Humanity = cancer?

[Unclebananahead]

Is humanity a 'cancer' on the planet? Why or why not? And according to what definition? And if they are, can anything be done about it, short of trying to eradicate the human race / human civilization or whatever?

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

How are you defining "cancer" exactly? Since obviously we're not literally a carcinoma...

[Klaatu]

Is humanity a 'cancer' on the planet? Why or why not? And according to what definition? And if they are, can anything be done about it, short of trying to eradicate the human race / human civilization or whatever?

I think this is a valid question. My own (IMHO) answer is this:

Those that are polluting/ruining/exploiting/destroying the planet, for their own gain, are the carcinomas, so-to-speak.

Those that are trying to prevent these crimes, are the "medicine" or the "antibiotic," as it were.

Some of us really do care, believe-it-or-not.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I don't think such clinical analogies are really helpful at the end of the day. It's dehumanising and fails to reflect the full subtleties of the reality on the ground.

[Unclebananahead]

Over the past couple hours, I've been debating with someone close to me about this question. The argument is to compare human behavior with the behavior of cancer: unsustainable growth and resource consumption. I had an issue With characterizing all of humanity this way, because in my thinking, it would tend to suggest a worldview which regards the bulk of humanity as an undifferentiated, monolithic entity, at least as far as ecological issues are concerned, and ignoring the social context--the class context in which ecological damage occurs. I have an issue with the sort of politics which emphasizes lifestyle choices, especially when the such politics deprives more organized, orchestrated struggles of momentum.

I myself am vegan, but I am not under the illusion that we can shop our way to communism.

[The Intransigent Faction]

I know I've heard this before...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola

So no. Just...no. Misanthropy, of this degree especially, is the secular or perhaps Atheistic answer to original sin, neither of which has any materialist basis. We can sit here and bad-mouth the species of which we are a part, or we can realize how malleable society can be and fight for something better.

This goes back to the days of Malthus, of which I'm sure someone here who cares enough could direct you to a thorough debunking. Rather than "getting rid of the excess population", it makes a hell of a lot more sense to engage in economic development that lowers birth rates and provides technology to sustain more people anyway.

In any case, it makes no sense empirically to talk about a "population problem" while we still have another, very real distributional and structural problem. Claiming that the "world can't sustain the current population" has so many flawed assumptions built in that they fall apart pretty quickly when you really start to question them.

[GPDP]

Misanthropic nonsense. Pay it no heed. Ask whoever is suggesting this to prove the cancerous behavior is something inherent to human nature or what have you.

[MarxArchist]

Over the past couple hours, I've been debating with someone close to me about this question. The argument is to compare human behavior with the behavior of cancer: unsustainable growth and resource consumption.

Capitalism is not 'humanity' or 'human nature'. Human history isn't the story of unsustainable growth and resource consumption that's the history of capitalism. There's no debate. The problem is capitalism. Production for profit. Consumption for profit. Everything linked to profit and thus perpetual expansion of markets across the globe devouring everything in it's path. Capitalism is the cancer and yes the earth is being eaten. Humans are being eaten by this system as well. Everything.

[Sidagma]

Also, it's important to keep in mind that the sort of massive wide-scale destruction that can endanger the planet and render large swathes unlivable is a really really really modern phenomenon that's the legacy of colonization and global capitalism. An honest inquisition into the origins of ecological destruction paints a much clearer picture -- it's only the American and European middle class (and pockets of bourgeoisie elsewhere) that take that sort of attitude towards the environment.

Can poor Somalis be blamed for toxic waste dumping off the coast of Somalia? No, because it's put there by western corporations. Can the Algonquin be blamed for the industrial output of New York City? No, because they were slaughtered and their land stolen. Can the Greeks living in northern Greece be blamed for the establishment of the El Dorado Corp's gold mine? Of course not, because it's based in Canada.

The issue at hand here is colonization, not something intrinsic to humanity.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Over the past couple hours, I've been debating with someone close to me about this question. The argument is to compare human behavior with the behavior of cancer: unsustainable growth and resource consumption.

Problem is, if we really did act like cancer cells then global population growth would be increasing, rather than beginning to level off as it is doing now.

Also, cancer cells are very dramatic example of cellular dysfunction, whereas human reproduction is very much typical. The comparison is good enough for fictional characters who hate humanity, but beyond that lacks sufficient rigour to be worth considering.


