Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.

Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!

What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.

China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.

Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.

The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time

For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:

• Since these European rulers are all bitterly against Russia;
• Russia possesses that cheap natural gas which could improve working class living standards; and
• the working classes could unite against their rulers and demand to have cheap Russian gas shipped to them.

How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.  

World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth  Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.

The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.

The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?

Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World

For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.

Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not

The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the  traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant.  As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:

• inclusive of many more combinations than the communism-liberalism-conservative, fascist and libertarian, linearly strung out;
• economic as well as political;
• must account for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
• decentered so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable under certain conditions. This means that all political tendencies would have to be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices;
• the spectrum must be flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia or between India (fundamentalist) and China and
• not limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum                      

This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?

• They are anti-imperialist.
• They are anti-war.
• They are anti-finance capital.
• They want to develop the productive forces of the world.

Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.

Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.

Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?

I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th  century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.

Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.

Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.

Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s  book After Capitalism.

What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers  created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.

This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.

The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding  onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.

The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy

There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not  universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.

Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.

Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.

What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.

There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:

• the treatment of peasants on the collective farms;
• the famines in Russia;
• the notion that Stalin was a dictator;
• that Russia operated in totalitarian way and
• the political trials of the 1930s.

Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.

So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.

Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.

Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds

For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:

• What is the role of the state?
• What is the role of a socialist party?
• What is the role of self-organizing workers? and
• What is place of markets?

To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.

Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing.  On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.

What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism

The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.

Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand  or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.

I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.

For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:

• beginning with historical anarchists culminating with Murray Bookchin (2 years);
• The Situationists of Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord culminating in Pannekoek and Gorter’s council communism (3 years);
• National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) converging in Lyndon Larouche’s book Dialectical Economics (1 year). More recently I’ve been influenced by William Engdahl, Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung, also in the Larouche orbit;
• world-systems theory following the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi;
• communist psychology of the Soviet Union whose main practitioners were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. Also one year’s involvement with Social Therapy founded by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in New York City;
• in 2000 the anti-war movement headed by ANSWER (8 years);
• the Occupy movement from 2011-2012;
• the founding of our own organization Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism from 2012 to today; and
• one year with anarchists from Olympia Assembly and the Industrial Workers of the World.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Seattle-area residents who don’t want to send that stuff to the landfill have another option: Ridwell, a subscription-based waste collection service. Ridwell picks up people’s so-called “hard-to-recycle” refuse curbside, hauls it to warehouses, and sorts it into bales. Then — the main selling point — Ridwell says it will send those bales to reprocessing plants, where they can be converted into new products.

On a recent tour of Ridwell’s Seattle warehouse, representatives from the company showed Grist a number of those converted products. One was a black cube of landscaping material, made from discarded multilayer plastic packaging and meant to help water drain more slowly during a rainstorm. Another was a gravel substitute used for hydroponic plants and gardening. A third was a pot for small shrubs.

The products were nifty — unquestionably more so than the junk they were made from, which otherwise might have festered in a landfill. “Reduce where you can, Ridwell where you can’t,” the company’s CEO, Ryan Metzger, told Grist. 

In the public’s mind, and to many governments and industry groups, recycling happens any time a used product is refashioned into something new. It’s this definition that allows so many T-shirts, tote bags, tennis shoes, and other consumer goods to incorporate old plastic water bottles and be labeled as “made with recycled content.” Trex, for example — a company that receives much of Ridwell’s plastic film — claims to make “eco-friendly composite decks from an innovative blend of up to 95 percent recycled plastic film and reclaimed sawdust.” The company calls itself “one of the largest plastic film recyclers in the U.S.”

But is it really recycling to turn plastic packaging into an entirely different product, if that product itself isn’t recyclable? 

Read Next

Why it’s so hard to create a truly recyclable Keurig coffee pod

Frida Garza

Many people involved in the recycling industry say yes. Metzger cited the Merriam-Webster definition of the word, which says that recycling means processing something “in order to regain material for human use.” For the experts and entrepreneurs who favor a broad definition of recycling, it’s obviously better to turn a plastic bag into a flower pot than to put it in the garbage. This group of people tends to be invested in boosting the official plastics recycling rate above the current dismal status quo of just 5 percent in the U.S.

