Retro-modernism

I wrote a lengthy piece about modernism in my last post. Then I drafted another lengthy piece about its critical implications for so-called ‘ecomodernism’, which became so lengthy that it turned into two posts. Then I read over them, and felt – bored.

So it’s probably time to move on from ecomodernism. But there’s a little bit of unfinished business to unfurl in this post before starting on something else. I may even need to spend some time actually farming soon (there’s ewes to lamb and seeds to sow), as well as putting in some research time for my next cycle of posts, so the pace may have to slacken.

Anyway – Unfinished business #1: I got some great feedback to my last post here on SFF, and at Resilience.org and via New York academic Anthony Galluzzo’s site. Constructive, engaged criticism – the blogosphere at its best. I’d argued with the help of the late Marshall Berman’s book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air¹ that agrarian populism – that is, the localist politics of a neo-peasant small farm movement – is not anti-modern, nostalgic or backward-looking but on the contrary is thoroughly modernist in its willingness to abandon the weight of tradition accumulated through the history of capitalist development, and to chart alternative paths to sustainability and social justice. The criticisms that came back to me mostly hinged on a sense that I was over-extending the concept of modernism and effacing its negatives. Reasonable points, calling me back to my more sceptical pre-Berman take on modernism. But I still think Berman opens interesting ways of seeing how contemporary politics – including the green, leftist and agrarian populist politics with which I’m most engaged – have to develop more subtle narratives about history and human agency than they typically do. I hope to come back to this at a later date.

Unfinished business #2: I received some other interesting feedback recently. In my critical post on Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book Inventing the Future, I implied that their analysis was more ‘grownup’ than that of Leigh Phillips in the latter’s book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts. Srnicek messaged me back, writing “Thanks for the considered thoughts here”. Phillips also messaged me back, writing: “Twig-munching reactionary”. Then he added “I’m only replying to your ‘critique’ that mine is not a ‘grown-up’ argument”.

It’s a sweet thing when you put a tentative hypothesis out into the world and then get the solid proof of it zinging right back at you, and I should probably rest my case right there. But I’d like to probe just a little more at the world-according-to-Phillips in order to wrap up my ecomodernist theme for the time being. Mr Phillips has been promising for a while to write a refutation of my critical commentary on his oeuvre without, to my knowledge, coming up with the goods, so I hereby invite him to do so in a guest essay that I’ll happily host at Small Farm Future. His writing exemplifies what I consider to be various failings of the techno-fixer and/or ‘ecomodernist’ worldview. I’d like to offer a quick two-part overview.

Part I: Ecomodernism as retro-modernism

It strikes me that ecomodernism and techno-fixer approaches generally find a receptive audience among vaguely left and vaguely green folks who worry (albeit vaguely) about the sustainability of our present civilizational course and are therefore predisposed to be positive about local food, organic farming, renewable energy etc. without looking into the issues too deeply or thinking much about how life might change if such approaches were generalised. Works like the Ecomodernist Manifesto or Austerity Ecology are reassuring to them in their business-as-usual-but-raise-up-the-poor-while-defeating-climate-change-while-we’re-about-it optimism (optimism/pessimism is another problematic contemporary duality in the modernism/primitivism mould). To the uninitiated, ecomodernism reveals itself as a fresh new critique of localism, organics etc.

But it’s not a fresh new critique. As I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere², the ecomodernist critique of localism, agroecology, energy descent etc is superficial, and the alternative narratives it mobilises are not new but are grounded in older liberal, neoliberal and communist modernisation movements which are now manifestly problematic. They involve a psychological flight from seeking an authentic self in favour of a self-overcoming Übermensch³, they involve a notion of modernity as a solidly achieved state rather than a provisional construct apt at any moment to melt into the air; and they involve, too, the notion of modernity as a one-size-fits-all technological culture to be spread by outmoded neo-colonial and/or Fordist means. In all these ways, I’d argue that ecomodernism is retro-modernism – less alive, less open to the changes and possibilities in the world, less modern, than the localism and the ‘folk politics’ that it derides as primitivist, romantic or backward-looking.

