From ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Politics: The Politicization of the Environment in Left-Wing British Intellectual Discourse (1970s–1980s)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the encounter between environmentalism and the intellectual discourse of the Left in Britain. It shows how environmentalism struggled to converse with British socialism and Marxism and why the final politicization of the environment took a quite long path to transition. Through the analysis of the discussions in The Ecologist, New Left Review, and Marxism Today the article documents their contributions to the ‘greening’ of wider political discourse, and the important place they had in rethinking the role of left-wing politics in the difficult years of the 1980s. While the concept of crisis played a central role in the assimilation of environmental argument and ecology into the complex ideological configuration of socialism and Marxism, it was however an external factor – Thatcherism – that forced the Left’s intellectuals to come to terms with the changing of the political and imposed the idea that the preservation of the environment was a ‘socialist principle’. The article contributes to two primary lines of historical inquiry: the field of modern British environmental history and the politics of the Labour Party’s reformulation during the 1980s.

Introduction: The Green Alternative

Local groups and associations dedicated to the protection of nature have existed in Britain since the seventeenth century with the founding of the Royal Society or The Temple Coffee House Botanic Club. ¹ While the British environmental movement sinks its roots in the Victorian era when the activists struggled against the damage caused by industrialization, recent historiography agrees in tracing the emergence of a politically-aware environmentalism to the 1970s within the context of the post-material society and counterculture. ² The politicization of the environment in Britain thus presents a distinctive double feature: a long history and tradition in terms of cultural sensibility starting with the Victorians and the romanticizing of nature in contrast to the Industrial Revolution, which, more than a century later, developed into a modern mass political movement questioning the limits of the Western capitalist socio-economic model. Although it is still difficult to speak of a distinctive British discipline of environmental history, ³ a solid literature on the topic has nevertheless recently grown, taking either long-term or overly short-term frames of analysis. The primary goal is to reconstruct the material transformation of the British environment in relation to the modernization and the economic transformation of the country, interlinking it with the advance of an autonomous environmental cultural and political discourse. ⁴

The exploration of the transition from an early conservationist approach ⁵ to the politicization of the environment has followed three main paths. On the one hand, the focus has been on the institutionalization of a distinctive ecological political culture, culminating in the creation of the first Green Party (GP) in Europe in 1973, then called People, soon becoming the Ecology Party (1975) and, ultimately, the Green Party in 1985. ⁶ The politicization of the environment may have proved particularly difficult in a two-party system, yet if understood as the process of penetrating the political discourse of the mainstream parties it had nonetheless found other avenues. ⁷ This second trajectory, at times labelled the ‘greening’ of the British political system, ⁸ has had varying degrees of success, starting from the Liberal Party which, in 1979, was the first traditional party to include the environmental issue in its manifesto, and reaching its climax in 1988, the year of a major speech on environmental issues delivered by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. A very recent historiography has put forward the hypothesis that the conceptualization of the environment not simply in terms of rural and urban problems regarding basic standards of public health but as a distinct field of public policy aiming at improving the ‘quality of life’ took place earlier on, in the 1940s and 1950s with the National Park legislation and the 1956 Clean Air Act. ⁹ In any case, the ‘environmental reformism’ managed to overcome the systemic and cultural obstacles and fully succeeded in placing the environment in the political agenda by the end of the 1990s. ¹⁰ Lastly, the third angle of analysis has focused on radical environmentalism in terms of ideology (ecologism ¹¹ ) and practice (direct actions ¹² ). The so-called third wave of British environmentalism was first observed during the early 1990s when an environmentalist campaign was formed to oppose the Thatcher government's road plan for Britain. The tactics used by protesters were spectacular, such as living in trees to prevent them from being felled, and involved a high level of commitment, especially among young activists. While this development has been understandably investigated mainly by political sociology and the sociology of social movements, ¹³ it was however instrumental in raising an interest, for instance, in the history of ‘ecological anarchism’. ¹⁴

This article offers a different angle on the ‘greening’ of British political discourse, focusing on a terrain which has been often overlooked by the literature: the unconventional and multifaceted milieu of left-wing intellectual journals. It draws attention to the contribution made by The Ecologist – founded in 1970 and considered the first ‘political ecology journal’ ¹⁵ – The New Left Review and Marxism Today. The interest is manifold: first, it provides the arena for observing the encounter between the long British tradition of conservationism and sensibility towards the environment with the critique of anti-capitalism in the context of the last phase of the Cold War. While the supposed bohemian posture of the British intellectual Left has been directly associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, ¹⁶ and the debate between ecologists and British Marxists has been frequently described as totally sterile, ¹⁷ a fresh look suggests instead a fecund cross-fertilization between the arguments of the green movement, the maturing of the anti-capitalist discourse in the 1980s and British Cultural Marxism. In this respect, the ‘greening’ of Left-wing discourse could be added to the ‘intellectual revolution’ incited by the British New Left, ¹⁸ opening a new array of historical inquiry and potential research directions at the intersection between environmental history, intellectual history, and social history.

