When the two shall meet

I've been a Socialist and an Environmentalist since my teens in the early 60s and I'm tired of feeling schizo about it.
We take great guilty pleasure in the writhing contortions of the Republican / NeoCon ghost dance, in spite of our supposed liberal sense of empathy. It's OK. Enjoy it. Revel in it. Liberals question themselves to a fault; it has led to rubber stamping or failing to confront the right wing assault of the last eight to thirty years. So we have to give ourselves permission, for good and bad reasons, to celebrate, to gloat, to scream "we told you so" in the streets. To be vindicated and returned to power while the right wing mindset self-destructs is plainly thrilling. The "liberal" label no longer triggers kneejerk contempt or guilt. The accusations spewing from the right wing nut farm are scarcely less funny, only a touch less ironic than the Olbermann / Maddow / Stewart / Colbert renditions. "Facism," "Communism," "government takeover," "the Obama dictatorship." Ha. Democracy, once corrupted and defiled, rises up finally, vindicates itself and buries the cancer that now can only eat itself.
But our Schadenfreude will subside as a larger reckoning looms: the scale of the tasks ahead make the changes in the works seem trivial. We liberals have also been sad victims of complacency and the assumption that a battle won will turn the war. The raw power, physical momentum, mental inertia and inherent greed in the bestial, unregulated "market" will never give up and could rise again without legislation, enforcement and public outrage should it try.
Call it what you will, the "liberal," "progressive," "leftist," or "socialist leaning" camp has yet to see past its own myopia, infighting and obsolete mindsets. There is a pattern connecting the war, the crash, the climate crisis and the health care dilemma, and most leftists have yet to recognize it, and the few that do have not had the courage to spell it out and make it the strategic spur that it should be.
I'm sick and tired and angry hearing leftist economists and strategists talk about labor, gender-age-and-race equality, economic justice and regulation without a mention of the environmental crisis. And I'm impatient at best when the environmental alarmists, still too timid to cite the worst case scenarios, fail to discuss the radical re-structuring of the economy that is now absolutely essential to our security if not our survival. And hardly anyone but me is talking about the massive mindshift that will be necessary to envision, let alone execute that new economic structure.
The Environmental Movement and the Socialist model share much more history and many more values and goals than is acknowledged in the public discourse. The corrupt "market" forces that exploited workers, accumulated vast wealth and then gambled away most of the shared benefits of "progress," are the same forces that stripped massive regions of the globe of their natural resources, at "prices" equivalent to theft. They are the same forces that have willfully ignored the "externalities" of pollution, child labor, resource wars and habitat degradation. It's not hard to see why we are so slow to arrive at an integrated, holistic set of policies to address the convergence of crises we now face. But to ignore this shared history is to blinker our vision of a just and sustainable future and to barricade ourselves from the road to get there. Because ... God help us, why is this not obvious? ... to achieve an egalitarian and equitable economy and to salvage a viable and sustainable environment, the values, objectives and goals of the Socialists and the Environmentalists are EXACTLY the same.
The Socialist Movement will never achieve credibility or viability, and the Environmental Movement will never turn the tide of eco-destruction unless and until they acknowledge, organize around and act on the fact that their paths have merged.
Economies and societies, to the degree they can be intelligently willed by groups of humans, are little more than sets of relationships, which are defined by values cum organizing principles within the culture. The organizing principles of an unregulated market dominating a finite environment, has OBVIOUSLY led us into the myriad set of crises we now face. No wonder we seem to be in a state of cultural denial.
There are organizing principles inherent in nature, evolving toward consciousness. They include some combination of these two: ONE: "from each according to ability, to each according to need," and, TWO, to live in shared moderation, in harmony with the planet, with the absolute minimum waste of human energy and natural resources.
A massive, global mindshift is inevitable. It will occur one of two ways, in one of two time frames: sooner as a collective act of human awareness, will and shared mission; or later, after the planet and civilization have passed the tipping point of no return.