Page 26 RAIN Summer 1986 Building the Green ' Movement, by Rudolf Bahro, 1986, 211 pp., $9.95 from: New Society Publishers 4722 Baltimore Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19143 Rudolf Bahro, one of the leading theoreticians of the German Greens (die Grtinen), r~signed from the party in June of 1985. In his resignation speech, which is included in this book, he said that he was not getting out of politics, just out of party politics. What went wrong? This book, which is a collection of articles, interviews, and speeches, traces Bahro's growing dissatisfaction with the compromises that Greens are increasingly willing to make with the Social Democrats (SPD). He is op.posed to an alliance with the SPD because they are unwilling ~ question the basic economic goal of production for world markets and are committed to military "defense." Bahro advocates .immediate unilateral disarmament. He thinks that our industrial civilization needs to be abandoned, rather than reformed. It is, in his words, a "train heading for th~ abyss." He does not believe that concerns about unemployment should be allowed to compromise plans for radical social and economic change. This is because the longer we participate in the "Megamachine" the more irrepar;able will be the damage done to the ecosystem, of which all living beings are a part and upon which we all depend. Bahro urges the creation of a "postmodern, post.:.industrial" way of life. This presupposes "the existence of a network of interlinked base communities.... These would produce their basic needs in the way of food, clothing, housing, education, and health care to a large extent by their own labour [and] decide on some specialized production mainly for exchange in the immediate locality.... " He thinks that the government should provide the start-up capital for these communities. ' Bahro says that "we should be-prepared to entertain the idea that in the last two hundred years evolution has gone wrong." He states his case zealously: "You want participation in government and joint responsibility foi: this richest, most powerful European province of the empire with which the white m·an, irresistable through ·his capitalist system, has overrun the whole of humanity _and driven· it towards the end ACCESS: Society· of history. We o~ the contrary would. like 19 dissolve the empire, to liquidate it in the same way that one liq~idates a bank'rupt business: in order to save something for a new start." Bahro is a student of history. He . believes that we are at a time of dramatic historical change, ·and maintains that our society is "extremist" in character. This analysis poses a radical challenge to people active in the environmental and peace movements who want to achieve their goals without fundamentally transforming our civilization. According to Bahro industrial society dQesn't have problems, it is the prob-. lem. -Johnny Stallings Johnny Stallings is active in ·the Portland Greens. Pacific Shift, by William Irwin Thompson, 1985, 197 pp., $15.95 from: Sierra Club Books 730 Polk Street San Francisco, CA 94109 Put on your thinking cap·s and pack your best dictionary-its· time for another journey through the landscapes of Western culture with our guide, William Irwin °Thompson. Our trip stretches from the "first cultural ecology of the West," when·Neolithic villages and towns in Mesopotamia were transformed into cities in the fourth milfenium B.C., through the second cultural ecology of empire, centered on the Mediterranean, through the third cultural ecology of industrial civilization, centered on the Atlantic, to the fourth, emerging ecolo-- gy of planetary culture, focused on the Pacific Basin and space. Along the way, we encounter such cultural manifestations as the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth; Homer's Illiad and Odyssey; Biblical prophets· and priests; the Gutenberg Galaxy; Newton's mathematics; Don Quixote; Finnegan's Wake; punk fashions; the Talking Heads; Zen Buddhism; Disneyland; and Ronald Reagan. · "The 'considerable skill of Ronald Reagan seems to come 'from his actors sensitivity to an audience. Jimmy Carter and Teddy Kennedy were seriqusly intent-the one pious, the other fervent.....,....but both failed to appreciate that in a media culture, ideas don't count, or vote. Reagan is always wrong but nev~ 1 er mistaken in his understanding that , the American -presidency is ·a role and · not a task.... The content of Ronald Reagan is small-town, mid-western, Protestant, and fiscally conservative America, but he, much more than the threatening Zen Governor Brown, has been the one to effect the shift from New York to Los Angeles, from Europe to the Pacific Basin, from steel mills to space shuttles and· Star Wars. Just as Nehru put Gandhis picture.on every wall in India and then led the nation away from cottage industries to capitalintensive economies of scale and nuclear reactors, so Reagan invoked every -platitude of the Reader's Digest in the very act of calming Middle America as ~e put them to the side of history/' Thompson is a cultural historian, so he deals with meta-history, or myth. He. is an ·extraordinary thinker who lets his vivid imagination play· with thought-images until they fall il)to· place, creating a wonderful story. Thompsons story describes the evolution of Western culture thro.ugh the present. As for the future, Thompson is wise enough to know his limitations. He describes the direction of culture, but recognizes tha~ conjectures of the future are "narrative fictions" that tell us more about ourselves now than about the actual future. Still, he does indulge a bit here and there: "When I encounter a culture like that of the Hopi, where there is no religion but where the whole way of life is sacred, I tend to think that the future will be more like that: not sacerdotal, but sacred; not institutional, but universal. Imagine a life like that of the traditi~nal Hopi lived in an environment of aerospace technologies and micro-electronics that permit · the machines to be, not large, industrial, and threatening to the trees, but · small, tuned to a different scale, ~nd symbiotic with living things." The "fourth cultural ecology" will also see the emergence of an "enantiomorphic polity," an opposite:..encompassing society. "Precisely because pollution cannot go away, we must generate only those kinds of pollution we can live with: Precisely because enemies won't go away, ... we have no choice but to love our enemies. The enantiomorphic polity of the future must have capitalists and socialists, Israelis and Palest~nians, Bahais and Shiites, evangelical~ and1Episcopalians." -Jeff Strang Jeff Strang is a student of cultures and a former RAIN staffer.
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