Rudolf Bahro Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Rudolf Bahro (1935–1997) is principally known as a green politician and thinker, and particularly as an advocate of ecosocialism and of a spiritual and psychological path to political transformation. He was born in 1935 in Bad Flinsberg, Lower Silesia, now part of Poland. He grew up in East Germany, and lost his mother, sister, and brother in World War II (1939–1945). As a youth he joined the East German Democrat Party and studied at Humboldt University in Berlin. He then worked as a journalist and as an official of the Union of Scientific Employees, a post from which he was dismissed in 1967 for publishing an article that was critical of the party.

On the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, Bahro wrote what would be published in 1977 as The Alternative in Eastern Europe, in which he presented a critique of East European communism, particularly its materialism and its destructive growth-based economic aims, which mirrored those of Western Europe. He was arrested and imprisoned for this publication, causing an international outcry and campaign for his release.

In 1979 he was deported to West Germany, where he joined the German Greens (Die Gruen). He argued for a synthesis of red and green political and economic principles, but he rejected many traditional Marxist ideas. His argument is best articulated in his 1984 book From Red to Green, arguably his best-known work.

Although associated with the green political movement, Bahro was deeply critical of the “realist” sections of the green movement that sought electoral victory within the existing political system rather than pursuing more wholesale change. He argued that change at the spiritual and psychological level was necessary to overturn the ecologically destructive patterns of living accepted in the postindustrial West. Like Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology, Bahro worked from an uncompromising biocentric viewpoint and was interested in the spiritual dimensions of green thinking. In 1985, after increasing frustration with the party’s strategy, he left the Die Gruen over a dispute about policy on animal testing: Bahro and his partner Christine Schröter would not accept the party’s compromise position that called for a ban on animal testing but allowed for exceptions in the field of medical research.

In the years after his split with Die Gruen, Bahro further developed his ideas on the spiritual and psychological dimensions of social ecology, moving further from traditional democratic politics. From 1990, he was professor of social ecology at Humboldt University. His thought tended increasingly toward an authoritarian approach as the only viable practical solution to environmental problems, to the dismay of many on the left of the green movement. This approach is evident in his last book, Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster:The Politics of World Transformation (1994). Bahro was diagnosed with cancer in 1995 and died two years later.

Bibliography:

Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green. London:Verso, 1984.
Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster:The Politics of World Transformation. Bath, U.K.: Gateway, 1994.
Frankel, Boris. The Post-industrial Utopians. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1987.
Ulf,Wolter, ed. Rudolf Bahro: Critical Responses. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1980.