Hi, On 16/03/11 12:28, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > 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.
In all seriousness, the bit I don't understand is why you spend so much time and energy complaining about the habits of the wrong crowd you have been with. All social movements have these kinds of people and tendencies and Social Change 101, Lesson 1 is precisely to not hang out with them - because: they seek not change anywhere else than in their own lives (like many academic "socialists") and therefore destroy the movements they are part of and consolidate the status quo of the elite (and they are often unbearable to be in the room with). That's what I meant with "dis-illusioned" - perhaps you are just disappointed, I don't know - but to my mind "the problem" in this context is that it seems like you might have been unaware of the exissting analyses of this most common of all problems in social movements - and carried on hanging with a crowd you should have never been in with in the first place, according to your own ideals as you now present them. As such, these anecdotes are - as far as I am concerned - much more relevant to your own life than they yield any new insights, since all you do is to confirm the age old wisdom to beware of influence seekers and enclosure from within. In the words of the master of liberal verbosity, Isaiah Berlin, speaking about the problematic, yet very insightful character, George Sorel: “The representatives of the working classes, Sorel observed, becomes an excellent bourgeois very easily. The hideous examples are before our eyes – Millerand, Briand, Viviani, the spellbinding demagogue Jean Jaurès with his easily acquired popularity. Sorel had once hoped for much from these men, but was disillusioned. They all turned out to be squalid earthworms, rhetoricians, grafters and intriguers like the rest” (Berlin 1955/1979: 313) It's OK to have been wrong and been with the wrong crowd and it is a good thing to realise it, but it is not very creative to remain in a critique of what you have since realised is so fundamentally wrong, as you show in such an articulate manner. Just let them be. Surely everyone on this list are aware of this classic challenge for social movements - i.e. to survive influence seekers or to find ways to dissociate from them - and the types of people that embody these challenges/problems, whether the movement in question is green or communist or whatever it may be. The interesting questions - to me - would be: what do you do instead, where do you find "authentic", "revolutionary" greens? Which movements do not embody greenwash and individual gain primarily, but look for the kind of social change that you are also looking for?? For they do exist........ Some of them also have a nice magazine: http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/ all the very best, sincerely, martin _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
