REPOSTED: Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism
by Minqi Li / Monthly Review.
Note: Minqi Li is a critic of China, regarding the nation as simply a capitalist state.
(Jul 01, 2008 . REPOSTED)
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he 2007 assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms that it is virtually certain that human activities (mainly through the use of fossil fuels and land development) have been responsible for the global warming that has taken place since the industrial revolution. Under current economic and social trends, the world is on a path to unprecedented ecological catastrophes.1 As the IPCC report was being released, new evidence emerged suggesting that climate change is taking place at a much faster pace and the potential consequences are likely to be far more dreadful than is suggested by the IPCC report.
The current evidence suggests that the Arctic Ocean could become ice free in summertime possibly as soon as 2013, about one century ahead of what is predicted by the IPCC models. With the complete melting of the Arctic summer sea ice, the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheets may become unavoidable, threatening to raise the sea level by five meters or more within this century. About half of the world’s fifty largest cities are at risk and hundreds of millions of people will become environmental refugees.2
James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, argued that to avoid a devastating rise in sea levels associated with the irreversible ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antarctica, as well as massive species extinction, the world should aim to limit further global warming to no more than 1˚C (or 1.8˚F) relative to 2000. According to the existing IPCC models, this implies an atmospheric concentration of CO2 no more than 450 ppm. However, in a recent study, Hansen argued that the IPCC models failed to take into account various potential climate feedbacks. Paleoclimate evidence suggests that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization has developed and to which life on earth is adapted,” atmospheric concentration of CO2 must be reduced to about 350 ppm. The world’s current CO2 concentration is 387 ppm and growing at a rate of 2 ppm a year.5
It is quite obvious that the very survival of humanity and human civilization is at stake. Given the gravity of the situation, many people (including some who claim to have the socialist political perspective) put their hope on an ecological reform of the global capitalist system, insisting that such a reform is within the technological and institutional feasibilities of the existing social system. The urgent and unavoidable political questions are: is it at all possible for the existing social system—the system of global capitalism, in all of its conceivable forms—effectively to address the crisis of global climate change and avoid the most catastrophic consequences? If not, what would be the minimum requirements for an alternative social system that will have the institutional capacity to prevent the crisis or, if the crisis cannot be prevented, to help human civilization to survive the crisis? These are the questions that anyone who is seriously concerned with the global ecological crisis will have to confront one way or the other.
Stabilizing the Climate: Technical Options
To prevent or alleviate further global warming, greenhouse gas emissions from human activities (especially the CO2 emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels) will have to be greatly reduced. The emissions of CO2 in turn depend on the emissions intensity of energy consumption (“Emissions Per Unit of Energy Consumption”), the energy intensity of economic output (“energy consumption per unit of output”), and the level of economic output (typically measured as GDP.) Thus, CO2 emissions = economic output ´ energy consumption per unit of output ´ emissions per unit of energy consumption.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the pursuit of profit and capital accumulation. Individual capitalists, corporations, and nation-states engage in constant and intense competition against one another in the capitalist world market. To survive and prevail in the competition, and driven by the desire for greater profits (or more rapid economic growth), individual capitalists, corporations, and nation-states are all pressured and motivated to expand production and accumulate capital on increasingly larger scales. Thus, under capitalism, economic output normally tends to grow, except in periods of economic crisis.
On paper, if energy intensity falls rapidly to offset economic growth, then the level of energy consumption does not have to grow. However, all economic activities inevitably involve certain physical or chemical transformations and must consume some energy (this is true not only for the material production sectors but also for the so-called services sectors). There is a physical limit to how much energy intensity can fall given any economic activity.
Given the way that capitalist markets operate, any decline of energy intensity tends to make energy products cheaper, as short-term demand for energy falls relative to supply. Cheaper energy products, however, encourage people to consume more energy in the long run. Thus, falling energy intensity (i.e., rising energy efficiency) is simply translated into more rapid capital accumulation (economic growth) and rarely leads to absolute declines in energy consumption.6
In reality, capitalist economic growth is usually accompanied by rising energy consumption. Since 1973, despite relatively sluggish world economic growth, world energy consumption has been growing at 2 percent a year. At this rate, world energy consumption will increase by 130 percent between now and 2050. Given these trends, the emissions intensity of world energy consumption will have to be cut drastically or the scale of economic output will have to decline markedly if there is to be any hope of reducing CO2 emissions to an appropriate level.
Fossil fuels account for about three-quarters of the primary energy consumed in electricity generation. To reduce CO2 emissions from electricity generation, there are three technical possibilities: carbon capture and storage; nuclear electricity; and electricity generation from renewables (such as geothermal, wind, solar, tides, waves, and ocean currents).
Emissions from power plants using fossil fuels can be reduced if the carbon emitted in the process of electricity generation can be captured and then stored underground without being released into the atmosphere. Carbon capture and storage is likely substantially to increase the capital cost of electricity generation and reduce energy efficiency (as the process of capturing and storing carbon requires energy). There may not be enough good, leak-proof sites to store very large amounts of carbon. The technology remains unproven, and cannot be applied to existing power stations. This means that, at best, it will take decades before carbon capture and storage is applied to a substantial portion of the world’s power plants.7
Nuclear electricity has very serious environmental and safety problems. It produces massive amounts of radioactive wastes. It uses uranium, which is a nonrenewable mineral resource. The German Energy Watch Group points out that the world’s proven and possible reserves of uranium would be able to support the current level of demand for uranium for at most seventy years and the world could face uranium supply shortages after about 2020. Moreover, given the long lead time to plan and construct nuclear reactors, it will be difficult to replace the half of existing nuclear power plants that will retire in the coming one to two decades.8
Electricity generation from renewables is not an environmental panacea. The equipment and buildings required for “renewable” electricity need to be built by the industrial sector using fossil fuels and nonrenewable mineral resources. Relative to conventional electricity, electricity generated from renewables remains expensive. Wind and solar—the two most important renewable energy sources—are variable and intermittent, and, therefore, cannot serve as the “base-load” electricity, requiring substantial conventional electricity capacity as backup.9
With the exception of biomass, renewables can only be used to generate electricity.10 Electricity generation accounts for less than 40 percent of the world’s total primary energy supply and only 20 percent of the total final consumption. About one-third of the primary consumption of fossil fuels is used for electricity consumption, but two-thirds are used as liquid, gaseous, and solid fuels in transport, industrial, agricultural, services, and residential sectors.
