Green Radicalism—Side-show or a New Alternative?

Almost unnoticed, green politics in the UK has emerged from being regarded as a flash-in-the-pan single-issue concern at the 1989 European Parliamentary elections to being a growing part of the political landscape. In some ways the most spectacular aspect of this development is not so much the fact that the Scottish Parliament, the British section of the European Parliament and the Greater London Assembly now contain representation from the Green Party; it is that on the streets, in May Day demonstrations and in demonstrations against the IMF and the WTO, green protesters have displaced the Marxist-influenced old and ‘new’ (now fading 1960s) left as the radical political alternative to contemporary capitalism. These green radicals combine new environmental concerns with apparently older concerns for social justice, but do so in the context of a critique of dominant materialist ethics.

Although it is clear that some pretty unsavoury and violent elements have muscled into the London ‘anti-capitalist’ demonstrations, the fact that large numbers of green protesters turn out is symptomatic of a much wider, more moderate, trend of green opposition to the direction of contemporary capitalism.

How is it that green ideas seem to be providing the basis for an alternative to mainstream notions of capitalism? Is there theoretical evidence that the ideas that propel this movement are any more substantial than the notion that economic growth is bad for the environment? I pose the issue this way not because I necessarily wish to pour scorn on what are now long-standing ‘dark green’ claims that continued economic growth will lead to ecological disaster, but instead to ask whether green politics can still be ghettoised by the political mainstream as being ‘only’ about the environment. Does contemporary green radicalism have key relevance to central social and economic issues in general?

An alternative to materialism

Traditional Marxist/hard left economic notions of central planning have been discredited as an inferior way (compared to neoliberal free market capitalism) of achieving the material objectives which unite both new right and traditional left. Neoliberalism, which has become today’s dominant ideology, can be described as a combination of two notions: first, new right ideas that the state is a wasteful, self-serving bureaucracy; and second, competition theory, which says that maximising competition through the market optimises social welfare.

However, green politics regards the very pursuit of material goals and the notion of maximising economic growth at best with scepticism and at worst with downright hostility. Green politics partakes of a rationality outside the common materialist rationality common to the conventional left and right. Thus radical greens can offer themselves as a new way of attacking dominant neoliberal thinking and can thus fill a political vacuum created by the hard left’s loss of credibility.

Certainly those of a so-called ‘light green’ persuasion argue that economic growth can be reconciled with the principle of ecological sustainability so that our activities do not undermine ecosystems upon which we depend in the long term. Nevertheless, even in the case of light green thinking as exemplified by the principle of sustainable development (popularised through the Brundtland Report), economic growth is dethroned from its predominant position as the only objective, and made conditional on the achievement of sustainability. Some have said that a creed which questions the legitimacy of economic growth as the central objective of public policy is romantic irrationalism. Yet protesters at the ‘anti-capitalist’ May Day events tend to go further than light or even many dark greens (who oppose continued economic growth) and argue that contemporary capitalism, or neo-liberalism as described here, is unsustainable not only on ecological grounds but also because of the social divisions which are generated by the system. It is the linkage between social issues and environmental issues, which has been made notably by the group that organises these demonstrations, Reclaim The Streets, that is significant.

Of course, the bulk of the population is unlikely to be won over by the defacing of a few national monuments and vague calls for the scrapping of capitalism. The violence is totally unjustified; moreover, without a moderate and coherent set of ideas to link this social and environmental scepticism with neoliberalism, such demonstrations are likely to be dismissed as little more than a seasonal side-show. So, is there a coherent theoretical framework to underpin a green approach which criticises neoliberalism on both social and environmental grounds?

Discussions in academic green circles tend to focus on whether greens should adopt an ‘anthropocentric’ or ‘ecocentric’ orientation. Anthropocentrism’ says that the environment should be valued for its use to humans, whereas ‘ecocentrism’ argues that it should be valued intrinsically. However, such discussions seem to have only indirect relevance to what is happening on the ground, or on the streets. Moreover, limiting green politics to merely a political economy of the commons (supremely important as this is) may limit its potential and ignore the practical linkages that are occurring today. Hence I want to look at what a radical green approach, which extends the green critique beyond a political economy of the commons, might entail. This could be called a ‘social green’ approach.

A social green approach

A social green approach suggests that both the move towards social polarisation and the slide towards ecological disaster ought to be halted by a change in consciousness that draws away from the ever more competitive materialism which seems to have grown increasingly strong in recent years. George Monbiot, in an article criticising Prince Charles’s apparent dallying with romantic notions of environmentalism, commented: ‘To me, the need to protect the environment springs not from ‘‘a sense of the sacred’’, but from a sense of social justice.’ There is some implicit recognition of this sentiment in the fact that those greens who have gone into government in Europe, notably in France and Germany, have done so in partnership with social democratic, not conservative parties.

