File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 321


Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 11:33:55 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: For progress


James Heartfield wrote:

>Rename the list, I say. Call it Environmental parochialism if that is
>what it is. But don't denigrate the name of Marxism with this derivative
>crap scraped from the bottom of Greenpeace's barrel.

and

>Memory, consciousness and human purpose are indispensable compnents of
>the dialectic. Nature is a moment of the interaction between man and
>nature, but man is the dominant moment.

James, you're a very smart, knowledgeable fellow, but what you say on this
issue is pure nonsense. First of all, you seem incapable of acknowledging a
whole school of writers - some explicitly Marxian, some not - who reject
both the corporate environmentalism of the bourgeoisie (like the NRDC, EDF,
NWF, etc.) and the gooey environmentalism of the New Age Gaians. This
red-green school knows its science, understands class politics, and rejects
the Malthusianism of Rockefeller environmentalism and the neo-primitivism
of Dave Foreman. This school also knows what you seem incapable of
understanding - it's not a matter of preference. It's a scientific fact
that if we continue in the present fashion we will kill ourselves. You can
say "man is the dominant moment" all you like, but that will not stop
fisheries from depleting, air from browning, species disappearing, or
oceans from rising. Read the "Apocalyptics" chapter from Tom Athansiou's
Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, and tell me where it's wrong.
Tom is no Luddite - he works for Sun, and has a SPARCStation as his home
computer - and frequently says that "greens can't be anti-science; green
science has to be the best science." And, as you can see from the subtitle,
his politics and his environmentalism are rooted in class. You & your
comrades are lost in dreams about the heroism of the 19th century
bourgeoisie; meanwhile, it's almost the 21st century, and we're choking on
the waste products of our productive forces. Be historical, man.

Doug




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