Andy at Socialist Unity has a long, thoughtful post about why The Labour Party may well get crushed in the next general election. Much of the reason is due to Labour ignoring their traditional constituency as well as changing attitudes about class.

The proportion of society that is self-consciously working class is diminished, and there have been huge changes in social attitudes, and cultural diversification that have led to the traditionalist left being increasingly marginalised.

The common retort to which is that many of those who don’t see themselves as working class objectively still are, and if there was a higher level of class struggle then their political attitudes would change, but this puts the cart before the horse.

Traditional leftist analysis always comes back to this. If the masses knew how badly they were being shafted, then they’d do something. Well, maybe they do know but aren’t interested in your solution as presented. This ties in with Marxist dogma (which seeps in everywhere) that social change can only come from the working class,so, by God, if you aren’t what we define as working class then you must be worthless boojies. By that bizarre reckoning, Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Che would have been excluded because they came from well-off non-working class backgrounds.

In Marx’s day, class distinctions were distinct and obvious. But today, they are blurry and mashed-up. The Left unintentionally marginalizes itself by trying to force events of today to fit political theory from 150 years ago. Is class important? Absolutely. But since the Left is demonstrably not making inroads into organizing the working class (however it might be defined) then clearly new ideas and tactics are needed.

Mass change happens when the masses act together. Thus, to organize them you need to appeal (and listen) to all of them. Not just to those you deem most oppressed. More to the point, you need to light the fuse, provide initial help and guidance, then step out of the way and let them organize themselves. Because how else can a massive cross-class coalition happen except if it is organized by members of those very same classes? And not by hardcore Lefties trying to steer it.

Because too often such mass work is done by a little sectarian faction as a way to recruit for their organization. Sorry, can’t have it both ways. Either it’s really for the people or it’s for a Leftist corpuscle. The whole concept of a vanguard party somehow steering the masses in our current era of instant communications and feedback is archaic and no longer works - if it ever did. (Lenin didn’t do it the way Leninists often think he did. Instead, he had genuine mass support and encouraged internal disagreement.)

Socialist Unity ends with quoting Zoe Gannon

It is, and will always be, the challenge of the centre left to construct a cross class coalition – based on the hopes and fears of all; and understanding who the middle classes are and what they really care about is essential. How we do this is a challenge which will always be at the heart of the progressive left.

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Mac Uaid reports from the Campaign Against Climate Change conference in Britain

A strongly represented view was that what we do is more important than how we label ourselves and that it’s entirely possible for socialists to develop theory and activities on climate change without changing how they view themselves. Again Derek and Alan dissented from this reminding the audience that the impact of climate change on the world’s population obliges socialist to rethink all their basic ideas inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I’m with Derek and Alan. Socialism needs (like capitalism constantly does) to reinvent itself to deal with a fast-changing world. “Marx said it, I believe it, that settles it” ain’t gonna play, or attract converts, or help stop global warming. How would a socialist world stop global warming. That’s what needs to be thought out and explained in specific terms. Not, “the workers will run the factories” and then all will be happiness and light with global warming magically disappeared.

Stopping global warming will require huge amounts of money and support from major governments and corporations. Socialists need to formulate a specific plan as to how this can happen without predatory capitalism being involved, and then make it something the average citizen agrees with and wants to get involved with. And that indeed means rethinking all their basic ideas.

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Doug Page at Dissident Voice asks this in a thoughtful essay detailing the flaws of capitalism. The elite make the money, the workers get shafted, and overproduction leads to economic downturns. Standard Marxist theory, really, even if Page doesn’t appear to be Marxist. He ends by proposing that the only way to fight the State is to, among other things, “stop our consumption of the products of the elite” and “grow our own food and meet our own needs.”

Um, Page seems well-meaning and genuinely searching for answers, but unless you want to go live in a yurt in the wilderness, you will need to purchase the products of capitalism. It is folly to pretend otherwise.

