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100 | THe Puttosopuy or Eco-Potitics
The more comprehensive the critique, the sooner this need arises.
This is a dangerous moment in movements’ lives. The temptation is great
to limit their program to the aversion of the bad and to identifying the
means necessary for this. Istvan Bibö, in his study The Meaning of
European Social Development, rightly attributed the failure of the socialist
experiments to a lack of realistic notions about the desirable state of
society. Instead, they placed the emphasis on the “revolutionary” means
of seizing power. The improperly thought-through utopias about the
abolition of private property and full equality led, together with the cult
of revolutionary violence, to twisted, bloody dictatorships worldwide.
The social reformers, on the other hand, had to content themselves with
achievements that served to bolster capitalism instead of overthrowing
it. Let us draw from this the conclusion that there has to be something
between a systematic critique of society and a strategy aimed at seizing
power, on which depends the relevance of a given political worldview:
what kind of world would they actually like to live in? Let us call this
the goal of the given movement and not confuse it for a moment with
the political means used to achieve it. It is my conviction, however, that
determining these goals is not primarily a theoretical question to be
answered in the depths of a library. The goodness of the chosen
procedures and goals are justified primarily by having been tried and
tested and proven themselves.
Perhaps we can state as a central thesis that the adherents of an
ecological (vulgarly: green) worldview want to maintain the rich diversity
and variability— ability to change — of lifeforms in every case and, where
necessary, to restore it, in society as well as in nature. It follows from
the principle of diversity that they can want many different things under
differing historical circumstances. It is not necessary for them to think
the same about the good life and even less to demand such concepts,
apart from a few basic principles, from others. The consequence of the
defence of diversity is nevertheless not the contingency of possible good
goals. For the rich diversity of lifeforms is not due in either society or
nature to the independence of optional variants, but precisely to the
ordered nature of their coexistence. The knowledge of the relations sets
limits to this relativism. ‘The ecological movements deny the right to
existence of practices that destroy diversity and they protest against
violent interventions against the spontaneous order of coexistence. ‘The
recognition that these can be eliminated only through systemic change
gives their conviction a decidedly political character.
What, therefore, do the Greens want?