There has been a tendency for green parties to ally themselves with marginal, oppressed groups and to support the left in opposition to the right. In Germany Die Grünen have campaigned both for the rights of women and for the grant of residency rights to foreign workers. In the USA the environmental justice movement has arisen out of a concern to combat the disproportionate impact of pollution and toxic waste dumps on the poor and ethnic minorities. In the UK the Real World Coalition, a wide-ranging group of environmental and other non-governmental organisations, campaigned on a wide agenda, including social issues, prior to the 1997 general election. All of this activity belies Marxist criticisms that environmentalists are confined within a ‘bourgeois’ political agenda. However, a social green approach is very distinct from a traditional leftist approach, for at least two reasons. First, a radical or social green approach will disavow the assumption that material acquisition is necessarily the prime objective of public policy. A second point of difference is the green contention that politics is not just about changing decisions made by centralised government but also about people changing their lifestyles and becoming able to take more control over their lives.

The arguments for a social green approach can be grounded, and made distinctive, by extending the theory of external costs which is normally applied only to environmental problems. This theory of external costs could be used to analyse the social costs of excessive competition which are associated with neoliberalism.

The theory of external costs was developed by neo-classical economists such as Pigou in his The Economics of Welfare (1952). It focuses on the notion that costs to society can be created by economic activities and that the actor that is causing those costs can escape responsibility for either paying for or rectifying the damage. This theory has been developed to a fine art in the form of monetarisation of environmental costs, conducted most famously in Britain by Pearce. My purpose here is not to discuss the uses (and economists’ abuses) of the theory of external environmental costs; rather, it is to extend the principle to consider the ex-ternal costs of the ever-increasing tendency towards excessive competition in society, a trend towards competitivity that has become almost a fetish of neoliberal thinking. We can demonstrate the existence of such wider, social, costs arising from neoliberalism’s obsession with competition and economic growth.

Materialism and health

Although the green critique of economic growth has traditionally been focused on the environment, there is manifest evidence that what is generally assumed to be the rational, overriding objective of pursuing economic growth does not always maximise health and happiness. Surveys do report that people are happier if they have more money in a given society; but this happiness is relative to the condition of poorer, lower-status people. There has been no absolute increase in happiness over the last fifty years in the West. Moreover, health data suggest that above a certain basic level of income sufficient to assure basic hygiene, piped water and sewerage services, there is only a very weak correlation between per capita GDP and life expectancy. For example, Cuba and Costa Rica have about one-tenth of the per capita GDP of the USA yet their life expectancies are, on average, the same as in the USA and almost as good as the UK. In fact, the average US citizen spends roughly as much on health care as an average citizen of Cuba or Costa Rica spends on everything!

Alongside these statistics is a curious paradox: namely, that while the difference in life expectancy between say, Costa Rica and the USA is non-existent, there are great relative differences inside countries. For example, a Dutch study reveals that there is a 12-year difference in life expectancy between the highest-status and lowest-status individuals, as measured by educational achievement. This means that a relatively high-status person in a ‘poor’ country like Costa Rica will live a lot longer than a relatively low-status person in the USA or UK, even though the latter will actually have a rather higher material standard of life. Wilkinson and other researchers have revealed a strong correlation between the degree of income equality in a society and its average life expectancy, while studies of the USA have indicated that life expectancies in states where there are more inequalities of income are significantly lower than in states which have a more equal distribution of income.

These are examples of the deleterious effects of a phenomenon known as relative deprivation, a concept that was discussed in theory by Walter Runciman in the 1960s. Studies conducted in the UK illustrate a pathway through which the effects of relative deprivation might be transmitted. This is through stress. Having defined stress as the degree of decision latitude, or control, that is enjoyed by an individual in his or her job, Marmot et al. conducted a massive survey of civil servants. They found that civil servants in the lowest grades were 50 per cent more likely to contract heart disease than civil servants in the highest grades, and over half of this difference cannot be explained by differences in smoking, diet or exercise. Although stress has often been typified as a problem of high-flying executives, it is those at the bottom of the status heap and those with least control at work and at home (and most of all those who have no work) who are shown by medical science to suffer most from stress.