But a small number of researchers and environmental advocates, who are concerned with reducing waste more broadly, think the word should refer only to the conversion of a used product back into a new version of itself, or something of similar utility. They’d consider a glass bottle, for instance, to be “recyclable” because it can be crushed down, melted, and reshaped into a new bottle a virtually infinite number of times. Most plastic products, by contrast, can be reprocessed only once — if at all — by turning them into lower quality products that are eventually destined for the trash bin. Although such reprocessing prolongs the life of the plastic, it’s a one-way trajectory that ultimately ends at a landfill or incinerator. Such a system isn’t recycling, advocates argue — it’s “downcycling.”

“Taking a plastic bottle and turning it into part of a pair of sneakers that after a year will be buried or burned is not perpetuating a cycle,” said Kevin Budris, deputy director of Just Zero, a nonprofit that advocates for waste reduction. In that “linear voyage,” he observed, plastic still ends up as garbage. “There’s no ‘cycle’ there.”

It may seem wonky to quibble so much over recycling’s technical definition. But experts say the stakes are high, because of the huge amount of goodwill people have toward the idea of recycling — and because of the way plastics companies have promoted it to justify ever-increasing production of single-use plastics. At the heart of the debate is the question of whether recycling is a valuable activity in and of itself, or if it’s only worthwhile when it reduces the amount of raw resource extraction needed to create new goods.

Companies’ use of the word recycling to describe linear processes “does real harm,” Budris added. It “gives consumers a false sense of confidence that what they’re buying is sustainable or environmentally friendly, when these industries know that is very far from the truth.”

When it comes to the definition of recycling, virtually everyone agrees on at least one baseline: It involves the conversion of a used product — one that otherwise would have been discarded — into something new. That’s what organizations as varied as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Association of Plastics Recyclers, an industry group, say in their descriptions of the concept. Other definitions, like one from the Solid Waste Association of North America, define recycling as the whole suite of activities — collection, sorting, marketing, and processing — needed to give used materials a second life.

But beyond this conceptual framework, few government agencies and industry organizations devote any attention to what materials are ultimately turned into. They don’t differentiate between, say, an aluminum can being converted into another can, and a granola bar wrapper getting incorporated into a carpet.

Before the invention of plastics, no one seemed to be concerned with this distinction between linear and circular reprocessing. Most industrial-scale recycling in the early 20th century involved metal, which is inherently recyclable multiple times, with low loss rates, or the amount of material that gets wasted during reprocessing. 

Plastic, which companies began to mass-produce in the form of single-use products after World War II, complicated things. Unlike metal or glass, plastic degrades every time it’s ground down or melted, meaning it’s difficult to turn it into new products without the addition of virgin material. Even the plastic in water bottles, the most widely reprocessed type of plastic, is mostly not turned back into new bottles, but downgraded into less pure products. Some plastics are so filled with chemical additives that it’s unsafe to reprocess them into products that will come into contact with food.

Paper faces a similar problem: High-quality cardboard, printer paper, and cardstock can only be reprocessed about five to seven times before its fibers get too short for another use cycle. But it was plastic — not paper — that by the 1960s and ’70s was ending up everywhere in the natural environment. And so, despite knowing about the shortcomings of plastics recycling, industry groups promoted recycling in order to neutralize concern among the public and fend off the threat of government regulations. 

These efforts were wildly successful. Ads, newspaper editorials, and lobbying to put the chasing arrows recycling symbol on all sorts of plastic products helped make recycling synonymous with environmentalism and moral goodness. For plastics in particular, they convinced the public that recycling was far more effective than it really was. By 2019, nearly 60 percent of respondents to a national survey said — incorrectly — that plastics are “endlessly recyclable,” and more than a quarter believed that plastics are more recyclable than glass or metal. 

More recent surveys have shown that an overwhelming majority of consumers overestimate the amount of plastic that gets recycled, while behavioral science experiments have suggested that the availability of recycling bins encourages people to use more plastic. (In reality, the global recycling rate for plastics is just 9 percent. And less than 1 percent of it is ever recycled more than once.) 

All of this created a difficult situation for environmental advocates, who, in their efforts to hold large plastic companies accountable for their role in the plastic pollution crisis, have found themselves criticizing one of the most beloved symbols of the environmental movement.