I had an issue With characterizing all of humanity this way, because in my thinking, it would tend to suggest a worldview which regards the bulk of humanity as an undifferentiated, monolithic entity, at least as far as ecological issues are concerned, and ignoring the social context--the class context in which ecological damage occurs.

Sounds like a good answer. Does your interlocutor have a reply to this?


I have an issue with the sort of politics which emphasizes lifestyle choices, especially when the such politics deprives more organized, orchestrated struggles of momentum.

I myself am vegan, but I am not under the illusion that we can shop our way to communism.

It also allows the real culprits to get away with what in some cases is literally murder.

[MarxArchist]

The issue at hand here is colonization, not something intrinsic to humanity.
I'll see your third world Maoist privilege theory and raise you one capitalism! Colonialism was simply the material base for the rise of capitalism and now a bi product of capitalism's push for perpetual profits. The problem is capitalism not white middle class or American and European 'middle class'.

[MarxSchmarx]

I think the proverbial jury is still out on this one.


Problem is, if we really did act like cancer cells then global population growth would be increasing, rather than beginning to level off as it is doing now.


Actually, cancer cell populations also level off - the phenomenon has been captured by the Gompertz function and also the famous logistic equation - both of which have been shown to fit the dynamics of cancer cell populations quite well.



Also, cancer cells are very dramatic example of cellular dysfunction, whereas human reproduction is very much typical. The comparison is good enough for fictional characters who hate humanity, but beyond that lacks sufficient rigour to be worth considering.


In many respects, it comes down to whether you think life on earth is essentially an emergent, self-regulating system the way the human body is. Cells multiply and then stabilize the way, say, species do, but occasionally you get a cell population that can successfully evade the regulating rules by which every other population must abide. I think humans have in effect done so as well. Multicellular cooperation does indeed stabilize under very different mechanisms from ecosystems, but both manage to result in stability in the face of considerable random perturbations because of a series of dampening oscillations via feedbacks ultimately caused by energetic constraints.

I think to a large extent a case can be made that both cancer and humans are aberrations and freaks of nature that have, at least in the short term "beaten natural selection" at its own game. Both emerged from natural selection among like types (humanity among early hominids, and cancer from among many other failed mutant cell lines) and aggressively/rapidly expand relative to the timeline of species range expansions or cellular growth. Both prove capable of evading environmental regulatory factors (humans evade diseases, cancer cells evade immune system interference).

Taken together, I don't think these analogies are aberrational - I think they speak to something about the processes of self-regulatory biological systems that can give rise to a "super organism" or a "super cell line" every now and then that manage to evade the regulatory feedbacks.

But whereas cancers tend to kill the host, we don't know whether humanity will end up destroying life on earth - although it has come tantalizing close and might yet.

[MarxArchist]

Sorry. Had to.

IM1-DQ2Wo_w

Hey MarxSchmarx.


we don't know whether humanity will end up destroying life on earth


I'd suggest you inject some historical materialism into your analysis. This isnt 'humanity' we're talking about it's an economic system which was initially forced on us and now maintained via all manner of propaganda, distraction and outright Machivellian mind fuckery with the might of the modern state holding the gun. Industrial production could be handled in completely different ways outside of the profit motive. You know this. Yes?

[Unclebananahead]

Problem is, if we really did act like cancer cells then global population growth would be increasing, rather than beginning to level off as it is doing now.

Also, cancer cells are very dramatic example of cellular dysfunction, whereas human reproduction is very much typical. The comparison is good enough for fictional characters who hate humanity, but beyond that lacks sufficient rigour to be worth considering.



Sounds like a good answer. Does your interlocutor have a reply to this?



It also allows the real culprits to get away with what in some cases is literally murder.

This person concedes that some are more responsible than others (i.e. big multinationals) but says that we all have to do our part to not buy GMO shit, sweatshop made shit, meat, harmful chemicals (like Monsanto's "Round Up") and other stuff which derives from, and monetarily supports these earth destroying activities. This person said, "well why shouldn't we try to stop supporting this shit? What should I do, just say 'fuck it' and buy whatever? Maybe I should just buy this bacon and these eggs" Both of us are vegan, but I'm a Marxist and the interlocutor in question is an anarchist who is very distrustful of any and all forms of centralized authority

[MarxArchist]

