Paris and green politics

Many experts on green issues in general and climate change in particular have made their comments on the Paris Conference (30 November - 12 December 2015.) Radicals in the green movement and wider have criticised the conference's absence of concrete and binding commitments. They have blown away much of the delirium of the liberal mass media in its talk of
'The world's greatest diplomatic success.' (Guardian).

It is a great achievement that a global, mass, green movement exists and that it is growing.  The women's movement of the 1970s and 80s, reborn in this century, acted and acts as the centre of knowledge and expertise on gender issues, and therefore can concentrate the globe's conscience on these questions. Similarly the massive green movement today, vastly outstripping its formal representation in the political forums available to it, is a critical repository of wisdom and understanding on the fate of the planet under late capitalism - as well as a huge political and social movement that forces key questions on to the world's agenda.

While the world's leading politicians have to balance the impact of global movements with the interests of the great corporations and networks that they serve, preferably neutralising the first to defend the second, nevertheless, they still have to act. They have to meet, they have to make promises, they have to give immense global airtime to the issues. They have to present themselves and their governments as the place to return to if the promises are unfulfilled; if the world keeps turning to the worse. This, in itself, is a tremendous political achievement for the green movement and its supporters, which started in the US a few decades ago from a position that, fundamentally, the greening of the earth was the responsibility of individuals, while simultaneously harbouring an underdeveloped critique of the dominant social and political systems.

Equally, the tangent that emerged in politics and economics that was created from that original baseline has closed up. Earlier some greens insisted on the need to stop growth, even to reduce it, in order to save the planet. Now a sophisticated analysis of social and economic systems has replaced this call on all, regardless of their poverty or their wealth, to 'stop being too greedy'. And while all sorts of experiments are blooming across the West about how to live a satisfying life without the drive to endless consumption, the centre of the green argument has become the deep inequality of a system of society that dominates the world and is simultaneously destroying its future. Concrete propositions for green energy, food production and global communication have supplanted the notion that technology is itself an enemy of humanity.

These developments are not even. Parallel to the history of movements on race or relating to women's rights, green politics is also now  socially, even economically diverse phenomena. The biggest profit machine in the world, Apple, flirts assiduously with an anti-establishment projection that incorporates 'Green' as well as 'people' power. Some green politicians in Germany are distinctly part of the political class there, no doubt 'working from within.' Nevertheless the larger green movement at its base has already added an enormous impulse to positive change and made a major contribution to the blue print of a new society.

It is the critical activity of the green movement that has created a practical experience of struggle that underpins the dramatic evolution of their thought. And the new thinking has broken through many of the old silos in its encounter with some older revolutionary political initiatives. For example Ernest Mandel, a major marxist thinker and writer in the later part of the 20th century, had, among others,  already challenged simplistic views of some schools of marxism who mechanically insisted on the need for universal abundance as the material basis for any eventual communist society. According to such thinking, super abundance was needed so that 'from each according to their ability - to each according to their need' might move from a slogan to reality.

Mandel argued for a new concept of 'rational abundance', a condition of essentially free housing, education, chiuld care, medical aid, power, transport and essential foods for all. Such a material platform would provide the basis in the world for people to decide what additions they might voluntarily and socially, personally and sexually create to best meet their needs for self expression. Hunting and fishing in the morning followed by an afternoon of Aristotle (Marx's personal desires) would not be most peoples' choices today!

It is the global perspective, the system wide challenge, the vast range of activities which the greens have launched, that have inspired much of the best of the new left. A courage to take on the whole world, to insist that its current social and political systems are stagnant and dangerous, that they must be challenged - in detail and in the most general terms, already provides tens of millions with a first coherent alternative to late capitalism's globalisation burn-out. Paris was a reaction to its force. That is the real contribution to humanities' future made in Paris.