How civic activism and ecology may (and hopefully will) defeat capitalism

It is easy to witness nowadays a widespread sense of uneasiness in the West and in the whole world in the younger generations. The political void left behind by the concrete action of the leftist parties in the last decades, the loss of balance in the logic of the ‘traditional’ parties, have brought to a period of social and political confusion. This atmosphere triggered the debate, concerning a sort of urge to an evolution towards a new conception of life, which would be more suitable to the needs of the humankind in the XXI century. This would request the ready intervention of enlightened political élites, but the society has nurtured in the last decades more and more distrust towards institutions for the reasons aforementioned. Is a properly channeled civil activism the key to answer this dilemma and cut the Gordian knot, which is paralyzing the research for an answer? Somebody would say that this is too much a XIX-XX century style way of thinking and acting. Apart from how ridiculous it sounds, it is utterly nonsense and fatalist. As it has always been and will always be in history, the humankind cannot help but playing a major role in shaping
the past, present and future of the world.

Civil society, in a dynamic and ‘advanced’ world as the one we are living in, is of utmost importance for the creation of a common awareness, for the empowerment of the weakest social categories, for the strong affirmation of pluralism and activism against the risk of polarization in the political discourse. Especially when dealing with period of massive transformation from a state of affairs to another, the society is called to act and create the new paradigms, which will determine the future, concrete realization of the everyday life. However, in what shape is civil society nowadays? What are the goals at which it aims? Which are the pressures on it and its modus operandi?
In this research paper, I would like to analyze how civil society operates today, underlining the substantial differences in goals and scope according to different areas of the world. This analysis is necessary in order to understands how the society is reacting to the (apparent or actual) crisis of political identity and trajectory, and to outline how this confusion may lead to a massive variety of concrete actions, which often miss the heart of the problem in their development. Starting from this point, I would delve into the political and economic expectations for the near future, pointing out
how the path toward the evolution of the world in mere capitalistic terms, i.e. how it is expected to go on, could turn barely attainable. At the end, getting deeper into the ecological issue, I will outline those solutions, which I think may be useful in the near future to overcome frictions in the actual scope of civil society and would actually implement it thoroughly, helping channeling the evolution in the next decades in an effective way which is becoming utterly necessary.

In 2016, Thomas Carothers and Richard Youngs from Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy and Rule of Law Program launched a Civic Activism Network, in order to investigate the nature of the new civic activism in selected developing and post-communist countries, so to “investigate what civic activism really entails and what kind of potential it harbors”. This focus is important in order to understand what the new movements are mostly dealing with. This all is aimed at pointing out the main characteristic of the emerging civil society, i.e.:

1. Common trends among countries versus unique national qualities;
2. Old versus new form of activism;
3. Overarching political versus bread-and-butter practical concerns;
4. Liberal vs illiberal identities;
5. Effective versus ineffective forms of activism.

In the analysis of eight different countries, namely Brazil, Egypt, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, India and Kenya, the authors underline the mix of common trends and country specific changes in civil society around the world. Besides becoming less dependent on permanent membership structures and less exclusively channeled through traditional non-governmental organizations, civic activism is becoming more “creative”, so to evade governmental controls, as
both democratic and authoritarian regimes respond nervously and defensively to the new type of contentious politics.
Nevertheless, the new activism is conditioned by more nationally specific patterns than before: in all eight of the examined countries, new activists judge themselves to be countering elitist NGOs, just as much as they target their respective governments.

It is of extreme interest to notice that not everything about the new civic activism is liberal, progressive, or benign in terms of its implications for the quality of democracy: well-off middle-class groups more concerned with preserving certain features of society undertake some activism as well. In Brazil, right-wing movements are rising in prominence, and in the Middle East and Africa civic radicalization is a growing concern. Today’s global civil society is not just about the universal human rights campaigns that have long been the central pillar of traditional NGOs work. Some new activism is more radically left-wing and some more radically right-wing than that which dominated international civil society in the past. The idea of direct communication between people and their government mirrors, for example, the spirit of political populism, a label that has become utterly fashionable in the last period.
Another minus of the overall situation is that the new civic activism has not been strong enough to reverse fully the factors that have spurred its emergence in the countries analyzed. It has not held at bay increasingly acute authoritarianism in Egypt, Thailand and Turkey, or growing political illiberalism in India and Kenya, nor has it managed to dislodge stakes blocking deeper reform in Brazil, Tunisia and Ukraine.

New activism is both a cause and an effect of harsher climate in civil society. Why is it happening so?