A hardcore Marxist would say the State needs to own the means of production, with the workers running things. Then, with foresighted planning, everything will run smoothly and there will be no overproduction, no boom-bust economy, no shafted workers. This sounds good in theory too, but tell me, why would a group of workers necessarily be any more competent in running a factory than a capitalist? Or any less less susceptible to corruption and the emergence of a new ruling class?

Another problem with Marxist theory is that it seemingly always talks about factories. The workers will run the factories. Well, in Marx’s time,  all they had was factories. But times have changed. Microsoft and Google are not factories, they can move production anywhere quite easily and - I’m just guessing here now - most of their workers probably don’t feel particularly exploited. Especially not the early ones who are multi-millionaires thanks to their stock options. So tell me, who has Bill Gates exploited?

Marxist theory has some valuable thoughts, but it needs to be updated and brought into the 21st century else it will be seen by most, especially in the US, as a dusty relic.

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(I meant to blog this earlier. Emphasis added.)

The Party for Socialism and Liberation polled an extraordinary 45,000 votes in the recent June 3 Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors election.

In the 5th District, Stephen Hinze, a warehouse worker, garnered 21 percent of the vote— 25,047—against 28-year incumbent Mike Antonovich

Marylou Cabral, a Cal State Long Beach student and anti-war activist, finished second out of three candidates in her race against right-wing incumbent Don Knabe. Cabral won 19,915 votes—about 18 percent—in the 4th District.

PSL got considerable mention in mainstream media and this astounding showing is testament to their skills as organizers and the desire of the public for real change.

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This mural gives a flavor of just how unsettled things were in the US during the Depression. It’s part of a public mural completed in 1934 at city-owned Coit Tower in San Francisco. The newspaper says “Home Foreclosures. Banks refuse US home loan bonds. Oil magnates arrested.” The man in green is pulling a copy of Das Kapital by Karl Marx off the bookshelf.

My great-aunt once told me when she and her Army husband were returning from China in 1933 friends told them not to settle in San Francisco because they were afraid there would be a revolution there.

It is, I think, a tribute to the free and open spirit of San Francisco that this mural survived the McCarthy Era, the Cold War, and the neocons.

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From Larry Holmes at Workers World.

The masses did not launch Obama’s presidential campaign—a section of the U.S. ruling class and its political operatives did. Some in the ruling class got behind Obama merely to advance their faction fight against the Clintons inside the Democratic Party.

But other forces in the U.S. ruling class have rallied behind Obama because they view him as better suited than Clinton or McCain to deal with a central crisis of U.S. imperialism. They need to find a way to halt the rapid deterioration of its position as the world’s dominant economic and military power.

All true, even if he does go on, as do many doctrinaire Marxists, to say this foreshadows the coming collapse of capitalism (”Marxists have predicted eleven of the past seven crisises”).  Actually, it probably doesn’t. Capitalism got through the Great Depression and thrived. The current times are a blip compared to that. ( And Marxist glee in possible coming economic collapses hardly seems a good recruiting tool.)

His stated beliefs that the ruling class might be setting up a Black man to take the heat for the coming crisis seem paranoid. As does his view that the Rev. Wright affair was secretly a loyalty test by mainstream media for Obama. (Huh?) Marxists too often seem to believe that capitalists control and manipulate everything, when in reality they seem more like the Keystone Cops, hardly in control at all. Do you think that a secret cabal currently runs the world economy? If so, they’re doing a dismal job of manipulating events, aren’t they?

But Holmes’ basic point is quite valid. A part of the US ruling class has backed Obama from the start, quite rightfully concluding that war and the insanities of the Bush Administration are bad for the economy, the people, and for long-term good of the US. Now Obama may well be the next president. That would be a sea change indeed.

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If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over – first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.

This seems to be the crux of the problem for the Left. How can you work outside of the system, presumably not co-opted, yet build enough of a mass organization that you can resist on a mass basis, then eventually take over that same system?