Out of the total final consumption of fossil fuels, about 40 percent is used in the transport sector, 24 percent in the industrial sector, 23 percent in the agricultural, services, and residential sectors, and 13 percent is used as raw materials for chemical industries. Electricity obviously cannot replace fossil fuels as chemical industrial inputs. In addition, it would be very difficult or impossible for electricity to replace fossil fuels in their uses in sea and air transportation, freight transportation on roads, high-temperature industrial processes, and the powering of heavy equipment in industrial, construction, and agricultural sectors. While it might be technically feasible to replace the gasoline-fueled passenger cars with electric cars (and passenger cars might be the crux of modern capitalist consumer culture), the technology remains immature and it could take decades before the electric car dominates the market.
Moreover, as currently about three-quarters of the primary energy used in electricity generation derives from fossil fuels and about three units of coal are required to generate one unit of electricity, an electrification of transport, industry, and other sectors would tend to increase rather than decrease CO2 emissions. For the purpose of climate stabilization, electrification of these sectors would not make much sense unless the bulk of the electricity generation has been “de-carbonized” (that is, the conventional fossil-fuels generated electricity replaced with carbon-captured, nuclear, and renewable electricity).
Even if all of the economic and technical difficulties discussed above were to be overcome, it is likely to take decades before the world’s electricity generation is largely transformed, and it could take several more decades to electrify much of the world’s industrial and transportation infrastructure. By then global ecological catastrophes would be all but inevitable.
Biomass is the only renewable energy source that can be used to make liquid and gaseous fuels.11 However, limited by the available productive land and fresh water, biomass cannot provide more than a small fraction of the world’s demand for liquid and gaseous fuels. Worse, recent studies reveal that taking into account emissions in land development and soil erosion, fuels made from biomass actually emit more greenhouse gases than conventional petroleum.12
Climate Change and the Limits to Growth
According to the IPCC report, to limit global warming to 2–2.4˚C (relative to the pre-industrial temperature), it is necessary to stabilize the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)—taking into account the total effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases—in the atmosphere at 445–490 ppm. This would in turn require that global CO2 emissions peak between 2000 and 2015, and fall by 50–85 percent from the 2000 levels by 2050.
Global CO2 emissions have been growing at about 3 percent a year since 2000. If the current trend continues, by 2010 global emissions would be 34 percent greater than the 2000 levels. It follows that to stabilize the CO2e at 445–490 ppm, global emissions need to fall by 63–89 percent from the 2010 levels.
Can these emissions reduction targets be accomplished under the system of global capitalism, with its constant tendency towards accumulation of capital and economic growth? Table 1 presents several alternative scenarios of emissions reduction and economic growth that are consistent with a 63 percent reduction of emissions (which would allow for stabilizing CO2e in the atmosphere at 490 ppm), assuming global emissions peak in 2010 and decline thereafter. In other words, the intent is to point to some possible combinations of changes in energy intensity, emissions intensity, and economic growth that would meet the target of stabilizing CO2e levels at 490 ppm. These scenarios, while hypothetical and based on optimistic assumptions, highlight the dramatic changes necessary to stabilize CO2 levels. They help to illustrate that no sensible goals of climate stabilization can be accomplished under conditions of endless economic growth and capital accumulation.
As is discussed above, in many areas it is technically very difficult or impossible to replace direct consumption of fossil fuels with electricity. Nevertheless, in all scenarios, it is assumed that 50 percent of the fossil fuels final consumption will be electrified by 2050. Moreover, despite various limitations to carbon-captured, nuclear, and renewable electricity, in different scenarios, it is optimistically assumed that 50, 75, or 100 percent of the electricity generation currently using fossil fuels will be de-carbonized by 2050 (corresponding to average declines in emissions intensity of 1, 1.7, or 2.7 percent a year respectively). Energy intensity is assumed to fall by 33, 45, or 55 percent by 2050 (corresponding to average decline of 1, 1.5, and 2 percent a year respectively). With a 33 percent reduction of energy intensity, the world average would approach the average level of “energy efficiency” seen in “advanced” capitalist countries today. With a 45 or 55 percent reduction, the world average would be comparable to the “energy efficiency” levels of Western European countries today.13
The observed levels of “energy efficiency” in the advanced capitalist countries result not only from some advanced technologies, but also from the massive relocation of energy-intensive industries to the global periphery. This raises the question whether these “efficiency” levels can ever be accomplished by peripheral countries, making the assumptions of global improvements in efficiency of this magnitude highly optimistic. It is also important to recognize that the three factors assessed in these scenarios—emissions intensity, energy intensity, and economic growth—are not necessarily independent of one another. Certain changes in the types of fuel used to alter emissions intensity, for example, may adversely affect the potential to improve energy intensity or economic growth, and vice versa. However, in the presented scenarios, these problems are optimistically ignored.
Given the assumed declines in emissions intensity and energy intensity, one can then calculate the maximum economic growth rate that is consistent with the emissions reduction objective. For example, in scenario 1, assume that 50 percent of electricity generation currently using fossil fuels will be de-carbonized by 2050 (implying that emissions intensity declines at an average annual rate of 1 percent) and that energy intensity falls at an average annual rate of 1 percent. Then to reduce emissions by 63 percent from 2010 to 2050, the average annual economic growth rate from 2010 to 2050 must not exceed –0.4 percent, that is, the economy must contract. Similarly, in scenario 9, assume that 100 percent of electricity generation currently using fossil fuels will be de-carbonized by 2050 (implying that emissions intensity declines at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent) and energy intensity falls at an average annual rate of 2 percent, then the average annual economic growth rate from 2010 to 2050 must not exceed 2.3 percent.
It is clear from table 1 that the assumed declines in emissions intensity and energy intensity are much more dramatic than the historical performance of the global capitalist economy (what the IPCC refers to as “business as usual”) and the assumptions for all scenarios are, therefore, very optimistic. Nevertheless, in most of the scenarios, the world economy would have virtually to stagnate and in one scenario, the world economy actually needs to contract absolutely. And this is even assuming declines in emissions and energy intensity that exceed historical averages, and dramatically so in the case of emissions intensity, where the scenarios are based on a rate of improvement of at least more than three-fold and up to nine-fold the historical rates. Considering that the world population growth rate is about 1 percent a year, only the most optimistic scenarios would result in positive growth of per capita GDP.
