-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Like the
>bourgeois apologists of old, they seek to justify the limits that are
>artificially imposed upon working class consumption by capitalism, as if
>it were a natural limitation, that will necessarily lead to disaster.
-So, James, you're not the least bit worried that a chunk of ice the size of -Delaware recently broke off the polar icecap? That storms seem to be -getting more frequent, destructive, and unpredictable? Just the fantasies -of Malthusian misanthropes?
Anybody with a brain is worried about the environment. Every poll shows that super-majorities in the population support more regulation and higher taxes if the purpose is to benefit the environment (and they also agree knee-jerk that industry is under regulated in terms of the environment).
So Red, Green, Moderate: all but the insane Right and corporate self-interested have a consensus on worry over the environment.
The issue is the philosphic response to that worry and the motivation entailed by actions in response. Jim overgeneralizes in his attack on "Greens" but there is unquestionably a section of the Green movement that is fundamentally anti-working class and misanthropic. I used to be a supervisor at the telephone fundraising operation that called many enviro group members. And many of those groups (and even more so many of their members) think the solution to environmental degredation is to just remove people from the premises- whether shutting down factories or kicking farmers out of third world rain forests.
Contra Jim, however, there is a strong strain of humanist environmentalism quite compatible with socialist views (although not synonymous with it). The Sierra Club leadership led a relatively heroic struggle recently against an anti-immigrant/largely misanthropic minority in recent internal ballot measures around defining immigrats as themselves an environmental problem. The environmental justice movement has a quite elaborate theoretical and political balancing of economic needs with environmental needs.
Right now the most interesting red-green clash emerging is over the Kyoto global warming treaty, with large parts of the union movement quietly (or not so quietly in the case of the United Mine Workers) mobilizing against it. The Kyoto Treaty is a clasic elite Green treaty-- clear "limits of growth" on overall consumption allocated by country with absolutely no reference to increasing the equity of consumption within each country. The implied and expected result will be more limits on the economic aspirations of the poor and working class with little demanded of the elite.
Which points to where Greens and Reds can collaborate. It is precisely an integration of environmental demands with demands for economic equity that can accomplish environmental goals of cutting back overall consumption. The working class has plenty of interest in the environment and will support environmental goals in such an equitable solution. But in an elite-led "limits of growth" approach, Green leaders will find themselves battling unions and a range of working class communities.
--Nathan Newman