Communism and Environment

[Le Rouge]

Hi comrades.
Communism would provide tv's, car, food, computers, etc, to everybody. Most people on the planet don't have these things (food excluded). It would need gigantic amount of material to create all this.
Since we're in an environmental crysis, we would aggravate the current situation. We would need to cut more trees for housing, give water to everybody, extract more minerals, etc.

So, communism would have a bigger impact on environment than capitalism today. :confused:

Btw i'm still learning communism.

[jake williams]

I can certainly conceive of socialist societies, everything else equal, consuming more resources than capitalist societies, especially capitalist societies where the working class is relatively poor and consumes little in absolute terms.

That being said, I can think of all sorts of ways that socialism is more resource efficient in terms not just of providing the goods it provides, but overall. Land use in poor countries is extremely inefficient, requiring a lot of land to produce relatively little food. Resource-inefficient and environmentally unfriendly mining is heavily incentivized. Capitalism is pushed to produce not to serve actual needs or wants, but simply to try to pull a little bit extra profit out of the world. People buy a lot of shit they don't actually want, drive cars when they'd rather use public transit but can't, repeatedly replace consumer goods designed to quickly fall apart so they have to be replaced, and so on. There are probably more personal computers in the world than they are people. Computer hardware technology is growing a lot more slowly than it used to and it's probably possible to provide basically everyone with personal computers for fewer resources than we're presently consuming.

For most purposes wood and water are renewable resources if carefully managed. Mineral resources are more problematic, and I won't deny at all that we may well, at least eventually, have to find ways to increase our standards of living while consuming fewer mineral resources (of certain types - there are other things we have ridiculous amounts of and won't realistically run out of any time soon). This can be done though.

[piet11111]

A lot of stuff we use is made to break after x years so if we stopped doing that we would already save a huge amount of resources to replace the goods that broke down.

Then you have recycling that is only done in a limited extent due to cost benefit reasons but under communism we would be able to turn almost all our trash into raw materials for industry.

There is still a lot we can do to be more energy efficient too.

[Sugarnotch]

You can't be 'Green' without being Red.

A shift in the the ownership of production is the only way to solve the environmental crises. Our private-market driven economy leads to, and has done so conclusively, exploiting resources to maximize profits in the cheapest and most catastrophically deleterious way possible. Once private ownership over the means of production is abolished, we can start worrying about making things with the primary concern being social utility -- i.e. not profit motive, and not trying to squeeze every thing dry for profit -- thus producing things using much cleaner methods; cleaner methods that already exist, mind you, they just aren't profitable in the capitalist market.


A lot of stuff we use is made to break after x years so if we stopped doing that we would already save a huge amount of resources to replace the goods that broke down.This is true. Planned obsolesce is one of the dirty secrets of consumerism.

[DarkPast]

Hi comrades.
Communism would provide tv's, car, food, computers, etc, to everybody. Most people on the planet don't have these things (food excluded).

Currently there's around a billion malnourished people in the world. So no, not everyone has even food.

Capitalist society is dependent on making profits so, for example, much land that could be used to feed poor people is currently being used to make cash crops or biofuels. Furthemore, huge tracts of land are used to grow monocultures, without using proper crop rotation and depending on industrial fertilizer. This is also done only for profit - in America, for example, huge farms are devoted solely to supplying unhealth fast food industries.

So, as you can see, capitalism is in fact an extremely inefficient sytem that only looks to enrich a few people in the shortest time possible - it simply does not think long-term.

Eliminating this inefficient system will go a long way towards helping reduce the environmental damage caused by modern society.

[The Douche]

OP, you'll probably not find a real solid answer to your question on here.

When it comes to issues that question more than just state/capitalism (cause what you're getting at questions civilization) most of the posters here get really locked up. And its not because there is a lack of knowledge, these questions are really, really difficult.

You're correct, the standards that we currently have in the first world, do not seem to be environmentally sustainable if we applied them to the entire earth's population.

You might find one or two interesting responses in this thread (most of them will just skirt the issue or go off topic), but I will advise you to read the work of Fredy Perlman, Jacques Camatte, and John Zerzan, who are all anti-civilizationists (though not all primitivists).

[Jose Gracchus]

John Zerzan is definitely a primitivist, he wishes that 'abstract symbolic thought' could be excised from the human brain so we wouldn't go about re-inventing civilization (and thus any constraint or hierarchy on human agency).

[The Douche]

John Zerzan is definitely a primitivist, he wishes that 'abstract symbolic thought' could be excised from the human brain so we wouldn't go about re-inventing civilization (and thus any constraint or hierarchy on human agency).


Who said Zerzan wasn't a primitivist?

What do you mean human agency?

[Zanthorus]

Jacques Camatte,

From what I've read Camatte was less focused on the environment though but his own peculiar version of the real subsumption of labour under capital whereby capitalism during the 20th century managed to incorporate all aspects of life under it's domination, making any attempt to superceed capital beyond a generalised human revolt against civilisation impossible. It's less a concern with the environment and more one of the many variants of the capital subsuming all spheres of life under it's domination meme that was popular among 60's radical milieu's (It's also arguably a thread that can be traced back to the Dutch-German Communist Left in their polemics against Lenin). It's arguably one of the worst variants since Camatte basically denied that capitalism was a contradictory or historically limited form of social life but instead argued that it had overcome it's material basis and become an ever-present reality which had poisoned even the very movements which attempted to fight it and made them integral elements for perpetuating existing society.


John Zerzan is definitely a primitivist, he wishes that 'abstract symbolic thought' could be excised from the human brain so we wouldn't go about re-inventing civilization.

He didn't say that they were all not primitivists, he said some of them were not primitivists.

[The Douche]

From what I've read Camatte was less focused on the environment though but his own peculiar version of the real subsumption of labour under capital whereby capitalism during the 20th century managed to incorporate all aspects of life under it's domination, making any attempt to superceed capital beyond a generalised human revolt against civilisation impossible. It's less a concern with the environment and more one of the many variants of the capital subsuming all spheres of life under it's domination meme that was popular among 60's radical milieu's (It's also arguably a thread that can be traced back to the Dutch-German Communist Left in their polemics against Lenin). It's arguably one of the worst variants since Camatte basically denied that capitalism was a contradictory or historically limited form of social life but instead argued that it had overcome it's material basis and become an ever-present reality which had poisoned even the very movements which attempted to fight it and made them integral elements for perpetuating existing society.

I basically agree with your analysis of Camatte. His focus was not really on the environment, but on civilization, which is why I used the term anti-civ to describe him. In reading Camatte you probably will only make the most basic of relationships between his ideas and the environment, but if you read Camatte in the light of Perlman, Zerzan, Jensen, and other primitivist and anti-civ thinkers, then I think he adds something to the ecological discourse.

And as for your disagreements with Camatte's conclusions, I suppose we can do nothing but agree to disagree. I believe that the workers parties and the unions are recuperators of struggle, not the leading organizations, but that's certainly a debate for another thread.

[Zanthorus]

Ok, thanks for clarifying. On the last point, just for the record, I actually agree with you on the role of the existing 'workers' parties' and unions. The problem I see with Camatte's critique though is he basically ended up rejecting any kind of political organisation whereas I think it's possible to form political groups in the present that can potentially contribute to and push forward struggles rather than acting as brakes on the movement. Certainly there's a space for doing something other than joining a survivalist commune in the French mountains. Although as you say that's probably best left for another thread.