JimmyJazz

"What do you think about the fact that socialist countries have been criticized by bourgeois apologists for their former stances on homosexuality? Or that imperialist apologists have used the same issue to build support for an attack on Iran? Does this invalidate the progressive nature of the call for full civil rights for gays?"

I believe that equality for gay people is progressive. I don't, however, think that there is anything progressive about the core ideas of enviromentalism.

"Interesting, but your claim that environmentalism is inherently Malthusian is just wrong. You can see here a Marxist and a Malthusian arguing over the issue of environmental sustainability--see especially the last post, which makes clear the dichotomy between a population solution and a consumption habits solution to environmental waste:"

Well, i see attacking working class consumption levels -- i.e. demands that the consumption levels of the masses need to be reduced -- as also deeply reactionary and anti-working class. After all, who needs the bosses and the state to enforce austerity and cuts in living standards, when you have environmentalists doing it and passing it off as radical?

A forward-looking critique of the current system needs to put forth progressive solutions -- neither population control nor cuts in mass consumption levels is the answer.

The trouble is that the vast majority of the environmental movement still contains core ideas which are fundamentally backward. I have yet to find an 'environmentalist' viewpoint that does not share the anti-development and Malthusian theses pretty much inherent to environmentalism itself.

Btw, if you're interested, i discussed Foster (editor of Monthly Review) and his extreme distortion of Marxism, in this post: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...9&postcount=12

Hi, thanks for your message. There's a fairly recent book by Marxist writer James Heartfield called 'Green Capitalism' which makes some interesting arguments about the way that environmentalism is being used by elites in the West to justify underdevelopment. More generally, have a look at the internet magazine spiked-online for a large archive of critical articles, book reviews and essays discussing, from a radical perspective, environmentalism and its role in contemporary politics.