“Learn from each other’s struggles”: An Interview with Laurence Cox
By Brian O’Cathail
Article originally published in Issue 6 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Rupture is a relatively new publication, but ecosocialism is not a new concept and the radical wing of the environmentalist movement has a long and varied history. We want to contribute to making the history of that movement more widely accessible. This will mean reprinting material about past struggles to bring it to a new or wider audience. It also means publishing interviews and articles about aspects of movement history and particular episodes and campaigns. This issue we start that effort with an interview with one of the most knowledgeable people about the history of environmentalism here, activist, author and academic Laurence Cox. This is a long interview that covers a lot of ground, so we are publishing it in two parts. The second part will be in issue 7.
If you have important documents from old campaigns in a box in your attic, or if you want to contribute an article about a previous struggle you were involved in, get in touch.
Brian: Could you tell our readers a bit about your own background in environmental activism?
Laurence: Good question! This sent me down a rabbit hole trying to track down details of a protest on my street when I was a child - it had become a rat-run and parents wanted to stop that, to make it safe for their kids. We had the same problem on the other side of Dublin when I was a new parent. The power of the car is still so big that most people don’t see it as a choice that was made - to close train lines, remove trams, build a country around roads and the car. And so people often identify with their car as some kind of statement of being real or whatever, or with their bike as a moral choice, as if those policies simply reflected individual preferences. And of course that is deeply divisive. Around the same time though my parents were involved in the local CND branch and we planted a cherry tree on Hiroshima Day which is still there - and at the time, of course opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear power were seen as two sides of the same issue.
Later on my dad was involved in the early years of the Green Party / Comhaontas Glas, and I came into that. In the '80s in Ireland, a party like that was obviously not about being in government, but - as the GP still does in some parts of rural Ireland - it was a space for people who realised that individual campaigns around specific issues needed to be seen as part of a systemic critique of industrial capitalism. And for people who had a sense of movements in continental Europe it meant something else beyond that, the New Left idea of a movement party that brought together all the big struggles of the '70s and '80s - anti-war, feminism, anti-nuclear power, LGBTQ+ rights, international solidarity, and radical democracy in the workplace, in education, in health, in welfare, and so on. John Goodwillie wrote a great pamphlet in 1988, “Colours in the rainbow: ecology, socialism and Ireland”[1] which laid out that argument for Ireland.
““Rossport is really central to where we are now because it divided the sheep from
the goats.””
So I helped run the Greens in college, which was very mundane stuff around trying to get basic recycling facilities, that kind of thing. I spent an Erasmus year in Strasbourg with Les Verts, and then did a year in Hamburg with the Grün-Alternative Liste, where because of all the splits I wound up being one of two people keeping our local branch going. Hamburg was very much the far left of the party, so I became a Marxist partly through that, and came back to Ireland to try and put that movement party idea into practice. I was the party rep to the European Federation of Green Parties for a few years. My arm got twisted into running the party journal An Caorthann / The Rowan Tree for a few years, making those links with all the different movements while being frozen out more and more by the party leadership. The breaking point for me was when the annual conference failed to pass a motion ruling out coalition with FF…
During that time as well I was involved in the anti-incinerator campaign in Waterford, which was driven initially by working-class people from the village where it was going to be situated (beside an ESB power plant) and local fishermen. A few urban greens and more crusty eco-types got involved - but then after six months suddenly half the city was on board with the campaign. Of course Waterford had a very strong left tradition, and that helped. Around that time there were also more direct action campaigns, often again making links (say defending Coolattin Woods in Wicklow, or Tara / Skryne against the M3) between eco-activists and locals who walked their dogs there or whatever.
In the 2000s I helped put together the Grassroots Gatherings, which responded to the Zapatistas’ call for “one no, many yeses” - a movement of movements against neoliberal capitalism. There were 15 of those between 2001 and 2015, but most in the first decade, and they overlapped with the Corrib Gas struggle as well as all sorts of other ecological campaigns. Rossport is really central to where we are now because it divided the sheep from the goats. Almost all Irish environmental NGOs shunned it because they were afraid of losing their funding, and the GP were in power when the military were sent in against protestors (on kayaks), something that was far too easily accepted.
