ECO-SOCIALISM
changes rather than traditional political outcomes. They try to create a new culture through personal transformation and new forms of relations. Their challenge to the state is indirect: bypassing it—the anarchist strategy—is often preferred. In fact the aim is to defend rather than demolish the gains of bourgeois revolution and civil society—to defend it from the technocratic state, which is the ‘enemy’. The movements’ methodological emphasis is on psycho-social practices (consciousness raising, group therapy and so on), creating free geographical space (urban squatting, rural and urban communes), the ‘personal is political’ (feminism) and grass-roots democracy (greens). While none of these are incompatible with a socialist approach, the emphasis on their centrality in revolutionary strategy, and on the individual as the locus of revolution, plainly is. Indeed, in the form of New Ageism and deep ecology these strategies can become distinctly counter-revolutionary (see below). But Scott thinks that Marxist structuralist analysis (such as that by Castells 1978) is often over-reductionist. Conflict, he thinks, is not always reducible to struggle over control of the means of production. It is, today, more of a struggle to consume more, and better, housing, schooling, health, amenity and material goods, and new social movements acknowledge this. They emphasise a consumer, not a producer, revolution. This ideology, therefore, sees radical (not necessarily leftward) change stemming from ideologically diverse groups, working partly independently and partly through ‘networks’ (the alternative movement’s panacea). They work towards some new social consensus, loosely located around human and nature rights and quality of life. The movements are idealistic and superstructural. They have more to do with ahistorical postmodernism than with Marxism’s historical materialism. Postmodernism That new social movement theory rejects rather than develops Marxism is underlined by Ignatieff’s (1986) assessment of it as part of postmodernist politics. Whereas modernist politics—communist, capitalist or socialist— counselled criticising and acting in the spheres of class and economics, faith in such ‘old’ politics is dying. Postmodernism tends to place all social conflict in the cultural, not political domain. Its struggle is not to control state bureaucracy, but against the state. The crisis for conventional politics lies here in the idea that the public sector is a synonym for everything cumbersome, inefficient and oppressive, while the private sector signifies everything liberating, efficient and responsive. As Dobson (1990,157) and Harvey (1990,46) point out, it is not just greens but many on the left who embrace postmodern politics. These suspect not only the idea of the working class as social-change agents but the whole concept of major agents in universal change. For universalist politics end in violence. There are unlimited models of political order, each generated by a 136