Re: Rain

[Brian James <hillbily@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote

>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.

Fascism was a mass movement as well. Still is in Germany.
Europe is just more extreme across the board.

The German Greens emerged as part of the mass movement against the
nuclear juggernaut that threatened to destroy us all in the '70s. What
they represent as a political party is something else altogether: the
usual mix of eco-centric, anti humanist, anti-enlightment, anti-marxist
rubbish that characterizes the mainstream environmental movement. To
call Western Europe more "enlightened" due to its Green Parties is a
contradiction in terms. Germany still struggles with a large fascist
movement, while the Social Democrat-Green government makes shameful
concessions to it over immigration policy. The German Green Party itself
had to purge several of its founders in the early '80s for expressing
fascist ("eco-fascist") views. Now they're pro-NATO imperialists.

Another layer of the ruling class that's not being examined here is the
powerful class of rentier capitalists: descendants of European
monarchies, wealthy landlords, rich family dynasties, who clearly have
an interest in slow economic growth. They contribute heavily to the
environmental movement. It is largely their creation.