The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Ecological Leninism can’t solve for climate change
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Ecological Leninism can’t solve for climate changeWoody, 2020 (Gus. “Revolutionary Reflections: Moving towards an ecological Leninism” rs21. December 18, 2020. https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/12/18/revolutionary-reflections-moving-towards-an-ecological-leninism/ ///MF) Given the necessity of systemic change in the face of climate breakdown, it was only a matter of time before thinkers would look to the Russian revolution for insights. Over the last year, ecological Leninism has burst onto the scene in the works of several authors. Andreas Malm’s latest book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency focuses on the concept, [1] Jodi Dean and Kai Heron have written of a ‘climate Leninism’, [2] and Derek Wall has written of Lenin’s importance to environmental movements in his latest book, Climate Strike. [3] The diversity of perspectives on Lenin found among these authors necessarily poses a question – what exactly is ecological Leninism? By looking at each of their accounts, it becomes clear that each writer finds something different within the corpus of Leninism. Furthermore, there is much to still be developed if ecological Leninism is to grow into a distinct approach to planetary breakdown. Given the development of such a system of thought will require more than one author or piece, this article aims to reflect on several concerns which may become the bedrock of an ecological Leninism: the state, the party and movements, imperialism, and the philosophical underpinnings of Leninist materialism. The arrival of an ecological Leninism ultimately presents an opportunity to build on the analysis of ecological Marxists concerned with metabolisms and similar accounts of capitalism, and to concern ourselves with organising for revolutionary change. The state of the party – Dean and Heron Starting with Dean and Heron’s account, ecological Leninism is crucial to challenging dead ends in the environmental movement’s strategies. To do this, they attempt to disentangle the contradictions present within the variety of contemporary Green New Deal (GND) proposals. In general terms, these aim through state-led investment to repurpose national economies towards decarbonisation and redistributive policies. Surveying plans from either side of the Atlantic, Dean and Heron point out that many GNDs still refuse to nationalise the industries necessary for large-scale decarbonisation. Furthermore, they point out that many retain a nationalist politics of growth, focused on creating new industries which may provide opportunities for employment, ignoring the continued extraction from the global majority such proposals seem to require. Many GND organisers recognise these contradictions but adopted an attitude of critical support, particularly while the Sanders and Corbyn movements were seeking election on GND platforms. Dean and Heron don’t advocate complete rejection, nor a falling in line with a social-democratic GND. Instead they argue we need to organise for revolutionary socialism whilst recognising the necessity of seizing control of the state for decarbonisation implicit within many left-wing GNDs. Or as they phrase it – ‘stripping the policy’s reformist content away from its revolutionary form.’ In their view, the GND’s image of the state being used to finally confront the global emissions crisis requires a revolutionary leap which takes it away from its often-limited policy content. By thinking through these issues around the GND, Dean and Heron affirm the need for environmentalists to abandon ‘state phobia’ and seriously engage with the possibility of a ‘state-led, centrally planned, and global response’ to the climate crisis—the ‘old’ Leninist revolutionary seizure of state power. They end by arguing for the need to build a revolutionary Leninist party, which is willing to seize the state for the working class and to use this apparatus to tackle climate breakdown. For Dean and Heron then, ecological Leninism centres on party building and the seizure of the state. There is much to disagree with in their interpretation. Most notably, in their argument for the importance of the state, they point to an extract where Lenin states the ‘apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed’, [4] using this to suggest the importance of seizing the state for a top down centralized response to climate change. As Gareth Dale has pointed out, their use of Lenin’s argument against wrecking the state is a serious misquoting. [5] If one reviews the quotation, the apparatus in question which Lenin is talking about is the particular ‘accounting apparatus’ in the form of the state bank and similar bodies. Despite the use of this quote to side-line wrecking, there is still the issue of smashing the rest of the state apparatus and its replacement. What is left underexplored in this article by Dean and Heron, though they certainly believe in it, is this difficult task of replacing the bourgeois state with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Herein we encounter a conundrum of ecological Leninism – how do we square the need for rapid changes to tackle climate change with the simultaneous need to smash the state and replace it with organs of workers’ control? War communism – Malm This leads us to Malm, whose ecological Leninism is focused predominantly on the period of War Communism and the struggles of the early Bolshevik regime to establish itself. Rather than Roosevelt’s New Deal period in the 1930s, to which GND organisers look for historical analogy, Malm argues decarbonisation would look more akin to the War Communism of the 1920s. Here, the Bolsheviks were surrounded by both imperialist powers and the forces of capital, as well as considering how to transform production. Today, any attempt at staving off climate breakdown will require a fight against fossil capitalists and imperialist states keen to pollute, as well as the struggle to wrest control of production. In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency Malm identifies three principles of Ecological Leninism as a political project. Firstly, ‘turning the crisis of symptoms into a crisis of the causes.’ In simple terms, just as the Bolsheviks sought to turn the imperialist World War One into a crisis for capitalism more generally, today ecological Leninism requires turning the chronic emergencies of climate disaster and zoonotic diseases into a general crisis for the capitalist system. In the face of escalating symptoms, there is a need to rapidly build for a revolutionary preservation of life. This leads to the second principle of ecological Leninism – ‘speed as paramount virtue.’ We all know the 12 years to avert climate catastrophe projection made by the IPCC 1.5 report two years ago. If the atmosphere is like a bathtub rapidly filling with carbon which will remain there unless removed, ecological Leninism understands the urgency of reducing and ultimately reaching negative emissions; it demands revolutionaries who understand every second counts in the fight against barbarism. Finally, Malm argues that the last principle of ecological Leninism, in a similar vein to Dean and Heron, consists of leaping ‘at any opportunity to wrest the state in this direction’ and turn society away from catastrophe towards direct public control. Crucially, his vision of this is not in line with the more optimistic vision of progressive GND proposals, or ‘luxury Communisms’. Instead, the idea of War Communism, of the Bolshevik state attempting to lead a transformation of Russian society whilst facing war, famine, and fuel shortage, reflects the sort of dire circumstances that any ecological Leninist regime would face. Attempting to mitigate and adapt will not be pretty, it may bring emancipation but will be hard work in difficult conditions. Here, Malm’s argument resembles similar sentiments expressed by Salvage’s editorial collective: The earth the wretched would – will – inherit, will be in need of an assiduous programme of restoration. While we may yearn for luxury, what will be necessary first is Salvage Communism. [6] In this Communism, caught between salvage and war, Malm goes further than Dean and Heron. Where their arguments against state-phobia lead them towards the necessity of the state apparatus’ growth, Malm rejects the Leninist doctrine of demolishing and replacing the state altogether. In his words – ‘all we have to work with is the dreary bourgeois state, tethered to the circuits of capital as always.’ War Communism here shifts to a violent pessimism, where all we can do is mobilise a variety of strategies to cut these tethers. Malm seems deeply sceptical about the possibility of the formation of alternative institutions of dual power. Ecological Leninism, contra Dean and Heron, need not imply a party or ‘any actual Leninist formations capable of seizing power and implementing the correct measures.’ The possibility – the urgent necessity – of building such formations is not really discussed, despite the very same pages recognising that these years of chronic emergency ‘can be expected to usher in pronounced political volatility.’ Malm attempts to have his ‘Lenin cake’ and eat it: he argues ecological Leninism should raise the consciousness of spontaneous movements and route them towards the drivers of breakdown, whilst he avoids really discussing how to approach Leninist organisation and the formation of working class power to rival the state. Malm falls into the trap of creating a dichotomy between waiting for revolution and acting within existing social movements to pressure the bourgeoise state. The possibility of working class agency that bucks these two categories is foreclosed. This points to an absence at the heart of Malm’s ecological Leninism. It is a Leninism without a revolution of 1917, focused instead on the difficulties of the Bolshevik government during the Civil War and on Lenin’s wagers during the First World War. It has little to say about the act of building movements capable of intervening in revolutionary situations, tipping them towards revolutionary outcomes. At the same time, as Tugal has eloquently pointed out, Malm’s ecological Leninism is without a revolutionary subject. [7] Rarely in his book does Malm speak of the role of working class struggle within any ecological Leninist project, and as a result he seems pessimistic about the formation of working class power which could rival the state, laying the bedrock for a Leninist project. As Max Ajl points out: One thumbs in vain through this book for any mention of the people who are not hypothetical, who are struggling in small, desperate, sincere, and hopeful ways for a better world. On this big, beautiful, desperate, poor, devastated planet are there no social forces which meet Malm’s standards for the subject or agent of ecological revolution or ecological Leninism? [8] Ultimately, if climate Leninists are to retain the desire to smash and replace the bourgeois state, there is a need to analyse how actually existing working class and peasant movements may organise to build the institutions necessary for a situation of dual power. The question is how to build these bodies whilst simultaneously mobilising for