Green Republicanism vs Anti-Political Extremism
Sustaining the Health of the Political Environment
I write this piece in response to the document Extremism Rebellion: A Review of Ideology and Tactics written by Tom Wilson and Richard Walton. This document is published by Policy Exchange, which describes itself in these terms: “Policy Exchange is the UK’s leading think tank. We are an independent, non-partisan educational charity whose mission is to develop and promote new policy ideas that will deliver better public services, a stronger society and a more dynamic economy.” I'll note that commitment to a 'more dynamic economy.' I am committed to the principle of Catholic business ethics, which proposes goods that are truly good and services that truly serve. That view invites an elaboration of the true ends to which all things are to be ordered. That commitment may earn me the title of extremist and fundamentalist. It's basic Catholic social ethics.
Members and supporters of Extinction Rebellion, which include many social media ‘friends’ and Green associates of mine, have been quick to defend themselves against accusations of extremism. They have been keen to emphasize their democratic credentials, pointing out their opposition to the way that politics has been hijacked by private economic interests. They have also been concerned to identify the backgrounds of Wilson and Walton and ask questions of Policy Exchange, its connections and motives. Politics is all about interests and motives. And values.
This is a report that has been a long time coming. I’m only surprised it has taken this long. Here is a warning along these lines from two years ago:
Militant environmentalism is coming, says the author in 2017. 'And we aren’t ready for it.' The article notes: ‘from the perspective of environmentalists, there are mounting reasons to doubt the political prospects for saving the planet.’ It comments: ‘No serious activist thinks the Paris climate accords, feted by governments, are enough — and that was before Trump pulled out of them. The signs of growing radicalism in green circles are already there.’ To which I would add that no serious climate scientist thinks the Paris climate accords are remotely enough, either, a view which is a rational invitation into political radicalism. The challenge, as ever, is how to translate the climate truths revealed by science into an effective politics - effective in the sense of being a practicable politics that is in accord with those truths. And by that, I do mean a politics, in the sense of something that engages people in determining the terms on which their common affairs are to be governed, something more than a statement of scientific truth. “You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact,” asserted John Oliver, in a passage lauded and celebrated by many. “You might as well have a poll asking: ‘which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ or ‘Do owls exist?’ or ‘Are there hats?’”
Or does the citizen voice count for anything in determining the terms on which people are to be governed?
Oliver’s statement here was repeated ad nauseum in support and celebration of the way that fact trumps the views of people, indicating the extent to which a certain strand of environmentalism has spectacularly missed the point. Politics is about judgement as well as truth, about value as well as fact. People’s opinions matter in politics, to the extent that individuals are only legitimately obligated by laws in which they have had a hand in making. The issue is not one of scientific truth. The distinction between knowledge and opinion is as old as the ancients. The issue is not the difference between the two but the bridge by which knowledge and truth enters the world of practical reason (politics and ethics). That point has been missed and by a very wide mark, effectively leaving environmentalism bereft of a serious politics.
The article quotes Earth First!: “no compromise in defense of Mother Earth.” That motto is anti-political to the core, in that politics is all about voicing and reconciling differences in dialogue. There is no point in dialogue if all sides are merely asserting truths that are non-negotiable. Too much of environmentalism as politics has been of this character of anti-politics. The article predicts: ‘Visit any of the environmentalist websites or blogs and you’ll find an endless run of protests, demos, marches, and planned civil disobedience. Something is stirring.’
It has now stirred. It is now in the form of peaceful, non-violent protest. But this article presents views as to why this may be short-lived:
‘The author Naomi Klein’s latest book, No Is Not Enough, offers an optimistic analysis of how politics could fix the world’s problems — although she stresses that time is running out. And when time runs out, as I’m afraid it will, books like Deep Green Resistance — a sort of how-to guide for radical environmentalists — urge abandoning ineffective peaceful routes and hint darkly that industrial sabotage is the only avenue left open. (This is all without even mentioning the broader anti-capitalist movement, of which environmentalism is increasingly a part. At the last G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, 76 police officers were injured in violent clashes with protesters.)’
When politics fails and peaceful protest fails – as they will if the political sphere is inadequate to the task and if you don’t (and can't) do politics right – then there is nowhere to go but the violent route – because those committed to the cause will remain convinced in its fundamental, and overriding, rightness.
Whilst we may express surprise that it has taken this long for a more militant or ‘extremist’ environmentalism to emerge, Roger Hallam, a specialist in collective action theory (as well as a climate change activist) argues that this is partly because people are not mobilized by abstract theory and scientific facts and figures alone. Research on social movements indicates that humans are more likely to be stirred by signal moments than abstract ideas or data. “At some point in the next five years,” Hallam claimed in 2017, “there will be a catastrophic climatic event. And suddenly the whole movement will take off.”
This strikes a chord with me, given that I have sought to make the facts and figures on climate existentially meaningful through stories, values, and visions of future society as an embodiment of the good life. I have been at pains to embed climate action within a substantive ethical and political framework precisely to avoid militant protest and demonstration, the dissolution of the public realm into chaos, and the setting of people at extremes opposed to one another. I have certainly sought to convert environmentalism from it scientistic frame into something existentially significant in political and ethical terms, but I have meant this in the ancient sense of Politikon Bion, a genuine public life – not rebellion and protest seeking to force change by pressure, but a genuine public life capable of constituting order.
The definition of terrorism — which is highly disputed and varies country to country — matters, and it is usually a political question. I asked Neumann, the ICSR director, if a green activist committing industrial sabotage without human casualties in order to change government policy to improve the sustainability of the planet was really “terrorism.” “That’s a tricky one,” he replied. And it is. But it’s also a question we may soon be forced to grapple with.
And here we now are, grappling away, with Extinction Rebellion being labelled 'Extremism Rebellion.'
For the record, I have not issued a single solitary statement in favour of Extinction Rebellion. My reservations have been expressed in private advice. I have not been more vocal for the very reason I am generally leery of protest and demonstration and prefer a very different mode and temper of politics. That personal view on my part could not but be viewed negatively by people for whom protest and civil disobedience is a vital part of speaking truths to power. And it may be misunderstood. So I keep silent. My public comments have been few, and they have expressed a concern for activists to transition as quickly as they can from protest mode to constructive efforts in building public community.
I find the controversy over legitimising and delegitimising voices somewhat tangential. It’s the stuff of politics. If you seek to challenge, check, and most of all subvert power, then those who have institutionalized their power will resist; those charged with maintaining political and civil stability will be concerned to identify and check those out to destabilize the prevailing order. I see no reasons for surprise that a movement involved in organised ‘rebellion’, civil disobedience and law-breaking, specifically designed to disrupt patterns of everyday life, should attract the attention of the authorities. I do find it surprising that those in Extinction Rebellion should be expressing outrage that they are being branded ‘extremists.’ They are openly breaking laws with a view to forcing change outside of existing political channels. Whether the political innocence is real or genuine is beside the point – it is the failure to do politics properly that is my concern here, because it will not only ensure that the environmental cause fails to punch its considerable weight (in terms of scientific knowledge and technological know-how). This could backfire badly, ensuring the very thing that climate rebels are seeking to avoid – ecological degradation and destruction.
I note the two banners on the photo of the Extremism Rebellion report: ‘system change, not climate change’ and ‘for life.’ This makes this a very pertinent and somewhat awkward issue for me. I could be counted as a ‘life’ philosopher, arguing for a human and planetary interdependence that brings civilization into healthy relation to the sources of life. (I argue that the issue is more complicated than that, hence my political and moral ecology, and hence my slight distance from ‘life’ alone as a principle. But the general categorisation fits). And I explicitly argue for ‘system change’ as necessary to avoid the worst impact of climate change. So I could, certainly, be said to be one of the ‘extremists’ being targeted here.
In terms of ends, I am one of the ‘extremists.’ I argue for the recalibration of the economy system, the restructuring of power and resources in more egalitarian fashion, and for the settling of practical activities within the commonwealth of life. So far, so good, and so general as to be little more than a vague idealism. The crucial part all along for me has been to translate these ideals into practices and transitions strategies which engage and facilitate the activities of people, fostering an ecological character and sensibility on their part, which they express in communities of practice. Hence my consistent emphasis on the field of practical reason as the field of ethics and politics, and hence my concern to address individuals as moral beings and as active, informed citizens. I therefore look to supply the springs of response and (co)responsibility on the part of people, establishing the means and mechanisms enabling a participatory ecological transition and transformation through communities of character and practice. It is precisely this aspect of ‘the political’ that is missing in Extinction Rebellion. If I count as an ‘extremist’ on ends, I most certainly do not on means. I am a good Hegelian to the core and insist on the interpenetration of means and ends, viewing the ends as means in the process of becoming. Since I started in the 1990s I have insisted on prefiguration and have eschewed the self-destructive doctrine of the means justify the ends.
Already I have heard stories of people being unable to visit dying relatives in hospital, of nurses not being able to get to work, operations being cancelled, meeting with the response that things of such personal concern to individuals are of no consequence set against the millions who will die as a result of climate catastrophe. When you make an end not merely of overarching but overriding significance in that manner then you are lost politically – because you have lost people. With an objective of such overriding significance, you have no need to listen to what people say, only tell them what to think and what to do. You have reserved to yourself the right to judge and act on the ‘objective interest’ of people, regardless of what people say themselves. It is to reserve to oneself an unimpeachable authority in politics. Such people are extremists in rebellion and totalitarians in power.
If we start with the premise that the mass of human beings are greedy, stupid, and indifferent, then we are led to a political pessimism in which all initiative is in the hands of active, informed elites. The futility of such an anti-politics lies in its denial of creative agency on the part of ‘ordinary’ citizens. Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticism of Marxist Herbert Marcuse’s pessimism with respect to the mass of human beings is pertinent in this respect:
‘One cannot liberate people from above; one cannot reeducate them at this fundamental level. As the young Marx saw, men must liberate themselves. The only education that liberates is self-education. To make men objects of liberation by others is to assist in making them passive instruments, is to cast them for the role of inert matter to be moulded into forms chosen by the elite. The majority of men in advanced industrial societies are often confused, unhappy and conscious of their lack of power; they are often also hopeful, critical and able to grasp immediate possibilities of happiness and freedom. Marcuse underrates most men as they are; the false contempt for the majority into which his theory leads him underpins policies that would in fact produce just that passivity and that irrationalism with which he charges contemporary society.’
Alasdair MacIntyre, Marcuse 1970 ch 8
We should always be careful in politics of invoking the great names of freedom, reason, and happiness whilst engaging in a practice that betrays their substance every step of the way.
This, I would say, is the real source of my objection. My objection is not scientific. Not only do I have no qualms with respect to what the world of science is reporting with respect to the crisis in the climate system, I have been an active campaigner for climate action and environmental protection and restoration since the 1980s. When we are told that we cannot ignore the science, I most certainly agree that we pay close attention to the latest scientific researches. My objection is fundamentally moral and political. I work from within a tradition and conception of ‘rational freedom.’ This view affirms a commitment to truth and knowledge but seeks not to state them passively but have them actively incorporated within and lived through human actions, practices, and relations. The bridge here between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world) and practical reason (ethics and politics) indicates a partnership between people and their world. In the conception of ‘rational freedom’ I develop, freedom has historically been embodied and articulated as a lawful and institutional freedom, securing the right relations between individuals in society and between society and the wider world. In time, I came to see that notion as rooted not just in ancient Greece, which is how I initially developed it, but in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Here, the partnership is one between God and human beings made in the image of God. There is a significant difference between this image of the world and the one of ancient civilizations. The ancient gods were natural gods, all-powerful forces of nature, impersonal and indifferent to human concerns. Humans sought to placate and appease these gods, even outwit them, but they could never get these gods to submit to the rule of law. Human beings therefore were in the hands of external impersonal forces, playthings of forces that proceeded without regard to human needs, desires, and appeals. When I see the extent to which science is being pressed into service as ethics and politics, I see Max Weber’s image of renascent nature gods taking form as impersonal forces and demanding human sacrifice. They are not true gods, just as the Nature those who speak with the authority of science refer to is not true nature – merely the collective environmental consequences of uncoordinated incremental human actions within specific social relations. Hence my objection to science being used in lieu of a genuine ethics and politics – it is a return of the old impersonal gods mediating the alienated world of capitalist relations and its economic imperatives. Not only do human beings cease to be partners in Creation, with an active hand in making the laws by which they consent to be governed, they are reduced to subservience not merely to the gods of the old indifferent Nature but to their own alien powers as they impact catastrophically on the natural environment. I fear that environmentalists, with the best of intentions, are merely equipping governments with the scientific rationale to institute an environmental austerity, preserving rather than altering the very social relations driving this eco-catastrophe in the first place. My objection, then, is not the science but the political naivety and ethical neutrality.
