Your Thoughts on GHOST MARXISM:

Posted on: November 25, 2019 at 08:28:53 CT

Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities

“Economic issues peculiar to capitalism have to be separated from those pervasive in modernity. When, for instance, contemporary leftists treat the environmental disasters that frighten us all as capitalism’s war against the planet—or, worse, of neoliberalism against the planet—they are engaged in a campaign that is, from a historical point of view, absurd. Environmental disasters are the right thing to be worried about, but it is the drive for growth, not capitalism in particular, that makes them happen. The degree and level of environmental disaster caused by the command economics of Eastern Europe were far greater than even the worst known in Western Europe and was made still worse by a state-controlled media that could not even wave a feeble flag of dissent. What happened to Lake Baikal under the Soviets never happened to an American Great Lake. The villain in our environmental disasters may well be the common fault of modernity and of industrialization. But to understand pollution as a problem owed to capitalism is to understand nothing. This is ghost Marxism: a will to repeat the same old curses and haunt the same old houses without having the confidence to go outside and see the world as it really is.”