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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 twentyfirst 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
