Our historical Juncture

The example of the West German Green Party gives some insight into the challenges and opportunities that Green politics presents as a vehicle for both socialist organising and electoralism. Today some thinkers and campaigners are once again suggesting that environmental issues can serve as a unifier of a broader coalition of ‘the people’ against an adversary to bring about change.

‘Left populists’ have mapped out a strategy that seeks to establish ‘counterhegemony’ to neoliberalism. In an article for OpenDemocracy, Chantal Mouffe leans on Karl Polanyi to explain the appeal of right-wing populists in a world characterised by uncertainty. She writes that our current circumstances force security high up on people’s agenda and consequently the desire for protection becomes a central political demand. Mouffe argues that right-wing populists frame protectionism and sovereignty in a nationalistic and xenophobic way, which has aided their recent success. To combat this, the left cannot leave the desire for protection and sovereignty to be defined by the right. It must construct an alternative – a Green Democratic Transformation – which links the reduction of greenhouse emissions to security questions: by saving the planet we are eliminating the biggest threat to security and sovereignty that humanity currently faces. At the same time, the climate movement can capture other activists for social justice issues, linking the impact of climate change to wider questions of inequality. She praises Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in the US and Jeremy Corbyn’s Green Industrial Revolution in the UK as good examples of what such a strategy could look like for political parties.

In response to Mouffe, the former Head of Strategic Communications for Corbyn, James Schneider, argues that a left populist strategy around the Green New Deal is the right way forward for the left. Schneider sees the left-populist Green New Deal in contrast to Labour’s normal managerial-technocratic framing around ‘competence’ and the ‘national interest’. Schneider also advocates for the left to throw its net wide to capture a broad coalition of a ‘we’, the many, that can together bring down the adversary – the ‘few’ elites and neoliberalism. Schneider hopes that a coordinated Green New Deal campaign can unite the post-Corbyn left with its various grassroots, social movements, trade unions and its parliamentary strands in the form of left Labour MPs. Unlike Mouffe, whose analysis seems focused more on broadening the electoral coalition, Schneider focuses his analysis first and foremost on a strategy that can ‘regroup’ the left, which he then hopes will be able to make advances again in the future.

Momentum also published its post-Corbyn strategy document which identifies ‘winning support for a Green New Deal’ as their priority campaign – although its proposals at this stage seem to boil down to passing motions to win policy commitments from within the Labour Party rather than wider political campaigning. This suggests that Momentum, too, believes that a construction of a shared left politics for the fractured post-Corbyn left is possible around the ecological question – but this is still suggested within the narrow framing of organising a very specific, rather than broad, group (Labour Party members) to carry out particular actions (passing CLP motions) geared towards inward-facing milestones (Labour Party annual conference).

Left populism’s coalition-building rests on an assumption that a ‘people’ can be created “as a popular majority independent of previous political affiliations”, but this vacuum of politics is what makes it so dangerous.¹¹ It is not possible to construct a coalition – whether that is for electoral purposes or around a single-issue policy solution – on the basis of a lowest common denominator without exploring underlying motivations. Green activism already can lend itself to conservatism – the idea of preserving, nurturing or protecting the natural environment has been cultivated by many right-wing philosophers or politicians from the past and present, from Edmund Burke to Martin Heidegger to Zac Goldsmith in the UK.

An example of why Mouffe’s suggested security framing runs considerable risks is offered by the New Social Covenant, a grouping which includes a co-founder of Blue Labour and Conservative Party MPs. Amongst its core political manifesto is a section on ‘environmental nationalism’ which calls for a “deal between the left and right to save the planet and reduce mass migration into Europe”. Rather than having a “globalist, anti-national agenda” like current climate movements, the group suggests that climate change must be framed and addressed as a security challenge to the nation state.

These proposals for “environmental nationalism” include major investment in border security and the Royal Navy patrolling the English Channel. This action at home is combined with a ‘muscular foreign policy’ that supports (what the British state deems to be) ‘good governance’ in the Global South via developmental aid, and intervenes in countries from which ‘security threats’ and ‘terrorism’ originates.

The underlying logic on which this climate activism is built does not challenge the current social and political realities but rather reinforces them: imperialism and economic liberalism, with freedom, security and prosperity for those politically defined as ‘citizens’ within the boundaries of the nation state. The group’s vision is that of a broad alliance for the climate on the lowest common denominator of ‘security’, where “the right will help save the planet if the left will help save the nation”.

This explains why environmentalism cannot function as an instrument for popular mobilisation and coalition-building in a left populist sense – if environmental politics is stripped of a socialist political foundation it can become actively dangerous. Is it worth pushing through moderate reforms to emission trading systems or plastic straws via the UK Parliament and a broad-church coalition of MPs, if it comes on the back of a rejection of migrants rights because the British nation state has to be protected from the influx of climate refugees? It is questionable that one can capitalise on the climate emergency as an existential threat and at the same time detach it from the reactionary interpretation of the ‘national security’ question as it is defined in Britain. Audience members in one of the electoral television debates between Corbyn and Johnson laughed at the former for suggesting that climate change disproportionately impacts people in the Global South, and that international solidarity was needed to tackle the issue for everyone. Hoping that these attitudes can be shifted quickly does not correspond with the political and societal realities in which we find ourselves.

