System Change and Social Transformation

I came across this video and statement from Rob Hopkins of the Transitions Towns movement.

I like Rob and his work on transitions. I support his work. Transitions strategies involving psychic involvement and change. This is part of what is needed. I continue to emphasize that ambitious large-scale projects of social and environmental action will only succeed to the extent that they are embedded in small-scale social reasoning, practice, and proximity. Rob Hopkins' work on transitions here delivers on this social infrastructure of enduring change and I heartily commend it. My concerns lie elsewhere. What concerns me is the disparity between this vision of localization and self-sufficient communities and the presumption that this ‘deep transformation’ is something to be delivered by an unreconstructed government. No matter how much such a government is compelled to act on account of a green mobilisation, it will remain what it is, an integral part of a wider capital system that is socially corrosive and ecologically destructive. That is because of its structural embeddedness in the process of accumulation. That cannot be simply overridden without economically disastrous consequences. The critique of political economy raises some uncomfortable questions with respect to power, economic imperatives, class, exploitation, and distribution of resources, but any vision of transformation ignores these questions at its peril. I am deeply suspicious of any politics that is 'conflict averse' (as many have expressed it to me). Conflict is something I dislike too. So does power. Aversion to conflict amounts to insulating asymmetrical power relations from challenge, contestation, and change. The mobilisation of pressure on government to act through protest does nothing to alter those power relations.

The appeal of such visions lies in their innocence of politics and class division. The very things that are at the source of our social and ecological ills are spirited away; the resolution of problems thus becomes a matter of lifestyle change buttressed by government action, dare I say coercion? It’s as if the enclosure of the commons never happened, and need not be contested. Merrie England is reborn as a matter of personal lifestyle choices. I’m slightly distorting the view here, but in its favour. Because if you read the statement that Rob Hopkins attaches to this localized utopia, its non-politics entails a very distinctive politics – government is going to deliver ‘deep transformation.’

I quote:

“Did you watch the BBC's 'Years and Years'? Well, here's the antidote. What if, over the next 11 years, a previously unimaginable transformation were to take place, sparked by Extinction Rebellion's non-violent direct action and by the student strikes, the subsequent election of a government committed to deep transformation, the reorienting of capital and business, the huge mobilisation of communities across the country, the creation of the conditions in which the imagination can flourish? A remarkable time in history when anything felt possible, a time future generations now celebrate in song and story. A time of guts, focus and wild creativity. What would it be like to arrive in that world?

I'd like to invite you to take a walk with me through a day in 2030. 'From What If to What Is' will be published by Chelsea Green Publishing on October 17th. This film is the work of the brilliant Emilio Mula, a true artist.”

I commend Rob's hopeful vision against the doomster scenarios which dominate the present age. We most certainly do need a vision of hope that inspires and motivates individuals to bring it about. I'm all in favour. But without appropriate and effective collective means and mechanisms, something more than individual choices or localized solutions, this vision veers close to the kind of idealistic wishful thinking in politics that we ought to have learned to be sceptical of. It’s not that I disagree with the vision of future society being evoked here. On the contrary, I have spent years arguing for this very thing. Quiet tree lined streets without cars would suit me fine, as one who has never driven a car and bemoans what Tolkien called 'the infernal combustion engine.' It sounds wonderful. But ideals with respect to a world sharing all good things in common is the easiest thing to get general assent on.

It’s an appealing vision, and so, naturally, people are drawn to it. I am not at all opposed to localized visions of ‘green villages’ and eco-communes, to local communities in control of their energy supply, food production, transport systems, decision-making and so on. In fact, I repeatedly argue that the concerted action within comprehensive frameworks required to address the crisis in the climate system will only succeed to the extent that it is embedded in the small-scale practical reasoning of individuals taking collective shape through proximal and trust relations infusing a love of home and place. At the same time, these small-scale activities cannot, in themselves, sum to the scale of changes required for effective climate action, hence there is most certainly a key role for government, nationally and internationally. In Homo Religiosus, positively appraised Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtuous communities of local practice, only to note that without being set in a wider framework, such communities would come under pressure from the forces of external corruption. I, therefore, argued for the need for these communities to scale upwards and outwards by way of a networking buttressed by the wider framework of a transformed state and government. In such a way are questions of the local and the global established on a continuum. This interpenetration of the local and the global has been called ‘glocalisation.’ That’s a dialectical vision which contrasts which continue to work within the institutional separation of state and civil society which is a defining feature of the liberal order. So long as we remain within that institutional separation, the local and the global are held in abstraction from each other. Hence my scepticism at the combination of lifestyle changes below and government actions above in these bucolic visions of the green future.

A Home and a Resting Place: Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience

Of course, the election of a ‘green’ government or a government that goes ‘green’ is something which those who have worked for The Green Party would, in general, like to see. There is an annoying tendency to see critical comments in this direction as devaluing the importance of government policies, programmes, and elections. Karl Marx’s position is nuanced, arguing in favour of working class participation in electoral politics and pursuing legislative reforms by way of parliament, whilst making it clear that these things are not the end in themselves but form part of a greater social transformation. It’s that greater social transformation and the modes of thought, action, and organisation that deliver such substantive change that is my concern here. ‘Green’ can come in very many institutional and social forms, and it is the lack of precision – or downright error - with respect to political economy that is my critical concern. A mistaken definition of ‘capital,’ for instance, can never be innocent. It comes with practical consequences. It is a mistake which Marx identified as congenitally bourgeois, serving to naturalize and eternalize capitalist relations as ‘the economy’ in general. It is an example of misplaced concreteness that serves to ensure that demands for radical change always remain firmly within the realm of the capital relation. To argue that popular democratic will can, through government, take over and reorient capital indicates a belief in capital as a physical thing. This is the classic error of the bourgeois mind that Marx’s critique of political economy sought to extirpate. For Marx, such notions eternalize what ought to be historicised in relation to specific social forms. This critical understanding is entirely lacking. Instead of an analysis of class and capital, there is a general appeal innocent of socio-economic drivers. We move from the ‘here’ of capitalist exploitation and overscale to the ‘there’ of green village communes without anything by way of process other than lifestyle changes and government action. Such vagueness appeals at the level of idle vision, presenting a reassuring heaven for those despairing of politics, but it is ultimately debilitating. We may well get a ‘green’ government as a result of the combination of popular pressure and protest and the increasingly obvious facts of climate change that are upon us. Government and business will act, and are acting. But such actions will proceed within prevailing social relations instead of seeking their transformation. My argument has consistently been for the ecological transformation of ‘the political’ leading to the Green Republic or Ecopolis. Such a republican and communitarian vision is distinguished from key elements of the liberal order, particularly the institutional separation of state and civil society, as well as the abstract figures of ‘the individual,’ ‘community,’ commonality, universality, and authority. I develop these points at length and in depth in my work. Put simply, the argument is that the false separation of individuality and sociality in the liberal ontology generates a dualism between two abstract figures. On the one hand, there is ‘the individual’ as a self-possessing being who contracts in and out of relations to others in society in order to preserve and/or advance self-interest; on the other hand, there is what rightly Marx called ‘the abstraction of the political state,’ denoting the tendency to which the commonality and universality that human beings as social beings need comes to be denied and frustrated in real civil society – bourgeois society as Marx called it – and projected outwards and upwards to the heavenly level of the state. The state thus serves as an ‘illusory general interest,’ a surrogate for real community. As a result of the liberal ontology all collective supra-individual forms such as community, government, law, authority, morality come to be felt as an infringement on individual liberty.

I examine this question with great depth in Ethics, Essence, and Immanence: Marx’s Normative Essentialism from 2018.

I refer people to that work if they seek clarification. The issues are fairly intricate and not easy to grasp in short-hand. Here I can do no more than raise a critical voice and sound the alarm at the great danger of green visions being diverted into the continuation of present relations in greenwashed form, for want of an institutional and structural analysis, a critique of political economy, and a politics worthy of the name. As things stand, in a decade I see not eco-villages and communes but governments informed and animated by assertions of climate necessity implementing an environmental austerity that imposes limits on a recalcitrant public within asymmetrical and exploitative relations of power and resources. In other words, without a transformation of social relations, it is entirely possible to envisage a ‘green’ government instituting limits and austerity, but to preserve capitalist relations in the name of preserving planetary boundaries. I don’t argue that ‘greens’ are dupes. I don’t doubt that they will spot the ruse. I’d rather that they see the danger and call a halt now rather than later, when it may be too late, and set on the right course with a clear-eyed vision, one informed by political economy rather than evasive of it, right now. We have had ages to have developed such clarity.

The problem is that such visions say little or nothing with respect to institutions, structures, relations, and practices. It is precisely here where the divisions and conflict arise; it is here where the separation of individuals from the commons lies, involving its subsequent breaking up and the destruction of unified interests. Instead, we are asked to imagine mass protest building sufficient support to bring about the election of a green government inaugurating the ecological society. Even if we accept some such scenario leading to a green government - having campaigned for the Greens, I can tell you that a government legislating green measures is far more likely that a Green government - the view still presumes that the state is determinant in relation to the private, and globalized, economy. On that delusion, the vision fails.

