Making the Green one red: environmental politics

National Review, March 19, 1990 by David Horowitz

IN THE TWO hundred years since the French Revolution, conservatives have been waging a rearguard struggle in defense of freedom against the forces of the radical Left.

It was the events in France that introduced "revolution" into our political vocabulary as a term meaning the absolute break with an existing order and the establishment of a radically new one: a government of Virtue to replace the despotism of Tradition, a religion of Reason to replace religions of Faith, the true order of Nature to replace the artificial system of Society. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the French Revolution also introduced the concept and practice of political terror. For behind the radical impulse is a consciousness alien to all that is human, rejecting the historically given needs and desires of ordinary people--which is why the radical effort to maintain its order always requires radical forces. For a hundred years this political combat has taken the form of an international civil war instigated by the Marxist heirs of Robespierre and Saint-Just against the democratic market societies of the West.

The radical differs from the reformer who seeks only to right particular wrongs; the radical seeks to annihilate the social order itself. His rebellion, in the words of Marx, is "not against any wrong in particular but against wrong as such." It is this radical idea that produces the radical's alienation from humanity.

What can justify the nihilism of the revolutionary agenda? Only a vision of the existing order as totally unjustified, unnatural, destructive. On the eve of Lenin's conquest of power, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg summarized this vision of a radical apocalypse in the slogan "socialism or barbarism"--if mankind did not choose the socialist future, civilization would be destroyed by capitalist barbarism and its imperialist wars.

The apocalyptic claim is the cornerstone of radical politics. If the cause is absolute, everything is permitted, and the real work of revolution can--and must--be carried out with no look back. Thus, in the name of everlasting peace, Marxists wage permanent revolutionary war; in the name of a final human liberation, they enslave entire nations; in the name of ultimate justice, they commit unparalleled crimes.

For more than seventy years this served to justify the destruction of the existing societies behind the iron curtain and to legitimize the institution of the Soviet future. But those seventy years have made Rosa Luxemburg's claim grotesque. Today--from Estonia to Armenia, from Alexanderplatz to Tianamen Square--the sea of humanity liberated by Marxism itself proclaims: Socialism is barbarism.

Even as its own inhumanity and inefficiency consume revolutionary socialism in the East, however, a specter can be seen rising from its ashes in the West. The colors are no longer red but green, the accents are those of Malthus rather than Marx, but the missionary project is remarkably intact. The planet is still threatened, the present is still condemned, redemption through radical politics still presses. In environmentalism radicals have found a new paradigm for the paradigm lost.

Thus, the official program of France's Green Party echoes Rosa Luxemberg's apocalyptic cry: "The future will be green or will not be at all." The blunt expression of the founder of American "social ecology," Murray Bookchin, exhibits the distinctive accents of the totalitarian voice: "We can't heal the environment without remaking society."

The old radical Adam is back. "From all the knowledge we now have about environmental issues," writes Jonathon Porritt, a spokesman for Britain's Ecology Party and director of Friends of the Earth, "the inevitable conclusion is that our way of life cannot be sustained . . . we cannot go on living as we do now." When he hears politicians say that they care for the environment and thus want to achieve "sustainable growth," it leaves him "spitting with rage." We cannot continue "with [our] same material living standard and at the same time be warriors on behalf of the planet."

Thus radical ecology leads to the familiar threat. "We in the West have the standard of living we do only because we are so good at stripping the Earth of its resources and oppressing the rest of the world's people in order to maintain that wealth." To achieve ecological balance means "progressively narrowing the gap to reduce the differences between the Earth's wealthiest and poorest inhabitants," until there are "more or less equal shares for all people."

Karl Marx described this prescription aptly 150 years ago:

Primitive Communism is only the

culmination of . . . every and leveling down

. . . How little this abolition of private

property represents a genuine

appropriation is shown by [its] abstract

negation of the whole world of culture and

civilization, and [its] regression to the

unnatural simplicity of the poor, rough man

without wants, who has not only not

surpassed private property but has not yet

even attained to it.