Green Politics and the Left: A Review Essay

Green Politics and the Left: A Review Essay Russell Janzen Green Hopes: The Future of Political Ecology, by Alain Lipietz. Translated by Malcolm Slater. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality, by Enrique Leff. Translated by Margaret Villanueva. New York: Guilford Press, 1995. There is a certain symmetry to reviewing Green Hopes and Green Production together. One deals primarily with the dilemmas of postFordist politics in the &dquo;North,&dquo; the other with the problem of ecodevelopment in the &dquo;South&dquo;; one is a political program designed for popular consumption and to convert a remnant left to a green political project, the other a theoretical treatise intended to provide the conceptual armature for alternative development strategies. But they share a central theme: environmental crisis is a concomitant to the paradigm or rationality of &dquo;productivist&dquo; and capitalist forms of development which externalize environmental conditions and make environmentally destructive behavior rational. Lipietz identifies as the &dquo;major enemy&dquo; of political ecology the model of capitalist development offered by neo-liberalism (p. 35). Leff takes aim at the economic rationality associated with capitalist development, particularly in the way in which it was transposed to zones outside the geographical and historical core of capitalism. Albeit at different scales, both argue that the social organization of production and political economy must figure in any reckoning of the causes and solutions to environmental and economic crises. Only by instituting social forms that embody different principles and incorporate different rationalities is it possible to render null the structured dilemmas of jobs-versus-environment and development-versus-environment. It may be an overstatement for Lipietz to claim that the &dquo;environment is other people&dquo; and &dquo;ecology is a social relationship&dquo; (p. 8), but it has two uses. Rhetorically, it places environmental issues Department of Political Science, York University, North York, Ontario, M3J 1P3. 116 and the argument for a &dquo;political ecology&dquo; successor project on a terrain familiar to the traditional left, and licenses the claim for a political ecology for which social issues are not made absent by the presence of environmental ones. Coincidentally, it addresses environmentalists who often are reluctant to acknowledge the importance of social dimensions. Analytically, it provides theoretical purchase for integrating a regulation school of political economy perspective on environmental and social issues. Policies and forms of regulating the economy, the &dquo;decisive mediation between humankind and its environment&dquo; (p. 43), thus form a substantial part of the book - although adumbrated in less detail than his earlier argument for an environmental &dquo;model of development&dquo; (Towards a New Economic Order, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Part of the attraction of the regulation school has been its openness to the cultural dimensions of via regulating and stabilizing patterns of economic activity consumption norms for example. It is in this cultural domain that Lipietz means to intervene. Since, by themselves, the policies could be a different iteration of economic growth, Lipietz argues for an ethical and cultural project that would subtend a new model of development by more or less consciously incorporating values of ecological responsibility, democracy, autonomy and solidarity. For Lipietz (and many environmentalists) environmental crisis today is attributable to &dquo;productivism,&dquo; defined as &dquo;a whole set of socio-economic structures and mentalities which push people to ’produce for the sake of producing’ without regard for the social and ecological conditions of its own sustainability (p. 26). Both Fordist and neo-liberal models of development are species of productivism in which cultural norms complement patterns of production and consumption that defer or externalize environmental costs and displace them to the developing countries of the South. In both cases, productivity increases are expected to fund rising levels of consumption and hence a virtuously expanding cycle of production. As an &dquo;answer&dquo; to the crises of Fordism, neo-liberalism is no closer to a solution for employment or environmental crises. The alternative, Lipietz suggests, must incorporate two principles of non-material growth and the social exclusion. The latter is a familiar enough refrain fight against familiar to &dquo;the left,&dquo; but altering consumption norms in favour of non-material growth, i.e., of free time, is less straightforward. Achieving this is at once a cultural and political project in which different policies and new forms of regulation are condition and consequence of cultural change from the scale of the international political economy to labor markets and workplaces. New conditions in the international political economy call for new forms of regulation at an international level. After the fall of the wall, Lipietz argues, the major axis of international political economy is North/South. Forgiv- &dquo; - 117 the debts of countries will relieve them of the presgenerate repayment funds by ever greater exploitation of their populations and their environments, thus providing a way of opening the doors for countries to adopt their own models of development. It is a &dquo;beau risque&dquo; that requires less an act of faith than an expression of solidarity in support of the other values of autonomy, democracy and ecological responsibility. And it extends equally to the need to the implement those values at home as it were. As the center of culturally entrenched productivism, the real fulcrum of change is in the North. The European Union is an example of the kinds of emerging international forms of policy and regulation to which greens need to propose alternatives. Rather than harmonizing the austerity of monetary and fiscal policy, Lipietz argues that