Green politics beyond Erich Fromm: A brief review of The New Materialism by Geoff Pfeifer

Erich Fromm, in works like 'To Have or to Be?' was an influence on my ecosocialism and part of the intellectual roots of green politics for many of us in the 1980s. Still, I think, worth a read, building on variously Zen Buddhism, Marx's early works and Freud, his argument that 'being' is more significant than 'having' still has some power.

Fromm is a thinker who identified ecological damage with consumerism, seeing consumerism as an element of capitalism, driven in turn by 'alienation'. To understand and combat climate change we need to move beyond capitalism, and for Fromm, Marx in his early work shows that alienation from the work process drives a kind of hunger. Similar Marxist/Freudism inspired the tradition around the group Socialist Self-Management, via the work of Alan Roberts.

'Erich Fromm and Andre Gorz held that consumer satisfaction, which serves as the main ideological    justification of economic growth, arises from our alienation from work and community. We may want good work and decent communities, but we learn to need only more consumer goods. As Fromm put it, “under capitalism man is transformed into a homo consumens who tries to compensate for this inner emptiness by continuous and ever-increasing consumption.” Or, in Gorz’s words, the corporation does not simply sell consumer goods. It sells means of distraction, “means of dreaming that one is human — because there is no chance of actually becoming such.”' S/R 55: Ecosocialism as a System of Thought (Cy Gonick) (greens.org)

So while I am not going to reject Fromm, I do think that we need to go beyond his thinking if we are to advance practical politics in the face of climate change and other disasters.

While this wish is not the intention behind Geoff Pfeifer's book, I think reading The New Materialism is helpful in this regard. Pfeifer's ambition is to examine the French theorist Badiou, and the better known Slovenian Žižek, examining how they seek to over come the challenge provided by Louis Althusser's reading of 'ideology'. I am interested in how discussion of 'ideology' can inform ecological politics.

As Greens/ecosocialists/etc...we tend to have a moral critique. Consciously or unconsciously to some extent this draws on the Frankfurt School, with which Fromm had links, and a reading of the Young Marx that stresses humanist and environmental themes.

Sophisticated readings of ideology, as outlined here by Pfeifer, tend to put a bomb under moral politics, notions of humanism and an easy path to a better world.

We like to think we are moral beings, fighting for a better world. Ideology is often seen as a set of false ideas, promoted by powerful groups, almost like a conspiracy theory, to maintain capitalism and corporations.

Pfeifer provides a particularly clear discussion of the role of 'ideology' based on the thinking of the  Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza. Spinoza is an ecologist, long before the word was coined, seeing human beings as having no kingdom separate from nature. This implies, uncomfortably, that we don't have total moral autonomy, but instead we are products of an underlying ecology, biological and social.

Materialism is, perhaps crudely, an alternative to an idealism that would suggest we are free to choose our future. Human beings, like the rest of nature, are a product of forces that are not immediately under our control.

The notion of ideology, developed implicitly by Spinoza, articulated explicitly by Althusser and providing a key problem that inspires the work of Badiou and Žižek, leads to a contradiction that makes political or indeed any intentional moral action problematic. However, ignoring this problem and pretending it does not exist, will not, I think, make it go away. It needs to be acknowledged.

'Ideology has no history' is a cryptic phrase but key to understanding. 'Ideology' is seen as having a history in the sense that humanity is fooled by false ideas; the revolution involves, amongst other victories, the removal of false oppressive views, thus ushering in a bright future.

If we look at climate change, ideology does apparently have a history. Climate change emerged as a scientific problem, but during the process 'Big Oil' constructed a counter narrative(s), variously arguing that climate change was not occurring, caused by factors other than carbon dioxide, didn't matter or that measures to reduce CO2 emissions were inevitably harmful.

'Ideology' in this sense, exists. However 'ideology' isn't just wicked manipulation, it isn't a matter of overthrowing the false, embracing the true, and tackling climate change, etc. Spinoza and co-thinkers argue instead that 'ideology' in a certain sense is always with us. To understand the world, even scientifically, demands the use of images and concepts which are ideological. There is no pure understanding of reality.

Even science has to grapple with this necessary mystification. Pfeifer usefully reminds readers of the work of the French philosopher of methodology Bachelard. Bachelard argues that scientists make discoveries but such discoveries are based on pre-existing images. An epistemological break occurs when scientific revolutions are made and the old images are eventually rejected. While science develops, it doesn't develop cleanly; an ideological residue exists. Science develops concepts but concepts are imagined, and images always have an ideological root.