In addition, the politicization of the environment read through the lens of the intellectual discourse converses very well with the crisis of the British Left in the 1970s and the process of ‘modernization’ undergone in the Labour party in the 1980s. In Britain during those years – when, according to a vast literature, the transition towards post-material values got underway ¹⁹ – post-materialism was institutionally invisible and there was no political formation challenging the Labour Party. The transition from ‘old’ to ‘new’ Left politics therefore happened inside the mainstream party of the Left, taking a long time to unfold. According to Prendiville ‘the Labour Party up until the arrival of Tony Blair in 1997, looked down on environmentalists as affluent, middle-class conservationists’. ²⁰ This transformation was strengthened and challenged by the external Left intellectual discourse forced to confront the Thatcherite neo-liberal (and populist, according to Stuart Hall's analysis ²¹ ) use of the environmental issue. Within the polarized context of internal and external hostility of the 1980s, with neo-liberalism and the capitalist approach on the one hand and traditional Marxist economism on the other, it is therefore interesting to reconstruct why socialists, new leftists and social-democrats embraced the environment not only as an instrument to regain electoral consensus, but also as an ideological argument to respond to the crisis of the Left in the battle against the new cultural hegemony performed by Thatcherism. This article investigates this chapter in British history.

My account remains epistemologically anchored to a historical reconstruction of the left-wing political-intellectual discourse, albeit questioned through the prism of a new issue: the environment and ecologism. Drawing from Stephen Collini's categorization of British intellectuals, by intellectual discourse I mean the matrix of critical debate on public and political issues fostered in left-wing journals. ²² Environmental history's prioritization of both physical and social factors proves to be valuable in approaching a discourse that was reconsidering materialism and welcoming the cultural and linguistic turn. In this sense, I have sought to incorporate an environmental history perspective into my historical-political approach.

The Environment as the (New) Political: The Roots of the Red-Green Debate in Britain

In 1986, in his emphatic Introduction to Red and Green, the activist and Chairman of the Strategy Committee of Friends of the Earth Joe Weston explained the contemporary political character of the environment:

Environment is much more than ‘nature’; it is the social, political, economic and physical world in which we live in. This means that environmentalists should be concerned with both the physical and the social world. […] It is time that the greens accepted that it is capitalism rather than industrialism per se which is at the heart of the problems they address. It is time for them to redefine what they mean by ‘the environment’ and begin to take up issues of more relevance to ordinary working people. ²³

In this pamphlet the simple desire to ‘clean up’ the side effects of industrialization gives positive room to a broader concern for the survival of the planet built upon an explicit critique of capitalism and a search for an alternative social and economic model. In terms of ideology, strategy and discourse the ‘elitist’ environmental establishment of the nineteenth and early twentieth century has thriven and the encounter between socialism and environmentalism succeeds here in what could be understood as the manifesto of the British Red-Green movement. ²⁴ At the heart of this discourse, which has represented the main theoretical frame around which the British ‘new environmentalism’ gathered in the 1980s and 1990s, ²⁵ there was the concept of crisis. Interestingly, Prendiville has observed a scenario very similar to the explosion of the recent protests in the UK. ²⁶

While nineteenth-century conservationism and the post-World War 2 approach to the environment were predominantly driven by human health concerns or the romantic idealization of nature, ²⁷ on the contrary this was an environmentalism that strongly believed in the existence of an ‘ecological crisis’: ‘A crisis’, clarified Weston, ‘which had been created by modern industrial affluence’. ²⁸ The debate on the so-called affluent society had developed in the 1960s and had produced a harsh left-wing critique. ²⁹ The overcoming of the affluent society's empty promises – ‘apparently free of poverty’ whose focus was ‘excess consumption rather than the fulfilment of need’ ³⁰ – however assumed a different politically charged status, globally thanks to the confrontation with the debate prompted by the publication of The Limits of Growth and Barry Commoner's response to it; ³¹ in Britain thanks to The Ecologist.