With ‘rational freedom,’ I take my stand on a moral-legal partnership between God and humanity in determining the right relation to Nature. That view holds that right is sovereign over might, that truth cannot be passively given, still less dictated by philosopher rulers but must be actively willed, and that there is no legitimate government without the consent of the governed. As stated, I originally located this conception in ancient Greece. I emphasize Plato’s employment of the dialectic to tease out the truth through dialogue. But I now go deeper and further to emphasize the active relation of the government to God the governor. Even God Himself does not dictate and impose truth, but works through partnership with human beings as moral agents. This, at least as much as ancient Greek conceptions, and probably more so, establishes the moral content of ‘rational freedom,’ the foundation stone of democracy, freedom, justice, and equality: no power, not even the unlimited power of God, is absolute. Above all rulers, of whatever description, philosopher-kings, democratically elected governments, monarchs, emperors etc. stands the supreme authority of the moral law. That principle is the first and eternal foundation of freedom, the defence of human rights against tyranny, the tyranny of tyrants but also of experts or what Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill called "the tyranny of the majority.”
I argue for 'rational freedom.' I argue for system change to restore the connection between reason and freedom. I argue the need to uproot the accumulative dynamic. I am forever urging those who insist on ‘system change, not climate change’ to engage in structural transformations rather than level demands for change on governments that are embedded in the very system they seek to change. Most of all, I argue for popular engagement and involvement in creating material counter-organisations. In short, I argue for a coherent organisation, clarity of ends, provision of effective and appropriate means of associative action, unity of purpose, and an active consent translated into conscious participation. This is very different from rebellion/disobedience on the part of active minorities aiming to check and pressure governments into action: such a thing has nought to do with system-change, in that it changes nothing, merely asks institutions embedded in the prevailing system to act against the interests and imperatives of that system. Worse, in seeking to level policies on governments within unaltered social relations it gives us a half-way house that cannot but collapse in on itself. The demands are unrealistic, are politically illegitimate – losing governments the consent of the government – sociologically illiterate in the absence of organized social content, and are economically disastrous. In conventional politics, such a politics is fantastical. It may well be true that without change, the world is on the road to ecological catastrophe, but that change has to be given precise institutional and structural form and also democratic consent and social content. It’s that latter bit that I have been concerned to emphasize over the years – both to give the environment movement social significance and the motivational springs of action and democratic legitimacy and to avoid this highly predictable backlash from the authorities seeking to preserve stable institutional and social order. To seek to coerce the actions of others through pressure and force of rebellion and disruption is simply not politics, but an attempt to circumvent politics. If politics currently practised is in a parlous state – and it is – then the solution to bad politics is not no politics, but good politics. I have sought to induce the environmental movement to take the politics (and ethics) of the world we live in as seriously as it takes the physics. I’ll take the opportunity to make that appeal again (and in the process make clear my distance from the politics of permanent protest as a politics of despair that takes a cause into a cul-de-sac).
A key problematic within this conception of ‘rational freedom’ concerns reconciling individuality and sociality, the two sides of the one human nature: how do you combine independence and association, autonomy and authority, liberty and law, freedom and solidarity? The relations to others through law, morality, and community are experienced as constraints on individual liberty to the extent that they diverge from desire. The solution is a political identity in which the terms balance and coincide, so that collective and solidaristic terms become not merely a condition of freedom but a dimension of it. Rousseau expressed the point in a phrase that liberals have found jarring when he wrote of the law forcing people to be free. The phrase only sounds coercive and repressive in the context of a dualism between individuality and sociality (a dualism integral to liberalism). By this phrase, Rousseau meant that the law embodies a social good which coincides with individual good, and embodies a moral and educative purpose bringing individuals to internalize that coincidence, a reason which educates desire. Freedom is therefore achieved through education rather than command, with the experience of constraint dissolving the more law succeeds in its educative process. The more than law and desire are brought into conflict, the more the individual experiences political order and authority not as freedom but as constraint. When politics is in command mode, then, with truths being dictated from the outside and relayed downwards, the conflict with desire means that truth is felt as a constraint to resist. Those demanding action to avert catastrophe will argue that such command and constraint is necessary. To repeat, I have no doubt that the crisis in the climate system has reached a stage in which concerted action is required. But the loss of the moral and educative dimension within this command and constraint model will prove debilitating in the short run – it doesn’t cultivate and incite the inner motives that generates response and co-responsibility – and politically catastrophic in the long run - it effectively legitimates a politics which reverses the democratic revolution of recent centuries by giving up the urge to educate desire to legitimise the dictate of experts.
I refer to Rousseau above. The idea of creating the collective conditions of a genuine freedom through a legal-institutional framework sustained by and sustaining a socio-relational and moral-psychological infrastructure is central to the idea of ‘rational freedom’ at the core of my work. I have written extensively on key figures in this tradition – Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas. I find it, too, in anarchists like William Godwin and Kropotkin. The basic idea concerns the education of desire so that the individual transcends selfish interest to see the common good as also a personal good. With this happy coincidence – and rational freedom is at heart a public happiness – the law is experienced as freedom as self-actualization, not as command and constraint; the law has been internalized. In the words of the Psalm: "I will walk in freedom for I have sought out Your law." (Psalm 119:45). It is a view of ‘free necessity,’ freedom as the recognition of a truth greater than individual desire. The rabbis engaged in a little pun on words to read the inscription on the tablets brought from the mountain by Moses not as "the writing was the writing of God, engraved (harui) on the tablets", but as "freedom (heruf) was on the tablets." That pun expresses the idea of rational freedom concisely. The moral and educative purpose of law is to engrave the terms, conditions, and qualities of freedom into the hearts of individuals so as raise them as citizens of a public realm who experience personal freedom collectively. I’m loathe to lose that conception. Had we built a public life on that notion of freedom instead of the libertarian view, then we would not have come so close to catastrophe as to be finding it necessary to resort to alarm and be embroiled in the self-cancelling conflict of command and resistance (with identities here forever changing round).
Let me note here that such clauses and qualifications on my part will cut no ice with the authors of Extremism Rebellion. They make it plain that they object to my ends, even though I propose to attain them by reasonable – political, democratic, legal – means:
‘Extinction Rebellion has captured the public imagination over the past year —becoming the UK’s most active campaign group. Using maxims of ‘rebellion’ and ‘non-violent protest’, it has rapidly enlisted the support of tens of thousands of followers who have been prepared to protest and even be arrested for their cause. Like the public at large, many of these activists appear to be genuinely concerned about climate change and other environmentalist issues. As this paper shows, however, the leaders of Extinction Rebellion seek a more subversive agenda, one that that is rooted in the political extremism of anarchism, eco-socialism and radical anti-capitalist environmentalism.’
Note how certain political platforms are labelled extremist by definition. I’m in those categories, and one of the reasons I am in there is precisely because the crisis in the climate system is so deep as to require fundamental transformation. To preserve the status quo in terms of social and political arrangements when it is precisely these arrangements driving climate catastrophe is somewhat less than reasonable – in fact, it is the plainest apologetics for the existing order. So let’s take it as read that I have little time for establishment appeals to defend a ‘liberal’ political order that claims the right of all political platforms to be advanced on a neutral terrain, only for alternatives to it to be defined as ‘extremist.’ This is Karl Popper’s defence of the free and ‘open’ society against its ‘enemies,’ i.e., those who advance alternative viewpoints to the liberal one. I shall be generous here, and consider that the groups that the authors of the report target here are active, organized minorities who fail to cultivate social content and democratic legitimacy the way I outlined above, in which case, as a lifelong eco-socialist, I reject them too. In my work on Marx, socialism, and anarchism in the 1990s I explicitly repudiated the ‘theoretico-elitist’ model of politics which privileged vanguards over the knowledgeable agency of people.
These works are socialist, most certainly, but the very antithesis of top-down, hierarchical socialisms in which a priori truths are imposed on a recalcitrant reality and people from the outside. In that sense, I have been concerned to guard against ‘extremism.’ In fact, the whole point of the conception of ‘rational freedom’ has been to restore law and order in the true senses of those words to a world that has been driven to extremes through the annexation and hollowing out of the common ground.
The report continues:
“Obscured from public view, these objectives mark Extinction Rebellion’s campaign out as an extremist one that seeks to break down the established civil order and liberal democracy in the UK.”
There, in a nutshell, is the dividing line – ‘liberal democracy.’
I am a consistent critic of liberalism, criticising liberalism to its very core, locating its deficiencies in the false ontology which separates individuality and sociality. The problems that beset the world in culture, ethics, economics, and ecology are problems of liberalism in its various manifestations. I also criticize the atomistic conception of democracy. In this, my critique is consistent with those eminently conservative gentlemen Plato and Aristotle. Popper may call them ‘enemies’ of the Open Society, but there is nothing very ‘open’ about a society that brands criticisms of its very contentious assumptions extremist and inadmissible. Neutrality, I argue in the work below, is just another name for liberalism.
Note the emptiness of the report’s defence of freedom, supporting free speech and freedom of protest and demonstration whilst drawing the line at attempts to develop alternatives to the institutions and values of ‘liberal democracy.’ You can believe what you like and say what you like, but such expression is the limits of liberal freedom; because when you seek to act on those views, you go beyond the parameters of legitimate action and are labelled an ‘extremist.’ The authors of the report single out anarchists and eco-socialists – and no doubt socialists as such – as extremists opposed to ‘liberal democracy’ here, but such views apply also to conservatives too. In fact, they apply to anyone who seeks to challenge the values and institutions of liberalism, and maybe most of all those who wish to challenge the false appropriation, sterilisation, and deradicalisation of democracy within the lexical ordering of state and society within the liberal standpoint. That includes conservatives like Rod Dreher, too, who wrote his Benedict Option for precisely this reason – the freedom and openness of liberalism amounts to repeating and reinforcing liberal values and institutions, with everything else declared beyond the pale. The open society, in other words, is not open to alternate platforms at all. You can say what you like, so long as you don't act on it. Another conservative, Patrick Deneen, demands that liberals be made to take ownership of the myriad problems they protest. In Why Liberalism Failed he demonstrates liberalism to be the dominant culture of the western world and the problems of economic instability, social division, moral implosion, and ecological unravelling to be self-authored. As I argued in The Coming Ecological Revolution, the centre ground has been hollowed out as the extremists have colonized the public realm, setting people against one another and sending the world to extremes. My criticisms of Extinction Rebellion in this piece is not that they are extremists but that they need to reconstitute politics and public life much better in order to reclaim the political commons from the true extremists. In saying this, I am saying no more than Alasdair MacIntyre said at the conclusion of After Virtue, where he noted that the barbarians are no longer at the gates but are ruling over us, and have been for some time. I see no point in asking such barbarians to secure human and planetary health – they are deaf to such appeals, and that deafness is systematic (please read my Marx and Meszaros pieces to understand what I mean by that).
If I am an extremist, then I am an extremist for being both a socialist and a conservative; I am an extremist in the sense that anyone who departs from liberalism is an extremist.
The truth is that the liberal order is imploding within, and the liberal democratic cover of the power of capital is being exposed and increasingly challenged. The rebels and protestors need to see that they are not liberal voices seeking to expand emancipation from the outside, but that liberalism is the dominant culture and that the problems they seek to resolve are self-authored. That is, to realize their principles they need to cease being liberals and become, well, anarchists, socialists, and eco-socialists – extremists. Or Catholics and conservatives. If you think I’m being provocative, then read the works of Edward Feser, Andreas Kinneging, Patrick Deneen, and Roger Trigg. These are consistent philosophical and theological critics of the prevailing liberalism of the modern age, expressing a view I share. My concern here and elsewhere in my writing is to induce environmentalist rebels to come out of the ‘permanent protest’ mode and engage in social and metaphysical reconstruction so as to prefigure and build the alternative law and order in their practices and actions.
