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Further to the environment, GMO, technophobia, anti-science, new age, woolly-thinking, etc., discussion over the last 48 hours, the lead editorial in the latest Jacobin from Alyssa Battistoni I think get's it exactly right. Not ecosocialism, but what she calls 'cyborg socialism': https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/toward-cyborg-socialism/ The history of environmentalism is littered with Malthusianism, ecological determinism, biological essentialism, and neocolonial conservationism. Left skepticism of — or perhaps more accurately, indifference to — engagement with ecological politics is certainly understandable. But we’re not talking about preserving an idealized concept of pristine, untouched nature — we’re talking about the world we choose to make, and the world we’ll have to live in. Green dominates the environmental landscape, from the light greenwash of “sustainable lifestyles” to the dark green of deep ecologists. But environmentalism is also black lung disease in coal-mining towns and toxic brownfields in urban neighborhoods, the iridescent sheen of an oil spill and the translucent white of melting polar ice caps. And so I cringe a bit at the term ecosocialism — it’s too earth-toned. What we need is a cyborg socialism that points not to the primacy of ecology, but to the integration of natural and social, organic and industrial, ecological and technological; that recognizes human transformations of the natural world without simply asserting domination over it. The Left doesn’t need to go green — to save the planet and the people on it, it needs to go red. Leigh Phillips European Affairs Journalist & Science Writer leigh.phill...@gmail.com Twitter: Leigh_Phillips ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
