The following is excerpted from the must read article 'Where Have All the Marxists Gone?' by Jim Peron. The Freeman • December 2002 • Volume: 52 • Issue: 12
Green "Logic"
Again, Green logic is a wonder to behold. For millennia humankind thought that poverty existed as man’s default status. Effort, energy, and thinking are used to create wealth. Where most people saw wealth creation as an evolutionary process by which we left poverty behind, the Greens say this is false. Poverty was created at the same time wealth was created. But what existed before poverty and wealth? We see poor people become rich all the time. We see man’s evolution as moving from a state of deprivation to a state of relative plenty. But if poverty and wealth developed jointly, what came before them?
This Green logic, however, is necessary to achieve the real agenda: the eradication of wealth. If you accept that wealth created poverty, then the destruction of wealth will destroy poverty. In the Memo, the authors merely say they want to "reform" wealth. But they do become more explicit.
As they see it, the problem is wealth itself, not its unequal distribution either in consumption or production. The idea of lifting the Third World out of poverty and despair is the wrong policy, according to the Greens. Such developmental ideas "advocate remedies for raising the living standards of the poor"(p. 35). What’s wrong with that? The Memo answers: "In short, they work at lifting the threshold-rather than lowering or modifying the roof. . . . Poverty alleviation, in other words, cannot be separated from wealth alleviation" (p. 35).
Thus the real Green agenda is "wealth alleviation," and all the movement’s policies are intended to do just that: reduce the wealth of Western "consumer classes." And it doesn’t mean reducing it by the piddling amounts envisioned by the Kyoto Protocol on alleged global warming. It means the destruction of the bulk of wealth in the world today. The Memo makes this clear: "the global North will need to bring down its overall use of the environmental space by a factor of 10, i.e. by 80-90 percent, during the coming fifty years" (p. 36). Memo author Roddick, once gushed about Castro’s Cuba, saying that it amazed her "how quickly you could fall in love with the economics of less."2 But then she’s a multimillionaire.
Wouldn’t this mean a return to a primitive state? Of course it would. But this is precisely what the Greens want. They are advocates of primitive tribalism over Western science and development. As far as they are concerned, science is a form of colonialism, an arrogant Western invention that diminishes the true value of "traditional" societies and their deeper understanding of the planet. That primitive communities still cling to existence in backwaters and remote regions of the world is alluded to as proof of their ability to create genuine knowledge. "[T]he success and long term sustainability of traditional strategies of generating and communicating knowledge" proves they are useful.3
The idea of a primitive paradise has Old Testament roots and it eventually evolved into the secular myth of the "noble savage." Rousseau’s idea of the "state of nature," where man lived in perfect harmony with nature, has long been a favorite with the radical Left. For Rousseau, such a state was one where man is "wandering up and down the forest, without industry, without speech, and without home, an equal stranger to war and to all ties, neither standing in need of his fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them and perhaps not even distinguishing them one from another."4 That such a state never existed is irrelevant to leftwing theology. Rousseau, like all good leftists, argues that it was private property that destroyed man’s paradise. Private ownership, he says, resulted in war and misery and the destruction of the mythical garden of social equality.
The Greens have merely adapted Rousseau’s secularized version of Eden and proposed public policy based on this imaginary state. In his book Wild in the Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage, Robert Whelan provides many quotations showing that the Greens, like those who wrote the Jo’burg Memo, believe that "indigenous" primitive groups lived in a perfect state with nature before the arrival of the evil westerners.5
Roddick used her chain of Body Shop stores to promote this kind of false history. A bag for her expensive soaps and fragrances had printed on it: "The wisdom of the world’s indigenous peoples is the accumulation of centuries of living not just on the land, but with it."6
But the "indigenous peoples" were terribly wasteful and destructive. Around the globe, including North America, tribes routinely slaughtered animals without concern for replenishing the stock. (See Larry Schweikart’s "Buffaloed: The Myth and Reality of Bison in America" in this issue.) Whelan notes that in Australia the arrival of the aborigines led quickly to the demise of several "’giant’ macropodids (kangaroos and related species). Within 15,000 years, all were extinct."7 In Madagascar natives drove several species of giant lemurs to extinction. The Maoris of New Zealand, science writer Matt Ridley said, "sat down and ate their way through all twelve species of the giant moa birds."8 The Aztecs of Mexico managed to deplete their soil. These are only a few of many such examples, all of which prove that the Greens are merely creating another false story to promote their agenda.
Read the whole thing here: Where Have All the Marxists Gone? »»