The magazine first appeared in July 1970; its founder and editor was Edward Goldsmith, heir of the famous European banking family. After reading PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, he spent most of the 1960s travelling around the world, discovering the reality of tribal peoples and developing his approach to environmentalism, considering it as inseparable from the survival of ‘primitive’ peoples. ³² The magazine soon became the focal point for all the social and cultural groups of the fledging new movements for the defence of nature and environment, representing the first platform around which to explore the deleterious effects of Western economic development on non-industrial cultures. ³³ In January 1972 The Ecologist published a special issue titled Blueprint for Survival (BFS), a landmark in British environmentalism. ³⁴ BFS reflected Goldsmith's ‘survivalist thinking’, echoing the analysis put forward in The Limits to Growth and concluding that the planet was heading towards a definitive ‘ecological crisis’. The January issue was a success: it quickly sold out, and, reprinted by Penguin, became a bestseller (750,000 copies). ³⁵

The federating role played by The Ecologist and BFS is undeniable: it eventually led to the creation of the GP and represented the starting point for a modern ‘green public discourse’, whose contents and semantics were much forged by the lexicon developed in the magazine with its explicit critique of consumerism – described unequivocally by Goldsmith as ‘the prostitute society’ ³⁶ – and the progress of industrial society. ³⁷ However, although the contradiction between economic growth and the finiteness of the world was at the heart of the concept of ecological crisis as understood by the new environmentalism, the dialogue with socialism was slow and conflicting. On the part of the environmentalists, there was a more widely diffused tendency to represent ecological politics as transcending the whole traditional opposition of Left and Right and the ideological spectrum. In addition, the intellectual traditions of socialism and Marxism were broadly condemned for their ‘productivist’ values. According to the Director of Friends of the Earth Jonathon Porritt, for instance:

Both are dedicated to industrial growth, to the expansion of the means of production, to a materialistic ethic as the best means of meeting people's needs, and to unimpeded technological development. Both rely on increasing centralization and large-scale bureaucratic control and co-ordination. ³⁸

On the side of the left-wing intellectuals, the lack of class perspective from environmentalism was the primary fault. According to the New Left Review, which hosted a long article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1974:

The social neutrality to which the ecological debate lays claim, having recourse as it does so to strategies derived from the evidence of the natural sciences, is a fiction. A simple piece of historical reflection shows just how far this class neutrality goes. […] The ecological movement has only come into being since the districts which the bourgeoise inhabit and their living conditions have been exposed to those environmental burdens that industrialization brings with it. ³⁹

In addition, the process of maximizing economic growth, although highly contested in its social structure and modalities of redistribution, was not rejected in its endemic nature by Marxism, or by traditional Labour or the revisionists. A well-known and much quoted passage by Anthony Crosland described environmentalism as ‘a set of middle and upper class value judgements’ whose champions, ‘though of course not consciously, […] want to kick the ladder down behind them’. ⁴⁰

That the capitalist mode of production has catastrophic consequences, as summed up by Enzensberger, was ‘a commonplace of Marxism’ and the exploitation of natural resources was just another aspect of it. ‘If ecology's hypotheses are valid – concluded the intellectual – then capitalist societies have probably thrown away the chance of realizing Marx's project for the reconciliation of man and nature’. Within this new world condition, the function of socialism had changed from what was once a ‘promise of liberation’ to a ‘question of survival’ and, in terms of ideology, ‘the rule of freedom will be further off than ever’. ⁴¹

It would take few more years for the environment to enter the pantheon of left-wing principles, if in 1986 David Pepper still wrote that ‘the lack of class perspective’ and ‘the lack of historical insight’ that continued to guide British environmentalism was, in reality, ‘a lack of political insight’. ⁴² However, commenting on the trajectory of the German Greens in 1985, the New Left Review recognized that ‘[for] the eco-socialists, the starting point is a principled opposition to the bourgeois social order and the capitalist states, a critique of the reformist policies of social democracy, and an unambiguous solidarity with all defensive struggles against the crisis’. ⁴³