To make clear the source of my criticisms here and in recent posts, let me draw on a distinction that David Held made back in 1987 with respect to the nature of ‘crisis.’ If we are faced with accidental events and happenings, then piecemeal reform or legislative and regulative intervention by government will suffice; if we are faced with problems that can be shown to be endemic to the system, then nothing less than a root and branch reformation will suffice. There is a distinction to be made here between a partial crisis, involving a period of temporary instability, on the one hand, and a more deep-seated and enduring crisis involving the fundamental basis of society, on the other hand. The former requires a combination of temporary measures and reforms to preserve stability until the crisis blows over and normal service is resumed; the latter entails the fundamental transformation of society. I would suggest we are in the midst of a crisis with transformative potential. When people say that crisis is the new normal, they are really saying that normal service will not be resumed. Instead of normalizing crisis, which allows the rich and powerful to keep engineering and exploiting a disaster capital to entrench their power, we need to engage in a thoroughgoing root and branch transformation. We are beyond the normal phenomena of the economic cycle of boom and bust. Infamously, as Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown declared an end to the age of boom and bust. That was a remarkable claim, given the extent to which the business cycle is an inherent feature of capitalism. In short time, as Prime Minister, Brown was confronted by the biggest and deepest depression since the 1930s, the global economy escaping complete collapse by the skin of its teeth (and accumulation of massive and insupportable debt). The problems have not gone away. We are dealing with the internal erosion of core organizational principles of capitalist society, with the various states and international bodies doing their level best to keep the whole system afloat. We have moved beyond the gradual corrosion and undermining of those societal relations which determine the scope of and limits to change for political and economic activity. We have moved into a much deeper crisis, a crisis with transformative potential. This crisis of a deeper type entails organising challenges to the fundamentals of the political and social order. (Held Models of Democracy 1987 7 Legitimation Crisis). The problem is that many of those who are most vocal about system change and social transformation remain firmly on the level of the first type of crisis, offering incremental reforms and lifestyle changes instead of engaging the system at its core and mobilizing a public to that effect. The potential for deep social transformation will be unactualised as a result, and we will drift into some form of capitalist adaptation. No matter how ‘green’ a face this adaptation will have, the fundamental drivers of the expansionist, extractive capitalist economy will remain firmly in place. If being conflict averse means evading the fundamental questions of power, control, class, and resources, then it is a plain invitation to a third way evasion that is ideological in Marx’s sense of serving to conceal and preserve existing power relations.

We need to treat any general appeal to desirable ideals which is accompanied by an evasion of the social and structural sources of division with suspicion. The danger is not merely of an impotent moralism that fails to deliver transition, but of a diversion of idealistic and radical energies into not transformation but the preservation of the very relations of power and exploitation instrumental in the environmental crisis.

I shall leave others to decide whether such evasiveness is a calculated vagueness or a political cowardice. People declare themselves to be conflict averse; they consider conflict to be destructive and self-destructive, and therefore seek a route to future society without having to challenge entrenched power and interests. Hence the emphasis on collaboration and on non-violent and peaceful protest. I always think there is a slight hypocrisy in this emphasis on non-violent protest, because the actions are designed to be disruptive. In my old sociology classes in the 1980s I learned that there is a distinctive class aspect to this. Working class action is considered physical and therefore violent, middle class action non-physical (passive protest, demonstration etc) and therefore non-violent. Trade unions and strike action are considered illegitimate, they entail violence for sectional interests; civil disobedience is fine, involving non-violent action for universal causes. That’s interesting. We have come a long way from Marx’s designation of the proletariat as the universal class, the class upon whose exploited labour the whole of society rests, the class whose emancipation entails the emancipation of all society. I well remember the industrial struggles of recent times. From a mining community, I remember the arguments of working class activists, strikers, and campaigners – this was for the preservation of the community. ‘We are doing this for your future,’ one woman said in response to a question from a young boy as to why so many people were being so vocal. The view of the right wing press was that workers and strikers were utterly selfish, greedy, and violent.

I recall here the systematic studies ‘white-collar crime’ by sociologist Edwin H. Sutherland. Sutherland defines white-collar crime as 'crimes committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupations.’ Blue-collar crime is committed by people at the other end of the spectrum. The archetypal image of blue-collar crime is that of physical violence and robbery. By contrast, white-collar crimes include bribery and corruption in business and politics, misconduct by professionals such as doctors and lawyers, the breaking of trade regulations, the misuse of patents and trademarks, and misrepresentation in advertising. Sutherland offers evidence to indicate that such offences are not merely widespread, but quite normal in busi­ness and political life, if not explicitly acceptable then tacitly accepted. Of the factors which serve to diminish the seriousness of white-collar crime, the idea that white-collar crimes are involve no physical violence to persons and are 'crimes without victims’ is prominent. Even if detected, studies find, many white-collar crimes are rarely prosecuted. Sociological studies of white-collar crime by the likes of Sutherland and Carson provided strong support for the view that there is ‘one law for the rich and another for the poor.’ Edwin Sutherland concludes that there is a consistent bias 'involved in the admini­stration of criminal justice under laws which apply to business and the professions and which therefore involve only the upper socio-economic group.' The disparity is neatly summarized by Willy Sutton, a professional bank robber, who stated, 'Others accused of defrauding the government of hundreds of thousands of dollars merely get a letter from a committee in Washington asking them to come in and talk it over. Maybe it's justice but its puzzling to a guy like me' (quoted in Clinard, 1974, p. 266).

It’s not puzzling once one brings in the great unmentionables of class and class division. Just as white-collar employment is considered of higher status than blue-collar employment, so the mentalities, motivations, and activities of white-collar people are considered of a much higher, more refined and respectable than those of blue-collar people. As a consequence of the biases discovered in sociological studies like the ones cited above, it is highly likely that official statistics underestimate the extent of white-collar crime, with an inordinate emphasis on violent crime. The result is that official statistics come to present a picture of crime as predominantly working-class behaviour. That bias seeps through into society, with the result that people come to unconsciously accept this biased portrayal. As a result they come easily to see themselves as outside of the spectrum of the criminal and deviant classes. In this context, non-violent clearly implies victimless crimes in the sense of entailing no physical violence. The distinction correlates very neatly with the distinction in individualistic liberal theory between the visible hand of the state and bureaucracy and the invisible hand of the market and private economic forces. Whereas it is very easy to see, resent, and resist ‘the dead hand’ of government, and very easy to portray socialism as a state bureaucratic imposition of a heavy-handed common good on society, it is difficult for people to discern the extent to which society is dominated by the external force and systemic constraint of economic imperatives arising from the anonymous ‘market.’

I am therefore exceedingly distrustful of this heavy emphasis on peaceful non-violent protest. In light of working class history and experience, it savours rather too much of middle class entitlement and sheer class snobbery, coming with the implicit judgement that we, the non-violent people, are somehow elevated above the common herd, breaking the law with high minded impunity, as distinct from those who do so with physical violence and base-motivation. There is an implicit judgement in this that is distinctly class-bound. There are good causes and there are sectional causes. Industrial activity on the part of the organised working class are selfish, ‘greedy,’ base, often violent. Do we have such short memories that we have forgotten the newspaper headings and editorials from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on the way that trade union struggle and strike activity was portrayed? These were struggles about working lives, wages, and conditions, the staple of everyday living for millions. The press emphasised the greed and violence of the workers. The workers were portrayed as selfish brutes doing violence to the public.

You engage in demonstration, you disrupt and disturb. You engage in protest, you break up the normal everyday patterns of the public. You break the law, you commit violence. It’s for a good cause. All think their views are right and just. Time will tell, truth will out. I do think climate is a just cause, in a way that protests against immigration and multiculturalism are not. But this is a game that all can play. The danger is that if all come to play it in an attempt to force government action, we will have no public realm left, it will be a mere congeries of forceful individuals and groups asserting non-negotiable truths. Climate change may be the Last Great Cause. I have described it as thus. I'm just making a slight objection to the implied denigration, devaluation, and delegitimation of anything that smacks of class struggle on the part of the working class. These definitions and designations are not innocent and are not without consequence in political terms. Ralph Miliband makes a distinction between class struggle from above and class struggle from below. There is a tendency to see class struggle in terms of working class struggle, the struggle of labour against capital. Capital, too, wages class struggle, this is class struggle from above. Class struggle from above is waged by many different protagonists- by employers, power-holders in the state, political agencies such as parties, lobbies, newspapers, and journals and by many other agencies which may declare themselves to be 'non-political'…. Indeed, class struggle from above is often most effective when proceeding through the ordinary and mundane aspects of everyday life. On a daily basis it is radio and TV journalists, columnists, jobbing 'commentators' of all kinds, and others in semi-professional occupations, who do most to normalize class perspectives, even though they are not members of the dominant class or power elite at all. Their job is to voice the obvious and the everyday, make sense of current affairs according to the dominant world view. They are the foot soldiers of the conventional wisdom. The main protagonists in the 'class struggle from above', however, are those who own or control the main means of domination in capitalist society: ‘employers on the one hand and the state on the other, with the hands usually clasped in a firm grip’ (Miliband 1989:115).

The delegitimation of working class struggle has been normalized. That is not without consequences. The demands for social transformation are being made without the very material force and structural power capable of making them effective.

I'll note this here for later reference.

There seems to be an optimistic view that non-cooperators/free riders can be encouraged into cooperation by the provision of the right transitions. Such a view identifies those drawing attention to the structurally rooted facts of social division, requiring substantial social transformation, as troublemakers potentially breaking up collaborative endeavours with their classless appeals.

There does seem to be something unconscious and congenital in this evasion of the facts of division and reality of conflict, denoting an innate incapacity on the part of the bourgeois mind. Marx exposed that mentality to full light. He's always been a threat and a danger that collaborators shy away from for that reason. To which I simply ask: are we serious about transformation? Neither collaboration nor cooperation are virtues in themselves: it matters a great deal with whom we collaborate and cooperate and to what end. The capital system thrives by hijacking the social instincts of human beings and diverting them to private ends. That is precisely what Marx exposed. He's not liked for it. He forces us to see some uncomfortable realities with respect to power, and seek to restructure power relations to enable freedom and equality.

The conflict averse mind consistently shies away from the facts of social division and the need for political clarity with respect to the distribution of forces in that division. Instead, there are vague appeals to ‘humanity’ in general, a putative ‘third way,’ ‘neither left nor right,’ that exists nowhere except in the bourgeois mind. It took quickly proceeds to a harmony of interests, failing to see that it is the structural causes of disharmony that are at issue. I well remember from my history classes the Labour MP and trade unionist Jimmy Thomas attacking the Marxists, demanding that they get away from this “damnable talk of class struggle.” This was the year before Churchill took Britain back on the Gold Standard at an overvalued rate that made industry uncompetitive and caused the General Strike.

Marx captured the essence of the bourgeois mind perfectly in the Grundrisse when he wrote that ‘the bourgeois viewpoint’ cannot see beyond prevailing capitalist relations. The bourgeois mind sees the present stage of capital, class, and competition as the end of history, beyond which it is impossible to go. The future is no more than the present enlarged to such a mind. Its visions of the future look remarkably like an idealised view of the past, established and maintained by new technologies. But not by new social relations of production. Instead there are idealized visions of localized production that are offered against large, commercialized realities, but are incapable of supplying any mechanism by which those realities are supplanted. Those disgruntled with the present cannot conceive of any way forward, and can only look backwards yearning for the pre-capitalist world we have lost. The two visions have a tendency to become mixed up, with an idealized past re-envisaged for a localized capitalistic present. I worry that this is what is being offered in the name of social transformation; this is not deep transformation but adaptation.

