BY JIM GREEN
In an article published in Green Left Weekly in 1996, Phil Shannon argued that a radical and militant labour movement would pull the environment movement to the left, or at least force many environmentalists to take sides in the class struggle and do away with their naive "neither left nor right but out in front" mantra. Currently, it's the anti-corporate movement forcing both environmentalists and workers to take sides in the class struggle.
Some environment groups have sided with the corporate ruling elite. The Australian Conservation Foundation has jumped into bed with corporate polluters such as British Petroleum, BHP, and Rio Tinto. This liaison was consummated last October with the release of the ACF's Blueprint for a Sustainable Australia (reviewed in the November 1 Green Left Weekly).
Other environment groups have hitched their fortunes to the Howard government. Academic Tim Doyle, in his 2000 book Green Power, takes to task a "gang of four" — the World Wide Fund for Nature, Humane Society International, the Queensland Conservation Council and the Tasmanian Conservation Trust — for their conservative positions on social and environmental issues, not least their support for the government's Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which Doyle describes as an "appalling piece of legislation".
Hardly any environment groups were prepared to criticise the Howard government's linking of funding for environment programs with the partial privatisation of Telstra in 1996-97. One notable exception was Friends of the Earth (FoE) Australia, which argued that the government was holding the environment to ransom, that the deal could set a precedent whereby funding for other essential services could be held hostage to further privatisations, and that building alliances outside of the environment movement becomes impossible if environment groups sell out others to further their own interests and feather their own nests.
Following the battle over Telstra, FoE Australia lost its government funding, which amounted to $19,000 in 1996. The next year the Howard government threatened to kick FoE Australia out of the National Environment Consultative Forum, a forum for liaison between the federal government and environment groups.
More recently, the anti-corporate movement has accelerated the shake-up in the environment movement, and its influence is evident in a document released by Friends of the Earth International (FoE-I) in December, "Towards Sustainable Economies: challenging neo-liberal economic globalisation".
The document is offered as a "contribution to a constructive public debate concerning the future of our economies" and is the result of a two-year dialogue involving more than 30 of FoE-I's autonomous member groups from countries with very different economic and political circumstances.
Diagnosis
"Towards Sustainable Economies" argues that neo-liberal economic globalisation is failing people and the environment: "The implementation of neoliberal policies has had real and diverse negative impacts on the day-to-day lives of millions of people and their environment, in all regions of the world, from peasant farmers unable to compete with food imported from more 'efficient' countries and Southern communities moved from their homes to make way for massive mining-for-export operations, through to people in the North who face increasingly insecure employment and the erosion of hard-won environmental and health standards. This is why so many people, from different walks of life and different parts of the world, joined forces to protest against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999."
And of course neo-liberalism is to the environment as chalk is to cheese: "There is no invisible hand guiding the market towards sustainability. These resources need to be husbanded; and sustainable economies need to be managed."
So neo-liberalism is the primary cause of environmental and social crises, and this diagnosis, which locates the problem in the system of economic and political structures, is much closer to the mark than those currents of the environment movement which blame the ignorance or greed of this or that politician or capitalist, or the breeding habits of the poor, or the alignment of the planets, or science and technology, or any number of other false diagnoses.
If the politico-economic system is socially and environmentally untenable, the system must go: "Something has to give. Since sustainable societies are the only long-term option we have, that something must be neoliberalism."
Solutions
So how to get rid of neo-liberal capitalism, and what sort of system to replace it with? It's at this point that "Towards Sustainable Economies" loses its focus. We're given any number of "goals" defining what a socially just and environmentally sustainable society might look like, and we're given guidelines and principles to help us get there.
OK, we've been given a diagnosis, a destination and a rough road-map. But within and between these levels of analysis, contradictions abound in "Towards Sustainable Economies".
The document mentions the huge protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999, but there's no sustained analysis of the anti-corporate movement or the broader class struggle. While some of the commentary in the FoE-I document reflects the anti-capitalist spirit of Seattle, parts of it could have been written by the nationalist-protectionist current in and around the anti-corporate movement, and parts could have been written by the corporations and governments that are driving neo-liberalism.