“The biggest hurdle to actually making progress on plastic waste and pollution is this incredible love that people have for the word ‘recycling,’” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the advocacy group The Last Beach Cleanup. 

Experts who favor a broad definition of recycling seem unconcerned with the possibility that the word has an unearned halo. To them, it’s axiomatic that it’s environmentally preferable to reprocess materials at least one time, if the alternative is that they will not be reprocessed at all. And they say differentiating between recycling and downcycling would add to the public’s befuddlement over complicated and often conflicting advice about how to recycle. 

“Recycling is already really difficult for consumers,” said Aisha Stenning, who leads a plastics initiative for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for a “circular economy” that tries to minimize waste by keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible. Even though only a tiny fraction of plastics actually get recycled, Stenning argued that it’s important to maximize the amount of material that gets collected in curbside bins to ensure that recyclers have access to feedstock.

Tom Szaky, the CEO of TerraCycle, a Ridwell competitor that converts so-called “hard-to-recycle” plastics into new products, acknowledged that “almost all recycling that occurs today is downcycling,” but he doesn’t think there’s a need to communicate that to the public. Rather, he argued that downcycling is recycling — and that quibbling over these definitions is making the problem worse. 

Metzger, the Ridwell CEO, shared a similar perspective, saying that downcycling is “part of the recycling umbrella,” and a “step toward keeping waste out of landfills and giving materials a new purpose for many years.” To him, the problem is less about terminology and more about transparency: “The real issue arises when products are labeled with recycling symbols but offer no visibility into whether the material is actually repurposed into something meaningful,” he added. “That’s where confusion and mistrust grow.” 

Read Next

How the recycling symbol lost its meaning

Kate Yoder

When organizations place any stipulations on what counts as recycling, they tend to involve examples of what recycling isn’t — burning trash in order to generate energy, for example, or using it as landfill cover. But it’s rarely clear where they draw the line. Stenning said that plastic conversion into roadways shouldn’t count as recycling because used material “has to go into something that is then inherently recyclable.” But her organization’s “Global Commitment” — a pledge signed onto by hundreds of transnational companies to use more recycled content and increase the recyclability of their products, among other objectives — does not mention that same condition. 

Sarah Dearman, chief innovation officer for the nonprofit The Recycling Partnership, told Grist that the recyclability of reprocessed products is “an important factor to consider,” but not required. Her short definition of a recyclable item: “It has to be accepted for recycling, it has to be able to be recycled in a recycling facility, and then purchased by a responsible end market.” She said her organization is primarily focused on overcoming obstacles in these areas. 

She also cited a geographical challenge: A given material might be recyclable back into the same product in one state, but downgraded into nonrecyclable products in another state. “So how would you label that, anyway?” she said.

“The average person, when they hear ‘recycling,’ they think of ‘recycling,’” she added — as if the definition should be self-evident. 

The problem with this perspective, according to its critics, is that it takes for granted that there will be an endless supply of plastic trash and focuses on mitigating the harm it causes — rather than trying to limit waste generation in the first place. It runs counter to the meaning suggested by the word “recycling”: a reuse loop in which discarded material repeatedly becomes new products, thereby eliminating waste and displacing the need to use virgin materials.

Advocates who seek to reduce plastic production, as well as some scientists and industry insiders, narrow the definition of recycling to include only cyclical processes. Bob Gedert, former president of the National Recycling Coalition — a group of roughly two dozen regional recycling programs around the country — said a scenario in which used plastic bottles get turned into landscaping materials, shoes, or tote bags, “is considered ‘downcycling’” and that the coalition is driven to “to keep the recycling definition pure and clean and not allow for downcycling to ‘count’ as recycling.” He added, “We don’t design definitions to make certain businesses feel good.”

Dell, with The Last Beach Cleanup, said genuine recycling should turn a product “back into itself” or into “something of equal class and value” with a loss rate no greater than 20 percent — a standard that, between sorting at material recovery facilities and processing at recyclers, no type of plastic meets. 

“What we should be thinking of as recycling just doesn’t work for plastic,” Budris, with Just Zero, said. He added that, despite decades of efforts from industry groups to boost the recycling rate, the needle has not shifted in an appreciable way. “We’re still at effectively a 5 percent plastic recycling rate across the country,” he said, referring to numbers from 2019 and 2021. “And that recycling rate, by the way, includes things like downcycling. So the true recycling rate is actually much lower than that.”

