Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 12:48:33 +0100 (MET) Subject: M-G: UNITE! Info #27en: 1/5 Who fights "green" fascism? UNITE! Info #27en: 1/5 Who fights "green" fascism? [Posted: 02.02.97] Note / Anmerkung / Note / Nota / Anm=E4rkning: On the UNITE! / VEREINIGT EUCH! / UNISSEZ-VOUS! / =A1UNIOS! / F=D6RENA ER! Info en/de/fr/es/se series: See information on the last page / Siehe Information auf der letzten Seite / Verrez information =E0 la derni=E8re page / Ver informaci=F3n en la =FAltima p=E1gina / Se information p=E5 sista sidan. AN IMPORTANT DISCUSSION - INTRO ON HOW IT STARTED Comrade Jacques Beaudoin, of Action Socialiste, Canada, <grabuge-AT-mail.odyssee.net>, This Info above all is in reply to a question which you recently (on 27.01) put to me on the Marxism-General mailing list managed by the Spoon Collective. At the same time, I shall take this opportunity to make some comments - at last - on (in particular) one of the articles in those issues of your organization's newspaper, "SOCIALISME MAIN- TENANT!" ("Socialism Now!"), which you so kindly mailed me on 11.11.96, Jacques, inviting my comments. Other things so far have kept me from accepting this invitation. And here, I shall only go into one of those many subjects which were dealt with in those issues - the subject, or group of subjects, of the article "Le capitalisme et la crise de l'environnement" ("Capitalism and the Crisis of the Environment"), in the issue of July, 1992, i.e., precisely after the so-called "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro that year. This is quite a big one, though. - In your recent M-G posting, you wrote: (Jacques:) >Please Malecki, be honest: supporting the so-called "good >points" of the fascist LaRouche has nothing to do with Maoism, >nor with Marxism. [Bob Malecki, I think, we can leave out of this for the time being.] [And to the "science people" - since I'm going to post this to newsgroup 'sci.energy' too - I say: Please bear with me for being rather "political only" initially here. This will, as an important part of its contents, also deal with the question of how humanity is to get plenty of cheap and clean energy - a question the *main* reply to which today doesn't actually lie in the realms of physics, chemistry etc but in the *social* sciences and, above all, in their application.] (Jacques:) >And to Rolf: how can you explain that a counter-revolutionary >organization as this one can have some good points? Maoism >is intransigent against all the reactionaries. And this includes >LaRouche's sect. I did in fact recently write (to the M-G list on 26.01) i.a.: (Rolf:) >Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of that small bourgeois group in >the USA which in my opinion has certain good points in that >it's rather squarely against the "green" warfare but which >of course is counter-revolutionary too, [...........] Why did I write that the group led by LaRouche has some good points? And btw, he's not a fascist. Why certain people want to put such a stamp on his - of course bourgeois - political current I shall try to explain too. There are some things that it's absolutely necessary for all adherents of Marxism too see, and to act on - for all adherents of what you called "Maoism", Jacques, a somewhat unfortunate term IMO which I'll comment on some other time. But many of those who today are saying that they're adherents of the ideology of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong - and here I'm referring to those who sincerely want to adhere to that ideology, which I believe that you do, and not to such obvious swindlers and crooks as the "Quispe"- ists, the leaders of the so-called "RIM" etc - do not see them at all. They have a completely insufficient understanding of Marxism and of some elementary facts of the natural sciences, and in part in fact are being led by their noses and misused by some bourgeois forces as a cover for, or even as cannon-fodder in, some heinous crimes of theirs. This absolutely must be stopped and reversed. "GREEN" WARFARE - WHO OPPOSES IT? One thing that everybody needs to see clearly is the fact that today, the main forces of the bourgeoisie in the world massively are engaging in a more or less new kind of warfare against (above all) the workers and the oppressed peoples, a "green" warfare in the ideological, political and economic fields. This warfare consists of a whole syndrome of ultra-reactionary campaigns directed against industry, against much of modern technology, against some very vital branches of science and against economic growth. It has already, during the 2-3 decades or more so far in which it has been going on and has come to be supported by more and more forces among the international political leadership of the bourgeoisie, caused enormous misery to many peoples, and it's going to cause much more. It's a main cause of the present-day mass unemployment and social degradation and decay in the relatively highly-developed, capitalist/imperialist countries. And its effects in many third world countries, even today, are genocidal. The real, in fact political, counter-revolutionary and genocidal, aims of these campaigns are being covered up by their movers by means of their using such terms to describe them as "environ- mentalism" - this above all, but in this case it's not a genuine concern for the environment at all that's meant - and, more