[lbo-talk] Green Left success in Brazilian election

[Alan Rudy]

Yeah, thanks Mike for helping me distill/clarify my reaction to Somebody's
argument.
The position SS took was essentialist in that it was predicated on a
naturalization of green politics as fundamentally conservative, or at least
as fundamentally conservative relative to labor/left politics.
This is clearly historically and materially wrong.  There is no essence to
Green politics and for proof all you have to do is look at debates between
the anarchist and socialist strands of fundi Greens in Germany and their
liberal realo counterparts.  Furthermore, what indigenous political ecology
movements across the global South and North American environmental justice
movements have done is not only to meld class and environmental analysis
(not ecological analyses, environmental ones concerned built and workplace
environments rather than the romantic wilderness terrain) but to generate
revisionist accounts of the environmental components of historically left
politics and the unearthing of working class elements in the environmental
movement.  In short, environmentalism is not encompassed or even defined by
the actions and politics of The Nature Conservancy, The Wilderness Society
and the Natural Resource Defense Council (much less by the way the World
Bank and its associated astroturf NGOs operationalize sustainability).
What you can clearly say about environmental politics is that, like all
politics, it is fundamentally variable, contingent and dynamic.  Somebody's
position is one that is predisposed to forego potentially robust left
coalitions, which strikes me as rather contradictory.

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au>wrote:


> Somebody wrote:
> The rise of environmentalism has done zero for the left, internationally.
> Maybe because the issue has nothing inherently to do with the traditional
> left-wing project of class revolt, social welfare, and development of the
> productive forces. With all due respect to the Partido Verde, Brazil is
> still a middle-income country, and needs to balance protecting biodiversity
> (which is important, but not as important as infant mortality or literacy)
> with developing industry. Funny enough, all socialist countries know this
> well, being even more pro-industry than petty bourgeois regimes like Lula's.
> *************************************
>
> Not so in Australia.  The Greens here are left of the Labor Party and many
> of the more militant unionists support them over Labor.
>
> Mike B)
>
> ***********************************************************************
>
> "Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour,
> so soon as it assumes the form of commodities?  Clearly from this form
> itself."
>
> http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319