In a climate of vivid and tangible confusion about the necessary path toward evolution in the long-term future, the debate is actually revolving for the very first time in a more concrete fashion around the sustainability of the system the world actually relies on. The magic recipe, made up of liberal democracy and capitalism, seems now less effective than expected two decades ago, and the Western world in particular is questioning the sustainability of the illusion crumbling today.
The delicate situation is shaking the very basis of the New World Order, and the seemingly closed dialectic historical circle now needs to open up again. The real obstacle to this all is just a simple question: how.
Far from having the answer, my purpose is now to try to activate one of the possible dialectic process, which may give one of the several possible answer to this supreme question.

The concept depicting the West lying in ‘chaos and despair’ does not represent anything new in the academic field. Dozens of contemporary authors and scholars have been denouncing the society of consumerism we are living in, but the blow for the failed predictions made by Francis Fukuyama about ‘our’ part of the world still hurts. “The end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” sounds now naïf, and the society seems incapable of elaborating a new prospect for the long-term development. The apparently invulnerable Western homo eligens seems now victim of the uncertainty coming from the outside world and stuck in a feeling of ineluctable apathy. Would this be enough to define the West and capitalism as doomed already?

It is of capital importance to start this dialectic process by analyzing the most important points, representing a solid reality, about which it would be hardly possible to argue. This is the necessary starting point, which would pave the way to further dialectic evolution, and without which it would be simply impossible to start a constructive dialogue. In time of confusion, to undress from any superstructure which seems unquestionable is the first step, in order to outline properly a path viable for the whole humanity, and not just the majority of it.

Civil society has already been inspired by this idea in the past, and has shown the power of an organic, comprehensive debate based on self-evident truths. Not to go too far in history, it is important to underline how it has been possible to express dissent in the late years of the Cold War even in the Eastern European bloc, despite the impression of impossibility to foster local activism. The Polski Klub Ekologiczny (PKE) managed in the beginning of the ‘80s to score several successes in protesting against the unbearable levels of pollution to which Poland was exposed in those years, and it never accepted to put itself under a state-sponsored umbrella. Similar processes have been witnessed in the Baltic countries, starting to test the resistance of the regimes to civic activism.

Starting from this good example, we could get a clue about the possibility of testing the actual system on one of the issue of the utmost importance, which is nevertheless frequently undervalued, but is hardly deniable. We have the identikit of a good starting point. Murray Bookchin’s work Ecology and revolutionary thought represents, in this analysis, the starting point for a redefinition of balances and needs in the society of the XXI century. It is possible to witness, even in the time this has been actually written (1964), a striking actuality of the thesis reported. “Modern man’s despoliation of the environment is global in scope, like his imperialism. It is even extraterrestrial, as witness the disturbances of the Van Allen Belt a few years ago. Today human parasitism disrupts more than the atmosphere, climate, water resources, soil, flora, and fauna of a region; it upsets virtually all the basic cycles of nature and threatens to undermine the stability of the environment on a worldwide scale”. According to Bauman, the disastrous environmental situation is direct cause of the polarization shaped by the forced privatization and individualization of the life’s objectives, and it is global in its scope. The possibility to fill the social and economic gap between individuals is
extremely uneven at a global level: Western governments spend $350 billions per year in subsidies for agriculture of their own countries, letting live European bovines much better than the vast majority of the global population. The International Institute for Environment and Development calculated that, in order to satisfy the needs of consumption of the people living in London, an area as big as the whole Great Britain is needed. The citizens of the US cities employ for their sustenance 4,7 hectares of land each, while those living in India just 0,4. The highest the standard of living, the biggest the ecological footprint. Vancouver needs a territory 180 times bigger than its own to provide sustenance for its inhabitants. As John Reader has underlined, if every person on Earth would live with the same living standards witnessed in North America, just one planet would not be sufficient: we would need at least three planets to provide for everybody’s need.

Social ecologists assert that the present ecological crisis has its roots in human social problems, and that the domination of human-over-nature stems from the domination of human-over-human.

As Bookchin investigates further, what is shaping up in front of our eyes today is a crisis not only in natural ecology but above all in social ecology. Modern society is organized round immense urban belts at one extreme, a highly industrialized agriculture at the other extreme, and bureaucratized anonymous state apparatus. If we leave all moral considerations aside for the moment and examine the physical structure of this society, what must necessarily impress us is the incredible logistical problems it is obliged to solve — problems of transportation, of density, of supply (raw materials, manufactured commodities, and foodstuffs), of economic and political organization, of industrial location, and so forth. The burden this type of urbanized and centralized society places on any continental area is enormous. If the process of urbanizing man and industrializing agriculture were to continue unabated, it would make much of the earth inhospitable for viable, healthy human beings and render vast areas utterly uninhabitable.

