for Confusion Review by CARL GARDNER This book"was originally published as a long article in The Ecologist earlier this year but has now been published in an extended version as a paperback. The adulation with which it was originally greeted by the bourgeois press and the influence it will have as a "radical' solution to the crisis of the environment (just one important element in the general crisis of world capitalism make it necessary for Marxists to examine closely the ideological basis of the work and criticise its innumerable deficienceies ruthlessly. Any Leninist group today must form a detailed and comprehensive analysis of this aspect of the crisis of capitalism. And a thorough critique of this liberal programme can serve to provide several pointers in this direction. CONFUSED CONGLOMERATION The book is in effect a confused and naive liberal conglomeration of measures and halfideas, culled from federalism, libertarianism, populism, Marxism, utopian socialism and out-and-out Luddism (with a fair sprinkling of banality), almost all unacknowledged and presented throughout as original (and somehow consistent) thought.
Some of the ideas presented, as might be expected by mere chance, are useful and could well be incorporated in a socialist programme. But the majority, apart from being contradictory, are both unrealisable under capitalism and would be unacceptable under socialism.
For one thing, the authors never really tackle the question of the change from capitalist domination and the social and political conflict this will involve. They speak loosely about getting governments committed to" various measures, of "starting a movement" and forming a party to contest the next general election, tirmly believing that the parliament perfected by capitalism would be able or willing profoundly to challenge the basis of the capitalist social system. The authors operate with a conception of the state as neutral and see its failure to take adequate measures to date as being due merely to "ignorance of the facts. rather than being firmly rooted in its functional relation to the capitalist status quo, and its protective role for a particular out moded economic system. They see the debate as being primarily about the measures to be taken to avert disaster and see the question of who is going to carry them out as secondary "Surely" , they would say, *man is reasonable and logical and once faced with the facts will make haste to change things". Unfortunately capitalism is not logical or reasonable and will protect its illogicality (its profits) by force. The debate which is crucial to this whole issue is that about state power, who holds it, what it is, etc.
Will it be wielded by the majority, those whose labour created the wealth which is being so abused, or the minority, the capitalist class whose insane economic system has produced the situation we are combatting?
LUDDITE CREED The authors hardly mention capitalism -for them it is "industrialisation" in the abstract which has produced the crisis and they advocate what amounts to deindustrialisation, a kind of reactionary, though sophisticated version of the Luddite creed, with its retrogressive bed-fellows, artisan-worship and the intensification of labour-intensive methods of production.
Instead of wanting to use modern technology within the rational framework of a planned economy (with all the pollutioncontrol, re-cycling and total view of the relation of man's production to nature which this would imply) so as to free man from labour, they glorify labour and want to eternally enchain man to a life of work.
They don't see that technology, freed from the constraints and uncontrollable forces of "free" capitalism, is potentially man's greatest aid.
The economic concomitant of the removal of power from the hands of the caritalist class by the working class, is the destruction of exchange-value and the laws of the market -in other words a return to the realisation of use-values - production for need, not profit.
Sybille Plogstedt, one of the first group to be charged after the Russian invasion, looks at One month before the fourth anniversary of On the other hand, Rude Pravo, the organ When we hear Husak's assurances today that