This article was adapted from a talk delivered by Richard Levins on a panel with Rudolf Bahro, a leading theoretician of West Germany's Green Party and author of The Alternative in Eastern Europe. The two panelists were asked to address the key issues concerning the constituency, organizational forms, and programs of anti-capitalist movements—Bahro from the perspective of Europe, and Levins from the perspective of Latin America and his experience in the Puerto Rican Independence movement. Both speakers shared a view of socialism as involving new patterns of relations with nature, developing a gentle thought-intensive technology, and mobilizing the intelligence of the people.
The event was organized by the New York Marxist School and took place on Sept. 23, 1983, at Washington Irving High School in New York City. This article was subsequently published in the School's Winter 1984 catalog.
Today we celebrate the 115th anniversary of the Grito de Lares, commemorating the first Puerto Rican republic which lasted only a few days. The second Puerto Rican republic also lasted only a few days. We are now working toward a lasting third republic.
Puerto Rico, is important in the context of this discussion because it is one of the few remaining directly administered colonies in the world, a place which has a relatively high rate of industrialization where you see a peculiar combination of the diseases of underdevelopment with the diseases of capitalist overdevelopment in the same country.
I am going to touch on some of the same subjects that Rudolf Bahro raised, but from the perspective of the Puerto Rican and Latin American struggle. Some of my views will be divergent from his, some will coincide, some will simply be a parallel in a different context. However, my intention is not to draw a confrontation between views that are sometimes contrasting and sometimes supplementary, but to explore the terrain that we're all interested in exploring. I think that when a new idea is presented, the appropriate response is not to feel threatened and look for ways to poke holes in it, but rather to ride with the idea, test it in different contexts, see how it works in different situations and gradually come to a judgement in the spirit of comradely discussion.
The Latin American Perspective
In several ways, the Latin American perspective is simply different from the perspective of Europe. First, people in Europe perceive the immediate threat of nuclear confrontation between armed camps. In Latin America what we see is not the threat of war but its actuality, war is being fought there with so-called conventional weapons-- defoliation, napalm and other sophisticated methods to try to break a people's spirit --that in fact represent the vicious ingenuity of science as much as nuclear weapons do. So the reality of war in Latin America is different from fighting against the expectation of war.
Puerto Rico is in a dual situation: it's part of Latin America, close to the actual wars; but it's a United States military base, a focus in any possible future global war. Puerto Ricans see their land destroyed simply in the practice for war, because modern weapons require modern practice ranges. When we organized struggles against the Navy firing range in Vieques, the admirals pleaded with us: "...but where else can we have a place where we can test electronic warfare, guides missiles, air to ground fire, naval landings in one place?" They're running out of places, and soon the only place for practicing war is the entire planet. That's where they're leading us.
Secondly, the confrontation between superpowers appears symmetrical in Europe: armed camps with more or less similar modern weapons. The origins of the Cold War, the history of military alliances and the arms race tend to fade into the background: the actuality is the armed camps.
In Latin America you see a confrontation not between superpowers but between the Latin American peoples and a single superpower – the U.S., and there is no relative justification for taking a symmetrical view or for keeping a distance from both camps. Our experience has been that one bloc is and enemy and one an ally. The Eastern camp made it possible for the Cuban revolution not only to survive 90 miles from the U.S., but to have the resources to experiment with a more emancipatory way of life than has been possible anywhere in Europe.
Thirdly, the worldwide ecological crisis affects Latin America and the colonial world differently. It comes to us as ecological imperialism. In the industrial countries, while people are being poisoned they also benefit from the industry. In the colonial world, the costs are separated from the benefits—not only socially but also geographically. And so a people fighting for its independence, resisting imperialism, comes into the battles for environmental preservation and recognizes immediately some of the long-term issues that in the U.S., for example, are reached only gropingly and more intellectually. In the tropics, the environment is more fragile. It's only a very short jump from not development at all to a destructive development that undermines our capacity to produce. In Puerto Rico we have the third- or fourth-highest energy consumption intensity in the world, but it has not brought the increased standard of living enjoyed by other high energy consumers. This makes it possible for struggle around immediate environmental issues to involve not only the highly educated sections of society but everybody. A lot of our struggles are intrinsically ecological from the very beginning.
The Environmental Crisis
Globally, there really is an ecological crisis. Some left groups would rather not have such a crisis because they think it diverts them from following the program adopted at their last congress. But the development of capitalism has come to a point where its contradictions are no longer mainly economic, but pose a physical threat to the survival of the species.
An increasing rationalization of the production process—an ever more detailed control over the minute-to-minute, even second -to second, activity of production workers; the ever greater use of energy and raw materials; the release of some 50,000 new chemicals into our environment, of which the E.P.A. can monitor only two or three at any one time; higher noise levels; increased temperatures around industrial centers—all of this creates an oppressive work environment. This rationalization simultaneously removes workers' capacity to control that environment, to adjust to the fluxes of stress, even to be creative on the job.