The reason this distinction is important, according to Budris, is because the point of recycling isn’t to reprocess used items for the sake of reprocessing them; it’s to displace the need for virgin materials, which are environmentally costly to extract and process. Displacement doesn’t happen with downcycling, Budris argues, because it makes a given line of products dependent on a continuous stream of waste. Even if companies were somehow able to reprocess 100 percent of the world’s plastic waste, but exclusively through downcycling, there would always be a need to make new plastic.

There’s also evidence that “recycled” plastic products are additive — items that would otherwise not have been made at all. Researchers have argued that more recycling may tamp down prices for both recycled and virgin materials, leading to an increase in supply and demand for new products.

On a global scale, the virgin plastic market is expanding alongside growth in the market for recycled polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, and recycled plastic products. Even companies that have explicitly pledged to reduce their virgin plastic use have made no progress toward that goal since 2018. Globally, demand for virgin plastic is expected to more than double to $322 billion by 2032. 

Recent research has mathematically disproven the idea that even genuinely cyclical recycling will automatically reduce the amount of material reaching a landfill or incinerator. Writing in the Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2018, professors Trevor Zink and Roland Geyer suggested that the only environmentally relevant metric by which to evaluate materials reprocessing is its “displacement potential,” its capacity to offset demand for virgin materials. They argued that, due to inevitable losses during reprocessing — even in the most optimal of scenarios — recycling can never be an infinite loop that diverts 100 percent of material from landfills. 

“The only way to reduce the amount of material we landfill or incinerate is to reduce the amount we produce in the first place,” the authors wrote. “The ability of recycling to accomplish that goal is uncertain at best.”

Read Next

What will it take to get companies to embrace reusable packaging?

Joseph Winters

These arguments are not new. The term “downcycling” entered common parlance — among environmental advocates, anyway — after the 2002 publication of Cradle to Cradle, which called out the failure of most so-called recycling processes to divert waste from landfills. Producing a rug out of used plastic soda bottles, the authors wrote, would only postpone the plastic’s eventual fate: “The rug is still on its way to a landfill; it’s just stopping off in your house en route.” The linear trajectory of downcycling meant there would always be a need to produce new products from virgin plastic.

Cradle to Cradle’s authors, the architect William McDonough and the chemist Michael Braungart, criticized product manufacturers for “blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects” — hinting that the “agenda to recycle” had turned the activity into an end in itself. Two decades later, the glut of companies offering clothing, furniture, and reusable water bottles made from discarded plastic suggests that this observation is still true.

You’d be hard-pressed to find companies proudly advertising their products as “downcyclable,” or that they support downcycling infrastructure. But plenty of them tout their activities as “upcycling.” TerraCycle, for instance, sells an “upcycled” tote made from discarded mailbags. Vissla, an apparel company, sells T-shirts made with its “upcycled textile system” composed of cotton and plastic waste. Even the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which supports reducing plastic production, sells an “upcycled” crossbody bag made from discarded plastic water bottles. 

Upcycling was coined in 1994 by a German mechanical engineer named Reiner Pilz, who defined it as a system “where old products are given more value, not less.” The idea remains popular. In the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of a circular economy, which relies heavily on recycling, products and materials are circulated “at their highest value,” meaning economic value. A 2019 report commissioned by the Department of Energy similarly described upcycling as the conversion of a waste material into “higher-value products,” although academic reports also describe it as increasing the “quality and lifetimes of materials and products.”

Quality and economic value, however, are subjective. They’re sometimes at odds with each other, and they can be poor proxies for environmental benefits. For instance, Repurpose Global, an organization that sells plastic credits to companies so they can say the packaging they create is “plastic neutral,” calls it upcycling when plastic trash is converted into plastic wood boards for use in construction. It’s undeniable that the boards have more economic value than a pile of dirty Snickers wrappers, but technically the final product is less pure than the plastic it was made out of. And because the boards are unlikely to be reprocessed due to the degradation of the plastic they were made of, upcycling doesn’t contribute to a cyclical system any more than downcycling does. 

