In the latest issue of What Next?, an online socialist magazine based in
Great Britain, there’s an article titled The Prophet Misarmed: Trotsky,
Ecology and Sustainability by Sandy Irvine. The gist of Irvine’s
criticism is that Leon Trotsky was clueless on the environment based on
a passage in “Literature and Revolution” that includes the following:
"The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of
meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered
final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not
few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison
with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but
technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down
mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes
(mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an
immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and
artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and
rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature.
In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at
least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that
this taste will be bad…"
According to Irvine, this kind of Promethean hubris can be found across
the ideological spectrum, something undoubtedly true. Keep in mind that
the broad cultural context for the Russian Revolution was futurism,
which lent itself to all sorts of grandiose schemes about mechanizing
the entire world. It was also the context for Italian fascism and it
would be difficult to distinguish between futurist art in Soviet Russia
and Mussolini’s Italy in the early 1920s.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/leon-trotsky-and-ecology/
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