> First of all, any rhetoric that reinforces racism can only hinder a
> political project of marxism to supersede capitalism. Racism divides the
> working class, and the divided working class with anti-immigrant (and hence
> anti-internationalist) sentiments are _not_ up to the task of getting rid
> of capitalism. Whether you like it or not, thinking in terms of
> 'population,' instead of _the working class_ versus capital, tends to make
> folks unclear about _where the fundamental contradiction lies_.
Marx talks all the time about 'population', 'surplus population', 'production of relative surplus population' etc. It's a category you can't ignore and don't have to. If we don't discuss demography we don't even know what's going on. Sure, class comes into it in all sorts of ways including the one you mention: for example a western middle class professional uses up about 15 times as much of the ecosystem as a middle class professional in India, while a western unskilled worker only uses up 10 times as much natural resources/services as an Indian middle class professional. So class is not just about class but about location: but Harvey's talk of geographies of socila justice systematically elides this world-systemic approach. A western unskilled worker absorbs more of the unpaid labour of peripheral proletarians than often does the bourgeois in those same peripheral states who actually supervises the exploitation of said 3rd world worker. You have to work that into your schemas, surely?
> Secondly, marxists' primary tasks do _not_ include educating all Greens,
> especially _not_ the likes of Lester Brown.
I don't think this IS a primary task of Marxists. And I don't agree with your dismissal of Lester Brown It's important to differentiate between the scientific work people do and their private prejudices. Lester Brown has consistently tried to alert the world to the kind of overarching problems which Harvey is in denial about. If we ought to take Chomsky seriously (and I do) despite his anticommunism, then ditto Brown.
> 'Education' of whatever kind
> would _never_ turn rich anti-immigrant Greens into friends of the working
> class. Waste of time, I say.
Immigration has appeared on their radars because of evdient and growing environmental stress in the US. I do not agree with corralling off people into national 'resevrations': the whole world is an apartheid state in fact, and no world socialism is thinkable which includes frontiers and passports. But I'm sure that David Harvey's redistributional politics are such a weak answer to THIS scale of social injustice that they are simply part of the problem. You have to take on board people's concerns and only then show why anti-immigration politics solve nothing and only exacerbate the problem they seek to solve. There is no point in only educating we already agree with. If people are worried enough about the environment then there is some point of access into their world view. Brown Marxists tend to miss that opportunity when they focus on a workerism
which simply elides the privileges enjoyed by millions of workers in the metropoles.
> Last but not the least, a fear of an 'imminent environmental catastrophe'
> is not likely to turn the working class toward marxism.
What does this mean? That we better shut up, not tell people the ship is holed below the waterline?
> More likely than
> not, such fear makes them look to RELIGION, since it only aggravates the
> sense of helplessness and the prospect for a bleak future that beset many
> working-class people today even without the help of such rhetoric. Good
> marxist propaganda work should strive to make workers _fearless and
> fierce_, not fearful and doomed.
>
It's important to show people that their self-interest lies not in burying heads deeper in the sand but in understanding the scale of the problem and at the same time showing them what needs to be done. I don't think people are quite in despair yet. Mostly they are cruising in a trance state thru the superstores, choosing new barbecues.
Mark