unity can go forward productively only if a new wages and employment pact is implemented to equalize social conditions. Against the trend towards neo-Taylorism, renovated productivity and wages pacts and worker participation are a necessary condition for the extension of democracy and autonomy for workers. More generally, an employment policy that supports reduced working time and the &dquo;third sector&dquo; (co-operatives and agencies servicing those unable to find work in the conventional private or public sectors) embraces an ethic of solidarity and extends the possibility of autonomy beyond mere consumption of material goods - issues addressed also by Andre Gorz over the past few years. Finally, fiscal, monetary and tax reform that internalize environmental costs encourage more responsible patterns of material consumption. The cultural revolution consists in developing the conditions that make possible reflexivity and deliberation and accountability for the social and ecological consequences of individual and social choice. Few can match Lipietz’s ability to weave together with such rhetorical eloquence and analytical elegance a wide range of complex social and environmental issues. Two of his arguments, however, will no doubt put Marxian socialists and ecologists on their guard. First, Lipietz claims that the central social contradiction is one of each person against every one else (p. 12). His point is that access to and appropriation of &dquo;nature&dquo; has always been differential and regulated. The concluding spin on this lends political ecology a universal appeal without reproducing the humanity/nature dualism of some versions of radical ecology, yet phrasing the problem of regulation in the fashion of rational choice tends to efface race, gender, and class as axes of exclusion that pervade cultural constructions of &dquo;nature.&dquo; Second, while &dquo;productivism&dquo; is a convenient way of naming the common problems of capitalism and formerly existing socialism, capitalism disappears as a category somewhere between paradigm and the more specific model of development. To get the political ecol- ing sures to developing 118 ogy ball rolling perhaps it is necessary only to expose the shortcomings of the &dquo;major enemy.&dquo; Still, if paradigms are simultaneously structural and cultural, then there would be some reason for distinguishing between structural characteristics and likewise the cultural constructions embodied in them. This extends also to the less general levels at which production and consumption are organized and regulated along, among others, class lines. A hegemonic discourse of productivism is general only through stitching together elements of the different experiences and representations generated at these other scales. Considering the differences, mobilizing people with a nigh universal counter-discourse is rather more problematic than Lipietz lets on. Marxism too has been accused of productivism. Lipietz is critical of its preoccupation with &dquo;productive forces,&dquo; others of the tendency to make of &dquo;labor&dquo; and &dquo;production&dquo; a fetish of metaphysical proportions. To the extent that the labor-valorization process articulated in capitalism is taken as somehow paradigmatic of the content and form of labor processes generally, the allegation is not unfounded. As feminists have noted, that formulation occludes other types of labor. It also renders problematic a Marxian approach to cultural constructions of &dquo;nature&dquo; and the role of ecology in social processes. Whether or how this can also be attributed to Marx and found at the heart of Marxism is a matter of some debate, to which Enrique Leff adds his voice. Green Production was originally published in Spanish ten years ago (as Ecologia y capital), and its conceptual language sometimes is dated, but it is a serious and timely restatement of a historical materialism that means to give ecological and cultural processes their due. In contrast to some variants of Marxism, ecological economics and systems theory, Leff asserts that historical materialism produces knowledge &dquo;of the social structure of the capitalist economic process that converts nature into objects and means of labor ... that can be incorporated into the process of producing value and surplus value&dquo; (p. 8). Under capitalism, Leff claims, natural processes are absorbed into value formation (p. 21), and social relations are reproduced through the appropriation of nature for the valorization of capital (p. 13). On Leff’s reading, capitalist development in the first instance was attributable to the resilience of temperate ecological conditions that permitted the growth of intensive agriculture and hence of capital accumulation. Naturally, there were limits to the extent to which the temperate zones might be exploited for capital accumulation, thereby producing some of the impetus for shifting colonial relations in the &dquo;South&dquo; for the purpose of extracting resources. Not only did this create a condition of capital and technological dependence for the South, but the very nature of the exported technology and methods of production (agriculture) were inappropriate to the ecological condi- 119 tions that obtained. There was a net loss of capital and a loss of productive capacity in the South that would undermine its own capacity for self-directed development. Moreover, colonial capitalist discourse subordinated local knowledges and practices, forcing peasants to reconstruct their cultural and ecological knowledges as a mediation between local production and the circuits of capital. Where historical materialism serves as a method to deconstruct the social environmental history of &dquo;development,&dquo; the reconstruction of principles of planning for ecodevelopment requires that it be supplemented by other methods. Centrally, the task is to address the &dquo;cultural conditions that regulate the articulation of ecological process into productive practices,&dquo; and to identify specificities by analyzing the &dquo;materiality of