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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
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