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What can I hope for (from politics)? 1131
eagerness to justify the system. Their original opposition, whether they
explain it with the opposition of oppressors and oppressed or with the
antagonism between freedom and equality, is by no means the
consequence of differing answers given to the challenge of the twenty¬
first century. It is therefore hardly surprising that they have nothing
relevant to say. Ecological politics begins at the very point where the
traditional concepts of left and right lose their meaning.
The left originally took action against social injustice. Primarily on
the influence of Marx, it saw its roots in the organisation of production
(exploitation) and its remedy in class struggle. Its goal was a new
system of the redistribution of goods, the fairness of which is ensured
by the workers’ state. However, as soon as it set to work to realise its
program, it always became clear that the Bolshevik dictatorship
exercising power over the proletariat in their name was incapable of
being anything other than a kind of state-organised capitalism: the
system of inhuman exploitation and total defencelessness. It also
became clear that exploitation is not an economic, but a political
category. It does not take place in factories where the evil capitalist
appropriates the mysterious something known as surplus value. It is
rather a matter of power: it depends on who exercises control over the
institutionalised means of compelling, controlling and deceiving others
and how. In full awareness of this, the radicalism of the new left
started proclaiming already a good half a century ago that capitalism
and communism are merely two versions of the oppressive system of
the modern industrial state. Ecological politics was originally
developed in this new left-wing milieu. Taking these realisations
further, it gained its particular character and distanced itself from the
traditional left.
In the West, the welfare state integrated these left-wing demands
for social justice and equality of opportunity, thus ending class struggle
there. By the time it could have started anew, there were no more
classes, only consumers. Employers and employees threw themselves
on the resources of nature with joint force and stripped them to the
bone in a couple decades. In the meantime, the unjustifiable
inequalities merely grew worse: they were exacerbated by the extreme
difference between the situations of the victims and beneficiaries of
the environmental catastrophe. However, progress confused with
growth no longer had the remedy, nor did the recipe of consumerism
confused with wellbeing; on the contrary, these appeared to have
caused the problem in the first place. What, then, is to be done? While