Table 1. Stabilizing CO2e in atmosphere at 490 ppm, 2010-50: scenarios relying on various declines in emissions intensity of energy and energy intensity of the economy and the rates of economic growth they allow (annual rates of change).
Source: Historical data for world economic growth, energy consumption, and emissions are from World Bank, World Development Indicators Online,2008.
And even with these highly optimistic scenarios on atmospheric carbon stabilization, according to the IPCC estimate, the world would still warm by 2.4˚C (relative to pre-industrial times). Indeed, the IPCC projections fail to take into account many of the latest developments. The Arctic summer sea ice is now likely to disappear and the Arctic Ocean will, therefore, absorb more heat. An atmospheric concentration of CO2e of 490 ppm will probably lead to a global warming of 2.7˚C (rather than the 2.4˚C suggested by the IPCC report), taking the world dangerously close to the 3˚C threshold, which according to James Lovelock would amount to a global collective suicide by humanity.
If the goal is to stabilize atmospheric concentration of CO2e at 445 ppm, instead of 490 ppm, then the global emissions need to fall by 89 percent, not just 63 percent. At 445 ppm, global temperature would still rise by 2˚C (relative to pre-industrial times). Some major ecological catastrophes would be unavoidable and dangerous climate feedback cycles could be initiated. Far more drastic cuts in global emissions would be required if the goal is truly to stabilize the climate and create a sufficiently large safety margin.
Table 2. Scenarios of emissions reduction and world economic growth (stabilizing CO2e in atmosphere at 445 ppm, 2010-50, annual rate of change).
Source: Historical data for world economic growth, energy consumption, and emissions are from World Bank, World Development Indicators Online,2008.
Table 2 presents the alternative scenarios of emissions reduction and economic growth that are consistent with an 89 percent reduction of emissions. The rest of the assumptions are the same as table 1. It turns out that the world economy would have to contract in all scenarios. For scenarios 1 to 3 (where the assumed declines in emissions intensity and energy intensity are clearly optimistic in comparison with the historical performance of global capitalism), the world economy would have to fall by two-thirds to three-quarters after 2010 to accomplish the objective of emissions reduction.
The results presented in tables 1 and 2 suggest that under no plausible circumstances could the objective of climate stabilization be compatible with the endless expansion of the global capitalist economy. However, the capitalist economic system is inherently incapable of operating with a non-growing (not to say contracting) economy.
The Politics of Climate Change and the Imperative for Socialism
Could this author be too pessimistic? Is the “ingenuity,” “innovativeness,” “adaptability,” and “resilience” of capitalism underestimated? The spokespersons of the mainstream environmental movement, such as Lester R. Brown (author of Plan B and director of Earth Policy Institute) and Amory Lovins (coauthor with Paul Hawken and L. Hunter Lovins of Natural Capitalism), try to convince us that magical technologies will come to the rescue. Solar panel costs will fall to the floor, as energy efficiency will surge ten-fold. Greenhouse gases emissions and other pollution can be reduced drastically, while gross domestic product will keep growing explosively. For them, there is no inherent conflict between production for profit and capital accumulation on the one hand and ecological sustainability on the other.
Their typical line of argument is that “the technology is already available” and “all that is needed is political will.” By “political will,” they are of course not referring to anything like fundamental social transformation. Instead, they are talking about some legislative reforms and international agreements within the basic capitalist framework. At most, they would demand some limited changes in personal consumer behavior.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he mainstream environmental movement, as far as its social composition is concerned, mainly consists of people who belong to the upper middle class in a capitalist society. They include the university professors, engineers, technicians, managers, financial analysts, and other professionals. Although they typically do not own significant amounts of the means of production, they play important managerial and technical functions for the capitalists and enjoy substantial material privileges relative to the working class.
In periods of revolutionary upsurge, such as in the 1960s, some of them could be rapidly radicalized and become various “ultra-leftists.” In periods of counter revolution, they could become the most important ally of the ruling class in the offensive against the working people. In the 1980s and ’90s, the upper middle class was an important social base for neoliberalism in many countries and they played a crucial role in the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China.
As the global ecological crisis deepens, some among the upper middle class recognize or sense that the existing capitalist “life style” is in serious trouble and cannot be sustained indefinitely. Yet, they are unable or unwilling to imagine anything beyond the capitalist system, on which their relatively privileged material life depends. They are not yet ready to give up their implicit political support for the capitalist class. Their living conditions and experiences are very much detached from those of the working class. It is therefore difficult for them to see that only with a massive mobilization and organization of the working class could there be any hope for the social transformation required for ecological sustainability to be accomplished. The upper-middle-class environmentalists, as a result, have to put their desperate hope (or faith) in technological miracles on the one hand and the power of moral persuasion on the other hand (which they hope would convince the capitalist class to behave morally and rationally).
However, the laws of motion of capitalism will keep operating so long as the capitalist system remains intact, independent of the individual wills and against the best wishes of the upper-middle-class environmentalists. Sooner or later, those truly conscientious environmentalists will have to choose between the commitment to ecological sustainability and the commitment to an exploitative and oppressive social system. Furthermore, with the deepening of the global ecological crisis and the crisis of global capitalism in general, it may soon become increasingly difficult for the capitalist system to accommodate the material privileges of the upper middle class while simultaneously meeting the requirements of production for profit and accumulation.
As I discussed earlier, there are many technical obstacles to the de-carbonization of the world’s energy system. Brown and Lovins have greatly exaggerated the potentials of technical change. But even if many of the proposed highly efficient energy technologies using renewables become available right away, their application will be delayed by the inherent obstacles to technological diffusion in the capitalist system. In an economic system based on production for profit, a new technology is “intellectual property.” People or countries that cannot afford to pay are denied access. Even today hundreds of millions of people in the world have no access to electricity. How many decades would it take before they start to have access to solar-powered electric cars?
Moreover, unlike consumer novelties such as cell phones or lap tops, which can be readily manufactured by the existing industrial system, the de-carbonization of the world’s energy system requires fundamental transformation of the world’s economic infrastructure. This basically means that the pace of de-carbonization, even under the most ideal conditions, cannot really be faster than the rate of depreciation of long-lasting fixed assets. Considering that many buildings and other long-lasting structures will stand for half a century or even longer, the assumed rates of de-carbonization presented in tables 1 and 2 must be seen as extremely optimistic.
