From: jurriaan bendien <Jbendien-AT-globalxs.nl>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: questions
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 18:55:42 +0100


Mr Proyect writes:

> The real problem for the bourgeoisie is the rather massive environmental
> movement that fights against nuclear power-plants, for survival of the
> Yanomami indians, clean air and water, etc. This gets in the way of
> profits, much more than the drooling sectarian trying to hawk their
> Bolshevique newspapers.

	Frankly I'm getting a bit bored and annoyed by Proyect's witch-hunting
diatribes appearing on the screen. Isn't it high time that Mr Proyect took
a more nuanced, critical view of the environmentalist movement ? 
Certainly, many environmentalists are sincere in their opposition to
deleterious manifestations of capitalism.  But they haven't
got a clear conception about what capitalism or imperialism is, nor a
coherent project to get rid of it.  So after building an environmentally
friendly motor-car (as Greenpeace people did) they end up wondering why the
car industry won't take it into production (it seems to them a "plot", a
"collusion of interests", but there is no systematic or structural analysis
behind it).
	The lack of a deeper and profound analysis of capitalist social relations
result in political policies and schemes which are often mutually
contradictory. Indeed often it would appear that the Greens operate very
pragmatically and eclectically to oppose certain "symptoms" of capitalist
mismanagement of resources, seeking to persuade the captains of industry of
a different "scale of values", and some of those values are, as LM has
shown, highly questionable indeed.  Isn't it also true that people like
Rudolf Bahro, whom Proyect quotes, concluded that really the Greens in
Germany had mostly "sold out" in the sense of being co-opted or assimilated
by the system through a variety of reformist bureaucracies ?  
> 
> The problem is that the Marxist left wrote the green movement off as
> "petit-bourgeois" back in the 70s and thus the movement was bereft of a
> Marxist pole. 

	There may be an element of truth in this, insofar as the greens, lacking a
serious class analysis, often vacillate between a capitalist perspective
and a working class perspective. The environmental issue by itself turns
out
not to be a sound basis to build a movement on - it's as simple as that.
Organisationally they flip from ultra-democracy to extreme centralism, from
completely "alternative"
modes of organisation to conventional bourgeois management practices. 
Their social base is essentially among the educated middle classes,
sections of the bourgeoisie and marginalised people, and not among the
working
classes.  
	But, more substantively, (1) the "zero-growth" society the Greens
advocated
in the 1970s was in fact realised in many countries with the onset of the
long recession (New Zealand where I lived being a case in point) and people
became more concerned with unemployment, and (2) the Greens tend to engage
mostly in reformist projects "within the system", which may at times be
progressive, but have their limits like any reformist project and
frequently do not challenge the status quo at all.  And at times the Greens
do indeed seem to become reactionary in their views (getting back to the
Narmada dam and conceptions about "progressive alternative technology"
which isn't really "progressive" etc.). They become prophets of doom
playing
on people's anxieties about the future, limiting the horizons of what's
possible.
	I think there exist a variety of "Marxist poles" these days (the
expression itself seems rather "phallic" to me) and e.g. revolutionary
organisations like
the Fourth International have devoted considerable attention to
environmental questions, making them part of their political orientation.  
	The key to the whole debate is that problem of environmental despoilation
cannot be seriously tackled in isolation of (1) a broader and coherent
political
perspective on the capitalist mode of production as such, (2) a clear
perspective on which social forces (which groups, strata and classes) in
society can be the agency of progressive change, and (3) an organisational
approach which genuinely counters the capitalist norms.  As those
perspectives are either lacking or inadequate among the Greens, the
movement tends to get re-absorbed into reformism and "political
correct" attitudes all the time.  
	No Marxist today can deny that environmental despoilation is a real
problem, and I don't think the RCP doesn't either. The question is only one
of how you go about tackling that.  What is our order of priorities here ?
Can capitalism go green ? Is that the question ? So long as the Greens lack
an intellectually coherent political approach, they continually stand in
danger of becoming part of the problem rather than of the solution.
	One of the problems which all radical groups face today is that they have
rather small forces while the social problems are huge and complex. The
intellectual, political and organisational disaster of Stalinism created
all sorts of "single-issue" movements and far-reaching political
fragmentation which no organisation really has been able to overcome.
Whereas we do need a coherent total perspective, tactically speaking it
isn't in real life possible to tackle all issues adequately at once, or do
them justice at the same time.  
	Political policy must in real life be geared to attracting particularly
categories of people, and the issues taken up must be those that fit in
with a thought-out political project.  The problem with the Greens, apart
from their social base, seems to be that mostly they don't have a
thought-out political project and try tackle a whole bundle of issues at
once which don't have any real coherence or strategy to them, a sort of
"activist reformism".  And that is why, insofar as the Greens haven't opted
for conventional management practices and conventional parliamentarism,
their groups and organisations are often riddled with contradictions,
fly-by-night, or collapse soon after they are built. They are most
successful in single-issue campaigns catering to the lowest popular
denominator, but precisely these campaigns have proved the most susceptible
to co-optation.   

Cheers

Jurriaan.
 


     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---