Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Is David Harvey a "brown Marxist"? I understand that he has been involved
> in and thinks highly of environmental justice movements.
That surely is what makes him a 'brown' marxist, ie, a marxist who is not interested in the question which interested Marx, namely the nature of capitalism and the preconditions for its overthrow. Harvey is interested in polishing its image, smoothing its rough edges and 'improving the lot of the people in the here and now', a possibly well-meaning tactic, or possibly the pious expressions of someone who has too big a stake in the here-and-now to want to do anything else with it. At all events, those pious hopes have never actually done a damn thing to improve anyone's lot, even tho they generate plenty of crocodile tears and the chance to be gratuitously condemnatory of revolutionaries.
> What Harvey is
> trying to do, I think, is first of all to point out the fact that there are
> Greens and there are Greens, and secondly to remind us that some--but not
> all--environmentalist rhetoric derives from and reinforces reactionary
> ideologies, which can lead some--but not all--Greens to embrace reactionary
> political positions. I think that the sort of ideological critique that
> Harvey brings to environmentalism is highly necessary.
On the contrary, what Harvey does is lump all Greens together in effect, and he does this because he is deeply cynical of their more important claims. Harvey never in his voluminous writing actually addresses the real issues of climate change, resource depletion and loss of biodiversity. If he did, he would be obliged to abandon his own positions, because they make no sense. You cannot have environmental justice on a dead planet, can you?
> Marxism without environmentalism is a
> problem, but for now, it seems to me that environmentalism without
> marxism--that is, without a political project to replace capitalism with a
> just social order--is a bigger problem.
Who could disagree with that? Except, apparently, David Harvey, who has no such project in view and who is not interested in greening Marxism, but in dumping on the Greens. But you are right: if we DON'T make a red-green synthesis then the Greens will never coalesce social movements capable of overthrowing capitalism. Therefore the question of the red-green synthesis is not soem optional extra, it is the single most important, decisive issue in marxism today, and therefore it is also a prfoudnly important historical issue, too. Mark