Re: [Marxism] Cynthia McKinney Supports Reconstruction Party

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Picón Álvarez wrote:
> 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.

Okay, it sounds like you are talking about Deep Ecology. The Green Party 
in the USA has very little to do with this trend, which is generally 
connected with the anarchist movement. Within the Greens, the emphasis 
is mostly on "appropriate technology", like windmills, etc. As I tried 
to explain to David Walters, I don't think it is very productive to 
figure out which form of energy will do the least amount of damage under 
capitalism. Electing Greens in the USA will most certainly not result in 
people being forced out of the cities in the style of the Khmer Rouge. 
The most likely impact is a crisis of the 2-party system. That is why a 
virtual lynch mob formed around Nader in 2004.

> 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.

To be sure. But the main danger to the planet is rapacious capitalist 
development, not middle-class utopianism of the sort that you are 
referring to.

> 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.

People decided to protest nuclear power plants not because they had been 
reading about Gaia, but because Three Mile Island and Chernobyl 
frightened them half to death.




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