cultural organization, rooted in the productive rationality of peasant societies and indigenous peoples&dquo; (p. 40). That is, how have the different ecological and social processes been articulated and regulated culturally? As a project of recovery, ecology, ethnobotany and anthropology are additional tools for filtering out the distortions endemic to capitalism and its productive rationality. Analytically, there are for Leff levels of materiality and, practically, ecodevelopment should respect the distinctions. Leff identifies three different kinds of corresponding productivities: ecological, technological and cultural. He argues that succession ecologies have the greatest degree of primary productivity that may be exploited for local purposes. Technological productivity, once freed from the logic of accumulation, must be appropriate to ecological and cultural conditions. And cultural productivity is dependent on local and indigenous knowledges about ecologies and the forms of technology and cultural organization of production. The manner in which they are organized and articulated constitutes the basis for a &dquo;system of natural resources.&dquo; Where capitalism may reduce this to environmental cost accounting and management by regulation, the features of development in the South prescribe the integration of the different knowledges in a fashion that would embody a different &dquo;system&dquo; or environmental rationality and foster the institutionalization of inte- grated resource management. For the tropical regions Leff has taken as his point of reference, an agroindustrial strategy as the most appropriate way of breaking out of the deformed and dependent forms of development that have so straitjacketed the South, especially the rural classes to which the peasants and indigenous peoples belong. Such a strategy requires, and ecological and cultural specificities demand, a different type of &dquo;technostructure.&dquo; On the one hand, the technostructure rests on tech- nological innovation that works with and enhances local ecological productivity; on the other, it secures local and regional patterns of industrial development that respond to local conditions rather than to 120 universalizing logics of capital or &dquo;development.&dquo; It is a &dquo;bottom up&dquo; approach that depends for its operation on democratic institutions of planning, and for its implementation on local resistance to the logic of capital and centralized development planning. Elements of Leff’s formulations parallel those made by Vandana Shiva, for example, and environmentalists working on development issues. For example, it is by now a commonplace that cultural diversity is a condition of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems. Yet the there are a number of elements with which environmentalists will no doubt be uncomfortable. Leff’s proposals are interventionist to a degree that upsets the cultural problematic set by many environmentalists. The scales of technology and manipulation of ecological productivities are not on that account reducible to the logics of social production but functions of domination. It is not entirely clear, then, that Leff has managed to escape &dquo;productivist&dquo; thinking, either in the sense that increasing levels of production are necessary or useful or in the sense that it overlooks the specific and autonomous role of culture in articulating what is &dquo;nature.&dquo; And to the extent that &dquo;social&dquo; and &dquo;cultural&dquo; tend to merge as the &dquo;materiality of culture,&dquo; it also renders oblique questions relating to the role and subordination of women. Some of this comes together in the ambiguous role of experts. The recuperation of ecologically sensitive knowledge and practices are crucially dependent on local resistance: had resistance not persisted that knowledge would not be recoverable and in any case would be irrelevant if the objective were simply to replace one universalizing logic with another. Local resistance as a condition of ecodevelopment is in fact the counterpart to the recognition that &dquo;articulations&dquo; are specific. If necessary, it is not a sufficient condition of change. It might serve as an injunction, but in the absence of a political strategy that problematizes not only the relation between scales of resistance but that between their knowledges too, the relationship between locals and sympathizers is unresolved and problematic for the form and practice of environmental and democratic planning. Reading Lipietz and Leff against each other can be a bit misleading. While one might quibble that Lipietz’s polemical intentions cover too many issues and leave unanswered important questions, or that the abstractness of Leff’s derivations and strategy could use a few illustrative examples, both books bear a reading by anyone interested in critical interpretations of &dquo;ecology&dquo; and the social and institutional dimensions of a left green alternative. Reading the two with each other as though their complementary concerns could be synthesized into a hegemonic unity of theory and practice is also deceptive. After all, Leff’s astute attempts to thematize the relationship between the social organization of production and culture might add nuance to Lipietz’s generalizations, and Lipietz’s focus opens a line of questioning left 121 silent by Leff’s problematic representation of the ecological conditions of the &dquo;North,&dquo; the development of colonialism and the consequences of autonomous ecodevelopment in the South. If their interlocutors are &dquo;postmodernists&dquo; and radical ecologists, however, the arguments about culture and the nature of knowledge will be less convincing and less compatible than their Marxian lineages might suggest. For all that, both have tried to mark out an agenda that is neither simply practical nor only theoretical and which answers to just such questions as were not addressed by their antecedents. And if there remain a series of questions there are few better signposts than those provided by Lipietz and Leff.