In doing so, don’t evade politics, power, and conflict. There is no institutional and technological workaround here, as sought by people working in eco-design. Power is entrenched and needs to be restructured. To think this can be achieved without conflict is to believe in the power of moral appeal and rational persuasion that flies in the face of history. The rational case has long been made – all lose when the ecological conditions sustaining the system fail and collapse: we await the persuasion of power. The best bet is the persuasion of sufficient numbers of the public to isolate those holding out against a change that benefits all. That is underway. And I suspect that it is this that the authors of the report are really afraid of – a mass persuasion that points in the direction of a society beyond what the authors call ‘liberal democracy,’ by which they mean the global anarchy of the rich and powerful. But let’s take the defence of liberal democracy at face value and affirm the necessity of persuading people of the rightness of one’s cause and winning the argument within legal, peaceful, democratic means. And when the argument on the need for climate action has been won and people have been persuaded of the rightness of the climate cause, by legal, peaceful, democratic means, and this requires the transformation of the liberal democratic state and the supplanting of the capitalist growth economy? I think it’s a winnable argument, particularly if allied to transitions strategies and communities of practice which draws ever increasing numbers of people into the circles, fostering an ecological sensibility through the character-forming culture of eco-praxis.
There’s the dividing line. My problem with many involved in Extinction Rebellion is not that they are anarchists and eco-socialists but that they are liberals who don’t realize the need for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal assumptions and the replacement of liberal institutions by an alternative ethical and political model. I have commented elsewhere on the striking political naivety of Greens as liberals (many of whom are explicitly anti-socialist, anti-Marxist, considering capitalism and socialism to be two sides of the same industrial coin). They demand system-change and degrowth but seem blithely unaware that this entails a declaration of class war against capital. Rather than build a mass movement of labour, a force equipped with the structural capacity to deliver such a transformation, they mobilize active minorities of like-minded individuals and seek to coerce government over the heads of citizens. They see such a thing as demanded by ‘Nature,’ not understanding that it is they, on behalf of ‘Nature,’ issuing the demand. They think the demand is reasonable because it is backed by science. They don’t see that those who speak on behalf of the human environment see their views as eminently unreasonable in demanding an end to the capitalist economy. No compromise on Nature is met by no compromise on Capital. This is not a political struggle but a theological one; we are in the realm of warring gods, gods demanding their sacrifices.
As I have written in other posts, this is class struggle by proxy, a clash of environmental elites armed with science and political and economic elites armed with material power. There’s only one winner and one loser here – material power will win and the environment will lose. Either way, the citizen body loses. It is that latter aspect that concerns me most with respect to restoring politics as the mediating term. The report continues:
“Those who accept planned mass law-breaking in a liberal democracy to further a political cause, are effectively condoning the breakdown of the rule of law. They may assert breaking the law is a means to an end, there is a crisis that needs addressing and law-breaking is the only tactic that will change government policy, but in doing so they have become extremists for their cause.
If you object to this judgement on account of the conviction that the climate cause is fundamentally right, then consider that most people believe the causes they espouse to be right. If belief in the rightness of the cause is taken as licence to circumvent processes of political deliberation and negotiation and break the laws, then politics as such is at an end and we enter a world of might tested against might. You may think yourself to be exceptional, but the reasoning is symmetrical. The law-breaking of civil disobedience is only effective on the assumption that most others continue to abide by the rules. When others start to defect for the same reason, seeking similar licence for themselves, then there is no political realm left. You end up levelling demands on a political authority so debilitated as to be ineffectual. Why do people presume that it is only right-minded people like themselves who can behave in such a way? The limitations of the view become apparent when we consider those other groups, in an age of myriad fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and totalitarianisms, who may likewise seek to circumvent democratic channels and mobilize extra-legal force on the constituted political sphere. Consider the situation when the voice of protest happens to be that of an unregenerate fascistic monster, every bit as convinced as to the rightness of the cause being advanced against the political realm. That’s the problem with licence in politics — it cannot be restricted to the people of whom you approve. It is on that problem that the happy law-breakers founder. I shall spell out my way beyond the impasse later on, with respect to my conception of 'rational freedom.'
Extinction Rebellion is an extremist organisation whose methods need to be confronted and challenged rather than supported and condoned. If we fail to confront those who incite and encourage mass law-breaking, we fail in our duty to confront extremism. This new form of extremism needs to be tackled by Ministers and politicians, the Commission for Countering Extremism, police and the general public. The honeymoon that Extinction Rebellion has enjoyed to date needs to come to an end. Members of the public need to be made fully aware this is not an organisation whose strategy and tactics should be applauded and copied.”
The point about rebellion and protest is that its impact is immediate and short-term. It makes its point, it gains its headlines, it galvanizes opinion, garners support, and then moves the agenda on. In politics, there has to be an end-game. Rebellion is not revolution. If you make radical demands but lack the institutional and organizational means to scale actions up to the level of substantial transformation, then you are merely provoking a conflict with authorities that you cannot win. Instead, with failure, it will look to the public you are seeking to persuade that there really is no alternative to the status quo.
Don’t. Play. At. Politics. Middle class liberal indulgence, entitlement, and decadence is a sure recipe for incoherence and defeat. And political innocence allied to wishful thinking is a positive menace. You simply cannot demand ‘system change,’ break the law in a campaign of civil disobedience and pressure, in expectation that others will change the system for you, and then complain at being labelled and treated as ‘extremists.’ People who think the authorities will indulge political campaigns on account of their declarations of being ‘peaceful’ are either being naïve or disingenuous. The authorities could care less which it is.
“As a result of the evidence this paper uncovers, no one can now plead ignorance of the ominous and threatening intentions of this campaigning organisation. The authors have successfully laid bare the history, strategy and tactics of Extinction Rebellion, revealing its underlying philosophy and intentions. The country and the public will benefit enormously from this seminal paper that breaks new ground in the understanding of environmental extremism in the UK.”
This statement, pointing to the ‘underlying philosophy’ of environmental activism (or, as the paper puts it, ‘environmental extremism’), would most certainly apply to me, as an environmental philosopher who has written a book entitled The Coming Ecological Revolution. But check my works. I have, at every stage, been concerned to advance ends which are squarely within a tradition of ‘rational’ law and order. I have argued against revolutionary vanguardism and against law-breaking. My emphasis has been on reconstituting authority, community, law, and morality. What effect it has had on the Left in politics is hard to say, precious little as far as I can tell. But this has been a defining characteristic of my view of 'rational freedom.' I have done this because it is right, because it is effective and appropriate, because it builds popular consent and democratic legitimacy as well as active participation into the transformations and transitions that constitute revolution as a process; I have done so because it checks against the claims advanced by the very predictable counter-revolution which is launched by the authorities, as represented by this paper.
My criticisms of the environmental movement in this respect has earned me a degree of unpopularity and the odd bit of abuse. Most of all, though, I have been ignored, as if offering nothing of any use and import. Ethics and politics are plainly considered ephemeral, as is poetry, literature, culture generally. That neglect is itself significant, in that it points to a democratic and existential deficit at the heart of an overwhelmingly scientistic movement. The idea that ‘system change’ becomes any more reasonable and less ‘extremist’ because science decides its terms – a view environmentalist friends have expressed to me against my emphasis on taking politics and ethics seriously – is remarkable in its naivety. And indicates an arrogance, too. Of course, the people who insist that science decides these matters of government and policy are themselves scientists, or people who think that science gives their preferences unanswerable authority. It is an anti-politics, and I have said so all along. And it leaves the environmental movement wide-open to objections as well as vulnerable to failure.
This is a somewhat awkward issue for me. I support the climate cause. I have been a climate campaigner and Green Party member since the 1980s and the hole in the Ozone Layer. I am no longer a Green Party member, because I seek to persuade with a voice that it independent of political loyalties and allegiances. And I do not support climate activism of this kind. In fact, I have never been persuaded by demonstrations and protests and, as I see the public realm dissolving into a cacophony of voices without any common language or unity of purpose making dialogue possible, let alone fruitful, I see demonstrations and protests as an invitation into a mutual self-cancellation that is destructive of politics and entrenches divisions. To that extent, I am interested in stepping up to the challenge issued by this report:
“Extinction Rebellion is now at a cross roads. If it persists in its current strategy of encouraging mass law-breaking in order to bring down the government in the furtherance of its cause, then it will be treated as an extremist organisation, lose its mainstream supporter base and all public sympathy for its environmental cause. Conversely, if it changes its current strategy towards engaging in lawful protest whilst acknowledging the liberal democratic order, it has the opportunity to become a significant and influential global mass movement that is a positive force for change.”
Have you got what it takes for revolution? Do you have anything like the support required for the substantial changes you demand? If you can answer in the affirmative for both of these questions, then why are you out on the streets protesting? I have a vague recollection of Ernst Fischer criticizing mass protests as a demonstration of impotence in The Necessity of Art. (It’s been twenty five years since I read the book, so I need to check). So many numbers on the streets demanding change, whilst yet lacking the nous to join together in association to create new social forms and sustain new solidarities. We can do this, we can build an associative democracy, developing new forms of governance and economic provision.
I would acknowledge the legitimacy of politics and public order rather than make a fetish of the particular form of liberal democracy. An insistence that radicals canalize their demands through the parameters of the very social order that is generating problems and stands in need of transformation is a demand for self-immolation and political suicide. But it behoves those demanding system-change to meet the alternative institutions requirement and build constituencies and consent. If you set out to deliberately break the law, then you have to have an end-game – and sufficient support.
Please take the time to read the report Extinction Rebellion in its entirety. As someone who openly identifies as an eco-socialist, it is of concern to me to be branded an ‘extremist’ for the wrong reasons. I have written elsewhere on this, noting that the extremists have long since occupied the centre-ground, hollowed it out and sent the world to extremes. The centre, in Yeats’ famous poem, no longer holds; in depriving people of their common ground and setting them against one another. That’s the ‘liberal democracy’ defended in this report. And that world is imploding.
The authorities are defending an order that cannot hold. But I am concerned to avoid environmentalism degenerating into a clash of elites seeking to embed themselves within the public domain. I’m interested in this claim made in the Extremism Rebellion report: “Extinction Rebellion has its roots in the political extremism of green anarchism, eco-socialism and radical anti-capitalist environmentalism.” I don’t think that that is the case at all. Extinction rebellion seems clearly a species of a very liberal civic disobedience. Indeed, people who are anarchists, socialists, and anti-capitalists have made that very point to flag up the deficiencies of such rebellion when it comes to demands for system change. In other words, there are anarchists and eco-socialists, such as I, who argue that climate ‘rebels’ come to convert their acts of law-breaking disobedience into attempts at law-making authority in constituting an eco-public. As an eco-socialist, I seek to move always from the mode of rebellion and protest into the hard practical work of institutional and structural reconstruction. The report continues:
Extinction Rebellion is not a single organisation, but a campaign of two fringe organisations steeped in the extreme left. The people behind these organisations and the campaign they have sparked (Extinction Rebellion), advocate a political agenda with ambitions that reach far beyond environmentalism; a campaign that seeks to use mass civil disobedience over climate change to impose a full system change to the democratic order.
I would argue that Extinction Rebellion is a liberalism in decline and despair, issuing demands to liberal institutions that transcend the liberal order, hence opening the transition to the ‘extreme left’ (if you insist on framing eco-socialism in those terms) without quite realizing it. Hence my constant criticism that the demands for system change are rarely accompanied by a coherent and systematic transformative agenda and practice. The demand that ‘government’ undertake these transformations is something I have criticised as incoherent, noting that the state is the political command centre of the capitalist growth economy. But I might be an extremist. If I am, I can ground everything I say in St Thomas Aquinas. As economic historian RH Tawney wrote, the last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.
Government simply cannot institute the kind of restraints on economic growth imperatives that environmentalists demand in this way. For any government to take this route is to invite economic crisis as well as provoke a crisis in legitimacy. The role of government in the capital economy is to facilitate the process of accumulation, hence the very economic growth that climate rebels seek to end. The power and resources of government are secondary and derivative. Once rebellion or protest reaches a level at which it encroaches on mechanisms of investment, accumulation, and valorisation, a crisis with transformative potential is provoked. Either the movement has a strategy and an end-point to pursue beyond this level or it must retreat and accept defeat or compromise. I don’t see climate rebellion as possessing a material and structural capacity to make good its demands for system change, and I don’t see it as commanding widespread support among the public. I don't see it as open to compromise on the climate crisis, either (it cannot).
