onset of World War I. A Gandhi-inspired wave emerged after World War II. The New Left/counterculturalist fundis I mentioned above (Pentagon, 1967) encouraged participation from people in all walks of life—students, workers, clergy, homemakers, professionals, seniors—even soldiers. Massive and robust participation makes movements hard to suppress. But movements develop in waves and the second wave dissipated.
Ukrainian peaceniks theoretically could have organized for passive resistance, broadcasting the message that it’s psychologically harder for invading soldiers to justify attacking peaceful civilians than attacking armed combatants. Somebody somewhere has to take the lead in that respect at some point. But, of course, within the context of current socio-political realities there was little chance Ukrainians would have given consideration to the idea of nonviolent resistance.
Our Nonviolence movement is still inchoate. Howie notes: “Mahatma Gandhi viewed nonviolence as a powerful and effective force for promoting peace and positive social change. But he also recognized that it was unrealistic to expect most people to summon the immense courage and self-sacrifice required when resisting oppressors who will simply kill nonviolent resisters.”
On that basis Howie is being realistic.
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But.
We must not leave it at that. We essentially need to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time: what’s currently realistic and what’s ultimately righteous. What’s currently realistic allows for social democratic reforms rather than socialism; for occasional voting rather than democracy; for some social justice gains but hardly egalitarianism; for militarist solutions rather than nonviolence.
If we don’t understand the need for two-mindedness we’ll experience disappointment. The outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war will be disappointing. The Ukrainian activists Howie mentions in his article are likely to wind up embittered, some lives shattered, possibly injured physically or psychologically. Every war ends that way.
Greens who call for armaments to Ukraine (the realo position) should also keep in mind that the armaments prolong a horror. Some Greens (noting the fundi position) should be saying that nonviolent resistance is better. The Nonviolence pillar was a significant reason why I gravitated to the Green politics movement. But I would be continually disappointed if I didn’t understand about how current realities require us to cultivate the ability to hold two ideas in mind at the same time. They require us to be able to operate on two levels.
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I term my worldview: “eco-communitarianism.” I got that from the aforementioned John Clark. The title of his book, The Impossible Community, suggests that we need to keep two ideas in our mind at the same time. We can and should provide visions of social transformation based on our ideals. We also can and should comprehend why those visions are impossible under current conditions. That being so, it’s not “selling out” to acknowledge that some of our immediate objectives can involve working for reforms that offer improvements and harm reduction.
Ecosocialism can defang the ruinous capitalist system by socializing some key industries. We can nonetheless keep in mind that doing so is not a panacea. If concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of private profiteers is anathema, concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the state has its own issues. If extents of decommodification are desirable via expansion of the social safety net, we can nonetheless keep in mind that communitarian solutions are superior to any cultivation of statist dependency. We can explain that an ecosocialism implemented under conditions of mass society and industrial hypermodernity is, at this critical point of history, a reform that can open pathways toward an ultimate deep transformation.
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This point in history is critically pathological. Not yet understanding what we face, leftism has been frustrated and floundering. Vide: postmodernism, identity politics, workerist delusions, tech-aided schemas for “participatory economics.”
Understand that there has been a paradigm. Progressive activism during the eighteenth century centered around republican democracy per Paine, Madison, Condorcet, etc. On the basis of recognizing the limitations of such, radicals like Babeuf, Maréchal, and Buonarroti advocated the extension of democracy from the political sphere into the economic sphere. Extended democracy (or what the Greens term “grassroots democracy”) is a righteous proposition. We radicals of the twenty-first century are still correctly advocating it. Capitalist enterprises are autocratic and exploitative, in addition to being socially and ecologically irresponsible. A modern economy, under anarchic conditions of private profit motivation, invariably engenders inequality, alienation, investment misappropriation, etc. as per our critique. It spawns economic empires like the multinational corporations. What a horror!
Throughout human history subjective control of the economy was usually the norm to at least some extent. The modern socialist conception is: collective ownership and democratic control of the major means of production (the “commanding heights” of the economy). On that basis our ecosocialist program advocates for nationalization of key industries such as banking, energy, transportation, and healthcare.
