IGNITING A REVOLUTION: VOICES IN DEFENSE OF MOTHER EARTH - Steve Best Interviewed

Interview by Claudette Vaughan

Steve Best and Anthony J.Nocella, II are editors of a new book called Igniting A Revolution: Voices in Defense of Mother Earth. It's a collection of essays on revolutionary eco-environmentalism from some of the leading US intellectuals of today, activists and prisoners alike. Here Dr. Best talks about the book, what's it like being an activist in Bush's Americka today and the future of the environmental movement.

Dr. Steve Best

	Click here to read Claudette Vaughan's review of Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (edited by Steve Best & Anthony J.Nocella, II)
	Click here to read the ‘Taste of Leeds' interview with Dr Steve Best

CV: In his book, The Soft Cage , Christian Parent said that the history of surveillance moves from slaves to immigrants to political radicals to criminals, and then to anyone with a credit card or computer. What is it like being an activist in Bush's America today?

SB: What is it like being a character in Orwell's novel, 1984 ? Or in Kafka's novel, The Trial ? What is it like living within a system of total surveillance where sophisticated technologies are usurped for purposes of domination and control? What is it like to experience the revival of McCarthysism, and to bear painful witness to the mutation of Corporate America into a police state and fascist society? What is it like to agitate in a society that has developed a “Total Information Awareness” system to track your every thought and movement, from your medical and financial records to your visits to the library? A society where Big Business and Big Government have merged seamlessly, such that the three biggest phone companies in the US -- AT&T, MCI and BellSouth – handed over the private records of their customers to the government, assembling the world's largest database? What is it like living in a society that is a total lie -- where the hypocrisy of the “war against terrorism” and “democratic national building” is unbearable, where most of the public supports Bush's assault on the Constitution in the naïve belief he is protecting them from the “terrorism” that his policies foment and aggravate?

What is it like? It's ominous and alarming. People are paranoid and scared, and those contemplating political involvement such as protesting the US invasion of Iraq are scared off by the thought of FBI paparazzi storing their image in massive data banks. The right to free speech ends as soon as you begin to exercise it. As the politics of nature --- the struggle for liberation of animals and the earth – is the most dynamic fight today, one that poses a serious threat to corporate interests, animal and earth liberationists are under ferocious attack. As now widely noted, the situation in the US today is very similar to the climate in the 1950s, with the difference that the Red Scare of communism has morphed into the Green Scare of animal rights and environmental “ecoterrorists.”

In the “home of the brave, land of the free,” activists are followed by federal agents; their phone conversations and computer activity is monitored, their homes are raided, they are forced to testify before grand juries and pressured to “name names,” they are targets of federal round ups, they are jailed for exercising constitutionally protected rights and liberties. Saboteurs receive stiffer prison sentences that rapists, bank robbers, and murderers.

There has never been freedom of speech or action in the US, but in the post-9/11 climate, where the USA PATRIOT Act is the law of the land, not the Constitution and Bill of Rights, activists are demonized as terrorists – not just the ALF, ELF, and SHAC, but also completely legal and peaceful groups like Food Not Bombs and vegan outreach organizations.

CV: What happened to the Left in America? How does one move a whole party out to the margins without there being a public outcry?

SB: It's a very strange atmosphere where the Democrats are too spineless to mount any real opposition to Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors, academics largely remain silent, and there is no effective mass movement against the most criminal and corrupt administration in US history.

The Left has failed to be any serious oppositional force. There is no Left group, figure, or even labor party of any significance. From the early 20 th century days of imported socialist ideologies to the Yippieism and Maoism of the 1960s to the identify politics of the 1980s to the present, the Left never spoke in a language that resonated with the American public, whereas conservative ideals of God, Nation, and Family had a far greater impact and continue to support the fascism of the Bush regime. In his excellent book, Political Power and Social Movements , Carl Boggs shows how all oppositional forces and “new social movements” in the US after the 1960s – including student groups, feminists, black liberationists, and grass roots neighborhood organizations – were crushed by state repression; co-opted by bureaucracy and markets; or self-destructed through hierarchies and infighting.

Another factor is that after the 1960s, radicals entered the academy, where their radical ideas were co-opted by the carrot and stick policies of university promotion systems and died in the reified atmosphere of abstract theory divorced from concrete politics. The right wing and lunatics like David Horowitz prattle on about the “academic Left” as if it were some hegemonic force that injects radical ideologies into the minds of helpless students, training cadres of revolutionaries, as it suppresses conservative ideas. Any academic with truly radical ideas can tell you what a joke that concept is, and how precarious it is for radicals in academia today, where anti-capitalist ideas regularly earn professors denial or revoking of tenure. The “academic left” does exist in the form of many professors teaching feminism, socialism, anarchism, poststructuralism, and so on, but they speak in theory-babble, and their influence travels no farther than the sterile space of the seminar room.