maximum climate action in the present. Malm’s otherwise engaging work requires these insights to flesh out a programme of ecological Leninism suitable for our times. Building the base – Wall Wall’s writings on Lenin and the environmental movement might be seen as filling this gap in Malm’s work. In his recent Climate Strike and in other writings, Leninist strategic thinking is central. [9] In particular, the necessity of building bases of working class power, seen as essential preconditions of dual power. Wall’s is a practical account of Lenin; it looks to the ways in which Leninist thinking suggest revolutionaries should organise in the here and now. In Climate Strike, Wall argues for a focus on building grassroots institutions that enable working class communities to come together – tenants unions, local food sovereignty groups, and more. Contra Dean and Heron’s need for a party, contra Malm’s need for speed, Wall argues for the slow construction of spaces of working class power. There are no shortcuts to revolution, and Wall argues this to its limit. Wall’s ecological Leninism is focused on creating collectives able to oppose capitalism and the state, as well as adapt to climate change’s effects. Let us take tenants organising as an example of this ‘base-building.’ By organising renters, it creates a new formation of working class power capable of resisting landlords as well as producing a core of individuals who have grown in both militancy and organising skill. As these institutions grow, not only do they hopefully build a base of working class revolutionaries, but they create spaces where the working class can come together to discuss how climate change and capitalism effects their housing. The ideal situation is that through the long work of building these institutions it lays the bedrock of working class alternates to the state necessary for the Leninist project. Wall thus rejects the binary between revolution today or popular pressure on reformist institutions, arguing for the constant need to build for revolution. There is still much work to be done on this particular aspect of ecological Leninism, not least because Wall often insists on applying it with the Green Party in view, despite the class composition of its supporters and its refusal to identify working class self-activity as the vehicle of revolutionary change. Furthermore, as Holmes has argued, Wall fails to specify the context under which this strategy could be adopted. This results in an elasticity to the concept of base-building, which allows it to become a hold-all term for any form of community organising. Whilst Wall has a slower conception of ecological Leninism, focused on the hard slog of organising, it doesn’t entirely repudiate the need for urgent action, which requires more specificity around the practicalities of building for dual power over the coming years. A strategy geared to base-building risks becoming a new form of economism, as Lenin might have put it. There is a balance that must be struck, but Wall’s intervention is crucial in pointing to the dearth of institutions here in the UK at least which could be considered bases of working class power. Three shades of Ecological Leninism Each of these authors reads Lenin in different ways. Dean and Heron emphasise the party and state, Malm for speed and struggle under conditions of hardship, Wall for constant strategic organising. Each has shortcomings, but all are contributing to a useful development of—or rupture in—ecological theory and practice. How should we reconsider Lenin’s corpus in these bad times? Just as John Bellamy Foster and others have excavated the concept of the metabolic rift from Marx, [10] is there a conceptual well to be found untapped in Lenin? I think not. It is not enough to find some kernel of an ecological worldview in Lenin, as much as his devotees love to talk of his reverence for nature. [11] If Leninism is an attempt to put theory into practice, the same must apply to its ecological variant. Ecological Leninism must be more than a theoretical extension of ecological Marxism, it must indicate the practices which a revolutionary eco-socialist movement are to adopt. Crucially, it also requires getting involved in actually existing movements, as there is no such thing as armchair Leninism. To kick the glass case off Lenin’s corpse, dust him off, and dip him in green paint is hardly enough. If we are to not only build Leninism, but an ecological programme aimed at tackling the climate crisis, a synthesis must be achieved between Lenin’s thought and other relevant thinkers on Marxism and ecology. The pieces I’ve discussed above leave open the construction of many aspects of such a programme. Malm, Dean and Heron, and Wall have opened the space by which we may move towards it. To begin developing a wider conception of ecological Leninism, to build on the excellent interventions of these authors, I wish to suggest several areas of Lenin’s thought which might be worth reinterrogating with an ecological view – the state, the relationship between movement, workers, and party, the centrality of imperialism, and finally wider concerns for the philosophy of nature and science. The elaboration and development of Marxist ecology in these areas may provide the bedrock for a revolutionary ecosocialist movement, and it should certainly not be left to one writer. As a result, the following is an attempt to indicate potential directions of travel that will build on Malm, Dean and Heron, and Wall, and hopefully furnish our society with something that can face the coming crisis. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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