Stress, consumerism and competition

There is a solid body of work published in medical journals on how chemicals associated with damage to the circulatory system and immune system, such as cortisol, are at high levels when individuals suffer from lack of control. A number of writers from various disciplines have made similar statements about how relative deprivation and stress are generated by the competitive consumer culture. Oliver James, writing from a psychological background, has looked at how relative deprivation produces depression among those who feel that they do not reach the high material goals set by an increasingly competitive society. People increasingly compare themselves to reference groups including the rich and famous whom most cannot possibly expect to match in material terms. The result is depression, and increased aggression and violence among those who see themselves as failures in the competitive race to maximise material possessions.

Juliet Schor, who observes such trends in the USA, the citadel of materialism, talks about the remorseless social pressure on people to work themselves into the ground in order to achieve the spending power they think that they need. Zygmunt Baumann describes how freedom is now associated with consumer choice, so that the more one is able to exercise consumer choice through the possession of wealth, the more freedom one is supposed to have. Ulrich Beck, best known for his treatise on the rise of ecological risk, links this with an increase in social risk. He speaks of how ‘community is dissolved in an acid bath of competition’ and how ‘competition undermines the equality of equals, without, however, eliminating it. It causes the isolation of individuals within homogeneous social groups.’ Andre Gorz, the French green socialist, has described how differences in consumption ‘are often no more than the means through which the hierarchical nature of society is expressed’. The only function of items such as Rolex watches is to constitute some as rich and some as poor.

All of these writers adhere, to a greater or lesser extent, to green objectives. Yet their critique of the competitive, materialist nature of society goes a lot further than its effect on the environment, as crucial as that may be in itself. This wider application of the green critique of the external costs of competitive materialism can be applied to instruments by which neoliberal policy is implemented, such as performance-related pay and increasing competition in schools.

According to academic research, performance-related pay in the public sector is generally more associated with lowering morale and reducing co-operation than with any discernible increase in productivity. Because it reduces the exercise of control by individual employees, it is associated with increased stress. Yet New Labour has emphasised the importance of this stratagem and its extension to the Civil Service and schools. In the university sector pressures on lecturers to produce research have intensified, yet despite the increase in the numbers of research articles published it is unclear whether this has increased knowledge or merely encouraged reproduction of various versions of the same research.

Perhaps even more seriously, as far as the wider social impact is concerned, the effect of school league tables is widely seen as adding to polarisation. Evidence suggests that the difference between ‘best’ and ‘worst’ performing schools has increased since school league tables were introduced, and the tables have served as an indicator of how middle class a school’s intake is rather than how well schools are performing in educating children. Social polarisation is exacerbated as the better-off buy into catchment areas of ‘high performance’ schools, which translates as schools with a strongly middle-class intake. Research has consistently suggested that it is social background and peer group influence, not differences between schooling techniques, which are the key factors in influencing educational attainment. Despite the spin put on literacy targets being ‘achieved’, literacy rates have remained much the same since 1950, with illiteracy still affecting around one in six of the population. A green analysis may say that enjoining the very people who see themselves as the losers in the ever more competitive materialist race to be more competitive will not succeed as the competitive system is identified as one that excludes them.

Policies such as performance-related pay and school league tables are widely seen by the subjects of such instruments as failures, yet unions and other groups find it difficult to oppose them since the policies are legitimised by the supremacy of the neoliberal discourse. This discourse is seen as representing progress, so that anyone who doubts such techniques finds it diffcult to avoid the charge of being against modernisation and progress. It is a problem that the left finds difficult to overcome given that its established alternative gives priority to materialist objectives but bases its means of pursuing such objectives on discredited ‘old-fashioned’ notions of central planning. An untested notion is that the ever more competitive practices that are deployed in an effort to achieve materialist objectives may do little, if anything, to further those materialist objectives while at the same time creating considerable external social costs in the form of stress and social polarisation. The social green trend, however, does not merely criticise neoliberalism. It also promotes a set of alternative policies and lifestyles.

Alternative policies and lifestyles

Three key notions can be said to inform social green prescriptions for alternative ways of doing things. First is the idea that systems which give people the maximum degree of control over what they do through employing co-operative forms of organisation at the workplace reduce stress and make the work more meaningful. As Schumacher put it: ‘To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods rather than people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.’

Contrasts between co-operative and stressful, competitive styles of work are especially evident in areas such as call centres, whose often highly stressful environments and performance-related pay systems have been criticised as divisive. As Arkin puts it, ‘Giving individuals greater autonomy can reduce stress and staff turnover without affecting productivity.’ Others who have studied a range of situations where employees are given greater control suggest that such schemes can, ironically, actually improve financial performance.