From a purely technical point of view, the most simple and straightforward solution to the crisis of climate change is immediately to stop all economic growth and start to downsize world material consumption in an orderly manner until the greenhouse gases emissions fall to reasonable levels. This can obviously be accomplished with the existing technology. If all the current and potentially available de-carbonization technologies are introduced to all parts of the world as rapidly as possible, the world should still have the material production capacity to meet the basic needs of the entire world’s population even with a much smaller world economy (scenarios 1 to 3 in table 2 would roughly correspond to a return to the 1960s material living standards).
However, under a capitalist system, so long as the means of production and surplus value are owned by the capitalists, there are both incentives and pressures for the capitalists to use a substantial portion of the surplus value for capital accumulation. Unless surplus value is placed under social control, there is no way for capital accumulation (and therefore economic growth) not to take place. Moreover, given the enormous inequality in income and wealth distribution under capitalism, how could a global capitalist economy manage an orderly downsizing while meeting the basic needs of billions of people? Economic growth is indispensable for capitalism to alleviate its inherent social contradictions.
The Kyoto protocol requires that the advanced capitalist countries reduce their CO2emissions by 5 percent from 1990 to 2012. Figure 1 presents the CO2 emissions of the world’s largest economies from 1990 to 2005.14 The United States refused to sign the protocol and U.S. emissions grew by 22 percent from 1990 to 2005. Among the signatories of the Kyoto protocol, Japan’s emissions grew by 16 percent and the Euro-zone emissions tended to grow since the mid-1990s. UK emissions (due mainly to its massive shift from coal to North Sea gas) have been on a flat trend.
Ironically, Russia is the only large economy that has reduced emissions substantially since 1990, during a period in which its economic output and population declined. Russia’s emissions fell by one-third from 1990 to 2005, with an annual rate of reduction of 2.7 percent. If the world economy were to repeat the Russian experience three times, that is, toexperience the kind of economic collapse that Russia experienced in the 1990s three times with a comparable reduction of emissions, then by 2050 the world emissions would fall by two-thirds. This would only allow the atmospheric concentration of CO2 equivalent to stabilize at about 490 ppm. As is discussed above, this would still fall short of what is necessary.
Chart 1. CO2 emissions, selected countries (millions of tons)
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators Online, http://devdata.worldbank.org/dataonline.
Since 1990, China’s emissions and India’s emissions have more than doubled, and China has now overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. At the current rate, China’s emissions will double in ten years and India’s will double in less than fifteen years. The European Union is currently committed to a reduction of emissions by 20 percent (from the 1990 levels) by 2020. All of this reduction would be offset by just one year of China’s economic growth. With the great Chinese capitalist boom, China now builds two coal-fired power plants every week. This means that every four years China will build as many coal-fired power plants as currently exist in the United States. What hope is there for climate stabilization with this kind of fanatical drive for accumulation? What magical technology can make this kind of capitalism sustainable?
It should be pointed out that the Chinese workers and peasants have not at all benefited from this relentless search for capitalist profit. It is the transnational corporations (who use China as the world’s “workshop”) and the Chinese capitalist elites that have reaped enormous profits from this. To a lesser extent, the upper middle classes in the advanced capitalist countries have also benefited from the cheap consumer goods and “services” produced by the workers in China, India, and other parts of the periphery.
On June 14, 2007, Financial Times published a quite bizarre article (“What is at risk is not the climate but freedom”) by Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and the former leader of the anticommunist “velvet revolution”:
"We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough…for environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather…Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us…
[Global] warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established truth”…As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."
The freedom-loving President Klaus (who is apparently a good student of Friedrich Hayek) then demanded that scientists “have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.” Klaus then assured us that “advances in technology” and “increases in disposable wealth” will continue and “will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.”
One has to admit that it does take some courage for Klaus to defend “freedom” at a time when an important political consensus is being formed among the international bourgeoisie that the issue of climate change cannot be ignored any more. Given my own political experience and background in China (a former socialist state like Czechoslovakia), I do feel some strange familiarity with Klaus’s position.
Frankly, only an extremely reactionary politician who has deep-in-the-heart hatred of the working class and socialism could have made such outlandish comments. In one respect, however, Klaus is closer to the truth than all the mainstream environmentalists. It does take global “central” planning for humanity to overcome the crisis of climate change, if by “central” one is talking about self-conscious, rational coordination by democratic institutions.
The technical requirements for climate stabilization are clear. The global energy infrastructure needs to be fundamentally transformed to be based on renewables. Much of the world’s economic infrastructure will have to be changed accordingly. Agriculture will need to be reorganized to follow sustainable principles and to be freed from dependence on fossil fuels for fertilizers and machinery. The entire transportation system will have to be re-built, with railways and public transportation operated by renewable electricity playing prominent roles. The scale of the world economy will need to be reduced in accordance with the emissions reduction objectives. All of these need to be accomplished without undermining the basic needs of the world’s population.
It is clear that capitalism cannot accomplish these objectives. If we do not want to undermine the ecological conditions that support civilization, what else can accomplish these goals other than socialism with public ownership of the means of production and democratic planning?
So-called “market socialism” is not an option. Both theory and historical experience have demonstrated that “market socialism” inevitably leads to capitalism. Those who object to socialist planning might argue that the experience of historical socialisms suggested that socialist planning would be “inefficient.”
Leave aside the question that the future socialism would no doubt do better than the historical socialisms in democracy and economic efficiency, given the extreme gravity of the global ecological crisis, “efficiency” is simply not a relevant issue. The real question is: can socialism provide food, education, and health care to everyone on the earth? We know that historical socialisms were able to, and Cuba is still able to accomplish this with quite limited material resources.
Capitalism has always failed to provide food, education, and health care to at least hundreds of millions of people. If the global ecological crisis is not overcome, then capitalism will eventually fail the entirety of humanity. Is the choice not clear enough?
Notes
1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report,” November 2007, http://www.ipcc.ch.
2. David Spratt, “The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007,” October 2007.
3. David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red (Friends of the Earth, 2008), http://www.climatecodered.net.
4. David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red; Jonathan Leake, “Fiddling with Figures while the Earth Burns,” Times Online, May 6 2007, http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock; James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 15–38.
5. James Hansen et al., “Target Atmostpheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” (abstract), April 2008, (accessed May 2008). Also see John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Destruction,” Monthly Review 58, no. 8 (2007): 1–14.
