Hi Joseph, I'm not going to spend too much time on your sermon of yesterday, but anyway you are badly mistaking my position. If you wanted to understand my position, you would need to be able to "think outside the box" in a non-discriminatory way.
In other words, just as with Louis Proyect, there is a whole universe of ideas outside the box of your own categorization system, but it is difficult for you to know that, because you are not used to think in any other way than you habitually and doctrinally do, and you think yourself to be "on top of the world". You are always within the safety of your own box, and you have your own "totalitarian catechism" of fixed categories to evaluate things. I did not "identify the environmental cause with the bourgeois environmentalists" or "curse the idea of environmentalism". I do not "curse the Greens" generally. That is just lying nonsense. I don't care whether I'm perceived as "radical" or not, I'll leave that issue to fashion-followers. My remarks about "jetsetting, SUV driving, designer kitchen Green knowledge bureaucrats" are based on my own personal experience of these people. They were really "jetsetting", including to Libya. They were really "SUV driving" techno-peasants with a hobby farm. They showed off to me their "designer kitchens" and fancy "stereo systems". They waffled about "consumerism" while they were using rich helpings of tax money and corporate money to embellish their lifestyle, deftly brushing away the more sordid aspects of their past. They very deliberately aimed to manipulate the use of knowledge, and gain control over things they had no experience of themselves. Nor am I "disillusioned", mainly because I had few illusions to start of with. Of course, you hope that things will get better, and you know things could be worse. If things don't get better, but get worse instead, that's disappointing. But that is not a matter of being disillusioned. In 1978 I was a freshman at university. From that year, after the election, the NZ Values Party actually rapidly fell apart. The Party had mooted the desirability of a "zero-growth society" but that zero-growth had arrived. Unemployment and price inflation were skyrocketing, and there was an investment strike by capitalists; the average rate of profit in industry had taken a nosedive. Nobody was interested anymore in Green idealism, they wanted job security and economic growth. The "red Greens" and the "green Greens" were at loggerheads with each other. The Party leader, Tony Kunowski, resigned, and became an investment banker. As regards myself, I began to study Marx and Engels, and scholars like Harry Rothman, Barry Commoner, Andre Gorz, Boris Komarov, Vaclav Smil etc. and I rapidly evolved towards Marxism at that time. I wasn't really attracted much to the New Zealand versions of Maoists, Trotskyists, Hoxhaists, Castroists and Stalinists - as a sophomore I wrote a political science critique of official communism - but I had the opportunity (as bookstore employee around that time) to read Hal Draper, Roman Rosdolsky, Harry Braverman, Isaac Rubin, Ron Meek and various other writers who had a fairly thorough understanding of Marx and Engels. And that gave me a very different perspective on the environmental issues I was originally concerned with in my youth. Environmental issues are too important to leave to the Greens. After that I co-founded about four socialist groups, thankfully without any supervision from SWP dictators, and I was union delegate for some time. The point of my comment about "regulation" is really that regulation is an intensely political game, whereby some actors aim to set limits on other actors. For that reason, it does not necessarily have any "liberating" or "emancipatory" qualities. "Green" is not necessarily "good". When you've worked for many government agencies like I have, you understand better why. Towards the end of the 1990s, I realized clearly that, in reality, the New Left was now fully exhausted as a progressive political or intellectual tradition. It was pro-state and anti-freedom, and it kept spouting rhetorics about "movements" which did not exist. In working life, I have carefully verified my political interpretations. I worked across many years for many leftist officials and academics back-office, in many different capacities, so I learnt about their ways very directly, and in minute detail. I've concluded, that in the end you have to decide whether you are for or against the New Marxist Exploiting Class. I was against them, and so I have only a few Marxian friends. But I don't mind about that, I don't like most "Marxists" anyway. Jurriaan _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
