During the first weekend of September 2024, representatives from Czech environmental groups, feminist collectives, the housing and tenant movement, trade unions, small left-wing political parties, academia and many others came together to share some much-needed “food for thought” at the Social-Ecological Forum, organized and funded by the Czech office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Czechia’s diverse but small and fragmented eco-left community was there to discuss critical contemporary issues caused by neoliberal advancement, such as ecological crises, deepening economic inequalities, democratic backsliding, the rise of far-right extremism and many others.
The forum kicked off with a Friday evening panel discussion titled “Does Central Europe have a solidary and sustainable future?”, followed by a smaller “world café” and “open space” debates on Saturday. The main goal was to collectively discuss the steps and strategies that the eco-left movement in Czechia needs to take given the deepening polycrisis and the specific context of Central Europe.
The forum made obvious the vivid “ping-pong” going on between activists and movement-relevant research, which Agnes Gagyi called upon in her 2015 paper situating East European social movements in the context of global history. She further expanded upon this in her book on the new left perspectives of Eastern Europe’s political economy, co-edited with the Czech political scientist Ondřej Slačálek. Gagyi also provided a series of lectures for Czech activists in 2022. The knowledge drawn from these sources, along with insights from degrowth scholarship, social-ecological theory, social scientists such as Bruno Latour or Ulrich Brandt, and various other strands of political economy and political ecology, shaped the forum’s framing. This framework placed local struggles within a world-systems perspective, connecting them to Czechia’s semi-peripheral position. This positioning also served as a starting point for laying out the forum’s agenda:
After three decades of post-communist transformation, socially and ecologically focused political parties, trade unions and activists are mostly on the defensive and often must fight for the mere legitimacy of their existence. In their quest for change, they also come across the increasingly obvious emptiness of the dream of catching up with the West and the rise of right-wing conservatism. This is often especially the case with people whom these actors would like to address with a vision of a just and sustainable future. Instead, transformation fatigue and the frustration of the defeated are spreading among them.
What determines the situation of social forces striving for a social and ecological future in Central Europe? Will the actors concerned agree on a common vision? What can be taken away from each partial success and what were the failures? What beliefs need to be reassessed in the future and what strategies should be taken? What makes sense to cooperate on across post-communist Europe, as well as across the diversified Czech movement, and where are the limits of such cooperation?
The forum left no one in doubt that activists often have knowledge and systems thinking that is not only informed by the latest science but, in many cases, surpasses that of academia. Especially in Czechia, still haunted by “zombie socialism” and the frenzy to “catch up with the West”, social sciences largely refrain from the critical analysis of systems as regards pressing societal and environmental issues.
Day 1
The Friday panel discussion was open to the public and hosted prominent guests such as the Polish materialist dialectical social theorist and researcher, Jan Sowa; the director of the Croatian Institute of Political Ecology and We Can! (Možemo!) party candidate, Vedran Horvat; an analyst from the Central European Labour Studies Institute in Bratislava Monika Martišková; and an activist from the Czech tenant movement (Iniciativa Nájemníků) Vojtěch Michal. Anna Karníková, the moderator and one of the forum’s initiators, started the debate by summarizing the current situation of the eco-left movement in Czechia with the following points of departure:
The left-wing movement in Czechia is avant-garde and separated from politics, with no influence on current political strategies.
The current wave of organizing is reminiscent of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
Cooperatives are on the rise.
The degrowth movement is proposing “universal public services” as an alternative to a “universal basic income”.
The movement needs to think about how to meet the needs of the people disenfranchised by capitalism.
It is necessary to overcome ubiquitous defeatism and ideas of meritocracy.
The eco-left movement must be more radical in its programmatic thinking, but does it have a shared vision of the post-capitalist future?
Photo source: author
The debate between the moderator, audience and panellists then largely revolved around the question of our societies’ self-image and what makes us part of the “West” or the periphery. Which changes have been good for our societies, and which ones have not? Martiškova mentioned the structural conditions ill-suited for improving people’s living conditions, while Horvat warned against the alt-right movement’s tendency to abuse the narrative about unsuccessful transformation and proposed the idea of the degrowth movement to replace economic growth by wellbeing without extractivism for all. Sowa emphasized the wrecking of the West by populism and the specific Eastern experience with the harsh impacts of capitalism in the 1990s, which gives the region unique expertise in handling capitalism’s failures. According to him, there is no longer a need to position the East in relation to the West. The basis of ecological transformation is in the public sector, which has been less destroyed in the East. The future of Western cities is thus in Warsaw or Budapest. The public sector must nonetheless be democratized to prevent its privatization and us for extractivism. Martišková followed up with a list of wounds suffered by trade unions in post-communist contexts, due to which workers are denied their voice in workplaces and their share of profit, resulting in a turn among workers to right-wing extremism. Meanwhile, programmes such as the European Green Deal’s Just Transition depend on strong trade unions. According to Michal, it is important to mobilize people affected by a particular issue and provide them with an alternative. Since most people have limited free time and capacity, it is important to mobilize as many people as possible to create collective action against the powerful real estate lobby.