6. This is known as the Jevons Paradox, named after the nineteenth-century British economist William Stanley Jevons who first took note of this perverse effect. See Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “William Stanley Jevons and The Coal Question,” Organization & Environment 14, no. 1 (2001): 93–98; John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 94–95.
7. Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 110–11.
8. Energy Watch Group, “Uranium Resources and Nuclear Energy,” EWG-Series No.1/2006 (December).
9. Michael H. Heusemann, “The Limits of Technological Solutions to Sustainable Development,” Clean Technology and Environmental Policy 5 (2003): 21–34. A recent experiment sponsored by the Germany government intends to show that a network with 61 percent of electricity from wind, 14 percent from solar photovoltaics, and 25 percent from biomass, can meet up to 100 percent of electricity demand (“Renewed Energy,” The Guardian, February 26, 2008). But as discussed below, biomass is very problematic and could emit more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. Thus, the experiment suggests a 75 percent limit to de-carbonization of electricity generation.
10. The energy statistics discussed here and in the following paragraph are from: International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2007.
11. Although there has been much talk of developing a “hydrogen economy,” hydrogen itself is not a primary energy source (i.e., there are no natural stores of hydrogen to be exploited). Hydrogen fuel is produced from water, a process which requires energy input. Thus, hydrogen is simply an energy storage mechanism (much like a battery), and its environmental consequences depend on the source of energy that is used to produce it.
12. Joseph Fargione, et al., “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” Science 319, no. 5867 (2008): 1235–38; Timothy Searchinger, et al., “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change,” Science 319, no. 5867 (2008): 1238–40.
13. According to Key World Energy Statistics (see footnote 9), in 2005, measured by 2000 U.S. dollars, the energy intensity of OECD countries was 37 percent below the world average, France 41 percent below world average, Germany 44 percent below world average, and UK 56 percent below world average.
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Revolutionary wisdom
Words from an Irish patriot—
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Winstanley’s Ecology Daniel Johnson, Monthly Review Beginning in 2011 a festival in honor of the seventeenth-century radical Gerrard Winstanley has been held annually in the town of Wigan, in northwestern England. Through poetry, music, film, and other activities, the celebration commemorates the life and ideas of Wigan-born Winstanley, leader of the Digger, or True Leveller, movement of the English Revolution (1640–1660). It is now forgotten that the great Cromwell, leader of the middle class (merchant/capitalist) revolution against the king also repressed the Levellers, as too radical for his taste. Any similarities with the American and French revolutions in this regard are not coincidental. Largely forgotten for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the communist thought of Winstanley was rediscovered by German and Russian Marxists in the late nineteenth century, leading to Winstanley’s inclusion in the list of revolutionary thinkers Lenin had inscribed on the obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden. Led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Winstanley’s name is eighth on the list of nineteen revolutionaries. From the socialists of the late nineteenth century to participants in the Wigan Festival in the early 2000s, Winstanley and the Diggers have provided inspiration for radical leftists for more than a hundred years. In the twenty-first century, True Leveller thought and practice has had a particularly notable influence on environmental and anti-consumerist activists like guerilla gardeners, freegans, urban allotment advocates, and squatters, among others.1 What accounts for the lasting popularity of a relatively marginal social movement and its main theorist in the middle of seventeenth-century England? More importantly for present purposes, why have Winstanley and the Diggers held a prominent place for modern activists concerned with environmental issues and consumerism? The True Levellers have appealed to anarchists as well as socialists, and the Digger legacy has been claimed by both traditions.2 The Diggers rejected traditional forms of authority, viewing the state and organized religion as instruments of domination created to subdue and exploit common people. Winstanley’s development of this idea therefore provides a crucial analysis of the social function of religion and the state in ways that prefigured later Marxist as well as anarchist theories. Lying at the root of state and clerical power was property, and in Winstanley’s theory of history the initial privatization and division of land led to the rise of government, state-sponsored religion, and law in the interest of monopolizing rulers. Though never fully systematized (unlike other famous thinkers of the time like John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, or James Harrington, Winstanley wrote his Digger tracts while experiencing severe repression), the True Leveller’s philosophy was consistently anti-authoritarian and egalitarian, evolving from a pre-Digger radical millennialism to a revolutionary materialism over the course of his brief writing career. THE CROMWELL MOMENT, A HISTORICAL SNAPSHOT. CLICK ON THE BAR BELOW [learn_more caption=”Revolutionary winds sweep over England”] The Diggers were a group of Protestant English agrarian socialists,[1][2] begun by Gerrard Winstanley as True Levellers in 1649, who became known as Diggers, because of their attempts to farm on common land. real property) to reform the existing social order with an agrarian lifestyle based on their ideas for the creation of small egalitarianrural communities. They were one of a number of nonconformist dissenting groups that emerged around this time. One of the greatest and bravest men of that turbulent age was John Lilburne (1614 – 29 August 1657), also known as Freeborn John. He was an English political Leveller before, during and after the English Civil Wars 1642–1650. He coined the term “freeborn rights“, defining them as rights with which every human being is born, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or human law.[1] In his early life he was a Puritan, though towards the end of his life he became a Quaker. His works have been cited in opinions by the United States Supreme Court. Why Hollywood has never found it in its collective imagination to make a film about a real life hero like Lilburne says, preferring comic book heroes or John Wayne type fantasies, says plenty about that industry’s self-imposed propaganda limits. [/learn_more] Though the Digger tradition has been celebrated by environmental activists in England, surprisingly little has been written about Winstanley’s ecology outside his native country.3Readers of Monthly Review will be familiar with the growing field of ecological Marxism, and the work of writers who argue for the fundamental incompatibility between a capitalist economic system and an environmentally sustainable human future.4 Winstanley and the Diggers also saw such an incompatibility, though from a distinctly rural and pre-industrial perspective during the development of agrarian capitalism in England. At a time when the enclosure of common lands threw vast numbers of peasants off the land and into wage labor and grinding poverty, Winstanley developed a radical philosophy that associated private ownership of land and wage labor with the exploitation and degradation of people and the earth. Winstanley and the Diggers were unique among political groups in the English Revolution in their advocacy for the interests of the impoverished rural working classes; integral to this support was a unique concern with land use and the environment. In their constant emphasis on common access to resources for use over wasteful private consumption, True Leveller philosophy had, to use Derek Wall’s term, a “built-in ecological principle.”5 Ultimately, for Winstanley and the Diggers economic inequality and exploitation, state violence, and the destruction of the earth were deeply interrelated