>By Daryl Lindsey
>Just after he finishes a taping for MTV, I approach Mike Roselle,
>founder of the Berkeley, Calif., Ruckus Society and co-founder of
>Earth First and Rainforest Action Network ... He continues, "Now,
>there's a certain number of the [labor] rank and file that are very
concerned >about this. They know that they've got to retool U.S. industry to
make it >competitive and they know that part of
>that competitiveness will be in how clean and how sustainable they
>are. They're actually looking to us for answers.
Yoshie responded:
"Competitiveness," I think, shouldn't be part of our concern. As soon as we accept the necessity for "competitiveness," our demands will be very circumscribed indeed.
I now write:
Before I slam the remarks of this guy Roselle, let me add the disclaimer: I haven't been organizing (just writing my diss and teaching working-class/ lower middle-class undergrads), I haven't made treks to Seattle/Washington DC, and I haven't been manning the barricades. I'm in no moral position to diss anyone's activism. Nor do I know anything about Roselle other than what I saw attributed to him above. That said ...
What the fuck is this guy thinking ? Premising a labor-radical green alliance on eco-friendly "competitiveness" ? You mean the same principle used to justify the speed-ups and lay-offs which have maimed timber workers and decimated working-class logging communities and created the conditions whereby it's easy for corporate front groups to pit workers against radical enviros ? Usually loaded accusations against Earth First as being "misanthropic" are starting to make sense to me ! And what is an Earth Firster doing defending notions of "sustainable capitalist development" -- i.e. industry using less energy/raw materials and producing less waste as being good for accumulation (what he calls "efficiency") ? And this guy is a founder of the Ruckus Society ? Are his A16 demonstrators going to lead usher us into a wonderful new world where U.S. industry is at one and the same time eco-friendly and outcompeting Germany and Japan (U.S. ingenuity and the careful stewarding of our resources triumphs over the Huns and Japs again, like the National Resources Planning Board and WW II) ?
John Gulick
P.S. This may sound really Frankfurtian and fuddy-duddy, but I really don't see the virtue of A16 activists doing interviews w/MTV. It's one thing to get your message out to the masses via mainstream media, it's entirely another to do it via MTV, one of the vanguard vehicles of late capitalist propaganda. Movement leaders instantly become venerated as hip rock stars, and any kind of substantive message immediately degenerates into content-less fashionable cut-and-paste pablum (rock the vote, dude -- here's a thumb in the eye of the establishment, let's drink Mountain Dew and cast our ballot for Jesse Ventura).