I think that O’Neill scored some good hits on the green movement: picking out the strong strains of misanthropy, paternalism and privilege attached to much environmental debate (and, it has to be said, George Monbiot provides rich pickings in this department). However, much of the power of his critique of environmentalism comes from his Marxism, not the later colourings of libertarian thinking that many of the Spiked authors have acquired.

Unlike Mick Hume (also at Spiked), O’Neill doesn’t seem to get around with volumes of Hayek and Nozick under his arm. He supports the NHS, and doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of moral hazard. Although, after explanation, he did understand how socialised medicine makes it easier for paternalists to police other people’s lifestyle choices, using a concern with individual well-being as a figleaf for their real concern with externalities (roughly translated here as ‘oh shit, we may have to pay for your obesity/smoking down the line!’). He also (quote unquote) ‘loves Lenin’, and spent half a pint’s talk time attempting to disassociate Lenin from Stalin and all his works and all his ways. He also tried to make an argument for the necessity of authoritarian rule immediately after a revolution, including a weird justification for The Terror.  

Now my view of people who admit to Marxism in public has always tended to be ‘don’t touch that, it’s concentrated evil!’, so I did make some rather unkind remarks about Mr Lenin, and also suggested that there’s only been one good revolution. But that’s by the by.

One of the nicest bits of arguing he did concerned the conflation of environmental concerns with what would — in times gone by — have been seen as religious morality (‘Catholic guilt on stilts’ he called it, in a line that brought the house down). Some of his best commentary for Spiked has been on the shrill tone that much environmentalist rhetoric takes on resource-depletion, exemplified by the panicked reaction to the birth of octuplets in California (intersecting, as he notes, with with some very peculiar catastrophizing about class and gender). Some of his ideas are also fruitfully discussed on the Oxford Libertarian Society’s blog:

Porritt [senior government green mandarin] is not objecting to population growth because he fears it will lead to a diminution in human living standards, but because the impact of an increased number of individuals will harm the earth – whose preservation he treats as an end in itself. By some unexplained metric, Porritt has decided that 2 children (conveniently the number that he himself has) is an acceptable burden for the earth, but that 3 is intolerable and deserves ostracism.

All that aside, the real power of O’Neill’s Marxist (and it is Marxist, not Marxian) critique of environmentalism has its origins in an unashamed use of Marx’s optimism. Marx was optimistic about technology, about the capacity of human beings to overcome setbacks and difficulties through ingenuity and progress. Marx passionately wanted everyone to live good, fulfilling and agentic lives: lives over which they had control. He was statist, but only in the sense that the state was the initial vehicle to facilitate human progress. The point of life is to live it. Much environmentalism — which in its extreme forms denies human agency, suggesting that we are at the mercy of ‘mother nature’ — conflicts directly with Marx’s dynamism and hope. Of course, Marx’s pious belief that the state would wither away — would prove only temporary — turned out to be just that. As Milton Friedman suggested, there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

O’Neill turns Marx on environmentalism, not as some sort of global warming skeptic, but as a believer in human progress. ‘Who says human beings won’t figure this out? Are you going to fall into the same trap as Thomas Malthus and assume that population grows while everything else stays the same? And are you asking me to abandon liberty in favour of the environment? I won’t, because it’s liberty that will give human beings the freedom to find their way out of all (or at least most) environmental thickets’. He has also — as one would expect of a Marxist, especially a British Marxist — been searing in his critique of the class basis of much environmentalism, and its tendency to want to police the pleasures of the lower classes:

Again and again, almost despite themselves, despite their defensiveness about coming across as wealthy snobs – the real privileged – attacking those chavs and slags who fly abroad on the cheap, Plane Stupid and its supporters return to the ‘scandal’ of cheap flights. They cannot help themselves. It really is cheap flights that they find most foul and offensive. Before yesterday’s closure of Britain’s ‘chief chav airport’, Plane Stupid forced the HQ of easyJet in London to shut down, on the basis that ‘binge-flying’ – a phrase that sounds deliciously like ‘binge-drinking’, that other famous pastime of ‘cheap people’ – is ‘choking the planet to death’.

Plane Stupid has also spent thousands of pounds taking out a newspaper ad attacking Ryanair; it was a spoof advert with Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary saying: ‘Let’s beat the climate to death. Book Ryanair today to ensure a real climate disaster.’ The dripping snobbery of Plane Stupid’s campaign comes through in its attacks on the kind of uncultured oiks who take Ryanair and easyJet flights from Stansted: ‘There’s been an enormous growth in binge-flying with the proliferation of stag and hen nights to Eastern European destinations chosen not for their architecture or culture but because people can fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner.’ [Footnotes omitted].

O’Neill calls himself a ‘Marxist Libertarian’, and his conflation of the two philosophies does involve some fairly serious cherry-picking. However, his Marxism also lets him see very clearly when a movement is ‘progressive’ in a genuine sense. I’ve always found it significant that ‘conservation’ and ‘conservative’ share a Latin root: there is often a broad hostility to change and progress, and the ‘watermelon’ greens — those who try to combine various forms of democratic socialism with environmentalism — are particularly vulnerable to O’Neill’s criticism.

Of course, conservatism/conservation is sometimes legitimate: I am a libertarian, but when it comes to the ‘majors’, I vote Conservative. This is partly because New Labour have utterly trashed the country (the Tories could not possibly be any worse), but it’s also partly because I accept the Tory argument that change for the sake of change often does more harm than good. As Hayek argues, custom has its uses.

And, it would seem, so does Karl Marx.