Given that theoretical framework, I don’t think you can. By staying outside the system you effectively limit your reach and influence to the relative few already on the Left who are willing to listen to you. But you can’t build a mass organization that way.

The question remains the same, whether Anarchist or Marxist, how do you influence the system if you are resolutely determined to stand outside of it?

Tip: American Leftist

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DSP splits in Australia along lines all familiar to the Left.

The fundamental dividing line therefore among Marxists today is between those who wish to continue with the demonstrably failed paradigm of building ideologically homogenous “parties” that are ostensibly “Leninist”, but have almost no impact on the politically relevant mainstream; and those who are prepared to work with others in the radical but pragmatic left to build a broad party in the space vacated by social democracy.

The first approach, the Leninist Party, risks becoming marginalized and ignored while often falling prey to endless factional splits over maddening obscure tenets of Marxism while the other can become diluted, losing zeal  and commitment for structural and revolutionary change.

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So it’s more than coming out. You can’t do it alone and certainly not in private.

And after all these years I am still a practising Leninist. Outwardly I look the same, but when I’m on a roll I’m at it hammer and sickle.

It’s true that we tend to be shunned in polite society. I admit that. There are some that pretend we aren’t there, that we somehow don’t exist just so that their sleep won’t be disturbed. Ours, unfortunately, is the politics that is not supposed to speak its name.

Well… at least he’s not, y’know, one of those crazed anarchists….

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The socialist ruling party in Spain has won the general elections while Socialists picked up many new municipal councils in France while retaining the two biggest cities, Paris and Lyons.

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Fun to watch, brilliantly done.
Tip. Lefti on the News.

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From 2001-2003, I was Co-coordinator of the Green Party of Los Angeles County. The GP was growing fast then, lots of voter registration drives and outreach. It was fun. Other parts were not so fun. In my role of Treasurer, I had a legal obligation to file a complaint against a Green Party member for his disposition of a $10,000 check. This caused ruptures that the California Green Party still hasn’t recovered from.

From there, I got active in the ANSWER Coalition, helping to build antiwar demonstrations, some of them quite massive. Got involved with the group behind them, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and learned about Marxism. Got purged from PSL quite recently for reasons I’m unclear of (and no longer care about) - so now I’m a free agent.

So, it’s been a turbulent several years. Quite exciting too, at times. Worked on the 2000 Nader campaigns and Peter Camejo’s run for governor in 2003. Helped build antiwar protests where tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands came. Drove the truck that led L.A. mass protests several times. I’ve learned a lot about politics, organizing, and people.

So what’s next for me?

Lately I’ve become increasingly interested in the political ramifications of global warming and peak oil. How do we organize for change here? To work towards solving these problems societies as a whole need to work together. We no longer have time for squabbling (or idiotic wars). Also, solutions will require huge amounts of money and resources as well as new directions for the planet. This means governments and business must become involved on a massive basis.

The Green Party absolutely played a huge role in getting global warming and renewable energy into the national consciousness. Whether they can survive the 2008 elections as a viable party is uncertain, but their contributions have been crucial.

I’m reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. It’s about how the planet is increasingly flattened by globalization, with work being done wherever it can be done the cheapest and most effectively. In it, he becomes startled when a Harvard political theorist tells him that his thesis, that the World is Flat, is almost precisely what Karl Marx wrote about in 1848. “The inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restraints to global commerce.” Of course, Marx believed once that happened, workers worldwide would discover their exploitation and then rise up and throw off their shackles. (They might also just sit back in the La-Z Boy and think, I’m glad I’m not living in a mud hut any more.)

So, am I an ecosocialist now? Maybe. But as you might guess, I’m currently a bit burned out on -isms, so no labels for me for a while, thanks.

As mentioned, to solve global warming, we all really do need to work together. I’m looking around for new groups to become involved with. What’s your group doing?

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Cyprus

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Dave Riley responds in the comments to Marxist groups, organizing, and clowning.