It has been my concern over the years to ensure that the environmental movement is equipped with sufficient institutional, organisational, moral, intellectual, and political resources to engage in successful and politically legitimate transformative action. Without these things, in particular popular support, it will be exposed to being constantly checked and marginalised as a species of impractical, hopelessly utopian, extremism – an idealistic attempt to coerce reality and people into shape. If you have time, please read my (admittedly lengthy) texts on Marx and socialism to see the consistent criticism I have developed of idealism and abstract rationalism in radical politics, particularly my criticism of tendencies to authoritarianism as a result of the failure to crack the paradox of emancipation. I have shown the way to resolve that paradox. I engaged in this criticism not to repudiate radicalism but to ground it in realities, practices, and people.
The report continues:
"Yet, the underlying extremism of the campaign has been largely obscured from public view by what many see as the fundamental legitimacy of their stated cause. This paper does not seek to dispute any of the details relating to climate change or the damage caused to the environment by current human activities. It does not question the legitimacy of protest on environmental issues, nor is the paper arguing that either governments or civil society should ignore these urgent concerns. Rather it is concerned with the politics and strategy of this new movement in the UK. Through a remarkably successful strategy, Extinction Rebellion has brought the politics of a radical fringe into the mainstream and incited significant numbers of people to break the law and invite the police to arrest them—including previously law abiding, politically moderate individuals.”
My fear is that a legitimate and necessary cause – action to avert the worst effects of climate change – risks being botched through rank bad politics, by which I mean not only the hardball politics practised in defence of a ‘liberal democracy’ (which is the ideological cover of capital’s global heating machine) but also a half-baked rebellion which demands system change whilst lacking the institutional and organisational capacity to make such a demand meaningful, coherent and effective.
My concern, then, is the utter incoherence of environmental politics as an ill-assorted mishmash of liberalism, protest, radicalism, and socialism. People are crying out for a genuine public order but, wedded to a liberalism in which values have dissolved into irreducible subjective self-assertion, have lost the capacity to engage in the institution building and practices capable of building and sustaining a public community. On the one hand, there is this Extinction Rebellion which emphasizes law-breaking to force governments to act; on the other there is an emphasis on climate litigation, involving respect for the law as a realm which, unlike politics, must recognize the facts of the case. On the one hand, there is a libertarian rejection of the authoritarianism of government (and socialism, read Green co-leader Jonathan Bartley’s explicitly liberal defence of the Greens as the Party of individual liberty Free Choice Against State Authority); on the other hand there is a demand for government action to deliver extensive programmes of climate action. I’m not sure how these things could be compatible in anything other than an elitist and authoritarian politics. (Note how many times Bartley uses the word 'authoritarian' in condemnation). I am sure that this position is marked by the absence of the creative agency, will, and voice of the citizen body. Such a politics is authoritarian to the core (hence the old accusations of eco-fascism, accusations which I have always sought to define and defend Green politics against).
In making these criticisms I am certainly not making a fetish of the institutions of the liberal democratic state, silencing any voice that fails to generate numbers within the mainstream. That defence of ‘liberal democracy’ is precisely what the report Extremism Rebellion attempts to do. For reasons I have spelled out at length in my work, I consider ‘liberal democracy’ to be morally, socially, and politically unsustainable, even before the ecological accounts come in. This report is plainly concerned with silencing the voice of Green rebellion. I am not, however, going to reject the report for that reason. I am concerned instead to note that the report has actually identified a weak link that really does hobble the politics of the environment. The report strikes at a deficiency in environmental politics that I have been concerned to overcome over the years. Incoherence here invites confusion in practice that cannot but have a detrimental effect.
I have over the years been concerned with relating political institutions to what I have called the possibility of politics. In the article I cite below (from 2015), I place the emphasis on making eco-citizens as a condition of an eco-public. In other words, I have explicitly underlined the importance of building a mass constituency of participating citizens in the ecological transformation of politics. The problem is that people are so righteous in their politics, and so despairing of persuading the ‘masses’ they consider stupid, greedy, and indifferent, that they proceed directly to demanding political actions and policies – without having won sufficient support to form a government in the first place. Simply put, the authors of the Extremism Rebellion report have the rebels bang-to-rights.
It is not the rightness or wrongness of the cause which is at issue. I support the cause and have done since the 1980s. It is the means by which the cause is being politically prosecuted which is the controversial issue. The point is that everybody in politics thinks that their political cause is the right one. That conviction, no matter how well founded you consider it to be, is not sufficient grounds to take the law into your own hands. Others, similarly self-righteous, can do precisely the same, until in the end political authority and public order dissolves into a universal self-negation and self-cancellation. My favourite and best subject at school was history. I took it to A level and beyond. I took Tudor history in my second paper at "A" level. The first lesson we learned came from S.T. Bindoff in his book Tudor England. Bindoff’s words stuck with me as a lesson in politics and public order:
‘the Wars of the Roses, like the politics which gave rise to them, were scarcely more than a sport which great men indulged in while the country as a whole stuck doggedly to the more important business of feeding, warming, and clothing itself. But anarchy is a dangerous pastime, and every year saw its crimson stain spread a little further across the fabric of English society. A Crown which had become a football was ceasing to be a referee, and a game which begins by doing without a referee runs a risk of finishing without a ball. Right was beginning to yield to might at all levels and in all relationships in society, and four centuries of heroic efforts by kings and statesmen to establish the reign of law seemed in danger of being brought to nought amid a surfeit of kings and a shortage of statesmen.’
Bindoff Tudor England 1950 (1976): 9
The key points here are that people withstand chaos only for a short time. There is a shock value and publicity value to protest, beyond which there is a need for serious politics demonstrating results. Persist in protest and rebellion and there is a serious risk of provoking a backlash from a public tired of being harangued and bullied. Point made, they will say, it is time to move on. To those who say, as they do, that it is time for action, it is beholden upon you to prove the effective and appropriate means and mechanisms enabling individuals to join together in collective action. Fail to do that, and you are generating a state of psychic tension that is incapable of relief. People will fall into ‘denial’ for sheer peace of mind. Hence my emphasis on organisational and structural capacity to act. For want of those, and not greed, stupidity, and indifference, people will fail to act. And the provision of such means and mechanisms is the responsibility of those demanding action.
A second point relates to ‘ordinary’ folk. I have persistently made the point that educating and informing the public with respect to the climate message – which critics call finger-pointing and hectoring – is ineffective. It doesn’t respect individuals as citizens with voices and creative agency of their own, and it doesn’t engage with social issues of everyday concern to the citizens. It doesn’t work. I know it doesn’t work. I have been out campaigning for the Greens and time and again have been met with the objection that saving the planet many years from now is an irrelevance when people and their communities are under pressure in terms of income and employment, housing, crime, drug addiction. Hell, I meet people who are dependent on food banks to feed their families. The climate message has to resonate in those terms, there has to be a bridge between the social and the natural environment, otherwise climate facts and figures appear cold and abstract, failing to move people. I distinctly remember making this point with a Green ‘friend’, who simply told me to tell ‘ordinary’ folk that ‘we’re doomed.’ The contemptuous tone was palpable. I caught it and I can tell you now that ‘ordinary’ folk feel it too. Hence the failure of the climate message to resonate. It comes over as elitist and patronizing. That testifies to a deep failure of politics, the result of which will be the destruction of civilisation. The smug assertion that physics trumps politics is meagre consolation and even less help – it merely rehearses the political defeat on the environment that is sure to come. There is precious little point in getting an "A" on climate and flunking at humanities.
The final point relates to the self-destructive nature of the politics of permanent protest. At some point, there has to be a commitment to the legitimacy of public order, government, and authority. My argument all along has been that an environmental politics is an invitation to recover the ancient notion of politics as the science of discerning the best political regime (Aristotle, Politics). Rebellion, protest, and law-breaking falls far, far short of this Green recovery of republican ideals and values through the constitution of the Eco-Republic. The eco-socialism I espouse is very far from anarchy-as-chaos, the very opposite in fact – it is about the revaluation of authority, community, law, morality, and public life.
I am reading Green voices defend themselves against charges of extremism in this report by pointing out the failures of the conventional political sphere in face of the climate crisis. I have no doubt that the conventional political sphere is failing in face of a series of converging crises. The inadequacies of mainstream politics to address the crisis in the climate system have been made manifest since Rio in 1992. I have been concerned to point out the failures and inadequacies of politics-as-usual in my own work.
The conventional political sphere is certainly failing, but the explanation for that failure is to be sought outside of deficiencies in will and personnel, to be overcome by the application of pressure - they are structural and institutional (as I explain in my Marx and Meszaros pieces and elsewhere). That makes it all the more anomalous for demands for climate action to be levelled upon an unreconstructed political realm that exists in symbiotic relation with the very expansionary economic system that is driving climate crisis. The failures of politics in this regard are not failures at the level of personnel, to be overcome by a change of heart and will, but are institutional failures. Hence I have been concerned to identity the institutional and structural roots of the failures of climate politics. If those roots remain in place, there will be no change in policy, no matter how much pressure is exerted from the outside.
We need to see the state and capital as existing in symbiotic relation within the capital system. That’s the lesson I have sought to teach environmentalism to bring its political understanding up to par with its scientific knowledge. The disparity in the movement between the two is utterly debilitating, involving it in a politics of protest that, at best, pressurises governments to take the environment more seriously, but can do nothing to alter the fundamental commitment to the process of accumulation. I shall repeat, for the umpteenth time, the fundamental error made in climate politics. To expect government to act as the embodiment of the universal interest is to mistake the system to which we are subject as a public domain which is amenable to scientific reason, moral appeal, and democratic persuasion. We know that is how government ought to be, but we ought to have learned by now that this is how it isn’t; we ought to have learned that government has become the surrogate of private interests. I am sure environmentalists will agree with this observation, not least because they have been very vocal in protesting the corporate capture of the state. But here is where my point goes deeper: the capital system is a regime of private accumulation in which the state functions as capital’s political command centre. To argue that the state can be detached from the process of accumulation and function as an agency of the long-term universal interest (securing planetary health, in this instance) expresses the reformist delusion that identifies the system as a public domain. It isn’t; that public domain stands in need of creation. Hence my point that the restoration of the planetary commons is also the recovery of the ethical and political commons at the same time. And that involves much more than the politics of extra-legal protest: it involves the reconstitution of the political around the common good through the recovery of common ground. There are no short-cuts here, only set-piece actions that could short-circuit the process of recovery. I therefore argue for a Green Republicanism that reconfigures key notions of authority, law, community, and legitimacy. The solution to a bad and failing politics is not the evasion of an anti-politics that proceeds outside of constituted law and authority but a good politics which equips us legally and institutionally to scale up collectively to the nature of the challenges we face.
The parallels between the points made by Bindoff with respect to the late fifteenth century and a modern age in which politics is degenerating into endless assertion and counter-assertion, without a common ground or language to hold people together in agreeing to disagree, is apparent. The ends on which people now fight are increasingly considered non-negotiable. Here’s the problem with that, not only is there a division when it comes to ends – you think it’s the environment, they think it’s the economy etc – if truth really is non-negotiable, then the idea of politics as negotiation to bring different voices to concord is rendered redundant. The temper of politics is judicious. In making politics a matter of truth rather than of judgement, you fracture the political realm into an endless contentious of right against right.
That’s a point I develop at length in Being at One
(Forgive the wealth of links to the many writings of mine over the years, but you will appreciate that this is a sensitive issue to me, having warned of the political and ethical deficiencies of environmentalism as a practical movement for change – not least the democratic deficit at the heart of a movement that practises scientism in place of politics. I believe in system change. I also underline how difficult such an undertaking is, as something very different from being a mere extension of reformism.
Here, too, is my article on ‘making eco-citizens’ as inherent to the process of instituting an ecological political order.
This article should be read alongside the Times article below before coming back to my commentary.
(And if you think all this reading is exhausting, then you should try researching and writing it as I do, and understand why I take pains to distinguish my position from others and make its key features clear. I don’t like being categorised as an ‘extremist’ without necessary qualifications on my part, and certainly not by way of association with a politics of protest I have consistently rejected).
“Britain must go carbon neutral by 2025; growth must effectively end; and the mass disruption on the streets will intensify until they get what they want.”
