The downsides of Wrong Kind of Green

Recently, I wrote a blog post about Wrong Kind of Green, and frequent and prolific writer Corey Morningstar's in-depth series about how neoliberal environmentalist NGOs have, a la Noam Chomsky, "manufactured consent" around Greta Thunberg.

The ultimate goal seems to be a "capitalism as usual" battle against climate change.

This I reject.

But, I also reject a lot of the background mindset of Wrong Kind of Green.

First, in his newest update, Morningstar seems to be falling into the fallacious belief that native peoples are Roussellian noble savages on the environment. Tain't so. Not so at all. Pre-Columbian Contact, American Indians had slavery, the bestiality of Aztec human sacrifices and other things. Today, American Indians have Utes drilling for oil and gas, others tribes operating casinos, etc. etc. And, please don't try to blame all of that on American Indians being co-opted and brainwashed. The potlatch culture of the Pacific Northwest, which also existed pre-Contact, shows that something along the lines of western capitalism was here before Columbus was. (In the most extreme potlatch events, slaves were killed on the same bonfires used to destroy material goods.)

That's far from the only problem with WKOG, too.

One is either a moral self-blindness or something similar. Calling wind farms "Fossil Fuel+" because they expropriate indigenous people is true to the degree that's true. That said, it's no more true than it is with fossil fuels themselves. If they use this to mean we not only need to de-carbonize but de-electricize? No, you first. Shut down your website. It's just like with people pushing population reduction around the world. No, you first.

The biggest problem of WKOG is that most writers there are Marxist. Marxism, whether in its traditional form or modern spinoff, is pseudoscience within what's already the scientifically weakest of the social sciences. No, really. Hegelian dialectic is crappy philosophy and pseudoscience when used as the basis for a theory of economics. Period and end of story. And Marx himself was as dogmatic as Herr Hitler.

Beyond that, I wouldn't call myself an anti-capitalist. With WKOG, I see enough problems with capitalism of today to call myself a post-capitalist, at least in my yearnings, but not an anti-capitalist.

Beyond that, what IS capitalism and when did it start? I certainly see capitalism as being centuries older than when Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations." Does it go back to when Croesus allegedly issued the first coinage? Tang China's first paper money? Medieval Italians' double-entry bookkeeping?

Or maybe, to riff on "The Gods Must Be Crazy" and some anthropologists, the invention of the triad, basically, of cultivated agriculture, settled civilization and private property.

For me, this plays out in my voting. I'm currently a Green at the presidential level and in most other cases where available. If the GP screws the pooch enough, my next destination would be SPUSA. But, I could never go further "left" than that.