Mumford, not Marx

Lewis Mumford was a radical who, early on, recognized that the problems of hypermodernity go deeper than just capitalist property relations. We could say that Mumford was a proto-Green.

So: “from Red to Green” could mean “from Marx to Mumford.” Marx suffered from nineteenth-century optimism regarding industrialism and in regard to the direction of our civilization in general. Including centralization. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out he wrote to Engels: “If the Prussians are victorious then the centralization of the State power will help foster the centralization of the working class.”

Mumford recognized that kind of thinking to be ideological in the worst sense of the word. Chimerical and misguided. He said we must back away from the tendency of “progressive development” to lead toward top-heavy centralization. He advocated decentralization for the sake of achieving a participatory form of democracy; bioregionalism to counter trends toward the kind of over-development that leads to institutional and technological hypertrophy.