I
It has exacerbated the menace of global
warming, destabilized whole populations,
set in train great one-way migrations of
our time, and led to new extinctions and
the spectre of ecocide.
Squandered resourcefulness
Following these developments, politics
ought, perhaps, to have gone far beyond
the ritual procedures that evolved in the
19th and early 20th centuries and the
slow and ponderous ‘reforms’ enacted
by a self-congratulatory West. The con-
straints of globalism have forced ‘local’
(ie national) governments to forfeit some
of their power, while a single worldwide
economy has placed the peoples of the
world into new ideological, economic
and moral relationships with each other,
antagonisms as well potential alliances.
These can no longer be contained within
the diminished, decorous dance of social-
or Christian-democratic or liberal parties
as constituted in those countries which
have constantly advertised their own
democracy, one of their principal moral
and cultural exports. ‘Choices’ offered
by this version of democracy no longer
correspond to the possibilities and per-
plexities in the world, since the cleavage
between an indefinite continuation of the
existing order, and the dramatic breach
with it required for the sake of survival, is
no longer to be found within the imagi-
native capacity of capitalism, however
ample and inventive this has proved in
the past. Perhaps the resourcefulness of
capitalism, like the material resources it
has devoured, is also close to exhaustion.
Socialism was predicated upon the
possibility, not of an alternative industrial
system to capitalism, but of a different
deployment of its riches for more benign
ends, and a restructuring of ownership
of the instruments of wealth-creation.
People would define their own priorities
and needs independently of the tyranny
of free markets which gave precedence to
the whims of the rich over the necessities
of everyone else.
The spaces in which socialists built
their structures of hope have, like gen-
trified working-class suburbs, long since
been occupied by the expanding power
of capital, magnified to such an extent
that it has both transformed the treasures
of the earth and at the same time colo-
nized the inner landscapes of humanity
with its promises to provide all the heart
desires and a great deal more besides. No
element of life on earth – or, it seems, in
the cosmos that capitalism has become –
is proof against its invasive power: outer
space is seen as its next frontier, a site of
astral overspill for a planet of seven and a
half thousand million people.
This imperium, both internal and
external, is vast. Before alternatives
become possible, great clearances and
extensive demolitions are necessary; not
only of the material edifice created out
of the living tissue of a wasted planet,
but also of the inner spaces, the sanctu-
aries, where the yearnings and longings
of humanity have been re-shaped on the
ruins of our capacity to make, do, create,
invent and to answer our own needs and
those of others; drawing upon a squan-
dered inner resourcefulness become
wasteland through neglect. This is where
resistance to capitalism must be concen-
trated: not only in the regeneration of a
spent and depleted world, but in renewal,
re-creating the great capacity of the heart
and spirit for reclamation and recultiva-
tion, in order to supplement the dwin-
dling plenitude of the natural world.Where the split occurs
The point at which the ideological cleav-
age now occurs has been blurred, so
that archaic conflicts continue a long,
inconclusive afterlife. Internationalism,
a desire for social justice, recognition of
the limits of what the planet can bear face
intensifying nationalisms and the politics
of nostalgia. If today’s professional poli-
ticians wish to discredit Greens, regional
parties, the displaced and evicted of
globalism, this is not because of theirirrelevance, but because these are the
principal actors in the present-day social
and economic struggle. They hint at
more vibrant disputes than a declining
preoccupation with capital versus labour
‘in one country’, particularly where the
industrial base of that country has all but
collapsed, capital is in perpetual flight
and the industrial army of labour has
been demobilized, wandering as scattered
mercenaries to fight under the colours of
this or that cult, just as a vagrant soldiery
has always been dismissed and scattered
once wars are concluded.
Present-day paralysis of political
debate is ritually deplored, although it
remains unaddressed, because the con-
servatism of the ‘mainstream’, despite its
sluggish meanderings, seeks to draw eve-
rything into its narrowing confines.
The split is now between planetarism
and parochialism. This does not mean
globalization versus the parish (although
there are distinct echoes in the contem-
porary response of the rich to refugees of
the Settlement Acts of England in 1662,
which sought, vainly, to tether individu-
als to the parish of their birth.) Nor does it
refer to ‘environmentalism’, a diminished
synonym for respect for the earth. ‘The
environment’ is an inert term. It suggests
scenery, ‘background’ against which the
dramas of social and economic life have
traditionally played themselves out.
Nothing could be more misleading than
this tame, yet tendentious, word, redo-
lent of volunteers picking up litter or the
tending of cordoned-off national parks.
If the faultline in the belief-system of
globalization is between those who fight
back against the degradation of the earth
as a consequence of industrial and tech-
nological development, and those who
believe the answers to the crisis may be
found in an intensification of processes
that have created it, what does this imply
for those who still interpret the world
in terms of Right or Left? It is not that
the older division has been invalidated- in fact, it also makes addressing the
Passing ideologiesFear is the dominant emotion of our generation
of politicians; fear, above all, of speaking truth
to the people about the limits of the earth that
they have promised
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