Notice how different this paradigm is

Editors’ Note: This article presents one view on a Green Party vision for the future, as part of a friendly debate. Please read Planetary Problems Require Planetary Solutions by Rick Greenblatt for a differing view. The Editors would love to hear your feedback on both!

The fate of the left depends upon its consciously undertaking an ideological transition “from Red to Green.” The central elements of such a transition involve reconceptualizations of fundamental issues such as the agency of social change, the interpretation of human history, and the end-goal of the process of transformation.

I’m a bioregionalist – not a socialist as per the traditional conception of socialism. I don’t espouse social ownership of the means of production as a universalist principle. But I do believe in system change. I think human society needs to go through a phase of eco-socialism for the sake of degrowth, detoxification, deconstruction-by-design, and general devolution – after having gone through a crucible of statist-developmentalism for five millennia and industrial-capitalist hypermodernity for two centuries. Devolution of power. Devolution of scale. Deconstruction of the statist and economic empires. Back (forward) to living more simply, more lightly, and more locally. That’s the ultimate vision.

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The most radical aspect of the bioregional paradigm, the one that poses the deepest challenge for consideration (or even contemplation) by us modernists, is the aspect of true cultural diversity. The trendline toward globalized monoculture is a corollary of the problematic now-gone-parabolic population, production, consumption, pollution, and depletion civilizational trendlines. Those trendlines have brought us to the point of an overshoot that is quite beyond what most of us can fathom.

Mass society and industrial modernity are a disaster. Do you notice that the trendlines go in the direction of increasing inequality despite the best efforts of communists, socialists, social democrats, and liberal progressives? It seems ideologically correct that the left should focus on injustice and inegalitarianism, especially if those things just keep getting more and more extreme. But there is something deeper going on. It’s a cultural insanity.

Erich Fromm started to get at this when he wrote The Sane Society in 1955. He had a sense that the problems go beyond capitalist economic relations. Like most leftists and Marxists of the time he was not able to fully grasp what he was intuiting.

Globalized monoculture is an aspect of the insanity. It’s aberrant, unnatural, and unhealthy. For a conceptualization of the alternative, it’s instructive to consider the way the Native Americans were living here in 1491. It was natural, healthy, and sustainable. There were 500 distinct languages on the double continent. That gives a sense that there were hundreds of cultural expressions and identities, all somewhat different. There was, of course, not a “perfect one” among them. Human consciousness of vulnerability, infirmity, mortality, etc. makes human life difficult and weird in relation to the lifeways of the other creatures. Human individuals and human cultural groups do all kinds of things. But despite all kinds of idiosyncrasies the Native American groupings were generally thriving—and not wrecking the place. 

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We cannot live in the current way. Unsustainable means “can’t be sustained.” And we’re not happy.

Capitalism is ruinous, but it’s just the current socio-economic manifestation of millennia-old aberrant and misguided lifeways. Socialism was naïve and mistaken to think in universalistic (progressivist, social engineering) terms.

Ninety-nine percent of our species-history was lived within the context of bioregionally-based cultural diversity. Sustainable culture: It doesn’t “go” anywhere. It doesn’t “progress.” It’s reflective of a type of creature living in its idiosyncratic ways. There are fights and mistakes and stupidities. It can’t be made “all fine” or “all rational.” There are no universalistic prescriptions.

Hopefully humanity will have managed to learn some lessons from its millennia of wandering through what we call civilization. Originally, human groups resisted population blooming and Power concentrations because of how destructive those things are. Now we’ve also witnessed how destructive are empire-building and, of course, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. One can hope that there will be a return to sustainable lifeways with a general sagacious embracing of resistance to population blooming, Power concentrations, empire-building, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

There are no guarantees and there can’t be a world police force. The human creature could very well commit ecocide and/or species suicide. But, of course, we can and should do more than hope. I think that’s what our movement is about!

It’s about a Great Turning, the beginning of which, I believe, will be dated to the twentieth century. I call the turning movement “the greening of society.” I think it will require an explicitly post-capitalist period of eco-socialism at the macro level. So I’m fully onboard with Green Party programs addressing macro-level policy prescriptions. But let’s get past being leftist-naïve. The Red paradigm was a product of nineteenth century industrialist-optimism and presumptuous developmentalism. Leftists who cling to it sound like credulous true believers waiting for the Godot of the “class-for-itself” working class revolution.