Read Next

How the ‘circular economy’ went from environmentalist dream to marketing buzzword

Joseph Winters

Budris considers the term to be an ironic admission of what his group has been arguing all along. “It’s partially acknowledging that the process is not actually recycling,” he said. “But it’s, like, attempting to upsell it.”

Dell, with The Last Beach Cleanup, said state legislators or an agency like the Federal Trade Commission should step in to more clearly differentiate cyclical recycling from linear processes — perhaps by replacing labels like “made with recycled content” to ones that say “made with downcycled content.” 

Although no states have enacted legislation requiring the use of the word downcycling, several have passed laws precluding certain processes — particularly those that turn waste into fuel, like most so-called “chemical recycling” — from counting toward legally mandated recycling targets.

“If changing the name were to prevent people from thinking that the impacts of their consumption can be erased at the point of disposal, I’m all for it,” said Zink, the lead author of the 2018 research paper and an associate professor of management and sustainability at Loyola Marymount University. He added, however, that he generally thinks hand-wringing around recycling terminology is a distraction from more systemic, upstream interventions to scale back the production of unnecessary goods.

“The answer is to buy less stuff,” he said, “and that’s a very difficult to impossible proposition for companies in an open market economy.”

To Ridwell’s credit, the company is forthcoming about where it sends the plastic it collects. Partners like Trex are featured prominently on Ridwell’s website. “It’s all there for everyone to see,” Metzger said, “so consumers can make educated decisions.” He said he supports “a system where everyone has insight into how much recycling is truly happening and what material becomes.”

Still, during Grist’s tour in Seattle, Metzger acknowledged the ambiguity of recycling terminology.

“Recycling, downcycling, upcycling” — it can all be a bit confusing, he said. “We prefer to just use the word ‘circularity.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘recycled’ plastic in your shoes, shirts, and bags? It’s still destined for the landfill. on Feb 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Democracy defenders on Monday sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's agreement to place the country's National Guard under the control of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right extremist who has advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Netanyahu's move is in exchange for a promise from Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party to remain in the prime minister's governing coalition despite an earlier threat to exit if Netanyahu delayed a highly controversial judicial overhaul. Facing massive street protests and a general strike by the nation's largest trade union, Netanyahu agreed on Monday to postpone the legislation until April or early May.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets Sunday to protest Netanyahu's firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who a day earlier advocated for a monthlong pause to the judicial reform.

"Instead of democracy, Israel doubles down on fascism against Palestinians."

Netanyahu explained in a televised address Monday that he is "not willing to tear the country apart," while asserting that "there must not be civil war."

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in response to Netanyahu's deal with his security minister: "We already saw what happened when Ben-Gvir wanted to suppress the protests, now one can only imagine what will happen when he has his own militias."

ACRI continued:

It is important to understand—the "National Guard" that Netanyahu promised is a private armed militia that will answer directly to Ben-Gvir. This is a police unit intended first and foremost to act in mixed cities, first and foremost against the Arab population. Such power in Ben-Gvir's hands = certain violation of Arabs' rights. Advancing such a proposal will also enable him to use these forces against the protests and demonstrators.

This is a new and dangerous addition to the coup d'état that we are witnessing. As if it is not enough to act against the judicial system, now we see operative steps to take authorities from the police and turn them into Ben-Gvir's Revolutionary Guards.

"The National Guard must be under the police rather than under the control of Lehava and the rest of the Kahanists," asserted Gilad Kariv, a member of Israel's parliament representing the center-left Israeli Labor Party, as he referenced the far-right Jewish supremacist political group and followers of Meir Kahane, the Orthodox rabbi convicted of terrorism before being assassinated in 1990.

For progressive critics, the idea of Ben-Gvir having a military unit under his direct control presents a frightening prospect.

Ben-Gvir was convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting the Kahanist terror group Kach after he advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. He is also an open admirer of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish supremacist who murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers at a mosque in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.

Moshe Karadi, former general commissioner of the Israel Police, told the Times of Israel that Ben-Gvir "has formed a private militia for his political needs."

"He's dismantling Israeli democracy" and "turning Israel into a dictatorship," Karadi added.

Currently a unit within the Israel Border Police, the National Guard was established under the previous Israeli government amid rising Palestinian resistance and in the wake of the 2021 military assault on Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.