Nevertheless, the ecological problem our planet and society are facing is put constantly to the test. The dominion of the capitalistic financial oligarchy in the everyday political life has no doubt when choosing between material gains and the preservation of the environment and humanity as existing phenomenon. How does it happen? “First, we have witnessed existential denial: in this case, it is said that the environmental problem in question – for instance, climate change – simply does not exist. But if the weight of evidence becomes impossible to ignore, we can turn to consequential denial. Here, it is possible to admit that the problem exists, but it really does not matter. Finally, if we cannot credibly deny the problem’s existence and its consequences, we might say we cannot do anything about it. This is fatalistic denial. For the die-hard environmental sceptic, fatalist denial is a last and all-but-impenetrable line of psychological defence”.

The pressure on this subject is enormous, and nevertheless the effort put by governments in order to tackle this all is minimal, if not non-existent (like in the so called biggest and strongest democracy in the world nowadays). Ecology derives its critical edge not only from the fact that it alone, among all the sciences presents this powerful message to humanity, but because it also presents this message in a new social dimension. From an ecological viewpoint, the reversal of organic evolution is the result of appalling contradictions between town and country, state and community, industry and husbandry, mass manufacture and craftsmanship, centralism and regionalism, the bureaucratic scale and the human scale.

The civil society has been quite active in this sense, organizing rallies and organizations which put the preservation of the environment, and consequently of social justice, at the top of their priorities. On April 22, 2017, a March for Science is expected to take place in more than 500 cities around the US in order to tackle the anti-scientific and anti-environmental policies lately undertaken by the newly elected president Donald Trump20. In the last years, there have been massive occasions of gathering and participation in environmental driven manifestations, the biggest of which has been the Global Climate March in 201421. With an overall participation of 600.000 people, the organizers claimed to create “the largest single event on climate that has been organized to date... one so large and diverse that it cannot be ignored".
On November 2016, The Guardian wrote: “The global green movement is preparing for the fight of its life against efforts by Donald Trump to rollback action on climate change, with a surge in fundraising, planned court challenges and a succession of protests. Environmental activists said the election of a climate change denier as US president, along with the prospect of former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and various oil billionaires holding senior posts, has prompted an “outpouring” of donations”. The risk represented by a newly elected negationist establishment in
the first power in the world has thus pushed the Green activists: “If Trump tries to go backwards on climate change he will run headlong into an organized mass of people who will fight him in the courts, in Congress and on the streets”, declared Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club (America’s largest green group).
On April 2nd 2017 the Global Greens and the European Greens have signed the Liverpool declaration, outlining the main lines of action for the agenda 2017. The meeting has seen the large participation of green MPs and party representatives from all around the world. “We Greens offer a politics which is both practical and visionary [...] we seek to replace fear with hope, hatred with compassion, racism with respect for all”. The event has not reached a decent visibility worldwide, but it seems evident that the Green activism is on the rise, reflecting the trend in the sensible rise in the percentage of Green MPs elected in the last six months in Austria, Netherland and Finland, to name few examples.

The awareness about the topic is significantly rising, but this does not mean that concrete action is going at the same pace. It is fundamental to notice that the environmental issue cannot be solved or tackled properly in a mass production/mass consumption society, which privileges quantity and accumulation of material and wealth over quality and redistribution of the existing resources.

The evolution of a system, which creates unbalance and inequalities, is strictly related to the concrete put in practice of certain dynamics that cannot start but from such basic and unavoidable questions, one of which is definitely the environmental issue. This topic must become one of the founding reasons to the launch of determined politics, which would tackle inequality, and would irreversibly modify the capitalist system itself. It is not just desirable, but strictly necessary.
It is important to underline the capital role civil society has in this all. The self-organization of individuals in the concrete application of certain principle is essential, for it would be hardly imaginable a comprehensive effort from the institutions in the implementation of this politics.

The organization in self-sufficient communes, the promotion of the sharing economy, to tackle the extreme consumerism wrapping our everyday life, the promotion of total recycling, fair trade, and to boycott the enterprises and firms not respecting basic environmental principles and the fair treatment of their workers and customers are the first, capital moves which could and must be adopted in this process of evolution of the humankind today. The environmental movements are one fringe of the avant-garde of the ongoing, silent, unstoppable revolution, which is destined to perform the inevitable overthrown of a system, which cannot give anything more to humanity but
unbalance and uncertainty.