The German experience played an important as well as influential role in the politicization of the environment in Britain and especially in the British Left, ⁴⁴ starting from the interview that the leader of the Die Grünen Rudolf Bahro gave to the New Statesman in January 1980 in which he advocated a new socialist revolution pivoted on the environmental struggle: ‘I am convinced’, he declared, ‘that discussion between socialists and ecologists, if conducted frankly and in public, will not lead to division but will bring together all those elements that have an eye to history, and above all to the future’. ⁴⁵ Bahro enjoyed significant popularity throughout the 1980s, especially thanks to the translation of three of his books: Socialism and Survival (1982), From Red to Green (1984), and Building the Green Movement (1986). He was particularly welcomed in the pages of Marxism Today, the journal of the British Communist Party (CP), which was experiencing a dramatic editorial and ideological conversion. ⁴⁶ John Fisher described Bahro's thesis on the external contradictions of modern capitalism – ecology, nuclear war and the explosion of the underdeveloped world – as an opportunity to explore ‘the needs for a new alliance and attitude on the part of the Left’ because what was at stake was the survival not only of the working class but of humanity as a whole: ‘A conversion from the consumerism of capitalism and away from the impasse of the institutionalized wage conflict’ he concluded. ⁴⁷

The Red-Green dialogue produced a substantial literature, a dedicated journal titled New Ground published by the Socialist Environment and Resources Association (SERA), an independent pressure group founded in 1973 and affiliated to the UK Labour Party, ⁴⁸ an academic journal – Capitalism, Nature, Socialism – and culminated in the ‘Red and Green conference’ held in London in May 1988. Here the realignment of green and socialist perspectives was debated on the grounds that ecology was compatible not only with a British socialist tradition of thought and action from News from Nowhere by William Morris, interpreted as a romantic socialist vision along anarchist and ‘ecological’ lines, to Richard Owen and Peter Kropotkin, but also with Marxism. ⁴⁹ There was a ‘branch of socialist tradition’, according to David Pepper, ‘[which] advocated a decentralized, small-scale, self-sustaining Britain, where human needs are satisfied by minimal use of energy’. ⁵⁰ Raymond Williams had authored an early attempt to map the transition from the romantic appeal of nature towards socialist sentiment in a pamphlet issued by SERA in 1983 and addressed considerable attention to ecology in his Towards 2000. ⁵¹ How, in terms of ideology and political theory, these aspects of the utopian British socialism were in contradiction with the broad interpretation of Marxism, which had traditionally looked at bottom-up politics and localism with suspicion, is not central to my reconstruction. To a certain extent the debate is still relevant today. ⁵² My interest here is to underline that this conversation, albeit conflicting and marginal in respect to the main debates on Marxism or post-Fordism, was hosted in the pages of the most influential journal of British Marxism.

In that context noteworthy is the lack of substantial continuity between the debate on nuclear disarmament and the ‘greening’ of the Left’s political discourse. Although in terms of personalities and names, as well as of organizations and political culture, the scenes and practices of action are largely the same, from a discursive and theoretical perspective it seems difficult to find evidence of direct connection. In November 1980, Raymond Williams wrote an account of the recent renewal of the campaign against the nuclear arms race in the New Left Review and Mark Levene participated in the Red and Green debate by advocating a ‘green peace’; ⁵³ nevertheless, throughout the decade the activity and the discourse performed by the regenerated European Nuclear Disarmament movement led by E. P. Thompson was refocused within the discursive context of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, recognizing the necessity of trans-European action, without touching the subject of the ecological crisis. ⁵⁴ The definitive encounter between ecology and socialism, or the confrontation between the concept of ecological crisis and the ‘new politics’ of socialism would arrive at the end of the decade, that is once the Cold War had ended.

The New Politics: the Environment as a ‘Socialist Principle’

In shaping the environment as a political issue, as we have seen, the concept of crisis was essential. For the British left-wing intellectuals, the discovery of the environment as an aspect of the wider social and political crisis was therefore the ground upon which the boundaries of the political were expanded and challenged not only from below, with the spawning of the new movements, but most importantly in terms of discursive cross-fertilization from the ‘outside’, came local issues that clashed and hybridized with the global problems. To some extent, by means of this process the environment returns to its proper context: a concept utilized not only as an analytical category, but as it was in the original meaning coined by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, ⁵⁵ a structure inextricably conjoined with the modern political and social processes that are materially or culturally constructed. From this perspective the politicization of the environment corresponds to the transformation of the idea of territoriality from a geographically and culturally homogeneous arrangement to a matrix of identity space and cultural settlements. ⁵⁶ One of the principal arenas where this debate unfolded was the Communist journal Marxism Today, especially through the works of Stuart Hall.