Marx in the Grundrisse writes:

“The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes pro­duction on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete empti­ness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.)”

Marx’s comments on ‘original fullness’ are directed against the Romantic reaction of the age, but apply to those Greens in the modern age who constantly cite ‘Nature’ as a referent to return to, whilst paying no attention whatsoever to the specific forms of mediation and how these determine the character of the human interaction with nature. Since there is no such 'Nature' apart from mediation, the moral imperative to preserve planetary health lacks a referent. Within a liberal culture, each individual is entitled to define the good as he or she sees fit.

My objection lies in the combination of idealism and evasiveness expressed by such statements. Their very appeal is all the more cause of discomfort. They are invitations into the politically vacuous ‘third way’ that is characterised by a deficiency, even absence, with respect to critical and practical purchase with respect to social reality and identity. I note the extent to which so many people seeking environmental health and well-being respond so positively to such statements. That’s even more worrying than the politically evasive statements themselves, indicating a mass audience for a “system change” that merely absorbs and adapts radical energies to a modified arrangement of existing power relations.

These approaches appeal because they reassure people that they can have change for the better without having to engage in the hard and uncomfortable business of challenging, contesting, subverting, and restructuring existing power relations. There is no need to identify and locate power with a social and institutional precision that makes clear which class is being opposed and which force with the structural capacity to act is being supported. In fact, class and exploitative relations are conspicuous by their absence in these visions. We live within the capital system, not ‘the system.’ Those who are serious about “system change” need to engage in a systemic analysis. 'System change' means specifically changing capital rule and the capital relation. That necessarily implies a class analysis of politics. Instead of this, I see a piecemeal do-it-yourself reformism from below, involving lifestyle changes. When there is recognition of the need for something more, we return to the familiar reformism-from-above, the dominant liberal-left tradition of the twentieth century - the recourse to government. It suits such people to identify neoliberalism as the source of all our ills. That implies that it is not the system that is necessarily at fault as a result of its contradictory dynamics, but a particular economic theory. It follows from this that the solution is not a new economic system but a new economic theory, hence the inherent Keynesianism of the Green New Deal now being offered. It's the same piecemeal, incremental change as against systematic analysis and systemic transformation. The language of 'system change' is in danger of being stolen and turned to the cause of system re-adaptation in light of climate change. The green government envisaged is painted in idealised images of tree-lined streets, local food, and community interaction. Much more likely is an environmental austerity using scientific imperatives to rationalize the preservation of capitalist relations as the preservation of planetary boundaries.

I argue that the converging crises of the contemporary world are as a result of the socio-economic, democratic, and ecological contradictions of the capital system; that this system is a class system in which capital rests as a power that is parasitic on labour and nature; and that system change necessarily involves a class analysis, politics, and struggle. Evasion here betrays radical energies into sterile channels, preserving prevailing power relations rather than transforming them. Or merely exhausts for want of an effective politics. Environmental politics stands in danger of becoming an ideological project preserving power structures in the name of ecological necessity. Where, I ask, is the organisational capacity allied to the structural capacity to act?

This is at the core of my suspicion when it comes to ‘third way,’ ‘neither left nor right’ appeals. Too many still consider socialism to be a top-down statist organisation of a still expansionist production. That’s a surrogate socialism, a false collectivism, that is instituted within a continuing capital rule and dynamic. References to ‘industrialism’ or ‘civilisation’ or some other equally sociologically vacuous term as ecologically destructive, with socialism as merely the collectivist flip side of individualist capitalism, remain precisely within a liberal viewpoint that falsely separates individuality and sociality. To remain within that false ontology is to guarantee a destructive social atomism on the one hand and its counterpart in a political centralisation on the other. The latter is not socialism but the surrogate commonality and universality of the capital system.

Let’s analyse this statement from Rob Hopkins and develop these critical observations.

First of all note the ‘what if’ with respect to the ‘unimaginable transformation’ that may take place in the next decade. Fine. William Morris asked us to do something similar in News From Nowhere. The difference is that Morris was a Marxist with an eminently practical approach to class struggle and the constitution of material counter-organisations to counter capital. Morris didn't just give us a vision of future society, he identified the means for getting us there. Transitions are all part of that, and I highly commend Rob Hopkins' work here. That's not my problem. The evasions when it comes to capital and class are the problem.

I note nothing of a critique of political economy in these Extinction Rebellion climate protests. On the contrary, I note the familiar evasion of class analysis and class struggle against exploitative relations. The language is all too familiar from political history and the way that socialism was rather hollowed out in being re-located from the social realm to the still abstracted and untransformed realm of the state. Instead of a socialization we got a nationalization that proceeded firmly within the capital form, hence the state capitalism that issued, which people persist in miscalling socialism.

Let us proceed to note the reference to ‘non-violent direct action.’ This is certainly not class struggle, something which the supporters of this kind of position would no doubt consider a virtue. Class struggle is violent, as is trade union struggle and strike action. Working class action, by definition it seems, is violent. That leaves us wondering precisely what kind of politics are involved here, entailing what kind of transformations. Because such positions are entirely empty of the social forces, (other than mindless mass publics), required to make struggles oriented towards social and structural transformation effective. Instead, all that we have is a civil disobedience and protest designed to build ‘mass’ pressure on government to force certain policies. This is not constituting a true public at all. Government and its relation to socio-economic forces and relations remains entirely untransformed. It's just that one group - environmentalists - gets their way rather than other - say, populists or fascists. By the same token, it is just as easy to envisage the latter groups prevailing rather than the former by the same tactics. Be careful of this kind of politics, because the good guys won't necessarily win, and in the 1920s and 1930s they spectacularly lost.

This is not socialism but socialism-lite. In fact, it is a socialism so lite as to be a diluted alternative to genuine transformation. Government is charged with doing precisely what a century of parliamentary socialism had promised but failed to do. This was not a failure of will on the part of parliamentary socialists, but a failure to understand the true relation between government and capital. As Ralph Miliband argued in 1965, the state is not determinant but is determined. That lesson has still to be learned. We are being presented with the old reformist delusion, reimagined as a new politics.

That ‘what if’ question begs the question of how we are to get from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ What are the forces of such a transformation? Note the specific reference to ‘student strikes’ in this statement. This is significant. The working class, trade unions, just transition, and industrial strikes are written out, consistent with the way that the working class voice has been written out of culture and politics in recent decades. The hundred years war on trade unions, the most successful example of working class self-organisation in history, has served to wipe the workers out of a supposedly revolutionary politics. And with the workers goes the structural capacity to act to ensure that a crisis with transformatory potential is developed in a liberatory direction. This is what happens when the bourgeois liberal mind appropriates the language of ‘system change’ from Marxists and socialists, dispenses the class analysis that is integral to social transformation, and adapts that emancipatory conception of change it to their classless, idealistic, and socially vacuous communitarian visions of future society. And, of course, such visions attract the similarly socially vacuous. Marxists and socialists have long since subjected such bourgeois reasoning to criticism, exposing its pious and powerless moralizing as utterly incapable of gaining any practical purchase on the society to be transformed. (I’ll call it 'bourgeois,' because that’s what Marx called it. I'm not dealing with the complexities of class composition here).

Eagleton writes well here:

“Marxists have no objection to students; but however politically important the intelligentsia may sometimes be, it cannot provide the major troops for the fight against capitalism. It cannot do so because it happens not to be socially located within the process of production in such a way as to be feasibly capable of taking it over. It is in this sense that the relation between certain social locations, and certain political forms, is a 'necessary' one which is not, to repeat, to assert that it is inevitable, spontaneous, guaranteed or God given. Such convenient travesties of the case can be left to the fantasies of postMarxism.”

Eagleton 1991: 218

I argue strongly for that 'necessary' relation between social locations and political forms. The importance of that relation has gone missing, with result that visions of a green future are entirely lacking in the social content required to deliver them. The green vision is a good idea we are enjoined to support. In light of this, it is highly significant that ‘student strikes’ are being prioritised and privileged here in this vision of ‘deep transformation,’ to the complete neglect of strikes on the part of the working class. The working class, class conflict, and industrial struggle are out, and protest and demonstration on the part of the right sort of people are in. Also out, significantly, is the structural capacity of labour. Where on earth is the emphasis on Just Transition? I publicize Just Transition and I publicize it. It gets next to no interest. The working class - the value creating class - are of no account. As with the commitment to a ‘system change’ that changes nothing with respect to the prevailing system, only adapts the demands for change to a renewed (however ‘green’) corporate form, so these student strikes are a class struggle that is entirely denuded of class. We seem to be being treated to a retreat to Marcuse's 'Great Refusal' of the late 1960s, appealing to groups outside of the production process. A decade later, that libertarian counter-cultural politics issued in the neo-liberal reaction. I'm giving warning on this, and if it costs me friendship, then so be it. I'll not join a movement heading in the wrong direction out of loyalty. And I've got the big calls right for a quarter of a century now.

There seems to be a presumption that the working class is either feckless, stupid, racist, sexist, and homophobic, seeking refuge in populism and fascism; and that the organised working class is selfish and sectional, firmly embedded in the industrial system. Entirely lost is the sense of the working class as a class both 'in and against' the capital system. Those who consider the working class to be hopelessly conservative, holding on to their sectional interests, then we need remember the systematic assault, backed by force of law and more, on the trade unions and other forms of working class self-organisation and self-representation. We also need to address the fragmentation of the working class, the neutering of unionism, and the lack of unionization. THIS IS NOT NEW!! The mid 1850s were an era of New Model Unions, unions as respectable organisations of the better paid workers firmly integrated in the system. The 1880s saw the New Unionism with the attempts to organize and mobilize other sections of the working class. That's what is needed today.

Workers do not have a free hand, and given the way that the working class voice has been abandoned in mainstream politics and culture, the organised working class is on the defensive. So there is no mystery as to why its political ambitions and actions have narrowed somewhat. What is needed is a politics that reinvigorates the working class from its roots upwards, instead of leaving workers confined within a legal straitjacket, unable to contest the power of capital effectively. The weakness of the working class will result in demands for social transformation having to have recourse to idealistic actions or existing government. There is no other option.

