It is said that Clare Short held talks with the Green Party about becoming a Green Party MP, after she left the Labour Party, could I comment on this, well what would I know! LOL!
Seriously despite some disasters that she was very honest about, she did some great things as MP.
She has a great blog and reviews Francis Wheen's Marx bio here.
(apologies for the stupid photo, its my blog innit, and if it makes me laugh it goes up!)
Now we see the same conditions being generated in China and the same resistance of workers demanding better conditions. But what Marx did not see was that the oil, gas, coal, steel and other resources that drove industrialisation were finite in quantity. These are the new constraints that will drive the next phase of history. We must share the resources and use them sustainably. Technologies are available to solve all our problems and give a decent life to everyone living on our planet. But our model of the expectation of endless economic growth, material consumption and the encouragement of greed is not sustainable and does not make people happy.
However Clare, Marx was obsessively concerned with ecology, something lost by much of the left in the 20th century and despite your inspiring comments on the need for ecosocialist economics, forgotten by you.
He and Engels endlessly worried about air pollution, fish toxins, soil erosion, industrial pollution forest destruction, etc, in a way that would have made Jonathon Porritt and Caroline Lucas blanche with shame in comparison.
The hombre with the beard, got to the roots of the matter, noting, in Capital vol 3
“EFrom the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”
Red-green politics starts with Marx.
And here is his and Engels thoughts about fish:
But the latter ceases to be the ‘essence’ of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence
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