Rethinking Revolution by Leo Panitch & Greg Albo

Author:Leo Panitch & Greg Albo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2016-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

PREFIGURATIVE ECO-SOCIALISM

Eco-socialist allies of the social, community and labour movements have expressed both hopes and reservations about the translation of examples such as these – and myriad other environmental justice struggles – into a full-fledged eco-socialist ideology. The 2008 launch of the Democratic Left Front (DLF) was one opportunity to link independents under the rubric of eco-socialism, and led many of its activists into the anti-extractivism that Latin Americans were establishing as part of the ‘Buen Vivir’ framework. The DLF ultimately faded in importance as its cadres were integrated into the United Front, a larger progressive network convened by NUMSA, in 2014. Although NUMSA did not provide sufficient resources to sustain the work, and although its own rank-and-file were mainly absent from building the Front, the union’s current advancement of a ‘Movement for Socialism’ relies on the idea that promoting grassroots campaigning is the sine qua non to establish the terrain which its (self-described) ‘Marxist-Leninist’ vanguard can operate within.41 This is directly connected with NUMSA’s break in the last year from the SACP’s Third-Internationalist-era communist-nationalist traditions by taking on the ANC from the left; NUMSA’s leaders often claim that they alone maintain the integrity of those traditions, given how far the official Communist Party has slipped into defending nationalism.42

Unlike many earlier-generation socialist activists who located themselves deep in the trade union movement, today’s generation finds different campaigns attractive. Alternative Information and Development Centre political economist Dick Forslund suggests eco-socialist potential in organizing to support ‘subsistence farming in many areas that are now contested by the mining corporations, unleashing many struggles for the land’. He points to one such area of intense contestation (Xolobeni on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape where a local anti-mining leader Bazooka Rhadebe was assassinated in 2016), arguing that, given the collectivized land ownership and pre-capitalist social relations in such sites, politics should emerge ‘in the way the land users want it, taking the parts of “modernity” that are not destructive and unsustainable into “the communal mode of production”. Eco-socialism can put food security at its centre.’43 Indeed, an independent-left food sovereignty campaign emerged (with strong residual influence by DLF cadres) in part because of the difficult conditions in the ex-homelands, as well as food price inflation. One of the main intellectual influences in this movement is Vishwas Satgar, formerly the secretary of the SA Communist Party in greater Johannesburg, prior to a purge that left traditionalists in charge, and also a professor of international political economy at Johannesburg’s main university. According to Satgar, ‘The ANC state has surrendered to market-centred green neoliberalism and the logic of ecocide . . . It has shown itself incapable of leading transformative just transition. Instead, this has to be led from below by forces such as the United Front, the emerging Food Sovereignty Alliance, the Solidarity Economy Movement, community-mining networks and rural movements.’44

Satgar’s colleague, Jacklyn Cock, has been most persuasive in repeatedly showing how ‘new coalitions and forms of co-operation between both labour and environmental activists contain the promise of a new kind of socialism that is ethical, ecological and democratic’.

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