While the ecological crisis starts in the workplace, it spills out through the windows and smokestacks. So occupational and environmental health re really the same field. People who are breathing poisons in the workplace are breathing them in buses on the way home, and in the house. In the production process and in the rest of society we face fundamentally the same problems: an industrial process designed to maximize profit and social control is destroying our capacity to survive and lead full lives.
The ecological crisis, then, spills out into all the relations in capitalist society. And when industries are exported to the Third World—because of cheap labor, lower environmental protection standards, the possibility of escaping from any kind of controls by the labor movement – destruction of the environment is exported as well. That's one way imperialism operates. It exports industries that are themselves harmful, it exports products that cannot be sold in the home country. The degeneration of the environment hits the workplace first, all over, then hits the colonized countries and spreads back, sometimes returning home as contaminated products.
Environmental crises develop unevenly. Some are very local: a notice that for the last three months Brattleboro, Vermont, has advised its residents to boil water; or a summer comes along when you're told not to use the beaches. But that, too, passes. It's not a steady, uniform deterioration: it occurs in pulses, but with increasing frequency and severity. This means people can become aware of the environmental crisis directly, temporarily join in and get excited, but not generalize it, and then withdraw. It is possible to move to a more general understanding of crises. When wastes from Ohio are landing in New England, you immediately see the need for a broader kind of solidarity, one that doesn't pit the need to breathe of New Englanders against the need to eat of Ohioans.
Environmental crisis does not arise from ignorance. Economists do calculate that if some resource reproduces at a rate slower than that of inflation, it makes good economic sense to destroy that resource: use up all of the fish now instead of letting them reproduce; then take your profits to rent out cars. The capitalist calculates which resources should be controlled and continued, and which destroyed. So there you have capitalist conservation, which preserves profitability in a rational way but can, equally "rationally," destroy the environment if that is more profitable.
The Scientific Technological Revolution
Although we are supposed to see the "scientific technological revolution" as innovation and human progress, it is not in fact the only way to interact with nature or to produce goods. It's not rationality per se but a capitalist rationality, which has developed according to the twin considerations of profit maximization and social control. For instance, the pesticide problem arises in part because pesticides are the easiest way to turn oil into something to sell to farmers; there are other ways of controlling pests. But if I suggest setting out a little sugar, which will keep ants alive so that they'll in turn eat beetles, I can't sell that to you.
There is not one way and one way only to interact with nature; progress is not inevitably industrialization; iron does not dictate Pittsburghs. There are many options for industry. The developmentalist mistake that we are fighting in Third World countries is the illusion that "modern, advanced, industrial" means copying a technology that is rational for only certain purposes. Because science itself has become a commodity under capitalism, because research is channeled toward producing commodities, because companies invest in scientists the way the invest in other workers, we have a science specialized within narrow horizons which can't see the whole. This produces a contradiction between the growing sophistication in the laboratory and the growing irrationality in scientific enterprise as a whole. And this contradiction makes it necessary for us to challenge not only the uses of science but the way science is developed and the entire design of industry.
In the developing countries, the advantage of backwardness is that we can learn from the Euro-American experience about the dangers of pesticides and asbestos, and figure out, say, how to have a metallurgy that doesn't poison people. But the extreme urgency of meeting the real material needs of the people makes for a contradiction. Now, affluent people very often look down on "mere" material needs. Yet a developing, revolutionary country's material needs are closely linked not only to survival, but to the practicalities of human development. For example, air pollution in Havana today is related not solely to population growth but also to the fact that people are twice as active: women have joined the labor force, kids have to be taken to day care. After work, people go to cultural activities. The streets are crowded until all hours of the night—Cubans play as hard as they work. Having more buses is not a luxury, it's a necessity for people's own development.
So these countries face a contradiction: they need industries in a hurry, to meet both the material and the spiritual needs of people, and they need a new kind of industry to further the multiple goals of workplace creativity, productivity, protection of the environment, and foreign exchange in a way compatible with people's schedules and health. But the design for this does not yet exist. In socialist-oriented Third World countries, there is a struggle between the constraints of present-day poverty and the urgency of meeting needs; and between the ideology of developmentalism which narrows horizons, and the vision of a different relationship to nature in which people fulfill themselves not by the accumulation of goods but by living.
Science and the Third World
In some ways, the Third World has pioneered in the critique of science. This is because science grew up with the bourgeois revolution in Europe. It's like bourgeois democracy. We Euro-Americans are impressed with its promises, regretful of its failures—but somehow it seems "really the best way of doing things." The critique tends to be held in check even when scientific internationalism has been replaced by secrecy, scientific neutrality replaced by the development of weapons, the open marketplace of ideas restricted by publishing for profit, and the independent checking of results is limited by the increasing costs of scientific investigation.
