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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 4 / 5, 2006
Notes on the Ecological Dimension
The
Left and the Environment
By MITCHEL COHEN
Radical environmentalists point to the
devastation the earth is facing, but even in this day and age
too many leftists examine only the finger.
The argument I'll be making
is marxist, but it is also very critical of many who call themselves
marxists:
A specter is haunting the planet
-- the specter of biological devastation and ecological catastrophe.
The ecosystems sustaining life are being ravaged. Many familiar
organisms -- butterflies, frogs, bees, whole species -- are in
sudden danger of being wiped out. At the same time, mechanisms
for propagation -- even seeds! -- are coming under the private
ownership and control of a few very large agro-chemical corporations.
These corporations seek to alter living organisms' genetic complement
and reproductive capacities in order to further their control
over land and monopolize the world's food supply.
All the good things that human
beings have achieved, and all the beauty of the world around
us are being grabbed, privatized and pillaged by corporate, technological
and political powers. This new colonization is legitimized by
new laws similar to the Enclosure Acts centuries ago, a legal
framework validating the shameless orgy of material profit.
In the last 40 years, fully
one-half of the world's forests have been chopped down. Forests
prevent floods, maintain soil health, defuse hurricanes, detoxify
drinking water and serve as habitats for millions of species.
Under Clinton and Gore more trees were clearcut in the U.S. than
under any other administration in recent history. The destruction
of the forests is a main contributor to global warming. (Think
about THAT, Al Gore!)
No more the once magnificent
old growth forests, pristine drinking water, healthy soils, seas
teeming with fish. No more the idea that people have the right
to own and control our own bodies, neither our reproductive capacities
nor our genes themselves on a cellular level. What does all the
lip-service about self-determination and democracy mean when
our own cells and individual genetic sequences can now be legally
owned and sold by private corporations?
With this reality in mind,
I offer five proposals for leftists.
1. In the Communist Manifesto,
Marx & Engels explained that the internal dynamic of capitalism
propels it to nestle everywhere, batter down all the "Chinese
Walls" that try to keep it out, colonizing those areas geographically
as well as supplanting their prior forms of production.
Today, with the globalization
of capital, capitalism is colonizing not only other countries'
economic and political systems and the natural world "out
there" -- but it is now colonizing the "nature within."
We, leftists, need to understand
that the privatization of the biological cell, of natural genetic
sequences, is the mechanism through which this new and fundamental
expansion of capitalism is taking place, via this new for of
colonization. Leftists must fight to:
a) Ban all genetic engineering
of agriculture, plants, pesticides, and foods -- this demand
becomes essential to the new anti-colonial movements of the 21st
century.
b) Abolish the private patenting
of genetic sequences and seeds -- so-called "intellectual
property rights."
c) Take private profit out
of research and development of health-related drugs.
d) And, in the meantime, require
all bio-engineered products and those derived from them to be
clearly labeled.
The rightwing grassroots have
been rallying around these demands; the Left is missing the opportunity
to organize that rightwing base out from under its leadership.
2. We need to challenge
the capitalist-manufactured consensus underlying what we mean
by Progress and the Good Life.
We reject the notion, to some
degree promoted by the Left, that the "good life" is
based on the mass production and accumulation of commodities.
Two hundred years ago, in 1811,
the Luddites -- like the Iroquois and other American Indian communities
-- offered a different measure of progress, one not defined by
efficiency or acceptance of exploitation of Nature or Labor.
Contrary to popular mythology, the Luddites did not oppose
machines per se, but "machinery hurtful to Commonality."
In England they wielded hammers against the machines; in France,
their counterparts threw "sabots" (wooden shoes) into
the gears (hence the term "sabotage"). The emerging
industrial system based on Grow Or Die (God!) found it could
only survive by physically crushing the Luddites and other opponents
of mass-factory production. They distorted and then obliterated
memory of their radical direct action "critique" from
history texts. So in that sense, I am proud to be a Luddite,
an Iroquois, a Saboteur ... a Zapatista! And so should all of
us.
3. We in the industrialized
capitalist world need to train ourselves to see "holistically".
