Letter.

• Position: Letter to the Editor

Dear S/R,

Patrick Eytchison has again contributed a thought-provoking essay, "Implications of Industrial Collapse for Green Politics" (SIR 30) to the ongoing discourse on who we are as Greens, and where we are headed. His opening synopsis of US Green history culminates with the "victory" of GPUSA over the "electoral faction," a victory which has frankly seemed to me somewhat Pyrrhic since the FEC named ASGP as the national Party organization. Admittedly, Eytchison's vision of the Party as a "guiding council" above and beyond the electoral dimension, puts the issue in a somewhat different light. I still wonder, though, if the word "Party" is necessarily the best description for such a council. Adapting Rudolph Bahro's call for "an elite ecological-spiritual council which would guide world governments through a period of biospheric breakdown," Eytchison reduces this to "some guiding political instrument" "not ... a spiritual elite." But if the Party he aspires to, is still the "more than a Party" espoused by Petra Kelly , must it not be an ecological-spiritual council as well as a guiding political instrument? Not either/or: both/and? Or do Party and Movement require distinct organizations, corresponding to the distinction of political from civil society, as I for one have argued in these pages? ("Greens in Civil Society," S/R 24)

But aside from the ambiguity of "Party" as a description of the plurality of Green institutions, Eytchison calls for the Greens to become a vehicle of social continuity and stability through coming decades of biospheric and industrial collapse, including a large human die-off. This is indeed a point on which Greens, like everyone else, "tend to be reticent." Greens who overcome this reticence may find that "ecosocialists" with Marxian allegiance are unwilling to admit the human overpopulation problem! Those who argue...