The paradigm: An economy of, by, and for the people. A leftist ideal. Attempts at implementation have proven disappointing.
In order to understand why there can’t be democratic-subjective control of the economy in our time we need to recognize how millennia of growth have led human society to a point of socially pathological and ecologically unsustainable hypertrophy—characterized by overpopulation, overdevelopment, and generalized overshoot. “Hypermodernity” refers to the scale and complexity. The size of the governments, institutions, and technologies is beyond too large, it’s insane. Within this socio-economic context inequality is hypertrophied. The trillionaire’s net worth is greater than the annual GDP of more than 150 countries.
It’s a “frog in boiling water” kind of thing, of course, in regard to the incrementalism of the process that has brought things to this point. We’ve lost our bearings incrementally, so it tends not to occur to us how ridiculous it is to cast one vote among 150 million; to log in to a forum comprised of three billion people; to be a resident of a megalopolis of five or ten or fifteen million people (and two or three million automobiles); to be a “citizen” of a sovereignty of 100 or 300 or 500 or 1500 million; to pay taxes to a government that’s so opaque, remote, and bureaucratic that we can know very little about it and have virtually no effect on its workings.
Is the malaise of the populace attributable to the fact that the bulk of society’s productive assets are owned privately instead of socially … as leftism has posited? Living under capitalism is depressing, indeed, but the immediate experienced reality has more to do with massification, atomization, complexity, and rootlessness. The individual confronts a socio-economic reality that is intimidating and overwhelming. It’s a world of impersonal institutions and enervating technologies. It’s a world that breeds sociopathology, psychopathology, and violence.
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Obviously people will always kill each other. There will always be knives, cudgels, etc. But I consider any device that can kill multiple people at a time at a distance impersonally to be a weapon of mass destruction. A rational society would ban weapons of mass destruction. Guns should be banned. Production, ownership, use of a gun should be a crime.
Standing armies should be banned. Group defense should be via deployable citizen militias trained in the use of non-mass-destruction weaponry. The citizenry as a whole should be trained in the methods of nonviolent resistance. We’ll want to transition away from the paradigm of nation-states with armies. But these are fundi, long-range kinds of goals. Under current conditions, as Howie Hawkins notes: “Gandhi recognized that real world situations arise where the use of armed force is necessary to protect the innocent or defend against aggression. The simplistic moral absolute of no use of arms under any circumstances is not moral in some circumstances.”
So, OK, what’s right, what’s best, is impossible in the world we currently live in. Nonetheless, we need to message about what’s right and what’s best. Just being realistic and leaving it at that generates an aura of resignedness and futility. Greens can have two thoughts in mind. We can message in two dimensions.
In a sane society extremes of inequality or injustice would be impossible. In fact, for ninety-nine percent of our species-history Power was resisted because it was perceived as a threat to community coherence. It is. We need to show what the alternative is. Prefigurative models are needed in order to indicate the ultimate re-direction we have in mind.
The EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) is a community comprised of three cohousing neighborhoods. There are 30 units in neighborhood A, 30 units in neighborhood B, and 40 units in neighborhood C, for a total of 100 households with a population of about 230 people. Participatory-democratic self-management is possible. Homelessness is impossible. People are known to each other. The idea that one day the residents would drive up Rachel Carson Way and notice that one of their neighbors suddenly was living inside a cardboard box on the side of the road, destitute, isolated, unhoused could never happen.
Two human lifeways. In one, homelessness is impossible. In the other (ours) homelessness is all but inevitable; people cannot and will not have a sense of co-responsibility for 350 million others. Lifeways characterized by massification, atomization, urbanization, isolation, and alienation are sick. The impossibility of community is an indication of social pathology. Of course it breeds psychopathology as well. The extent of the inequalities, the degree of alienation from nature, the stress on people and the planet is egregious beyond anything that possibly could have been imagined during most of our species-history. The scale and destructiveness of modern weaponry is beyond anything that possibly could have been imagined in the past. If we feel that we have to call for arming the Ukrainians we can also message beyond realism at the same time … about a world where nonviolent resistance is possible. Where nonviolence as an ethos is a bedrock.
