The great Caliban: the struggle against the rebel body – part two

“The prospects for red‐green politics in Britain can appear bleak. The fourth successive Conservative general election victory in April, 1992 has caused disarray and demoralization among the opposition parties. Nevertheless, the shock of defeat leaves a fluid situation in which there is a growing space on the left. There is at least a possibility that this could be filled by an eco‐socialist political force.     

House organ

Red green theory and practice in the world today take a wide variety of forms that eschew leftist dogmatism and “time‐honored, time‐worn” slogans, on the one hand, and “mere utopianism,” on the other. The Alternative Rouge et Verte (AREV) movement in France is one of these, as a reading of this statement of their general political views, written for CNS, will reveal. The publication of the AREV movement is: Alternative Rouge et Verte, 40 rue de Malti, 75011 Paris, France.     

The 2019 Portuguese general elections

Abstract

The 2019 Portuguese general elections have led to the formation of another minority government of the Socialist Party. Right-wing parties suffered a resounding defeat. The election had two key consequences. First, after four years of contract parliamentarism with an extreme-left party, the Socialists returned to their historical position of pivotal party in the system. Socialist leader Costa refused to replicate alliances with parties to his left. Second, the 2019 election witnessed the emergence of three new parties, Chega, Iniciativa Liberal and Livre. The election of Chega marks a watershed moment in Portuguese democratic history, as for the first time an extreme-right populist party has gained representation in the country.     

From Islam en France to Islam de France: contradictions of the French left's responses to Islam

ABSTRACT

The political class in France, especially the left, has been profoundly shaped by the revolutionary heritage of 1789. Determined to combat the determinisms that fractured French society under the ancien régime, such as religion, the individual was reconfigured, first as a citizen and then, by the left, as indistinguishable from a class, the proletariat. While in both cases the conceptualization of the individual had the benefit of unity and clarity, the abstract nature of these notions too often left out those very factors that are most significant to those individuals themselves for their self-definition. Moreover, the social transformation of France since the 1960s has exposed the culture-specific conditioning that underlay the apparent neutrality of the conceptualization of the individual bequeathed by 1789. Raymond explores how the left has struggled with its intellectual heritage in its relationship with minorities, especially Muslims, from the xenophobic populism of the Communists in the early 1980s to the recognition proposed by some Socialists during their last period in government. Paradoxically, the institutional accommodation reached with the Islamic community by the centre-right governments of the past decade, notably the creation of the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (French Council of the Muslim Faith) in 2002, built on the initiatives of previous Socialist administrations. They set the course for a better integration of the Muslim community by transforming Islam en France (Islam in France) into an Islam de France (French Islam). But in spite of the initial impetus given by the Socialists to the institutional assimilation of Islam, their reactions to the emergence of a French Islamic identity remain contradictory. The question therefore persists as to whether the left in France, impregnated by a historically conditioned secularism, can be reconciled with a community defined by its faith through the emergence of a ‘Gallican’ Islam, or whether the time has come for a fundamental reappraisal of the ideology of the French left, and even the Republic itself.     

Housing needs and effective policies in high‐tech metropolitan economies

Abstract

What are the most effective ways to provide low‐income housing to those left behind in new economy housing markets? Do winners and losers in high‐tech competition require federal housing strategies geared to metropolitan differences? This article examines 45 large metropolitan areas grouped along a high‐tech spectrum to see who is dis‐advantaged and to deduce effective local low‐income housing strategies from market characteristics.

Finding affordable housing was, on average, more difficult for low‐income renters and owners in high‐tech economies in the 1990s. Nonetheless, high‐tech metropolitan economies, like other local/regional markets, vary greatly. Sharp differences among and within metropolitan markets make it essential that federal strategies allow local policies to respond to local conditions. To most effectively provide low‐income housing to those left behind in all markets, federal policy should target sufficient resources to severe housing needs through many more vouchers and programs that permit and encourage effective local choices.     

When a pariah party exploits its demonised status: the 2019 Finnish general election

Abstract

The governing Centre and Conservative parties played the ‘economy’ card – we’ve got Finland ‘back into shape’; the green parties, the Greens and Left Alliance, played the ‘climate change’ card, demanding action to go with the talk; the Social Democrats played the ‘caring’ card and the need for a Finland that cares for the elderly, the low-paid and young persons; the Finns Party in contrast played the ‘no one likes us, we don’t care’ card, seeking to exploit its pariah status for electoral gain. The adoption of a siege mentality strategy, designed to capitalise on its ostracised position, served to mobilise protest support and the Finns Party came within a whisker of beating the Social Democrats into second place. The Social Democrats then turned the clock back and put together the type of left?centre (‘red mud’) coalition that had characterised Finnish governments for half a century from the mid-1930s onwards.     