The campaign brought together a very strong local community with trade unionists, anarchists, socialists, republicans, and international eco-activists. It won huge popular support, forced Shell to take 15 years to build their pipeline and cost them €3.2 billion rather than the €800 million they had budgeted. Shell and the state couldn’t afford to be seen to back down, but immediately after the thing was completed, activists won very quickly on fracking. And part of that was people from Erris talking to communities facing fracking and saying “this is what it’s going to mean in practice.” I was involved in making connections to Norwegian trade unions (Statoil were a partner) and later on, a student on the Masters in activism we were running at Maynooth recorded Gardaí joking about raping and deporting protestors. She was incredibly brave and went public with it, but of course a world of grief descended on her head and to a lesser extent on mine and other colleagues’.
For a few years I’ve been involved with the Ulex movement training project,[2] which is about developing strategic learning for activists in radical movements across Europe, including some key ecological ones along with many others. So that’s really about working with people who are in a critical and reflective place around their own movement and organisation - beyond simply celebrating and condemning, but realising that their movement is (typically) able to do some things well but not as much as it really needs to be able to do, and thinking with people in other movements and from other countries and organising traditions about how to go further.
Here in Ireland we’ve just hosted the Zapatistas for a 15-day tour of movements.[3] As indigenous peasants who rebelled over the issue of defending common land for shared subsistence farming rather than cash-cropping or extractivism, and are now resisting the Tren Maya megaproject, agroecology is one of the key pillars of their day-to-day politics. They had a really powerful encounter with groups resisting mining in the Sperrins, Leitrim, Donegal and elsewhere and with all sorts of other environmental campaigns.
Brian: Would you say that the modern environmental movement in Ireland has a particular starting point?
Laurence: One absolutely crucial moment of course is Carnsore Point, where we defeated nuclear power back in 1978-80. Not many countries have done that so comprehensively, but it became politically impossible to go further after Carnsore, which was a huge win. There’s a great pamphlet by Simon Dalby[4] which you can find online about that experience, but an important thing is that the campaign won despite some very different political trends and organisations. They did manage to overcome some of the clichés that are often used to set us against each other - e.g. when locals saw that protestors from elsewhere had brought their kids and were struggling to deal with the practicalities, they turned up with sandwiches.
But already before that there had been a string of local battles in the '70s, in Munster in particular, where the state was trying to get US chemical companies in on the grounds of low wages, lack of unions, lack of safeguards, etc. and local communities increasingly resisted. Like with Erris people and fracking, it got so as soon as an announcement was made, people from the last town or village would come round and tell people what it actually meant in practice, so really speeding up the movement learning process. Guests of the Nation, by Robert Allen and Tara Jones, tells a lot of that story.
And of course in Dublin we had the Wood Quay campaign, which was really a struggle over who owned the city and what it meant. So the built environment is also a site of movements, right up to squatting and resisting evictions today. In Ballymun and probably elsewhere there were all sorts of conflicts in the '70s over the quality of life - for bus routes or a swimming pool, self-organising childcare, etc. “Environmental” doesn’t neatly separate off from class or gender and never has, but as with any movement there are strands within it that need to be called out (of course one of them is in government right now). Hilary Tovey, who supervised my PhD, did fantastic work on this (and wrote a book Environmentalism in Ireland), and reckoned there was basically a tension between an “official” environmentalism which is very top-down and elite-oriented, and what you could call environmental justice, which is fundamentally about disadvantaged people (as in Munster or Rossport) who aren’t against development per se but are asking very pointed questions about who is actually benefiting. But for years there were strands of the left which assumed all development was good and technology was neutral, or which just wanted any jobs at any price.
Pretty much anyone who has done serious work on Irish environmentalism has said that environmental justice (or other names for the same thing) is the dominant form of environmental activism in Ireland - though the people involved don’t necessarily call it that. For the last half-century really there have always been protests, direct action, community resistance to any number of capitalist or state developments that have promised progress and jobs, but have mostly been about extracting capital and cheap labour while dumping pollution costs on locals. The mining struggles are one obvious example today, like the struggle against fracking in the North.
Brian: It's important not to have too narrow a view of what constitutes environmental activism or environmental struggles, right?
