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On 2017/09/26 04:12 AM, DW via Marxism wrote:
... The more interesting thing, IMO, is not Parenti but Angus' non-take on ecomodernism. There is little substance in his charges against them (there is, actually, but Angus fails to document this). I have of course a lot in common with some aspects of ecomodernism, which in someways is a helluva lot closer to the actual Marxist outlook on what is *needed* to solve the environmental crisis than, say, the Greens or Greenpeace, Joseph Romm or others Angus defends or quotes.
Yes, although Greenpeace has begun to move to an environmental justice perspective, the difficulty in getting useful discourses between the camps remains. There's an argument - which I try to move into the realm of contemporary climate politics here: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond_Frankfurt_talk_June_2016_version_of_19_April.pdf - drawing upon advice offered more than 20 years ago by David Harvey in his book Justice, Nature and the Politics of Difference. In suggesting that "the environmental justice movement has to radicalize the ecological modernization discourse," the key passage (3 'grafs) is this:
At this conjuncture, therefore, all of those militant particularist movements around the world that loosely come together under the umbrella of environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor are faced with a critical choice. They can either ignore the contradictions, remain with the confines of their own particularist militancies - fighting an incinerator here, a toxic waste dump there, a World Bank dam project somewhere else, and commercial logging in yet another place - or they can treat the contradictions as a fecund nexus to create a more transcendent and universal politics. If they take the latter path, they have to find a discourse of universality and generality that unites the emancipatory quest for social justice with a strong recognition that social justice is impossible without environmental justice (and vice versa). But any such discourse has to transcend the narrow solidarities and particular affinities shaped in particular places - the preferred milieu of most grass roots environmental activism - and adopt a politics of abstraction capable of reaching out across space, across the multiple environmental and social conditions that constitute the geography of difference in a contemporary world that capitalism has intensely shaped to its own purposes. And it has to do this without abandoning its militant particularist base.
The abstractions cannot rest solely upon a moral politics dedicated to protecting the sanctity of Mother Earth. It has to deal in the material and institutional issues of how to organize production and distribution in general, how to confront the realities of global power politics and how to displace the hegemonic powers of capitalism not simply with dispersed, autonomous, localized, and essentially communitarian solutions (apologists for which can be found on both right and left ends of the political spectrum), but with a rather more complex politics that recognizes how environmental and social justice must be sought by a rational ordering of activities at different scales. The reinsertion of the idea of "rational ordering" indicates that such a movement will have no option, as it broadens out from its militant particularist base, but to reclaim for itself a noncoopted and nonperverted version of the theses of ecological modernization. On the one hand that means subsuming the highly geographically differentiated desire for cultural autonomy and dispersion, for the proliferation of tradition and difference within a more global politics, but on the other hand making the quest for environmental and social justice central rather than peripheral concerns.
For that to happen, the environmental justice movement has to radicalize the ecological modernization discourse. And that requires confronting the fundamental underlying processes (and their associated power structures, social relations, institutional configurations, discourses, and belief systems) that generate environmental and social injustices. Here, I revert to a key moment in the argument advanced in Social Justice and the City (Harvey, 1973: 136-7): it is vital, when encountering a serious problem, not merely to try to solve the problem in itself but to confront and transform the processes that gave rise to the problem in the first place. Then, as now, the fundamental problem is that of unrelenting capital accumulation and the extraordinary asymmetrics of money and political power that are embedded in that process. Alternative modes of production, consumption, and distribution as well as alternative modes of environmental transformation have to be explored if the discursive spaces of the environmental justice movement and the theses of ecological modernization are to be conjoined in a program of radical political action. This is fundamentally a class project, whether it is exactly called that or not, precisely because it entails a direct challenge to the circulation and accumulation of capital which currently dictates what environmental transformations occur and why.
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