On Nov 20, 2014, at 4:42 PM, Marv Gandall via Marxism wrote: > Here’s a link to another review of Naomi Klein’s This Changes > Everything, this one by Elizabeth Kolbert...Kolbert thinks Klein’s > various proposals to resolve the crisis through “managed degrowth” > and “regeneration” are too vague to be meaningful or, like carbon > taxes, “hardly seem to challenge the basic logic of capitalism.” > This, despite the fact that Klein is avowedly anticapitalist, > although her rhetorical flourishes about “changing everything” > though a global environment movement are arguably aimed not at the > system’s overthrow... > > http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/04/can-climate-change-cure-capitalism/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nybooks+%28The+New+York+Review+of+Books%29
Not aimed at the system's overthrow? Such criticism is beyond stupid, ultra-left of ultra-left. Greenhouse-gas-fueled economic growth, still proceeding apace, threatens imminent collapse of human civilization, perhaps even of the (last unextinct) human species itself. The overthrow of the capitalist system (ie., the worldwide proletarian democratic communist revolution) is at best somewhere far beyond the horizon of present historical possibility. Therefore any measures to stop increasing and then start reducing atmospheric carbon gasses can only be effective not by "challenging" but by OPERATING IN CONFORMITY WITH "the basic logic of capitalism.” That is why the central program of any "green," "socialist," "working class," even "progressive" political movement has to be the immediate introduction of a comprehensive, substantial, and annually increasing carbon tax-- taxation that would make all forms of carbon pollution, starting with the worst like coal and tar-sands, uneconomic (ie., unprofitable, loss- making) synchronically with the concomitant increase of increasingly profitable pollution-control technologies and pollution free (mainly solar and aeolian) energy supplies, an increase that is (in the latter case) inherently unlimited. This must be central to the Hawkins/Jones- style Green presidential campaign that we have to envisage for 2016. Shane Mage This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures. Herakleitos of Ephesos _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
