It is a state of withdrawal, an antecham-
ber to future commitment to whatever
will seize the heart and imagination of
the people.
It is not that what are euphemistically
called ‘green issues’ have been ignored.
But no effort has been spared to drag
these onto existing discourse, so that
they remain subordinated to the appar-
ently greater importance of a sacralized
‘economy’ and the material, social and
moral advantages which are supposed to
derive from it. And indeed, the passion
engendered by attempts to mitigate
global warming demonstrates a wide-
spread recognition of the gravity of the
situation. But even this does not place the
integrity of climate, the safeguarding of
planetary diversity and the survival of
species and life-forms at the centre of
ideological debate. The heating of the
earth’s atmosphere appears to lend itself
to technical solutions, and thus the belief
that it can be contained within the exist-
ing paradigm. It is, however, significant
that what was seen initially as a problem
of the lifestyle of the rich (over-consump-
tion, waste and pollution, as exemplified
in the Club of Rome report ‘The Limits
to Growth’ in 1972) has been transformed
over the years into ‘anthropogenic activ-
ity’, which makes it the responsibility of
all humankind, even the poorest.
Limping behind
The ecological imperative is no tem-
porary diversion. If Greens have been
successfully marginalized as an embodi-
ment of ‘fringe’ or ‘single issue’ politics,
this is precisely because, foreshadow-
ing struggles to come, they are in the
vanguard of the politics of globalism.
Politics always limps behind economic
and social realities: it took generations
before organized labour achieved power
in the industrial era. The ‘real’ Britain
lingered in an imagery of sunny corn-
fields, autumn hedgerows red and black
with hawthorn and elderberries, dairy-
churns in frosty farmhouses and harvest
suppers, even when large tracts of the
country were blackened pit-villages, city
slums and urban desolation.
Similarly, post-manufacturing Britain
is still haunted by memories of its historic
industrial function, even as the mills fell
silent and factories collapsed in rubble
and splintered glass. Just as the possi-
bilities of socialism were slow to show
themselves, so the politics of a global
industrial system, in which the making
of necessary and useful objects has
deserted the ‘developed’ world in order
to set up its oppressive compulsions else-
where, has also been shy to show itself –
not least because local nationalisms and
parochialisms have hidden producers
and consumers from each other. Rich
societies have been able to talk of ‘post-
industrial society’, ‘a service economy’, a
‘knowledge-based society’, because their
dependence for the necessities of life
has been outsourced to unvisited sites
of manufacture in the South. If we have
been complacent in acknowledging the
most remarkable ideological division
confronting us, how much more grudg-
ing will be our recognition of the impli-
cations of this.
It is quite clear why the internal clash
of interests within industrial society has
for so long been an overwhelming ideo-
logical preoccupation. The existence of a
working class called into being by capi-
talism was from the start inimical to the
necessities of capital: from the Luddites to
the arson and agitation against threshing
machines, the Combination Laws (which
for 20 years from 1799 forbade any ‘com-
bination’ of workers), the Rebecca riots,
the Plug riots, the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
the Hungry Forties, the long Depression
after 1873, the great socialist demonstra-
tions at the end of the 19th century, the
formation of the Labour and Commu-
nist Parties, the 1914-18 war, the general
strike, the Depression, the war against
Nazism, the less than permanent settle-
ment of 1945, the miners’ strikes, Mrs
Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’, the collapse
of the Soviet Union – who had time or
energy to worry about anything beyond
these epic dramas, for which the planet
appeared to be simply decor, mute setting
and witness of events?Fabulous prosperity
The long-term response of capitalist
society to an early threat to its exist-
ence – the menace of a socialism which
would expropriate the excesses of the
rich and deploy these to raise up those
who had laboured in poverty – was the
creation of a form of affluence which in
industrial society muted criticism and
brought a majority of the people within
its embrace. This appeared not only to
have reconciled a sometimes mutinous
working population to the system which
had given it birth in such pain and grief
in the early industrial era, but also to end
the melancholy certainties of a socialismwhich would have forcefully divested
privilege of its advantages for the sake of
the excluded toilers of industry. Indeed,
the existence of the workers’ state, the
Soviet Union, which had promised so
much, and yet could provide only the
most clumsy imitation of the cornuco-
pia which spilled from the productive –
and highly imaginative – technological
advances of the West, was undermined
by its inability to compete.
After 1945, economic breakdown was
seen to have been the source of the evil
that had engulfed the centre of what liked
to think of itself, not only as European,
but as world civilization; it was vital to
ensure that no such horrific taint should
ever recur. Rehabilitation of capital-
ism was a priority and, accordingly, this
became the hour of economic miracles
and wonders, designed – not without
success with the passage of time –to erase
all memory of what had gone before.
In spite of this, the West could never
be quite sure that the Soviet Union would
not provide both plenty and social justice
to its captive peoples; particularly when
so many countries liberated from Euro-
pean colonialism, as well as China, also
declared their commitment to social-
ism. When, in 1957, the Soviets launched
Sputnik, the first space satellite, alarm
was expressed at the possible permanent
advantage the USSR might gain over the
West; a possibility enhanced when Yuri
Gagarin became the first human being in
space in 1961.
The West diffused a global iconog-
raphy of fabulous prosperity, both as
a signal of profound penitence to for-
merly colonized territories, which were
promised they could ‘become like us’ if
they followed the prescriptions offered
by the Bretton Woods institutions, and
also to eclipse the hollow promises of its
ideological rival. In the West, constructed
upon a secure edifice of the welfare state,
the affluent society was born. But like
many initiatives embarked upon to serve
a particular purpose, the abundance of
the West created a profound depend-
ency in its own people and, in doing so,
took on a life of its own. Values intro-
duced into an alien context wither and
perish as readily as transplanted flowers.
Wester n prosper it y beca me a ffluence,
and this swiftly turned into an unstop-
pable consumerism, a cult which has now
overrun the world and has fed prodigious
growth in many countries until recently
reduced to the ordinal number ‘Third’.FEATURE
50 NEW INTERNATIONALIST