Founded in 1957 as the theoretical periodical of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxism Today represents an unusual case on the British Left scene. Described as ‘a dry, parochial journal’ in its early years, ⁵⁷ starting from the mid-1970s under increasing pressure from the new generation of militants, the party's line changed and opened up to a sort of pluralism of ideas which, on the one hand, led the CP to a strong dichotomy between the youth and the traditionalists whose battleground was also the politicization of the environment, while on the other hand it created sufficient room for manoeuvre within which the journal's new editor, Martin Jacques, was capable of negotiating Marxism Today's transformation. Between 1977 and 1991 the journal represented one of the most influential intellectual spaces for political debate among the British Left, attracting and soliciting interventions from both the Centre and Right of the British intellectual spectrum. ⁵⁸ It became more of a network of intellectuals and a think-tank, similar to the experiences of the European journals in Italy or France, and, according to a widespread narrative, thanks to the interventions of Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, Geoff Mulgan, and Beatrix Campbell among many others, Marxism Today was considered a laboratory for the reinvention of the Labour Party. ⁵⁹

In its early phase, the emergence of the environment appeared in Marxism Today within the context of urban sociology and the politics of planning, and in relation to energy policy. The debate which revolved around the traditional framework of progressivism and the tension between industrialization and economic growth on one side, and the preservation of the environment, on the other, continued to be resolved in favour of the former: ‘A deindustrialized society is a society of poverty’, stated the Marxist journal, ‘in the broadest sense of the word. Twentieth-century technology can only be successfully and continuously used by twentieth-century levels of industrialization’. ⁶⁰ Pollution and climate change were at the core of several articles, ⁶¹ and the spread of desertification and famine in Africa was highlighted as a direct consequence of colonialism. ⁶² However, the environment was not (yet) a focus for socialist decision-making in the foreseeable Left government. It was the striking realignment of the working class towards Thatcherism and growing evidence that the traditional relations of social representation have been fractured that stoked the intellectual discussion and fostered a rassemblement between the Left and the environment.

Much of the debate about Thatcherism stemmed from Stuart Hall's famous analysis constructed upon his lengthy research into culture and identity. ⁶³ The term itself was coined by Hall in the pages of the journal to elaborate on the prevailing ideological forces associated with the ‘cultural revolution’ represented by the new Conservative government. ⁶⁴ A recognition of the break-up of traditional class alliance, a highly selective use of historical interpretations and a nostalgic language which echoed an idealistic British past created a new hegemony capable of articulating contradictory discourses within the same ideological formation. The preservation of the traditional British environment was an aspect of this discourse. ⁶⁵ It was, therefore, within this framework that the cohabitation of neo-liberalism and environmentalism was possible and, according to Hall, against which the Left should act.

The situation was serious. ‘It is because the problems are not temporary or superficial’, he argued in November 1982, ‘that, far from a crisis of the system provoking a revival of the Left, the crisis of the capitalist system and the crisis of the working-class movement are proceeding together, in tandem, mirroring and feeding off one another’. ⁶⁶ The Left had two stark alternatives: it could have continued to appeal to a materialistic class consciousness and to the traditional ‘statism’ – whose overcoming by putting the environment at the centre was one of the facets of the new politics advocated by Marxsim Today ⁶⁷ – or it could have re-imagined the new times in an alternative way to the Right, but in one that had ‘popular appeal’, which in Hall's language translated into ‘democratic appeal’. The consequences were critical. In a significant passage titled ‘From smoking to Mother Earth’ Hall stated:

The ecological and environmental impulse has, in addition to its own intrinsic democratic potential, links with much wider, and more obviously ‘political’ trends. It has a powerful link with the pro-abortion movement, and with feminism and its commitment to enlarge the freedom of women to control their own lives. But it also has connection to the growth of health and safety legislation, a highly significant advance in trade union work […] where the unions can clearly be seen, not simply as defensive, but as advancing into and laying down the conditions of work and life in modern industry. ⁶⁸

Because it was perceived as an individualistic stance and therefore ‘more personalized and apolitical’, ‘the ecological and environmental impulse’, to use Hall's expression, was a cultural movement from which the Left and the labour movement had remained largely insulated. But the forging of links was not inconceivable: ‘Why should socialism be a popular political force when it is not a force in the popular cultures and aspiration of the masses?’ Hall denounced. ⁶⁹

