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> >> On 11/22/14 9:31 AM, Carrol Cox wrote: > >> > >> The fact that former Mayor Bloomberg could join the climate march ought to > >> generate some caution. > > > > [Louis Proyect wrote] I agree with Carrol. We need a communistic climate > > change movement led > > by fighting detachments of an aroused proletariat. > [Marvin Gandall wrote] > Not to mention, on a more serious note, that not all capitalists > outside the coal, gas and oil industries are wedded to fossil fuels and > unconcerned about their disruptive and potentially catastrophic effects. > Bloomberg is a prominent spokesperson of this growing wing of the > bourgeoisie. If solar and other alternative energy prices continue to fall > in line with advanced technology and more widespread adoption and become > more cost-effective and safer than environmentally destructive forms of > energy, there's no reason to suppose today's capitalists would not do what > previous generations of capitalists have done and move to superior forms of > energy. It's not an inevitable development, but neither can it be ruled > out. Carrol Cox's opposition to the environmental movement is completely wrong, would doom the left to impotence, and would increase the danger of environmental collapse. But it's also wrong to be complacent about the bourgeois wing of the environmental movement. Yes, even today a section of the bourgeoisie is concerned about the environment, and more will be in the future. But establishment environmentalism has put forward futile marketplace solutions. Indeed, it's measures aren't simply weak or inadequate, but some of them have made things worse. * There's the corn ethanol fiasco. This is an example of a section of the bourgeoisie realizing it can make a profit from certain measures, and it has been a fiasco. * There was the promotion of biofuel from palm oil. This has helped accelerate the devastation of the rain forests. * There is cap and trade, which was a fiasco in Europe under Kyoto. * There is the carbon offset program, which isn't simply weak or ineffective, but has done environmental harm in various ways. * There is the promotion of nuclear power by various bourgeois environmentalists. * There is even the promotion of geo-engineering, which promises disasters of its own. Why let global warming destroy the planet, when the bourgeoisie can do it directly with geo-engineering? * And so on... One of the positive points of Naomi Klein's book was the chapter on "Big Green", the large bourgeois environmental organizations. These organizations even have financial deals with the fossil fuel companies. The more I see the issue of bourgeois environmentalism avoided in this discussion, the more I appreciate that Naomi Klein devotes some attention to it and is angry about it. Another useful exposure of bourgeois environmentalism is in the book "Green gone wrong: Dispatches from the front lines of eco-capitalism" by Heather Rogers. She shows, for example, concretely how various fair trade plans, supposed to be ecologically friendly, don't help either the small peasant producer or the environment. Neither Klein nor Rogers have a clear plan on how to build an effective section of the environmental movement consciously independent of Big Green. But their books help show why this is needed. The left must not simply participate in the environmental movement, but build up a working-class section of the movement, which doesn't simply cheer the bourgeois environmentalists on, but has a separate program for what measures need to be taken in order to effectively fight the environmental crisis. So far, even the more radical and militant section of the environmental movement, a section which has carried out many excellent actions, generally won't directly take on Big Green and has connections with the bourgeois environmentalists through Al Gore or various foundations, etc. Even the section that criticizes market measures in general, generally supports the carbon tax as supposedly something else. This amounts, in practice, to a tacit alliance with the market fundamentalism of the bourgeois environmentalists. Such environmentalists as Timothy Flannery (who was a Green Party activist at one time, but I don't know what has become of him) worry about planning being a "carbon dictatorship" (Flannery's term). The major emphasis on setting the "carbon price" is an attempt to avoid the "carbon dictatorship" through a price mechanism; it is a tacit alliance (and sometimes an open and direct alliance) with bourgeois environmentalism; and it means evading the need to fight neo-liberalism. (The one correct thing about Shane Mage's comment was that he directly showed the market nature of the carbon tax.) Carrol Cox concludes from the need to oppose bourgeois environmentalism that all environmentalism is bourgeois, and that we can and should ignore it. That is a fatal error. In fact, Carrol Cox's abstention from the environmental movement would turn it over to the hands of bourgeois environmentalism, and thus maximize the chance of environmental catastrophe. The left should take part in the the environmental movement, but it should develop a working-class section of the environmental movement, working-class not just in composition but in its opposition to the mistaken orientations of Big Green. -- Joseph Green _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
