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The Prophet Misarmed: Trotsky, Ecology and Sustainability
Sandy Irvine, What Next Journal
What Next editor: Leon Trotsky showed great insight on many issues but, argues Sandy Irvine, his biggest blind spot concerned ecological sustainability, now the greatest issue of our times. His thinking reflected the technological cornucopianism that bedevils the socialist tradition. Unless addressed it threatens to render the movement unable to address today’s primary challenge.
IT IS a tribute to Leon Trotsky’s standing that his ideas are still widely discussed. If the number of ex-members as well as actual supporters of avowedly and quasi-Trotskyist groups were to be counted, the total would reveal an army of people who, to some extent at least, have been influenced by his thought and deeds. It is not a question of numbers per se. Many leading figures in contemporary anti-globalisation, anti-racism and “stop the war” movements are Trotskyists in the broadest sense of the word. Many apolitical citizens are aware of his struggle with Stalin and subsequent fate.
…It is argued here that Trotsky both reflected and encouraged an even worse tendency amongst the radical Left, namely an almost total myopia about the most significant of all developments in the 20th century, the ecological crisis. It is the most serious, all-embracing challenge of our times. Global overwarming is only one of many symptoms of dangerous planetary disorder. Not only did Trotsky fail to anticipate the most serious failing in the dominant social and economic order, he actually endorsed technologies, lifestyle choices and policy goals that could only serve to increase the unsustainable impact of humankind on the Earth’s life-support systems. (The threat from nuclear war will not be discussed since, fortunately, it remains only a possibility whereas ecological meltdown is an actuality).
The following study focuses on one person. In doing so, it also comments on the more general socialist tradition, especially its Marxist variant of which he was a leading representative. Trotsky provides a particularly good case study. Whatever his failings, he was a very intelligent man. His writings on literature and other arts show great subtlety. He demonstrated immense foresight on many issues, especially the threat from Fascism. In his early political career, he perceptively warned of the dangers of excessive centralism in political organisations. In short, Trotsky combined remarkable erudition with often sharp perception.
His ecological blind spot was not some personal failing but the product of a whole political tradition that, in this respect at least, was gravely flawed. Unless corrected, this ecological blinkeredness will make it as irrelevant as more conventional politics, no matter what sensible things socialist activists might say about specific matters such as the better funding of public services, job security, protection of citizen rights, militarism and the closing of the wealth-poverty gap.
(no date – 2007 ?)
PDF version.
Sandy Irvine is the co-author of “A Green Manifesto”, founder and co-editor “Real World”, author “Beyond Green Consumerism” and one-time member of the executive of the Green Party of England and Wales. His site is Putting the Earth First. (Alse see About Us)
From the British Marxist discussion journal, What Next.
Some Comments on Sandy Irvine’s ‘The Prophet Misarmed’
Ian Birchall, What Next Journal
… The article makes two fundamental criticisms of Marxism whose validity must, I think, be accepted. Firstly, the Marxist tradition has not done sufficient work on ecological problems. And those problems have not been integrated into the Marxist view of the world. There is certainly a lot of work to be done there by Marxists if they are to produce an analysis and a programme for the twenty-first century.
And secondly it is indeed true that the traditional Marxist notion of “abundance” has been somewhat naïve. What Irvine calls the “cornucopian” standpoint does now seem rather implausible. It is clear that there are objective constraints as to the resources available in any society, and if a socialist society came into existence, these would have to be confronted. However, it should also be said that capitalism is a colossally wasteful system, which devotes enormous resources to activities that are useless if not positively pernicious – war, advertising, etc. To put an end to that waste would be a huge step forward for human society.
… But if Irvine has made some valid challenges to Marxism I think his case falls down when it comes to the positive proposals he makes. Traditional Marxism argued that capitalism created its own gravedigger, that the working-class, pursuing its own class interests, could be a universal class which would act in the interests of humanity as a whole by overthrowing capitalism. And this question of working-class agency is central to Trotsky’s major contributions to Marxist thinking, in particular the theory of Permanent Revolution and the writings on the United Front (of which Irvine has little to say).
Now Marx may have been wrong, and historical experience since 1917 shows that the working class has often failed to act as Marxists had hoped it would. But at least Marxism did confront the question of agency. The reason Marx rejected the Utopians, despite their main valid insights, was that they gave no account of the agency whereby society could be changed. Any advocate of a radical programme of social change that aspires to replace Marxism must offer some account of the agency of social change.
In these terms Irvine remains a Utopian.
… Irvine advocates that “humans must all learn to tread more lightly and to ‘share smaller pies’.” But how? Any party with a programme of “smaller pies” would be condemned to electoral oblivion. (“Smaller but better pies” might be a winner, but the better would have to be very carefully spelt out.) The Green Party has undoubtedly made a real impact on ecological awareness – but it generally campaigns on relatively minor matters like “more recycling bins” rather than on “We shall take away your cars”. (Most Greens I know drive cars. I don’t. Does Irvine?)