This is not something that
will come about on its own within the capitalist or patriarchal
frameworks -- nor will it come about in the kind of socialist
framework based on industrial development.
Take this item, about a malaria
outbreak in Borneo in the 1950s. The World Health Organization
(WHO) sprayed DDT to kill mosquitoes. But the DDT also killed
parasitic wasps which were controlling thatch-eating caterpillars.
As a result, the thatched roofs of many homes fell down, and
the DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckoes, which were in
turn eaten by cats. The cats perished from the poisoning, which
led to the multiplication of rats, and then outbreaks of sylvatic
plague and typhus. To put an end to this destructive chain of
events, WHO had to parachute 145,000 live cats into the area
to control the rats.
The Left, like the rest of
society, is steeped in the same linear thinking. It finds a problem
and then looks for the magic bullet approach for addressing it.
I talk about this in a number of other essays, grouped under
the general heading, "Zen-Marxism." Leftists need to
practice holistic thinking. That will not occur automatically
for those of us raised in this society. It takes a lot of work,
conscious effort.
To begin with, holistic thinking
attempts to look at entire ecosystems, at totalities, at their
underlying Unity as the starting point. We must ask ourselves
how the Whole informs interactions of the "parts" within
every issue. One important effect of that type of approach is
the minimization of unintended consequences, but that's not the
only one. I don't have time here to get into that in any depth,
but perhaps we can discuss more about how to train ourselves
-- how to practice -- to think holistically in the discussion
period.
4. We need to stop fetishizing
science and technology.
Science and Technology are
not "neutral forces"; they are dripping from their
very "soul" with the ideology and social relations
of the system in which they formed. But we, leftists, over and
over again fall for the "Technological Imperative"
-- technologizing one's way out of a problem, the Lone Ranger
riding to rescue us from the contradictions of existence under
capitalism.
Some examples:
- U.S. communist parties endorsed
nuclear power plants in the 1960s;
- they also endorsed fluoridation
of drinking water, which was a means for the burgeoning aluminum
industry to get rid of its waste products in the 1940s and 50s;
- they endorsed mass vaccination
of children for diseases that children SHOULD get, we WANT them
to get so that they don't get these diseases as adults where
they are far more dangerous -- diseases such as chicken pox,
measles, mumps, etc. -- in societies like ours in which they
have access to healthy food, clean water and adequate sanitation
(obviously, this is not desirable for impoverished or colonized
countries where measles is among the top killers of young children);
- the communist parties also
endorsed mass spraying of pesticides and over-application of
antibiotics;
- they continue to endorse
the torture of animals by cosmetic companies like Gillette under
the guise of "scientific research," and refuse to hear
the wide-scale protests of young people involved in animal rights
struggles, ruling them out as part of the Left;
- and they even uphold genetic
engineering -- rationalizing it, as they did with the Rockefeller-sponsored
Green Revolution, as a technological means for ending world hunger!
yea, right! -- instead of examining the real causes
of hunger to begin with.
So, what do we do? Well, for
starters, we need to call not only for free universal health
care, but engage in a continent-wide discussion of what that
health care should consist of, instead of the factory model
of healthcare that the Left promotes today! Where is that discussion,
the understanding that free universal health care is by itself
not enough and may even be counterproductive when not combined
with those contextual demands, such as access to acupuncture,
homeopathy, chiropracty, nutrition, herbology, and de-toxification
of the environment?
Why are there 3 times as many
episiotomies performed on women in the U.S. than in Europe, percentagewise?
Is it that women in the U.S. are genetically inferior to those
elsewhere in the world, or that they don't know how to give birth
properly? Obviously, that's not the case; but I'm sure some enterprising
corporation will soon try to market genetic implants to "correct"
that "defect."
In Cuba, women squat in a sort-of
rocking chair with the bottom removed and rock the baby out,
with much lower need for C-sections. Similarly with hysterectomies,
which in the U.S. are performed at a rate that is at least double
that of other industrialized countries. WHY AREN'T THESE AND
SIMILAR ISSUES BEING RAISED BY THE LEFT as part of the demands
for Universal Health coverage? Why doesn't the Left address widespread
concerns over what that coverage should consist of, instead of
leaving that to the so-called capitalist-trained "experts"?
Increasingly, the choice is the Capitalist system vs. the Immune
system. The left needs to stand on the side of the Immune system
-- don't you agree?
Leftists have long thought
that we could just take over Science and Technology as though
they were "neutral", and use them for the good of all.
But one cannot just take over these frameworks and wield them
for one's own purpose, for technology is an ensemble of social
relations, and every finished product is a crystallization of
the history of the exploitation, organization of production,
and destruction of the communality that went into making it.
So, stop treating science and technology as the answer to our
problems. Let's try to imagine a different kind of future,
one that is not based on factories, factory farming, and factory
health care.
5. We need to actively search
for the ecological dimension in every social justice issue and
raise it as part of that fight.
Bob Dylan sang: "I'll
let you be in my dream if I can be in yours." For many years
the left acted similarly; organizations made alliances that led
to raising each others' issues and concatenating them into laundry
lists of seemingly unrelated programmatic points. But the globalization
of capital has changed all that. EVERY issue now has an ecological
dimension that is fundamental to it. It is our job, as revolutionaries,
to search for that green dimension and unpeel it, reveal it,
and organize around it even when it does not seem obvious at
first. This must become a fundamental component of every fight
that we enter. I call this framework "Deep Marxism."
For example, there is currently
being organized an international boycott of CocaCola (www.killercoke.org),
called to protest Coke's murder of indigenous working class organizers
in Colombia. Green activists have brought to that struggle Coke's
support for the mass herbicide poisoning of the entire countryside
with Monsanto's RoundUp -- the same deadly organophosphate that
they are spraying to kill weeds in New York City and here in
Massachusetts, and on corn in Mexico. Monsanto has patented a
procedure for genetically modifying what they call "RoundUp
Ready" corn so that it is resistant to the mass-spraying
of ONLY Round-Up. As a consequence, corporate farms pour thousands
of tons of Round-Up onto the crops, killing every living organism
-- weeds, butterflies, frogs, earthworms, bees. The only organism
left standing is the corn itself. And then we eat it, saturated
with poisons.
The Green dimension also reveals
that Coke is one of the world's leading buyers of genetically
engineered hi-fructose corn syrup, which now permeates almost
every processed food, and which is responsible in large part
for the epidemic of overweight children in the United States.
I'll give another example:
When Greyhound went on strike a few years back, some of us not
only did strike support -- of course, we all do that -- but also
challenged the workers to begin thinking about how to reconfigure
the entire transportation system, to raise the issue of alternatives
to petroleum-based fuels, and to see such expansion of working
class domain as valid and necessary.
Unpeeling the ecological dimension
is crucial to expanding the Left, and in successfully vying for
workplace and reparation of the damages inflicted upon the communities
we, as workers, live in.
Imagine, for instance, how
different things would be if workers at General Electric's plant
in Schenectady N.Y. fought against the company's dumping of PCBs
into the Hudson river and demanded that G.E. clean up its toxic
wastes from the river as part of its union organizing and contractual
demands.
The best example of actively
looking for the ecological dimension of a particular issue occurred
in Australia in the late 70s when unions issued "Green Bans"
and refused to construct highways and malls unless they were
first approved by the communities that would be impacted by such
"development" at public meetings. [I talk about this
more in my pamphlet "What is Direct Action?"]
We can, and must, teach ourselves
todo the same with every issue -- even those that seem
to have no ecological connections whatsoever at first glance.
We need to oppose genetic engineering not only as a social justice
issue but from our understanding that it is a new and fundamental
mechanism through which capitalism is colonizing and exploiting
new dimensions of life. We need to oppose and reframe what is
presented as "the good life." We need to train ourselves
in how to think holistically and practice how to bring out the
ecological dimension to issues that are perceived solely as moral
or economic social justice issues; and we need to stop fetishizing
science and technology. All of these (and more, of course) are
necessary in enabling our movements and the working class in
general to reveal and explore the deeper connections, which then
would allow us to take actions that strike more deeply into the
system itself and provide the basis for more powerful, successful,
and radical social movements.
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the
newspaper of the NY State Greens. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
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