This is a matter of huge importance because, for all of the hopeful visions of the future ecological society – one that I agree with - ideals are not being attached to the appropriate and effective means of their realization, and are in danger of becoming attached to the only means capable of acting - a combination of government, new technologies, and 'green' business. Hence demands for social transformation are being levelled on the untransformed government, ignoring the extent to which the state is embedded in the capital system as capital’s political command centre. Thus is transformation delivered to system preservation. There is nothing at all wrong with students and the intelligentsia. As Eagleton points out, such people may ‘sometimes’ be politically important. But if we are serious about social transformation, then it is the structural capacity to act that really counts in a social movement. This is why Marx and Marxists always specify the power of labour. Capital is the power of labour in alien form. Labour can autonomize itself from capital, but capital can never autonomize itself from labour without thereby ceasing to be. Although seemingly all powerful, the power of capital is secondary and derives from labour. Lose that understanding and social force, and you are politically lost. You will either fail, be absorbed, or go over to the other side. It is no surprise that a social movement lacking in such structural capacity should come to see itself as no more than a pressure group seeking to compel government action in certain (environmental) directions. That is not the ecological transformation of 'the political' that I have long argued for with respect to a green republicanism and communitarianism, it's an alternative to it, something that falls far short of genuine transformation but which is capable of seducing radicals into being content with something that falls far short of their demands.

Let us proceed and note further the extent to which statements such as this obfuscate the true nature of capital. Capital, Marx argued, is not a ‘thing,’ to be appropriated, re-directed, used according to some desired end or other; capital is a process and a relation which rests on the exploitation of labour. Note the extent to which the bourgeois mind refers to capital as a thing that is capable of being taken over and redirected. This was precisely the source of Marx's split with Proudhon, despite superficial similarities in their views. Marx accused Proudhon of naturalising and eternalising prevailing economic categories, and hence remaining within the bourgeois economy. (All references to the claims I make here can be found in my works on Marx. I refer readers to those. My concern here is to keep the argument flowing). Clearly there is a presumption here that capital is a 'thing' of production that can be democratically captured and turned to socially and ecologically beneficent ends. That is a crass error, and one with hugely damaging consequences, betraying environmentalism to the very economic system that is instrumental in environmental degradation and destruction. It is upon that delusion that the demands for ‘system change’ will be betrayed into an adaptation proceeding firmly within a continuing corporate form renewed and fuelled by green energy. At the heart of the capital relation is the exploitation of labour and the accumulative dynamic and imperative. It is easy enough to ‘expropriate’ the institutions of capitalism, but this entails merely changing the personifications of economic categories. The imperatives of the accumulative dynamic remain firmly in place.

Here is the line which reveals the proponents of these views to be shallow, utterly lacking in the precise institutional and structural understanding of the capital system, and uncomprehending as to what social transformation actually entails:

“Non violent direct action” and “student strikes” result in “the subsequent election of a government committed to deep transformation, the reorienting of capital and business, the huge mobilisation of communities across the country.”

I shall leave the rest on the flourishing of the imagination and wild creativity uncommented on. After years of boasting about being 'neither left nor right,' rejecting socialism as merely the other side of capitalism in an ecologically destructive industrialism, pursuing tinkering reformist measures through government, seeking a legislative and regulative antidote to environmental crisis rather than social transformation, hallelujah and praise be, bourgeois liberals have discovered the need for “system change” after all. The problem is that they have learned the language but have absolutely no idea what the words mean or to what they refer. Instead, they take the words and adapt them to the same old reformist actions and values they are wedded to – the ones that have now racked up decades of failure.

That statement says everything that is incoherent about environmentalism as a movement dominated by liberal modes of thought, action, and organisation. The idea that mass protest in time develops into a mass constituency for the triumph of a green party at the ballot box is question begging enough. But even if such mass support for a green party or for a green government emerges, there are much deeper problems. The clear presumption is that the capital system is a public domain in which governments are amenable to democratic persuasion and direction, so long as sufficient numbers can be gathered for a programme of social transformation. This is a mistake, and a profound one. The capital system is a regime of accumulation. Capital is not a thing to be democratically captured by mass pressure or government and redirected to social ends. Such a view betrays a complete ignorance of the institutions and structures of the prevailing system, one that is, frankly, breathtaking on the part of those claiming to be in pursuit of ‘deep transformation.’ There is no understanding whatsoever here that governments are not autonomous of capital but are capital’s political command centre, providing the unity and mediation that capital, as a competition of capitals, cannot provide. The purpose of government is to mediate the anarchy of production and facilitate the process of private accumulation. If the idea of a mass electoral victory of green politics is fanciful, then the vision of governments initiating and sustaining a deep social transformation betrays a total lack of comprehension with respect to the social world we live in. This is what happens when the bourgeois mind steals the language of socialism and turns it to its own ends – an utterly impotent bastardization that takes our values and principles and turns them into something alien and hostile. And socialism gets the blame for the disasters than ensure. The bourgeois love it, of course, It’s socialism without the working class, socialism for nice non-violent people, without the need to struggle against capital and power, without the need to change social relations; this is a transition into the future as the present enlarged and the past idealized. It’s the idea that the ills of capitalist society are all really accidental and can be cleaned up without any need to change anything. So long as the workers obey and do as they are told, of course.

I agree with what Rob Hopkins says on education, community, food production, civic democracy etc. My concern is that these estimable ideals – which I have spent a lifetime supporting – will be no closer to being realized in ten years than they are now, for the very reason that the media capable of delivering such a future are entirely lacking in this vision. Whether Hopkins’ view is to be welcomed as a step in the right direction depends on the extent to which we see his omissions and evasions as mere oversights that can be corrected or as indicating some much more deep-seated in the ‘bourgeois viewpoint.’ I see the trademark bourgeois commitment to reformism from above via the abstract stare being accompanied by a reformism from below. The one thing I don’t see is the deep social transformation with respect to institutions, structures, and relations that the attainment of future ecological society requires. Time and again, all I am seeing is “system change” being wrenched from its socialist origins and adapted to the tamest of bourgeois politics.

I think I have imagination, and Aristotelian flourishing, as in Eudaimonia, is central to my argument, and I am certainly creative, if only occasionally wild. But if you want ‘guts,’ I go in hard on these questions. Let’s see who, really, has guts here. George Orwell had some harsh words to say about the domination of the middle-class element in what was once called 'socialism,' but is socialism no longer. I also empathize with Orwell when he writes: 'I know the whole dreary argument very thoroughly, because I know it from both sides.' Orwell is singularly unimpressed: "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England… " The Road to Wigan Pier (Chapter 11). All very healthy and liberatory, no doubt. I have a very soft spot for the Quakers, I must say. Orwell felt that such obsessions would not only not redress the 'serious mess' the world is in, but that Fascism would run a coach and horses through such a flabby political terrain. It did. Lose touch with the 'ordinary working man,' and your politics has lost touch with reality, however much truth it contains.

The working class base has been corrupted, or maybe it has merely been absorbed within the system as a result of the general satisfaction of basic needs. Either way, Marxist socialism has lost its spring for action, leaving the emancipatory cause looking elsewhere. I don't play the game chercher le proletariat, and don't waste time looking for substitute revolutionary agents. I long ago abandoned beliefs in vanguards, elects, and privileged agents and instead embraced an ethical conception of society and its regulation. At the same time, I do consider that without the forces of labour, we have a transformative politics without social content and structural capacity. Hence the recourse to protest, pressure, and government. The problem is that voices are shouting over against each other in a contested field. What we have is not a public but a mutual self-cancellation.

In this respect one can draw on the conclusion to Ralph Miliband’s Divided Societies from 1989. Making the case for socialism, Miliband acknowledges that

‘the conditions do not at present exist—and will not exist for some time to come in any advanced capitalist country—for the coming to power of the kind of government that would seek to bring about a radical transformation of the existing social order. But as I have sought to argue, it is quite realistic to think that these conditions will come into being within the next ten, twenty, or thirty years—a long time in the life of an individual, but a mere moment in historical time. In this perspective, class struggle for the creation of democratic, egalitarian, co-operative, and classless societies, far from coming to an end, has barely begun.’

Miliband 1989: 234

Thirty years have come to pass, and we are in the midst of a crisis with transformative potential. My fear is that, through persisting with modes of thought, action, and organisation that are wedded to the prevailing system, that potential will be missed or, worse, diverted and perverted into the preservation of existing power relations. The fundamentals of the capitalist economy, including its full range of second order mediations, will remain unchanged. (see my work on Meszaros). Hence my suspicion, and growing anger, at the absence of an acute and critical political economy perspective among those most vocal, and most appealing, in their calls to change the world. And by that I don’t mean bland references to ‘the economic system’ nor even to ‘capitalism.’

All I see are the deleterious consequences of postmodern fantasy and decadence. Again and again I find myself repeating Terry Eagleton’s observation on Lyotard’s declaration that the age of grand narratives is dead: as capital, the biggest grand narrative of all, went even bigger through the globalisation of economic relations, the Left started to think and act small. So small, indeed, as to cease to be Left at all. Incremental, piecemeal, politics as culture and lifestyle, personal choices, hygiene, diminished public expectations and public imagination, supplanting of reformism-from-above by a reformism-from-below. These actions will never and can never sum to the changes required to address, let alone resolve, a ‘crisis with transformative potential.’ It lacks social depth and structural capacity.