recently, "sustainable development" and "Agenda 21". Since decades back, people in many countries have been systematically doused with a phoney "environmentalist", "green" propaganda on the part of all the ultra-reactionary bourgeois mass media, a propaganda which today constitutes a veritable "modern" Inquisition, tolerating practically no opposition whatsoever. It's a propagandistic counterpart to the use by the US imperialists, in the late '60s / early '70s, of the chemical "Agent Orange" to defoliate the woods of Vietnam in which the national liberation guerilla forces were taking cover, or the Soviet social-imperialists' saturating the whole of Afghanistan with millions of mines in the '80s in order to combat the national liberation forces then of that country. Today, one or even two generations of younger people in the more highly-industrialized countries have grown up under the circumstances of this massive, all-pervasive propaganda, having been forced, so to speak, to suck in this poisonous "Agent Green" with their mother's milk. Many have proved rather immune to this ultra-reactionary and anti-materialistc propaganda, above all people with working-class background and also most technicians and scientists in the fields concerned, the latter because of that knowledge which they already had or which the ruling class despite everything couldn't avoid giving them. But this systematic propaganda poisoning of course has had some very serious effects, on at least a significant minority of the population in those countries, in particular since it has been coupled with a deterioration in education about nature. And when - as in almost all cases - it has turned out to be impos- sible for the ultra-reactionaries to achieve their aims by decieving a majority of people about the technical/scientific facts, they have resorted to attempts at deceiving people about what a majority of people in fact have wanted, and when this again has failed, then they have gone to the length, also in so-called "bourgeois-demo- cratic" countries, of using more or less openly *fascist* methods, in order at all costs to force their destructive programmes through. The country from which I'm posting, Sweden, is one clear example of this - see for instance my "UNITE! Info #4en: A barbaric anti- industry attack", of 21.03.96, and some other earlier postings on the subjects dealt with here - but by no means the only one. In fact the whole "green" ideology is permeated with fascist ideas. It is >from this bourgeois ideological corner - and typically, not seldom cloaked with a camouflage of phoney"left" demagoguery, too - that the most important Nazi danger lurks today. Now what forces in society have been *combating* this "green" warfare? What forces have been pointing at the very harmful character of, and indeed the clearly racist and fascist elements inherent in, the entire "green" ideology? THE OPPOSITION BY THE GENUINE MARXIST-LENINISTS First of all, the Marxist-Leninists have combated the "green" anti-worker attacks. And by this I mean the *actual* adherents of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The Chinese communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong of course repudiated what today is known as the "green" or (phoney-) "environmentalist" ideology, when the US imperialists and also the Soviet social- imperialists and other reactionaries startedstepping up their propaganda campaigns for it, in the early/mid-'70s. They published internationally a few articles against it, such as the one I recently reproduced in "UNITE! Info #26en: China,early '76, on nukes etc", on 18.01.97. But the most important and also the most consistent and know- ledgeable counterattack against the whole fleet of anti-industry campaigns in general and their "flagship" the anti-nuclear-energy campaign in particular came precisely in the country where it was most of all needed, in (West) Germany, from the spring of 1977 on. It was delivered by that very small but, at that time, really exellent proletarian revolutionary party which I have already mentioned and quoted many times in my postings so far, the KPD/ML(NEUE EINHEIT). It was because of its genuinely revolutionary character and its real understanding of Marxism that the (then) NE was able to intervene, explain to the masses what was going on and, by the broad support it received in these matters because of this, to a certain extent put a brake on those campaigns of destruction in (West) Germany. Basing myself on the NE:s analysis, I even was able, together with very few others, do do something similar here in Sweden. But eventually, as I've written, that party degenerated (in the late '80s). It still writes against the "green" warfare but, as now in reality a bourgeois party, by no means is combating it as *radically* as it itself, earlier, pointed out was (and is) necessary. What about other forces calling themselves "Marxist" today? What have they done against these massive ultra-reactionary attacks? Nil, zip, absolutely nothing. On the contrary, some of them actually have participated in them or have given them fire support in one way or another. Such is the case, for instance, with your organization, Jacques, the Action Socialiste, Canada. At the very least, this is a serious mistake by that organization. And it cannot but give rise to the suspicion: Is the AS in reality controlled by some ultra-reactionaries of other? The