Greenpartywatch: Anarcho-communists ... wooo

Nicholas Blincoe turns up again with a fairly bizarre article on the Greens. The Tories, it seems are quite green because they are mates with some of the right people and some of the Green Party's founders were of a barking right wing bent.

I agree of course that the Lib Dems are greener than the Greens, when we consider what might actually work. Blincoe is even lighter on the detail here, and this is not really why I bring this up.

Réponse de resistance goes to Green blog the Daily Maybe. He quotes Blincoe on the new Green Left faction

"Their anti-capitalist, anarcho-communist ideas, found in their founding manifesto, the Headcorn Statement, make them the Wombles of green politics."

And here's the rebuttal:

Sounds alright doesn't it?

More greens queue up in the comments to endorse the sentiment.

I'm not going to rehash the arguments again - they are in this blog's history. But there is something tragic about what should have been the pre-eminent environmentalist political party being side-tracked into flawed and failed political ideology. Mind you Marx would never have stomached their irrationalism.

Blincoe meanwhile seems to attach some significance to the formation of the Green Left faction in 2006, as if this was anything new. "The Way Ahead" was formed in the early '90s, (the 1890s?) with much the same agenda. These groups are not born out of a change in the party's ideology, but out of a frustration the vanguardists have with the rest of the party not being able to articulate a non-communist position without sounding pro-capitalist. That sounding remotely pro-capitalist is such a no-no indicates where the party as a whole is at, and has been at for a decade.

As for being entryists... no, to be an entryist you must have an agenda that the organisation you are joining does not already share.

Denialism dot com

On cue, following my discussion of science and politics, which noted the similarity between global warming deniers, creationists, anti-vaccine and anti-animal testing movements and so on, I find the blog denialism.com, dealing, in some detail with much the same issues, with a couple of differences.

In particular denialism.com deals with the methods of denialists: conspiracy theories, selective use of evidence, fake experts, impossible expectations and faulty logic.

Denialism.com doesn't mention, as I did, alternative medicine, anti-GM food and perpetual motion. It is explained here that there isn't the same kind of organised denialism going on for alternative medicine. I guess largely this is correct, alternative medicine is interested in asserting its own efficacy, and not so much attacking the efficacy of conventional medicine. But it may be a close call.

GM food seems to be off the agenda now, and perpetual motion I suppose is just too silly to spend any time on.

Denialism.com's subjects that I didn't mention are these:

1. Anti-regulatory/Industry Apologists/Fake Consumer groups/Astroturf
2. HIV/AIDS Denialism
3. Stem Cell Denialism/Adult Stem Cell Hype/Fake Bioethicists/Cloning, Eugenics and Euthanasia Paranoids

It wouldn't have occurred to me to include group 1 in this sort of exercise. Arguments over regulation are intensely political on both sides and are rarely made with scientific rigour on either side. One or two commenters have pointed out that there are probably equivalent pro-regulatory deniers around. Still, if people are using the denialist tactics described in political debates then this should be exposed.

Group 2, good point.

Group 3, again surprising. I'm not sure how one might qualify as a fake ethicist - I tend to take the view that we're all ethicists, in the sense that we're all entitled to express our views on ethics, and that all these views matter - the idea of believing what is right or wrong on the authority of an ethicist seems bizarre. Glancing at the sites listed, I would agree that there are some terribly bad arguments being used out there to oppose stem cell research. But I do think - as I said here - it is reasonable for people to argue a position that they have only religious and not scientific reasons for believing. But on the face of it, this does seem to be denialism of a similar quality to the others, so perhaps I am being too generous. Please comment.


Anyway, while we are drifting into the denialisms of politics and ethics as well as those of science, what else could we add to the list? How about denialism of the benefits of free trade?

Remember this is about methods. 1. Conspiracy theories: Anti-traders assert that free trade is just a consipiracy by the rich and powerful to drive down wages and environmental standards. 2. Selectivity: The huge gains in prosperity in Asia-Pacific are ignored. 3. Fake Experts: The New Economics Foundation? 4. Impossible Expectations: Economists all disagree anyway, Economics doesn't work. 5. Bad logic: What ever it is, we're smart enough to make it here. (Being able to make anything doesn't mean we are able to make everything we currently consume, when giving up economies of scale.)