I shall end by tempering the "I told you I was right about capitalism" message of the caption. My views are rational rather than dogmatic. In a particular sense. As with R.H. Tawney, my concern in every place and at every stage is with the effects of principles and policies on the lives of actual individuals, in the qualitative rather than the quantitative sense. The accumulation of material quantity is of little account if it diminishes opportunities for human autonomy, creativity, happiness, and self-development. A society of too many useful things, Marx wrote in the Paris Manuscripts, produces too many useless people. R.H. Tawney applied what may be called the Dubb Test, in honour of the archetypal ‘common man’, Henry Dubb, whom he described as 'the civilian equivalent of the P.B.I, or poor bloody infantry, i.e. the common, courageous, good-hearted, patient, proletarian fool.' (‘Christianity and the Social Revolution', in The Attack and Other Papers, p.163). Poor Henry can be used as an apology for decidedly unambitious policies which presume the lowest of expectations, or ignored altogether. Ignore his concerns for any length of time, and beware the revenge that can be taken. Such revenge can be self-destructive, harmful to Henry’s own interests, but such ‘populism’ is a desperate reaction against continuous neglect. Ignore Henry Dubb for any length at time at your own peril. It will leave your politics either short of social content and structural capacity, or facing a solid opposition of the sullen, resentful, and distinctly unpersuaded. The fact that Henry Dubb was never far from Taw­ney's side served him well in navigating the creed wars of the twentieth century. For Tawney, capitalism and socialism failed his Dubb test in different ways. Fascism most certainly failed, as did Christianity in certain forms:

“A Christianity which resigns the economic world to the devil appears to me, in short, not Christianity at all; Capitalism a juggernaut sacrificing human ends to the idolatry of material means; and a Socialism which puts Dubb on a chain and prevents him from teaching manners to his exalted governors a Socialism — if such it can be called - which has more than half its battles still before it."

Tawney stated his own position clearly: 'In the interminable case of Dubb v. Superior Persons and Co., whether Christians, Capitalists or Communists, I am an unrepentant Dubbite.’ ('Christianity and the Social Revolution', in The Attack and Other Papers, p.163). I, too, am an ‘unrepentant Dubbite.’ It was this approach which allowed Tawney to keep a demo­cratic head on his shoulders when so many others in the 1930s, armed with the truth as they saw it, lost theirs. Truth is a slippery notion in politics. Without good faith and connection with others, it seduces people into a self-righteous assertiveness that overrides the legitimate claims of others. The temper of politics is judicious. Truth is for philosopher-kings, of which we seem never to be in short supply when it comes to changing the world. I have been drawing attention to the anti-democratic temptations of a politics of environmental truth, and have sought to check these by reference to a green republicanism. As the issues which beset the world divided people into 'credal blocks', Tawney stood alongside Henry Dubb and suggested that the real division in the world lay 'less between different forms of political and economic organisation than between different estimates of the value to be put on the muddled soul of Henry Dubb'. Tawney’s position throughout it all was clear-sighted and solid: there was no totalita­rian temptation as a result of truth and morality. 'Tawney's contempt for our ruling class is more intense than ours', Beatrice Webb observed, 'but he does not share our faith in Soviet Communism.’ If Tawney’s Dubb Test provided a safe path to navigate the way through the ideological struggles of the 1930s-1950s, it still offers us a yardstick by which to assess the social and economic transformations required to stave off the looming ecological catastrophe. Truth does not trump politics; on the contrary, the challenge of politics is to access and disseminate this truth in the greatest numbers. The measure of the test is qualitative rather than quantitative, enabling the individual to 'enjoy a better prospect of growing to his full stature, and of turning his mature capacities to good account.’ Such a notion implies civic engagement and democratic participation, extending the powers and increasing the happiness of Henry Dubb by way of easing his access to the means of civilisation.

I shall therefore end, as I have ended several other pieces critical of various strains of environmentalism in recent weeks, with a restatement of my overarching commitment to ‘rational freedom,’ indicating the extent to which it entails a green republicanism that transcends the alienating separations and dualisms of liberal thought, institutions, and practices.

My view seeks to transcend modernity and liberalism, not turn the clock back against them. This is in line with the way that Marx sought to extend political emancipation into human emancipation in general by realizing the universal emancipatory potentials of the citoyen beyond the atomistic conceptions of the bourgeois (in On the Jewish Question and other places). The view is post-liberal rather than illiberal, a view that has never, and could never, satisfy liberal critics, for whom Marx and socialism are inherently repressive of individual liberty. I challenge that view directly in Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx.

My work is influenced by Alasdair MacIntyre, but baulk at his reactionary tendencies with respect to modernity (although I would argue that he is not the reactionary his critics take him to be). I incorporate the work of modernist philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, noting at the same time the cogency of Nietzsche’s critique. That critique has led me back to Aristotelianism and Thomism, as it did with MacIntyre. But I still consider the emancipatory potentialities of modernity to be far from exhausted. I like the way that Rousseau sought to reconcile ancient and modern conceptions in a genuine public community. Rousseau is a much misunderstood philosopher. His view that human beings are born free but are everywhere in chains is often understood as an argument for human beings to return to a nature free from chains. That is not merely mistaken, it completely inverts Rousseau’s philosophy. Rousseau is concerned to replace the illegitimate chains of political and civil oppression in an unequal society with the legitimate chains of a public community resting on self-assumed obligation. When I argue against untransformed government, as in the demands for environmental action levelled on government by way of extra-parliamentary popular pressure, it is precisely because I am committed to a republican view of the polity. A ‘green’ government to me is more than the mobilisation of protest to force existing governments to act, but denotes a Green Republic and republicanism. I want more than numbers in protest. An aggregate is not a public. This is a point I argue in depth in Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth’s Commonwealth of Virtue

Jurgen Habermas is a social philosopher who is the greatest representative and exponent of the ‘rational freedom’ I espouse in the modern world. He is someone who argues openly for ‘the Rational Society.’ I have drawn on Habermas extensively in my own work. Ultimately, I am critical of the way that Habermas’ view tends to be ‘thin,’ mirroring the conceptions of the liberal order, and so I consider MacIntyre or Arendt to offer more in this respect. I nevertheless think Habermas is important in drawing attention to the emancipatory potentialities that still exist in the project of Enlightenment modernity, allowing me to link Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx to the moral traditions of pre-modern society that I seek to revalue.

Habermas seeks to reconcile autonomy and solidarity in a way that points beyond the alienating separations of liberal society. But Habermas’ position itself is quite unusual in that it combines liberal and Marxist elements. He understands the paradoxes of this position:

“I have been a reformist all my life, and maybe I have been a bit more so in recent years. Nevertheless, I mostly feel that I am the last Marxist.”

Habermas, ‘Concluding Remarks,’ in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, 1992: 469

I once considered those who described themselves to be ‘Post-Marxist’ to be ex-marxists pure and simple. Since criticizing and, ultimately, rejecting Marx’s critique of God and religion to reinstate the necessity of transcendent standards, I am much less insistent on fidelity. I continue to argue for the cogency of much of what Marx wrote. I am just now sceptical of a rationalist humanism which, in the hands of those seeking a total transformation on the understanding of human perfectionism, can become the very opposite of what is intended.

I remain committed to Marx’s emancipatory project, but emphasise the way in which Marx’s critical method needs to be applied independently of the nineteenth century determinations and categories of Marx’s writing. The critical spirit of Marxism as a philosophy of revolutionary-critical practice needs to be emphasized over the dead letter of the text. (In passing, I shall note that that is precisely how Gerrard Winstanley read the Bible, something that placed the emphasis on live spirit, reason, and experimentation in practice. That’s my view of the world in which we live, our relation to it, and knowledge of it).

Given the extent to which I have written on Marx, I would baulk at the notion of being labelled a ‘post’ or ‘ex’ Marxist. Many, reading my criticisms of Marx motivated by a religious ethic and commitment could consider me to be an anti-marxist. I suggest they read my work on Marx again until they appreciate that I have a claim to be, with Habermas, one of the last Marxists. Like Habermas, I have been concerned to counter the Nietzschean assault on Enlightenment rationalism on the part of post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers. At the same time, I have also emphasized Marx as a post-Enlightenment critical thinker who possessed a nuanced view of reason in relation to specific social forms. I read Marx as anticipating and countering the repressive turn of reason in the later Weberian form of rationalization.

Over time, I have had no qualms in broadening out Marx’s emancipatory project, in relation to ecology and religion. The recent publication of Marx’s ecological notebooks indicate the extent to which Marx was a pioneer in social ecology, incorporating natural scientific researches into his critical viewpoint. My work on religion, on the other hand, could be taken to indicate the extent to which I have sought to bring something extraneous into conventional Marxism. I don’t know whether than makes me ‘post’ or ‘ex’ or even ‘anti’ Marx. I know I continue to be critical and emancipatory in relation to specific social forms and relations, and that seems to me to be the very essence of Marx. In the above quote, Habermas sees himself as a Marxist with a ‘reformist’ dimension, engaging with elements outside of Marxism in order to overcome certain historical limitations and theoretical deficits that may exist in Marx’s work. I seek to overcome the religious and spiritual deficits in order to deepen possibilities for profound social transformation.

The ‘motivating thought’ which Habermas claims to have driven his work is one that I would also apply to my own work. Habermas defines his ‘motivational thought’ as ‘the reconciliation of a modernity which has fallen apart’:

“the idea that without surrendering the differentiation that modernity has made possible in the cultural, the social, and economic spheres, one can find forms of living together in which autonomy and dependency can truly enter into a non-antagonistic relation, that one can walk tall in a collectivity that does not have the dubious quality of backward-looking substantial forms of community.”

Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jurgen Habermas 1992: 125

I have worked hard to conceive this reconciliation of autonomy and solidarity, involving me in immense reading and writing, weaving various theoretical sources together to form a coherent whole. I have drawn on various political traditions and theories, socialism, conservatism, anarchism, and liberalism. If my views are critical of liberalism, then they also demonstrate a positive evaluation of the work of, say, John Stuart Mill. I also appraise the libertarian conception of rational freedom in William Godwin’s Political Justice. I have also sought a democratic constitution of authority with respect to viable forms of anarchism and anarchist society. I have examined a range of philosophers in depth to extract key elements making for a deep and rich conception of rational freedom: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx. I have studied Max Weber and Lewis Mumford in depth and written extensively on them. I draw on a range of subject disciplines to develop notions of structure and agency, community, differentiation, solidarity, individuality, process and adaptation, action and behaviour, steering media and institutional and psychic mechanisms, the motivational economy, moral motives, economic incentives. The work is unfinished, not least because it is unfinishable in its vastness.

I cite Habermas and praise Habermas for this reason: he emphasizes the extent to which Marx’s emancipatory project is post-liberal and not illiberal. My critique of liberalism is grounded very firmly in this understanding, eschewing reactionary visions and ‘back to nature’ fantasies. I’ll strike a critical note here that may jar with certain green friends, but I do so without flinching. I note the extent to which green friends cite and share this quote from John Trudell:

“We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.”