Personally I think the old guard standalone groupuscule form like the ISO, your old outfit, the SWP, etc has reached its use by date. But where Camejo tripped up, I think, is that he failed to note the massive advantage of cadreisation and collective commitment that is fostered in these partyish milieux under Leninist protocols.

Absolutely. It’s often the cadre organizations whose members keep working long after everyone else has gone home or given up. It’s in their collective DNA to do so.

You need very serious activists working together to do politics that returns to the attack again and again. But that’s the rub. How do you sustain that core without falling victim to the circle or bunker spirit? Especially when you are still marginal regardless of all your activity.

Dedication that was once admirable can become inbred and exclusionary, pushing out others, causing friction and fractures. Really, circular firing squads are such a huge waste of resources and time…

Maybe the organization needs to open up. Realize that other besides cadre can and should be members, that they can bring new ideas and perspectives into the group. Indeed, a group that remains insular has little hope of growing and spreading their message.

Would the non-cadre change the group? Absolutely. That’s what the cadre are afraid of, losing control. But if they took the risk, they could end up with a much larger organization and wouldn’t need to be tireless cadre any more because there would be so many more to do the work.

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(Another post in the wake of my post, “I got purged” from a far left grouplet.)

Peter Camejo nails it, describing how the absolutist views of Marxist vanguard parties (coupled with their imitation of who they think Lenin was) virtually guarantees such parties will be highly sectarian and doomed to being on the fringe.

The appearance of the “correct program”, “we are a Leninist Party” ideology has tended to always require a “leftist” view of reality and prognostications that cataclysmic events will soon catapult the sect into importance. This phenomenon is also to be found in all cults.

The “leftist” side is necessary because the sect members have to be more radical than any living movement. The attraction of association with a living process has to be broken to maintain the sect. This requires forever knocking any positive development in social movements. Analyses have to be made continuously showing the failings of all movements and their inevitable collapse and failure.

Much of the endless sectarianism on the left is due to precisely that, the insistence by the sect that only their view is the correct one. To allow other views to be accepted within the group would lead to the breakdown of their groupthink. Hence, vitriolic criticism of the perceived failings of any other group or movement has to be near constant.

But there are more productive and effective ways to work towards social justice.

Imitating others is a dead end, but one can learn from almost any experiences, especially successful ones. For a period, large numbers set out to imitate the Cubans in Latin America. This was a mistake. So were the attempts to imitate the Russians after 1917. People who can think for themselves have the best chance of success.

For more on Camejo, his history, and on sectarianism and regroupment, read Dave Riley’s comment to our previouas post on this topic. Dave has a wealth of information and insight to share and blogs at LeftCast (among other sites.)

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(This is the first of a series of posts in the wake of my post, “I got purged” from a far left grouplet.)

Among the socialist Left exists a multitude of little Marxist groups and parties. Too often, they secretly (or even not so secretly) believe they have the “correct program.” Thus, they see their task as convincing everyone else of the errors of their ways and then recruiting them into their faction.

Such groups are, of course, most often vexed by the little Marxist grouplet next to them whose program deviates ever so microscopically from theirs. Too often the result is lunatic infighting and splinter groups breaking away from other splinter groups.

The problem is not only are their parties microscopic in size, they also only recruit from those already on the hard left, and not from the masses at large. Thus they aren’t representative of the working class nor are they leading it, even though they claim to be.

Lenin, who they frequently quote (if not worship), recruited and attracted people from all levels and segments of the populace. Tens of thousands were members. His party, at least in the beginning, had competing newspapers (and thus apparently felt no need to have a “correct program.”)

The idea that a group of a few hundred people who are not in the leadership of any mass movement, much less integrally involved in leading the working class as a social force, can be referred to as a Leninist party and having a “correct program” would never have crossed Lenin’s mind. In 1918 Lenin would refer to such an idea as clowning.

By the 1940s, however, within the Trotskyist movement a conception had taken root that no matter how small or disconnected from the workers movement a group might be, if it had the “correct” program and a cadre, it was a Leninist Party and would eventually “win”.

