But when you look at Green politics, much of it has a great deal with the Red project - as the working class pays the most of the costs of industrial externalities. For yuppies, it is a matter of choice between farm raised and organic salmon, but the working class has no choice whether they are poisoned or not (cf. the Bhopal disaster.)
The reactionary elements of Greens are due, in a large part, to the fact that Reds simply shunned them, leaving the ground open for pseudo-hippie shysters like John Mackey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mackey_(businessman). The red effort to take over the Green movement was limited to fringes of the academia (e.g. ecological Marxism http://home.ca.inter.net/~greenweb/Ecological_Marxism.html). I think that the root cause of this animosity is cultural identity - blue collar working class feels uncomfortable with the "bourgeois" or "yuppie" cultural image of Greens, while many lefties are attracted to the "blue collar" cultural image rather than actual politics.
Wojtek
On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:58 PM, Somebody Somebody
<philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Bhaskar: I thought they were just a run of the mill petit-bourgeois formation running to the right of the WP.
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> Somebody: I find it noteworthy how often Green parties outpace traditional social democratic parties in moving to the right.
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> Marina Silva's mixture of anti-hydroelectric and nuclear power, anti-GM crops technophobia and Pentecostal Christianity has precious little in common with progressive politics. And Silva's running mate is a cosmetics tycoon and billionaire, one of the richest men in the country. But, hey, he does care about the Amazon rainforest.
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> 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.
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