> Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> > Tell me why a lot of the politics of long-run
> > ecological catastrophe, indigenous peoples,
> > race/gender/sexual orientation discrimination
> > doesn't reduce to class-indifferent solutions
> > (if not worse)
>
> I'm not sure what class-indifferent solutions mean, but if it means
> 'technical' then I don't see that there are any technical solutions to
I mean fixing a problem at disproportionate or unnecessary expense of the working class. Like carbon taxes unmitigated by distributional concerns and offsetting devices.
> global warming or surplus-population because they are results of
> capitalist irrationality, misapplication of resources, over-accumulation
> of the wrong things and underaccumulation of things necessary for humans
> to live well. People do mobilise against the general threat to the
> enviornment I think as people mobilized against fascism in the 1930s,
A question is whether said mobilization, which may not have been sufficiently great to get us into WWII without a Pearl Harbor, was driven by a labor movement that was founded upon more fundamental issues like food, clothing, and shelter.
There is no mobilization against the environment when a Dem president and Congress cannot pass a pissant BTU tax.
> without necessarily understanding exactly WHY it was a threat, but
> knowing it was anyway. Huge numbers of Americans are members of one or
> another Green organisation. But the Greens surely won't get very far
> without a different kind of politics. Long-run ecological catastrophe is
> actually with us now; it's happening, the left has an important and
> exclusive role to play and ought to play it.
My reference to long-run was founded on the difficulty of connecting what you say will happen by 2075 (or whenever) if we don't do such-and-such with what is happening right now, in front of peoples' eyes. If it wasn't difficult, you'd be in charge.
>
> >or screaming into the wind.
> > Being morally righteous and politically
> > ineffectual. (Been there, done that.)
> >
> > If I thought it worked, I'd go for it, believe
> > me. At the very least, it would be better for
> > my career.
>
> Green politics are often more militant than anything the left gets up
> to, but they embrace a huge swathe of opinion and middle class people
> with de luxe lives are often involved just because they have more to
> lose. But there has surely to be a red-green synthesis.
They have less pressing day-to-day problems.
It's not synthesis that is in question, in my mind, but sequence. Red comes first. You can't scramble production and jobs unless people have adequate economic security systems to smile through such changes.
MBS