Laurence: That’s one of those questions which assumes the answer is yes - but of course it’s true. Basically, if we let the capitalist media, or the state, or greenwashers, tell us what environmentalism is, we’ve lost in advance. It doesn’t really matter whether they are trying to sell us a “Fine Gael on bikes” idea where it is all about individual moral consumption habits, or a caricature of what “an environmentalist” is. We have to start from a very material place, of seeing that human beings have needs, which are not identical with what capitalism tells us they are - which is crucial politically. No Marxist can be OK with the statement that having a job, any job, at any cost is good enough for us; for example - we go back to “yes, but does it meet our needs?” Can we pay the rent, is it destroying our health, do we have to spend three hours a day in traffic to do it? Those are questions about needs.
The Rossport campaign started very simply, from that initial concern about safety - the company was going to put an experimental high-pressure gas pipeline right beside their houses and use compulsory purchase on their fields. Of course, because Shell were going ahead with their pipeline rather than refining at sea (“Shell to Sea”), it became about the project as a whole.
People realised quickly that any jobs for locals would be low-wage and temporary and that there would only be a very small number of high-skilled, well-paid jobs which would probably not go to local people. And that of course is a realistic, cynical view of shiny PR presentations from disadvantaged local people. And they heard from the Ogoni in the Niger Delta about exactly what it means to live where there is oil wealth. Sr Majella McCarron from Fermanagh, who had been an aid worker in Ogoni, helped make those connections, and eventually we published the last letters of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni leader murdered by the dictatorship for his opposition to Shell. (Free online as “Silence Would Be Treason”.[5])
From that then came the demand to tax oil and gas properly, to benefit everyone as the Norwegian state had done - solidarity from Norway helped there obviously. But then also some of the most active locals were fishermen, farmers, or B&B owners, so directly dependent on the environment for their survival. And of course local people have just as much a sense of beauty as outsiders. There were certainly tensions with some of the international eco-activists who did come to put their bodies on the line, but didn’t get why local people were not all 100% opposed to any drilling at all. So it’s not even that a particular environmental campaign essentially “is” this or that - people learn, people change their ideas, their opponents force them together, or they disagree. An eco-socialist’s job would be to help make those connections in a way that builds a broad alliance around a radical platform.
Brian: You mentioned an early involvement with the Green Party as well as a correspondingly early disenchantment with them. Understandably, given the Greens’ grim record in government, they are at this point generally viewed with considerable hostility by the radical left, but were there aspects of that experience that were worthwhile?
Laurence: Obviously I don’t think there is anything to be rescued within the Irish Green Party - and anyone who joined it after its first stint in government, expecting the same people who had stayed with and defended that to behave differently a second time round was either deeply naïve or very young. But at the same time joining a political party is the kind of mistake many people make in their youth, and an entirely understandable one…
Seriously though, Ireland has never had a left government in the history of the state, but we have repeatedly constructed social majorities around particular movements. So we do need a bit of humour and self-awareness if we’re going to start asking who is more “realistic”. The easy dismissal is a way to reassure the young member - “I’m glad you asked me that question; the answer is…” - but not really a way for the organisation to become more reflective, or for a deeper left culture.
So part of that is not just becoming “eco-socialist” overnight, but having a serious think about why left parties in Ireland have taken so long to get there. After all, the proposition that infinite growth is impossible on a finite system is easy enough to understand - I got it as a schoolkid in the 1970s. But much Irish left culture still confuses a knee-jerk sneering at “green” and quality of life issues with the necessary critique of the Green Party, which is of course that it is a machine for greenwashing, for individualising collective issues, and for demobilising popular struggles outside the state. There is a laddishness and a range of media-derived clichés about “real life” etc. in a lot of that discourse online which shouldn’t be encouraged. Instead we should start by asking what, in that culture of simplistic answers, made it so hard to really take these issues onboard fully decades earlier - because those are some of the weaknesses that a radical movement, in or outside the state, needs to overcome.
