Indeed
>"Environmentalism" is not a thing. Roughly 80% of the American public
>has repeatedly identified itself as "environmentalist", so it's obvious
>a very elastic, highly contestable label.
As someone once said, the dominant ideas of the age are those of the dominant class.
But I took cheer from this Christmas tale: Saturday was international no-shopping day, according to the 'Friends of the Earth'. They launched a campaign against Toys, deciding that those happy smiling faces were the real danger to the environment. 'Christmas? Humbug!' Cried FoE and urged parents to refuse to buy christmas presents for their little charges. Thankfully, everybody ignored uncle Scrooge, and went out shopping instead.
>Marx was hostile to productivism, too, you know. All that production
>just to produce the means for further exploitation really rankled.
>"Let's put the CRITICAL back into critical thought."
I know what Marx said. He identified the progressive tendency of capitalism that it developed the forces of production, and further that it generated new, social needs amongst the population (see the Grundrisse).
>
>There are some misanthropes, to be sure. But the bulk of
>environmentalists might better be accused of being too humanist.
It might seem too humanistic to you to want to subordinate mankind to a fetishised concept of Gaia, natural balance or somesuch. But I prefer my humanism anthropocentric.
> All
>that commodity fetishism is severely dehumanizing, while environmental
>concerns break that spell and speak to our full humanity.
On the contrary, environmentalism is the acme of commodity fetishism, as it tends toward the naturalisation of human relations, rendering the contingent limits of capitalist society as absolute, natural limits.
>All Hail The Catholic Church, the Revolutionary Vanguard! Is that what
>you're saying here?
No, that's what you're saying. If I'd said it you could quote me directly.
>
>How's come working class women just can't wait to stop being baby
>factories, especially once the underlying economic logic disappears, as
>it has worldwide over the past 200 years?
You choose to misconstrue me. I'm entirely in favour of abortion and reproduction rights. What I resist is the promotion of population control as public policy. This has been a key component of America's writ in the third world since National State Security Memo 200.
>> working class mobility (too many cars!),
>
>Surely you jest! Here in LA, the red-green leading edge is the
>Busriders Union. The buses are far more eco-friendly AND
>worker-friendly than cars OR rail, the bourgoise environmental option.
In Britain the bourgeois option was to welcome green demands for a moratorium on road-building, a budget saving of several billion pounds a year. Needless to say, the subsequent congestion is a spectacular waste of their lives for most working people.
>
>> working class consumption (fast food is cutting down the rain forest),
>
>Fast food is cutting down the working class. See the McLibel
>information on McDonald's nutritional house of horrors. Next you'll be
>telling us that I.F. Stone was a reactionary, because his pathbreaking
>work on the deadly nature of tobacco was intended to overburden the
>working class with tobacco taxes.
You miss the point. If the working masses rose up as one to demand health food, the green snobs would quickly find a reason to denounce that, too. It's not the burger they hate, its the burger eater.
>I've never heard any environmentalist complain about the Chinese getting
>fridges.
I'm surprised. The hysteria about how much freon gas it would take to fill the potential fridges of China was a standard routine in FoE talks here. See Lester Young Who Will Feed China? Earthscan, for a more general, environmentally inspired Sinophobia.
> The worry is that the Chinese government committed to a real
>dinosaur technology that will hurt the Chinese people as well as the
>environment by needlessly gobbling up resources.
Dionsaur technology is what they have now, but are getting rid of. Too slowly.
>God forbid that folks in America should learn about
>and respect the Ogoni people, or any of the other scorse of tribal
>people around the world .
You make a virtue out of the very conditions that most people are trying to get away from. But all you are really doing is ogling pictures in National Geographic, or day-dreaming about how great it would be to shed the cares of the workaday world for some Gauginesque paradise. Romanticism is a luxury of industrial societies, as is 'learning about other peoples'. Tradition isn't "authentic" when you are a part of it - just oppressive. If you meant it, there is no barrier holding you back from shedding the burdens of civilisation. Don't tell me about it. Do it. -- Jim heartfield