This person concedes that some are more responsible than others (i.e. big multinationals) but says that we all have to do our part to not buy GMO shit, sweatshop made shit, meat, harmful chemicals (like Monsanto's "Round Up") and other stuff which derives from, and monetarily supports these earth destroying activities. This person said, "well why shouldn't we try to stop supporting this shit? What should I do, just say 'fuck it' and buy whatever? Maybe I should just buy this bacon and these eggs" Both of us are vegan, but I'm a Marxist and the interlocutor in question is an anarchist who is very distrustful of any and all forms of centralized authority
Capitalism is the problem. We can't end it by supporting so called "green capitalists". What we need to do is end capitalism while accepting that there will no longer be multitudes of strip malls selling useless shit by the ton. Useless shit is everywhere. Decentralized production with an endless amount of capitalists trying to figure out what peoples inner most desires are in order to market the dream product. Literally trillions of tons of useless shit.

3gjLS2NUFGA

[Jimmie Higgins]

Well, I agree with others who've been saying that humanity can not be seen as a cancer and this view implies some malthusian views as well as a liberal economic understanding.

It's also a very fatalistic ("original sin/human" nature argument) and pessimistic argument that excuses the workings of capitalism by taking such an abstract view of the problems that any specifics (and therfore any specific ways to challenge these problems) is obscured. It's like saying all Ocean-bound ships that sink, sink because of the depth of the Ocean. Even if this is abstractly true, it does no good for ship-builders or passangers to know why or how ships may or may not sink.

The brief answer to the "cancer" analogy is that cancer can only reproduce itself, it doesn't decide to do so whereas human organization can be done in ways that are more or less harmonious or sustainable in relation to other people and the natural world, or they can have a more parasitic/exploitative relationship. Since human history shows both are possible, then it's not a question of some inherent human biological drive, but a social problem and one of how and why we use resources.


This person concedes that some are more responsible than others (i.e. big multinationals) but says that we all have to do our part to not buy GMO shit, sweatshop made shit, meat, harmful chemicals (like Monsanto's "Round Up") and other stuff which derives from, and monetarily supports these earth destroying activities. This person said, "well why shouldn't we try to stop supporting this shit? What should I do, just say 'fuck it' and buy whatever? Maybe I should just buy this bacon and these eggs" Both of us are vegan, but I'm a Marxist and the interlocutor in question is an anarchist who is very distrustful of any and all forms of centralized authority

Induviduals can do what they want, but this view of taking consumer action ultimately doesn't amount to much. It takes for granted the liberal idea that production is based on consumer demand, not profits and exploitation. So this means that even if consumers "choose" to consume "ethically", if the greater exploitation and profit potential is in producing in a different way, then the consumption of choice never becomes more than a niche. "Centralized authority" in this instance is misleading because capitalism can be centralized in the sense of driving towards the greatest exploitation while the mechanisims of this can be decentralized, and privitized - spread out over various competing enterprizes. So the decentralization (in a privitized way) of production and ownership of natural resources means that there is even more of a chance that natural resources are going to be exploited because competition of those producers means that the ones who exploit the most rise to the top.

This is not an argument for nationalization in the abstract, but just an argument that within capitalism decentralization or "small capitalism" is really any alterantive - especially in the neo-liberal era where it's more about the centralization of finance than of specific production. Ultimately it's a battle over who controls resources and production and for what purpose. Democratizing this, having resources in common, rather than the sort of top-down nationalization would mean that people's relationship to the environment would probably be more focused on sustainability and meeting needs easily, rather than exploiting quickly and then letting the pollution and run-off be dealt with in common or through government programs.

[Unclebananahead]

This person's thinking tends to be, 'they wouldn't sell it if they didn't think that people would buy it, so if virtually no one buys stuff produced through ecologically damaging processes, then they wouldn't sell it.'

The presumption is that if enough people boycott certain products, it would harm profits enough that corporations would sell less of those things. She claimed that doing this makes more of a difference compared to what us Marxists do.

[Luís Henrique]

Over the past couple hours, I've been debating with someone close to me about this question. The argument is to compare human behavior with the behavior of cancer: unsustainable growth and resource consumption.

Well, the "planet" isn't a living being, so it can't care less about the growth of lackthereof of any particular species.

Any living species, left on its own, will grow unsustainably, resulting in an unbalance of ecosystems. Usually, such unbalance will result in a populational crisis of the species causing the problem, leading into a different state of equilibrium. We are just particularly "good" in growing unsustainably. But, unlike any other species, we don't necessarily need to reach a populational crisis to restore the balance: we can, and do, either restablish the equilibrium by making what was previously unsustainable rather sustainable, or refrain to expand population-wise.

