19.10.2005

Going back to Marx

Derek Wall, a member of the Green Party for over 25 years, is the author of a new book, Babylon and beyond. He describes himself as an "eco-socialist" influenced by Marxism and is currently standing for election to the executive of the Green Party. He spoke to Mark Fischer about his vision of socialism and the state of the Marxist left

What is the balance of forces in the Green Party between the left and right? How organised is the left? I have to be fairly circumspect, as the electoral process is still going on in the party. There are no organised factions at the moment, but there certainly is a history of them. If you go back to the early 90s, when the Green Party got 15% of the vote, there was a rightwing faction, Green 2000. This basically wanted to refashion us as a mainstream party and was strongly opposed by the Association of Socialist Greens, which I co-organised with Penny Kemp. The right wing basically won, but after their victory the Greens got just two percent in the 1992 general election. Subsequent to that, you had the strange situation where the right wing basically imploded, left the party and their leading figures like Sarah Parkin set up NGO organisations such as Forum for the Future - they essentially got into bed with big business. People involved in the left faction that lost that particular struggle got more involved in the direct action movement. After the decanting of the right wing, however, the people that remained in the party found it much easier to come to consensus on most issues. The last organised left grouping in the party - the Way Ahead - wound itself up about five years ago. One of things that is quite odd about the Green Party is that we have an executive composed of nine or 10 posts. Quite often, elections for those posts are unopposed, as I was last year, for example. The post I stood for - local party support - is now being contested by councillor Matt Sellwood, another strong anti-capitalist eco-socialist. He is also unopposed. We don't have a 'leader' as such, but we do have female and male speakers on behalf of the party. The female speaker is Caroline Lucas MEP - someone who is very popular across the party - and she is unopposed. This year, I am standing against Keith Taylor for the post of male principal speaker. I am standing to articulate an explicitly eco-socialist version of politics and to get debate and argument going in the party. Do you generally have much debate in your ranks? One of the things that I am critical of is that the Green Party - in contrast to Marxist groups - will tend to have debates simply on policy. We have our manifesto and the assumption that flows from that is that we will win parliamentary power and then put it into practice. So there is a whole range of serious debates around energy, women's rights, civil liberties - policies right across the board. But a great deal of the sort of debates that Marxist groups might have about the fundamental nature of imperialism, or the capitalist economy and the methods of struggle, are not on the agenda in the Green Party. It is a classic electoral party - we tend to come up with policy rather than theory. But the Greens do start from a world view of some sort. By contrast the Marxist left seems frightened of promoting alternative visions of society. One of the things I draw from my Marxism is the Hegelian notion that you cannot leap beyond your time. If you design some giant blueprint for a future society, that can actually be quite oppressive. There are obviously lots of areas where I would disagree with the CPGB, but one of the areas where I would certainly agree with you is on the Socialist Workers Party: its politics at the moment tend to be shaped by short-term, tactical considerations. In the 1980s the Green Party would be attacked as a rightwing, neo-Malthusian organisation. Now, we have the likes of John Rees saying that the Greens are part of the left. And I don't think it is the Greens that have fundamentally changed in the intervening years. Yes, it may have moved a little to the left, but the real change is what the SWP now considers is tactically advantageous for itself. Now, I'm sure the CPGB would say that the Greens are a bourgeois or petty bourgeois party, but we have been pretty consistent over the years in our world view. So what type of Marxist are you? An unapologetic eco-socialist. In terms of the tradition I would locate myself in, well, it's straight back to Marx really. Marx wrote a great deal about the environment - something that the contemporary Marxist left don't seem to have fully taken on board. That's something I do like when I look at CPGB stuff - you do recognise that and are making efforts to rediscover it: I note you are seriously studying material by John Bellamy Foster, for example [Marx's ecology: materialism and nature New York 2000 - MF]. I think both the Greens and the Marxists should go back to Marx. Marx is an incredibly provocative, fertile and practical thinker with a tremendous amount to say that is relevant for our struggle today. I am not someone with a background in Leninist orthodoxy. But there is a sort of eco-socialist orthodoxy that Greens have got the critique of growth and accumulation, but to properly understand these processes you need to understand capitalism. That's where Marx comes in. Of course, there is a trend of