I argue for carbon neutrality and zero emissions; I also argue not only for the end of the growth economy but for recalibrating the economy in order to remove the accumulative dynamic at the heart of it. I am one of those ‘extremist’ eco-socialists, then, who argue that the expansionary imperatives of the capital system lie at the heart of our converging crises. That said, I have never ever made the mistake of arguing that government should be charged with the responsibility for ending the growth economy in the absence of a widespread social transformation involving a mass mobilisation and organisation of the citizen public. System change is nothing less than a substantial undertaking – it isn’t something you can encapsulate in a programme and implement through government, and it is not a series of policies you can force a government into instituting through civic pressure.
Here is another passage from The Times article:
“The concerns of senior police officers reflect the warnings in a report, Extremism Rebellion, published this week by the think tank Policy Exchange. The authors, one of whom, Richard Walton, is a former Metropolitan Police head of counterterrorism, have been criticised for branding the protesters as radical and extremist anarchists hellbent on ending democracy. But they are dead right. Democracy is at risk. Extinction Rebellion doesn’t accept basic democratic tenets and wants to replace the British parliamentary system.”
The protestors claim to be engaged in civil disobedience and peaceful protest. As someone raised in a working class area based on the mining industry and industrial struggle, I hear in this constant reference to ‘peaceful protest’ the voice of middle class entitlement distinguishing itself from those rough, ill-mannered, ill-educated, physical, brutish, swinish, foul-mouthed working class folk. The complaint is utterly duplicitous, elevating high-minded middle class force as non-physical from brutish working class force as physical. All protest is violent to the extent that its aim is to disrupt normal patterns of life in order to coerce the will of others and force change. It may or may not be justifiable, I’m just concerned here to check the high opinion that advocates of non-violent protest have of themselves and demand a little more honesty on their part with respect to attempting to coerce others in order to get their way. And that’s leaving to one aside the related issue of protest as creating an ever-enlarging space which invites other, much less squeamish, forces in. (Already, those involved in Extinction Rebellion have been complaining about the infiltration of the Socialist Workers’ Party – if you talk the language of system change, then don’t be surprised that others in the vanguard may claim to have a better idea of how to do it). There has to be a political end-game, there has to be a legitimate politics, there has to be a proper way of canvassing the citizen voice – there has to be ‘ordinary’ folk as agents in change as a self-change. Otherwise these criticisms from the establishment will strike home.
Rupert Read is a FB friend and Green colleague of mine. I agree with his approach to philosophy, too. So it genuinely pains me to quote this next passage:
“This became clear listening to the superficially reasonable-sounding Rupert Read, the philosopher turned official spokesman for ER, who was on air defending the protests this week. Read has failed several times in his attempts to get into parliament. Might there be a connection between this and his seeking to alter the political system under which he has failed?”
That question hits its target. I am genuinely worried about people who cannot command anything like a majority at democratic elections seeking to circumvent the democratic process with a politics that amounts to coercion upon government. Because it is not only the nice and reasonable Greens quoting a mass of scientific facts and figures on their side who can engage in such an extra-legal, non- or even explicitly anti-democratic politics.
“There is a fundamental democratic objection. Anyone seeking to do to the economy what Extinction Rebellion plans to do should surely put it in a party manifesto, be scrutinised by the media and voters, stand sufficient candidates, win by beating the other parties, form a government if they have the seats and, via legislation and/or referendum, implement the end of the economy as we know it.
No wonder Extinction Rebellion eschews the conventional approach. It will never be a winner.”
As uncomfortable as the points made in this article are to radicals, it tells a truth that too many Greens have been too deaf to hear. I have made these points, and I have made them in an attempt to transition the environmental movement from liberalism and scientism to a green republicanism and eco-socialism. I made these points more aggressively this year, in an attempt to pull people away from the "Greta says" mode of dictating scientific truths to people and politics. (Check my blog posts on this). I saw the criticism coming and sought to warn. I’m afraid that too many have been so busy educating/informing what they consider to be an empty-headed public on climate truths that they have paid insufficient attention to political truths – the need to engage, involve and persuade people as active citizens with an autonomous significance of their own. Hence rebellion as a politics of despair that sees the public as an external body to provoke and government as an external institution to bully and coerce.
The article concludes:
“It [Extinction Rebellion] plans to blockade the streets until terrified politicians give in and do what Rupert Read and his bossy friends have decided is good for us.”
Even in this current phase I have argued the need to move from this rebellion/disobedience mode to a politics of reconstruction – by which I mean a genuine politics, building material organisations and constituencies, involving people and equipping them in communities of practice. And that means translating the climate message into terms of everyday concern – Lord alone knows there are enough of them to motivate and mobilize the people.
As God is my witness, I have offered friendly criticism and advice to the climate movement on politics to avoid precisely this backlash being led by this Extremism Rebellion report and The Times. ‘Friendly’ because the crisis in the climate system is real, is upon us, and demands political action. But by political action I do mean ‘political’ action – I don’t mean science pressed into service as politics and ethics, with some claiming to speak with the unanswerable voice of Nature. I have frequently checked activists when they say that physics doesn’t give a damn what politics says and that scientific facts don’t give a damn about the opinions of people. People as citizens give a damn, and that’s what politics is about. If you don’t have a politics here, then you have nothing, other than asserting that physics or ‘Mother Nature’ will exact revenge, an explicit expression of bitterness and spite. I have consistently pointed out that assertion that scientism as politics entails overriding the voice of the people in determining the governance of their common affairs. That doesn’t merely put politics – and people – on ice, it legitimises an anti-politics that proceeds over above the heads of the people. People won’t like it. It is inherently anti-democratic. Complain all you like, but this Extremism Rebellion report hits home here. This combination of politics and truth is inherently anti-democratic. Time and again I have praised Rousseau’s great insight in developing the concept of the General Will – the truth cannot just be passively given, it has to be actively recognized, willed, assimilated, and lived on the part of the people. I may as well have written in hieroglyphics for the recognition I have had in making the point. Instead, the consistent message I have had back is that science should decide such matters. Such people really do think politics is about truth, and on that delusion they will go down to defeat, taking the environment with them.
It gives me no pleasure at all to have to write this, but write it I must. Because I saw it coming and I have done my best to persuade people to desist in practising scientism as politics, inducing them not merely to educate and inform people but actually engage them as citizens in a politics worthy of the name. This is to ask for no more than a recognition of the worth and dignity of politics and a respect for the citizen voice. The problem of the modern world has been elites and systemic imperatives circumventing the public realm. This politics is a continuation of it – a rebellion in which active organized minorities tell governments what to do. One of the reasons I broke with The Green Party came with the incoherent statement of its co-leader Jonathan Bartley to the effect that the Greens are the party of individual liberty as against the authoritarianism of the state (and socialism he added – so much for eco-socialism being the ‘underlying philosophy’ of the rebels. Not so – they are liberal to the core, just demanding actions which do imply a politics that transcends liberalism. That they don’t realize that, and would openly object to being called anarchists and socialists indicates how deluded they are and how incoherent their politics are). Yet here they are as an extra-legal, extra-political minority demanding sweeping actions from the government regardless of the popular voice as registered in democratic elections. Bartley is a ‘friend’ and associate of mine as is Read, the philosopher-king of Extinction Rebellion. I feel the need to support them out of loyalty, and out of knowing that the cause they advance is just and right. I have described it as the Last Great Cause. I stand by that. Lose this fight, and civilization is over. I recognize that the apocalyptic tone itself is an invitation to ‘extremism,’ but that conclusion is the product of long hard analysis. But I cannot support such an explicitly elitist anti-politics whose means betray the very ends they are supposed to serve. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that the pathos of means and ends serves to undermine an emancipatory movement and turn it into its opposite in practice.
The point of politics is to reconcile differences in open forum, to engage with others with alternate platforms, persuade others to your position, and to build support, consent, and a constituency to whatever political position you are advancing. If you can’t do that, then you have no more political legitimacy than anyone else, whatever the truth of the matter. This is not science, it is politics, and the sooner environmentalists recognize that, the better.
Freedom is attained not merely by a society of laws incarnating truth and justice, but by a society of individuals as lawyer-citizens who, in joining together in deliberation, articulate the laws by which they are to be bound, obligated, and governed, each person a willer and knower of truth and a guardian of justice. It may be late in the day for such philosophical niceties, and climate emergency and litigation compelling government action is a tempting shortcut to climate justice via climate stabilization. But, politically, it is the way of tyranny – who guards the guardians if not the people as lawyer-citizens? It is in light of this that you may come to understand why I wince whenever I hear environmentalist friends, commenting on government policy, say ‘It is for science to decide …’ Sorry, but no, this is wrong. Scientists can decide on scientific subjects, and science can inform. But policy and laws are decided politically by human beings as social and moral beings. There is a (self-)educative aspect to the principle of self-assumed obligation which is a built-in defence against tyranny. The notion, therefore, is developmental as well as protective.
I am interested in the fact that the word Torah means "teaching.” “Teaching” here is educative in the sense of drawing out an innate understanding. Human beings as citizens are taught the truth, which is quite distinct from them being told the truth. With respect to the Torah, God is revealed to humankind not in the purely natural forces of winds, storms, hail, and rain – let’s say climate change in a contemporary context - and in the science that describes them, but in the voice that teaches and the words that instruct. In the first chapter of Genesis, the voice of God is heard as the song of Creation: "And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The phrase “God said” occurs nine times in Genesis 1: 3-29. “And God said .. And it was so.” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1 1). And the word of God is addressed and comprehensible to not merely rulers and their priestly servants, claiming possession, even a monopoly, of knowledge, but to every member of society. That implies a political society in which each individual is party to the terms by which they are governed and consciously give consent to the laws as a condition of their being binding on them. Moses and all the prophets relaying God’s word are not dictators but educators; they are not the guardians of truth but teachers of it to the people, which refers to everyone. I repeat: Plato understood the need for the dialectic to bring people to recognize the truth through dialogue. Rousseau developed a Platonism for the modern world. His general will holds that the truth cannot simply be passively given but must be actively willed by the people. Rousseau’s law and political society possess an inherently moral and educative dimension for this reason. Miss that out, and the truth is frozen and sterile, it risks becoming tyrannical.
The challenge is to bridge the gap between the unanswerable authority and dictate of truth (whose referent is God or Nature) and the irredeemable ambiguity of the human world as a sphere of diverse ‘yeses’ and ‘noes.’ Simply opposing the former to the latter merely entrenches the gap rather than overcomes it. The challenge is to achieve the reconciliation of multiplicities within a recognition of truth. Hence the balance of authority, equality, and freedom. The age old problem of politics concerns that of establishing fraternity in a fractious people. But the problem goes much deeper once one recognizes the existence of truth and expresses a concern to bring people to the recognition of truth. If politics were simply about truth, then Philosopher-Kings would be the appropriate rulers and we could dispense with democracy. The problem with command, though, is that it breeds resistance. And that applies even when we may consider that command to be in the interests of the people. People prefer to be asked rather than told. The temper of politics is judicious. There is a point to the seemingly interminable exchange of ‘yeses’ and ‘noes’ between people. The trick of politics is to channel truth into the social world of human beings through dialogue and thus translate conflict into argument. By making dialogue and argument the pulse of political life we create a self-educating public in which people find their way to truth through judgement. You can also find that view of dialectic and dialogue in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Jonathan Sacks thus describes the entire rabbinic literature as an anthology of "argument for the sake of heaven.” (Jonathan Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Jason Aronson, Northvale, N. J., 1991, xviii-x). If I may be so bold, I would seek to rephrase this in terms of fostering a ‘rational’ politics based on ‘arguments for the sake of the climate system.’ It’s not quite as lofty an ambition, but is nevertheless focused on a kind of celestial salvation all the same. Sacks’ point is that the rabbis, seeing how the Jews had brought disaster on themselves through internal dissension and division, didn’t avoid, override, or suppress the disagreement of the endless yes/no but relocated it in such a way as to achieve reconciliation through recognition of truth rather than destruction through the endless assertion and counter-assertion of subjective truths.
I also like the words of Tennyson in The Ancient Mariner:
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’
In that clash, that dialectic, the intellectual and moral senses sharpen and see the truth as it lights up. Truth brightens in the clash, and people are incited to see it.
There is a real problem, in that there is such a thing as truth, moral as well as scientific. But the whole point of politics is to incarnate that truth politically, that is, to have people recognize and will that truth as existential truth. That is the very opposite of elites forcing that truth – or their version of it – on governments.
