I
Passing ideologiesJeremy Seabrook surveys a political landscape riven with
virulent nostalgias which obscure an essential conflict –
how to reconcile the needs of the planet with the necessities
of economics?What we
cannot avoid
T
he great ideological divide in
the world between capital and
labour has been overtaken by an
even more urgent conflict. This is the
dispute between the defenders of global
industrial society and those who defend
the rapidly depleting resource-base of
the planet and all who depend on it.
The spaces between an ever-expanding
economy and the living, breathing earth
have been choked by continuous eco-
nomic growth.
This is not, of course, to underesti-
mate the familiar gulf between rich and
poor. That would be irresponsible, when
the eight richest men in the world (and
they are all men) possess wealth equal
to the poorest 3.7 billion people on the
planet. Such a gap could be closed, were
the $80 trillion ‘global product’ (as esti-
mated by the World Economic Forum for
2018) shared more fairly; but this would
do nothing to halt the contamination of
the biosphere by irreversible industrial
processes.
Existing political parties do not deny
this. They are quick to own what they call
‘green issues’, ‘environmentalism’, even‘the ecological crisis’. The great falsehood
is their claim to be able to deal with it
within the system that caused it.
The actors within this deeper ideo-
logical split have made their roles clear.
Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and their
supporters see in the laissez-faire of free
markets and perpetual economic growth
answers to all human ills. For them global
warming, resource-depletion and species
extinction are either fictions or the nec-
essary price of progress. They face cam-
paigns by indigenous peoples against
corporate invasion of the habitats they
have sustained for millennia, and ecolog-
ical and internationalist movements for
the defence of cultures, languages, spaces
and species threatened with extinction;
a threat created by the system that has
caused all the radical discontinuities in
the world.
Occasionally, this clash of forces
expresses itself within the existing elec-
toral process. Elections in the German
state of Hesse in 2018, in which the
two main parties ceded ground to the
Greens and to the far-right Alterna-
tive für Deutschland, far from being anaberration, actually presage the future of
political conflict. This was in part con-
firmed by the elections for the European
Union Parliament in 2019, where both
Greens and racists gained ground. This
is part of a developing process, which has
yet to define itself with the clarity that
the more familiar division of the disputa-
tious partners of capitalist society (capital
and labour) achieved long ago, and which
masks the more recent cleavage, albeit in
an increasingly threadbare way.
The rise of nationalistic, xenopho-
bic and overtly racist parties on the one
hand, and of Greens and internationalists
on the other, should not be interpreted as
a consequence of popular ‘disenchant-
ment’ or ‘disillusionment’ with the old
parties – anyone who was enchanted by
them or under any illusions about them,
at least within living memory, must be
part of a small and eccentric minority. It
is because fewer people recognize their
interests in these ossified political groups
that disengagement from what is some-
times still called ‘mainstream politics’ has
occurred. For a long time this was called
‘apathy’ by politicians. It is no such thing.Illustration — Peter ReynoldsSEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019 49