> It is looking as if the right-wingers inside the German Greens are now
> celebrating their war victory. A group of influential members is calling for
> a break with the old left programme. I dont know whether this comes as a
> surprise to list members, but to me it look as if a lot of North Americans
> are still having illusions about the character of the Greens.
While the 'break to liberalism' of the German Greens is not a surprise, I still think that the emergence of the Greens poses a challenge to people who critique them from a more clearly defined Marxist stance against capitalism. While Jim O'Connor's collaboration, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism seems to produce good work (I've only read the stuff published for free on their WWW site, never having had enough money to subscribe), an important popular form of anti-capitalism evident today (as in the trashing of the City of London, the anti-McDonalds campaign, etc) seems to borrow heavily from Green-oriented (e.g. deep ecological) thought.
Of course, some socialists write this off as a 'mere result of fuzzy thinking', or a result of the social roots of the protestors. Yet this seems to me to be poor method - a better approach would be a *popular oriented* form of argument which could tap into the concerns that led to the birth of the Green movement without becoming mired in the proverbial swamp.
Peter
PS. I started off in Green politics in South Africa, and would argue that the particular linkage of environmental goals with social goals which occurs in the Green tradition is a result of liberal environmentalism linking itself to a broad movement for mass change. In a situation where mass struggle has made far-reaching changes seem possible, widening one's scope to broader issues of capitalist destruction of the ecosystem seems possible. Having widened one's area of concern to 'the whole system', however, one needs an adaquate analysis of the system - which is why I became a Marxist. -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk 'The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.' - Karl Marx