The project to connect the ecological impetus with the aim of socialism and Marxism for a better and fairer society should therefore have started from adding ‘another dimension to their philosophy and their practice’, Malcom MacEwen reported in July 1984. While socialist thinking had traditionally placed great emphasis on growth rates, ‘the time has come to reconsider our priorities’, he wrote, and by reviving William Morris's gaze upon nature and combining it with George Perkins Marsh's condemnation of the destruction of land, ⁷⁰ Marxists could benefit from ‘having the inestimable advantage of an integrated, dynamic view of nature and of change’ and be ‘the first, not the last, to integrate conservation completely with development’. ⁷¹ The anti-conformist approach to the political question of environmentalism chosen by Marxism Today in publishing the Scottish activist who had resigned from the CP after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 ⁷² – still remarkable in 1984 if we put this intervention in the context of British communism ⁷³ – continued with long interviews with the co-chairperson of the Ecology party Jonathon Porritt ⁷⁴ and with Petra Kelly, one of the best-known figures of the German Greens, ⁷⁵ and with a report on the rise of Greenpeace described as a sparkling new example of how to modernize internationalism:

Prominence has been given to a number of global environmental issues: nuclear bomb testing; threats to those unique creatures, the whales and hooded seals; insidious pollution from radioactive and chemical waste. […] A key to the development of this strategy lies in its internationalism. The idealised ecological buzzphrase ‘Planet Earth’ has been made real. Groups of individuals from different nations have come together to carry out direct action on the high seas and frozen wastes. Nations violating the environment have been skilfully isolated in international fora and legitimately judged by a broader sovereignty. ⁷⁶

Steward reiterated his analysis of the growing significance of green politics in August 1988, arguing that ‘current threats to the environment [were] forging a new internationalism, which present[ed] a challenge to the socialist tradition’. ⁷⁷

It is difficult to avoid asking whether the welcoming of the environment into mainstream socialist thinking was instrumental or cynical. ‘If the Left is to engage with this in other than opportunistic fashion then the implications of green values must be taken on board and given a genuine place in socialist politics’. ⁷⁸ Stuart Hall himself had attempted to solve this problem by claiming that the future of the Left lay in cross-fertilization with the emergent movements: ‘We need more not less; across a wider spectrum of activities; and as part of the building of a self-active, democratic popular force, not as mere fancy opportunism’. ⁷⁹ This is indeed a tension that still defines contemporary British political ecology and the question of sustainable development which, in a sense, might confirm from the point of view of historiographical understanding how questioning the idea of modernization as a unilinear progress is an aspect that environmental and political history shared. ⁸⁰

Yet it was within the perimeter of the New Times discourse that, among other new themes, the environment played a role in the renewal of the Left. The New Times project was launched by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques through the platform of Marxism Today in September 1989; it must be read as an attempt to force the Left, the Labour Party and the far-Left to come together, ‘to move with the times’ and to confront the historic shifts in economics, society and culture that had occurred since the crisis of capitalism started in the 1970s. The New Times must not be read as a coherent political manifesto but as a work-in-process critical analysis. The title of the book edited by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques – New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s – summed up the aim of the project: Thatcherism represented a skilful exploitation of these shifts and the Left's reluctance to appropriate these ‘new times’ was relegating it to the margins. The need to move ‘with the times’ was not to be read as a realignment to the Right or a revival of 1960s revisionism, but, on the contrary, only by understanding and disarticulating the dominant discourse of Thatcherism would it be possible to rearticulate the social and cultural transformations in terms of a new hegemonic discourse for the Left. ⁸¹ Clearly, in this political project the environment played a crucial role.

A series of articles and interventions advocating the integration of environmentalism with the new renewal of the Left and supporting a new form of ‘social environmentalism’ featured in the last two years of the publication of the communist journal. From ‘Thatcherism may command the political agenda of New Times, but the green commands its moral agenda’ ⁸² to ‘the emerging relationship between environmentalism and commerce forms part of the new political agenda of the 1990s’, ⁸³ the left-wing intellectuals harboured no doubt that environmentalism was a socialist principle they ought to fight for. Writing after the fall of the Berlin wall, Geoff Mulgan acknowledged the political impact of environmentalism: ‘The green movement calls to account the responsibility not only of politicians and industrialists but also of the human species. Humans are held to bear responsibilities to other species and to life itself’. Recuperating the paradigm of the crisis, Mulgan added the ecology crisis to the failure of communism and the rise of neo-liberalism and globalization, concluding that ‘a retreat from industrial civilization is justified on the grounds that only then can human power be brought into line with humans’ capacity to use it responsibly’. The mantra of industrial growth that had fashioned left-wing intellectual discourse for such a long time was finally being reversed, mirroring in addition a transformation of the social and the political as well: ‘The political and the personal are seen to be intimately linked, and one of the great appeals of green ideas is their claim that the individual can act in practical, everyday ways, rather than waiting for states to find collective solutions’. ⁸⁴