Water law and the American West(s)

Donald J. Pisani: To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.

John Hart: Storm Over Mono: The Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Arthur L. Littleworth and Eric L. Garner: California Water. Point Arena, CA: Solano Press Books, 1995.     

Book Reviews

Arran Gare: NIHILISM, INC.: Environmental Destruction and the Metaphysics of Sustainability. Como, New South Wales, Australia: Eco‐Logical Press, 1996.

David Harvey: Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

David Macauley, editor: Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.

Daniel M. Herman and John T. O'Connor: Who Owns the Sun? People, Politics, and the Struggle for a Solar Economy. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1996.

Harold Crooks: Giants of Garbage: The Rise of the Global Waste Industry and the Politics of Pollution Control. Toronto: Lorimer, 1993

Sudhir Chella Rajan: The Enigma of Automobility: Democratic Politics and Pollution Control. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

Garrett Hardin: Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.     

Civil liberties and the left

Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa. Monthly Review Press: New York. 1996. pp. 288. (foreword by Mel King)

Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Modernization and the Production of Power

Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 286 pp.

Milagros Pena, Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The Role of Ideas in Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 222 pp.

Partha Chatterjee (ed), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 220 pp.

Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in South Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 261 pp.

Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right‐Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. pp. 445. $19.95.)     

Noam Chomsky's politics

Karen J. Warren: Ecological Feminist Philosophies . Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Nicholas Low and Brendan Gleeson: Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Robert Elliot: Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration. London: Routledge, 1997.

Barbara Noske: Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1997.

Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, eds.: Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993

Steven Mark Cohn: Too Cheap to Meter: An Economic and Philosophical Analysis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Jesse Vorst, Ross Dobson, and Ron Fletcher, eds: Green on Red: Evolving Ecological Socialism. Winnipeg/Halifax: Society for Socialist Studies/Fernwood Publishing, 1993.     

The Greening of the Americas

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates global capital’s ecological management and extends the assessment to the “green economy,” as developed in the first “green” neoliberal project, in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has been an important “laboratory” for experimentation in environmental governance mechanisms using debt-for-nature financial exchanges and other instruments of the Kyoto Protocol. I explore how “greening” can be understood as a new phase of capital accumulation, as I go into its five main aspects.     

Guilt,spectatorship and The third man

Abstract

Though no longer as strong a current in film theory as once it was, psychoanalysis presses upon one in looking at a film that looks as much like a film noir as The third man. If, in addition, one wishes to examine the theme of guilt in the film, then a psychoanalytical approach might appear inescapable. This paper seeks to escape it, not because it is wrong, but because, in relation to this particular film, at least, an alternative approach could prove revealing. Besides drawing upon some invaluable contextual work by other scholars on The third man, this paper seeks that alternative in an account of spectatorship and perception culled from Bishop Berkeley and Samuel Beckett. It is an approach that reveals the film's preoccupation with being as well as with power, and with the significant absence of certain religious concepts or preoccupations, which seem to have left the shape of their evacuation behind them in the film. It thus sheds light on the persistence of religious categories in modernity, and it brings into focus radically incommensurate points of view (e.g. of morality), whose clash the film dramatizes.     

Reply

Sandra Steingraber: Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment . New York: Addison Wesley, 1997.

Rodney Barker: And The Waters Turned to Blood . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Richard Grove: Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History 1400–1940 . Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1997.

Richard Primack, David Bray, Hugo Galletti and Ismael Ponciano: Timber, Tourists and Temples: Conservation and Development in the Maya Forest of Belize, Guatemala and Mexico . Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998.

Alan Weisman: Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Chelsea Green Publications, 1998.

Pierre McDonagh and Andrea Prothero, eds.: Green Management: A Reader . London: Dryden Press, Harcourt Brace, 1997.

Vandana Shiva: Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge . Boston: South End Press, 1997.     

On Sugar,Capitalism, and Socialism

Elinor G. K. Melville: A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994

Douglas Murray: Cultivating Crisis: The Human Cost of Pesticides in Latin America ,Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994

Wes Jackson: Becoming Native to this Place . Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994.

Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello: Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction From Ground Up .Boston: South End Press, 1994.

Wolfgang Sachs, editor: Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict . London and New Jersey: Zed Books and Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 1993.

John Walton: Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992.

