Socialist Talks on Ecology

"The environmental movement may become a rest home for middle-class activists who did not end the war in Vietnam or the problems of the cities," Michael Harrington, national chairman of the American Socialist Party and author of The Other America, told an audience of about 80 in Burr A yesterday.

"The market system has put a price on labor but not on air and water," Harrington said. "It costs nothing to pollute, and profit can be made from pollution," he added.

Harrington stressed "the social cost of private economic decisions." "You have to have planning," he said.

'Status Quo Suggestions'

He rejected "status quo suggestions" such as shifting the burden of pollution control to consumers, giving tax credits to industry to finance its fight against pollution, or permitting business to pollute the environment and then making it pay for the clean-up.

Instead, he favors the creation of a federal board to assess the cost of pol-lution and ban devices which might cause pollution.

Harrington cautioned students to be "realistic about social issues," "Riots are an extremely effective way of influencing voters toward the right," he said. "The American working class is not composed of bronzed proletarians with copies of the Little Lenin Library in their hip pockets,"

Rather than a "wholesale apocalyptic take-over," Harrington said he favors "the euthansia of capitalism," Leave the title to private property, he said, but "drain it until it becomes meaningless,"

"The fundamental contradiction of capitalist society is between a revolutionary technology and conservative decision-making," he said. But he added that one cannot say, " 'Let's stop the technology altogether,' " he added. "If you have that solution you are condemning people to death because the people of the earth will not have enough to eat,"

"It is not the technology which menaces us," Harrington said. "What menaces us is the political use we make of that technology,"