The fact that science has departed so much from its self-image is much more obvious in the Third World where people had fewer illusions in the first place because science came with the conquest. Science came to our shores with the instruments of conquest—improved navigation and ballistics – and with the instruments of exploitation and extraction. Even advances in medicine, like overcoming the yellow-fever mosquito, meant the domination of Panama. Science also provided new justifications of superiority, new rationales for racism, new ways of putting down the knowledge accumulated over centuries by peoples of the Americas and other continents. A critique of science doesn't mean relapsing into mysticism: it means recognizing that existing science is a product of the particular history of Euro-American capitalism. It means separating out the aspects that can be fitted into a new way of relating to nature from the aspects where we have to say, "That isn't true, that's just the shared bias of you community." In sum, we are talking about how to incorporate the struggle for a rational relation to nature into our politics.
We're dealing not only with ecology but with changed opportunities for human development. The traditional left has dealt with economic issues: the workplace, consumption and employment. These material conditions are still important. In the Boston area, say, when you go from neighborhood to neighborhood, you find about a 40% variance in infant mortality; children are being born underweight because of inadequate maternal nutrition. Even in the U.S., struggles around economic issues are still life-and-death matters.
But other issues are also emerging. The ecology movement raises the issue of our relations with nature and the feminist movement, with the slogan "The personal is political," opens up the whole domain of what is usually regarded as private experience. Struggles around health are not only struggles against an unhealthy society but attempts toward a fuller life for individuals. And there are crucial struggles against racism, against its attempts to dump all the contradictions of the capitalist crisis on Third World peoples, both inside and outside the empire. Hovering over all this is the threat of ecocide inherent in nuclear war.
As we confront this system we recognize that people generally come to political struggle out of the forms of oppression that affect them most immediately. To complete the confrontation, a wider vision of society is necessary, a recognition that it is capitalism that has created the big sufferings of our time, or has incorporated and maintained them. But not all people are going to have that vision. People will try to reconcile their opposition to the system with their love for it, and with the benefits that they get from it. The process is going to be complex: the movements struggling against different manifestations won't always see eye to eye.
The Conservatism of Marxism
In order for us as Marxists to help build a movement which unites to challenge capitalism while maintaining its diversity, we need to overcome the traditional conservatism of the Marxist movement. Lenin in his writings recognized Marxist theory's tremendous debt to French utopian socialism, English political economy and German philosophy: but since then Marxist have not recognized one external source for a single idea. This is a serious problem. We have recognized the naive enthusiasm of students who went into the streets. We have recognized feminism to the extent of putting a point in the platform regarding the just democratic demands of women. We've recognized the needs of nations for independence. What we have not recognized, however, is the creative, revolutionary theoretical contributions coming from these other sources.
This theoretical work, particularly of the women's movement, must become a part of the whole left's heritage. Feminist theory is much more than an analysis of the dimensions of women's oppression. In investigating how members of one family do not all have the same relation to the means of production, it forces us to re-analyze class. It investigates capitalism's penetration into all corners of life. Marxists tend to recognize only the public aspects, rather than seeing how it penetrates the private domain and comes back into the public. Not incidentally, the women's movement also offers new approaches to leadership and organization.
The pacifist movement has made important theoretical contributions too: it recognized that even non-mass movements can rock boats. While we worried about isolation ourselves from the masses, the pacifists were sticking their necks out, making the ripples that later caught on. And the struggle against the French war in Algeria was initiated not by the Marxist leadership in France, but by rank-and-file activists who acted in ways that were regarded as adventurist and individualist. We have to learn about ideas and methods of struggle from these movements, and not simply appreciate their energy and commitment. Marxists have to shed our conservatism in order not to become obsolete and irrelevant.
Most important, we have to overcome economism and go back to the totally liberating and challenging perspectives of early Marxism. Because of their specific needs, people are understandably attracted to particular political issues and programs, for shorter or longer periods. But the sticking power comes from a realization that there is really no other way to live. Everything that surrounds you and limits your human development is imposed by an oppressive social order; fighting that social order is the only kind of relative freedom we have. We're trying to create a different kind of world, one that transforms all aspects of our existence.
Theory in the Flesh
What makes these visions real and achievable—and not utopian in the pejorative sense—is that lots of other people are thinking about them, although we may not notice. So the appeal is to open our minds to the ideas of others who are also struggling against the oppressive system.
Different groups are being oppressed in different ways and are responding in their own particular ways. We must reject the idea that difference is divisive, and stop looking for lowest common denominators. We must recognize that difference is a source of strength. Audre Lorde, discussing the recognition of differences in her essay in This Bridge Called My Back, points out that theory is created not in academic tomes or theoretical journals, but in practice. The struggle against environmental destruction often leads to a recognition of the interconnectedness of life.
The company says that sulfur in the river extends only two miles. We say that along the way it kills fish. They say it doesn't kill all that many fish. We recognize that it kills the fish who eat those fish, and say so. They say, "Well, it really doesn't matter." We say, "But fish are important for controlling vegetation in the streams." And the battle around ecology has become a struggle to see the world as a whole. In a way that academic Marxism can never appreciate within the confines of a university. People are in fact struggling for a dialectical materialism—in the streets, in the battle to be able to breathe better. We are creating what Cherrie Moraga, also in This Bridge Called My Back, calls "theory in the flesh." The theory is there. Let's look for it and use it.