Such schemes should not be confused with ‘stress management’, where individuals are taught ways of coping with stress (for instance through taking deep breaths) rather than attending to the root cause of the situation, which is the way work is organised. Nor is this greater control to be confused with traditional left-wing demands for workers’ control. This is concerned with replacing rule by capitalists and their managers with rule by workers’ committees, and merely substitutes one group for another at the head of the system without altering the unsustainable nature of the system itself.

A second aspect of this green alternative concerns the way that people could organise their lives so as to reduce stress. Robertson, during the 1980s, suggested that part-time work and work-sharing could contribute to what he calls an ‘own work’ culture where people organise their lives to suit non-economic as well as economic criteria. Such ideas have been taken up in a more reformist sense by Handy when he discusses how work should be visualised as a portfolio of activities. The notion of work-sharing and sharing the upbringing of children between spouses (rather than the traditional model of the women bearing the main responsibility of child rearing) is part of this sort of approach. This could help solve the dilemma created by the late twentieth-century social innovation of it being ‘normal’ for women to pursue careers while they are still expected to look after the children.

A radical version of what has become termed ‘downshifting’ has been discussed by several US practitioners. This path to downshifting involves accumulating savings sufficient to provide a modest income from the interest payable on the savings. Some who have documented their experiences along these lines note that they have come to appreciate the social and environmental dimensions of their political approach which started out as a means of achieving the financial security to enable them lead worthwhile, low-stress lives.

These two notions which inform the social green alternative are about work and stress. However, the people who have least control in a work sense are those who have no paid work, for they suffer low status and the ultimate in relative deprivation in our society, which largely equates personal value with material success. Hence the third social green notion is one that involves a decentralised approach to urban regeneration—an approach that clashes directly with many of the ideas associated with the conventional notion of globalisation.

Globalisation and regeneration

It often seems that the green critique of globalisation, which argues for a focus on local self-sufficiency in goods and services rather than intensifying the trend towards a global marketplace, is out of step with the reality of globalisation, seen as increasing efficiency through the provision of greater competition. In fact, political economists point out that 90 per cent of goods and services are still traded domestically and thus the argument that we are being subjected to increasingly competitive practices is based on a neoliberal myth. Similarly, the ‘free trade’ argument against measures to protect the environment is, on closer examination, also a myth; for example, measures such as labelling of products give more information to consumers, surely something that is supposed to be a condition of moving towards ‘perfect’ competition.

There is less disagreement on the point that there is a globalisation of finance, with money flowing globally in search of the highest return. Unfortunately, this process has considerable external costs, in that the money that is generated by poorer areas goes out into globalised financial networks, but no money comes in. The consequence is a growth of polarisation between rich and marginal areas. The London-based green think-tank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), wants to promote a strategy which aims to bring money back into depressed urban areas. This could be achieved by encouraging institutions like community banks which can support local businesses. In addition, control of public funding allocated to help these purposes could be given directly to local communities. This in itself could revive local government in a very localised ‘neighbourhood’ form. NEF consultant Pat Conaty condemns government initiatives to help urban regeneration for their ‘big is best’ mentality, the notion of the quick fix, involving franchised business being imported, and the notion that poor areas can be revived by the application of the same ‘competitive’ techniques that have marginalised them in the first place. ‘Mutual organisations and co-operatives are ideal organisations if it is actually possible to revive the local economy. Community banks can give priority to local private enterprise. Public funds are best controlled at the small community level and aimed at very local schemes whether they be community heating or food co-operatives. You have to start slowly and build up participation and knowledge in managing budgets.’

Using this approach, relatively modest injections of public money can top up the difference between what local banks (which usually need to be created) could earn in the financial markets and what they can earn for investment in local business. This sort of approach fits in well with the decentralist strategies supported by greens, but not so much with the mainstream left, whether of a ‘competitive’ neoliberal New Labour version or the centralized, bureaucratic ‘old’ type of left.

Greens—the new new left?

The ideas outlined above, including the notion of the external, social costs of excessive competition and growth, and the alternative set of strategies, could act as at least parts of a theoretical basis for a nascent, but distinctive, radical green alternative that is threatening to become a significant political force. As such, this social green approach could form the equivalent of a sort of ‘new’ new left, albeit with distinct differences from the heavily theoretical new left of the late 1960s. The new green radicalism is not merely about changing policies at a governmental level; it also depends on people changing their lifestyles at home, at work and as consumers. It is about demanding a higher quality of life, not just the higher wages that were the central goal in the economistic approach so redolent of the traditional left.

Originally published in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 4, October 2000

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