Re: Ecology

[Russell Grinker <grinker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
Should we view trade unionism and environmentalism as the enemy?

Who ever mentioned trade unionism or suggested opposing it?  As for
environmentalism, some of my best friends...    As I argued previously, the
politics currently dominant in the south use the language of
environmentalism to urge acceptance of lower levels of consumption and
services on the basis of "sustainability".  Rather than endlessly repeat
your now standard anti-LM mantra, why not take a look at material produced
by any of the many NGOs and donor agencies (including the World Bank) who
currently dominate development thinking and practice in Africa?
Environmentalism and sustainable development are the MAINSTREAM positions
these days.

>When you create a dichotomy of "growth" versus "anti-growth," you are
>accepting an economic agenda which is framed by the Wall Street Journal on
>one side and the Sierra Club on the other.

This is just another way of saying that bourgeois ideas are dominant. Given
the current political balance of forces, to the average punter your position
must look pretty much like that of the Sierra Club or worse. "Social
ownership of the means of production and scientific planning in pursuit of
the common good" are all very well but meaningless to just about everyone
outside a few left wing lists. And no doubt in your eyes I look like part of
the WSJ camp.  So we both face the problem of building a new relevant and
distinctive left politics. What's new?

Given the current balance of forces and relative invisibility of the left, I
think your "third way" is either utopian, or worse still, runs
the risk of falling into the mainstream Western development camp which these
days happily uses all your environmental language.  Out here I have no
problem arguing against the "sustainable development" camp.  This kind of
ideology, peddled by NGOs and a petit bourgeois political leadership, has an
insidious and corrosive influence on collective struggles for survival and
development.  On the other hand, few ordinary people have any illusions in
big business and there is little danger of us getting "too much"
development.  We need the roads, power networks, modern industry and
agriculture.  Yes this will all be on free market terms and have all its
problems.  So do we repudiate it because any prospect of significant social
change and thus development not wholly on "our" terms is not feasible in the
immediate future?  I don't think so.  Surely we need to be for "development"
but ready to struggle for the best deal we can get.  At the same time we
have to shape a new politics which can eventually take us beyond an
accumulation of reforms.

It's fine for people in the developed world to preach about the sustainable
alternative.  Unfortunately, most people here are already living with it -
if you can call it living.

Russell