There is so much wrong-headed and misguided with this statement that it is impossible to deal with it in short order. The statement may be being taken out of context, losing the qualifications which may make it more reasonable. Human rights can be arrogant, civil rights can be ignorant. The socialist critique of liberalism was motivated from the first by the need to supplement the formal equality of civil rights with a substantive social equality. But the temper of this statement is very different, and strongly suggests a stark antithesis between the civic realm as artificial and bad and nature as natural and therefore good. This is the plainest romanticism that is neither true to human beings nor nature – human beings create culture quite naturally and are immersed in their creations naturally. Notions that human beings are ‘only a small part’ of nature as a greater entity merely restate an ancient theological truth with respect to God. That truth has been lost in an era in which morality has dissolved into irreducible subjective choice. That is the real source of error here, and it is one that I consistently target. It exposes me to criticisms from those who take me for being thoroughly beastly to very nice people. I have written extensive, and possibly very boring, painstaking critiques with respect to liberalism and rights. They are reasonable. It’s frustrating that people don’t read those critiques and that I have to engage in short exchanges. It’s impossible for me not to cut to the chase there, and no doubt shock and horrify those who have their understandings checked and challenged.

The whole notion of rights is in some way anthropocentric. Nature is indifferent to all such notions. The struggle for human rights, applying to each and all equally, without regard to station, has been one of humanity’s greatest achievements and is an ongoing struggle. Denigrate this at your peril. Civil rights concern precisely the terms by which human beings, as social beings, come together to order their existence in common. Again, it has been an immense struggle to ensure that the egalitarian perspective here should come to prevail over perspectives restricting citizenship to property-based entitlement. This, too, is an ongoing struggle, and it is always a struggle against partial, one-sided, that is to say, ignorant conceptions. As for ‘reality,’ philosophers write entire books on this subject. Nature is reality, you and I are reality, God is ultimate reality. But be clear that we know reality through our cognitive apparatus and conceptual ordering. There is always, therefore, a degree of contrivance with respect to reality. The reality of rights, natural or otherwise, is of another order. I follow philosophers like John Finnis, for whom natural rights are rooted in natural law. There is nothing, in other words, remotely new about these assertions of ‘nature.’ We can go right back to the early sophists who debated the relation between nature and convention, arguing which one merits primacy.

My concern here, however, is not with such philosophical debates. I’ll just state in passing that the ontological status of anything is uncertain, leaving us having to find a way of living that is less assertive and more faithful with respect to all that cannot be proven. I shall leave that there. My concern is with the denigration of rights in favour of something called ‘Nature.’ Read Einstein’s positive embrace of what he calls Spinoza’s God, and understand that Nature is entirely indifferent to human concerns. It is a short step from calling ‘human rights,’ and by implication human beings, arrogant to a fully-fledged misanthropy that is careless, not to say callous, with respect to freedom, equality, and justice.

I am a critic of liberalism and of ‘bourgeois’ democracy, for the reasons Marx gave. It is worth emphasising at the same time that Marx scorned ‘back to nature’ pre-modern fantasies for being the reactionary delusions they are. Marx looked to ‘go beyond’ liberalism, not in the sense of transcending arrogance, but transcending atomistic conceptions of rights in order to realize their universal and emancipatory citizen qualities. That’s my view and that’s the view of Habermas. Habermas is crystal clear that ‘bourgeois’ democracy is infinitely superior to having no democracy at all, and that democracy is a tender plant that needs constant watering. Ideologies that diminish the achievements of modernity, or scorn them as arrogant, starve the plant and risk spreading a desert. As Habermas writes, “we know just how important bourgeois freedoms are. For when things go wrong it is those on the Left who become the first victims” (Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity 1992: 50). But as I make abundantly clear in my writings on Marx, these freedoms are not simply and inherently ‘bourgeois’ but contain universal emancipatory and egalitarian implications that can be released from and realized beyond their ‘bourgeois’ social forms. In short, my critique is motivated by a concern that the modern impulse for equality, justice, and cooperation ceases to be merely formal and instead becomes universal in a substantive sense, rather than particular and class-bound. It is precisely that particularism within asymmetrical relations that compels freedom to be projected upwards to the abstract heaven of the state, surviving as a formal existence precisely on account of being denied substantively.

Habermas does precisely what I seek to do, and that is to establish a via media between ideal and real that proceeds intellectually, morally, institutionally, and practically. Without that bridge, visions split between ideals shorn of their means of realization and realities which are also increasingly impossibilities. In Between Facts and Norms (1996), Habermas continues in the footsteps of the ‘rational’ tradition to make the ‘real’ rational and the ‘rational’ real. That view is located in Hegel and Marx, but also goes back to the way that Aristotle related the ‘is’ of his scientific studies with the ‘ought’ of his politics and ethics. Habermas does indeed present a reformist view of this rational tradition. As Anthony Giddens commented, Habermas thinks we can facilitate ‘reason without revolution.’ (Giddens ‘Labour and Interaction,’ in J.B. Thompson and D. Held Habermas: The Critical Debates 1982: 95-121). A deep transformation with as little disturbance and unpleasantness as possible would suit me fine. I am far from making a fetish of revolution, not least because such things tend to get out of control and backfire spectacularly. My argument remains eminently rational, arguing that human beings as rational beings come to embrace voluntarily the collective restraints and freedoms of common living according to reality rather than having to submit involuntarily to external necessities and constraints arising as a consequence of unreason. This involves a deep institutional, structural, and moral analysis of who ‘we’ are, as individuals and as societies, where ‘we’ are, where ‘we’ ought to go (and not merely want to go), and how ‘we’ may get their without thereby losing modernity’s emancipatory achievements, its material conquest of necessity, and its concern to locate political action and legislation in a democratically organised consensus. All of these things are themselves insufficiently or inadequately realized and stand in need of further advance in various ways (governments are subject to corporate capture and constraint by private economic forces, material resources are inadequately distributed etc).

I shall have to bring this discussion to a quick end now, lest it turn into an extended essay on Jurgen Habermas. I’ll declare myself a reformist and rationalist in line of descent from Jurgen Habermas. I am a very reluctant revolutionary. I argue for deep social transformation, but possess an optimistic philosophical anthropology which holds that human beings may, one day, come to see reason and establish the rational constraints in an authentic public community upon which freedom and happiness depend. That involves communication and consensus, it also involves transformations with respect to social forms and relations, and it is in the latter where conflict can be expected. Power concedes nothing without demands. It is worth noting, then, that Habermas’ reformism entails no wishful thinking with respect to mass persuasion. The radical, anti-capitalist implications of Habermas’ arguments are clear:

“Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus. Taken together, autonomy and responsibility constitute the only Idea that we possess a priori … only in an emancipated society, whose members’ autonomy and responsibility has been realized, would communication have developed into the non-authoritarian and universally practical dialogue from which both our model of reciprocally constituted ego identity and our idea of true consensus are always implicitly derived. To this extent the truth of statements is based on anticipating the realization of the good life.”

Habermas Knowledge and Human Interests 1978: 314

Such a view is characterised by the ‘immanent critique’ which constitutes Marx’s approach. Such a critique always looks to ‘go beyond’ or transcend current social forms, not merely reject them. ‘Bourgeois’ democracy is not to be rejected and extirpated but transcended/realized. We retain the achievements of a differentiated modernity as we seek to reunify what has been rent asunder.

I shall end by declaring that Habermas’ concept of learning is precisely mine, involving: ‘moral insight, practical knowledge, communicative action, and consensual regulation of action conflicts … that in turn first make possible the introduction of new productive forces.’ (Habermas Communication and the Evolution of Society 1984: 97-98). And more, it entails a commitment to the rational society and public life. I read with interest that Habermas, a lifelong atheist, is expressing an interest in religion. I took the plunge a long while ago now. It's not a fashionable choice, seeing as religion is in sharp retreat across the western world. But it's a choice I have made, for reasons I set out at length elsewhere. I am reading Rod Dreher on 'The Benedict Option'

'How, then, should believers adapt to a society that is not just unsupportive but often hostile to their beliefs? In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, the Scottish moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre warned that the Enlightenment’s inability to provide a binding and authoritative source of morality to replace the Christian–Aristotelian one it discarded had left the contemporary West adrift. He likened our age to the era of the Roman Empire’s fall … The old believers, MacIntyre wrote, need to respond. Which means to stop trying to ‘shore up the imperium,’ and instead build ‘local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.'

Withdrawal, retreat, preservation, conversion, and restoration is in the air.

In The Ecology of Freedom (1982), Murray Bookchin argues that “The rudiments of an ecological society will probably be structured around the commune – freely created, human in scale, and intimate in its consciously cultivated relationships.” I argue some such thing in my work on Lewis Mumford. Lewis Mumford and the Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation

I have also written on Rudolf Bahro’s argument that we need to withdraw from a collapsing industrial civilisation and associate at a lower scale in the eco-commune. (The Coming Ecological Revolution).

