Author and Professor John Mohawk spoke at the first national Greens gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts in July 1987. He provides, to my mind, the most profound theoretical center for Green politics. Marxism, he argues, is the flip side of capitalism, not its opposite or its solution. While he recognizes the contributions the Left has made to fighting the excesses of industrial capitalism (and the long tradition in radical culture of deconstructing capitalism), Mohawk poises the wellspring of Green theory: Industrialism in capitalist, socialist or communist countries exists in a colonial relationship to Nature and to indigenous people.
The solution is a thorough Native or Green perspective, quite different in its solutions—technological, spiritual, economic, educational, energy and consumption—than that of Labor-Left allies. Mohawk is arguing that the old-isms do not address the threat to the very biology of the planet — tears in the ozone layer (cancers); acid rain (basic chemistry of plant roots destroyed); global warming; chemicals disrupting reproduction. They can make the unresolved 20th century issues of social class and distribution appear moot.