Grünen Kapitalismus - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

leading activist, and his role in spearheading the “350.org” movement 191
is without question a positive one. We can expect that, as such a movement
grows, its more astute participants – inspired perhaps by McKibben
but not limited by him – will come to understand through experience
the role of capitalist structures in blocking their efforts. They will
then be more open to arguments for socialism, especially if these come
from activists.
The environmentalist movement, like all the other manifestations of
progressive activism in the US, suffers from the absence of a hegemonic
socialist/Marxist analysis. More troubling still is the fact that this absence
is not even widely perceived to be a problem. Not for the first time
in US history, the younger generation of radical activists is powerfully influenced
by anarchism. Or, more precisely, they have experience which
makes them receptive to such influence, and the attraction is reinforced
both negatively – by the continuing marginalization of the organized
Left and of Marxist theory – and positively, by a culture of spatial atomization
and radical individualism.
The theoretical approaches that we have examined reinforce the anarchist
predisposition, in that while they acknowledge capital’s deleterious
economic role, they do not extend their critique to the capitalist state.
They speak and write in terms which treat restraints upon capital as
a readily available political option – a matter of passing the appropriate
legislation – rather than as an agenda that calls into question class-power
in society and therefore the class make-up of the state. The perspective
at issue thus does not encourage recognition of the need to take state
power – and to transform its class basis – as a precondition for moving
toward whatever green or localist visions might inspire us. It implicitly
views state power (suitably stripped of any class content) as a given:
as something either to be petitioned for the desired laws or to be denounced
as inherently hostile – regardless of possible change in its class
identity – to popular aspirations.
State power in the US, such as it is, is confronted by a wide array of environment-related
organizations, many of them embodying popular and
191 See above, note 178.
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