It was left to Stuart Hall, in one of his last articles in the journal, to ultimately condense the trajectory of the politicization of environmentalism: citizenship, largely absent from left-wing political discussion and debate for more than two decades, needed to be reconceptualized and, with the end of the Empire, its boundaries needed be redrawn. While citizenship was, therefore, the new ‘flavour’ of British politics and should lie at the very heart of a new socialist politics, ‘a contemporary “politics of citizenship” must take into account the role which the social movements have played in expanding the claims to rights and entitlements to new areas’. A new socialist politics, he concluded ‘must address not only issues of class and inequality, but also questions of membership posed by feminism, the black and ethnic movements, ecology (including the moral claims of the animal species and of nature itself) and vulnerable minorities’. ⁸⁵

Conclusion

The subject of this article is the reconstruction of the political and ideological encounter between environmentalism and the Left’s intellectual discourse in Britain. Environmentalism, understood as a concern with the sustainability of the modernist project of continuous physical expansion, struggled to converse with British socialism and Marxism, hence the final politicization of the environment took a quite long path to transition. While the schema of the institutionalization of post-materialistic values is not completely suited to the British case due to the rigid two-party system which de facto relegated the new politics argument to the margins of the British Left-wing political culture, ⁸⁶ I have shown that three main discursive factors contributed to the ‘environmental shift’. In terms of chronological trajectory, the first conversion from a romantic conservationism to a more engaged concern for nature appeared in the pages of The Ecologist. The main contributions of this very original magazine were, on the one hand, to have coined the ‘language and the vocabulary’ of environmentalism for the British public discourse and, more importantly, on the other hand, to have introduced the concept of crisis as the main pillar upon which the environmental debate developed. The concept of crisis would prove to be central for the assimilation of environmental argument and ecology into the complex and highly structured ideological configuration of socialism and Marxism. In short, it was within the perimeter of the idea of crisis that socialism and environmentalism found a common theoretical ground. The sporadic, albeit highly influential interventions by the New Left Review and the more consistent approach taken by Marxism Today, facilitated this ‘ideological merging’.

The politicization of the environment paralleled and entwined with two other major transformations: the appearance of a new perception of territoriality and the articulation of a new concept of identity. Shaped by the dilation of the concept of the global, starting from the 1970s, territoriality was no longer the bordered political space and geographically defined sense of belonging that it used to be in the first half of the century. ⁸⁷ Stuart Hall engaged profoundly with this transformation elaborating a post-Imperial and post-colonial representation of identity that fruitfully cross-linked with the idea of the finite nature of the environment.

That said, it was yet an external fact that forced the Left’s intellectuals to come to terms with the changing of the political landscape, and imposed, perhaps shrewdly, the idea that the physical and human limits to the modern expansionary project could be a ‘socialist principle’. In this reconstruction, to a certain extent, Thatcherism represents the variable that accelerated a process already underway. Marxism Today and the ‘New Times’ thesis made the case for an ‘epochal shift’ in society and demanded an adequate modernization of the Left, one of the pillars of which was the ‘introjection’ of environmentalism. The British CP's 1989 Manifesto stressed that a profound ecological crisis was in place, and remarkably pointed out that the old Left was unlikely to respond creatively because it rested upon a world ‘fast disintegrating beneath its feet’. ⁸⁸ A statement not dissimilar to what Anthony Giddens would write 10 years later:

[T]he Greens […] pose ideological questions that are impossible to ignore, and that place in question some of the basic orientations of social democracy. In spite of the ten-year-old discussions of ‘ecological modernization’ it cannot be said that social democrats have been able adequately to assimilate ecological thinking’. ⁸⁹

The politicization of the environment in Britain was a long, conflictual, and taxing process and the British Left-wing intellectuals played an active part in it.