processes; a radical transformation in social relations—the abolition of private property and the establishment of a “free Commonwealth” based on reason and secular education—was required. Inseparable from Winstanley’s communist philosophy, and what also helps to explain the Diggers’ continuing relevance and influence, was the group’s commitment to a specific form of praxis. The Digger communities that by the winter of 1650 had emerged throughout England were attempts to create autonomous agricultural communities for the landless poor, and their mission to reclaim the commons for the working classes has been likened to European squatter movements, the occupation of factories in Argentina and Italy, and the Brazilian MST (Landless Workers’ Movement).6 Though in some respects the experiments prefigure the utopian socialist movements of the nineteenth century in their emphasis on nonviolent social change, Winstanley’s call for a general strike in The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced (1649) and other works, and his blueprint for a communist commonwealth in The Law of Freedom (1652), demonstrate a Digger commitment to revolutionary action and transformation. Of the many radical groups that flourished during the English Revolution (including Ranters, Seekers, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchists, and others), only Winstanley and the True Levellers theorized and attempted to put into practice an alternative social system not rooted in millenarian religious belief. As Winstanley put it in the summer of 1649: “Then I was made to write a little book called, The new Law of righteousnesse, and therein I declared it; yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts run in me that words and writing were all nothing and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.”7 Despite their ultimate defeat, a brief exploration of the Digger movement can demonstrate how some working-class English men and women responded to the ravages of early modern agrarian capitalism, and how organic intellectuals like Winstanley rooted a critique of existing social relations in a radical plebeian ecology. In so doing the True Levellers can contribute to the growing historical literature on ecosocialism, and at the same time provide inspiration and ideas to new generations of activists. At a time when the appropriation of the earth and indigenous knowledge for private profit is accelerating, and the global working classes are struggling to construct viable socialist alternatives, it is worth revisiting the theory and practice of what was the first organized anti-capitalist movement in history. Origins and the English Revolution In the spring of 1607, thousands of people in the Midlands of England rose to prevent the enclosure of their common lands. Participants (mainly rural laborers, artisans, and small farmers) referred to themselves collectively as “diggers” and “levellers”—up to that time terms of elite derision and contempt.8 Anti-enclosure riots were not, however, new to the early seventeenth century. Large-scale popular opposition to enclosing (the privatization of common lands) and engrossing (the amalgamation of two or more farms into one) dated to the fifteenth century. The conversion of arable to pasture land with the expansion of the cloth industry, a rapidly growing population, and changing class relations in the sixteenth century signaled the rise of agrarian capitalism in the English countryside.9 It is often forgotten that Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was in large part a work of social criticism aimed at landholders who enclosed the commons for the production of woolens. The idle English nobility and gentry enclosed all land possible, leaving nothing for food production. Former tenants whose labor was no longer needed in the fields were forced to wander, beg, or steal for their survival, and many found themselves unemployed in “hideous poverty.”10 Though More himself was no revolutionary, popular rebellions were a constant feature of Tudor society, as a new class of capitalist yeomen emerged at the expense of the traditional nobility and peasantry.11 The revolts of 1607 were part of a long tradition of peasant protest in England; four decades later the Diggers would take this tradition in a dramatically new direction. The English Revolution was a complicated affair. Most traditional accounts emphasize the political and religious conflict between Parliament and King Charles I, with the execution of the king in 1649 followed by a period of political instability that ended with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Yet the century preceding the outbreak of war witnessed dramatic economic and religious change in England. King Henry VIII’s establishment of the Anglican Church in 1536 was accompanied by the dissolution of the monasteries, which led to the systematic transferal of property that benefitted large landowners and the royal state. Between 1580 and 1620 the enclosure movement resulted in a massive upward redistribution of wealth, while the 1590s and 1630s were decades of severe subsistence crises. The years 1646–1650—the period that witnessed the creation of the Digger movement—saw the worst run of bad harvests of the seventeenth century, as well as the lowest real wages for working people; starvation was reported in the north of England.12 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England saw the unprecedented creation of nationwide laws that legislated wages, apprenticeship, and poor relief; over the same period numerous petty crimes against property were made punishable by death.13 By the middle decades of the seventeenth-century England’s social, economic, legal, and religious landscape had been profoundly transformed. The first Diggers’ colony appeared on St. George’s Hill near Cobham, Surrey at the beginning of April 1649, seven years after the outbreak of civil war and two months after the beheading of Charles I. Though initially just five Diggers began to plant “parsenipps, and carretts, and beanes” on the admittedly barren commons, their numbers grew thereafter. From such modest beginnings it was envisioned would emerge a revolutionary movement, for the ultimate goal of the Diggers on St. George’s Hill was no less than to make the earth a “Common Treasury” for all, through shared agricultural labor on commonly held land. The Diggers would thus till the commons and wastes of England collectively; withdrawing their labor from commercial society they would decommodify social relations and establish the True Levellers’ relationship with the earth. Once the common people saw the success of the Digger experiment, they would refuse to labor for wages any longer, and would work to create free associations of communist commonwealths in England and throughout the world. By “labouring in the Earth in rightousnesse together,” the True Levellers intended to “lift up the Creation from that bondage of Civill Propriety, which it groans under.”14 Officials and writers were unsure what to make of the small group of radicals digging on St. George’s Hill. The Royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus made fun of “Prophet Everet’s”—a reference to William Everard, an early leader of the Diggers—intention to convert “Oatlands Park into a Wildernesse, and preach Liberty to the oppressed Deer,” while implicitly acknowledging the group’s potential threat to social order.15 Though officials of England’s New Model Army concluded the Diggers were not at that time a serious threat, some local residents commenced attacking the group almost immediately. Local lords like Francis Drake and freeholders organized gangs to attack the commune, and Winstanley responded in writings addressing the persecution and specious arrests for trespassing leveled against the Diggers. Despite incarcerations, the pulling down of houses, and the destruction of their spades and hoes, Digger numbers continued to grow. Yet finding local courts on the side of their oppressors, the group was forced to abandon St. George’s Hill in August of 1649, just five months after the digging commenced.16 The Diggers then moved to nearby Little Heath in Cobham, where they cultivated several acres of land, a number of houses were built, and new pamphlets were composed. Local hostility at Little Heath was less marked than at St. George’s Hill, as a number of Diggers had ties to the community and the parish of Cobham, and a history of