'Bachelard argues that the human pursuit of knowledge is characterized by a history of radical shifts, discontinuities, and ruptures with earlier conceptions of reality; in order to come to know anything new [...] the scientist must 'break' with her previously held beliefs about the world.' (Pfeifer 2015: 17)

Ideology in terms of set beliefs/images can be challenged and changed but never entirely removed. It is not simply a negative thing, where we are fooled and mystified. The argument is that ideology is an essential part of human existence, we understand reality through images/beliefs, the truly 'real' is not directly represented.

The problem is that politics is never pure. What we desire is shaped by pre-existing ideology. 'Nature', for example, has an ideological function, one thinks of the necessity of the oak to English identities, the sunflower as a symbol of green politics, etc, etc, etc. It is not so much that we have ideology as that ideology has us. The notion of ideology as inevitable, constructive to identity and our understanding of reality, largely unconscious and a product of material practices, is articulated in this book with clarity. Light is cast on necessary mystification.

A non ideological purely scientific view is perhaps impossible. Politics is shaped, in turn, by preferences of which we may not be fully conscious. This provides huge problems for political action, however the modest aim of challenging ecological destruction means we must grapple with it. While to repeat, this is not the ambition of Pfeifer's book, at least, not directly, he nevertheless introduces the question with clarity. 

An essay submitted to Fromm but apparently rejected by him, noted:

'Ideology is as such an organic part of every social totality. It is as if human societies could not survive without these specific formations, these systems of representations (at various levels), their ideologies. Human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere...' (Althusser in Pfeifer 2015: 27)

Like Jason Read I tend to view Badiou as a better polemicist than a theorist (I need to remind myself as to the reference to this statement from Jason!) and I am a Žižek sceptic on the whole. I won't discuss here how Pfeifer argues that Badiou and Žižek build on the question of ideology in a materialist sense, although as a side note it was interesting to read how Badiou, rather than providing a clean break, was to some extent inspired by Sartre. I do feel this is a readable, concise book that deals with challenging philosophical concepts in a way that those of us who are non-philosophers, engaged in practical politics including the struggles around climate change, can learn from.

As a footnote, I have found the work, both in terms of philosophy and of armed resistance, of Jean Cavaillès instructive when considering climate change. In a tradition that largely rejects tradition for sharp breaks, Cavaillès helped inspire both Bachelard and Althusser.

Climate Strike

 I have written a preface for the Left Book Club Edition of Climate Strike. 

Preface.

Climate Strike is a sustained reflection on political strategy. Climate change is with us, causing harm and likely to intensify, so we are obliged to think as deeply as possible and act decisively to combat this threat. Between starting to write this book in 2019 and providing a preface for a new edition in 2022, the fundamentals remain the same yet perhaps there are some new lessons to learn?

I finished the book in 2020 when the covid pandemic hit. Indeed, the book is dedicated to Carole Chant and Ted Knight who both died in the spring of 2020. Carole was one of the first to be taken from us by the pandemic https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/fari-bradley-remembers-scratch-orchestra-s-carole-finer The book is haunted by covid, but I resisted making any instant judgements on the crisis and its implications for climate change politics in the original text. Rather than a hot take in 2020, I can now make a warm take in 2022. The pandemic is continuing and its implications will no doubt only be fully understood in decades to come.

A miasma of slow burning, ongoing crisis pervades Britain. A smell of decay. Government mismanagement has killed many of our loved ones here. Having escaped covid for nearly two years, I recently succumbed, two red lines on a test, my symptoms were slight but, writing this, my energy levels remain low. The weather gives continuing cause for concern, twin storms Dudley and Eunice are hitting the UK as I write, ripping out trees, cutting electricity and disrupting life. No single weather event can be linked unambiguously to climate change, but such events are more frequent and intense.

There have been suggestions that climate change and the pandemic have the same root cause, with exploitation of the environment leading both to rising carbon emissions and the clearance of forests, causing species infected with the virus to move into areas of human population https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02341-1. I am not qualified to judge this hypothesis. I do think the approach taken to the pandemic has lessons for the likely trajectory of responses to unfolding climate change.

Some governments have taken the problem of the pandemic seriously and limited deaths, from China to Vietnam to New Zealand, so called ‘zero covid’ strategies have been effective. Whether, by time you read this, they may be failing to cope with new variants, I cannot say. However reducing the spread of covid reduces mutation, and zero covid policies could have spared our planet’s inhabitants much suffering, had they been implemented more widely at the start of the crisis.

Covid has been a disaster for the USA and much of Europe. Complacency has led to an astonishing death toll. As I write, the US death figures are over 900,000 and in the UK over 160,000. Responses, including the first lockdown in March 2020 have been delayed and weak, with horrible cost. This parallels responses to climate change: an acknowledge of the problem, but with feeble action, leading to catastrophe looks likely.

