Red and green

I’m a regular visitor to Steve Chapman’s blog. There's usually something there that interests me and I occasionally comment. When I visited yesterday I left a comment on a post he had up about environmentalism.

Here’s what snagged me:

Environmentalism, and the risk-averse mentality that goes with it, must seem like manna from heaven to socialists - a whole new reason to expand the power and reach of government, their idol. Both socialists and environmentalists do seem more and more to be singing from the same hymn-sheet

Socialists and environmentalists have been singing the same tune for some time.

What passes for “environmentalism” today is largely a creature of the internationalist left; criticisms of capitalism are increasingly being couched in environmental terms and the wider green movement shares much of the left’s agenda.

The roots of the green movement in Europe are deepest red.

The Green Party in Germany, established in the 1980s, took many of its ideas and drew much of its membership from the anti-nuclear movement that had developed out of the European New Left of the late sixties and seventies.

In Britain the situation is a little more complex. The UK Green Party only formally came into being in 1985 when the Ecology Party voted to change its name. The Ecology Party had been established in 1975 and was a strange coalition of radical environmentalists, patrician conservationists and New Age hippies. But, unlike their colleagues in France and Germany, the UK Green Party has had difficulty in developing and maintaining strong links with the wider environmental movement.

In the seventies, parts of that wider movement in the UK were particularly radical. Anticipating revolution and the violent overthrow of the existing social order, they held communist China aloft as the model for a new “green” society.

Today, some of those proto-revolutionaries are respected members of the environmental movement and continue to exert an influence on green thinking.

Godfrey Boyle is a Senior Lecturer in the Open University's Technology Faculty and a respected author, while Peter Harper works at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales from where he occasionally sallies forth to lecture the world on the wisdom of sustainability.

In 1976 Boyle and Harper edited a book called “Radical Technology”. Published by Wildwood House, it offered a compendium of practical techniques and theoretical perspectives on radical environmentalism and alternative technology.

Here’s the first paragraph of the Introduction.

Given that modern capitalist industrial societies are morally contemptible, ruthlessly exploitative, ecologically bankrupt, and a hell of a drag to live in, is there anything we can do to change them?

Modern capitalist societies come in for a lot of criticism from Boyle and Harper in contrast to communist China, which “was, and remains an inspiration”:

She is practising many principles of radical technology in a strikingly original way […] creating a balance of mental and manual work in a context of rigorous equality and guaranteed welfare rights.

This is Mao’s China they’re talking about!

The book closes with an article on China by Tony Durham. Durham regards the Chinese as “the worlds leading practitioners of radical technology” and quotes Mao approvingly whenever the opportunity arises.

Dismissing the example of India as a country that was also making use of intermediate technology at a village level, Durham makes it clear that China is to be praised as much for its communist system as for its use of radical technology.

The crucial difference is not in the technologies […] but in their respective class structures and political systems.

Remember Mao’s China? If radical environmentalists ever gain power you won’t have to, you’ll be living it.