Grünen Kapitalismus - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

stances of direct action have targeted the destruction of rainforests in the
Pacific Northwest and the practice of mountaintop-removal in the coalmining
regions of West Virginia. 210
Speed is of the essence, as efforts to save the environment must outpace
the continuation of existing trends. The alarm is so great that a small
sector of younger environmental activists has turned to more problematic
forms of direct action such as burning SUVs that are for sale. Despite
the validity of complaints against the automobile industry in general and
SUVs in particular, this tactic risks legitimizing efforts of the authorities
to link radical environmentalism with terrorism. The real threat to the
status quo, which has nothing to do with terrorism, is the frontal clash
with capital that a full ecological agenda will bring.
It is not yet clear what organizational form will characterize the proecology
forces in that confrontation. The strictly “ecologically defined”
forces seem to become more fragmented as they become more militant.
Anti-capitalism yields ground, in some of those sectors, to a mindset
which tends to blame environmental devastation on the human species
as such. On a different level, some useful educational and local political
work has been done in the US by local sections of the Green Party, whose
membership is receptive to anti-capitalist analysis but has avoided articulating
a comprehensive alternative to capitalism. But radical electoral
challengers in the US context – given the country’s size, administrative
divisions, and electoral laws – will invariably have trouble reaching a
wide public in the absence of a truly massive social movement. The social
movement approach has been taken up in a promising way by the
Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, 211 which has led mass
action focusing at once on transit needs and on air quality, informed by
a wide-ranging anti-capitalist analysis which links local with global issues,
stressing especially the importance of achieving working-class unity
across racial and ethnic lines. This and other local organizations make
up a growing Environmental Justice movement, which has counterparts
as distant as the peasant movements in India, and whose role entails integrating
environmentalism with class struggle.
210 See interview with Mike Roselle, of the group Climate Ground Zero, Democracy Now!
(April 8, 2009), www.democracynow.org/2009/4/8/the_struggle_against_mountaintop
_removal_leading
211 www.thestrategycenter.org
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