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.
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.
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