It’s not just pie-in-the-sky. The movement termed the “Great Turning” or “the greening of society” has begun. It is symbolized by the inauguration of Earth Day [1970]. To some extent it’s a response to the sense of pending cataclysm. Richard Heinberg: “So far, the number of people attracted to degrowth, re-localizing, re-indigenizing, and bioregioning movements is small. Thus, it’s probable that the intertwined fates of society and nature will be determined more by failure of supply chains and support services, by resource depletion or toxification of ecosystems, and by the disunity of larger governance systems than by deliberate bioregional design projects. But [as the tide turns from global to regional in trade, investment, and politics] what has seemed impossible may become obviously necessary to larger numbers of people.” As the process unfolds leftists must work patiently for ameliorative and regenerative “greening” reforms that will ease the coming descent while forging pathways toward social sanity. Gary Snyder wrote the following [1969] because he could see it coming: “Since it doesn’t seem practical or even desirable to think that bloody force will achieve much, it would be best to consider this a continuing ‘revolution of consciousness’ which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side.”
There are no billionaires at the Ithaca EcoVillage. No one lives in a mansion. Opulence and homelessness are both impossible. There is an egalitarian ethos. People with relatively high incomes often voluntarily contribute more than the required HOA fee each month in order to compensate for those who find it a strain. There is a democratic ethos. Such is possible at a human scale of community. It is possible within the context of a bioregional commonwealth. It is not possible when the scale becomes inhuman.
China can’t be a democracy. Russia can’t be a democracy. The United States can’t be a democracy. “We the people” cannot take over the government of the United States. There is no operationally effective “we the people” at that scale. So leftists who message that the root cause of our problems is capitalism and the solution is socialism are making a mistake. Consequences of that theoretical misapprehension are disappointment and frustration. Collective ownership and democratic control of the economy is not possible within the industrial-scale Leviathan.
That doesn’t mean that in a world of thousands of bioregional sovereignties the scale would be conducive and so they all would be socialist. Subjective-communitarian control of the economic sphere can be implemented in many different ways. Bioregional commonwealths would exhibit cultural, social, legal, political, spiritual, and economic diversity. There will always be people organizing and contending for extensions of democracy and justice. There will always be contentions because conceptions of democracy, justice, and nonviolence vary.
But, meanwhile, whatever the conceptions might be, democracy, justice, and nonviolence are impossible within our present society. Misguided civilizational trajectories have led us to capitalism, industrialism, hyper-urbanism, overpopulation, overdevelopment, and general overshoot within a world of institutions rather than communities. Ecosocialism is needed in order to open pathways toward re-direction and transformation. Toward peace and liberation. Ecosocialism constitutes the realo aspect of our work. Bioregionalism is the fundi-visionary aspect. Our movement should embrace both. We can keep both in mind at the same time. Every realo reform that can be won is of value. Meanwhile, our work can be guided and inspired by the long-range, overarching fundi-ultimate vision. We can avoid disappointment and frustration by understanding that social transformation is possible but it’s an extended process. The crisis we are endeavoring to address has developed over millennia.
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In the early years of World War II, Green Party supporter Roger Waters’ father was a conscientious objector who drove an ambulance during the Blitz. At some point he changed his stance on pacifism, joined the Territorial Army and was commissioned into the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, as a second lieutenant in 1943. He was killed five months later at Aprilia, during the Battle of Anzio, when Roger was five months old. He is commemorated in Aprilia and at the Cassino War Cemetery.
It’s just about impossible for a person of our society to understand how insane it is to “pick up arms” and fight in one of their wars. Like: It’s just about impossible to convey how uncommunitarian these nation-states are, how deranged it is to get involved in any way with their militaries, to fund their militaries, to countenance the activities of their militaries. Greens don’t want to be viewed as unrealistic dreamers, so on some level it makes some sense to support the courageous Ukrainian armed resistors. Those who do so should neither have nor promulgate illusions about the outcome of that proposition. They should explain the context of their realistic advocacy. They should keep in mind the better world that our Nonviolence pillar points to.