This was the “proven” Leninist way. What the Trotskyist movement did as a whole was drop the direct involvement with the living mass movement as a prerequisite for the development of a party. Thus “program” was separated from its social roots.

Thus, they aren’t even trying to build a mass party, but rather assume the rightness of their ideas will somehow, someday, win them mass followers who will then rise up and smash capitalism with a mighty blow (with them in charge, of course.)

Lenin’s argument was that the discipline and unity required of a party that can lead a revolution is only built up politically through the class consciousness of the vanguard of the working class, its ability to link up with the broadest masses and ability to exercise political leadership over the masses. He said: “Without these conditions all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning.”

The ability to “link up with the broadest masses” is precisely what many such parties are incapable of doing. Often because they have no clue how to do so. Nor do they want to. Organizing on a mass level means there will be factions and disagreements within the group (this is a healthy thing and quite normal.) But groups that believe in their own inerrancy and “correct program” can’t allow competing ideas. So they, by dint of their own self-limiting agenda, can never become large and thus doom themselves to remain tiny as well as irrelevant to the working class at large that they pretend to represent.

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But then, I never have been able to turn off my brain and robotically accept dogma. My thought crime apparently involved being insufficiently Marxist. Mentioned this to a long-time socialist friend who laughed and said, congratulations.

A Steppenwolf lyric seems appropriate.

Your mind is so narrow
That it’s no surprise
If you fell on a pin
You’d be blind in both eyes.

And a bit more poetically, also from Steppenwolf.

I can’t return to where you’re goin’
What I have learned, it can’t be undone
…
All my faith got caught in a maze
Lost our dreams in a far a way place
Now that I have seen you again
Can’t believe your world’s still the same.

This was of course done in the finest tradition of the far left, without explanation or recourse and in a way that insured any existing friendships were vaporized. Go figure.

Update: Thoughts on the subject. Marxist groups, organizing, and clowning.

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Squirrel Communism looks at the horrors of Stalinism and the sometimes tendency of the socialist left to say this occurred outside of or was a perversion of the revolution.

If we are to deal with this problem and eventually overcome it, we shall have to go beyond calls for a “return to Lenin” and a rejection of “Stalinism”. We must accept Stalinism as a historical part of our movement, its horrors as our horrors. Only then will we actually try to find some real solution to our (get it?) contradictions and give capital a final kick in the butt.

A primary force leading to such horrors is the dictatorship of the proletariat. In theory it is supposed to be aimed only at the recently deposed bourgeoisie, and a temporary situation as well. In practice, it becomes  an entrenched system run by a few with vast powers and no way to replace them.

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Chavez is abandoning his socialist agenda “for now,” granting amnesty to right-wing coup plotters, replacing left-wingers in his cabinet, and signaling he wants to build alliances with the bourgeoisie.

New Statesman opines the recent defeat of socialism at the Venezuela polls had little to do with socialism and quite a lot to do with Chavistas becoming insiders.

A closer look at electoral patterns reveals a clear protest vote, not against a socialist agenda, but against corrupt administrations, at the national and the regional level.

The vote outcome has everything to do with the accession of many a Chavista to the rank of “insider” over the past eight years. This process has been gradual, and perhaps inevitable in a society in which institutionalised rentier-mechanisms have been endemic for decades.

But the contradiction between a radical socialist government agenda and the “Chavista elite”, bent on defending its share in the oil rent, effectively came to a head last year.

In other words, it’s a battle between the left Chavista street and the right Chavista elite, many of whom hold positions of power in the administration, and pretended to back the reforms while working against them and destabilized markets to create food shortages.

Thus, says the New Statesman, a weakened Chavez hasn’t the power to fight them and must make accommodations, at least for now, until he strengthens his mass party - assuming he can.

