Re: Re: Re: My looniness

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol:
>(and rightly so) has incorporated environmental concers into its program. The
>second point in a way is even bigger. The particular action you cite fits
David
>Harvey's picture of environmental action, and David Harvey is categorized by
>Lou as a "Brown Marxist." I doubt that the protestors would have taken time
>out from more important business (political or personal) to leaflet on Wabash
>Ave. not about the local dump but on the dangers of Detroit drowning in
>Lake Erie 50 years from now.

You totally misunderstand the issues, although I am glad that you are
finally defining yourself with more clarity. I always suspected that
beneath the barrage of personal insults that you direct against Mark and I
there lurks a strong sympathy for Harvey's ideas, at least as you've
gleaned them from email exchanges.

Yes, one can be a "brown Marxist" and still be against environmental
racism. In point of fact, the missing dimension in Harvey's thought is
ecology itself. To take a stand against toxic dumps without considering the
overall political economy which is driving their location in poor
neighborhoods serves Marxism poorly.

Marxists must think globally and in epochal terms. We do not pooh-pooh the
problem of disappearing old-growth forests because it is not of immediate
concern to black people, nor do we stop raising our voices about species
extinction because middle-class people care more about the Panda or the
Grizzly Bear. Those kinds of animals belong to all humanity and their
disappearance would be as much of an assault on our true civilized values
as if somebody went into the Metropolitan Museum and set fire to all the
French Impressionist canvases.

Harvey's problem is that he is an isolated, petty-bourgeois left professor
like most of the denizens of PEN-L and wants desperately to connect with
the underclass, in his case black Baltimoreans. He went into a saloon on
Earth Day and all the black folks were muttering about how little it meant
to them. So he decided to accomodate to their lack of understanding and
wrote a book defending this kind of parochialism using Leibnizian
philosophy. That's the long and the short of it.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/