30.11.2006

Red and green

Do you have to be red to be green?' was a debate between Pete Dickenson of the SP and the Green Party's 'male principal speaker', Derek Wall. Simon Wells reports

It was, however, not really a debate at all - comrade Wall is a member of the recently formed Green Left platform and his presentation was fairly sprinkled with Marxist quotes. In fact it was difficult to gauge who was the Marxist and who was the green.

Comrade Dickenson said that catastrophic climate change was probably less than 10 years away. Meanwhile the Kyoto protocol was a "fiasco", eco-taxes would hurt the poor and the market in carbon permits has collapsed, meaning that the cost to pollute the environment is virtually zero. The idea of contraction and convergence does not add up.

Comrade Wall gave over a section of his speech to Marx. There was a lot in Marxism that is valuable, he said, though not all: the left does not critique productivism and accumulation, and does not understand that we need to go back to William Morris.