In any system of government, a primary task is to insure that a privileged elite does not gain control, enriching themselves at the expense of others. This clearly has  happened in socialism (USSR managerial class and current day China) as well as capitalism. Somehow, we need governments beholden and responsive to all, and not primarily to the few at the top.

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Occasionally, however, capitalism requires a good dose of diluted socialism to keep it kicking, and the capitalist elite may well be hankering for a bit of socialist economics to straighten out the neoliberal disaster engineered by ideologues with fanciful derivatives they can’t understand (and neither can the “rocket scientists’ who engineered them) and an energy crisis that they can’t break out of.

Oh, the rocket scientists understood their derivatives well enough, it was the risk they didn’t understand. “The range of markets practically never goes outside two standard deviations.” Yet in the 1987 crash, it was twenty standard deviations. Oopsie. “Our models predict no more than a 2% default rate in subprime mortgages.” Whoops, “How did the default rate go to 4%, our models show that to be impossible.” Darn that pesky reality that refuses to conform to mathematical models.

Socialists tend to think that capitalists control the system with a firm hand and glacial calm. Not so. Financial markets sometimes careen about like chipmunks on meth with no one in control or knowing what will happen next. Like now, for example.

Yes, capitalism absolutely needs a huge influx of money to pay for R&D and development of clean energy. They know this. The money will come from governments, private enterprise, and non-profits (like the Google foundation.) Venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins already are pumping in millions, probably billions. Some governments are deeply involved, sadly not ours (yet.) Hey, I don’t care how clean energy gets developed as long as does and becomes available to all.

As for the derivative debacle, it signals the death knell for neocon lunacy and their hands-off-the-market philosophy, as this rather clearly led to massive greed followed by the credit crisis. Plenty of hardcore capitalists are now calling for increased and strict governmental regulation to insure this can’t happen again.

So, if governmental investing in clean energy and increased regulation of markets be Socialism Lite, then it most assuredly is coming.

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Is capitalism entering a huge crisis or will it (as it often does) somehow muddle through, perhaps even strengthening itself in the process? Socialists are divided on the issue, says The Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect, referring to a debate between Robert Brenner and Sam Gindin (videos)

(As an aside, there’s a funny opening quote on the video from the moderator. “We on the left are famous for predicting crises… Marxists have predicted ten out of the last six crises.”)

Proyect himself is undecided on the debate.

I confess to being wishy-washy on the topic. Perhaps I became immunized to the kind of hard-core catastrophist analysis associated with the Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties after hearing leaders of the American SWP describe the late 1970s in cataclysmic terms. For nearly the past 30 years, they have been predicting a global depression in the 1929 style. There is a certain logic to this. If you are trying to hold together an isolated and shrinking sect, hope takes the form of such predictions. While the rest of American society has fond hopes of prosperity, the far reaches of the Marxist left goes to sleep at night fantasizing about Hoovervilles.

Marxist organizers might wish to consider that gleefully predicting that millions will lose homes and jobs might not be the best of all possible organizing ploys to attract people to their cause. Also, an economic calamity does not magically guarantee workers will stampede to the left, they could also go right - or do nothing.

Sam Gidlin: “I think the crisis is on the Left, not in capitalism.” He also says employees now have often internalized the values of neoliberalism. Tell a Google employee he’s being exploited and he’ll probably look at you like you’re a Martian. He *wants* to work 14 hour days.

This brings me to a point that Gindin made in his presentation. He said that the problem today is political more than anything else. He said that if you had told him in 1975 that the U.S. would undergo the loss of good trade union jobs and welfare state social legislation with so little protest over the next 30 years or so, he simply would have not believed it–and neither would have I.

Project thinks the only solution is to start a mass (emphasis on “mass”) leftwing party. Maybe we also need to take a tip from 4th Generation Warfare tactics, which posits that the winning side is the one that has the best story - and “whoopee we’re going to have a Depression” is not a contender story.