local social tensions may have contributed to popular sympathy for the True Leveller colony. Yet official repression was more pronounced in Cobham than at St. George’s Hill; in October the community was harassed by local officials, and in the following month Digger houses were again pulled down by soldiers and organized thugs. Though local gentry, supported by justices of the peace, the county sheriff, and detachments of soldiers led a highly organized campaign against the group, they were unable to mobilize local commoners against the colony. As Digger communities in other parts of England sprouted into existence, the Little Heath group began to thrive—despite repression and a particularly brutal winter in 1649–1650. Yet their financial resources were dwindling, and in March 1650, as the Commonwealth government became increasingly concerned over the revolutionary social experiments being conducted by Diggers, the Council of State sent a military detachment to disband the community at Cobham, while other True Leveller colonies were also suppressed. In the midst of numerous legal actions against the Little Heath Diggers—including indictments for riot, trespass, illegal assembly, and the illegal erection of cottages—the radicals at Cobham disbanded in the summer of 1650.17 Winstanley’s most important works were composed under substantial duress over the short period of 1649–1650. Despite severe persecution, the True Levellers paradoxically sought a restoration of humankind’s natural equality by engaging in a dramatically new social experiment. As Winstanley formulated his unique vision, Diggers attempted to establish autonomous agricultural communities on the commons of England, to sustain themselves free of market relations, and to demonstrate to the laboring classes throughout the world that the power to emancipate themselves from slavery existed in this world. Whatever the practical limitations of the communities (and there were many—not least their mistaken belief that the ruling class could be persuaded voluntarily to relinquish its dominion), the Digger colonies show how common people could, through direct action and cooperation, formulate a radical alternative to existing social relations. Winstanley’s Ecology Though the Digger experiments were in large part a response to profound socio-political and religious crises, Winstanley’s ideas were formulated during a period of unprecedented cultural and intellectual ferment. As official censorship of the press in England lapsed in 1640 (only to return with the monarchy in 1660), common people for the first time were able to publish criticisms of the state and the official Anglican church, while interpreting religious doctrine in new, more egalitarian, ways. Although critics like the Puritan supporter of Parliament Thomas Edwards denounced the “Ecclesiasticall Anarchy” resulting from “all sorts of illiterate mechanick Preachers, yeah of Women and Boy Preachers,” what were traditionally subterranean anti-clerical beliefs among the common people were nonetheless expressed openly for the first time during the 1640s.18 In addition to the anti-hierarchical religious views of groups like Anabaptists and Seekers, anonymous early Digger petitions like Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1648) would influence the development of Winstanley’s thought—particularly the notion that “inclosers” had historically monopolized the earth’s natural bounty, creating inequality and class oppression among humankind.19 Winstanley, however, diverged from other radicals of the revolution in his novel interpretation of the relationship between the environment, property, social relations, and how to remedy the injustices that pervaded the world. The idea that God had given mankind dominion over the earth and its creatures, and that the fall of man destroyed the natural equality of Eden,20 were truisms for most people in early modern Christian Europe. Though Winstanley, like many radical Protestants of the time, drew on these beliefs, his religious views were highly unorthodox, and would have been punished as heretical in earlier periods. His use of the Bible was often allegorical, and his allegories were filled with natural imagery; the Garden of Eden, for example, was the inward spirit of humanity which had been filled with weeds—pride, envy, covetousness, and hypocrisy.21 From his earliest pre-Digger writings Winstanley also displayed a tendency towards a pantheism that would significantly shape his ecological outlook in later writings. These initial leanings were influenced by the belief in some radical circles (notably among Seekers, whose beliefs foreshadowed those of the Quakers) that God—or Reason, Winstanley’s substitute for God—dwelled within all human beings and throughout the natural world. In the pre-Digger work The Breaking of the Day of God (1648), Winstanley stressed that humankind was part of “one flesh, or one earth,” and that heaven was not to be sought in the skies as the histories had written. Rather, heaven could be found wherever God dwelled—which was to say, in every part of the material world.22 Early in 1649, prior to the establishment of the Digger colony on St. George’s Hill, Winstanley wrote that before the existence of private property and hierarchy “every creature walked evenly with man, and delighted in man, and was ruled by him; there was no opposition between him and beast, fowls, fishes, or any creature in the earth.”23 Winstanley’s Digger writings nonetheless diverged in important ways from his early works. Most importantly, his increasingly materialist orientation brought about a rethinking of humans’ relationship with each other and the earth—which necessarily led to the idea that liberation must come in this world. The foundation of these ideas were laid in the first Digger manifesto in 1649, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced. Here it is revealed that in the beginning of time the “great creator Reason” made the earth to be “a common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Man.” With the invention of private property, classes were created, establishing societies in which the majority labored in servitude and slavery for a minority that monopolized the land and goods it produced. Utilizing biblical evidence and symbolism, and dividing history into seemingly millenarian epochs (with great emphasis on the Norman conquest of England in 1066), Diggers declared their intention to liberate both humankind and the earth from the oppression of the ruling order: “we have now begun to declare it by action in digging up the common land, & casting in seed that we may eat our bread together in righteousnesse.” The figurative way in which Winstanley used the Bible, and the extent to which ecology informed Digger belief, was demonstrated in the Standard’s injunction to honor thy father and mother.24 Father here symbolized the “Spirit of Community,” while Mother was “the Earth, that brought us all forth.”25 Religion was by this time useful largely as an educative device; community and the earth had taken primacy in Winstanley’s now thoroughly materialist philosophy. Traditional religious belief also stressed that with the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden the curse of labor was inflicted on humankind by a vengeful God.26 Though a popular belief in the dignity and virtue of honest labor had existed for millennia, Winstanley turned many traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs regarding labor on their head. For the Diggers the physical act of labor was no longer a painful reminder of humankind’s sinful fall from grace. On the contrary, “labouring the Earth in righteousnesse” collectively, without wages, would liberate humans and the earth from oppression and the bondage of individual ownership. More radical still, the Standard recognized labor’s contribution to wealth/value, stressing that “the poor by their labour lifts up tyrants to rule over them,” as riches were transferred from producers to the thieves of labor’s produce. Winstanley therefore called on all those who labored for wages to refuse to work any longer, in effect demanding self-emancipation of the laboring classes through a general withdrawal of their labor (i.e., a general strike).27 At the root of this critique and call to action was the materialist notion that as Mother Earth brought forth all creatures, so all, “according to the Reason that rules in the Creation,” had an equal right to the