As Chris Green explains in his review of For a Left Populism for New Socialist, Mouffe asserts that it is ‘at the national level that the question of radicalising democracy must first be posed’ for we “cannot ignore the strong libidinal investment at work in national – or regional – forms of identification”. This gives way to the familiar attempts of the left to construct a ‘progressive patriotism’ which Mouffe defines as “a patriotic identification with the best and more egalitarian aspects of the national tradition”’¹²

Green further points out the dangers of focusing on the adversary of ‘neoliberalism’ as a particular ideological expression or form of capitalism, rather than on capitalism in its totality or generality. Without an understanding of capitalism as a political, economic and social system one might arrive at the conclusion that another capitalism is possible. Not wanting to abolish capitalism but merely hoping to enact reforms to achieve e.g. a social market economy and a stronger welfare state within national boundaries is an inherently social democratic position. This ‘social democracy in one country’ logic results in an obscuring of questions around imperialism and with that an endorsement of foreign and economic policies that put ‘the nation’ first.

An example of how these themes interact was provided by Lisa Nandy in a Chatham House speech: in Nandy’s approach, “radicalising democracy’ is interpreted as ensuring a form of participatory buy-in into foreign policy decisions of the British state, by linking overseas missions directly to the material benefits to people here. Consent for it will be established by ‘giving ordinary people more of a say” – Nandy suggests “town hall” style meetings of ‘foreign policy institutions’ reminiscent of initiatives such as citizen’s assemblies, a method suggested by Mouffe (and XR) to overcome the ‘antagonistic struggles’ within our current system. Foreign policy questions are therefore bizarrely framed as a social conflict that exists domestically, between those who understand the ‘need’ for Britain to intervene for the good of others, and those who believe that it is bad for people here – rather than acknowledging that a proactive foreign policy pursued by a country like Britain can have detrimental impacts for people in other parts of the world. It is questionable that social justice can be achieved if the policy decisions of a country in the imperial core remains focused on the ‘national interest’, even if it is dressed up in the ‘progressive’ language of ‘radical democracy’.

The question of the viability of a left populist strategy is as much an institutional as a political one. Looking back to April 1991, as the moderate Greens were victorious over the left in stripping radical approaches to party organising and parliamentary democracy out of their strategy, perhaps there was simply no way to utilise the organisation and going elsewhere was better than wasting time and energy on reclaiming a failed project. The Green members who left might not have succeeded in starting a new socialist project but their historic circumstance – the fall of the Soviet Union, regardless of the subjective attitude of what was largely a New Left, critical of aspects of actually existing socialism – would have made building for socialism extraordinarily hard regardless. The question is whether disillusioned Labour members find themselves in a more favourable environment now – either to turn outwards or to achieve anything within Labour.

To build a successful environmental movement in the UK we must first define what success constitutes and then draw our lines accordingly. For a political programme that unites climate campaigns with social justice from a global perspective, socialist underpinnings are essential. Left populism is not a useful strategic framework for anyone seeking to seriously organise for these outcomes because of its reluctance to draw these political lines and its desires to construct a new coalition without grappling with the trade-offs that this forces, especially if this framework is adopted by a political party contesting parliamentary elections.

Labour, even under Corbyn, has been reluctant to reconstruct the ‘people’ in any meaningful sense, leaving it significantly determined by existing ideological content. Thus we see (and saw) a consistent framing around the nuclear family, ‘responsible’ economic budgeting or the willingness to push aside a defence of migrants’ rights for some perceived greater electoral good. Ultimately, broadening an electoral or political coalition through bringing on new members on conservative terms is more likely to pull that coalition to the right, legitimating the articulation of radical needs to conservatism and the state than to offer a basis for a process of ideological struggle that brings these people towards a liberatory project, even if that process is gentle and careful. There is a paradox here in the left populist project: on the one hand certain themes like security (or a non-political ecology) are held to be useful for the left, precisely because they engage existing conservative voters, yet at the same time the meaning of these themes is held to be so indeterminate that they can easily be polarised leftwards, cutting their connection to any right-wing meaning whilst continuing to draw in conservative voters.

Left-wingers in Britain today might, unlike the German left-wing Greens, not be faced with a strategic challenge as enormous as the total breakdown of the political world order, but their circumstances remain difficult. The constitutional questions of Brexit and Scottish independence, the strength of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in Parliament and the impact of the COVID19 pandemic means we find ourselves not short of challenges to work through. Valuable time that should be used thinking through our political context and working with socialist comrades inside and outside the Labour Party to find a way forward is likely wasted by seeking to influence Keir Starmer. Similarly, a Labour Party that is taken over by ‘left populists’ might not be up to facing the fundamental challenges we encounter, precisely because of the rejection of firm left-wing politics as a basis for its coalition-building and line-drawing.

What we can learn from the example of the German Green Party is that it is natural for people to turn towards parliamentarism, and seek bigger coalitions, at a time of struggle and defeat – at the time Dutschke sought out his Green comrades, the German SDS was dissolved, West Germany was dealing with the fall-out of the Red Army Faction’s urban guerrilla warfare, with some ex-comrades from the APO days either imprisoned or dead, and he himself still recovering from the assassination attempt years earlier, the consequences of which would eventually end his life so prematurely.

Currently many of the left activists who burnt themselves out in CLPs and Momentum groups might find the thought of organising within Labour to take it back from Starmer comforting, familiarity and security bringing comfort in hard times. Everyone will likely feel bruised from their experiences in the pandemic. But as we slowly emerge out of lockdown, the question is whether fighting over an institution that already represents a compromise, on the basis of a compromised strategic framework, will be the best thing to do. History might tell us not to give into the temptation.