Brendan Prendiville: Environmental Politics in France . Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994.     

From the Agora to the Coffee-House: Heller's Quest for Philosophical Radicalism

Abstract

This paper considers Agnes Heller's attempt to construct a post Marxist radical philosophy. It examines the two main phases of this project: beginning with her late seventies A Radical Philosophy, it charts her development towards the position she now characterises as reflective post-modernism. It shows that despite a constant commitment to rational critique, Heller's concept of philosophical radicalism has shifted from an emphasis on total critique to that of maintaining balance between the rival technological and historical imaginations that exercise a ‘double-bind’ over the modern individual. The paper explains the rationale of this evolution, highlights the features of each phase and critically analyses their weaknesses. Finally it argues that Heller's contemporary position represents a sophisticated attempt to overcome the limitations of former left radicalism and address the continuing need for orientation in contemporary modernity.     

Environmentalism: Movements,rhetorics, representations

Leif Ohlsson, ed., Hydropolitics: Conflicts Over Water as a Development Constraint. London: Zed Books, 1995.

John M. Donahue and Barbara Rose Johnston, eds., Water, Culture, &; Power: Local Struggles in a Global Context. Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1998.     

The Land of Henry George

Andrew McLaughlin: Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology .Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993

Raymond A. Rogers: Nature and the Crisis of Modernity: A Critique of Contemporary Discourse on Managing the Earth .Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994.

Mark Dowie: Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century .Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Luke Martell: Ecology and Society: An Introduction .London: Polity Press, 1995.     

The pressures for protection

Japan's Unequal Trade, by Edward J. Lincoln. The Brookings Institution, Washington, 1990. xiii+223 pp. $26.95. ISBN 0–8157–5262–8.

Japan's Quest for a Role in the World: Roles ascribed to Japan Nationally and Internationally, by Bert Edström. Institute of Oriental Languages, University of Stockholm, Stockholm, 1988. xiii+325 pp. ISBN 91–7146–585–5.

Japan at the Summit: Its Role in the Western Alliance and Asian‐Pacific Cooperation, by Shiro Saito. Routledge for RIIA, London, 1990. xii + 220 pp. £30. ISBN 0–415–04271–2.

Made in Japan And Other Japanese ‘Business Novels’, translated and edited by Tamae K. Prindle. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY and London, 1990. xviii+203 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0–87332–529‐X.

Trade and Investment Relations Among the United States, Canada and Japan, edited by Robert M. Stern. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989. viii+448 pp. £47.25 ($43.95). ISBN 0–226–77317–5.

International Economic Pluralism: Economic Policy in East Asia and the Pacific, by Peter Drysdale. Allen and Unwin Australia, Sydney and London, 1988. 294 pp. £20 paperback. ISBN 0–04–350075–7.

Japanese Business Down Under: Patterns of Japanese Investment in Australia, by David W. Edgington. Routledge, London and New York, 1990. xiv + 294 pp. £40. ISBN. 0–415–03499‐X.

Japan's Foreign Policy, by Reinhard Drifte. Routledge and the RIIA, London, 1990. x + 112 pp. £7.95. ISBN 0–415–03234–2.

Japan's Trade Policies: 1945 to the Present Day, by Takashi Shiraishi. Athlone Press, London, 1989. viii + 228 pp. £37.50. ISBN 0–485–11363–5.

Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade, by Helen V. Milner. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1988. xiii+329 pp. $29.50. ISBN 0–691–05670–6.     

Australian counterfactuals

The Secret History of the Convict Colony: Alexandro Malaspina's report on the British Settlement of New South Wales, by Robert J. King. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. xii + 179 pp. £25. ISBN 0–04–610020–2.

Taming the Great South Land: a history of the conquest of nature in Australia, by William J. Lines. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991. xx + 337 pp. £30. ISBN 1–86373–017–6.

Governing Savages, by Andrew Markus. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. x + 214 pp., illus. £9.95 paperback. ISBN 0–04–442150–8. Sydney, by Jan Morris. Viking, London, 1992. 246 pp. £16.99. ISBN 0–670–82745–2.

Australia's Immigrants 1788–1988 (2nd edition), by Geoffrey Sherington. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. x + 199 pp., illus. £9.95 paperback. ISBN 0–04–442204–0.     

Coca Eradication in the Andes: Lessons from Bolivia

Al Gedicks: The New Resources Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations. Boston: South End Press, 1993.

Richard Hofrichter, ed.: Toxics Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice . Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993.

Raymond Bonner: At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Theodore Steinberg: Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.