Such views express a hopelessness with respect to the transformative potentialities of the prevailing social system, tempered by the great hopes they have in the regenerative potentials of scaled human community. I very much agree with the latter and argue strongly for it. It is clear that the communard retreatists of various stripes, religious and environmental, have no hope that the present system can be transformed. Any emancipatory possibilities contained in industrialism, capitalism, modernity, and Enlightenment are either considered delusional or exhausted. Since there is no hope for internal transformation, the only option is to withdraw. Politics is hopeless. I have had that argument made to me by friends who work in permaculture. My response back is to argue that even if you should succeed in building your communes, you can never escape the influences of the wider society in which you are immersed. If there is a central corruption in state and society, then it will inevitably seep outwards and corrupt all that is healthy elsewhere. This applies to MacIntyre’s local communities of virtue as well as to eco-communes based on permaculture. I would hope for the success and gradual expansion of such communes, regenerating the health of society from within. That is very much how Gerrard Winstanley saw his Digging communities coming to constitute the true and peaceable commonwealth in the seventeenth century. In the end, however, with the systematic destruction of his communes, Winstanley came to see the need for politics and government. In The Law of Freedom in a Platform, Winstanley argued explicitly for setting communes within a governmental framework. It constitutes an explicit case for ‘rational freedom’ as against a libertarian freedom. We need to scale upwards as well as downwards. In Catholic social ethics, subsidiarity refers to power and resources residing at the lowest level of competence. That principle avoids false antitheses being asserted between different levels. We live in a multi-layered society. Having argued for Marx’s vision of commune democracy, for the Green Republic as a modern polis democracy, and for conciliar forms of organisation, I very much argue for the importance of communes in leading the way to a more just and equal society and a more healthy and harmonious ecology. I have believed since that 1980s that ‘a completely new socio-economic system is needed’ to deal with the converging crises that civilization faces (Milbrath 1984: 82), and everything that has happened since then has served to reinforce that view. In that time, however, I have seen those arguing for substantive social transformation dismissed and maligned as ‘extremists,’ even as the agencies and forces sending the world to extremes have continued to hollow out the centre ground. I mention Gerrard Winstanley above. He and his Diggers sought to resist the enclosure of the commons from the beginning of the process, offering an alternative commonwealth in its place. The enclosure of the commons in all its forms has continued ever since, and continues to this day. Instead of resistance, we have seen left-of-centre governments take form as a technocratic neo-liberal elitism advancing the corporatisation of public business and commons. Whilst this is often referred to as privatisation, in truth it entails the expansion and entrenchment of the corporate form, extinguishing both private and public property. The ‘moderates’ concerned to avoid issues of class, exploitation, and conflict have presided over this process. These are the technocrats and technocrentrics, the planetary managers, the reformists, those who think that the resolution of crisis involves merely technological and managerial adjustments to the prevailing system, not its fundamental alteration. I believe that the only solution to the current crisis is system change and deep social transformation. As much as I admire Lewis Mumford and Alasdair MacIntyre, as much as I am tempted to take the Benedict Option, as much as I see Bahro’s eco-communes, I see them all as a retreat that forecloses on public life out of despair. I don’t at all disagree with the communalist vision; on the contrary, I strongly advocate it – but as part of a multi-layered society that builds power and distributes resources within an overarching republican vision. That is a vision of a Republic that is powered from below by humanly scaled communes, a modern polis democracy.

The way to the socially just and ecologically healthy society lies in establishing a network of humanly scaled and proportioned communities where individuals seek to live in accordance with right principles determined in relation to ultimate reality, expanding our being in three ways – Nature, Society, God. A writer who has influenced my views is Erich Fromm. He argues that ‘our only alternative to the dangers of robotism is humanistic communitarianism.’ (Fromm 1956: 361). Fromm’s ethics are secular. I have come to the conclusion that such humanistic ethics collapse in on themselves. Hence I am suspicious of retreat and argue for an expansion of being outwards. Ultimately with retreat, we reach a situation in which solipsism holds all the trump cards.

“Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.” (Emile Durkheim).

I argue strongly that we hold our nerve and cleave to the possibilities of a public life shared in common with human beings across the planet. And for the life of me I don’t see how human beings can do without God without thereby coming to mistake themselves for gods, dissolving society into a self-assertive, self-cancelling, and ultimately self-annihilating atomism.

But that seems to identify me as one of the minority for whom Rod Dreher is recommending the Benedict Option.

Despairing of getting through to people mired in subjectivism, relativism, and nihilism, I feel like taking the Benedict Option. I argued against it as self-defeating in Homo Religiosus, arguing that communities of virtuous practice need to scale upwards and outwards to embrace a transformed state. That view essentially lies at heart of my criticisms of visions of local green communities that are bereft of an understanding of power and political economy. They are utopian in the worst sense, inviting realizing in bastardized, repressive form.

Dreher describes The Benedict Option as a choice that Christians living in an increasingly secular West need to make: to build the resilient local communities MacIntyre calls for. 'You don’t have to be cloistered as monastics to learn from the structure and practices of Benedictine life. The early Benedictines were an example of what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a ‘creative minority’ — a small group within a larger society that responds creatively to a crisis in a way that serves the common good.'

That sounds defeatist to me, presuming the triumph and ultimate dissolution of secular forces. It is not dissimilar, though, to the argument of one of my favourite thinkers, Lewis Mumford, who argued for withdrawal and abstention on the part of individuals in relation to the Megamachine, followed by a long process of recovery and conversion within local communities, returning to re-colonize the corrupted world from within. To those who would say that Mumford or MacIntyre are reactionaries trying to turn the clock back, I would argue that the truth of transcendent standards lie outside of time and place, and have nought to do with the date at the top of the paper.

Father Martin Bernhard, a young American Benedictine in Norcia, states confidently: ‘People say, “Oh, you’re just trying to turn back the clock,”’ he told me. ‘That makes no sense. If you’re doing something right now, it means you’re doing it right now. It’s new, and it’s alive! And that’s a very powerful thing.’

That is indeed powerful and true, but it also puts you outside of a contemporary society in which individuals think and act very differently, according to standards they set themselves. Tired of constantly clashing against this, I am increasingly inclined to withdraw, seeking to preserve the intellectual and moral virtue for the time when individuals are more receptive: 'in the contemporary world, it also means being different. In order to be faithfully Christian now and for the foreseeable future, believers will have to become more like Orthodox Jews and Muslims in the way they live out their religion. They will have to recognise themselves as outsiders, and cease to care about conforming to the norms of secular society. They will have to live with far more spiritual discipline regarding prayer, worship, study, work, and asceticism, radically re-ordering their lives around the faith.'

Dreher nails it here:

'But wait, comes the protest. Secular democracy has served the West pretty well. We are doing better in many measures of social health and wellbeing than we have in decades. What’s the problem? It’s a fair point. What many don’t understand is the extent to which secular liberalism has fed off Christian teachings and virtues. The Enlightenment secularised Christian teachings about the sanctity of life and the dignity of the individual human person. But it could not come up with a stable grounding for those teachings in reason alone. For a long time, the West has been coasting on the residue of its Christian faith. But without basing our morality in transcendent values, how will we recognise threats to our humanity in the future (from, say, genetic manipulation), much less resist them?'

'The kind of faith that survives catastrophe is one that can perceive victory even in apparent defeat. This is the message of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people. It is the message of Christianity: the Saviour’s death is not the final word. It is the message that the believing Christian remnant in the West can make incarnate in their daily lives, in concrete and sacrificial ways. This is no grim, white-knuckle counsel. Not to anyone who has met the Tipi Loschi, a merry confederacy of Italian Catholic families living in San Benedetto del Tronto, a small city on the Adriatic coast. They are counter-culturally orthodox in their Catholicism, but not angry. They draw inspiration from two English Catholics they regard as heroes: G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. -Tolkien. The community school is called Scuola Libera G.K. Chesterton, and the Tipi Loschi fancy themselves as ‘hobbits in the shire’. These are Christians who are not deceived about the long odds facing Christianity in the West. They are filled with light, hope and joy. I asked Marco Sermarini, the middle-aged lawyer who heads the group, to divulge their secret. ‘We invented nothing,’ he said. ‘We are only rediscovering a tradition that was locked away inside an old box. We had forgotten.’

As Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man: ‘Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.’

The question is: do you really want deep social transformation, one that doesn't just recalibrate systems of economic provision but possesses real moral and psychic depth? Or just a pleasant green version of prevailing social relations and structures, fuelling capitalism with clean energy for another bout of expansion?

I fear demands for social transformation going off at half-cock, delivering precisely the opposite, an economic wasteland presided over by a repressive authoritarian state instituting necessity and austerity to preserve existing power relations. Whatever else that is, it is not the socialism I espouse. But maybe the point is that such socialism demands something of human beings that is beyond them in their fallen, imperfect state. That leaves me contemplating The Benedict Option, for all that I know of its limitations. I still argue for widespread social transformation as the best way forward.

CLIMATE CRISIS IS AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

I shall bring this long peregrination to a close (if not closure). The disquieting thoughts above remind me of something that Hannah Arendt wrote of Karl Jaspers:

“The gap between the immediate success of the book and the criticism voiced by nearly all organs of public opinion seems to indicate that Jaspers has succeeded in reaching many, but that these many are precisely those whose opinions and feelings are hardly represented at all in public. One is unhappily reminded of the only other bestseller Jaspers ever wrote (Man in the Modern Age) which, published in 1931, sold five editions in short time which separated its appearance from Hitler’s rise to power. Jaspers then warned of the rapid disintegration of the Weimer Republic which made Hitler’s victory possible. The kind of success he then had was ominously similar: his forebodings of an imminent catastrophe were denounced by all respectable critics, and he was read by a minority that, though perhaps strong enough numerically to make itself heard, was in fact impotent – able and willing to face the all-too-obvious realities but powerless to change them.”

Arendt Foreword to Karl Jaspers, The Future of Germany 1967: x/xi)

In the final passages of the Postscript to this book, Jaspers writes:

“In 1945, we wanted to build on the idea of freedom, to organize ourselves in a democracy under a republican form of government. We failed. We are regressing further and further…

I consider it very cheap to be outraged at the new party, and idle to try arguing against the nuisance…

If we take recent events for the first symptoms of a future condition we may anticipate a change in the meaning of opposition as such. It is conceivable that soon there will be no more opposition as we understand it. As a matter of form, then, ‘opposition’ will mean ‘talking as if,’ and as a matter of fact it will be a mere function in the opportunistic bustle of a pointlessly embroiled multitude. Issues will be changeable at will. Having fought for no cause, having kept no faith, yesterday’s deadly enemies will get along as if nothing had happened. Augur will laugh at augur; neither will respect the other or himself. No one will trust anyone or deserve anyone’s trust. Since no man will take a position, none will be in opposition.”

This is the second to last page of Jaspers’ 1967 Postscript to The Future of Germany. His critical comments are aimed at the value-free careerism and consensus into which post-war politics fell. Political exchange was merely a shadow-boxing between positions exaggerated to make it look as though something essential was at stake. Politics had become industrial and technocratic, a function of facilitating ‘economic growth.’ Arguments over ideals, values, different ends had exited the political arena. The arena was overtaken by functionaries of ‘the system.’ The complacency of such a politics is apparent as we live through the long 1929. Crisis is now being normalized. There is opposition, there is protest and resistance, but it is coming from outside the conventional political sphere. The political establishment remains inert, finding the array of pressures and forces facing it incomprehensible, uncontrollable and unappeasable. “Where there is nothing,” Max Weber wrote one hundred years ago, “both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.” By this, Weber meant that since we live in an objectively valueless and meaningless world, we have no option but to project value and meaning upon the world by way of existential choice. Weber’s gloom for the future suggested that he well knew that such choices could only be empty. The modern world would finally freeze in its emptiness:

“No summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.”

Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946) p.128

Where there is nothing, all have lost their rights. In a world reduced to the externalities of human self-creation, all that there is, is a fight over the terms on which the self-made world is possessed, used, and controlled. That generates plenty of heat and passion. There is plenty of opposition in this world. But, deep down, there is a sense that the increasingly shrill and angry character of the exchanges is as a result of a suspicion on the part of the protagonists that they are really fighting for honours in a world bereft of meaning. Those who invest meaning in the world as a matter of existential choice have a vested interest in their meaning prevailing over against all other contrary meanings. Alternate meanings are felt as rival theologies that contradict one’s own. Hence the anger expressed in ‘debate.’ If one’s position is incontrovertibly true, then those advancing alternative views must be irredeemably evil. For reasons that Max Weber explained so clearly, the moral emptiness of modernity’s ‘nothing’ has exploded into a clash of rival theologies. Weber thus charted the descent of modernity into a polytheism of values, a world of endless conflict between rival gods:

Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. What is hard for modern man, and especially for the younger generation, is to measure up to workaday existence. The ubiquitous chase for ‘experience’ [Erlebnis] stems from this weakness; for it is weakness not to be able to countenance the stern seriousness of our fateful times. [Schicksal der Zeit]

Weber, Science as a Vocation, 149/547

By this, Weber meant that each individual chooses their own values as they see fit, leading to a perpetual conflict between moral and philosophical positions that cannot be reconciled. In the absence of an objective standard, there is no way of resolving the debate between competing gods/devils. Note well that Weber refers to polytheism rather than secularisation. Hence my reference to the clash of rival theologies. The only difference is this, whereas in the past there was some pretence of the one God, the one transcendent standard by which to adjudicate claims, now there are only self-chosen, self-created gods. Others, naturally, may be inclined to see these gods of others as devils. By what standard can we judge who is right or wrong? One person’s god may be another person’s devil. Indeed, it is inevitable that it should be so. The world divides into a war between good and evil, but without the transcendent standards that are capable of securing, orienting, and resolving struggle.

Instead of free individuals, Weber saw self-important little narcissists and egoists crushed under the ‘irresistible force’ of the capital economy, celebrating their freedom within a steel-hard bondage:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Weber 1985: 181-182

This is Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man.’ Human beings are masters of nowhere, yet possessed with a prideful self-worship.

If such thoughts are discomforting, then bear in mind what I say next, if nothing else, because it is the beginnings of seeing things aright: climate change is not the cause of our problems but the symptom.

I’m quoting from Karl Jaspers and Max Weber here. I could go back to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. These questions are existential in the deepest sense. I could go back further to Christian existentialists, who were the first existentialists in the field, from Pascal all the way back to St. Augustine. Environmentalists are currently repeating the view that climate crisis is an existential crisis. This phrase interests me, and I read further in expectation of profundity. Instead, all I read are concerns over physical existence, the future or otherwise of civilization, even the human race. This is shallow. All things must pass. This would appear to be news, and a source of great anguish, to those who have thought the inventions of the technological order had brought not merely heaven on earth, but immortality. When it comes to resolving an existential crisis, I go deep. I go beyond the physicals. If you want eternal life, you need true theology. I recall former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks quoting an ancient rabbi who, pointing to the economic largesse enjoyed by the community, asked why so many were complaining. I like to repeat the view that the human beings who live in capitalist modernity are healthier, wealthier, better educated, better fed, and longer-lived than at any time in history. And in much greater numbers to boot. So why, then, are so many people complaining so much? There has never been a better time to be alive. And maybe never a worse time, either. The point that the rabbi Sacks was citing was this: the accumulation of endless material quantities does nothing to fill the gaping hole where the soul once was. Deep down, an existential crisis stems from the personal relation to God. A missing God is a missing soul.

The expropriation of the commons and the death of God are the source of our problems; climate change is a symptom of faulty relationships.

‘Opposition may cease,’ Jaspers speculated in 1967. ‘Much of it is curiously ambiguous even now.’ There is opposition. In the late sixties we saw the rise of the counter-culture, individuals who were prepared to affirm visions and values that transcended the modern capitalist order. Lewis Mumford was unimpressed. He referred to the counter-culturalists as the ‘new barbarians’ whose reversion to infantile fantasy was as a response to the murderous, tyrannous barbarism of the barbarians in charge of the modern Megamachine. We need to know not merely what we are against, Mumford argued, but what we are for. And we need to know how to get there. Mumford noted the extent to which the counter-culturalists were themselves the product of the very consumer culture they denounced, how totally immersed they were in it. He would not have been surprised by the fact that the beautiful people had, a decade later, created the cultural conditions for the libertarian reaction against Keynesian social democracy.

Environmentalists have a cause, they see goodness and value in the world. They constitute a meaningful opposition to the empty capitalist order and its rationalistic desolidarisation. That is why I have argued the case for environmentalism for so long: it is a universal cause embracing each and all within right relations on the planet. That cause cannot be realized within prevailing modes of thought. Environmentalists would not only agree with that, but will claim that that is precisely what they argue. Closer examination, however, soon reveals the extent to which the problems of capitalist expropriation, desolidarisation, and disenchantment of the world remain unaddressed in their fundamentals. You cannot resolve this existential crisis by way of the modes of thought that are implicated in it.

A disenchanting science tells us that the world is objectiveless valueless and meaningless. Yet environmentalists tell us that Nature is all that there is and ‘she needs us.’ They say this at the same time they condemn the arrogance of human and civil rights; they say this at the same time that they condemn anthropocentrism. Yet they will at the same time be keen on the rights of nature. The view is incoherent. Read Einstein’s affirmation of Spinoza’s God as a god that unfolds harmoniously in the universe without regard to human concerns. That is a god which mirrors Weber’s description of the rationalized capitalist order as a world that proceeds ‘without regard to persons.’ The personal God, the God of love and relationships has been extirpated. Einstein considered such a notion to be naïve and childish. Grow up then! The world is meaningless, power rules all, survival is the name of the game, and Nature doesn’t give a damn. We are being enjoined to serve and save a Nature that is completely indifferent to us. I can’t think of a more dispiriting, demoralising, demotivating concept. A personal God motivates personal moral effort.

I seek the ecological embodiment of the ‘rational freedom’ I have spent decades developing. This is why Karl Jaspers’ words on embodying freedom in a republican form of government strike such a deep chord with me. I have entertained hopes for the ecological transformation of the political in this direction, issuing in the Ecopolis or Green Republic. I see such green republicanism as grounded in rational freedom as a moral ecology, offering not merely an opposition to the nihilism of the prevailing order, but supplanting it. Hence my disquiet in seeing the environmental opposition betray its emancipatory transformative potentials on account of remaining within dominant paradigms and perspectives.

Jaspers concludes:

“A glance at the prospects of opposition in our republic over the years ahead may well dishearten us. Yet this only adds to the challenge for every [person] to make it clear to himself what he wants and whether he wants anything at all – whether he will participate in that empty activity of aimless contention or will yield to resignation, abandon political hope, and withdraw in silence to another world.”

Do we continue to fight over the terms on which the mastery of nowhere are determined? Or take the Benedict Option, whether in ecological or theological form? The former is pointless, an immersion in endless contention in a meaningless world that came from nowhere and is going nowhere. The latter is tempting, if one despairs of redemptive possibilities in the social and political world. As noted, a favourite thinker of mine, Lewis Mumford revalued the regenerative culture of monasticism in the modern world and advocated withdrawal and abstention with respect to the Megamachine, the creation of small communities enabling a period of conversion to new values. Mumford was arguing this long before MacIntyre wrote his famous conclusion to After Virtue in 1981.

Against this, I argue clearly and unambiguously for the politics of hope. Modernity and Enlightenment have read achievements to their name, and their emancipatory possibilities are far from being exhausted. But, just as I see Marx as a post-Enlightenment, post-liberal, post-capitalist critical thinker, the realization of these possibilities entails the abolition of prevailing modes of thought, action, and organisation. I mean ‘abolition’ here in the German and Hegelian sense of a transcendence that preserves/realizes/enhances as it goes beyond. That notion is far from being ‘against’ capitalism, modernity, and liberalism.

In my work on the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri, I point out how Dante is the prophet of hope. Dante in exile has lost everything, but finds reason to go on living and affirm life. In The Comedy, he shows how hell is full of those who have foreclosed on life’s possibilities. Despair, Dante emphasises, is the easy option, the coward’s part:

"none is so lost

that the eternal Love cannot return

as long as hope maintains a thread of green."

(Dante, Comedy, Purgatorio III 133-135).

Love may be hanging on by a slender thread these days, but there's more than a few of us holding on to it in the public realm. I'm staying green in this sense, and not withdrawing.

“But if we want to live, if we want to be ourselves, we must not despair… We can go our way with those who will at least struggle for the possibility of reason and preserve human dignity. There is always a chance that ultimately man will conquer the unreason in himself; if not, he will have the alibi, so to speak, of having set another course that failed. Unconsciously or consciously, each individual chooses how he wants to live, to think, to act, and to die.”

Jaspers 1967: 173

In the end, it all comes down to an existential choice of some description. Where there is ‘nothing,’ Weber’s existential choice is empty and pointless. A meaning that is projected onto the world rests on nothing other than itself. The psychic effort of living for one’s own reason cannot be sustained in the long run. The Deuteronomist urged us to ‘choose life.’ That is a meaningful choice. That’s the existential choice I make. It's the choice that trumps solipsism, drawing us outwards to the good world outside of the ego.

The Ecological Communism of William Morris

Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx

Marx, Praxis, and Socialism from Below

An Introduction to the Thought of Istvan Meszaros

Marx, Reason, and Freedom: Communism, Rational Freedom, and Socialized Humanity