Re: [Marxism] Cynthia McKinney Supports Reconstruction Party

[David Picón Álvarez <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> Green itself is not exactly that specific a concept. I am for
> ecosocialism, while Al Gore is committed to capitalist development with
> some environmental window-dressing. Are we both Green? Some would say
> yes, but that doesn't really say very much.

The Greens that concern me are not those who want to inject a certain amount 
of care for the environment into their policies. After all, as your own 
quotation from Engels shows, we are a part of nature, and n-order effects 
are very difficult to calculate when dealing with complex systems. What 
concerns me is the tendency to subordinate all aspects of policy towards the 
conservation of the so-called natural world (cities are natural, we make 
them after all) accompanied by some form of nature-worship and a 
quasi-religious puritanical sense that intelligence, artifice, is evil and 
must be minimized and hindered, lest it destroys the transcendent beauty and 
harmony of the "natural" processes. Part of my point is that artificial is a 
subset, not an opposite, of natural. As a matter of fact, much of Green 
sentiment is to be found in urban independent professionals who rarely have 
a realistic idea of what untamed nature means. The fact that Greens often 
make use of blatant emotional language doesn't make me like them any better, 
either.

I am sorry that I cannot make a better analysis of the Green phenomenon as I 
see it. In particular, there seem to be several weird currents in the Green 
movement that might be mystical in nature, which is why environmental 
positions on things like nuclear power seem so stiff and unyielding as 
fundamentalist explanations of the creation of Earth.

--David.

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