In the mid 19 th century, Karl Marx envisioned socialist revolution on the horizon, emerging from the internal contradictions of capitalism, but capitalism proved far more resilient than he imagined possible and time and time again has defeated or co-opted labor and other oppositional forces. The Left has to find a way to articulate systematic opposition to capitalism, to form coalitions, and to create a mass movement for radical democracy at the grass roots level.

Obviously, in a society organized around state repression and surveillance; obsessed by security; narcotized by consumerism and entertainment spectacles; and plunging ever more members of the middle class into the ranks of the poor, it will be immensely difficult to organize such a movement. Discontent will have to grow considerably. But that seems a guarantee as long as Bush revs up his class warfare policies.

CV: Isn't the real war going on in the world today not against Iraq but it's a war of and for the New World Order versus the rest of us and they know that whoever controls the utilities, controls the purse strings globally and locally?

SB:Yes, your question brings to mind the fallacies of Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” thesis, where allegedly the dynamics of history have shifted from the cold war between communism and capitalism (the former decisively defeated) to the conflict between Islam and the Christian West.

Obviously, this thesis is flawed on many levels. For one thing it assumes a monolithic structure on each end of the equation, when clearly the majority of Muslim followers are not at war with the West and there are strong theocratic and anti-secular forces in the West, such as the Christian Right which exerts a major influence on the policies of the Bush administration. It's not so much a clash of civilizations as it is a clash of fundamentalisms and extremist factions -- whether Muslim extremists or Christian neo-cons. Bush and Bin Laden need each other to carry out their divinely-inspired power ambitions and terrorist schemes; the rest of us are caught in the crossfire as the planet continues to spiral into barbarism and tyranny.

But make no mistake, transnational capitalism is consolidating power over the world's peoples, resources, and biodiversity. You mention the importance of control over resources and utilities – as water and land become scare, and the world reaches the “end of peak oil,” the kind of conflicts Thomas Malthus predicted would overwhelm society are unfolding and will escalate.

CV: Doesn't the New World Order not only want all the oil in Iraq, it also wants to destroy Islamic culture, religion, and intellectualism, relegating them to the ranks of the dispossessed and landless. The neo-con policies of the US not only destabilizes that region, but also threatens to spark WW III.

SB: Absolutely. And 9/11 – whether Bush and others planned it, knew in advance and allowed it to happen, or were just too busy playing golf to pay attention – exploit it as the perfect excuse for world domination and a global Pax Americana. Under the guise of “nation building” and “spreading democracy,” Bush, neo-cons, and transnational corporations are violently imposing onto a complex and diverse world their monolithic vision of “free markets,” a global economy undisturbed by unions, protests, and environmental regulations. Anyone who doubts the coercive policies behind capitalist globalization ought to read John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , an insider's account of the insidious forces driving US Empire building. Utopians of the marketplace are oblivious to national, ethic, and cultural differences, and think that, as they believed in Iraq, they will be greeted as “liberators” not occupiers. Capitalism eliminated the Euro-fascist threat by 1945, it triumphed over communism by 1990, and – reviving the ancient Crusades – it now seeks to vanquish Islam, replacing the monotheism of Mohammed with that of Jesus, and trying to conquer Islamic nations with guns, markets, and mass culture. Of course, they have only inflamed Islamic fundamentalism and bred new armies of resisters and suicide bombers. Their attempts at negotiating conflicts are always lame, heavy-handed, murderous, and self-serving. They have no respect for international laws and treaties, and ultimately they just might throw the world into chaos and war.

CV: As editors you and Anthony J. Nocella II just published Igniting A Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press, 2006). Can you talk about the book and its message please?

SB: Igniting a Revolution is a new anthology featuring over 40 radical voices addressing the global social-ecological crisis that threatens all life. The voices range from social ecology, deep ecology, Earth First!, ecofeminism, and anarcho-primitivism to Native Americans, Black liberationists, animal and earth liberationists, and political prisoners.

Similar to Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (which Tony and I edited and released with Lantern Books in 2004), Igniting a Revolution employs a boundary-transgressing and bridge-building approach. It brings together sundry people and positions that ordinarily never meet: academics and activists, scholars and prisoners, whites and people of color, men and women, and human and animal rights advocates. Each standpoint offers a crucial perspective on the nature and causes of social and environmental breakdown that contributes to an understanding of the whole.

An important task of Igniting a Revolution is to decouple environmentalism from white, male, privileged positions; dislodge it from a mainstream, single-issue pedestal; and diversify and radicalize it along class, gender, race, ethnic, and other lines. This broadens the environmental movement such that it addresses social justice issues; makes it larger, more diverse, and stronger; and brings to the table the crucial issues of race and class.

CV: What would you say is the overarching argument or position of the book?

