>The fundamental mistake that the "brown" Marxists Frank Furedi and David
>Harvey make is in assuming that the Nazi party introduced nature worship
>into German society.
Really? In Louis' own posting he quotes Frank Furedi as saying
> it's not surprising that when you look at the more
>xenophobic right-wing movements in Europe in the 19th century,
....
> it quite often had a very strong environmentalist dynamic
>to it.
Clearly Louis is wrong to say that Furedi fails to understand that
> Nature worship in Germany goes back to the origins of
>modern romanticism.
Karl Marx also was well aware of the influence of nature worship in Germany. This is what he had to say about it:
'We see that this cult of nature is limited to Sunday walks of an inhabitant of a small provincial town who childishly wonders at the cukoo laying its eggs in another bird's nest, at tears being designed to keep the surface of the eyes moist, and so on. There is no question, of course of modern sciences, which, with modern industry, have revolutionised the whole of nature and put an end to man's childish attitude to nature as well as to other forms of childishness ... For the rest it would be desirable that Bavaria's sluggish peasant economy, the ground on which priests and Daumers likewise grow, should at last be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines.'
Karl Marx (Quoted in Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of nature in Marx, p 131-3)
Louis writes
>It is important to understand that the feeling of loss that the industrial
>revolution brought on was very widespread throughout Europe and was not
>peculiar to Germany. Thomas Carlyle articulated this feeling of loss and
>the pre-Raphaelite school was a movement based on such a desire to return
>to pre-industrial roots.
Marx was also aware of this influence in the labour movement, too. He wrote of it extensively as 'feudal socialism' in the Communist Manifesto:
'so little do they conceal the rectionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the order of the old society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.'
(Peking Ed. p63)
So when
>The Nazis promoted the view that the
>class-struggle in the city could be overcome by returning to the villages
>and developing artisan and agricultural economies based on cooperation.
>Ayrans needed to get back to the soil and simple life
That was an idea that Marxist were already used to arguing against.
Louis goes on to say that the Nazis introduced heavy industry, in defiance of this environmental motif in their politics. I don't know who it he thinks that ever doubted that the Nazi regime was dependent on heavy industry.
The point argued by Harvey and Furedi about the Nazis is not that they observed an environmental policy in practice, but that the cult of nature was an important component of their ideology. Who could disagree?
In message <3555EB8C.E7878CB2 at sprintmail.com>, "Gar W. Lipow"
<lipowg at sprintmail.com> writes
>I thank you for your article -- especially your exploding the nonsensical
>linking
>of environmentalism with nazism.
But Louis has not 'exploded' the linking of environmentalism with Nazism. He attributes a position to them which neither of the people he cites holds, ie that the Nazis were the *first* nature cult, and then demonstrates - lo and behold - that it is not so.
Louis' contention that
>The first radical environmentalists in charge of a state were actually the
>Soviet Communists.
seems less plausible. All wings of the early soviet communists favoured rapid growth. The decree Louis cites
>The Communist Party issued a decree "On Land" in 1918. It declared all
>forests, waters, and minerals to be the property of the state, a
>prerequisite to rational use.
Only implies that they wanted to use natural resources consciously, and in a planned way, not that they wanted to hold back from the use of these resources.
This quote from Trotsky is a fair indication of the attitude of the early soviet regime to the question of technology, and its relation to Marxism:
'Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist programme upon the dynamics of the productive forces. If you conceive that some cosmic catastrophe is going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist perspective along with much else. Except for this as yet problematic danger, however, there is not the slightest scientific ground for setting any limit in advance to our technical productive and cultural possibilities. Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress.'
>Harvey's attempt to drive a wedge between the greens and Marxism is tied to
>a workerish impulse that has marked the extreme left over the past 25
>years.
And here was me thinking that the 'workerish' impulse in Marxism dated
back to the 1840s. Louis gives himself away when he writes
> This is not Marxism. It is sectarianism and must be fought.
In other words, Louis finds Marx's inveterate productivism a barrier to the enviromental politics that he wants to support.
But is this quixotic task of trying to reinvent Marx as an environmentalist necessary? If Louis wants to get stuck into green politics nothing is holding him back. Why is it necessary to fight over the heritage of Marxism? Surely the case for environmentalism does not rest on the endorsement of the late Karl Marx. -- Jim heartfield