Doug posted:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>>I am pretty sure that we can, but it will require *radical* adjustments
>>>including:
>>>
>>>1. overcoming the city-countryside split as called for in the Communist
>>>Manifesto.
>>>2. elimination of the automobile and jet plane except for extraordinary
>>>reasons.
>>>3. promotion of bicycles and trains and other forms of environmentally wise
>>>transportation.
>>>4. drastic reduction in meat eating.
>>>5. sharp cutback in fashion, luxury goods like Rolex watches, Mount Blanc
>>>pens, overseas vacations, fancy restaurants and delicatessens--ie.
>>>everything that goes into a "yuppie" lifestyle. In exchange for a reduction
>>>in these kinds of dubious "goodies" we achieve more free time and a sense
>>>of relief that we are not fucking over the rest of the world.
>>>6. in general, less is more as Mies van der Rohe put it.
>>
>>1-6 won't solve the problem, though, if fossil fuels & clean water
>>are soon running out & there is no practical alternative energy
>>source, as Mark says. How do you make bicycles & run trains
>>without fuels?
>
><http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue31/cont31.htm>
I have yet to browse through the entire issue, but are you pointing
to the following?
***** Nader vs. the Big Rock Candy Mountain
Jesse Lemisch
[from New Politics, vol. 8, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 31, Summer 2001]
... I SUPPORTED RALPH NADER FOR PRESIDENT IN 2000. Nonetheless, I
think that in some ways Nader and the Greens offer a bad model for
the future of independent politics....Here is my criticism, first in
summary: Nader and the Greens abstemiously turned their backs on
people's reasonable and deeply human longings for abundance, joy,
cornucopia, variety and mobility, substituting instead a puritanical
asceticism that romanticizes hardship, scarcity, localism and
underdevelopment -- a traditionalism that blinds us to the
possibility of utopia. I see in this complex, vestiges of an Old
Left/New Left puritanism, a continuing quest for a kind of a faux
working-class authenticity and a reaffirmation of the Protestant
Ethic. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
continues to have much to tell us about puritanical asceticism.
A lot of this austere and abstinent complex has been seen as just a
quirk of Nader's character, but it's more pervasive than that. Many
of us who gave general support to Nader nonetheless saw and spoke --
as Landy and I did in our pro-Nader petition -- of serious problems
in his views on abortion, race and gender. Some friendly critics
spoke of Nader's "tin ear" or "blind spot" in these areas. But these
are not just blind spots or imperfections in an otherwise good
program, but rather add up to a coherent and systemic component of
Nader's thought, rooted in a Gitlinesque horror of identity politics.
Nader's contempt for what he called "gonadal politics" is as deep as
Todd Gitlin's contempt for identity politics, and despite the
political gap between them, there is an interesting congruence on
this.
Similarly, a romance of parsimoniousness and asceticism is not just a
quirkiness of individual Greens but rather permeates Green thought.
(In this paper I often speak simultaneously about Nader and about
different kinds of Greens. Obviously, there are differences. But to
deny the fundamental consensus among them on asceticism is to throw
out all reasonable generalization. The central point is not whether
there is explicit and total agreement, but whether these beliefs are
ever questioned. My experience and reading indicate that these values
are hegemonic and are publicly unquestioned among Greens.) Such
blinders leave the left incapable of tangling with many difficult
questions that independent politics should face: What, after all, is
the matter with food in abundance, and wonderful material goods?
Might globalization, under popular control, be a good thing, or is it
intrinsically and inevitably bad? Might large-scale agriculture,
under different conditions, be a good thing? How can it be that in
2000 Nader still believed in the family farm as what he
anachronistically called "the cultural backbone of America"? Why do
we hear so much about such archaic notions as "self-reliance"? Are
TV, Viagra, Prozac and tourism necessarily, as Nader thinks, bad
things? What about cars? Even if we were to deal successfully with
pollution, I just don't think that Greens would accept, much less
delight in, the utopian potential of the easy mobility given to us by
cars....
...Do demographic and other data support Green notions of scarcity,
or does the Green mystique of scarcity precede investigation of the
realities? Are Green ideas of "sustainability" sometimes rooted in
apparent givens that turn out in fact to be political choices? For
instance, would population decrease with increased education for
women and increased social and cultural rewards for female roles
other than motherhood? Empirical study after empirical study seems to
support this conclusion, which points the way to a radical feminist
alternative to Green strategies for cutting back demands for food and
fuel. These latter seemingly given demands would decline with a
declining birth rate.
So it's not clear whether the real limits of what the earth can
produce cause the ascetic complex, or whether the ideology comes
first, a priori, focusing attention on the limits rather than the
possibilities. What ever became of the notion of planning -- figuring
out how to accomplish social goals, especially with newer
technologies?...
<http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue31/lemisc31.htm> *****
Another concern that is often missing from Green praise of bikes is
that bikes don't work for some of the disabled. I don't think that
Greens actually object to the disabled people using cars if they are
asked, but they often forget to volunteer that they don't, which
omission says something about the problem of the ideology of
self-reliance & "a romance of parsimoniousness and asceticism." Some
uses of technologies are destructive; others are life-sustaining.
The distinction is all-important but not always made clear in many
currents of the Green thought.
Yoshie
