[R-G] THE UNABOMBER AND GREEN ANARCHISM

[Macdonald Stainsby]

> I can't claim the educational credentials of Mr. Proyect, nor the acumen,
> nor the erudition.  As a radical and as a marxist, I'm an autodidact, a
> simple retired army sergeant trying to make amends for a career in the
> service of imperialism.  So my criticisms here are put forward with the
> greatest humility.

Stan, it is always ironic to me how the people who have the least to be humble
about produce the most humility. From just the little pieces of your work I have
seen in cyberspace, consider yourself free and clear, as I said in my short note
before, . There is nothing more beautiful in humanity than your form of treason.
Serious as I can be in saying that.

>
[*snip comments about Christianity*]

> One group of people I work with regularly are anarchists.  They may be
> theorteically and ideologically fuzzy (the rest of us, I'm sure, emerged
> from the womb as fully conscious leninists), but they show up--far more
> often, I might add, than the local Marxist intellectuals from the
> University--and they are willing to make a fight.

This is extremely true. The reason we all see and hear so much from Anarchists
might have something to do with their emphasis on action. Tenure isn't all it's
cracked up to be. I personally find that time and results (despite my
differences, which there are many) brought about by these Black flagged comrades
has me impressed on a regular basis. I am not interested in selling newspapers
to the demonstration, and the populace doesn't care for that either. The reds
who marched with the "blacks" in many demonstrations I have attended in the last
couple of years seem to have a finger on the pulse of what is actually up.

> And whether they
> articulate it or not in their pronouncements, they are there when there's a
> worker's fight just as they are there to save an old growth forest.

This list is a wonderful place to try and sort out how to deal with this
contradiction, because I only wish what you say here were true. Yes, more and
more people are seeing through the lie of "jobs vs. forests", but that initial
hostility and crux still is a major problem. So, when we see the false dichotomy
taking place, what is our response, beyond explanation? How do we deal with this
situation?

> So,
> while I and other marxists will debate with them, that style of debate does
> not include name-calling.  We've learned, some of us, that you catch more
> flies with honey than you do with vinegar, and we don't punctuate our
> arguments with epithets like "reactionary."

I agree with you on this one immensely. What is needed is also a Marxist
understanding (and I'm a definitive Marxist) of the huge gains in producing a
mass movement that have been made by these "reactionary" Anarchists. The
so-called "propaganda of the deed" has been a tremendous bell-ringer for so many
people who have seen their frustration channeled into useless NGO's or electoral
politics. It has only been the Anarchists who have taken the battle to the
"Earth Rapers", to borrow a phrase from Earth First! propaganda. For this
trouble, they have been given what is the initial beginning of the next
McCarthyite-style political culture- which will be geared and directed in a
combination of ridicule and politcal attack on our Anarchist comrades. It will
be the first time such has happened in North America since nearly the turn of
the last century.

With that in mind, any criticisms we bring to bear towards any of our comrades
(regardless of ideological label at the outset) need to be in the spirit not of
ideological and intellectual conquest, but synthesis that propels us towards
power conquest.

> It's great arcane shorthand
> for marxists when they are alone with one another, but a great way to fuck
> up a good relationship in "mixed company," like this list.  Claiming they
> are bypassing the class struggle because they don't say enough about it,
> when they are actually in the streets with us in practice, seems a good way
> to provoke a sometimes justified defensiveness.

Yes. I must profess that Mr Proyect didn't write this for Rad Green, so he's not
guilty of provocation here. Perhaps I am.

> The ones I know actually
> have quite a bit to say about class struggle, even if their understanding
> of the state is something I will engage them in a debate about.  And as a
> marxist, I have a lot of experience being on the receiving end of straw man
> arguments, so I am loathe to subject others to the same kind of
> generalizing and distorting gambit.
>

Yeah, well you never did understand the national question in Poland. Shame on
you.


> On Red-Green dialectics, I guess my understanding of dialectics is that as
> an interpretive tool (one facet), we examine relations (always changing),
> factor in new knowledge and insight, synthesize, and historicize.
>
Then, as a supporter of active anarchism and a comrade that will not break such
ranks- I want to engage in what is wrong (to my view) with trying to propose
that "civilization" itself is an enemy. What is it about the modern radical
movement as it is developing that makes people resort to such Luddite
Malthusianism as an ideology? Is it simply a reflection of and reaction to
revulsion towards the worst of Stalinism and it's promise of the
supra-civilization of the future? Or is there a deeper angle?

Can this ideology continue to occupy a place in the new mass movements in
co-existence with Unions, radical independents, environmentalists from the city,
etc? Is such an ideology self-isolating?