eco-socialism that has a rightist dynamic, particularly in Europe. There are people like Joschka Fischer who have come from the far left and whose move to green politics expresses their evolution towards reformism. Then there are trends of eco-socialism composed of greens that are in transition in a left direction. So the picture is a complex one. How do you view the Marxist left? The left looks very fragmented to me. The Labour Party left has almost entirely collapsed. The communist parties have not recovered from the conflicts between the Eurocommunists and the 'tankies'. The SWP and its projects seem to be the next 'throw of the dice', in some ways. I think that Marxism, as derived directly from Marx, is essential. And there are obviously positive things about the organised Marxist left. I would single out the SWP, the Socialist Party of Great Britain (where I learned my Marxism) and the comrades who came from the Militant tradition, who obviously have been instrumental in the development of the Scottish Socialist Party - a much more open and pluralist political formation. I say this despite the fact that the SSP has stood against the Green Party (although this doesn't mean that there has been no dialogue). If there was a possibility of such a party of the left being established throughout Britain, then I think the left of the Greens would certainly argue for an engagement with it. Clearly, the task of reconstructing Marxist politics in the third millennium is a difficult one, and the left currently reflects that. And Respect? This is obviously more viable electorally, but what about its politics? I think this is a difficult question. If you look at the left in the Green Party, there is a minority of people who are generally supportive of the Respect project. But most of us on the left of the Greens, having seen the collapse of the Socialist Alliance, are very cautious about Respect. Given that the SWP is perceived of as being undemocratic, narrow and sectarian, it is very difficult for people to put much faith in a project they are centrally involved in. Also, although he has done some very impressive things, we are cautious about George Galloway. People are generally quite negative about the SWP and, in some ways, although we have massive problems with political islam, we are probably closer to the islamic component of Respect than the SWP and Galloway. In what sense? I think there is more trust. There have been some useful engagements between the Greens and the Muslim Association of Britain, for example. Of course, when it comes to sexual politics, we make no compromise whatsoever. So we obviously have some huge disagreements, but on areas such as ecology, social justice and the freedom to either wear or not wear the hijab, we have found common ground. I was very please that MAB backed Caroline Lucas in the last European elections. There is a feeling that we can have a good, honest debate with this element of Respect. Interestingly at Glastonbury, I sat with George Galloway for about 20 minutes in the 'green field' and discussed the Green Party and Respect. George was at pains to underline that fact that Respect is keen to have some kind of electoral agreement with the Greens - I know he is someone who is very impressed with Caroline Lucas MEP. I was frank with him that, in view of the fate of the Socialist Alliance, there is a real scepticism about the role of the SWP. In fact, if you look at a lot of people on the Green Party executive at the moment, there is a sympathy for the Socialist Party and a feeling that this left organisation has evolved in a more pluralist and democratic direction - both in the form of the SSP and the organisation in England and Wales. The current chair, Hugo Charlton, is happy to develop a dialogue with the SP, for instance. But there remains a deep suspicion of the SWP. The other problem with Respect is that, for us, genuine environmentalism is non-negotiable. There is a letter in the name Respect that is meant to stand for 'environment', but if you don't think through the implications of that political statement then it will remain a dead letter. I have a great regard for George Galloway as a campaigner, but he is not an MP like Alan Simpson, who has a long track record on environmental issues. The left is in a period of flux and disintegration. We are fighting for a realignment into a Communist Party. How do you view this period and the tasks of Marxists? That's a huge question. The key point for me is an unambiguous commitment to an eco-socialism. We are facing an ecological crisis, a crisis of democracy and of world poverty and these can only be solved with socialism and learning properly the lessons of Marx. Biological realities tell us that an economy based on waste is ultimately unsustainable. So, the key task must be to engage in a battle of ideas. The ideas represented by groups like the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs were defeated and marginalised during the Keynesian era. But they regrouped and won a new hegemony for their ideas for the sovereignty of the capitalist market. It's true that, given their political project, they were supported by huge corporations and that possibly gave them a head start. However, for me our big hegemonic idea is to say that we can build a society without the market, that the market is innately destructive and unequal. Our job is to