>>Michael Keaney says:
>>>It's not clear to me that we disagree on anything substantive. The
>>>implication that I'm somehow having a go at Lenin is misplaced, because the
>>>point is not how mistaken Lenin was, but how constrained by his
>>>circumstances he was. Those circumstances included civil war and the
>>>unwarranted intervention of Britain and the United States. There's not much
>>>room for utopianism in those circumstances.
>
>Yoshie writes:
>>If we are ever successful in making a transition to socialism, we
>>will likely face civil war & unwarranted intervention (with
>>increased military powers on the part of imperialists, compared to
>>what the Bolsheviks faced), which will have to lead to the
>>postponement of ecologically-minded socialism until military
>>threats to the existence of socialism get put down, our increased
>>scientific knowledge regarding the environment notwithstanding.
>>There is nothing more ecologically destructive than war.
>
>in addition, Louis P. has argued (pretty convincingly) that the
>early Bolshevik regime was pretty ecologically-minded (especially by
>the standards of the day), until the rot set in ....
>
>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Many Greens understand the "rot" in question to be the ideology of
"productivism," but I think that the main problem was rather the
construction of the national security state, which imperialism made
necessary (& the bureaucratic elite inflated). The national security
state meant that social movements from below -- including
environmental movements -- had a difficult time getting started, with
a result that citizens didn't have the means to put political checks
upon the extent of ecological destruction.
Yoshie
