By James O'Connor
The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the geopolitical and ideological upheavals this has caused have altered the nature of class struggle throughout the world. Without the Soviet Communist Party, parties in the rest of the world have lost legitimacy and their claim to leadership of the working class. The basic tension between capital and labour remains, but the traditional means of addressing working class and minority grievances have necessarily changed. Without either a model or a support base — the two possibilities that the Soviets offered the working classes of other countries — those demanding economic and social justice must confront capital with new forms of organisation and struggle.
The radical shift in geopolitical centres of power since the late 1980s has coincided with the steady movement of capital toward globalisation and the long-run decline in the rate of world economic growth. These two trends intensified just as socialism lost much of its international prestige, and "free market" dogma reigned supreme among the world's economic technocrats, East, North and South.
As capital restructured itself globally, centralising power in transnational enterprises and banks, it sought logically to reduce labour, energy, and raw material costs as well as the turnover time of capital. The slow growth rate led the manipulators of multinational capital to intensify the exploitation of labour. Over the past decade world unemployment has risen, and the inequalities in the division of wealth and income grew ever more dramatic. Tens of millions of people were cast out of workplaces, villages, homes — and even nations.
The social impact of this trend has been devastating and, inevitably, resistance developed, but without the existence of the traditional "red" experience or the methods that derived and drew their power from the existence of a communist international based in the "super power" Soviet state.
Simultaneously, those who control the great conglomerates and houses of finance, who decide what and where to produce, have attempted further to stem the declining rates of growth and profits by externalising more of their production costs onto the environment. As air, land and water, and the various life forms sustained by these elements, bore the brunt of capital's newly globalised practices, a shift occurred in the class struggle as well. With ecological destruction and the advent of a global environmental crisis, the local community and the non-
governmental organisation emerged as green movements paralleled (and sometimes coincided with) labour struggles as a force of resistance to capital.
"Reds" have increasingly adopted one or another "green" discourse, and "greens" have leaned more and more to the left. More labour unions and Social Democratic parties are taking on green issues, especially with regard to workplace and community environmental health. More grassroots environmental groups are raising the issues of social and economic justice. And more left green parties (the best-known of which is the German Greens) have sprung up in more counties. The outlines of a red-green movement are now visible, in the North and South, consisting of a range of organisations, movements and ideologies from the most sectarian to the most politically open and fluid.
The question arises: is it possible to organise an international red-green movement, a coordinated response to global capital, to initiate new democratic, ecologically rational and economically and socially equitable ways of life? To link economic, social and ecological issues theoretically and practically in ways that would further alternative development paths and visions of the future? To overcome capital's strategy of divide and conquer, which pits labour against environmentalists, urban workers against small farmers, men against women, majorities against oppressed minorities and, last but not least, the North against the South?
A positive answer to these questions requires that greens (and reds) not only "think globally, act locally", but also "think locally, act globally", and, ultimately, "think and act both globally and locally".
For some years, the slogan "think globally, act locally" has facilitated the US and other peace movements, anti-nuclear campaigns and even solidarity movements. For greens, "think globally, act locally" means "think about the effects of what you are doing on the global environment". Indeed, each locality can make a small dent in the global depletion of resources by organising recycling programs; reduce ocean pollution by demanding tertiary treatment of municipal wastes; and save energy by subsidising solar heating and discouraging the use of cars — to take three examples.
The world over, bioregionalists push for more economic self-sufficiency and less disruption of hydraulic cycles; local anti-nuclear groups and toxic waste campaigns fight for source reduction; and green city and village movements seek mass transit and high density housing, and the use of local biomass for food and energy and the redistribution of water supplies to small
farmers, respectively. These examples demonstrate that green thinking is widespread, and also that more local green movements have adopted regional, national and international perspectives.
The basic problem with the greens is that they offer no means to transform the "local" into the "global". The green movement has no method for thinking about the ways that the local is constituted by the global nor about many related questions (for example, the meaning of "site specificity", which greens define in terms of ecological systems and physical space rather than the scale of reproduction of "local" material and social existence). Greens also discount the growing centralisation of economic and political power, hence that "local environments" are increasingly the victims of global economic and political restructuring and change.
The chasm between the good intentions and unintended bad effects of local actions thus tends to widen. The toxic waste struggles in the North are good examples. One of their unintended effects is to increase the export of poisons to the South and internal colonies in the North (but they may also inspire and link with other localities and acquire global dimensions).
Local recycling programs are a more intricate example. Newspaper recycling weakens the market for wood pulp, hence has the unintended effect of stimulating paper and pulp companies to cut costs by ecologically damaging forestry practices or to postpone technological improvements that reduce the volume of poisons released in rivers. Recycling programs also fall prey to the capitalist discourse on waste and recycling, which privileges economic over social and ecological aspects (e.g., high value aluminium cans were first targeted for recycling in the US). Acting globally entails understanding the unintended effects of green practices, which means addressing how and why these practices arise in the first place — namely, as a result of national and international economic and political forces.
"Thinking globally, acting locally" can help greens feel better about themselves and their lives (it is an ethical as well as practical slogan) but may lead to a self-deception — substituting global thinking for global strategy. The basic reason? Reds historically addressed the social relations of production and power, and ignored the relations between society and nature; greens privilege the latter to the detriment of the former. "Green" often may be read as a simple historical inversion of "red".
If the slogan "think globally, act locally" is turned on its head, greens might be forced to develop their discourse on environmental destruction and reconstruction in the direction of
a global politics. Most localities are fragments of the division of labour on a global scale, which is why the question — how does world capitalism constitute localities? — is so important. Instead of posing a dualism between the global and the local, greens can try to grasp the way that localities exist only in relation to one another and also in the totality of the international economy.
