Until Environmentalism Rejects the Marxism in Its Midst It Will Continue to Lose Influence with Everyday Americans
We’ve all heard the ‘green on the outside, red inside"‘ description of environmentalists but, of course, it’s not entirely fair as there are many conservative environmentalists. Indeed, I once got an ‘Environmentalist of the Year” award from my local Audubon Society chapter. I continue what I would describe as traditional conservation causes such as reasonable regulation of development, clean air standards, basic water quality rules, stormwater management and the like. For many, though, environmentalism has become an excuse for degrowth, NIMBYism and Marxist quests for power.
No better example of this rot is available than an outline for a new course offered by The New School, New York City’s ultra-trendy bastion of left-wing indoctrination. The college describes itself as follows:
The New School is a legendary progressive university in New York City. From the start, we've aspired to be open to dissenting opinions and the avant-garde in scholarship and the arts. Students from around the world come to Greenwich Village and The New School to participate in an intellectual life of critical analysis and experimentation. Learning is driven by discussion in classes led by faculty known for their creative, interdisciplinary approach to problem solving. Visit and engage with The New School, find more information, and apply for one of our rigorous, selective programs in art and design, social science, liberal arts, management and public policy, media, or performing arts.
Many of the school’s notable alumni are actors (Marlon Brando, Peter Falk, etc.), but Norman Rockwell came from there as well. It seems to have gotten ever more trendy and avant-garde over the years and I suggest it may have reached the new course being offered for the Fall. It’s titled Research as Accompaniment: Scholar-activist Methodologies for Social, Environmental, & Global Change and is taught by Bhumika Muchhala. An example of her writing may be found here and I confess we share a contempt for BlackRock, but you’ll get the idea who she is from the article. Here is the course description, which says it all (paragraphing and emphasis added):
Due to its past and present complicity in colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, Eurocentric academia has a complicated relationship with oppressed populations around the world. Given this relationship as well as the ever-mounting crises of late capitalist modernity, how can critical and radical scholar-activists sensitively yet effectively engage these populations?
How can they balance methodological rigor, conscientious self-reflection, and their political commitment to progressive social, environmental, and global transformation?
How can they make their work both accessible and actionable for communities, organizations, and movements marginalized or altogether disregarded by the transnational academic-industrial complex?
This course addresses these pressing questions by attempting to re-frame research as accompaniment. Drawing inspiration from the Oaxacan Indigenous concept of acompañamiento (“accompaniment”) and the Zapatista concept of preguntando caminamos (“Questioning, we walk”), it invites students to consider how intellectuals situated within the neo-colonial and neoliberal university can, through their research, forge concrete and mutually beneficial bonds of affinity and solidarity with frontline and fenceline actors fighting capitalism, state violence, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, ecological collapse, and other interlocking oppressions.
This course asks students to contemplate how they can accompany their interlocutors at every stage of the research process, from project design to field or archival research to the interpretation and dissemination of results. Students will review a range of texts on scholar-activist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and other critical and radical approaches to research.
Course materials will equip students with methodological frameworks that challenge the epistemological and axiological foundations of the typically depoliticized, extractivist research process as well as with particular methods that they can use in their own research projects. Students will have the opportunity to develop not only articles for scholarly publications but also editorials, policy proposals, creative interventions, and other research outputs that befit their personal, political, and intellectual goals.
This course, in other words, seeks to train students how, as activists wearing academic masks, to invade and corrupt institutions and propagandize for Marxist policies. And, here’s the outline other course she’s teaching titled Critical Political Ecology/Economy: From Extraction to Regeneration:
This course provides the foundational knowledge for the study of political ecology and political economy from a critical, interdisciplinary, global and Earth system perspective. It proceeds from the question: What background and tools are necessary to rigorously examine the intertwined ecological and economic crises of late capitalism and to substantiate viable alternatives?
By critically intervening at the intersections of political ecology, political economy, environmental science, development studies, environmental geography, and subaltern history, it provides the theoretical, historical and empirical basis to analyze how resoure extraction and transnational capital circulation disrupts Earth system processes (geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere).
Yet in analyzing the making of the world-system economy/ecology of Euroamerican colonial capitalist modernity, it also charts the histories of alternative social ecologies. On the one hand, the course traces the genealogy of dominant ideas, theories, texts and institutions, where the colonial capitalist and imperial reorganization of world ecology is enabled by epistemological, governance and management systems that undermine Earth processes, ecosystems, biotic and human communities, thereby creating an ecological rift.
This provides the background knowledge and conceptual tools needed to substantiate a rigorous critique of dominant ideas, institutions, theories, texts, models, institutions and assumptions. Assumptions subject to critique include, for instance, the human/nature divide, nature as resources, the rational actor model, the naturalization of self-interest, scarcity, and endless growth, utility maximization, technocratic management, and the supposed inevitability of modernization and developmentalism.
This in relation to historical and contemporary issues like the coloniality of mainstream conservation and natural resource management, the extraction and plantation economy, the industrialization (and green industrialization) of economic sectors, the recursive expansion of extractivist frontiers, and the proliferation of commodity and supply chains at the expense of biogeochemical cycles and diverse biotic and cultural communities.
Grounded in interdisciplinary Earth systems complexity science and radical ecological economics, the course thus deconstructs the genealogy of mainstream paradigms like (neo)classical political economy, modernization, ecological modernization, neoliberalism, green neoliberalism, and developmentalism (including sustainable development).
On the other hand, the course foregrounds the subjugated histories of ideas and movements that in defending territories and communities, have sought to repair ecological rifts upon principles of regenerative and cooperative place-based autonomy, dignity, equity, and resilience. This is a living history that serves to substantiate viable alternatives and transformative paradigms like (eco)feminism,(eco)Marxism; postcolonialism, decolonialism, Indigenous, post-development, degrowth, post-extractivism, and environmental/climate justice.
And, there you have it; (eco)Marxism in all its glory. How is anyone supposed to take this stuff seriously? Environmentalism is in the self-destruct stage of life.
#Environmentalism #Climate #NewSchool #Marxism #EcoMarxism
"How can they make their work both accessible and actionable for communities, organizations, and movements marginalized or altogether disregarded by the transnational academic-industrial complex?
Drawing inspiration from the Oaxacan Indigenous concept of acompañamiento "
No irony in using a Colonialist Spanish word then for this SJW?
I particularly enjoy the word salad irrational PhDs subject their students to (or inculcate in the ways of said stupidity). Adding 'ality' to words and mangling together adverbs and adjectives to look smart only makes it obvious how I'll educated they are. Unfortunately arguing with these faux intellects is nearly impossible because without an agreement on the data at hand or what words mean to both parties, there can only be talking past each other. It's pathetic.