build debate around that idea and I believe that - although all political parties are imperfect instruments - the Green Party is the vehicle for achieving this. One of the reasons why I like the Green Party so much is that it has a quite explicit critique of conventional economics. However, I do feel that 'green' without 'red' doesn't work. You need an injection of Marxism. We need to go back to Marx, we need to educate people in what were Marx's genuine ideas "¦ So one of the results of that 'battle of ideas' would be to turn the Green party into a Marxist party? One of the problems I have is that I can't really distinguish the Marxism in eco-socialism from the green politics. Marx actually criticises productivism and the domination of economics, but that is something you don't always get from the politics of Marxist parties. So I would like to see the Green Party evolve into an eco-socialist party and, certainly, you can't be an eco-socialist if you don't go back to Marx. But I would certainly see the Green Party as very different from the manifestations of Marxist parties we have seen over the past historical period. We should never forget that if we go back to 1884 and the very first Marxist political party in Britain, the Social Democratic Federation - despite all the problems with its leader, Hyndman - that organisation was essentially an eco-Marxist party. So there is undoubtedly a legacy we can critically draw on. Surely the message of Marxism is that humans are part of nature - its highest and most complex form. The laws of nature need to be understood and utilised and for that we need a society that will allow us to interact with nature in a genuinely human, conscious and planned way - ie, communism. But the versions of red-green politics we encounter often sound more like Proudhonism - 'fair trade', small-scale production, etc. I don't think that's a fair critique of what I would call red-green politics. Certainly, I am someone who is critical of growth, but I am not critical of human potential. I think the interesting thing about growth is Marx's distinction between use-values and exchange-values. We have a society dominated by exchange-values. If you look at every aspect of society - from the Olympics to school playing fields - it only happens if it produces exchange-values and that is incompatible with ecological realities. Without any increase in GNP you can increase prosperity and human potential. So I think the kind of arguments against a society dominated by abstract growth and the production of exchange-values are absolutely vital to make. At the same time, we have to be absolutely clear about rejecting Malthusianism - and, by and large, I would say that greens are clear that they do. However, unless you base that rejection on a Marxist analysis and why capitalism is ecologically destructive, you have a basic weakness in your analysis. I very much agree with your basic idea: Marx famously wrote in his Paris manuscripts that human beings are not separate from nature; we are part of it. In Capital, he talks of that common metabolism between humanity and the rest of nature. Now, that means that we need a form of economic system, a metabolism, that actually serves and conserves human beings and nature. One of the great dangers of not having a Marxist analysis is that, in some senses, you therefore have no rational analysis at all. You can adopt forms of thought that make humanity per se the problem, the type of methodology that lies behind theories that inform the notion of the 'population bomb', etc. You mention 'fair trade'. What I find interesting is that many greens will say that, yes, capitalism is perhaps problematic, but if we could achieve some sort of Adam Smith-style model of the market, then it would work. David Korten - the author of When corporations ruled the world, which inspires many greens - argues that the relationship between the market and capitalism is the relationship between the healthy body and a cancer. In contrast, eco-socialists would say that it is more like the relationship between a chicken and an egg. What do you hope your new book will achieve? Debate, of course. But the main project for me is to make eco-socialist ideas hegemonic. On the one side we have the official left looking for new ideas; on the other we have the plain fact that green politics simply do not work without an injection of Marxism. In particular, I want to get people to be deeply sceptical about the whole notion of the market. The conventional model is that we either have state action or we rely on the market to deliver the things we need. That is, resources in our economy are allocated either spontaneously according to the law of value or through government direction. What I try to emphasise in my book are things like the open-source principle - the whole idea that people can produce what is good for our society, what is good for individual human creativity and potential and what at the same time sustains and conserves nature itself. If you look at the greens in Europe, there is clearly a choice to be made. Their project of aligning themselves with social democratic governmental parties has clearly failed. I would want my book to help start a debate which encourages a renewed, rearticulated politics that goes beyond Joschka Fischer. * Fair trade or Marxism? Alan Long reviews Derek Wall's book Babylon And Beyond