The argument that neo-liberalism must be done away with is itself done away with in "Towards Sustainable Economies". Most of the proposals in it are far milder. For example, FoE-I doesn't seek to abolish the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but merely to change the way they work "in line with sustainable economies policies".
Likewise, FoE-I doesn't want to see capitalists expropriated by those they exploit but merely to make them "broadly accountable to citizens" and to "rebalance trade, deprioritising international trade, giving a higher priority to local and regional trade (and small and medium-sized enterprises) and promoting more local self-reliance".
Championing small capitalists (as opposed to big ones) is as much a dead end as the ACF's championing of "good", environmentally "friendly" capitalists as opposed to "bad", environmentally destructive ones.
There's a strong hint of small-is-beautiful romanticism in "Towards Sustainable Economies"; for example it states, "Whilst a certain level of international trade may be inevitable and even desirable, healthy and sustainable economies and communities are the key to meeting people's basic needs."
The question of Third World poverty and environmental destruction receives considerable attention in the document and, better still, the problems of the South are linked to the dominance of the North. However, the document then proposes a range of North-South remedies and asserts that "governmental cooperation is key to achieving these ambitious objectives".
How can Northern governments be expected to cooperate in the redressing of North-South inequity when these governments are tools of the corporations which profit from, and perpetuate, that inequity? Easy: by providing governments with "incentives to cooperate". Corporations provide governments and political parties with incentives to cooperate, and it works well enough for them. But of course they can offer far more incentives (read: money) than the rest of us.
Clearly, diagnosing the patient as suffering from neo-liberalism doesn't preclude offering bland, liberal placebos as the remedy.
FoE-I is against neo-liberalism, but what is it for? This question isn't tackled in "Towards Sustainable Economies". It's not socialism — there's no mention of the word (and it's not too hard to find anti-socialist and anti-party sentiments in FoE literature). But if neo-liberal, corporate capitalism and socialism are off the agenda, there's nowhere else to go. It's just this sort of equivocation that doesn't wash as the class struggle sharpens.
We're told in "Towards Sustainable Economies" that a just and sustainable society is "within our grasp". But how to take economic and political institutions out of the grasp of the capitalist class, which has no intention of handing them over? The FoE-I document simply avoids tackling the crucial strategic questions.
"Towards Sustainable Economies" says that it appears to be completely taboo to criticise neo-liberal economics in most governmental and academic circles, and that nothing can change until this taboo is broken. But until FoE-I overcomes some taboos of it's own, it will be similarly hamstrung. In particular, socialist analyses of social and environmental problems needed to be tackled head on, not side-stepped as in "Towards Sustainable Economies".
In the Spring 1999 issue of Chain Reaction, FoE Australia's national liaison officer Cam Walker argued that the more progressive elements of the environment movement should disengage from the more conservative elements and forge alliances with progressives outside the environment movement.
"To do otherwise", Walker warned, "means maintaining the status quo of hovering around the edges of reactionary political structures or actively embracing a political world view and corporations which are the antithesis of justice and sustainability."
These arguments seem pertinent when reading "Towards Sustainable Economies", which is clearly a compromise between some within FoE who believe that capitalism can be greened, and some who don't. Perhaps the progressive current within FoE needs to disengage from the conservative current.
For all the faults in "Towards Sustainable Economies", FoE's politics are clearly moving in the right direction, i.e., left wards. This is clear when comparing, for example, "Towards Sustainable Economies" with the 1998 document produced by FoE Europe, "Sharing the World", which embraced the (capitalist) market as "the most efficient means for building critical feedback into production and consumption systems".
It's also clear that FoE is moving leftwards judging by its strong and positive presence at the S11 protests in Melbourne, and its involvement in the protests outside the international greenhouse gangsters' conference in the Netherlands in November, and FoE Australia's involvement in the red-green collaboration Earthworker as well as its persistent and productive campaigning against radioactive waste dumping in South Australia.
So FoE is moving leftwards, but, as Walker says about the leftwards shift of a number of environment groups in recent years, "whether these groups will move fast enough and far enough remains to be answered".
["Towards Sustainable Economies: challenging neoliberal economic globalisation" is on the web at <http://www.foei.org>. Copies are also available for $6 from FoE in Melbourne, Box 222, Fitzroy, 3065.]