These retro-modernist leanings are disguised to casual readings of the main ecomodernist texts, but are not hard to discern (by ‘disguised’ I don’t mean in a deliberate, conspiratorial way – rather, they figure as an implicit set of unexamined assumptions). The disguised leanings of the ecomodernism associated with the Ecomodernist Manifesto and the Breakthrough Institute are towards neoliberalism (I’ll take the BTI’s professed pro-poor narrative more seriously when it campaigns as vociferously on green boxes as on golden rice). And the disguised leaning of Phillips’ Austerity Ecology is towards Bolshevism.

Part II: Ecomodernism as Bolshevism

Let me illustrate that briefly. Phillips stridently denounces Bolshevism and I don’t doubt that he feels as genuinely opposed to the excesses of the Bolshevik regime as anyone. Indeed, I think ecomodernism in its various incarnations is usually a genuine attempt to reckon with the problems of social justice and sustainability we face in the contemporary world. It’s just that its retro-modernism reconstitutes the problems it’s trying to redress so its solutions become self-undermining. In Phillips’ case, his arguments rest implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, on so many commonplaces of communist/Bolshevik ideology that it seems hard not to locate his analysis within communist retro-modernism, and hard to imagine how a political programme based on it would avoid the excesses of that ideology.

I wrote a more detailed critique of Phillips’ political theory, such as it is, elsewhere⁴. Here I just want to identify in short form the five main Bolshevik elements I discern in it.

1. ‘Democracy’ – Phillips invokes democracy as a kind of deus ex machina to right the wrongs of contemporary global governance, but provides no account of what such a democracy would look like, and no account of what the political communities it’s organised within would look like either. This was also a failing in Marx (cf. Berman: “Marx never developed a theory of political community…this is a serious problem”⁵). The omission haunts the history of communism, and underlies the problem of democracy in places such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, neither of which have ever been conspicuously democratic. In Phillips’ democracy “all economic actions occur as a result of rational decision-making on the basis of maximum utility to society”⁶, a strong utilitarianism of the kind which is notoriously ruthless towards minorities and pariah groups. I fear the democracy of Mr Phillips very much.

2. Global government – But there would be no escaping it, because Phillips aims for a single global socialist government. This would return us to good old-fashioned communist orthodoxy – the orthodoxy of Marx, Engels, Trotsky and Lenin that sought a global communist revolution, before Stalin gave up the ghost with his unambitious ‘socialism in one country’. According to Phillips, a global government is necessary to foster the rational decision-making demanded by the severity of the problems we face – at which point, his democracy really does start to look rather GDR-like.

3. Big kit – And let it not be said that Phillips’ programme lacks for ambition. He quotes what he calls the “continent-straddling ambition” of the old left, approvingly citing Lenin: “Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country”⁷. You could doubtless argue that breakneck Soviet industrial development brought benefits to an underdeveloped country. You could also argue that indeed it broke a lot of necks – mostly those of peasants, who bore the brunt of the country’s modernization, and in some respects still do. In the face of Phillips’ enthusiasm for what he calls ‘big kit’ solutions to global problems, I find Berman’s a more salutary voice: “Millions of people have been victimized by disastrous development policies, megalomaniacally conceived, shoddily and insensitively executed, which in the end have developed little but the rulers’ own fortunes and powers”⁸. As energy and climate crises loom, sadly I think we can expect to see many more such grandiose projects, delivering less than they promise, and quite possibly less even than their antecedents achieved, while clothing themselves in a techno-modernist rhetoric that’s contemptuous of humbler, less chancy, more sustainable and less grandiloquent ambitions. Phillips’ writing no doubt gives a foretaste of what’s to come, as does Graham Strouts’ enthusiasm for the idea of Hinkley C as compared to EDF’s unenthusiasm for its actuality.

