Re: Back to the 21st Century,was Re:...Vulnerable Planet...

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> I have not seen much new coming out of this thread for a while.  Maybe I
> am missing something, but if not, maybe we should move on.

The post from which this subject line derives was written casually, even
flippantly, but it did quite seriously try to introduce something new --
a suggestion that we remember that we live in the 21st century, not the
25th or the 15th bce, and that our perspective had to be the present as
history (an old MR slogan). And if we look back on the present from the
future, the relevant future for the present discussion is that long
period of destruction, death squads, state terror, broken strikes,
riots, burning cities, fixed elections, steady deterioration of the
environment, crushing of revolutions, revolutions that go bad after
preliminary success. There fore when you go on to say:
>
> [clip]
>
> Working out an environmentally sustainable system of production is bound
> to be a wrentching process.  Not doing anything is also destructive --
> since we are doing terrible damage to the environment on which we depend.

Your second sentence is terribly misleading. The point of departure for
this discussion _must_ be that for the next half century or so we simply
are not going to do anything about the environment -- it is going to get
worse and worse. The struggle has to be to reach a position from which
humans can even talk sensibly about making rational decisions about the
environment.

Environmental issues can certainly be part of that struggle -- I think
Mark and Lou are essentially correct on both global warming and energy,
but they are pathetically irrelevant to the struggle to  incorporate
those concerns into ongoing struggle. The various scholarship they cite
is worthwhile as background -- it is worse than useless as a club with
which to beat fellow leftist cadre over the head. We need to have a
sense of a general class movement _within which_ all the essential
social questions (anti-imperialism, feminism, ecology, racism, etc.
etc.) can be approached. Lenin offered the key when he insisted that the
working class had to be concerned with all issues. A working class not
concerned with women, gay rights, NATO aggression, the racism of workers
themselves, etc etc etc will be a working class incapable even of
defending itself decently, let alone any more ambitious struggles.

If you start out with the working class, and face the concrete issues
which are a barrier to their unity, you reach all the issues that Lou is
interested in. If you start with those issues, you end up with nothing
at all.

Carrol
>
> Simplistic positions [new technology, traditional technology] won't get us
> very far.

E-mail won't tolerate any but simplified positions. To demand that
expressions be complex is to condemn the very idea of a maillist.

  We need both an understanding of the technological options and
> a vision to be able to make people WANT to make changes.

What will make them want to listen to you. What will cause them to even
know that you are speaking. Until you attract them with something other
than your message they won't know you have a message to deliver.

Carrol

  If we cannot
> even communicate with each other, then ...
>
>  --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx