Revenge of the Aristocrats

[Vanguard1917]

Humourous and thought-provoking article discussing how members of the privileged classes are increasingly using the language of environmentalism to justify austerity for the masses and, in the case of Prince Charles, the maintenance of the 'natural order of things'.

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Revenge of the Aristocrats
Brendan O’Neill

Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne who is most famous for talking to plants, has signed a deal (http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/24/britains-prince-charles-to-publish-book-on-environment/) to make a movie and write a book about climate change. The project will be called “Harmony,” because, in Charles’s words, humankind must “rediscover that sense of harmony, that sense of being a part of, rather apart from, nature.” His film will educate the unruly masses — with their fast cars, fridges, and other planet-destroying luxuries — that human beings “have a sacred duty of stewardship of the natural order of things.”

The thought of being lectured about living more meekly by a taxpayer-subsidized prince who has never done a proper day’s work in his life — and who is currently flying around Europe on a private jet with a master suite and plush bathroom that will spew a whopping 53 tons of CO2 (http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7440846&page=1) into the atmosphere over the course of his five-day, $116,000 charter — is of course eye-swivellingly irritating. But this is something we’re getting used to in Britain — because here, environmentalism looks very much like the Revenge of the Aristocrats. The British green lobby is stuffed with the sons and daughters of privilege, for whom environmentalism provides a perfect, scientifically tinged gloss for expressing in a new way their old foul prejudices against mass, modern society.

Many of the major players in British environmentalism are posh, rich, and hectoring. One of Charles’s top advisers is Jonathon Porritt (http://www.jonathonporritt.com/), a former director of Friends of the Earth and a patron of the creepy Malthusian outfit, the Optimum Population Trust (http://www.optimumpopulation.org/) (OPT). Porritt is a graduate of Eton, Britain’s school of choice for the rich and well-connected, and is the son of Lord Porritt, the 11th Governor General of New Zealand. The increasingly influential OPT also counts Sir Crispin Tickell (who is as posh as his name suggests) and Lady Kulukundis, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate, among its patrons.

The head of the organic-promoting Soil Association (http://www.soilassociation.org/), Peter Melchett, is also known as the Fourth Baron Melchett: that’s because he is the Eton-educated son of the Baron and Sir, Julian Mond — former chairman of the British Steel Corporation — and is heir to Sir Alfred Mond’s extraordinary ICI fortune. Melchett is the man who spearheaded the Soil Association’s recent attempts to prevent poverty-stricken African farmers from flying their organic produce to Britain on the basis that the “air miles (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/article3613691.ece)” would further pollute the planet. This is what we call eco-colonialism.

Zac Goldsmith, editor of the greens’ monthly bible The Ecologist (http://www.theecologist.org/), is the son of a billionaire (Sir James Goldsmith) and an aristocrat (Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the daughter of the eighth Marquess of Londonderry.) And if you thought it was grating to be lectured to by the mansion-owning, electricity-zapping Al Gore during his Live Earth bonanza two years ago, then spare a thought for us Brits: during Live Earth, we were given the Gore-approved “Global Warming Survival Handbook,” written by one David de Rothschild (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3569/). Yes, David is a member of the mind-blowingly wealthy Rothschild banking family and is an heir to its enormous fortune. His book advised us — the little people — to wear a jumper instead of turning on the heat, to grow our own tomatoes, to ride bicycles instead of buying cars, etczzzz. In other words: live like paupers.

Even many of the younger, supposedly radical green protesters are the grandsons and granddaughters of privilege. The members of Plane Stupid (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-523220/Posh-protesters-How-anti-Heathrow-Commons-invaders-included-Baronets-granddaughter-MPs-grandson.html), for example, the shrill anti-flying campaign, have better elocution and table manners than many of the attendees of dinner parties at Windsor Castle. Plane Stupid contains the spoiled children of baronets, lords, inventors, and aristocrats, and thus upholds a long and inglorious tradition of posh people sneering at crass mass tourism, which they see as drunken, destructive, and dangerous.

The aristocracy’s embrace of environmentalism, their unflinching commitment to “protecting the planet” from slovenly tourists, African farmers, or the overly fecund classes, is striking indeed. What it reveals is how innately reactionary environmentalism is, to the extent that it can become the political refuge of the landed classes, the moneyed set, and even royals who, by rights, should be stripped of their state subsidies.

British aristocrats’ historic disdain for teeming cities — with their distasteful record of providing upward mobility to the lower orders — can now be respectably recast as a desire to protect the green countryside from polluting urban life (http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_how_cities.html). Their long-standing suspicion of working-class communities, who apparently have too many children and are too obsessed with material things, is rehabilitated in the language of “population reduction” to protect “Gaia.” And their preference for the quiet local life, as lived in well-off villages where they are lord of the manor, is given a new lease on life in the discussion of the dangers of “cheap tourism” and of flying foreign food — planted and grown by Africans: yuck! — into the UK.

Most strikingly, environmentalism allows them to once again indulge their backward ideas aboutnatural hierarchies and the rule of the intelligent, eco-minded few over the brash, greedy masses. As Charles says, his new film will remind us of the “natural order of things” — how convenient for the Prince to have discovered a new religion that endorses his long-lost divine right to rule.

— Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/) and the author of Can I Recycle My Granny? And 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas (http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0340955651).

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDAzNjJmZDBmZmJlZjI0OTdmNzc1MGU4MmVkNjY4NjA=

[Vargha Poralli]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Chipko.jpg

Yeah really Aristocraats taking revenge.:rolleyes:

For More info about the image (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipko_movement)

[Vanguard1917]

The Chipko movement was not so much about environmentalism as about peasants responding to the threat to their livelihoods posed by industrial logging. It was then interpreted by environmentalists as a grass-roots environmentalist movement -- as your Wikipedia article points out.*

The phenomenon described in the article in the OP -- members of the privileged classes championing mass austerity via environmentalism -- is very different to the one to which you refer.


* "The Chipko movement, though primarily a livelihood movement rather than a forest conservation movement, went on to become a rallying point for many future environmentalists, environmental protests and movements the world over and created a precedent for non-violent protest."

[Vargha Poralli]

Which essentially disproves your constant record that Environmental Movement was reactionary and the environmental issues are not what we should be concerned of.

[Vanguard1917]

Which essentially disproves your constant record that Environmental Movement was reactionary.

What does?

[Vargha Poralli]

Many grass root struggles does have been formed on the basis to struggle for saving environment from pollution by big businesses.

[Vanguard1917]

You used the Chipko movement as an example of that, and i pointed out that that movement was not motivated by environmentalist politics (e.g. conservationism) but by a simple attempt by peasants to protect their livelihoods. The movement was then championed by environmentalists as a grassroots eco-movement. But it appears that environmentalism was not the content of the movement at all; it was simply a movement very typical of other historic spontaneous and instictive peasant and petit-bourgeois protests against industrial expansion and for class self-preservation (something which, btw, the Communist Manifesto described as 'reactionary' in its very first chapter*).


*'The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.'
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

[MikeSC]

I think there's a need for environmentalism, but having said that I think the premise of the thread is spot on. I used to read the Guardian online, and some of the comments are completely atrocious. People in the Third World who have children called "breeders", who should be restricted and things like that. It's the successor to despicable bourgeois Fabianism, in my opinion.

[Vanguard1917]

I used to read the Guardian online, and some of the comments are completely atrocious. People in the Third World who have children called "breeders", who should be restricted and things like that.

Yeah, the emphasis of Western Malthusian prejudices has traditionally always been on 'them' -- i.e. 'wrong' kind of people overbreeding, whether urban workers in West growing in size and making life more uncomfortable for the nice middle class people in the suburbs, or the 'backward' peoples abroad growing in size and intensifying the world's problems as a result.

[Vargha Poralli]

You used the Chipko movement as an example of that, and i pointed out that that movement was not motivated by environmentalist politics (e.g. conservationism) but by a simple attempt by peasants to protect their livelihoods. The movement was then championed by environmentalists as a grassroots eco-movement. But it appears that environmentalism was not the content of the movement at all; it was simply a movement very typical of other historic spontaneous and instictive peasant and petit-bourgeois protests against industrial expansion and for class self-preservation (something which, btw, the Communist Manifesto described as 'reactionary' in its very first chapter*).


*'The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.'
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm


Yeah same Marx have also said

****In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. [245] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer.*******

Source (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm)

So this also makes Marx a reactionary aristocrat against human progress in you opinion ?

Yeah it is really great to see your Labelling of Chipko movement which had originated among the most oppressed section of the Indian society to defend the only livelihood they posses as reactionary shows on whose side you stand for. Thanks for clearing that up.


I think there's a need for environmentalism, but having said that I think the premise of the thread is spot on. I used to read the Guardian online, and some of the comments are completely atrocious. People in the Third World who have children called "breeders", who should be restricted and things like that. It's the successor to despicable bourgeois Fabianism, in my opinion.


You know world is bigger than Guardian. I hope you don't make opinions about the entire environmental movement by reading some stupid posts in that website.

[MikeSC]

You know world is bigger than Guardian. I hope you don't make opinions about the entire environmental movement by reading some stupid posts in that website.Of course not, but that has been my greatest exposure to members of mainstream environmentalist movements- it should be clear that I'm not, and the article isn't, talking about socialists who are also concerned about the environment because they're an insignificant minority within a minority that's already deeply unpopular with the public. Environmentalists, in being environmentalists only, are not being neutral- they're for the status quo and against socialism.


Yeah it is really great to see your Labelling of Chipko movement which had originated among the most oppressed section of the Indian society to defend the only livelihood they posses as reactionary shows on whose side you stand for. Thanks for clearing that up.

That's not what he said, he said it was a valid movement that got commandeered by posh kids in hemp socks who substituted their own agenda for that of the peoples. Like how the fascists tried to commandeer the protests about unemployment, to turn them towards their own racist agenda.

[Vargha Poralli]

Of course not, but that has been my greatest exposure to members of mainstream environmentalist movements- it should be clear that I'm not, and the article isn't, talking about socialists who are also concerned about the environment because they're an insignificant minority within a minority that's already deeply unpopular with the public. Environmentalists, in being environmentalists only, are not being neutral- they're for the status quo and against socialism.

For the last part I think mostly because of the terrible track record of the Bureaucratic nightmares which called themselves socialists(Cuba might be an Exception). The Fate of Aral Sea might give you a small Idea. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea)

I have posted this often in this same site I would like to do that for you again

The Green Movement was able and continues to engage hundreds of millions of people because it offers people a means of participating in day-to-day life – by recycling their own rubbish and so on, (something learnt from the Women's Movement); organisational methods (consensus decision-making, media-events, focus groups, etc) and non-violent protest tactics developed mainly by the Peace Movement were developed to an even higher level by the Greens, while terrorist tactics are employed by some extreme green groups.

The issues raised by the Green Movement were and remain genuine issues of life and death for humanity; the problems were posed to humanity for the first time in the early 1960s as a result of the gigantic expansion brought about by the post-war boom. No force existed capable of confronting this danger, and the Green Movement came forward to meet this challenge. It seems clear that neither the market nor bureaucratic states in which people have no democratic rights can resolve the problems of environmental destruction; in general the Greens have shown that the problem of preventing destruction of the environment is the same as the problems of poverty and freedom. People who do not have enough to eat or who are ignorant, will not and cannot prevent governments and corporations who are accountable to no-one for destroying Nature.

Source (http://marxists.org/glossary/events/g/r.htm#green-movement). I would suggest to read the entire article in the encyclopedia of MIA.

It is really a shame that a seperate movement was needed historically to fight against the environmental pollution. But we must accept this as a fact it is the failure of the worker's movement to seriously confront this destruction that has given rise to a new movement.

And the conduct of the Left in general towards these environmental issues is what letting the green movements to continue enjoy support among those workers and peasants who are concerned about the destruction of their environments in most cases thier livelihoods. As longs as the "The Left" does nothing other than preaching that Capitalism is what destroying environment workers are never going to take them seriously.

[Vargha Poralli]

That's not what he said, he said it was a valid movement that got commandeered by posh kids in hemp socks who substituted their own agenda for that of the peoples. Like how the fascists tried to commandeer the protests about unemployment, to turn them towards their own racist agenda.

It is absurd comparing Green movement to Nazi Movement just like comparing Stalin to Hitler.

[MikeSC]

It is absurd comparing Green movement to Nazi Movement just like comparing Stalin to Hitler.

Oh I didn't mean that- the protests from a couple of months ago in the UK were just recent examples I could think of. People striking and protesting for jobs, the BNP commandeers it as a way to attack immigrants, completely subverting the original cause.

Thanks for the post, I'll read the links when I get online tomorrow.

[Vanguard1917]

Yeah same Marx have also said

****In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. [245] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer.*******

Source (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm)

So this also makes Marx a reactionary aristocrat against human progress in you opinion ?

While it's true that Marx criticised some of the agricultural practices of his time in one or two passages of his multi-volume writings championing industrial progress and condeming capitalism for holding it back, it's also true that he had no time whatsoever for the environmentalists of his day. Read his criticisms of Daumer, for example,* along with his repeated insistance that mass industrial progress (along with modern mechanised agriculture) is the way forward for humanity**:

* "There is no question, of course, that modern sciences...with modern industry, have revolutionised the whole of nature and put an end to man's childish attitude to nature... For the rest, it would be desirable that Bavaria's sluggish peasant economy, the ground on which priests and Daumers likewise grow, should at last be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines."

** "Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified."

"Hence the great civilizing influence of capital, its production of a stage of society compared with which all earlier stages appear to be merely local progress and idolatory of nature. Nature becomes for the first time simply an object for manking, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognised as a power in its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements, whether as the object of consumption or as the means of production. Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and the inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life. It is destructive of all this, and permanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of the productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces."

"Development of the productive forces of social labour is the historical task and justification of capital. This is just the way that it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher mode of production."


It is really a shame that a seperate movement was needed historically to fight against the environmental pollution. But we must accept this as a fact it is the failure of the worker's movement to seriously confront this destruction that has given rise to a new movement.


The workers' movement did not embrace environmentalism simply because environmentalist demands were considered utterly reactionary and anti-working class. Why working people would not support a political ideology which champions mass austerity and the closing down of people's places of work is not very difficult to understand.



Yeah it is really great to see your Labelling of Chipko movement which had originated among the most oppressed section of the Indian society to defend the only livelihood they posses as reactionary shows on whose side you stand for. Thanks for clearing that up.



It seems that you don't prefer sensible discussion.