Changing the world with four MPs?

This is a response by John Foster to Rupert Read’s piece on the Green Party’s post-electoral options.

Like Rupert Read, I've been a member of the Green Party for a good while – since before it was the Green Party, indeed. And just to start by putting recent events in that perspective: had we been told back in 1985 when the old Ecology Party started to call itself the Green Party, that after nearly 40 more years of electoral effort we should have attained to four MPs, that would have seemed a promise not of eventual triumph but of dismal failure. For even back then, time was recognised to be of the essence. It is almost incomparably more so now. And as Rupert has pointed out, what we certainly don't have time for is to wait until the Greens quadruple their four MPs again at the next election, and then again at the election after that, such that by the mid-2030s they might hope, with luck, to have as much parliamentary clout as the Liberal Democrats have presently. The world is going to hell in a handcart far too fast for that to be any kind of hopeful prospect.

So I am entirely with Rupert when he says that Greens must urgently look for a way to parlay the four MPs whom they already have into a force for transformative power in the very short term. And again, I find myself broadly in sympathy when he argues that if they were to use that expanded parliamentary pulpit to tell the truth about our situation, as trusted voices, responsibly and with no taint of toxic optimism, that might offer their best opportunity to help bring into being an effective wider-than-parliamentary movement for transformative adaptation to our current plight – adaptation which might then happen sufficiently quickly to enable us, not to avoid the blood, toil and tears and sweat which he likes almost quoting from Churchill, because these are coming anyway, but perhaps, just perhaps, to avert climate and ecological catastrophe.

That, I also agree with him, is a much more realistic posture, in a spirit of tragic realism, than saying “Let’s just persist enthusiastically along the parliamentary route” – more realistic, that is, in terms of its chances of actually bringing about change of the order needed. Where I part company from him, however, is on the question of the nature of that extra-parliamentary force.

I want to pay heartfelt tribute to Rupert for his insight, initiative and courage in stepping outside the conventional parameters of UK green-political thinking (having already spent an impressive amount of time and energy operating within them), in order not just to articulate those hard truths but to conceive the idea and set up the structure of the Climate Majority Project in service of them. But that project is of course called what it is in avowal of the belief that only if that wider-than-parliamentary force comes to comprise a majority of the community can it have any legitimate locus in reshaping society along ecological lines. I want to suggest, firstly that thinking such a majority achievable in the time available is a form of optimism with its own toxicity,  and secondly that believing it necessary in order to legitimate the action which has to be taken is a political-philosophical mistake.

Both these points flow from the same fact, that the majority population in a society like Britain has now become addicted to the economic and social framework which drives climate and ecological destabilisation. That word addicted is not a metaphor. We are talking about a collective condition which in an individual would be clinically recognisable as pathological dependence.

Addiction in general terms arises from some hole in the soul, some deep significant lack, which for one reason or another there is no ordinary or natural way of filling, so that the attempt is made to fill it with substitute satisfactions – which, because they are all the time recognised as substitute and unsatisfactory, do not actually fill but merely deepen the hole. This is for example the pattern where somebody turns to buzz-inducing substances from a lack of love, or stress-relieving activities from a lack of ease, and then finds him- or herself progressively more and more dependent on the substitute to keep ahead of the lack.  And in the case of consumer society’s addiction, various forms of material resort attempt to substitute in just the same dependency-generating way for lack of robust life-meaning. That this is now the pervading social disease of our time can be seen everywhere you look, if your eyes are open. How else explain not only the constant competitive churn of superfluous commodities, but also for example the perverse hyper-mobility, the frantic mechanised scurrying, of people who can’t help feeling that they are always getting nearer to something that matters by not keeping still? Or how explain so much time spent in the pathetically impoverished instant world of the internet and the pretend-relations enabled by social media, which now lay waste (especially among the young) to so many of the possibilities of real life?

Those so addicted are now, after 80 post-war years of capitalist consumerism, the majority population. And they are in a condition which renders them deeply incapable of responding to arguments and truths about the medium-term destructiveness of their combined activities, something which very severely constrains the general effectuality of Rupert's truth-telling. Because the crucial point about an addict is that he or she can know the truth about his or her condition, recognise and even endorse the need for changing it, but nevertheless be wholly unable to act.

So that's my first point, that even the most compelling truth-force will not now serve directly to construct a climate- and ecologically-responsible majority. My second point, that it does not need to do so for political legitimacy, really flows from the same facts. For why do we pursue majority legitimation in political contexts? Because it expresses our recognition that every sane adult has equal inherent status as a rational agent, and thus should have an equal voice in collective choices, so that in such choices a plurality of equal voices must decide. But the rub lies in that requirement of sanity. The commodity-addicted are just to that extent insane, and consequently, ours is an insane society, driven on its massively and unremittingly deranged consumerist blow-out by profound loss of meaning and of grip on any reliable human good. Correspondingly, the non-addicted minority who remain capable of seeing the climate and ecological truth have a responsibility which is now fundamentally therapeutic. Like the doctor's or the therapist's responsibility to do what is best for the patient, those who remain well and strong in spirit have a responsibility not just to care for but as necessary to decide and act for the pathologically impaired. In a therapeutic-political context not all voices count equally, for some voice only the disease.

So what we should be assembling, I submit, and what the Green Party should be politically spearheading if it really wants to change anything vital, is not a Climate Majority but a Climate Minority Project – a project to organise into a self-conscious vanguard the minority who are intelligent, imaginative and reflective as well as honest and brave, who remain unclaimed by commodity-addiction, who know or can be brought to recognise the truth about what is coming, and having accepted their responsibility, can act on it.

But what could such a minority actually do? Well, given that just because of that minority combination of virtues – intelligence, imagination, reflectiveness, honesty and courage – it would comprise a good many people with their hands on or near the levers of power, influence and authority within the fossil fuel state, what it could principally do is coordinate to sabotage that state while building shadow administrative and economic structures to replace it. In this it would be working with the grain of the moral and environmental pressures, the crumbling from within and the hammering from without, against which people at large will increasingly recognise that they must struggle. It could persist in this until, on the brink, enough of those trying to run the country accept the need for an emergency government, formed ad hoc from vanguard elements and strong enough to implement the radical reconfiguration – the carbon rationing, the localised socialisation of land and production, the citizen’s income – which we all know to be indispensable for any real transition to sustainability.

This is very plainly an ambitious – some will say a fantasy – programme. But it is one to be pursued in the spirit of transformative realism about which Rupert himself writes – the spirit of devotion to what is not imaginably possible until we start to make it so by resolutely imagining it. That makes it, I think, actually a good deal less of a fantasy than achieving the necessary transformation by either whistling up a popular majority or just plugging electorally on.

It is only as the consciously electoral and parliamentary arm of such an emerging vanguard, I believe, that the Green Party has any chance of contributing leadership towards averting catastrophe. It must now seize its historic moment, stop aspiring to be the thinking person’s Liberal Democrats, and embrace re-imagining itself as the new, green Bolsheviks for our desperate times.