Page 10 RAIN October 1980 Ecology As Politics by Andre Gorz, 1980, 215 pp., $5.50 from: South End Press Box 68, Astor Station Boston, MA 02123 Question: What do you get when you cross Karl Marx with Ivan Illich? Answer: Andre Gorz. I've been waiting for this book for nearly three years. Though the French edition was originally published in 1975 and 1977, the English edition, after numerous false announcements, was not released until this summer. Andre Gorz is the author of, among others, Strategy for Labor (1967, $3.95, from Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108). He is also, in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse, one of the foremost social thinkers of modern France, indeed Europe. • Three-of the book's four sec_tions are compiled from essays written between 1971 and 1976 on several environmental issues, nu- , clear pow~r, medicine and health. Gorz's keenest and most original thinking, though, is in the opening section, "Ecology and Freedom." Gorz argues, predictably, that "the ecological movement is not an end in itself, but a stage in the larger struggle" (Marx's influence). Yet he acknowledges that ecology transcends the political objectives of socialp isin (Illich's influence) . The result is an argument for appropriate technology: "Socialism is no better than capitalism if it makes use of the same tools. The total domination of nature inevitably entails a domination of people by the techniques of domination." This is accomplished via the destruction of civil society by the expanding institutions of the state (e.g., public schooling). By "civil society" Gorz means "all relations founded upon reciprocity and voluntarism, rather than on law or judicial obligation." The only way of decreasing the power of the state (and the accompanying threat of technofascism) is through the expansion of civil society. Hence , his enthusiasm for ecology as politics: "Against the centralizing and totalitarian tendencies of both the classical Right and the orthodox Left, ecology embodies the revolt of civil society and the movemen't for its reconstruction.'' The book's epilogue concludes with some ob_servations made during a mid-1970s trip to the U.S. Gorz describes us to his fellow citizens as follows: ... typical Americans start from the premise that the country belongs to them, that it will be what they make it, that it is up to them and not to the authorities to • change life. The American revolution is not over. -MR ICS Political Ecology: An Activist's Reader on Energy, Land, Food, Technology, Health, and the Economics and Politics of Social Change, edited by Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway, 1979, 422 pp., $6.95 froni: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co:, Inc. Three Park Avenue • New York NY 10016 In this case, the title really does sum it up. This is a good anthology which should be of interest to teachers as well as activists, with selectior{s by a range of authors from Ralph Nader and George McGovern to Amory Lovins and Richard Merrill to Ivan Illich and E.F. Schumacher. It also,includes Hans Magnus Enzenzberger's classic essay, "A Critique of Political Ecology.'' Cockburn and Ridgeway conclude the book with a discussion of the horizons of political ecology: A political ecology that does not regard as central the fact of structural unemployment fY!-U~t be rightly perceived as marginal or frivolous: a political ecology that does not integrate such central economic issues into its analysis and programs has failed before it begins-a victim of the same tunnel vision that has been the crippling limitation of middle-class refarm· movements for the last few decades. -MR
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