In turn, astonishing to my mind, there have been vigorous protests by activists who have been variously opposed to lockdown, masks, and vaccines. While there may be some serious issues in terms of human rights when it comes to vaccine mandates, and it is always wise to consider the unintended consequences of action, in essence we have seen a pro-covid protest movement take to the streets. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin used to attack deep ecologists, claiming that they defended the rights of small pox http://libcom.org/library/social-versus-deep-ecology-bookchin. He would have been surprised to see vibrant protest movements acting as if they were the active advocates of a virus. 

There is a cross fertilization of right wing politics and some members of the green movement. Right wing political activists in a host of countries, including Britain and most visibly the US, are enthusiastic about reducing restrictions that protect life. The ‘economy’ and ‘freedom’ are defended, but we might ask rhetorically what freedom is there in failing to tackle a deadly pandemic?

On the green and left side of politics some have embraced the anti-vaccine movement. A criticism of the power of pharmaceutical corporations, a justified suspicion of the state and an embrace of preventative and alternative medicine, can mutate into a hostility to measures to protect the public from the pandemic. The examples are numerous, but I think of Adrian Oliver, at one time a Green Party councillor who worked as an office manager for the Party. He became a leading member and by-election candidate in 2021 for the Freedom Alliance, a political organisation opposing vaccine rollouts and lockdowns.

Covid doesn’t automatically translate into climate change accelerationism.  However covid sceptics are increasingly climate sceptics. This works in the following way: Governments bring in measures to deal with the problem, these fall far short of what is needed, but suspicion of government from a variety of directions creates counter movements who loudly demand they do far less. Green-inspired covid sceptics may attack electric cars and challenge the ‘great reset’. In the UK, elements of the right have established networks to attack net zero.

So to sum up, while climate change, as I argue in the book, is a product of capitalism, to gain either fundamental revolutionary transformation or more modest practical reform, a battle of ideas will need to be joined. I have been impressed by the tenacity of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain to put climate change on the agenda, yet I feel more sustained activism is necessary. While the future looks far from secure, with climbing C02 levels and toxic political mobilisations, there are signs of hope. The technical means to combat climate change, from satellites detecting methane leaks to rapidly developing sources of ever cheaper renewable energy, offer a little good news. Yet technical fixes only go so far. Changing the economy to protect both humanity and nature is a bigger challenge. A society that responds to the drumbeat of profit harms life; creating an alternative based on ecology, diversity and equality is both necessary and challenging. While conspiracy and right wing thinking may be a threat, a revolutionary politics based on rooted community action provides organised hope. The growth of base building alternatives, including Philly Socialists and the Welsh Underground, has been the most positive development for me since finishing the book. Transcending capitalism is necessary to transcend the climate crisis and there are signs that alternatives are growing from small beginnings. I hope reading this book will inspire you to get involved in such projects, boats that can take us to another shore that provides a sustainable, safe, ecosocialist future.

 

John Dos Passos U.S.A

 U.S.A. is a vast, 1184 pages long, modernist novel. Reading approximately 100 pages a day it still took nearly two weeks. While it is long it is very readable, it's core is the personal and engaging stories of twelve individuals. This isn't Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, while it is 'experimental' and there is a lot of it, the words are generally transparent and each character faces a clear narrative. Dos Passos tells stories, stories that draw you in.

The stories of the characters are broken up with other literary forms. There is a newsreel of fake newspaper headlines along with biographies of real American figures ranging from Henry Ford to Veblen. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction, newsreel and novel, are blurred.

It is in fact three novels in one, telling the tale of the USA during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Above all, it is a socialist novel. Revolution is in the air. The International Workers of the World, maximalists, anarchists, the Communist Party and trade union militants fight injustice. America has long the been the site of brutal class warfare, the cops shoot workers hear, while some of the characters in contrast make millions from the sweat of others. Lenin and 'Trotzky' pop up in news reels and characters engage in revolutionary warfare in Mexico.

The first character introduced Mac, goes by the Christian name of Fenian, in memory of the Fenians who fought against Britain to build an independent Ireland. 

'Mac didn't usually say much, but sometimes he got sore and gave them a broadside of straight I.W.W. doctrine. Concha would finish all arguments by bringing on supper and saying with a shake of her head, "Every poor man socialista ....a como no? But when you get rich, quick you are very much capitalista." Penguin edition (2001:260-261)

Dos Passos was a fervent revolutionary when he wrote the trilogy, published in the 1930s. By the end of his life he was a right wing Republican, supporting Barry Goldwater and finally Richard Nixon. The erosion of revolutionary enthusiasm in the USA is one story but as capitalism grinds on inequality generates new lefts. Dos Passos, like Orwell fell out with Stalin during the Spanish Civil War, he went through his Orwell phase but lived longer and moved farther to the right than Eric Blair. What ever his later politics, U.S.A. is both a great novel and a great socialist novel, don't be put off by the length, it is an amalgam of many  interesting short stories.