Date: Sun, 22 Feb 1998 18:50:07 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Michael Perelman's comments on Boucher


Boucher's article seemed to be much weaker than I had expected.  He seemed to
be attacking straw men.  What eco-Marxist would take a position that we should
sit back then just deferred to science?  What eco-Marxist would ignore
politics
altogether and stake her or his politics on some future catastrophe?

In a sense, he seemed to be using the same critique of eco-politics that
Russell Jacoby used to attack Kautsky and the politics of the third
international some years back.  In Jacoby's analysis, Kautsky and his group
emphasized crisis theory because they preferred to wait for an economic crisis
rather than to take political action.

His second straw man seemed to be the notion that accepting scientific
analysis
of was tantamount to assuming that political and economic factors do not have
significant effects.  For example, a scientist may inform us that pesticides
are having a harmful affect on our health.  Of course, any sane person would
realize the social and political forces that lie behind the application of the
pesticides.  No sane person would merely accept a purely scientific analysis
and just wait for a catastrophe to unfold.

Louis's comment about David Harvey working with the inner city people in
Baltimore suggests a more serious critique all eco-Marxist.  In fact, if
Harvey
is doing what Lewis said, then he is acting as an eco-Marxist in the best
sense
of the word.

We should be critical of some of the oversight's environmentalists, as David
Harvey suggests, but that hardly constitutes a reason to abandon eco-Marxism.

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 916-898-5321
E-Mail michael-AT-ecst.csuchico.edu






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