Weekly Worker 628 Thursday June 8 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

On your bike

Phil Kent criticises the limitations of greenism

Summer Offensive 2006 No nonsense I have excellent news to report in this, the first of my weekly columns detailing the progress of this year’s Summer Offensive, the Communist Party’s annual fundraising drive. In the first seven days of the campaign, we have already received just under £3,210 towards our £30k minimum, with a number of comrades taking large chunks out of their individual targets. In particular, thanks go out to comrade PK, who has stumped up £700 - courtesy of a nicely timed rebate from the taxman. In addition, comrades MJ and MM have produced a sturdy £200 and £140 respectively, comrade AM has pushed her standing order contributions to the party up to £300 a month for the duration, comrade AD has given us £100 and PM £200, a no-nonsense start to his push for £1,000 by the end of July. The same comrade writes: “Last year I set myself a modest target initially - I was tight for cash and thought I would be stretched for both time and money. But I had a few good badge sales (the Make Poverty History event in Edinburgh and the SWP’s Marxism proved productive) and I also organised some extra classes where I teach. In the end I notched up just over £1,000. So this year I have decided to be more ambitious and set my target at £1k from the off. Again I am teaching once a week right through July and will use all the extra income for the SO.” (read full article) Click here to download a standing order form - regular income is particular important in order to plan ahead. Even £5/month can help! Send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker, BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX Donate online:

It was clear from the number of stalls belonging to revolutionary groups that a substantial element of the left is trying to intervene in and influence the green movement. All preaching the virtues of ordinary people coming together to provide a solution - but not quite to the point of practising this by coming together themselves.

The first workshop I attended with about 30 or 40 others reinforced this impression of left involvement. It was entitled ‘Do we have to sacrifice living standards to fight climate change?’ Whose living standards was not mentioned and in fact the question was not answered, but all the speakers claimed to be for socialism of one type or another, including Alex Fisher of the Green Party. Ruth Thomas-Pellicer (a rather incoherent academic) was a fan of the young Karl Marx and Elaine Graham-Lee of Respect thought revolution would in the end be necessary.

But no one from the top table uttered the words, ‘working class’. It seems that it is a class-free socialism that is on offer. Theory is abandoned in order to make ‘socialism’ more palatable to the greens. In view of this you could almost sympathise with the speakers from the floor who called for the dropping of ideologies in favour of “letting the facts speak for themselves”. It sounds so reasonable, but it expresses an empirical or sciencist viewpoint that implicitly accepts the norms and common sense or existing capitalism in all its craziness.

Two speakers whose arguments I could follow both called for local democracy, linked of course to local activity. Think globally, act locally as a strategic approach to politics. While I have no problem with local activity, localism is problematic. Surely if climate is global then the problem can only be solved globally. This calls for a centralisation of decision-making at a world level. Capitalism spontaneously organises the world in the interests of accumulation for its own sake and constantly tries to hollow out or restrict democracy as far as it can. Centralisation is democratic only if it represents conscious control of the whole from below and local initiatives have value to the degree that they serve bringing this about. On their own they are limited or even conflictual and in that case you end with the tyranny of structurelessness - anarchism.

In fact the openings were interesting in their own way and threw up a large number of questions that could have occupied the entire conference for the whole day instead of a minority for an hour and a half. Before we could get going it was all over. Nothing destroys serious debate or is more open to manipulation than workshops - they should be banned.

The second one I attended, ‘Is there a corporate enemy and if so who?’, left me feeling I should have gone somewhere else. It was a Greenpeace-type affair about picking out the most evil capitalists in the world, exposing their activities and calling on people to boycott their products. While this can be entertaining, it does have its obvious limitations.

The villains this time were Exxon, Land Rover and Ryanair. A speaker from the floor related how he had driven past an Esso station while very low on fuel - and was relieved that the next garage was Shell. The concept of very evil capitalists implies a lesser evil and even good capitalists, though they don’t seem to have found many yet.

Apropos Ryanair, it was pointed out that only 6% of air passengers were from social class D and E, so a flying ban would not inconvenience the poor. But is the problem not with a capitalism that, as well as exploiting people, constantly creates new wants and needs? Needs and wants that constantly go from being luxury items to become necessities. Is the CACC really going to argue for the outlawing of cheap holidays in Spain or Greece?

I suggested that Exxon and Ford contributed so much money to George Bush because they wanted the protection of the American state, without which their exploitation of people and nature would be impossible. So should CACC not be fighting for the extension of democracy in the US and globally, including replacing the standing army with a people’s militia, up to the point where international popular control totally replaces the principle of profit with the principle of need? But this was beyond the remit of the speakers, whose conception of class struggle was non-existent, corporate enemy or no corporate enemy.

But when people actually came together in the plenary session, we saw how peripheral the far left is in the minds of most of the organisers. No space for the SWP here. Michael Meacher and Caroline Lucas were both agreed that we need a completely different type of society, but what they seemed to mean by this is that we the people should ride bicycles, take our holidays at home, etc.

In other words, meeting the challenge of climate change is the responsibility of individuals sacrificing their lifestyle, while the state and capital are kindly requested to clean up their act.

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