Is the "Green New Deal" a Marxist Plot?

At the CEPR blog, Beat the Press, Dean Baker and Jason Hickel are debating degrowth. Dean makes the excellent point that "claims about growth" from oil companies and politicians who oppose policies to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, "are just window dressing." I also agree, however, with the first comment in response to Dean's post that his point about window dressing could be taken much further.

I would add that economic growth is window dressing for what used to be referred to much more aggressively as "man's triumph over nature" or the "control of nature." Climate change deniers are more forthright about this connection between aggression and so-called growth: "Is “Strive on -- the control of nature is won, not given” a controversial statement? What does it mean for science if it is?" asks Linnea Lueken at the Heartland Institute website.

Scattered throughout his writings, Donald Winnicott made fleeting but intense criticisms of "sentimentality." "Sentimentality is useless for parents," he remarked in a 1949 article on the analysis of psychotic patients, "as it contains a denial of hate, and sentimentality in a mother is no good at all from the infant's point of view." The inference he drew from this observation was that "a psychotic patient in analysis cannot be expected to tolerate his hate of the analyst unless the analyst can hate him." 

In a 1946 article on the treatment of juvenile delinquents, he warned against "one of the biggest threats" to the use of psychological methods in the management of young offenders was "the adoption of a sentimental attitude towards crime:

If advances seem to come but are based on sentimentality, they are valueless; reaction must surely set in, and the advances had better never have been made. In sentimentality there is repressed or unconscious hate, and this repression is unhealthy. Sooner or later the hate turns up.

The most thorough discussion by Winnicott of his aversion to sentimentality is probably his 1939 article, "Aggression and its roots." As it is only three paragraphs, I quote it in its entirety:

Finally, all aggression that is not denied, and for which personal responsibility can be accepted, is available to give strength to the work of reparation and restitution. At the back of all play, work, and art, is unconscious remorse about harm done in unconscious fantasy, and an unconscious desire to start putting things right. 

Sentimentality contains an unconscious denial of the destructiveness underlying construction. It is withering to the developing child, and eventually it can make him need to show in direct form destructiveness which, in a less sentimental milieu, he could have conveyed indirectly by showing a desire to construct. 

It is partly false to state that we 'should provide opportunity for creative expression if we are to counter children’s destructive urges'. What is needed is an unsentimental attitude towards all productions, which means the appreciation not so much of talent as of the struggle behind all achievement, however small. For, apart from sensual love, no human manifestation of love is felt to be valuable that does not imply aggression acknowledged and harnessed.

He might well have added, "And I'm not so sure about sensual love." 

This all may sound somewhat arbitrary and speculative but actually it is a very compressed and jargon-free application of Melanie Klein's developmental theory of the self. What Klein referred to as the depressive position involves an infant's feeling of "guilt" -- or in Winnicott's less extravagant terminology, "concern" -- about its aggressive fantasies toward its mother. In Klein's rather lurid account of the infant's aggressive fantasy:

The phantasied attacks on the mother follow two main lines: one is the predominantly oral impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop out, and rob the mother’s body of its good contents.… The other line of attack derives from the anal and urethral impulses and implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self and into the mother.… These excrements and bad parts of the self are meant not only to injure the object but also to control it and take possession of it.

Whether or not the infant has such unconscious aggressive fantasies about the mother's body, Rex Tillerson, when he was CEO of Exxon, expressed similar, fully-conscious ones, "My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that's what I want to do..." Robert White-Stevens, the corporate-designated nemesis of Rachel Carson following the publication of Silent Spring, exemplified the "control of nature" faction of science:

Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist, believes that man is steadily controlling nature.

White-Stevens's vision of a "feeble creature" penetrating "every corner of the planet,"  and "contest[ing] the very laws and powers of Nature, herself," could have been written as a Kleinian parody of the of the infantile arrogance of scientistic triumphalism:

Within the past 100 years, man has emerged from a feeble creature, virtually at the mercy of Nature and his environment, to become the only being which can penetrate every corner of the planet, communicate instantly to anywhere on earth, produce all the food, fiber, and shelter he needs, wherever he may need it, change the topography of his lands, the sea and the universe and prepare his voyage through the very arch of heaven into space itself. 

This is the stuff that science is made of, and man has learned to use it. He cannot now go back; he has crossed his Rubicon and must advance into the future armed with the reason and the tools of his sciences, and in so doing will doubtless have to contest the very laws and powers of Nature herself. He has done this already by expanding his numbers far beyond her tolerance and by interrupting her laws of inheritance and survival. Now, he must go all the way, for he cannot but partially contest Nature. He has chosen to lead the way; he must take the responsibility upon himself.

But I digress. What does all this have to do with economic growth? Again, as Winnicott explained, "aggression that is not denied, and for which personal responsibility can be accepted, is available to give strength to the work of reparation and restitution." However, "[i]n sentimentality there is repressed or unconscious hate, and this repression is unhealthy. Sooner or later the hate turns up." Indeed, the hate does turn up at the Heartland Institute, where the "Green New Deal" is exposed as the "Old Socialist Despotism."

If it fails to acknowledge the primitive aggression of "man's triumph over nature" that lies beneath the reparation of adopting environmentally-friendly policies, the debate between degrowth and green growth risks descending into sentimental bickering about the window dressing in the hotel on the edge of the abyss.