same question must be raised concerning some other organizations too, for similar reasons. This despite the fact that, like "SOCIALISME MAIN- TENANT!", the papers of those organizations on certain points indeed have supported some correct and important things too. In a leaflet in May, 1985, later published in No. 2/1985 of its theoretical organ "NEUE EINHEIT", the KDP/ML(NEUE EINHEIT) correctly wrote, criticizing the so-called "MLPD", which had then recently been launched in Germany by the bourgeoisie and which today is connected with and is being propagandized by the so- called "MIM" ("Maoist Internationalist Movement") in the USA: "Eine Partei, die die 'gr=FCne' Tendenz innerhalb der Gesellschaft nicht radikal angreift, die diesen Trend im Grunde mitmacht, betreibt letzten Endes Verhohnepiepelung und Diskreditierung des Marxismus-Leninismus." (NE 2/85 p. 11) or, in my translation: "A party which does not radically attack the 'green' tendency within society, which after all participates in this trend, engages, when all is said and done, in a mockery and a discrediting of Marxism-Leninism." This was particularly true in Germany at that time. (And at a party conference in Dortmund in April, 1990, I among other things quoted this earlier statement of theirs as part of a criticism of my soon-to-be ex-comrades, of the NE.) In some other countries and at a later time, under the circumstances that much of that knowledge of Marxism that had earlier existed in several countries later came to be lost, newer organizations perhaps to a certain extent may be excused by their in fact knowing so very little about this ideology. But at least their representatives, such as you, comrade Jacques, should be aware of the considerable limitations - if nothing worse - of such organizations and should not speak about Marxism, "Maoism" etc as if they had much knowledge of what the ideology of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong is really about. OPPOSITION BY BOURGEOIS OR NON-MARXIST FORCES Now why do I say that the - undoubtedly bourgeois, undoubtedly also counter-revolutionary - relatively small LaRouche group in the USA does have some positive points, as seen from the standpoint of the proletariat? Because this group actually does combat the "green" tendency within society, and in fact rather radically too. It has made and is making several sharp attacks on, and revealing exposures of, that tendency, on a number of its different fronts or from different aspects of it. This it's doing of course in accordance with its own bourgeois interests, in the interests of a certain part of the bourgeoisie which by no means wants that proletarian revolution that you and I, Jacques, both are saying that we consider to be absolutely necessary, which absolutely wants the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to be upheld and which is not only against the "green" forces but also against the (genuine) Marxists, but which - in contradiction to the "mainstream" bourgeoisie today - still does want industrial, technological and scientific development to continue in practically all respects and not to be strangled. And in this, its interests on certain points do coincide with some vital interests of the workers and the oppressed peoples. It should be added that the LaRouche group is not the only bourgeois group that takes up such a standpoint on industry, technology and science. There are a few other non-Marxist critics of the "green" destructive tendency - some people attacking various mendacious "green" campaigns on the Net, for instance, who have nothing to do with LaRouche's particular ideology at all but who do want people in general to get some technical and scientific facts straight. Getting the main such facts straight, in those fields where one knows or sees reason to suspect that the bourgeois mass media are out to decieve people, today isn't all that easy for the Marxist-Leninists either. The fields in question are often quite large and require at least a certain level of technical- scientific knowledge, if you're to understand approximately what's going on in them. And the genuinely Marxist forces in the world are numerically very weak; they cannot have all that advanced knowledge in a number of fields which they really need - and of course must strive to get. They today don't have such connections to certain experts in various fields which it's possible for even a relatively small bourgeois group to have. The "green" Inquisition, consisting of the main group of bourgeois politicians and of practically all the forces in the mass media in the "developed" countries today, very much fears and hates criticism of itself, since its lies are so blatant. It greatly fears not only the Marxist criticism and exposure of it but also the criticism by such forces as the LaRouche group. And it's obviously at least in part because this group has been relatively consistent in its opposition to that ultra-rightist Inquisition that the latter has tried to pin the designation "fascist" on it. Studying the publications of that group, I have found such a designation to be incorrect. Some of these publications in fact are quite informative, on a number of subjects. The informations in them of course need to be checked on, as do all others too. [Continued in part 2/5] --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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