fruits of the land. The True Levellers were self-consciously attempting to put into practice a program of liberation based on challenging deprecatory traditional beliefs regarding the “curse” of labor. Laboring in common for subsistence and comradeship was in fact “righteous,” and was associated with “universall Liberty and Freedome,” rather than with human sin and punishment.28 Winstanley continued to develop the ideas first expressed in the The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced over the following year, despite the severe repression experienced by the Diggers on St. George’s Hill and at Little Heath.29 The most complete expression of Winstanley’s evolving materialist philosophy was published in 1652, however, after the successful elimination of the Digger communities. The Law of Freedom was a blueprint for what Winstanley termed a “free Commonwealth,” in contrast to the “Kingly Government” that still prevailed in England, despite the execution of Charles I in 1649. Many Digger themes were evident in the work: the rich had obtained their wealth through the oppression of the laboring classes, after the appropriation of the earth had led to the establishment of class society and legalized domination. Official religion and ideas about heaven and hell were the creation of a national ministry designed to keep the people in ignorance and fear. The communist commonwealth would restore true freedom, and this freedom was rooted in Digger earth ecology: “True Freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the Earth.”30 Since private property had created oppression and exploitation, as one part of an interrelated ecological system the liberation of human society required the deliverance of the earth from the bondage of individual ownership. And, though his treatise was famously dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, Winstanley stressed that with the abolition of private property the people would be sovereign; the Commonwealth’s leader (at the time of the Rump Parliament) was vividly reminded that “The Earth wherein your Gourd grows is the Commoners of England.”31 The originality of the Law of Freedom lay in its program for a secular society characterized by equality, democracy, and a spirit of free inquiry. The work is also a complex mixture of hope and despair—the Digger communities had been destroyed, and Winstanley stressed to Cromwell that now “I have no power.” Though scholars have pointed to the patriarchal and harsh disciplinary measures evident in the work, it should be kept in mind these were rational, if severe, responses to anticipated criticisms from a dominant culture obsessed with “idleness” and social order. In contrast to social convention, in the free Commonwealth women would marry whom they desired, and throughout his writings Winstanley, like the Quakers after him, was far more radical than most contemporaries in arguing for woman’s natural equality with man.32Although in the free Commonwealth those unwilling to labor would be forced to work, the “idle” from the popular perspective were not the poor and unemployed; they were traditionally the “rich men” who lived at ease, “feeding and clothing themselves by the labors of other men.” Production in the free Commonwealth would be organized along uniquely democratic lines. Regulators of crafts and agriculture would oversee a system of apprenticeship, and these overseers would be annually elected by the workers themselves, “to prevent the creeping in of Lordly Oppression.”33 If an earlier Digger call for working-class self-emancipation was necessarily absent, Winstanley’s consistent hostility to class society and exploitation were expressed in a new blueprint for a society based on equality and democracy. Similarly revolutionary was the Law of Freedom’s educational system, which was rooted in experimental science, human reason, harmony with nature, and the widespread dissemination of knowledge. Private property and the exploitation of natural resources were in fact linked to the historical suppression of knowledge. If “the Earth were set free from Kingly Bondage,” and all were guaranteed a livelihood, the wonders of nature “would be made publike” instead of being monopolized by professors; with the establishment of the free Commonwealth knowledge will “cover the Earth, as the waters cover the Seas.” In keeping with Winstanley’s uncompromising anti-authoritarianism, a class of educated professionals was anathema, for the gatekeeper of information was “he who puts out the eyes of man’s knowledge, and tells him he must believe what others have writ or spoke, and must not trust to his own experience.” “Ministers” (like the overseers of trades and agriculture) would be elected annually; they would deliver secular lectures on history, law, and the sciences—though all would be free to address topics involving knowledge of the earth and movement of the stars and planets. Understanding of the material world was fundamental, for in nature “all true knowledge is wrapped up.”34 Winstanley’s plan for a communist commonwealth combined an absence of private property and exploitation, respect for the natural world, and an educational system whose focus was rational scientific inquiry rather than superstitious speculation. Rooted in his radical ecological vision, the True Leveller’s last published work sought to lay out a vision based on substantive social and environmental justice. The Diggers’ Contemporary Relevance In 2010 the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth adopted the “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth,” and submitted it to the United Nations for consideration.35 Though the English Revolution occurred prior to the emergence of eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses regarding natural rights, many of the issues emphasized in the Declaration resemble in fundamental ways ideas articulated by Winstanley and the Diggers in the late 1640s. The interrelatedness and interdependency of all living things, and the fundamental incompatibility of capitalist social relations with a sustainable and peaceful future for humankind emphasized in the Declaration’s preamble, would not have sounded strange to True Levellers. In contrast to a dominant view in early modern Christian Europe regarding human’s dominion over the earth and its resources, the Diggers, like the People’s Conference, recognized that “Mother Earth is the source of life, nourishment and learning and provides everything we need to live well.” Diggers’ call for the recognition of the earth as a common treasury, and for the “Birthright” of “universall Liberty and Freedome” among all peoples, presaged modern rights ideas in ways worth revisiting.36 C.B. Macpherson wrote that what distinguished Winstanley and the True Levellers or Diggers from the Levellers was “Winstanley’s utopian insight that freedom lay in free common access to the land. For Winstanley that was the key to freedom, for that was the only way to assure freedom from exploitation of man by man. The only natural right of the individual that Winstanley recognized was the natural right of men to labour together and live together, governing themselves according to a natural law of self preservation.”37 The Digger experiments and the ideas of Winstanley are also relevant in their call for self-organization among the working classes, and for emphasizing the intelligence and dignity of commoners often portrayed by elites as needing guidance and discipline. Liberation, as Winstanley frequently claimed in his Digger writings, would only come when working people throughout the world (not just in revolutionary England) withdrew their labor from market society, and set up a social system in which exploitation and poverty no longer existed. Winstanley frequently responded to elite criticisms regarding the emergence of “mechanick preachers” during the 1640s by noting that the biblical scriptures were written by “the experimentall hand” of shepherds, farmers, fishermen, and others of the laboring classes.38With the Law of Freedom, Winstanley made clear the radical democratic elements of his philosophy in his call for a secular education for all citizens of the commonwealth. In their revolutionary ideology, rooted in a radical ecological vision and centered on the self-emancipation of the oppressed through “righteous” collective labor and the sharing of knowledge, the Diggers have much to offer modern ecosocialist theory and practice. Notes |