So far, so good, I suppose. But might this work for denying theories that should be denied because they are bunk? Like Marxism:

1. Conspiracy Theories: Anti-marxists assert that Marxists are trying to take over the world. 2. Selectivity: Er, the soviet economic boom from agrarian backwater to superpower in 50 years? 3. Fake Experts: Tories 4. Unrealistic Expectations: Worldwide revolution hasn't happened yet, so Marxism is bunk. 5. Bad logic: Trying to make the world better will only make it worse. (This is an argument you occasionally hear from some on the right who can't be arsed trying to make the world any better. Panglossian rubbish.)


So, while I very much like what denialism.com is doing, I am also a little underwhelmed. The point to keep aware of is that dealing with the poor arguments in favour of a proposition does not deal with the proposition. Denialism.com is all about identifying and disposing with common poor and deceptive arguments for certain propositions. It is the fact that most perpetrators of these poor arguments don't have any good arguments that deals with their propositions. Why make the weak argument if you have a strong one?

But the arguments that are found in politics, economics and ethics generally are weaker than those found in science, and this makes the denialism.com approach rather less biting in these fields.

The Trap: What happened to our dreams of freedom?

Having missed the first two of these programmes, I was pleased to catch the third. I hope that my profoundest observations on it weren't lost during Desperate Housewives which was on immediately after.

The thesis was, in short, that there was something missing from Isiah Berlin's negative liberty concept, which has led to failures in imposing negative liberty in Russia, Iraq and elsewhere. Cicero provides a good defence of Berlin and negative liberty.

I think you could take Curtis' arguments and arrive at the rather different conclusion that negative liberty just can't be imposed. He makes the point that when it came to the Iraq war, we were so steeped in the culture of self-interest, that we didn't trust Blair and Bush. This is what perhaps led them to fabricate the evidence of a threat from Iraq.

And here's the problem. Freedom suffers if we can't rely on legislators and politicians to be honest brokers, rather than self-interested rational men. And of course we can't rely on anybody not to be self-interested, but we can, if we have elections and a true democratic culture, create the right incentives for politicians and vote out those that fall short.

An attempt to impose negative liberty cannot introduce this kind of check on power. Without democracy, politics becomes corrupt and self-serving whether done in the name of negative liberty, of socialism, of God, or of any other cause you care to mention.

Curtis argues that negative liberty relies on people being self-interested, and that positive liberty seeks to do better than that. But this is wrong. Negative liberty allows people freedom to choose their own values - so long as that doesn't interfere with the freedom of others - and so people are perfectly free to be altruistic without undermining the system. It is positive liberty that makes some reliance on people behaving appropriately and can go wrong when they don't.

The lesson I take from The Trap is not that negative, or positive liberty is prone to fail, but that the imposition of values is prone to fail. The imposition of values is of course against the principles of negative liberty, whether negative liberty is one of the values being imposed or not. Revolutions make things worse. The way to enhance freedom, of either kind, is not to tear down the system, but to reform it incrementally and democratically.

Curtis' description of Pol Pot's murder of the entire Cambodian middle class reminded me of this quote:

As an eco-Marxist I believe that only a socialist society will meet human needs and sustain ecological diversity, politics is based on class struggle, it isn't a matter of changing a few laws we live in a social totality that is utterly destructive and must be replaced.
- Derek Wall, principal speaker of the Green Party

I discuss an alternative approach to environmental problems, offering more freedom, negative and I daresay positive as well, here.

Greenpartywatch: Derek Wall elected Principal Speaker

I remember Derek from my Green Party days. He always seemed to keep out of the way of the rest of the party, you would find him in the bar, or at his own fringe meetings, plugging books, grumbling that the party wasn't Marxist enough.

Derek is articulate and intelligent. He wrote a history of the Green Party, part 1 of which I referred to earlier. Part 2, part 3, part 4. All quite frank and interesting.

But the thing is that Derek's politics are way out there. They always were a bit extreme even for the Green Party! Probably the party has now moved a little to meet him, all the more reason to expose it for what it is.

In his own words (from here):

Marxism is a sophisticated, subtle, philosophical system with inexhaustible insights. As an eco-Marxist I believe that only a socialist society will meet human needs and sustain ecological diversity, politics is based on class struggle, it isn't a matter of changing a few laws we live in a social totality that is utterly destructive and must be replaced.

I used to think this sort of revolutionary talk was benign but misguided. I no longer think it remotely benign. Revolutions in democratic societies make things worse. There are problems intrinsic to Marxism that make something like Stalinism fairly inevitable. An awful lot of what we enjoy in modern western societies is extremely good: human rights, prosperity, freedom, public services and so on. This is not a totality that is utterly destructive, and anybody who suggests it is clearly hasn't the slightest idea of what they should be fighting for.

Tags: Greenpartywatch, Green Party, Derek Wall