My great fear is that such scientism as politics merely serves to equip governments with the scientific rationale to institute an environmental austerity under the auspices of environmental philosopher-kings/experts. Such a thing will do precisely nothing to preserve the health of eco-systems, but has the consequence of entrenching and extending existing social relations, the very relations implicated in the climate crisis.
From the article:
“The radicals want immediate action against cars, planes and gas boilers. And they are convinced they are unimpeachably right. There is a snag. The evidence of recent years is that bossy middle-class people lecturing their supposed inferiors (educationally and economically) is not going well. Resentment and a desire to kick back against sanctimonious, hectoring elites played a notable part in the Brexit referendum result.”
I have written some such passage myself in the past, as someone who has been on the receiving end of this hectoring and lecturing. (The posts gathered under the heading "The Failures of Environmental Politics" on this site contain these arguments on my part). For pointing out the simplicities of a position which insisted on an immediate transition to the eco-lifestyle, banning cars entirely, no less, I was abused for being an apologist for cars and an apologist for the lifestyle of the rich. Somebody somewhere is seriously not paying attention to belly-to-earth realities. I was merely asking for the involvement of people in a just transition. I also said I considered it obscene to be cheering environmental disasters in richer parts of the Earth, and was merely concerned to point out the necessity of the car in current transport infrastructures in certain parts of the world, and that transitions will take a period of time, for sheer engineering reasons. And that made me, someone who has never driven a car once and dislikes cars intensely, an apologist who merits being harangued at length on how damaging cars are for the environment. Like I was in need of lectures on emissions. These characters knew me. The lesson I drew is that such people see themselves as environmental educators/dictators and go straight into that mode whenever checked or challenged, without even seeing with whom they are engaging; that’s the mind-set they are in, and they don’t seem able to come out of it. Their manner is not persuasive, the very opposite in fact. I came away realizing what many people must feel when they have been on the receiving end of one of their harangues – damned angry, actually, aware of the monomaniacal stupidity of supposedly clever people, resentful at being lectured to, and in no mood to ever return to these sources for further enlightenment. And I’ll guarantee that most people will feel the same. I felt I was in the presence of a hermetically sealed world, a cult. The experience actually did me good. I have no need to keep feeding the monster out of loyalty to the cause.
I have dared raise this issue with Green ‘friends.’ I have done it gently, and been ignored. I get the distinct impression that if you are not a scientist or a technologist, then you are considered to have no real knowledge or insight to offer. Your job is merely to be a supporter and mouthpiece for set positions. Whenever I have been more aggressive in presenting my views on politics, it has been made clear to me that only those with a science basis have a legitimate voice, even in politics. I quote another friend in a recent blog who, in these ‘debates,’ told me openly that it is for ‘science’ to decide on these matters. This friend is, of course, a scientist. And I am not. So I, with a wealth of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, should defer to him, albeit he would say to science. Science is the voice of Nature and scientists are the voice of science. And of course the point is that no citizen need to defer to any other in politics – politics is about the legitimate voice of the people, regardless of their qualifications to speak in any area of knowledge.
I have been hectored and lectured and treated as though I was an ignoramus by people who know that I’ve been campaigning on Green issues since the 1980s, giving time and sacrificing health and wealth for free. I was treated as if I was a mere empty-head to be filled with facts and figures. I gave them a blast back – to the effect that their attitude reveals precisely why Green politics remains a minority cause – the utter contempt for ‘ordinary’ folk is palpable. Because what they did to me they will do to others. I wrote the experience up on my blog back in 2017. Such folk are now in rebellion/disobedience mode. Which doesn’t surprise me in the least. They have given up on the people who have, in turn, given up on them. There's nowhere else for them to go. It’s political despair being driven into the politics of permanent protest, soon disappearing into a cul-de-sac for want of an end-game. Such people despair of real people, consider them stupid, greedy, and indifferent because they don’t respond to being externally educated. Realising that they will never command a majority for the radical actions they demand from government – whilst at the same time condemning socialism for being authoritarian and governmental (read Bartley’s article) - they now engage in extra-parliamentary action to force governments to institute the measures they favour. The position is utterly incoherent. I can only explain it as a middle class indulgence within a decadent phase of liberalism. I argue this to demand the reconstruction of a Leftist position that actually has coherence and substance. Because these people are running the right issue into oblivion through a rank bad politics. This politics will ensure the demise of the environment they claim to be defending.
Stop hectoring and lecturing and start involving people in the shifts needed; start recognizing the worth and dignity of politics – and the citizen voice – in other words, instead of indulging in an arrogant scientism, and you won’t be forced to engage in ‘rebellion’ outside of existing political channels. Such tactics have a short shelf life. Over a period of time, the effect wears off. People can abide chaos only for so long. Without a political end game, such rebellion disrupts not ‘the system,’ but the lives of ‘ordinary’ folk. Rather than galvanising people and winning their support, it starts to annoy them and turn them against the platform being advanced. The time will come when people will say that the point has been made, and that the ‘time for action’ has indeed come. That’s where organisational and structural capacity become important – what have you got to offer people who are now prepared to act? All along the problem has been that these calls for action on the part of environmentalists has not been accompanied by the provision of appropriate and effective collective means and mechanisms of such action. Instead, the demands for sweeping changes come to be levelled upon government. It. Won’t. Work. That betrays a complete ignorance of how government is instituted and functions within the growth economy whose end activists demand. This is not serious politics at all. This is people who have failed to win sufficient popular support seeking to hijack government and direct the public purpose their way. This is illegitimate whoever does it – regardless of whether you agree with the cause or not.
Unless I have understood this incorrectly, Extinction Rebellion have explicitly set out to break the law, cause disruption, with a view to being arrested and gaining maximum publicity for their cause. It’s a campaign of civil disobedience, then, justified by a cause they think is right and just. I think the cause is right and just, too. But breaking the law is always a tricky one. They claim a truth which is higher than the law. This has many sources. Aristotle noted it was possible to be a good citizen and a bad person and vice versa; Augustine and Aquinas held the existence of a divine law above positive law. An unjust law is no law at all, wrote Augustine. Aquinas also described law as an ordinance of reason to promulgate the common good. The common good, here, is the health of the climate system. I see the case for breaking the law. I see the case for not breaking the law, too, in that we have lost the authoritative moral framework recognized by Augustine and Aquinas. Without that framework, we are in a situation of political dissolution in the manner of the Bindoff quote.
At this point, I need to spell out the nature of my politics in terms of principles, commitments, and practices. I have argued for socialism my entire life, I argued strongly for a Red-Green alliance in the 1980s, argued vociferously against the ‘new realism’ of The Labour Party of Neil Kinnock, and treated Blair’s ‘New Labour’ as so manifestly toxic that I ceased voting Labour at any level. I have written extensively on figures who would be classed quite clearly as revolutionary socialists, beginning with Marx and Engels, going on to the likes of Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, James Connolly. The first book I ever wrote was entitled The Proletarian Public, a sympathetic examination of the industrial unionists, revolutionary syndicalists, and council communists in the early twentieth century. I have written extensively on the seventeenth century religious radical and communist, Gerrard Winstanley, and am finishing a book on the man and the ideas behind his Digging movement.
You could conclude from that, then, that I would be a fully paid up member of Extremism Rebellion. But read any of the works of mine I cite above closely. None of them are arguments for rebellion, still less civil disobedience. The examination of working class militancy in my first book was called The Proletarian Public for a very definite reason. Always, I put the accent on working class self-activity, self-organisation, the development of institutional, ordering capacities and material counter-organisations which possess the potential to constitute a genuine public realm. Revolution is not an event, it is a process of self-education, self-activity, and self-organisation, with the designation of ‘self’ employed in the expansive sense of individuals associating in common cause and endeavour to reclaim social democratic control over swathes of life hitherto concedes to external institutional and systemic constraint.
That is not rebellion, which is a mere rejection of constituted power and authority, but a revolution seeking practically to reconstitute power and authority on a popular basis through the organisational forms of active consent. Hence my emphasis on public life, constituting public community, as against levelling demands on an untransformed state sphere, a state still embedded in the imperatives of a capital economy.
This ‘rebellion’ may contain the potential to transition to revolution in these terms. That is employs the slogan ‘system change, not climate change’ and, further, that this slogan is finding appeal among increasing numbers, suggests potential radicalization. No doubt this is what the authors of Extremism Rebellion have also identified, fear, and are concerned to resist. Those who have read this piece to think that I am in agreement with Extremism Rebellion have misread it completely. In arguing for ‘system change,’ Extinction Rebellion are raising political demands and promoting actions that are beyond the liberal democratic pale – that is, they are implicitly (at least) demanding that the accumulative dynamic at the heart of the capital system be uprooted. I merely query how conscious many are of this. By levelling these demands on the (untransformed) state, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the state and capital exist in symbiotic relationship within a regime of accumulation, many do seem to lack political consciousness. The implication is that the corporate capture of the state is a mere political accident, that the state is the agency of the universal interest amenable to the democratic will, and that government can be reclaimed by popular pressure. That’s the old reformist delusion. There is a stark contradiction here between revolutionary demands and implications and reformist actions (civil disobedience as a reformism from below).
My criticisms of the new climate militancy are entirely consistent with the (sympathetic) criticisms I made of the wave of industrial militancy in The Proletarian Public. If my attitude seems lukewarm to the point of being oppositional, then this should be read in terms of the lessons of the repeated failures of a left politics that makes a fetish of strike actions, militancy, violent struggles with the authorities. The emphasis at all times should be upon developing the germ of the new public order through converting organs of protest and pressure into material organs of genuine publicity, working with activists to clarify the institutional and systemic nature of the problems they are seeking to resolve. This is to work within climate rebellion to focus and orient militancy on building something real and enduring with respect to a genuine public community. It is not enough for a movement to know what it is against, it needs to move quickly from protest mode and start building with respect to the alternative social order it is for. My question here is how many are actually committed to an alternative, or would have the nerve and the nous to embrace such a commitment if it were put before them. I ask because of bad experiences on my part with people who, whilst arguing vociferously for climate action, have turned downright reactionary whenever I have brought out the revolutionary implications of ‘system change, not climate change.’ ‘Left wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism,’ I was told in response to my revelation that the state is not a genuine public realm amenable to democratic will and persuasion, but embedded in the capital system as a regime of private accumulation.
By all means let’s get involved in an attempt to make climate rebellion and militancy something real in terms of climate action on the part of governments. That action is needed. But within an untransformed state and civil society under the sway of business imperatives, the danger is that such climate action will proceed under the rationale of an environmental austerity designed not to preserve planetary boundaries but the very capitalist relations implicated in their unravelling. And that, in a nutshell, is my point – to push climate action all the way to climate justice within a new public order, the Eco-Public or Ecopolis. That has been my consistent argument. Hence my concern with the use of science as overriding authority, my concern with the way questions of democratic participation within institutional and structural transformation are glided over, with the continued absence of constructive models of the alternative polity and economy, and with the lack of a genuine politics in the sense of winning and organising a mass constituency and an active consent.
Here is where all the horrendously difficult institutional, systemic, strategic and tactical problems of substantial transformation arise. Note well, I am not arguing against climate rebellion because of the scale of the problems it raises in this regard, quite the opposite: I am arguing that it scales up its modes of thought, action, and organisation to resolve those problems at the appropriate level of difficulty. Fail to do that, and all you have succeeded in doing is arming governments with the rationale to impose an environmental austerity which serves no other purpose than to preserve capitalist relations. It will be the usual liberal half-way house that invites a populist backlash (tax burden, increased costs, regulations, price rises … all falling iniquitously on the poor in a still grossly divided and unequal society). To put it bluntly, environmentalism has to finally ditch its middle class cultural cringe and openly engage in class struggle. The most important thing about climate rebellion is that, at long last, the politics of climate change has slipped the leash of institutionalized incrementalism. That approach has racked up decades of failure, failure which the world’s poor are already bearing the cost of. Climate politics has ceased to be the monopoly of intergovernmental negotiations and NGO lobbying. And not before time. I would just widen this, and emphasize the point that science – expertise in general – should never be used as political authority to substitute for citizen agency and democratic legitimacy. The need to reclaim and revalue publicity is precisely the point of my argument in this piece.
