Euro Greens & the Third Way (was Re: Rain)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou:

>The initial impetus was obviously a result of the collapse of Soviet aid.
>But in the interim genuine ecosocialist modes of thinking have developed in
>Cuba.

There is nothing wrong with ecosocialist modes of thinking, organic
agriculture, urban gardening, etc. in Cuba, but it seems undeniable
that Cuba also badly needs oil (hence Hugo Chavez's friendship with
Fidel & Cuba is tremendously good news), among many other things
(like painkillers).  Not even the most ecologically-minded Cuban
loves blackouts....

>  >The question is: why is there less resistance to environmental
>  >issues in some countries than in others? Why are Green parties more
>>successful in Europe than in America? Is it because Europeans are more
>>enlightened or is there economic self-interest at the root of it?
>
>For the same reason Western Europe is generally more enlightened across the
>board. There are powerful left parties that have been challenging the
>bourgeoisie since the 1920s. European workers get 5 weeks vacation a year.
>There is public health. So on and so forth. Being opposed to poisoned
>rivers is not tail-ending the bourgeoisie, my dear chap. Europeans have a
>much more powerful environmental movement for that matter. The German
>Greens arose out of a mass movement.

Didn't Euro Green movements -- as well as social democratic parties,
be they parties of the Socialist International or Eurocommunist
varieties -- emerge out of back-to-back dismissal of bosses &
organized labor; the capitalist West (esp. America) & the socialist
East (esp. the Soviet Union); etc.?  Weren't they the original Third
Way, avant la lettre?  The Euro Greens were a progressive force while
they were pacifists & in opposition to American deployment of nuclear
weapons in Western Europe, etc.  That was then.  Now, the German
Green Party is mainly a party of humanitarian imperialism & Green
scissors of neoliberalism that cuts waste from the old welfare state.

*****   ...Referring to the Finance Ministry's imminent move from
Bonn to a Berlin building that was once the Nazi-era Air Ministry of
Herman Goering, Werner Schulz of the environmentalist Green Party
said: "Of course the Reichstag's name should be changed.  Who would
call the new Finance Ministry the Reichluftfaehrtministerium?"

Who indeed?  But "Reichstag" appears likely to stick, as it has
through an extraordinary history.  This has included being a center
of war propaganda during World War I, the Parliament of the Weimar
Republic and the site of a Nazi exhibition in 1938 on "The Eternal
Jew."...   <http://codoh.com/newsdesk/9903062.html>   *****

1999 was a fateful year for the German Green Party.  Installed in the
Reichstag, it guilt-tripped liberal & leftist Germans into shedding
its guilt-induced pacifism.  (Goldhagen's _Hitler's Willing
Executioners_ had become a bestseller in Germany by then -- ironic,
no?)

What can we do to prevent the same initiative from emerging out of
American Greens?

It appears that the path toward ecosocialism & red-green synthesis is
more difficult & torturous than ever....

Yoshie