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From Red Pepper

Many socialists look to the state as the decisive instrument of social change. Nigel Harris argues that, on the contrary, nation states, with their priorities and resources focused on maintaining power through military might, hold back the reduction of poverty. He insists that globalisation, despite all of its ambiguities, is essentially a liberation from the shackles of the competing nation state. We have to look to NGOs and social and labour movements to constrain the market, he says.

It seems dicey that NGOs and movements would be able to constrain the market in a globalized world, something they certainly can’t do now. Given the recent credit crisis, it’s clear that governments can’t either. Nor can the markets themselves, for that matter. So where will the control mechanisms come from?

We do not know what structures of governance will emerge, but emerge they must. The left’s role is to ensure they are directed to protecting all equally – to establishing the equality of all in the world, and, insofar as national governments survive, that they are obliged to accept the free flow of people internationally and the protection of all within their territories, not merely their supposed citizens.

A key insight here is that the forces of globalization basically oppose and wish to override the nation states. Thus, rather than oppose globalization (a pointless and losing task), we need to make it work for us. What other choice is there, really?

In essence, the left has to help and lead in recreating a world society that corresponds to the new world economy. Within that poverty really can be conquered and war eliminated.

If globalization takes over as the dominant mode from nation states - and I think it will - then the world will be vastly more decentralized. Therein lies the challenge that socialism hasn’t really thought out. In a decentralized world, there will be no powerful states that can manage things, much less be the owners of the means of production. For socialism to stay relevant, it needs to find new ways to address our fast changing and decentralizing world. This Red Pepper article helps find that path.

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Check their Ecosocialism and the Fight Against Global Warming interview with editor Ian Angus.

Ecosocialism has grown out of two parallel political trends — the spread of Marxist ideas in the green movement and the spread of ecological ideas in the Marxist left. The result is a set of social and political goals, a growing body of ideas, and a global movement.

As a body of ideas, ecosocialism argues that ecological destruction is not an accidental feature of capitalism, it is built into the system’s DNA. The system’s insatiable need to increase profits — what’s been called “the ecological tyranny of the bottom line” — cannot be reformed away.

Incidentally, Ian emailed me and asked if he could use the theme for Polizeros as a template for the relaunch. I said sure, and sent it along, he tweaked it considerably, and the result looks great. I got the theme for free from here, modified it, now Ian has done the same. No money changed hands nor did it need to. Which is kind of a socialist process when you think about it!

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Under socialism, the workers’ state can impose mandatory emissions controls and implement emissions reduction technology in a coordinated fashion. The worst case scenario of global warming can be averted.

Such mandatory controls would need to be worldwide, not just nationwide. The question, as always, is how could such a global government be implemented - especially since we don’t have decades for this to happen. Action is needed now.

We need some kind of worldwide controlling body that has the power to mandate climate control changes because it’s highly doubtful that private enterprise will do it en masse on their own because of the cost. Such a controlling body would also have to be composed of highly competent (and non-corruptible) people. It would have to be able to build consensus and implement the changes in a way that made the players want to participate. Again, we don’t have time for conflict and violent disagreements, as the climate change clock continues to tick.

Also, solutions won’t scale worldwide. What works in the US won’t work in, say, Bangladesh. There are probably hundreds of millions of people who burn animal dung and chop down trees for fuel. While this is ecologically disastrous when done on a large scale, a governing body can’t tell them to stop doing so without providing alternative, clean fuel - not unless they want protests and uprisings. Here in the States, forcing coal plants to close would be politically impossible unless new sources of energy have already been created.

Somehow, we need worldwide consensus on climate change, then mandating the changes becomes relatively much simpler.

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There’s an interesting discussion on Marxmail on the Respect / SWP donnybrook, discussing how the party-building doctrine of a Marxist vanguard sometimes means they use mass organizations as recruiting and propaganda tools rather than as a way to work with other factions in a coalition and focus on the issues at hand.

Lest this seems esoteric, Respect is the British party founded by Member of Parliament George Galloway, while SWP is a vanguard party within it. But maybe not for long.

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