I was told that such ‘us and them thinking is an anachronism.’ My response back is that it is an ‘us and them’ world and to bring about the unified, harmonious, cooperative society requires that enough people constitute a public of an ‘us’ united around common ends to overcome the resistance of the ‘them.’ In Being at One I argue this in terms of creating clusters of co-operators that network extensively to exclude opportunities for free-riding, eliminating free-riders or, better, encourage them into cooperation, finally overcoming the division of society into ‘us and them.’ But, to repeat, that is a question of institutional and structural transformation that faces the not inconsiderable problem that the ‘them’ have succeeded in institutionalizing and embedding their power. Seek a workaround around that, and you will have de facto accepted the status quo, contributing to the entrenchment and extension of ‘us and them’ class division. Rebellion and civil disobedience needs to be converted quick smart into the politics of substantial social transformation.
In contact with others I have been explicitly warned away from even veering in a socialist direction, let alone advocating socialism, being told that it would put most people off. What such characters mean is that it would put them off. Their loathing of socialism is much greater than their concern with solutions. This from people who openly argue against the right in politics. I call it the politics of cowardice: the attempt to address politics with the only real solutions declared out of bounds. If you seek solutions within the same intellectual and institutional parameters which generates the need for solutions, you won’t resolve anything, only carry on generating a whole lot more problems.
The socialism I espouse is premised on Marx’s principle that any emancipation worthy of the name can only be a self-emancipation. There’s room for debate here about the balance between personal moral effort and collective organisation and struggle. I agree very much with the Christian Socialist RH Tawney here: “However the socialist ideal may be expressed, few things could be more remote from it than a herd of tame animals with wise rulers in command.” George Orwell receives plaudits for distinguishing between a socialism in which the working class acts – I call it citizen agency above – and one in which it is acted upon. It seems not generally understood that that is precisely the distinction upon which Marx’s socialism is made: the emancipation of the working classes is an act of the working classes themselves. Marx explicitly repudiated ‘would be universal reformers,’ ‘alchemists of revolution,’ and ‘workers’ dictators.’ (I detail this anti-elitist, anti-authoritarian, actively democratic politics in my works on Marx). This distinguishes Marx from the various forms of authoritarian collectivism that have raised their heads in politics, many in Marx’s name. Tawney recounts a meeting with Beatrice Webb, one of the founders of the Fabians (a middle class, top-down, statist-reformist bureaucratic socialism), saying she ‘froze my blood by remarking that she desired to establish “a regimen of mental and moral hygiene” for her long-suffering fellow countrymen.’ (TP Toast, Fabian Dinner, May 1954 (19/3). That comment needs to be set against Marx’s consistent affirmation of the principle of self-emancipation. Marx saw the way that top-down authoritarians speaking over and acting in place of people were infesting the politics and socialism of even his day and made his protest. Hence this explicit statement in the Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, et al.
As far as we are concerned, after our whole past only one way is open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the most immediate driving power in history and, in particular, the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social upheaval; therefore it is impossible for us to ally ourselves with people who want to eliminate this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois. If the new party organ assumes a position which corresponds to the opinions of those gentlemen, which is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains, much though we should regret it, but to declare publicly our opposition to it and to abandon the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad. We hope, however, that it will not come to this.
Marx, Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, et al. 375
The world went the way of the top-down bureaucratic authoritarian elitists, the Fabians of various stripes. 'The world is going your way,' Marxist William Morris told Sydney Webb. 'But it is not the right way in the end.' And it isn't socialism either. Those people are still around, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be taking advice on socialism from such ‘philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.’ Such people accuse Marx of the very authoritarian collectivism that they are guilty of, which Marx explicitly sought to uproot by an actively democratic politics.
Marx makes reference to the way in 'which the conscious forces of reaction have intimidated the bourgeoisie with their fear of the red bogey' (p. 88). I can honestly say that, in my dealings with liberal environmentalists, that fear is not only still alive, it is overriding. A century of Stalinist Communism has confirmed the ‘red bogey’ to be all too real, and they are not for persuading otherwise when it comes to socialism. Indeed, I have found such folk so easily intimidated by the ‘red bogey’ as to reveal themselves to be positively reactionary. They remain firmly wedded to an existing institutional and social order that is generating the very crises they claim to want resolving.
Marx was more optimistic, writing: ‘In order to dissolve the last trace of fear on the part of the bourgeoisie it must be shown clearly and convincingly that the red bogey is really only a phantom and does not exist.’ Marx, of course, wrote at a time when socialism was new and the future was there to be created. Weber warned that Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would be realized as ‘the dictatorship of the officials.’ And so it came to pass. I have tried, only to have liberal associates warn me away from socialism. People will need much more courage than this if they are to seriously address the institutional and structural problems that face us. And greater intellect and insight, too. What has been presented as socialism is patently not the socialism espoused by Marx.
The socialism I espouse is inherently and actively democratic. Any truth (Platonic or otherwise) that there is, is to be translated into political effect through the cultivation of the popular will, not imposed as a matter of state hygiene. Webb, in common with many of the Fabians and those who knew them (Shaw, Wells, Russell, intelligent folk one and all) spoke in favour of eugenics to preserve the human stock. Socialism, by way of complete contrast, is concerned to realize the human potential residing in each and all for an active citizenship oriented by consensual devotion to common ends.
But how? You will have to read my work for my answer to that question. It involves institution building, the formation of character, the cultivation of the virtues, the creation of the happy habitus in which the virtues could be known, learned, acquired, and exercised.
The idea of citizen assemblies has been advanced. Whilst some may be inclined to dismiss such things as toothless talk-shops to give those participating in a semblance of democracy, much depends upon their constitution, content, and remit. Others may also be inclined to say that current parliaments have been reduced expensive rubber-stamping chambers as a result of corporate capture. The accusation of being non- or anti-democratic applies also to the status quo being challenged. Something that makes the idea of citizen assemblies much more interesting is the concept of deliberative democracy. This concept does recognize the extent to which politics is about dialogue and discourse. I would compare this to Jurgen Habermas’ notion of the communicative community, where the only force is the force of the better argument. I have argued in favour of such things, as part of a commitment to the rational society, seeing human beings govern their common affairs in accordance with reason, understanding that such reason also comes with its ethical component in place, embedded in social practices and relations. My only critical comment here would be to ensure that victory doesn’t merely goes to the most articulate, the most vocal, the most eloquent, those who are most skilled in getting their own way. Such a scenario reproduces the old elitist, hierarchy, and division that fosters estrangement in politics. Depending on how it works, the idea at least offers one way whereby truth ceases to be passive and becomes part of an arena in which human beings come to apprehend it, internalize it, thrash out its nuances, interpret it between themselves, seek to live up to it and in accordance with it. The trick is to devise a deliberative democracy in which dialogue and dialectic are embedded in citizen discourse, interaction, and exchange, reiterated encounters in which learning as a change in behaviour occurs. This is very different to entrenched views being exchanged on the basis of organized political platforms, which would merely be a continuation of the present situation.
I come back to this comment from Marx in the Circular Letter: ‘We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.’
You can read in that passage the precise nature of my objection to the use of science as an authority legislating and even dictating in politics. I end by repeating something a scientist friend has told me on at least three separate occasions when debating political and policy questions with respect to climate action: ‘it is for science to decide these issues.’ At a stroke, I am deprived of my voice. That view disenfranchises the citizen body, deems people too uneducated to be able to free and govern themselves, renders them passive, to be liberated from above by those who claim to speak with the voice of Nature.
My political objection here is also a moral objection. I hear environmentalists claim that ‘Mother Nature is boss.’ To them, I tell them in all candour that ‘Mother Nature’ doesn’t give a damn about you and your concerns. The God of Einstein and Spinoza makes a virtue of this indifference. What we have here is a supplanting of the personal God, the God of love and human relationships, by the God of physical creation and causality. This Nature worship is a manifestation of the old polytheism from the days when the world was young and communities were directly dependent on natural cycles and seasons. What we see here is the substitution of physical Creation for the Creator God. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Creation and Creator go together, setting the study of and respect for the physical universe within the all-encompassing Love of the Creator. Remove the latter, and we have the god of the philosophers and scientists, the universe as unfolding in complete indifference to human concerns and affairs. I read environmentalist friends tell me, in response to my case for eco-socialism, that Nature doesn’t care which side wins between capitalism and socialism. In all honesty, I don’t think they realize what they are saying there. In the first instance, it matters a great deal how human beings mediate their practical interchange with Nature through social relations. Capitalist social relations are instrumental in driving the crisis in the climate system. The socialism of the Soviet Union that environments quote back at me was not a socialism at all but embodied capital rule and its dynamic to the core, organized through the state. The politics of this matters greatly, and my point is that environmentalists as naturalists, thinking science can do the job alone here, are deluded. They seek persuasion and unity on the science alone, avoiding the facts of political life rooted in conflict and disagreement. The world will be beset with fire and flood before they have succeeded in persuading government, business, and citizen by scientific reason.
The second aspect to this is ethical – Nature doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t care, either politically or ethically. Any attempt to ground ethics in nature is problematic for this very reason. This strand of environmentalism has effectively supplanted the personal God with Nature and its indifferent, impersonal cycles and processes. Fine. It is a god of scientific and philosophical reason. It doesn’t care for people, and it doesn’t move people. It doesn’t inspire, it doesn’t motivate, it has no meaning, no end. It is a purposeless materialism. So no wonder the politics based on this foundation are proving so uninspiring – people are being asked to sacrifice a self-interest for the long term health of a nature that doesn’t give a damn about them. It won’t happen.
Such environmentalism is a false religion with a false god (“Mother Nature”); a bogus priesthood (environmental scientist); its own form of worship (the adoration of physical Creation); and its own mission (“saving Mother Nature”). Behind it is a misanthropic self-loathing, a denigration of the human species in spoiling Eden in the first place. It inverts the Biblical message, which calls upon humans to live up to the beauty of Creation, ‘playing God’ in the sense of seeing themselves in the image of God. Instead, humans play God by seeing themselves as identical with God, powerful enough to re-create Eden by their own scientific, technological, and instrumental means. That ambition has been stated explicitly throughout the scientific revolution that has taken place since the seventeenth century. God walked hand in hand with man in the unfallen state of Eden. Humans acquired knowledge and were banished from the state of innocence. They could have worked in partnership with God, playing God in the true sense of living up to the image of God implanted in them. Instead they decided to go it alone with their scientific knowledge and technological know-how; fallen man made the mistake of thinking that that their knowledge and know-how made them gods with the power to recreate Eden in their own image. Where God banished humans from the perfect state of Eden, fallen humans banished God from the Eden of their own making. Humans thought they could go it alone as gods, and that is precisely where they have found themselves – alone, possessors of nothing and masters of nowhere, their Eden sliding in all directions as the planet unravels. The existential crisis of the age of Enlightenment is a story of self-made man and the process of his undoing. Initial material success encouraged humans to discard the moral supports and assumptions, the partnership with God upon which enduring success in re-creating Eden depends. The absence of those stabilising and orienting foundations wasn’t noticed for a long time, not least because the process of material accumulation and expansion continued. Now we are feeling the effects of the missing moral compass, and we are adrift. The problem is that we have become so adrift we cannot identify and recognize precisely what it is that is missing.
To state it bluntly – the environmental crisis is not merely a crisis in the natural environment: first and foremost it indicates a crisis in the moral environment. In supplanting God with Nature, the modern world has stripped the personal and relational dimension from the world, reduced life to physical causality, processes indifferent to meaning. We had thought that the switch could be effected by scientific and technological expansion. We now see that the expansion of means has brought about a diminution of meaning. The demand for environmental protection falls on deaf ears precisely because what has been lost is the sense of the sacred. Nature as indifferent physical processes is not sacred, it has no meaning and purpose in itself; it just is. The call to action issued on the basis of such a disenchanted nature will fail, has failed. The environmental protests are loud and insistent, but they are the existential howls of humans as gods in the process of being orphaned by their machine gods. The nature they claim to speak for when they say ‘Mother Nature is boss’ is not real nature. This is not the revenge of Nature but the revenge of the repressed – climate catastrophe is nature mediated through the alien power of men as gods. Unless peace with Creation is united with peace with the Creator, setting the environment within a sense of the sacred, the great unravelling will continue. Instead of rebellion, you will be better off calling back the soul and making peace as best you can.
I shall end with a brief presentation of the conception of 'rational freedom' with which I work.
