Hegemony and its discontents

Review of Tim Doyle’s “Surviving the Gang Bang Theory of Nature: The Environment Movement during the Howard Years” in Social Movement Studies Vol 9, No. 2, 155-69, April 2010

I really wanted to like this. I’ve met the author (he’s a good friend of a good friend) and he’s engaging, intelligent and committed. But this article merely sets out the problems, rather than sketches out some possible solutions.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the Australian environment movement during the Howard years, 1996– 2007. First, the author maps out key issues which emerged during this period of governance, and then focuses on outlining the strategic and tactical repertoire of the movement at this time. The author argues the case that the movement embraced a neoliberal ideology often expressed within the dominant discourses shared by the state and big business, as the movement sought to operate more and more on business principles. In addition, environmentalists pursued a neoconservative moral agenda, so typical of the Howard years, right across the policy-making realm. Finally, the article concludes with the argument that the Australian green movement, mistaking a neoliberal geo-economic agenda as postmodernity, reorganized itself in such a way as to deliver political wins to its traditional adversaries, fundamentally weakening its position within Australian society as an advocate of radical social change.

Doyle lays out the terrain well;

The Howard government, then, continually advocated free-market, radical libertarian solutions to environmental problems, removing the role of active public and community sectors from environmental monitoring, regulation and problem solving. In turn, the input of large corporate interests into the shaping of government policy was ever increasing. This free-market ideology, ushered in by the Labor Party, but in a far purer ideological form under the Coalition, threatened environment movements directly.

And he nails the underlying ideology-

As the market place was deemed natural under sustainable use, wise use built on this premise, and then reversed it, arguing that, in fact, nature itself was a free marketplace (as was the global polity). Elsewhere, I have referred to this as the Gang Bang Theory of Nature (Doyle, 2001). In this neoliberal depiction of the biophysical processes of the planet itself, no longer was the Earth deemed finite. Everyone could have what they wanted, and nature could be put back afterwards.

And he is good on how being drawn into the state is a mixed blessing…

During the 1980s, in Australia under Hawke, large parts of the movement became the state (at least on occasions) (Hutton & Connors, 1999). Large chunks of environmentalism became mainstream; part of the furniture: institutions and business incorporated these concerns into their agendas. This led to different opportunities and weaknesses for the movement.

and what happens when there’s a regime change

Third, their enthusiastic embrace of corporatist politics under Hawke had weakened its more radical networks. Next, many networks were now understandably being punished by the conservatives for their overly close association with Labor; and those which retained/gained access to government were involved only in green window dressing, receiving vast amounts of money and kudos from Robert Hill and others, via the mining and pastoral sectors to plant trees and to ‘save’ species.

But there are missing concepts;
(Eagleton on ideology, Gramsci on hegemony).

There’s missing citations;

Moreover, these processes of capital accumulation quickened with the inevitable outcome being further discrepancies between the rich and the poor. (page 158)

While this is almost certainly true, a reference to the Gini co-efficients for Australia in 1996 and 2007 would be useful!

There’s an entertainingly vitriolic description of NGO-land spoiled by a rather odd use of the word palimpsest.

To describe the environment movement during these troubled years as a non-goal-specific, smeared-out palimpsest may accurately describe Australian non-institutional, green politics in a society (or non-society) now so overrun by a single meta-narrative that all opposition had been dispersed, and cast as disparate ‘minority voices’. (page 158)

Doyle then has a series of very interesting descriptions of elite and grass-roots techniques (the Rockefeller inspired ‘Earth Charter’ and the 1997 “Public Inquiry into Uranium.” These are fascinating and worth close attention.

Doyle is often right on the money-

The movement, profoundly anti-intellectual (again reflecting its society), often incorrectly interpreted this postmodern political space as a justification for strategies that were simply neoliberal and that ultimately deliver market-based outcomes. This neoliberalism, despite Howard’s eventual demise, currently pervades the operational and strategic reality of the environment movement in Australia, particularly in elite networks: ‘Find your own comfort level in social and political systems and pursue your own environmental ends and ecotopia will be revealed.’ (167)

and

The extreme neoliberalism of some environmentalists has not dealt with the basic problems of access to power and wealth. Any effective postmodern/poststructural tactical armoury must also include adversarial, structuralist, front-on, us– them, win –loss conflicts, as well as other forms of appeals to elites, win –win, and mass mobilization politics. In their acceptance of ‘universal embrace’ strategies, many Australian environmental strategists continue to overindulge in the characteristic of postmodern politics which White has already alluded to: in their ‘irreducible pluralism and . . . suspicion of totalistic revolutionary programs’ (White, 1991, p. 11), they rarely offer combined and confrontationary stances which are sometimes most appropriate in creative forms of postmodern politics. Instead, what is eulogized as postmodern cleverness usually manifests itself as neo-pluralism and neoliberalism.

But the key question “What is to be Done?” is not answered. We know we are under-performing, that we are in the smugosphere. Maybe Doyle thinks it’s not his place to be prescriptive, but criticism without ideas for praxis is akin to power without responsibility. How DO we go about surviving the Gang Bang theory of nature?