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Really good stuff, Lou. You're doing your homework as if there were no tomorrow. And there isn't. Coupla things: it's implicit in your emphasis on the absolute imperative of systemic change, and I haven't read Tim Jackson or seen the film to which you refer, haven't even followed very closely the current discussion on this list on topic; but how or where can reality assert itself unless and until no-growth accommodates the other implacable sine qua non, climate justice?

This is predicated in my judgment at least substantially on migration of labor and the equalization of the wage rate (now so frighteningly blocked by Trump's wall, the blocking of labor into Europe and elsewhere, and draconian immigration and labor organizing policies), so that those in the privileged "North" and the class enemies managing the nation-states of the "South" no longer benefit from that incongruous disparity, and no longer support the concomitant ongoing trend toward nationalism, tribalism, racism and all entailed.

That shifting migration has its ineluctable material compulsion in people's desperation in the South, which can only accelerate with the economic adjustments now being virtually forced on capital that include the superfluity of a growing preponderance of the global labor force, and imminent, ongoing climate collapse. Patrick Bond has written here about some of this. It screams for close analysis, dialectical parsing which develops along with the inevitable coming action appropriate to that line of inquiry.

On 5/8/2020 6:48 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
Ever since Mother Jones owner Adam Hochschild fired Michael Moore for refusing to publish Paul Berman’s attack on the Sandinistas in 1986, I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for him. But when he got down on his knees on the Bill Maher Show in 2008 to beg Ralph Nader not to run for President, a lot of that affection disappeared. For the past dozen years, I had grown weary of his conventional Hollywood liberalism that smacked of Rob Reiner and all the other millionaires who always ended up pleading for a vote for the lesser evil.

You could have knocked me over with a feather after I discovered that Moore had executive produced a film titled “Planet of the Humans” that broke with the liberal establishment. Like poking a stick in a hornet’s nest, all the voices of establishment liberalism, from The Nation to Rolling Stone, swarmed around his head. The editors of the pink-tinted Jacobin must have suffered whiplash when news of the film broke. Only last November, Meagan Day’s adulatory piece titled “Michael Moore Was Right” appeared. Like Trotsky losing favor in the mid-20s, Michael Moore became an unperson after “Planet of the Humans”.

Jacobin unleashed their ecomodernist hitman Leigh Phillips, who penned a piece titled “Planet of the Anti-Humanists” that predictably condemned the film as “Malthusian.” He even raised the possibility that Moore and director Jeff Gibbs were “anti-civilization,” as if they were plotting to recreate the world of Alley Oop and The Flintstones.

full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/05/08/the-planet-of-the-humans/


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