>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,
Abundance, joy, corncupia, variety and mobility? I think that's what most
NY'ers like Lemisch enjoy right now, while their taxes go to pay for a CIA
and military that denies it to the rest of the world.
> 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?
This is not what Marx argued in v.3 of Capital, but Lemisch's connections
to Marxism seems tangential at best.
>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"?
Because people feel appalled by the kind of cancer epidemics industrial
farming produces?
> 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....
Don't forget fox-hunting. You haven't lived until you ride across the bog
on a foggy morning in your red suit, blowing your horn.
>...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?
There are only so many blue-finned tuna in the ocean. With fishing boats
made from converted sonar-equipped WWII sub hunters, they will rapidly
disappear. This has nothing to do with Malthus, but common sense.
>>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?...
Right new technologies. Let's clone blue-fin tuna.
Louis Proyect
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