There will be no full-scale socialization of the modern industrial economy. It’s credulous to even contemplate that “the people” could “democratically own and control” the Leviathan. The scales are insane. You can have a participatory form of democracy within an ecovillage community. Maybe people could relate democratically, with an operationally-effective sense of “we the people,” if the context was a bioregional sovereignty of a million. But in a world of renewed cultural diversity nothing would be universalistic, not the numbers or the economic relations or the cultural expressions or the lifeways in general.

Won’t some pollute? Won’t some get autocratic? Won’t some get conquistadorial? How ever will conflicts be resolved?

I’m inclined to think that homo sapiens can learn lessons. That’s actually our only hope, not schemas of socialist planning. You can’t systematize generalized responsibility or righteousness.

How will conflicts be resolved? How will lustful empire-builders be constrained? They won’t always. Bad things happen. Messes have to be cleaned up. People have to talk. Groups have to confer. In bodies of interaction. Red paradigmers loved ideas like a “United Socialist States of Europe.” Such represented the peak of delusional modernity. But, sure, in the bioregional future: bodies of interaction among decentralized sovereignties. Representatives from the villages to the counties to the bioregional administration to the continental council to the world council … something like that. It’s very unlikely that a world council could set policy. It’s very likely that discussion and voluntary cooperation could be helpful. 

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So . . . all we have to do (!) is un-do. It’s been just five thousand years of aberration. (Speaking of messes; I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s hardly much use studying the history of statist history, it’s all wars, conquests, empires, oppressions, exploitations, over-expansions, and alienations). In the final sentence of his Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford writes: “… the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.” 

But . . . “we need the refrigerators” . . . “we need the medical technologies.”

How ever did the Native Americans live without our stuff prior to 1492? Amazing that there could have been any quality of life.

But . . . here’s a confounding thought: Their quality of life might have been as good as our own.

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Of course, I’m half-kidding when I say “all we have to do” is deconstruct the modern Leviathan. Of course I realize that the process will be extended, difficult, and dark. We mostly actually will be forced toward devolution by the crisis. Keep in mind: The extent of the current overshoot is beyond what most of us can fathom. But there could, and I believe will, be some positivity to the process. Some of us have already viscerally felt it! The tiny green shoots of the Sixties counterculture were an indication of how cultural change can spring up. People started to have an image of getting ourselves back to the garden. There were prefigurations of the new paradigm.

I’m not suggesting our political program should advocate that society go back to the Turtle Island 1491 state of things. Humanity may, in fact, wind up more or less back there after the crucible of the long devolutionary crisis period. But none of us can know what level of population, consumption, or extraction could be sustained, especially given our current disorientation in regard to overshoot and hypertrophy.

It would be counterproductive for Greens to be viewed as catastrophist, over-dramatic, or hyperbolic, especially given that no specific destination is determinable from here. Bioregionalism is not a system; it’s what Edward Goldsmith calls a Way, a natural, fundamental, sustainable praxis. I point to 1491 for the sake of conveying a conception of directionality. But in our social change work we should never say “go back.” We should use positive “greening of society” verbiage. It involves advocating counter-trajectory steps toward lifeways embracing regeneration, health, ecology, and community.

Marx said capitalism would establish the material basis for the next stage. He was  a purveyor of ideology in the worst sense of the word. New paradigm thinking says that transformations of consciousness and character will establish the cultural basis for a new society. The making of a counterculture precedes material and political redirection. The process has started, but it’s still inchoate. It will continue to unfold, over generations. There will be waves of devolutionary creativity that will include music, art, community, and spirit. The color will be Green.

Erich Fromm intuited something when he wrote The Sane Society; Charles Reich when he wrote The Greening of America; Edward Goldsmith when he founded The Ecologist magazine; Ernest Callenbach when he wrote Ecotopia. Lewis Mumford went beyond intuition. He recognized that an analysis of the Wrong Turn is crucial if we are to transition onto a better pathway. He dated the Wrong Turn to the period between the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of the statist-developmentalist complex (Sumer being the exemplar). He noted that, while aboriginal societies had most often resisted the development of Power in people (as being a malediction vis-à-vis community coherence) statist societies allowed and enabled the development of Power manifested as technology in the service of elites. The first “machines,” of course, were agglomerations of laborers, people subjugated into “social megamachines” to construct the irrigation canals and ziggerats. Mumford posited that mechanization has a tendency to take humanity in the wrong direction.

It was on the basis of such questionings and re-thinkings that the Green politics and bioregionalist movements emerged during the 1970s. Their most radical aspects pose the deepest challenge for consideration (or even contemplation) by modernists. But the crisis will demonstrate their insightfulness. Greens should try to do all we can to motivate, foster, and facilitate the civilizational turning that constitutes the great social-change engagement of our unprecedented times.