By situating environmental questions within the spectrum of ‘rational’ thought, I have sought to revalue the moral "voice" and distinguish an emancipatory politics from other, more sceptical, even cynical, perspectives in the post-structural and post-modern world. The conception of ‘rational freedom’ I have developed since the 1990s demonstrates an unflagging commitment to the primacy of a moral standpoint based on transcendent standards beyond the relativism of time and place. I am an ethical cognitivist, meaning that I consider moral questions to be questions of knowledge and truth. I therefore affirm the existence of moral knowledge and moral truth as well as scientific. In disputes, objective considerations of "right" and "wrong" are at stake, which may be adjudicated by recourse to rational methods of argumentation. This view is defined against the dominant positions in modern moral philosophy, which have been distinctly noncognitivist or "emotivist." Modern morality is conceived under the split between fact and value, with the former considered the rational realm of true knowledge and the latter the non-rational sphere of irreducible subjective opinion. As a result of the decidedly anti-metaphysical impacts of logical positivism and the philosophy of ordinary language, the brave soldiers of modern philosophy have been wary of recognizing that moral disputes and judgements involve questions of truth, claiming instead that moral issues are merely a matter of individual likes, choices, and preferences, a matter of taste, about which nothing rational can be said. The result has a wealth of means being misapplied owing to a confusion of ends. From first to last, whilst others have wallowed in the myriad sophistries, scepticisms, and cynicisms of contemporary thought, I have ploughed this moral furrow with ‘rational freedom.’ I have consciously engaged the false freedoms promised by other, more fashionable, philosophies more in tune with the period of late capitalism. Whereas those philosophies are now up-a-creek-without-a-paddle, I remain the unwavering champion of democratic precepts, transcendent truths, and universal community.
One of the key philosophers whose work I have explored at length is Immanuel Kant. Kant is one of the philosophers whose lessons I have sought to bring into environmental theory and practice. For Kant, the philosophical problem of politics is how to convert lawless conflict into a moral ideal of peace (Saner 1973:310 313). This task is a struggle for the rule of law and persists until the realisation of the ideal of the republican state ensuring the greatest possible freedom for all.
The chaos that conflict between the freedom of the individual and all others produces can be avoided only with the imposition of a lawful framework regulating individuals in a universally binding manner. This ensures that the free actions of one individual 'can be reconciled with the freedom of the other in accordance with a universal law', individuals remaining free to pursue private ends within the constraint of external freedom as defined by the 'Universal Principle of Right':
Every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual's will to coexist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals 1991: 133
In this Universal Principle of Right, Kant defines the principle of ‘rational freedom’ succinctly.
In 1795, Kant proclaimed that the peoples of the earth have entered into a "universal community.” For Kant, the rational ideal of human community which he developed throughout his writings assumed its final form in the Idea of a peaceful universal community of all nations (MM 352). I can only be brief here in this mere blog article, but these are the ‘rational’ ideas of Kant (and other philosophers) that I sought to bring into the environmental movement in order to ensure the philosophical grounding of the Ecopolis, a Green Republicanism in which the universal law serves to secure the equality of freedom for each and all. I make these points to make clear that my critique of the liberal order is steeped in a deep understanding law, rights and civil order. Kant affirms the principle of innate freedom to be the source of all rights (MM 237). As the innate right to external freedom under universal laws, the principle of innate freedom contains the right to equality, independence from others, sovereignty over oneself, and liberty to do anything without harming others. That’s the liberal freedom that I have sought not to extinguish but to deepen and enrich, ‘abolish’ in the Hegelian and Marxian sense of realizing, preserving, raising up. Public law is an expression of the collective will of the people and therefore belongs to a civil society (MM 311). The constitution of a civil society is the product of collective action on the part of a community. Here is where ‘rational’ precepts or transcendent truths are fleshed out socially, in the interactions between social individuals. The line of ‘rational’ philosophers whose work I develop – from Rousseau and Kant to Jurgen Habermas – thus integrate autonomy and solidarity within a social ethic and practical philosophy. This is the ‘centre ground’ I claim has been hollowed out and lost in the contemporary world. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ wrote that famous extremist Marx. In his extremism, Marx was protesting the reduction of warm human relations to icy calculation and the callous nexus of cash payment; he demanded that community resolidify around proper relations. His antecedents here are Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. I believe Rousseau made use of the device of the social contract but isn’t quite a contractarian; the contract does not do the heavy lifting in Rousseau’s philosophy. Rousseau resolidifies human bonds in other ways, even if he did entitle his most substantial work in political philosophy The Social Contract. Hegel is anti-contractarian but his doctrine of Sittlichkeit, proposing a tripartite structure integrating civil society, the economic ‘system of needs,’ and the state as ethical agency securing the universal interest is very much a Rousseau for the era of the nation-state. Kant does something similar himself in taking Rousseau’s concept of social contract to identify the Republican state as the united general will, thus rendering Rousseau's important concept of the general will the foundation of public law (MM 313-15). Rousseau’s idea of the general will is of huge significance. With this concept, Rousseau made it clear that the truth cannot just be passively stated but has to be actively willed on the part of the citizens. If only a radical movement concerned with getting politics to recognize the truth equipped itself with a practical philosophy along these lines, we could be spared so much wasted time and effort.
The ultimate end of such a community is the embodiment of ‘rational freedom’ by way of securing equality and justice for each and all citizens. For Kant, the justice of a state is synonymous with its well-being (MM 318). Kant thus develops the Platonic Idea of Justice in his Idea of a Republican Constitution.
As such an ideal, the republic of ends exists as a criterion by which to evaluate the existing political order. And Kant does indeed use the ideal in this way.
A constitution of the greatest human freedom in accordance with laws .. is at least a necessary Idea, which one must place at the foundation, not only in the first project of a state constitution, but also with regard to all laws... Though a [perfectly constituted society] may never come to pass, the Idea itself remains completely correct, which posits this maximum as an archetype, in order to bring the legal constitution of man ever closer to the greatest possible perfection, in accordance with the archetype. What the highest level may be at which man must stop, and how great therefore is the gap which necessarily remains open between the Idea and its realisation - that is a matter which no-one can or should determine [in advance] precisely because it is Freedom which can transgress any assigned limit.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith trans 1965: B 372-74
The parade of Ideas that Kant presents before us in the Metaphysics of Morals is an explicit affirmation of ethical Platonism. We shouldn’t be surprised. As David Lay Williams argues in Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, Rousseau himself was the greatest Platonist of the modern age in affirming transcendent norms and values against the conventionalism of the age. Kant called Rousseau ‘the Newton of the moral world,’ praising Rousseau for having done for ethics what Newton had done for science. Kant continuously appeals to the Ideas of pure reason.
Since the concept of the general will is an Idea of reason, the concept of civil society that constrains the individual will in accordance with the general will is also an Idea (MM 306). The Idea thus serves as a regulative ideal and internal standard by which to judge every actual union of individuals in a commonwealth (MM 313). The concept of the civil state is the Idea of what a ‘rational’ state ought to be when conceived in accordance with the pure principles of justice. The contract by which individuals leave the state of nature for the civil state is also an Idea of reason, and not a historical or empirical concept (MM 315). So, too, is the concept of an ideal state, which for Kant is the republican constitution (MM 341). Everywhere, transcendent truths are affirmed against conventionalism, relativism, and sophism.
I read Marx as entirely in line with this 'rational' tradition. 'A state which is not the realization of rational freedom,' he wrote, 'is not a true state.'
The contemporary state is not a true state.
And here is the key point. Neither Rousseau nor Kant simply take these Ideas out of the Platonic Heaven and bring them down to earth. They may well be transcendent truths, but they are not simply asserted against empirical reality from the outside. They come with a practical philosophy that bridges the gap between contemplation and action, theory and practice. The Ideas of social institution are incarnated and embedded in the phenomenal world and are therefore immanent as well as transcendent. The point is that practical reason – the field of ethics and politics – animates these Ideas in the way they articulate the transcendent Idea of Justice.
John Rawls was one of the greatest of modern moral philosophers. His greatness lay in his critical appropriation of Kant. But as I have argued, he presented a Kant shorn of his metaphysical commitments to fit modern liberal institutions. Writing of Kant’s formula of the universal law, Rawls wrote:
It is a mistake, I believe, to emphasize the place of generality and universality in Kant's ethics. That moral principles are general and universal is hardly new with him; and as we have seen these conditions do not in any case take us very far. It is impossible to construct a moral theory on so slender a basis, and therefore to limit the discussion of Kant's doctrine to these notions is to reduce it to triviality. The real force of his view lies elsewhere.
John Rawls, Theory of Justice, 1971: 251
Rawls took his inspiration in Kant's theory of justice and in doing so became one of the greatest of modern liberal political philosophers. But he didn’t quite appreciate the true character of Kant the liberal’s ‘elsewhere.’
‘This was his secret for becoming one of the most productive Kantians in the past century, while the loyal followers of Kant were blithely advocating his ethical formalism. But even Rawls failed to realize that Kant's theory of justice was not his own invention but his adaptation of Plato's theory for the liberal ethos of modern Europe. So Rawls never recognized the ultimate source of inspiration for his own theory of justice. Thus he mistook himself for a Kantian because he never came around to appreciate the Platonic legacy in Kant's normative theory, probably the only thing worth saving in his entire philosophy.’
T.K. Seung, Kant A Guide for the Perplexed 2007: 142-143
In fine, the Platonic legacy in Kant's normative theory, which Rawls absorbed without knowing into his own theory of justice, is probably the only thing worth saving in Rawls’ entire philosophy. Ponder those lines at length, and then understand precisely the depth of my critique of liberalism and liberal democracy.
The rational ideal of human community espoused by Kant assumed its final form in the Idea of the peaceful universal community of all nations (MM 352).
That all sounds eminently reasonable to me. That sounds a genuine alternative to the war and disorder of present political and social arrangements. That’s the ‘rational freedom’ I have developed, and whose implications for environmentalism as a political theory and practice I have explored at length. If it is categorised as an extremism, I will argue it is concerned to develop the rational integration of autonomy and solidarity against the limitations of liberal institutions that realize neither and frustrate both.
Since Kant presented his idea of ‘universal community,’ the inter-connection of the peoples of the Earth has proceeded apace, unifying the planet to such an extent as to make the idea of a Green republicanism as a “biospheric cosmopolitics" entirely conceivable. Such a notion seems most appropriate for the coming Age of Ecology and its transnational synergies.
In breaking the law, climate rebels set out to prevent people from going about their lawful business. That is a criminal act of aggravated trespass on private land, it is obstruction on public land. I note the defence of ‘peaceful demonstration.’ But in deliberately setting out to interfere with the lawful business of people, these illegal actions cannot be presented in terms of "nonviolent protest." There’s a violence involved, in that there is interference, deliberate disruption, attempts at exerting force on others. It’s an attempt to bring pressure to bear on others to compel a change in their behaviour. The insistence on the non-violent and peaceful nature of such disobedience isn’t persuasive, and won’t persuade people if they are exposed to disruption for any length of time.
But I note this:
The love of violence is, to me, the ancient and symbolic gesture of man against the constraints of society. Vicious men can exploit the impulse, but it is a disaster to treat the impulse as vicious. For no society is strong which does not acknowledge the protesting man; and no man is human who does not draw strength from the natural animal. Violence is the sphinx by the fireside, and she has a human face.
—Jacob Bronowski, The Face of Violence
I don’t remotely trust the "we are right regardless of the law" approach, not least because the self-righteous have been among the most deluded, destructive, and vicious people in history. The critical issue is that human beings are different from animals:
‘Man creates symbols and bases his culture upon them; the flag and patriotism are examples, as are status, religion, and language. The capacity to create and deal with symbols, actually a superb achievement, also accounts for the fact that we are the cruellest species on the planet. We kill not out of necessity but out of allegiance to such symbols as the flag and fatherland; we kill on principle. Thus our aggression occurs on a different level from that of animals, and not much can be learned from animals about this distinctively human form of aggression.’
Rollo May, Power and Innocence 1976: 147
The meaning of the graphic I attached to this post is this: if you don’t come off the barricades to engage in a politics that constitutes a genuine public community now, then you are condemned to a future on the barricades in the futile attempt to stave off the climate catastrophe that is sure to come.
‘Rational freedom’ still lights the way.
Will the future belong to ‘rational freedom?’ Only if we are lucky.