"Think globally, act locally" also must take into account that particular localities define themselves, or acquire self-definitions, both cultural and environmental, in ways that are also constituted by world capitalism. The life of tropical forests, and the value that greens place on these forests, depend not only on the conditions of production in forestry in the South and North, but also on the totality of the world supply and demand for timber and lumber products, which, in turn, depends on a complex set of inner connections between profits, interest rates and debt; the global construction industry; labour struggles; environmental actions to save tropical forests and old growth trees in the North; and technical changes in the forest industry.
To return to the example of local newspaper recycling, this depends on a generalised discourse on reducing waste, recycling in other communities and price structures that may or may not equate the cost price of recycled paper and the products of paper and pulp mill (today more "recycled" newspapers are destined for landfills than for paper mills).
The potential for solar energy in a particular locality depends not only on local climate but also on the class and racial compositions of the community, the rate of exploitation of fossil fuels, the state of inter-imperialist rivalries in the oil-producing and consuming countries, the monopolisation of solar energy by the giant utilities and other structures and processes which are dimly understood, including by solar activists.
"Act globally" has another meaning, given the uneven and combined development of capital and social and ecological destruction, and the vast inequalities between the North and South. Capital in the North has always acted globally toward the South, with the purpose of extracting cheap raw materials, energy and labour power — as nationalists and revolutionaries in the South have long understood.
Today, green movements understand the danger of growing economic marginalisation and social segregation and increasingly act globally toward the North. This is especially true when they hear the advice of many well-meaning NGOs in the North to emphasise sustainable community agricultural models, the revival of
indigenous technologies and debt for nature swaps, which, in effect if not intention, legitimise the existing division of labour and misery between North and South in terms of the "common fight" for a better environment.
For example, at the Global Forum in Rio last June, when some big Third World countries confronted the "small is beautiful" proposals by Northern NGOs with the demand for equitable transfers of technology to help build safe and sustainable industrial projects, the gap between NGOs in the two parts of the world widened as much as that between First and Third World governments.
"Acting globally" implies the awareness of strategic thinking and actions not only against the ecologically and socially disastrous practices of a particular corporation or industry but also the global institutions whose decisions affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The key targets are the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the new regional linkages (the European Commission, North American Free Trade Area and Japan's informal financial empire in Asia). Their policies regarding Third World debt and "economic adjustments", infrastructural investment and the rules governing world and regional trade have created immeasurable ecological harm and human misery.
"Act globally" means to make the IMF and other undemocratic world economic bodies accountable for their policies and programs, and to demand that future policies be geared to the needs of the people of the world and the globe's fragile ecologies, rather than to the interests of central banks, Treasury Ministries and privately owned financial monopolies.
Greens could help to revive the militant demonstrations organised in Germany against IMF and World Bank policies two years ago. They could demand that the IMF become an elected body — as a step toward democratising the supply of money — which would limit the damage the world bankers and treasury ministers could do to people and nature. Such a notion of political struggle against the pillars of world capitalism would require a new kind of environmental movement, a red-green movement, which is in tune with the struggles and needs of women and oppressed minorities and nationalities in the North as well as the South.
This is a challenging and difficult task. But what are the alternatives? If green politics is bereft of a global strategy, local struggles and ecological alternatives will continue to "succeed" — meanwhile generating more bad unintended side effects and also failing to reach into the centres of power of global capital. A global strategy should not devalue local
movements and actions, but rather politically valorise them — to raise the political stakes in a world conjuncture in which the ecological and human stakes increase every day, and in which profit and power become more centralised and undemocratic.
In fact, there is an international movement. Millions of people engaged in social and ecological struggles in dozens of countries understand the local connections between problems of land use, transportation, water supplies, air pollution, soil degradation, congestion, health and poverty, including the particular local gender and ethnic/racial dimensions of these problems. Tens of thousands of activists grasp the central role of global capital and the dominant international institutions in creating havoc for people and nature. Hundreds of scholars have studied the ways that particular localities are constituted by global capital and international politics.
However, most local groups have little knowledge of similar groups in other parts of the world — a fact partly remedied at the Global Forum in Rio — hence cannot even speculate about, much less connect with, opportunities for strategic and tactical alliances. Most activists for whom the destructive roles of the IMF and other international institutions are crystal clear are not in contact with one another. Most scholars who understand that particular "locals" are constitutive parts of the "global" do not read one another's work.
To develop and strengthen linkages between local groups, activists and red-green intellectuals and scholars around the world calls for an international movement — a "fifth international". This new international would possess a deep understanding of both ecology and capitalist economy; its "line" would "celebrate differences" as well as commonalities; its purpose would be to develop an international focus and coordinate a global political strategy.
To build such a movement requires more than putting aside sectarian politics and "correct lineism", meanwhile pooling the experience and knowledge acquired from two decades of green struggles.
It also depends on acknowledging that the rulers of capital and the international economic institutions themselves understand that they face global environmental problems, and that their economic future depends on renewing or remaking the earth's ecological foundations; hence that we are in for a long period of sustainable development rhetoric and restructuring of the conditions of production. An international red-green movement must address this capitalist rhetoric and restructuring, and develop strategies and tactics that are critical and militant enough to redress the horrible inequalities in the world and the
terrible destruction of global ecologies. What is there to lose? What is there to save? The questions answer themselves.
[James O'Connor is the editor of the magazine Capitalism Nature Socialism, from which this article is reprinted.]