This often-overlooked strand of Marx’s work was a continuation of his early thinking in the Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, which was concerned with the perversion of the “species-being” of mankind by the development of capitalist relations of production, as well as its ruinous effect on the environment in which the species lived. Marx himself said of the planetary eco-sphere that society must “hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition”. It was an insight that fused romantic anti-industrialism with a cold economic analysis of capital. It is the basis of Lowy and Kovel’s vision of a socialism which consciously distances itself from the productivist varieties of the 20th century that led, in one iteration, to the Soviet Union’s satellite states Czechoslovakia and East Germany holding the record for emission of greenhouse gasses per inhabitant. It was this vision that inspired the Belem Declaration, an Eco-Socialist Manifesto discussed and signed by thousands of anti-capitalist activists and writers at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in 2009.
As humanity races towards the second quarter of the 21st century it is now clear that to have any chance of not exceeding a 2°C increase in global temperature–an increase in itself now virtually inevitable, and which will produce severe environmental and social crises especially in sub-Saharan Africa and coastal areas–two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves will have to remain in the ground. At the same time, we must move rapidly to a post-carbon energy infrastructure with radically new forms of transport. Fracking, supported by some trade unions because it creates jobs, is an enormous backward step. If unions are to play any role in shaping and saving the future, they must urgently promote re-skilling and publically-funded jobs in renewable energy rather than act as compliant footmen to capital’s exploitation of natural resources and human labour. As John McDonnell put it in Another World is Possible: A Manifesto for 21st Century Socialism (2007), “We cannot tackle climate change unless we address the system that has caused it”.
The redefinitions of Marxism suggested by Bookchin, Albert, Bahro and Gorz, and latterly by Lowy, Kovel and other eco-socialists, emerged from the failure of Leninism to produce a democratic socialism or to transcend capitalism’s productivist economic model. In the late 19th century Bernstein, without fully understanding what he was doing, laid the groundwork for such a revisionist critique. To the fury of dogmatic Marxists he attacked the theory at its point of pride–that it was a science akin to Darwinism, a unique paradigm shift amounting to a separate academic discipline. Bernstein denied this was so and claimed that a rigorous reformist socialism–i.e. a programme based on realistic plans for economic regulation–was in fact more scientific than the abstractions of Marxist political economy.
The utility and necessity of reformist socialism arose from the industrialised and urbanised capitalism of Europe and America at the beginning of the 20th century. But Imperial Russia was several decades behind this process and openings for political reform did not exist. Resistance to the gross inhumanity of early capitalism in Russia was a mixture of ferocious trade union organising and the occasional riot in the face of brutal state repression. The Russian labour and trade union movement may have been in its infancy, but it was already following Marx’s prescriptions for resistance to working inhumanely long hours in unhealthy and unsafe conditions.
In Capital, Volume I, Marx pointed out that although there may seem to be a voluntary exchange of contracts between worker and owners in a free market, the imbalance of power was such that workers were inevitably exploited. The first step to resistance therefore had to be securing strong employment regulation and restrictions on working time. As Marx wrote in the “Working Day” chapter:
The labourers must put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ comes the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working day, which shall make clear when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.17
One of the most significant examples of this kind of trade union organising arose from the General Union of Jewish Workers, known as the Bund.
In the mid-19th century most of the four million Jews within the Russian Empire’s borders were confined to the Pale of Settlement, which stretched from Poland and Lithuania to Ukraine and the Black Sea. In the 1860s and 1870s, Alexander II began to reform the Empire’s oppressive anti-Semitic laws by allowing certain categories of Jews (merchants, doctors, craftsmen and ex-soldiers) to move beyond the Pale. Jews were allowed to enter the civil service and attend universities, and Jewish communities began to appear in St Petersburg and Moscow. But the accession of Alexander III saw a reappearance of mass pogroms, a ban on Jews working for the government and a restriction of the number of Jewish students.
The most significant change was a ban on Jews working the land. This inevitably pushed them into the cities of the Pale and created a large Jewish working class. By 1897 there were an estimated 105,000 Jewish urban workers in the Russian Empire, mainly in the big cities of Warsaw, Vilno, Lodz, Minsk, Grodno and Białystok. Between 1897 and 1910, the total Jewish urban population leapt to over three million. The result was the creation of the Bund, a trade union and political party which was an “organic emergence out of existing working class networks”18 in those cities.
The Bund had its own democratic structures, a popular newspaper and paid full-time organisers. It was one of the founding bodies of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1903. It also rejected Zionism, which it called “emigrationism”, and the idea that there was a World Jewry with common problems. At the same time, it insisted that the issues faced by the Jewish proletariat within the Empire must be addressed primarily by Jewish organisations. There was an obvious contradiction here. On the one hand the Bund dismissed the idea that it had a common interest with, say, rich French Jews, but it considered all Russian Jews a nationality and it wanted a Russian Revolution to deliver autonomy for all the Empire’s oppressed nationalities, including its own. Yet for a time it led the way in providing a model of grassroots industrial organising for all the Russian working class.19
In late-19th-century Russia this kind of activism arose from the work of Jewish trade unionists in Vilno that became known as the Vilno Programme. At the end of the 19th century Jews comprised nearly 60% of the urban population of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus. In 1891 Alexander III expelled all Jews from St Petersburg and Moscow, leading to an upsurge of radical political organisation in cities such as Vilno, Warsaw and Riga. In 1892 the disparate socialist groups in Poland came together to form the Polish Socialist Party. This would attract far more support from Polish workers (both Jewish and Catholic) than would the Marxist Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania group, formed in 1893 on Rosa Luxemburg’s initiative, which denied the necessity of a separate struggle for Polish independence.
The Bund adopted a socialist political programme which sought to improve the lot of Jewish workers inside the Empire. It campaigned for the recognition of Yiddish, full legal and cultural rights for Jewish citizens, and political liberalisation. The Vilno Programme, which pre-dated the creation of the Bund, derived from the efforts of Jewish social democrats such as Alexander Kremer to break out of propagandising for Marxism with small groups of “advanced workers” and to bring their ideas to the mass of common workers. To do this they decided to drop abstruse discussion of Marxist philosophy and concentrate on agitating for legal reforms and employment rights.