By Allen Myers
The January-February issue of New Internationalist contains an article by Jeremy Seabrook, "A world to be won", subtitled "The future of the left". The topic is one that has been much discussed since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the eastern European regimes, and the subsequent ideological offensive of capitalism. Seabrook is a former member of the British Greens and has written extensively on problems of development and social inequality in the Third World.
The offensive of the right is Seabrook's starting point. He describes it with the metaphor of "thinking the unthinkable": "To 'think the unthinkable' today means solemnly to enunciate the most barbaric, discredited and inhumane political ideas".
To counter the right, he argues, the left must also think the unthinkable, and so far it has been far too reluctant to do this. The metaphor, however, is not a very useful one for his purposes. So, for example, shortly after being told that the left should follow the right in its rethinking, we are admonished that in fact it should not:
"The error of the Left has been to assume that this return to fundamentals by its enemies must and can be matched by an equivalent return to its own roots. This is untrue; the roots have atrophied with the old industrial culture."
This seems to be the real point of what Seabrook is getting at: the left, in his view, is still too tied to what he calls "industrialism".
The left, he says, "must now rethink the very nature of industrial society. It should contemplate ways of disengaging from a wasting, squandering, abusive industrialism."
An examination — "rethinking" if one prefers — of industrial society could no doubt be fruitful. But it is more than a little pessimistic to decide even before the rethinking has occurred that "disengagement" is the most that can be hoped for in regard to a "wasting, squandering, abusive" form of industrialism.
After all, leftists may all "disengage" by going off to live in rainforests, but that would not stop such an industrialism from destroying the planet. Can we not put in a bid for a serious effort to abolish wasteful and abusive arrangements?
Part of the problem here is that Seabrook attributes to the "left" beliefs which in fact are held only by part of the left — and certainly not the most left part of the left. He writes, for example, that he is presenting his ideas to "a Left which always imagined that the fruits of industrialism had only to be more equitably distributed to bring about socialism".
That left has usually been called "social democracy", although left social democrats might well argue that only right social democrats would imagine that you can change things fundamentally by changing distribution only, without touching the ownership of major means of production. In any case, no-one on the Marxist left has ever imagined that a changed distribution would bring about socialism.
Perhaps it would be progress of a sort if social democrats who think that more equitable distribution equals socialism were to decide that it is also necessary to "disengage" from abusive and wasteful industrialism. But surely this is not the "world to be won" promised in the title of Seabrook's article.
Another difficulty is discovering just what Seabrook understands by "industrialism", and what he proposes to replace it.
The fact that he modifies the word "industrialism" with the phrase "wasting, squandering, abusive" might suggest that he envisions the possibility of a frugal, restorative, non-abusive industrialism. But in fact this seems not to be the case, for he goes on to argue for what appears to be a generalised rejection of industrial production, calling for "a struggle for liberation from the very phenomenon which has hitherto been seen as the supreme creator of wealth — the industrialized answering of human need".
Of course, human needs are not confined to food, clothing, housing and similar creature comforts; there are a whole range of emotional, intellectual, cultural and social needs, many of which are actually denied satisfaction by the present arrangement of industrial society.
Nevertheless, it is also the case that satisfaction of the basic material needs is usually a precondition for satisfaction of the others: few people with an empty belly can really appreciate a rainforest or a symphony orchestra. And it is equally true that even the most basic material needs of the world's present 5.5 billion people cannot begin to be met without some fairly generalised industrial production.
Thus the challenge is not, as Seabrook implies, to get rid of industrial production, which would imply the permanent impoverishment, if not the death, of 80-90% of the human race. The challenge is to subordinate industrial production to human needs — the full range of human needs.
How is this to be done? Seabrook's suggestions really don't take us much beyond "disengaging". To counter "the invasion by the market economy of areas of activity from which it should be excluded — the traffic in women and children, for instance, the trade in illegal arms, the genetic manipulation of life-forms", he writes, "Market-free zones must be declared".
The capitalist market, unfortunately, does not roll over and play dead when confronted by declarations: if it acknowledges them at all, it is usually to buy them and resell them.
It's in the character of a capitalist market not to stop at any boundaries. If it is allowed to buy labour-power and to monopolise land and factories, it will soon go on to traffic in women and children, illegal arms, genetically manipulated life-forms and anything else that seems likely to turn a profit.
In short, the only really effective way to challenge the market's "illegitimate" extension is to challenge its "legitimate" existence. The market's "legitimate" operations are what create wasting, squandering, abusive industrialism.
Not to mince words, there is no future for the left, or anyone else in any real sense, unless it is a socialist future. Capitalism is not an ecologically sustainable project.
Unfortunately, Seabrook explicitly rejects a socialist solution (he can't even bring himself to use the word), which is why he is thrown back on little except disengaging and declarations. The argument is impressionistic and rhetorical rather than reasoned.
"The moment in which the project of the Left was formulated is past; only the formulae remain", he writes. "This is why the Left appears to have been stranded, like sectarians selling their tracts on windy street corners to unbelievers and sceptics who scarcely give them a second glance."
The socialist project was formulated in the 19th century because that was when capitalism's antisocial and anti-environmental nature began to become evident. That character of capitalism is anything but "past"; it has only been multiplied many-fold.
The socialist left appears stranded — i.e. isolated — because of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of eastern Europe, which were falsely identified as socialism, and because the social democratic "left" has so completely accommodated itself to capitalism.
That isolation is already beginning to break down in many parts of the world — witness the anti-nuclear protests in Germany, the French strikes, the mass marches for jobs in Belgium — simply because the miseries perpetuated by capitalism are so obvious.
As someone who sells Green Left Weekly on street corners, I can assure Jeremy Seabrook that it's not as bad as he imagines, although sheltered street corners are definitely to be preferred to windy ones. One does meet a majority of unbelievers and sceptics, which is not so surprising if you think of the ideological defences that capitalist society constructs for itself.
But one also meets an encouraging number of people whose experiences or observations have caused them to look for answers to the problems our society faces. Disengagement is not such an answer.