And any regime trying to impose “smaller pies” would not only have to block the profit drive, but also introduce a very considerable degree of egalitarianism. During and just after the Second World War people did to some extent (though not as much as sometimes claimed) accept austerity in the name of fighting a common enemy. There was a much higher level of recycling (we called it “salvage”). But there were also punitive taxes on higher incomes and the ruling elite had to adopt a degree of asceticism (I recall in my childhood being told that the King had only five inches of water in his bath).
It is just possible people might accept similar constraints in the “war” against global warming – but only if there were some attempt at equality of sacrifice. As long as rich parasites like Cherie Blair and David Beckham are allowed to flaunt their wealth, ordinary working people will see no reason to abandon their consumption habits. A radical redistribution of wealth would be a necessary precondition for a major change in consumption patterns. And that cannot be achieved under capitalism.
(no date – 2007 ?)
Ian Birchall is “a British Marxist historian and translator, a member of the Socialist Workers Party and author of numerous articles and books, particularly relating to the French Left.” (Wikipedia).
In response, Sany Irvine wrote a
Reply to Ian Birchall .
The ecological sins of Leon Trotsky
Andrew Leonard, How Things Work, Salon
… Given the evidence, one must immediately grant that Irvine’s basic characterization of Trotsky as unconcerned with ecological issues is correct.
… Irvine’s real agenda is to lay out the familiar “limits to growth” argument that holds that endless economic expansion, whether driven by capitalist “free” markets or communist five-year plans, is ecologically unsustainable. Humanity is in the process of a population “overshoot” in which it has already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. As a consequence, the numbers of humans on the planet must be reduced, and everyone living will have to be satisfied with less rather than more. Technology cannot and will not save us. Oh, and it would be best if we all stopped eating meat.
This may well all be true. But it seems to me that if Trotsky were alive today, he would more likely be making a similar argument than singing the praises of Monsanto. In other words, he might just be a green fellow traveler who, like Irvine, decides that “the deepest anti-capitalist argument and the biggest one in favor of some form of planned economy” is precisely the fact that “biogeophysical limits to growth” ensure that “capitalism is an inherently unsustainable form of economic organization.”
But that’s idle speculation. The real question raised — and not at all answered — by Irvine’s essay is, supposing that eco-suicide does loom for humanity, how practically does one go about avoiding it? Because, as a Marxist rebuttal to Irvine also published in What Next? argues, it’s difficult to imagine a popular movement winning electoral success in any of the world’s current working democracies while running on a platform of forced sterilization; a ban on pork, beef and chicken consumption; and the denial of the right to drive. The populations of China and India, just for starters, are not going to be easily dissuaded from reaching for the standard of living enjoyed in the United States and Europe.
Sometimes, the impossible is the only way forward. As has been noted in How the World Works numerous times before, affluent societies experience slower — or even negative — population growth than do poor societies. Which raises the very real possibility that Trotsky’s dream — universal affluence for all — is a prerequisite for achieving sustainability on this planet.
(7 October 2007)
Leon Trotsky and Ecology
Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist
In the latest issue of What Next?, an online socialist magazine based in Great Britain, there’s an article titled The Prophet Misarmed: Trotsky, Ecology and Sustainability by Sandy Irvine. The gist of Irvine’s criticism is that Leon Trotsky was clueless on the environment based on a passage in “Literature and Revolution”, as well as other writings, that includes the following:
The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad….
According to Irvine, this kind of Promethean hubris can be found across the ideological spectrum, something undoubtedly true. Keep in mind that the broad cultural context for the Russian Revolution was futurism, which lent itself to all sorts of grandiose schemes about mechanizing the entire world. It was also the context for Italian fascism and it would be difficult to distinguish between futurist art in Soviet Russia and Mussolini’s Italy in the early 1920s.
… While I would be the first to take umbrage at the suggestion that “non-urban” ways should be condemned out of hand, you have to put Trotsky once again in his historical context. The Russian countryside was not something to be idealized. Peasants were illiterate, in poor health, and worked like mules. In the context of the 1920s, the drive to socialize farming was progressive just as it was in Cuba after 1959. Health improved, literacy was achieved, and the conditions of work became more humane. The real issue, however, is not about life-styles over “home-brew” but how to integrate the town and the countryside. Trotsky was not noted for understanding the issues raised by Karl Marx in his examination of the problems of soil fertility (not the “soil erosion” alluded to by Irvine) but his urban prejudices are almost besides the point in coming to grips with the underlying problems. Being tolerant of rural ways will not get us out of the intractable problems facing humanity in the 21st century.
(16 March 2009)
I’m not sure why Louis Proyect writes this criticism now. The original article by Sandy Irvine appeared in 2007. Louis Proyect is the moderator of Marxmail, a discussion forum. He has written occasionally about peak oil and related concepts. -BA