Feedback from the audience mentioned that contemporary movements often have only one of two necessary dimensions—a struggle without a vision or a vision without a struggle. Another guest warned against increasing systemic pressures on people’s private lives, due to which they lack the time and resources for grassroots organizing and are thus incapable of tackling large issues (as small collectives). In the concluding answers from the panellists, Horvat warned against transformative ideas such as the European Green Deal being corrupted in the context of neoliberalism, which could easily happen with the solutions to the housing crisis as well. Remembering his engagement in struggles against privatization in Croatia in the 1990s, he stressed the importance of the movements’ regeneration and the tackling of issues such as burnout and fatigue in addition to the necessity for activists who enter formal institutions to stay connected with their movement. Martišková called attention to the overburdening of trade unions with too many expectations which are impossible to live up to, especially given their disenfranchisement. Sowa stressed the need for the eco-left movement to differentiate itself from the left that is embedded in the liberal project as well as make a distinction between the First International and current movements. While the proletariat had nothing to lose but its chains and was embedded in the togetherness inherited from the countryside communes, for contemporary activists, it is more rational to operate as individual subjects. Michal concluded by stressing the volatile prices of housing due to its financialization.
Day 2
On Saturday, the eco-left movement met again, this time in a non-public gathering, to discuss their common vision of a solidary and ecological future in the domestic context.
The programme began with a presentation of the “New Deal: A Programme of Social-Ecological Transformation for the Czech Republic”, which strives to find interconnected solutions to complex issues, such as democracy, decarbonization, affordable housing, care work, sustainable agriculture, labour, the economy and resource extraction. It was created by Re-set: the Platform for Social-Ecological Transformation in cooperation with participants from various fields. The programme was formally embraced by several NGOs, grassroots movements and collectives but so far has not gained traction in terms of implementation. The forum served as an impetus for debating future steps.
Consequently, attendants were presented with five questions to be discussed in a “world café” format:
1) Which trends deserve our attention?
2) Which pathways of the social-ecological future are functional and which ones are not?
3) What are the takeaways from the successes and failures of the social-ecological movement in Czechia?
4) Which convictions shall we abandon?
5) How can we increase the chances for meaningful cooperation across the spectrum of actors?
After sharing the main outcomes of each discussion and a lunch break, attendants continued with an “open space” conference, with some offering topics for discussion and others taking part in them. The topics touched upon rewriting the narrative about catching up with the West, the prospects of a strong-enough green left party in Czechia, Czech anti-communism, universal public services, climate mainstreaming in politics, the rise of the extreme right, mobilizing people, universal basic income, participatory democracy and the role of science in eco-left movements and the social-ecological transformation.
Photo source: Petr Vrabec
Summary
Five participants preselected by others in an online poll finally summarized the main takeaways from the forum. The first stressed that real democracy is inseparable from the social and ecological conflict and currently absent in its parliamentary version, the need for structures allowing different levels of participation in social movements to avoid burnout, and for new narratives based on our own activities. The next participant expressed the irrelevance of historical struggles and past mistakes for the young generation that did not live through them and the need to focus instead on how we can succeed now. Another speaker framed trade unions as a good mechanism for creating ruptures in the neoliberal orthodoxy and mentioned the need for them to function horizontally, provide education and facilitation skills and make important wellbeing and mutual care among members. A former politician shared his sense of the prevailing opinion that progressive solutions are impossible in the context of neoliberal cultural hegemony and called upon everyone’s serious involvement in the struggle aimed at breaking this hegemony and in the continuation of the debates initiated by the forum. He framed political parties as monstrous organizations which need to be rebuilt into democratic institutions and advised more attention to be focused on the transformation at the municipal level. The final summary by a philosopher stressed our responsibility and the right to act as well as the difficulty of gaining attention in an era where that attention is fiercely contested. For this reason, it is also important to involve artists in these debates. The key to survival, in her view, is the ability to be observant and replace generational conflicts by fostering relationships. Different movements have in the past shown that they can achieve big things. All actors should know about each other and collectively break down the neoliberal discourse.
In summary, the forum left many with a much-needed sense of togetherness and perhaps renewed motivation to carry on. It also however left many unanswered questions, such as how to continue these debates and how to transform them into collective action. Have the foundations been laid for a possible coalition of the Czech eco-left movement? And if so, who will take responsibility for making it happen? Additionally, many thoughts revolve around one of the open space debates proposed and facilitated by the author of this article concerning the role of academia in helping social movements and the social-ecological transformation. The small groups of academics who gathered at this debate agreed that this question has hardly started in Czechia and is bound to face opposition. Much remains to be done in this regard, and projects such as Sustain Action can make a meaningful contribution to continuing this task. Even the fact that these questions were raised, and this article written, counts for something.
Photo source: Petr Vrabec
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