SB: The book argues that a revolutionary environmentalism is necessary to the extent that ecological and social problems are systemic and inherent to capitalism or even “civilization” itself. Revolutionary environmentalists renounce reformist approaches that aim only to manage the symptoms of the global ecological crisis and never dare or think to probe its underlying dynamics and causes. Revolutionary environmentalists see “separate” problems as related to the larger system of global capitalism and reject the reformist notion of “green capitalism” as a naïve oxymoron. They seek to abolish all hierarchies, including the one whereby humans live as if they were separate from nature and pursue the deluded goal of mastery and control. The goal of an egalitarian, democratic, and ecological world cannot be realized within the present world system, and requires a rupture with it.

In the last three decades, there has been growing awareness that environmentalism cannot succeed without social justice and social justice cannot be realized without environmentalism. Such a holistic orientation is evident in the international Green network, the US. environmental justice movement, Earth First! efforts (as initiated by Judi Bari) to join with timber workers, alter-globalization channels, Zapatista coalition building, and often in the communiqués and actions of ALF and ELF activists. Examples of broad alliance politics are visible also in recent efforts to build bridges among animal, earth, and Black liberationists and anti-imperialists – such as are evident in Igniting a Revolution .

To be sure, defending forests and protecting whales are crucial actions to take, for they protect evolutionary processes and ecological systems vital to the planet and all species and peoples within it. Yet at the same time, it is also critical to fight side-by-side with oppressed peoples in order to address all forms of environmental destruction and build a movement far greater in numbers and strength than possible with a single-issue focus. From a broad perspective, revolutionary environmentalism is a class, race, gender, and culture war that aims to abolish every system of domination, including that of human beings over nature.

As the dynamics that brought about the ecological crisis are not reducible to any single factor or cause, all groups and orientations that can effectively challenge the ideologies and institutions implicated in domination and ecological destruction have a relevant role to play in the global social-environmental struggle. While each radical standpoint is important, none can accomplish systemic social transformation by itself. Working together, however, through a diversity of critiques and tactics that mobilize different communities, a flank of militant groups and positions can drive a battering ram into the structures of power and domination and open the door to a new future.

CV: There are numerous factions in the radical environment movement of today, although predominantly non-violent, it encompasses every position from violence to pacifism. Does Igniting a Revolution address the diversity of the cause?

SB: The main objective of Igniting a Revolution is to advance radical critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, speciesism, and anthropocentrism and call for profound social transformation at all levels. While it acknowledges other tendencies in the Western environmental movements, it does not rest satisfied with a relativist position, but rather is sharply critical of mainstream environmentalism. The book advances the position that mainstream and reformist strategies – while typically white, male, and privileged – are lacking in diversity, and urges an environmental politics that engages social issues of such as class and race, while also promoting understanding of the deep connections between human, animal, and earth liberation.

CV: How do you mobalise the white western middle classes when the common perception of ecology is something to do with ‘pandas' and eating museli?

SB: In the last three decades there has been growing awareness that environmentalism cannot succeed without social justice and social justice cannot be realized without environmentalism. Such a holistic orientation can be seen in the international Green network, the US environmental justice movement, Earth First! efforts (as initiated by Judi Bari) to join with timber workers, alter-globalization channels, Zapatista coalition building, and often in the communiqués and actions of ALF and ELF activists. Examples of broad alliance politics are visible also in recent efforts to build bridges among animal, Earth, and Black liberationists and anti-imperialists (as evident in Igniting a Revolution). These various dynamics are part and parcel of the emergence of what we call revolutionary environmentalism.

CV: The environmental situation seems increasingly bleak; are there grounds for hope?

SB: Our epoch is utterly unique in the history of humanity and planetary evolution itself. Homo sapiens has become so alienated from nature, so imperialistic on a global scale, so monstrous in its growth and needs, it has initiated the sixth great extinction crisis in natural history and brought about global warming. We likely will see the extinction of species such as orangutans and chimpanzees in our lifetime, along with elephants, tigers, giant pandas, whales, and countless other endangered species. Future generations will have to adapt to the incredible challenges of global climate change; it will not be the best time to live.

As the slumbering giants of India and China awaken and rise to create modern societies organized around automobiles, hamburgers, and fossil fuels, it is easy to become resigned to the potential tragedy playing out on this planet, that of a failed species. But it's not too late and this crisis situation may yet spawn dramatic change. As Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci put it, “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”

This is a pivotal time in history, a crossroads for the future of life. Windows of opportunity are closing. The actions that human beings now collectively take or fail to take will determine whether the future is hopeful or bleak. While the result is horrible to contemplate, our species may not meet this challenge and drive itself into the same oblivion as it drove countless other species. There is no economic or technological fix for the crises we confront, the only solution lies in radical change at all levels.

Politics as usual just won't cut it anymore. We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities.

A new revolutionary politics will build on the achievements of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human standpoints in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and its omnicidal grow-or-die logic.

Radical politics must reverse the growing power of the state, mass media, and corporations to promote egalitarianism and participatory democratization at all levels of society – political, cultural, and economic. It must dismantle all asymmetrical power relations and structures of hierarchy, including that of humans over animals and the earth. Radical politics is impossible without the revitalization of citizenship and the re-politicization of life, which begins with forms of education, communication, culture, and art that anger, awaken, inspire, and empower people toward action and change.

Clearly, there is no guarantee that Homo sapiens will survive in the near future, as the dystopian visions of films such as Mad Max or Waterworld may actually be realized. But nor is there is any promise that revolutionary environmentalism can or will arise, given problems such as the factionalism and egoism that typically tears political groups apart and/or the fierce political repression always directed against resistance movements.

Amidst so many doubts and uncertainties, there is nonetheless no question whatsoever that the quality of the future—if humanity and other imperiled species have one—depends on the strength of global resistance movements and the possibilities for revolutionary change.

CV: We know from even in the short history of the radical environmental movements' history there is a body count. These are undeniable facts and many – the latest casualty being Bill Rodgers who committed suicide in a Phoenix jail cell in December 2005 – have died violently in the front lines of the ecology wars. The loss in terms of human and non-human lives is appalling whether their deaths were outright murder such as Judy Bari, Dian Fossey, or Karen Silkwood to name just a few, or indirectly as a result of the effects of the rape of the land, soil degradation, water pollution, and so on. Environmentalists have been subjected to suppression, physical and legal intimidation, and scapegoating. How does one defend oneself against this backlash?

SB: Through intelligence, security, resolve, and support. It is crucial, first, that everyone understand the mechanisms of state repression, take appropriate security measures – from confiding in comrades to email and phone conversations. Activists must carefully monitor the movements and methods of those who monitor them. Never forgetting the plight of the planet, we all must redouble our resolve and efforts and commit ourselves to fighting for the earth – for total liberation – whatever the risk or costs, while understanding that in the US, UK, and elsewhere, sabotage, harassment, and other forms of direct action can lead to lengthy prison sentences. We must realize that the repression is a sign of progress and our growing strength; we are crossing the Rubicon, and the fight to save the planet is becoming a real “struggle.” I think we must also solicit support from the human rights and legal communities. It is incredible that the animal rights and environmental movements are bearing the brunt of state repression, and yet human rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have ignored their plight – although this is just beginning to change as civil liberty groups finally start to grasp the deep significance of the SHAC 7 trial. When they come for animal and earth liberationists, they come for all.

CV: The interests that are threatened by radical environmentalism are corporate and the federal government supports corporate interests. What is the alternative to corporatism and militarism that is ravaging the planet today?

SB: Revolutionary environmentalists recognize the need for fundamental changes on many levels, such as with human psychologies (informed by anthropocentric worldviews, values, and identities), interpersonal relations (mediated by racism, sexism, speciesism, ageism, classism, homophobia, and elitism), social institutions (governed by authoritarian, plutocratic, and corrupt or pseudo-democratic forms), technologies (enforcing labor and exploitation imperatives and driven by fossil-fuels that cause pollution and global warming), and the prevailing economic system (an inherently destructive and unsustainable global capitalism driven by profit, production, and consumption imperatives).

As the dynamics that brought about global warming, rainforest destruction, species extinction, and poisoning of communities are not reducible to any single factor or cause—be it agricultural society, the rise of states, anthropocentrism, speciesism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, industrialism, technocracy, or capitalism—all radical groups and orientations that can effectively challenge the ideologies and institutions implicated in domination and ecological destruction have a relevant role to play in the global social-environmental struggle. While standpoints such as deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, animal liberation, Black liberation, and the ELF are all important, none can accomplish systemic social transformation by itself. Working together, however, through a diversity of critiques and tactics that mobilize different communities, a flank of militant groups and positions can drive a battering ram into the structures of power and domination and open the door to a new future.

Although there is diversity in unity, there must also be unity in diversity. Solidarity can emerge in recognition of the fact that all forms of oppression are directly or indirectly related to the values, institutions, and system of global capitalism and related hierarchical structures. To be unified and effective, however, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist alliances require mutual sharing, respectful learning, and psychological growth, such that, for instance, black liberationists, ecofeminists, and animal liberationists can help one another overcome racism, sexism, and speciesism.

New social movements and Greens have failed to realize their radical potential. They have abandoned their original demands for radical social change and become integrated into capitalist structures that have eliminated “existing socialist countries” as well as social democracies in a global triumph of neoliberalism. A new revolutionary force must therefore emerge, one that will build on the achievements of classical democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions; incorporate radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles; synthesize animal, Earth, and human liberation standpoints; and build a global social-ecological revolution capable of abolishing transnational capitalism so that just and ecological societies can be constructed in its place.