Rudolf Bahro (1935 - 1997): A TRIBUTE
"The earth can belong to no one."
"I believe that the ecological crisis will
bring about the end of capitalism."
Rudolf Bahro,
the German green philosopher and activist died of cancer in a Berlin
hospital on Friday,
December 5th. He was buried on
Friday, December 12th. Newspaper reports say about 200 people
attended the funeral oration. I
was upset and very sorry to hear of his death. Since hearing of it, I
have been
thinking about the importance of
Bahro's work for radical ecology, his contribution to the green
movement,
and have been re-reading parts of
his books.
Personally,
his thinking and the evolution of his jarring ideas inspired and
influenced
me, and gave me
strength. He explored with a
ruthless honesty the real contradictions for a left wing person of
becoming a
green. For Bahro, the working
class
along with the bourgeoisie are intrinsic parts of the industrial
system:
"In the case of capitalism the
workers are
part of the carousel of the capitalist formation." The trade
unions
belong to
the most conservative societal forces
and are opposed to the transformation of society.
Bahro's
writings gave me the courage to say things which I believed and needed
to be said, but which
I knew would not be well
received. Bahro
was against that reformism which passes itself off as
oppositional
activity, but which prolongs the illusory life
of industrial society.
Bahro, a
founding member of the West German 'Die Grunen', in 1980 was elected to
the Federal
Executive. For him, green
politics was about
capturing people's consciousness, not accumulating votes.
By 1985 he had resigned from the
Party. His
resignation statement noted how the Greens did not want
to get out of
the industrial system: "Instead of spreading
consciousness they are obscuring it all along
the line." Bahro
particularly repudiated the continuing
justification of animal experimentation by the
green party.
For Bahro,
industrialized nations needed to reduce their impact upon the Earth to
one tenth of what
it was. "Development" was
finished. Like
the Norwegian deep ecology philosopher Arne Naess,
Bahro had a biocentric, not
human-centered
world view. Unlike Naess, Bahro was steeped in the
culture of the left.
Bahro came to
critical awareness in the former German Democratic Republic, East
Germany.
There,
a communist party Marxism
was the
taken-for-granted official view. Bahro himself joined the Party in
1952
at age 17. After the 1968 invasion
of Czechoslovakia, he withdrew his identification from the
official
regime. He was imprisoned for writing his
first major work, The Alternative In Eastern
Europe, published
in then West Germany. He was deported in
1979 from the GDR after serving
two years in jail.
Bahro moved
intellectually from a critical communism/Marxism, to eco-socialism, to
Die Grünen
party
spokesperson, and finally to a
Green movement fundamentalism and concern for personal spiritual
transformation. On this path he
demolished left, green party and bourgeois orthodoxies. He made many of
his supporters uneasy as he
explored the links between environmental politics and spiritual
transformation.
Humans, he believed, need to look
inward in order to find the strength to break with the death course of
industrial society. Bahro sought
to establish communal liberated zones within industrialized society
which
would provide "institutional
security for the experience of the self."
He was also
deliberately misunderstood and slandered. Radical dissenters are never
loved. There is no
slot to place him in. It was said
of Bahro that he was still sitting in the train between the East and
the West.
Since 1990 he had a marginal
teaching position as professor for social ecology, at Humbolt
University in
East Berlin.
Bahro had sent
me a letter, dated December 20, 1995, saying he was in agreement "with
the essential
points" of the philosophy of left
biocentrism, the orientation of the Green Web.
His physical
body is no more, yet his ideas remain. His books show his ideas about
the needed new
coalition of social forces for a
new world order. The following books are available in English:
- The Alternative In Eastern
Europe, 1977. Bahro called this book "A Contribution to the
Critique
of Actually Existing
Socialism" from a revolutionary standpoint.
- Socialism and Survival,
1982
- From Red To Green,
1984. Particularly recommended.
- Building The Green Movement,
1986
- Avoiding Social &
Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation,
subtitled An
Inquiry into the
Foundations of Spiritual and Ecological Politics. 1987 (in
German) and 1994
in
English.
David Orton - December 14th, 1997
This Tribute was
published in the Socialist Studies Bulletin No. 50 (Oct.-Dec.
1997); Canadian
Dimension, March-April 1998,
Vol. 32, No. 2; and in abridged form, The Way Ahead, No. 36,
January 1998. It was
also translated into Spanish as "Rudolf
Bahro (1935 - 1997): Un tributo".
For more on Bahro, see the Rudolf-Bahro-Archiv
(in German).
Further discussion of Bahro's
ideas can be found in Green Web Bulletin # 68, "Ecofascism:
What is It?
A Left
Biocentric Analysis".
To obtain any of the Green Web
publications, write
to us at:
Green Web, R.R. #3, Saltsprings, Nova Scotia, Canada, BOK 1PO
E-mail us at: greenweb@ca.inter.net
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Last updated: November 19, 2006