by Gregory Albo
...The following critique of eco-localism and its conceptualization of a transition to a sustainable economy encompasses five dimensions: (a) the effectiveness of prices for transmitting ecologically sustainable decisions for place-based regulation; (b) the limits of technical and organizational change - apart from issues of distribution and social relations - as a solution to ecological problems; (c) the coordinative and ecological failures of bioregional and community-based economic alternatives; (d) the issue of whether all supra-local scales are ecologically perverse; and (e) the scale and role of democracy in any ecological transition that is socially just.
...Political organization also makes more widely accessible - both in knowledge and active solidarity - the class struggles of one place with those of other places, thereby accomplishing in practice what conceptual abstraction allows in theory. But it does so in a structured way, so that political mobilization, reflection, debate and learning can move fluidly across scales. Political organization allows a depth to strategic thinking and action in a way that international justice fairs, although they can be remarkably open spaces for cross-sectoral dialogue, cannot. The internet can generate fantastical amounts of global e-mail information and outrage but this can rarely be backed up, however much it is used to project an organic spontaneity onto the multitude, with social mobilization. A developing political capacity is necessary to translate local militancy into wider demands and socio-ecological programmes at other territorial scales of democracy and ecological sustainability.
...The eco-socialist political challenge is to connect particular local struggles, generalize them, and link them to a universal project of socio-ecological transformation, against the universalization of neoliberalism and capitalist markets as the regulators of nature and society.
The politics of eco-localism have been, in a sense, quite the opposite of the agenda just sketched here. Eco-localism projects the local as an ideal scale and conceives communitarian eco-utopias in a politics that is individualizing and particularizing. Under neoliberalism, eco-localism has evolved into a practical attempt to alter individual market behaviours, and to disconnect and internalize local ecologies and communities from wider struggles and political ambitions.
But there is no reason to support, and every reason to oppose, any suggestion that the national and the global are on a scale that is any less human and practical than the local. This is not to deny the importance of the local in anti-neoliberal politics; nor the importance of the question of appropriate scale for post-capitalist societies. It is to insist, however, that local socio-ecological struggles cannot be delinked from - and are indeed always potentially representative of - universal projects of transcending capitalism on a world scale.
