“How to be green? Many people have asked us this important question. It’s really very simple and requires no expert knowledge or complex skills. Here’s the answer. Consume less. Share more. Enjoy life.” […] This blog promotes anti-capitalism, green politics, direct action, practical lifestyle change, Venezuela/Cuba and a touch of Zen. Ecosocialism or muerte!

(Anyone who thought we over-egged the pudding on Sunday for calling the Green Party ‘the party of death’, take note.)

One might expect Wall, allegedly a lecturer in political economy, to have a rather more sophisticated political argument than Lucas. But think again. The ‘Socialist Unity’ blog, for which Wall writes, carries the following image over his latest post.

Oh dear.

Wall’s post comes in the wake of the bizarre spectacle of the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, admitting to the Guardian newspaper that ‘people are pissed off with us [the Labour Government]’, and that economic times ahead ‘are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years’.

As we have said before, moments from history are often deployed where ideas have run dry

History lends today’s political players crutches to prop themselves up by. Alluding to WWII, public figures demand that we get on a ‘war footing’ to limit our consumption by ‘make do and mend’, as one British public information slogan said. To question this is to demand to be judged by that historical absolute; holocaust denial. To be a denier is, according to the likes of Hansen, to be guilty of ‘crimes against humanity’. The need for such crutches stems from the fact that today’s politicians have no legs to stand on, and environmentalism cannot produce its own history.

Darling puts us on a post-war footing by telling us that we face the worst economic conditions for 60 years. Caroline Lucas with the New Economics Foundation call for a ‘green New Deal‘. The United Nations Development Program’s 400-page Human Development Report on tackling climate change as a development issue begins by quoting Martin Luther King’s ‘Where do we go from here: chaos or community’ speech. [WARNING: BIG PDF]. Al Gore favorably compares himself to JFK by making ‘within ten years’ speeches, even though he holds no office, and has withdrawn from politics.

And Wall compares the Labour Government to Nazis, by using a quote from Mussolini (who was a fascist, not a Nazi), to advance his brand of eco-socialism (which, like the National Socialists is not socialist). There are two things to say about this. First, there is the fact that eco-socialism Wall is selling apparently cannot make a case for itself without the shadow of the swastika hovering above it. Second, Wall’s ‘socialism’ cannot sell itself without the ‘eco’ prefix. Wall calls for ‘eco-socialism or death’. But where the original slogan (‘socialism or death’) might have represented a sincere commitment to the struggle for equality, now it merely stands for ‘balance’ within the biosphere; if we don’t balance it, it kills us.

Wall places himself in contrast to Alistair Darling. But, as the Guardian article reveals, following his appointment, ‘Darling’s life, in his wife’s words, has been “a crisis a week” ever since.’ Mrs Darling understates things. The Labour Government has been in crisis since 1997. Poltics today only survives through generating crisis to avoid its own crises. And in his challenge to Darling’s party, and the mainstream politics which bumbles from crisis to crisis, Derek Wall does nothing other than create more crises – the spectres of Nazism and environmental chaos – because he, just like Darling, lacks any coherent political vision. Without crisis, he would be lost. As his profile on the Green Party website explains:

Dr. Wall describes himself as an eco-socialist, and Green politics as “the politics of survival”, stressing that “unless we build a green economy based on meeting need rather than greed our children face a bleak future. A world dominated by the need for constant growth puts people and the rest nature behind a blind economic system of accumulation”.

But this is fantasy politics. Later on in the profile, we learn that:

Dr. Wall practices Zazen and is influenced by spirituality through “pursuing a pagan appreciation of the living world in a variety of ways”. In Babylon and Beyond, he argues that Zen acts as a guard against utopianism as it “is based on being in the world rather than escaping from it”. He also links anti-capitalism and Zen, stating, based on the work of anthropologist and economist Marshall Sahlins, that “Zen minimises need and provides an alternative road to affluence”.

Hmm. The green hero, Dr. Wall stands against the forces of darkness and their plans to build an empire, by being in tune with the living world… Who does that remind you of?