> One of the points brought up repeatedly on the Crashlist, and for which I
> have heard no credible counter-argument, is that industrialization
> developed through the exploitation of fossil fuels has some profound
> implications for our future as a species that exosomatically uses energy.
> While there were some Malthusian echoes, if you go in for that kind of
> dismissive -ism argument, the points about population and energy stand.
> Couterposing it to a "M"arxist analysis strikes me as a little doctrinaire,
> and as a false dichotomy.  For me, the simple old soldier, marxism is a
> method, not a doctrine, and it is called historical materialism, and there
> have been new insights in feminism and ecology discovered using that
> method, that point to some limitations and errors in past applications.

Ironically, successful or not, people like Judi Bari have done far more for
revitalising a Marxist attitude (in a real materialist sense- that we are part
of and not lords over nature) that had been almost extinguished by decades of
hyper-industrialising. So, when we realise that the Earth is indeed finite- what
the heck is the answer for say, India? What can we in the first world do to
resolve the class AND the environmental concerns of South Asia? I do not feel at
all comfortable complaining and pointing fingers at China for trying to "catch
up" after they stood up, while here we consume the front end fruits of
imperialist enviro-rape. Yet, obviously there must be a line- how do we approach
it with respect to all concerned?

> Calling the capitalist mode of production the ROOT CAUSE, and implying
> therein that this is the only subject worthy of examination or struggle,
> seems a little religious to me.  Industrialization damn well DOES cause
> environmental degradation, not just because of the capitalist developmental
> origin, but because the manipulation of specific materials in that
> process--like fossil fuels--is INHERENTLY problematic.
>

Okay: So what is to be done? Not to be cheeky, but we need to establish an
alternative measure for such a process. A global socialist system, in which
countries can fill a role economically on an equal footing and receive the same
can quell the desire to advance into an industrialization binge by providing the
same fruits. Yet, there is a problem. We are a long way from GLOBAL power
(which, I dare say, might spell our end- but not without a fight).


> That does not change the correctness of most of Mr. Proyect's historical
> overview of capitalist development.  These twin truths need to be
> integrated, not opposed to one another to draw yet another sectarian line.
> As an aside, neither did his argument--in my humble opinion--prosper from
> the ritual simplification and denunciation of Stalin, which takes us back
> the tedious partisan Trotsky-Stalin wars on the left, wherein both "camps"
> keep an intellectual Kashmir going for decades with this periodic exchange
> of artillery volleys.
>

I tend to ignore these references unless they come from someone like Louis, who
it should be noted is hostile to "taking sides" in such a debate. Our greatest
ability to move forward will come from learning the fundamental lesson (and this
is applicable to all ideologies on the left) that no matter who you are, you
cannot direct a revolution from somewhere other than the country itself and
through experience. The enduring lesson to me is that "internationals" (not to
be confused with internationalism) are to be avoided and we need to trust our
comrades (of all flag colours) to fight their battles based on information we do
not have away from their location.

> I agree with much of his analysis with regard to the "genetic
> predispositions" of capitalism, but this kind of general theorizing does
> very little--and this may be a bit unfair, so I apologize in advance--to
> help us identify the concrete targets of our struggle in the here-and-now,
> where Greens and Reds have a great deal of common ground.  I want to engage
> Greens in the converstaion with Reds, and I think they will be convinced by
> the correspondence of lived experience to marxist insight into essences if
> we don't throw it down like a gauntlet.

Well, if you can be picky, so can I. There is no such dichoctomy as Reds AND
greens, but Green Reds, and vice Versa. It was a deep concern for the livable
planet being saved that pointed me originally towards socialism and revolution.
That will not change, and Marx only made me a more confirmed green. It also led
me to respect Anarchists again on a different level-  direct action to save the
human race from extinction- the ultimate capitalist apocolypse.


Just as I don't attack the
> religions of my allies--which Marx himslef identified as a kind of
> medication, and therefore declined to attack--I am not going to go for the
> throat when people describe their very real attachment to "nature,"
> problematic as that concept is--partly because I myself enjoy forests, and
> rivers, and mangrove, and mountains, and I understand why these things are
> valued for what they are.

If I ever have to leave a part of the world where I can easily reach the beauty
of earth, my existence will be diminshed and my struggle will weaken.


>I can't quantify my emotional attachment to
> them, but I have come to despise the bulldozers that are busily tearing up
> the forest near my home as I write this, and have often considered
> monkeywrenching as a good alternative way to take my exercise.  Blanquist
> as it may be.  I still work with the union, still organize political
> coalitions, still engage, when I can, in these clarifying debates.
>
> Those are some of my thoughts, and they should not be construed as an
> attack.  Louis Proyect and I are on the same side in the final analysis:
> communists at the end of the day, because we work for the end of property,
> exploitation, and alienation... and probably for some harmony with our
> material surroundings and fellow members of the biosphere.
>
> For a new future,
>
> Stan Goff

To me, this is the way forward. A mini-glimpse of why indeed:
"A better World IS Possible".

Warm revolutionary regards,
Macdonald Stainsby