Why Marx would have been a denier

Snowman

well now, I recall with nostalgic embarrassment being told that the Marxism inspired societal constructs were ‘commanding the rains and the winds’. A fat lot of good did it do either for the people who were fed this pap, or for the survival of the regimes themselves.

Nature has, and will continue to trump any attempts by us to manipulate it, be it by Marxist zealots one way, or environmentally fanatical ecochondriacs the other. Adaptation to the nature’s overwhelming powers has been and will remain the surest way of survival.

Roger Raven

Rupert Darwell’s self-serving half-truths by definition misrepresent the issue.

“During the Cold War, the communist bloc had no interest in the environmental questions that were moving up the agenda of the West”, yet he then writes that “Of the 152 international experts selected ahead of the UN Stockholm conference in 1972, … six [were] from the Soviet Union. It is a representative measure of Rupert Darwell's attitude to the facts that he equates six with zero.

Given the enormous resistance to action on climate change being put up by the climate change denialists and the vested interests, and the gross shortcomings of such schemes as are being put to conferences such as Kyoto and Copenhagen, Rupert and others would seem grossly hypocritical to portray the institutional indifference to environmental issues in the Comecon countries as being unique to state socialist systems.

Allow me to quote some headlines from a number of issues of the monthly periodical “Soviet Union”: “The Aral Sea: Problems and Solutions” (No. 3, 1989), “Ecological Security of the Planet” (front cover, No. 3, 1990), “The Cost of Free Water” (No. 8 1989), “Ecology Sounds the Alarm” (No.5 1986), “A Procurator Turns Into An Ecologist” (No. 12 1989).

Capitalist restoration has done nothing good for repair of the ecology - or indeed delivered almost any other real and lasting social benefit - in the former Comecon countries. But it has allowed for the much greater dumping of Western Europe’s waste there. Similarly, the pollution once emanating from European and American industry has not been erased, but transferred to China and other parts of Asia.

To quote a Hungarian university student in 1996, “"In the 1950s there was the belief that there simply weren't nature conservation problems in socialist countries because natural resources were being harnessed for the benefit of the workers. Today, nature conservation is seen as an obstacle holding back development and marketisation. It's this vadkapitalista (or "wild capitalist") perspective that we are up against."”

Product packaging in state socialist countries was minimal, meaning that while it didn’t favour slick marketing techniques, it was easily re-usable and re-cyclable. Not today’s packaging!

Thus, Western lobbyists can give us arrogant lectures on the ecological virtues of capitalism in the West because although pollution remains an essential part of consumerism, its relative invisibility to ordinary Westerners allows that inconvenient truth to be conveniently hidden.