Another way to come at this is to realise that there’s something quite provincial about the easy equation “Green parties are X” when in fact their history is far more varied than that of say members of the ISO or the CWI were. That leads you down a naïve equation between a name, an ideology, a politics, and a set of social interests which should be the question rather than the answer - and which breaks down as soon as you look a bit further afield. Even the Green Party of England and Wales, for example, was well to the left of Corbyn’s Labour, never mind Starmer’s, on many issues.
Never mind that wider history which I came into in the West German party - which really has a lot more to do with the question of radical left parties and participation in government (Paolo Chiocchetti argues convincingly that they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t) that we have most recently seen in Syriza and Podemos. And beyond that again is the question of how political parties - irrespective of their nominal ideologies - function in postcolonial or semi-peripheral states. We are after all now in a world where “tankies” celebrate China because they make that same naïve equation between name, ideology, politics, and social interests. Anyone on the non-Stalinist, non-Social Democratic left - the lefts that do not have a long and close association with state power - needs to be cautious about encouraging that kind of ideological short-circuit.
Later we’re going to talk about the question of why the past half-century has seen so many encounters between “red” and “green” under different names, and why we keep on reinventing that political wheel without necessarily getting anywhere. I do think we need to try and understand past failures rather than simply dismiss them, obviously.
One Irish-specific thing about the Green Party is the way in which outside the cities it sometimes managed to include quite a lot of the local movements. That’s an obvious feature of rural and small-town alternatives in Ireland: at any given point there may only be one or two things going on locally, and it is often the same people who are involved in each of them. They have a bigger picture obviously, and feel the need of a framework for that. The GP has not been that for a long time, but as we know the urban-based left also struggles to engage with that, for reasons which aren’t entirely its fault - but that challenge is worth exploring.
One important dimension of green parties (not so much the Irish one) that we can learn from is that several of them made a serious attempt to engage with the question of how to understand the state after 1968, which is after all the most recent quasi-revolutionary moment in most of western Europe.
Briefly, “1968” in many countries (famously France) was relatively uninterested in simply taking over state power, not least because of the repeated disappointments of doing so, or the discovery that “revolution in one country” was a limited proposition. Post-colonial states such as the Republic of course also incarnate that problem. Subsequent social movements, but also the direct challenge to the neoliberal order of the early 2000s or of 2011 - and of course the way in which the Zapatistas and Rojava currently punch far above their weight and for far longer than might be expected, while traditional statist revolutions are faltering or fail (Rojava is now the only surviving success of the “Arab Spring”, for example) should give us pause to think. In their various ways the Syriza and Podemos experiments also point to that problem.
On much of the Irish left, but also the Anglophone left internationally, there is a naïve state-centrism and focus on the individual nation-state (whether 32 or 26 counties makes less difference) which is out of kilter with everything revolutionaries should have learned about the state in neoliberalism and its relationship to the transnational order. So how do we think power works at that level (the level of an international revolutionary wave), and what can we do about it? The European left green parties were part of the first generation of New Left parties to seriously think through this problem, and their defeats are not good news for anyone who wants an alternative that is neither Xi Jinping nor Joe Biden.
You mentioned the slightly incongruously left wing Green Party theoretical magazine, An Caorthann, that you were centrally involved with in the mid '90s. I notice that its website is gone. Are there any plans to make it available again?
The Irish Left Archive kindly digitalised the final issue with links to the others on the Internet Archive.[6] It’s also the focus of one of their first podcasts - which are all very much worth a listen to get a wider sense of the complexities and problems of left activism in Ireland over the last few decades.
Laurence Cox is one of Europe’s best-known social movements researchers and has been involved in many different movements since the 1980s. He teaches at Maynooth, edits the activist-academic movement journal Interface and works with the Ulex movement training project.
Notes
https://web.archive.org/web/20040227130216/http:/www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/rev/colours.doc
https://ulexproject.org/courses_events/the-ecology-of-social-movements-2-2/
Dalby, Simon “The Nuclear Syndrome”, available at http://laka.org/protest/geschiedenis/Ireland.pdf
Corley, Ide, Fallon, Hellen and Cox, Laurence eds. “Silence Would be Treason: The Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa”, available at https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/10161/1/2ndEditionSilence.pdf
Green Party. An Caorthann, issue 5, available at https://www.leftarchive.ie/document/3101/