Book: Capitalism is Bad for Environment

[RyanPsych]

Book Review
Red Roots, Green Shoots
By Virginia Brodine, edited by Marc Brodine
International Publishers, 2007

In 2007, International Publishers released Red Roots Green Shoots. Since then, we have experienced another global financial crisis (April 2007 - present), the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (March 2010) and the ongoing nuclear fiasco at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan (March 2011 - present). These events highlight the need for us to reconsider our economic and environmental practices. This collection of Marxist environmentalism provides that opportunity. The book expands our timeline and looks back on the work of communist activist Virginia Brodine from 1976 to 1999. These essays, articles, speeches, conference papers and newspaper columns provide a detailed chronological account for this segment of the modern U.S. environmental movement.

Marc Brodine, the editor and son of the late author, wisely chose a variety of writings that reflect the important economic and political happenings of the times. These selected works include the necessary Marxist philosophies and examples of practice that make this book a living document. Most mainstream environmental groups and activists take a piecemeal approach when addressing ecological problems, rather than focusing on the capitalist treadmill of production. Red Roots provides a decisive analysis of our unsustainable relationship with the earth, and offers an excellent starting point to learn about environmental socialism or eco-socialism.

continue reading at : http://www.peoplesworld.org/capitalism-bad-for-the-environment-says-book/

[Silent3]

1. Damn those capitalists at Chernobyl!

Damn those capitalists who drained Lake Aral!

You say those weren't capitalists? No! Ah, but they weren't "true" Marxists either! And they had to compete against a capitalist war machine, so they had no choice!

You can regulate capitalism to make it much better for the environment. Will those regulations fail to work all of the time? Of course. According to the standard anti-capitalist rant, when the regulations fail it's the inevitable outcome of capitalism.

Can you create a Marxist or socialist or communist system that's good for the environment? Of course. Will it be eternally environmentally perfect? Of course not. But when it fails, will Marxism or socialism or communism ever be the problem? Perish the thought! According to the standard anti-capitalist rant, those failures will be anything but failures of Marxism or socialism or communism. In fact, if there's any capitalism left anywhere else in the world beyond the borders of the non-capitalist country that has an environmental failure, that'll be a good candidate for blame.

It's very easy for a non-capitalist system to outshine the admittedly bad environmental record of capitalism when every failure in a capitalist system is blamed on capitalism itself, and when the non-capitalist system is either a completely theoretical construct with no real-world track record, or it's a real world non-capitalist system, but with excuses for excluding all or most of its environmental failings as not "counting" for one reason or another.

[bread_and_roses]

2. Of course it is. Which makes it bad for humans, of course. Not to mention...

...that it is especially bad for children. And workers. Capitalism commodifies eveything - even our genes. It takes an artificial construct - "capital" - and elevates it above the real. That even our Labor movement - whatever we say - acts in accordance with this lunacy is both shameful and illustrative of how deeply this delusion is embedded.

[former9thward]

3. There were no bigger polluters in the history of the world

than the Soviet Union, China and the Eastern European Soviet client states.

[RyanPsych]

4. you left out

the U.S.