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Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes
nothing “on faith,” is actually able to cut down mountains and move
them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for
railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably
larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man
will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will
earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he
will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according
to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be
bad.
– Leon Trotsky, “Literature and Revolution” (1924)
For some Trotskyist groups, these words have been interpreted as a green
light to support all sorts of ecomodernist schemas. For those unfamiliar
with the term, it simply means using technology, often of dubious value,
to ward off environmental crisis.
For example, the Socialist Workers Party, when it was still tethered to
the planet Earth, was a strong supporter of Green values but after
becoming unmoored it began to publish articles that asserted: “Science
and technology — which are developed and used by social labor — have
established the knowledge and the means to lessen the burdens and
dangers of work, to advance the quality of life, and to conserve and
improve the earth’s patrimony.” These abstractions have meant in the
concrete supporting GMO: “The latest focus of middle-class hysteria in
face of the progress of science and technology is the campaign against
foods that have been cultivated from seeds that have undergone a
transplant of a strand of genetic material, DNA, from a different plant
species–so-called transgenic organisms, or Genetically Modified
Organisms (GMOs).”
A split from the SWP, the Spartacist League is just as gung-ho. In a
diatribe against ecosocialist scholar and Monthly Review editor John
Bellamy Foster, they position themselves as global warming skeptics:
“Current climate change may or may not pose a sustained, long-term
threat to human society.” Their answer is very much in the spirit of the
Trotsky quote above: “Instead, the proletariat must expropriate
capitalist industry and put it at the service of society as a whole.” It
turns out that Indian Point et al would be put at the service of society
based on an article titled “Greens’ Anti-Nuclear Hysteria Amnesties
Capitalism”.
Of course, the granddaddy of this kind of crude productivism is the cult
around Spiked Online that while correctly perceived today as a
contrarian and libertarian outlet. But its roots are in the Trotskyist
Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain that defended GMO,
nuclear power, DDT, etc. using Trotsky’s rhetoric. Today, there’s
nothing to distinguish it from Donald Trump’s Department of Energy.
As it happens, Trotsky’s business about moving mountains through
technology serves as the epigraph to Jacobin’s special issue on
environmentalism that is permeated by ecomodernist themes. Among them is
an article by Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski titled “Planning the
Good Anthropocene” that shares an affection for nuclear energy with the
nutty sects listed above. They reason: “From a system-wide perspective,
nuclear power still represents the cheapest option thanks to its mammoth
energy density. It also boasts the fewest deaths per terawatt-hour and a
low carbon footprint.” Their techno-optimism rivals that of Steven
Pinker’s: “We patched our deteriorating ozone layer; we returned wolf
populations and the forests they inhabit to central Europe; we relegated
the infamous London fog of Dickens, Holmes, and Hitchcock to fiction,
though coal particulates still choke Beijing and Shanghai.” As it
happens, China is reducing coal particulates by displacing them
geographically. The IEEFA, an energy think-tank, reported that a quarter
of coal plants in the planning stage or under construction outside China
are backed by Chinese state-owned financial institutions and corporations.
full:
https://louisproyect.org/2019/05/17/trotsky-bukharin-and-the-eco-modernists/
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