The Gap

February 14th, 2008

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Interesting debate over here between Rob Hopkins of the Transition Towns intitiative and Rupert Read, philosopher and Green Party activist, over the relationship between bottom-up, self-organising activism and top-down, legislative, institutional approaches to ‘crossing the gap’.

The gap in question here is that which separates an energy-intensive, high-waste, fossil-fuel based social ecology from one which bases itself on sustainable modes of production and consumption. Instead of being primarily a response to global warming, Transition views Peak Oil as the key issue to which sustainability is a response, and takes the view that the best way of crossing the gap is by agitating for greater localisation of food production, the pursuit of energy efficiency and distributed microgeneration, and what is effectively a grassroots politicisation of communities focused on the question of future-oriented responsibility, the nature of wellbeing, and (implicitly) what social practices we consider to be harmful to our wellbeing. Crucially, this is not a form of survivalism: what makes it so attractive is the maximalism implicit in its implicit ethical perspective, the recognition of continuity between past, present and future, and the consequent desire to pass on a better world, which draws heavily upon the work of Joanna Macy.

Read offers friendly criticism of what he sees as a totalising attitude among some TT-ers, which amounts to the belief that grassroots activism for sustainability is enough, and removes the need for ‘traditional’ institutional politics. He points out that, once action is taken to increase energy efficiency, the free-rider problem arises, in the shape of a market incentive for others to use more energy and to pollute more. As a result, the only solution is to seek to institutionalise equity-based measures such as Contraction and Convergence, thus addressing the problem of price signals creating more energy use, etc. overall.

The debate recalls any number of debates between anarchists, Marxists and social democrats, as well as the debate between care ethicists and ‘principlists’ over the grounds of morality. The question is how far any of these kind of debates are really between two entirely compatible positions, and if so, what is the ‘middle’ between them that renders them compatible. Crossing the gap here is, for either position, ultimately about using what we have now, here in the present, in order to transform the future. There is no question of simply imposing an abstract solution in response to an emergency - the ecofascist programme about which so many defenders of the status quo fantasise. The key point for both the TT approach and the Green party’s view on institutional solutions, is how to build solidarity - at the local level on the one hand, and internationally on the other. With Transition, it becomes a matter of mobilising people’s existing resources of care, of understanding what already connects people to a future that is different from that which is circumscribed by the imperative to seek credit as a source of increasing one’s power to consume. For the Greens’ internationalism, it becomes a matter of re-energising the best liberal understandings of equity, of using this intellectual heritage to articulate a new distribution of rights.

The middle here is the question of accumulation and how it is socially solved, and this brings us back to the need for an understanding of how equity and care have to be socially articulated. How can production be organised for goals other than the accumulation of surplus value? The middle that unites the two extremes is a socialist problem - of how participative democracy can be built into production for social goals in general. As such, it demands a new understanding of the relationship between the present and the future that seeks solidarity with a people yet-to-come.