4. The working class: Phillips espouses another old-fangled orthodoxy about Marx’s ‘new-fangled men’, which was crude enough in Marx’s own writing and further debased by the Bolsheviks, namely that the proletariat is the privileged historical subject: “the working class is not just the liberator of itself, but of all mankind. It is the universal class”⁹. But the proletariat that emerges from Phillips’ pages is shallow, censorious, materially-oriented, pleasure-seeking and status-obsessed – basically indistinguishable from the capitalist bourgeoisies it supposedly replaces. Peasants have never really fitted into the ‘universal class’ rhetoric of vulgar Marxists, who generally like to speak for them and tell them what they ought to want: “It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturist – or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine – any day”¹⁰. It also takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to ignore the fact that the Bolsheviks built their regime substantially on the back of peasant rebellion and then, believing they knew what peasants really wanted and what was of ‘maximum utility to society’, returned the favour by murderously expropriating them. Peasants are too often written out of history by soi disant sympathisers who don’t want to romanticise them.

5. The terror: And finally there’s Phillips’ taste for a mode of discourse that deals in archetypes rather than arguments, and sometimes doesn’t seem a million miles away from hate speech. So I, for example, am dismissed as a “twig-munching reactionary” while others figure as an “army of tattooed-and-bearded, twelve-dollar-farmers’-market-marmalade-smearing, kale-bothering, latter-day Lady Bracknells”¹¹. And so on. I suppose there’s a danger of taking this all a bit too seriously, but then what are the implications? That Phillips’ analysis isn’t serious? It seems clear that he thinks it is – in which case I’d have to say that the way he engages his foes is…serious. Hacks with literary skills of this sort did a roaring trade in the 1930s, writing prepared confessions for show trials and anti-kulak posters. I hope they never get anywhere near political power again. If they do, I wouldn’t bet against me finding myself in a court some day confessing my degenerate kulak praetorian fascism. Until then, I plan to call it as I see it. Not everything Phillips writes sounds Bolshevik, but for me there’s a preening, self-regarding character to much of it that’s redolent of historic communist autocracy. It traduces the subtlety and variety of socialist traditions into rigid, bombastic certainties. And if it were to be realised politically, it would make the world a more frightening, more repressive and indeed a less sustainable place. Or, to quote from Anthony Galluzzo’s splendid piece of invective, Phillips uses “a Stalinoid rhetoric of productivism” involving a “cult of quantitative production-technological development and outputs-while reifying (rather than abolishing) the worker”. Quite so. This is old, old wine. Not even the bottles look that new.

But I think I’ve pretty much said my piece. Phillips has been promising for some time to unmask my innumerate arguments, and to provide the evidence to prove I’m wrong (another worrying ecomodernist tic, as if sifting different political philosophies and orientations to what human life is all about is simply a matter of ‘evidence’). He refers to my “blud-und-boden doom-mongering” which particularly intrigues me – I’d very much like to know what I’ve written that invites the Blud und Boden tag. Actually, I doubt Phillips has read much of what I’ve written. I think he just prefers the dualities of the propagandist – if it’s not standard modernist/rationalist fare then it must be anti-modernist/Blud-und-Boden reaction. In my eyes, what he calls my doom-mongering is a positive vision for a just and sustainable neo-agrarian future. Anyway, I’d be interested to read a genuine critique from him. Well, he knows how to contact me. Leigh, the next blog post is yours for the taking…

References

1. Berman, M. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso.

2. For example here. And here. And here. And here.

3. cf. Berman op cit, p.42.

4. ‘From growth economics to home economics’ – available here.

5. Berman op cit, p.128.

6. Phillips, L. 2015. Austerity Ecology & The Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Zero Books, p.227.

7. Ibid p.189.

8. Berman op cit, p.77.

9. Phillips op cit, p.153.

10. Ibid, p.252.

11. Ibid, pp.92-3.