So, if we are a "cancer", we are a very particular kind of cancer that can actually improve the "organism" we infect, and that cares about it.

Luís Henrique

[MarxArchist]

This person's thinking tends to be, 'they wouldn't sell it if they didn't think that people would buy it, so if virtually no one buys stuff produced through ecologically damaging processes, then they wouldn't sell it.'

The presumption is that if enough people boycott certain products, it would harm profits enough that corporations would sell less of those things. She claimed that doing this makes more of a difference compared to what us Marxists do.

The lifestyism debate is an old one. There seems to be a revolving door of same issues never ending on the left. I grow weary of it all.

[Nevsky]

Humanity does have the potential to be the "cancer of the earth", although the latter would be a too narrow minded, misanthropic definition of humanity and wouldn't do justice to the species. I have heard this kind of definition a lot of times while reading more pessimistic philosophy. It is justified in the sense that humans are the only elements of nature which consciously see through the cycle of nature and abstract themselves from it (in their minds). They also possess the ability to create weapons capable of "destroying" the whole system of nature as we know it. Hence, the known misanthropic philosopher Emil Cioran once called humanity "nature's attempt at suicide" (I roughly translated this from a book of mine).

That being said, keep in mind that this is only a potential scenario and mainly based on the old hobbesian, dark view of human nature which also served as an ideological foundation of capitalism (an inverted, positivistic version, though). We as communists shouldn't resign to such apocaliptic thought but rather use it as model for what we don't want to happen, what will be prevented by socialist revolution and progress.

[chase63]

That being said, keep in mind that this is only a potential scenario and mainly based on the old hobbesian, dark view of human nature which also served as an ideological foundation of capitalism (an inverted, positivistic version, though). We as communists shouldn't resign to such apocaliptic thought but rather use it as model for what we don't want to happen, what will be prevented by socialist revolution and progress.

I agree with this very much so. Capitalism creates a culture that causes many humans to act as "cancers of the earth," constantly consuming, buying, wasting, etc. But, culture under communism will be different and should promote humanity to be constructive and respectful of the environment.

[Jimmie Higgins]

This person's thinking tends to be, 'they wouldn't sell it if they didn't think that people would buy it, so if virtually no one buys stuff produced through ecologically damaging processes, then they wouldn't sell it.'And yes, this is based on the assumption that capitalism sets out to meet pure demand, rather than to make profits. It also ignores economic inequality and why there is a market for cheaply and quickly produced sub-standard commodities in the first place. If capitalists made money by meeting our abstract demands, then no one would live in crappy appartments, for example. Instead, the pressures of capitalism ensure that production is guided by the quickest cheapest buck no matter if it insufficiently meets the actual demand or is destructive to the consumer or society (and the environment) in general.

In addition many of the "needs" of capitalism are structural. People need cars, why - because they need to get to work and there isn't efficient or easy public transportation and affordable (for stable working class people) housing developments have gone further out of main population areas. So for poor urban people who just can't afford a car, they get stuck in a situation where because they live paycheck to paycheck, they probably pay more in the long run for expensive public transportation than they would if they had the credit to buy a car. Upwardly mobile urbanites "choose" to not have a car, but they can rent one if they want to get out of town, and they pay more cost of living to live in gentrified neighborhoods where there is access to jobs and public transportation or practical biking-lifestyles. The process of gentrification that allows the upwardly mobile to live an ethical lifestyle then, ironically, increases housing and living costs to workers and therfore increases their "need" to buy a car so they can live further away in areas where rent or housing is more reasonable. So the fundamental issue in this example is not consumption choice, but structural issues of inequality and how capitalism maximized profits.


The presumption is that if enough people boycott certain products, it would harm profits enough that corporations would sell less of those things. She claimed that doing this makes more of a difference compared to what us Marxists do.Well the first problem with this is that it's pretty impossible and modest compared to the threat it's supposed to deal with. For one thing, you wouldn't be able to buy anything because fossile fules and bank investments were probably a major part somewhere in the production process. So if you buy local you are still buying from people who get investments from banks who then take that capital and invest it into the most profit-maximizing (and probably exploitative and destructive) places it can find. If you don't live in Edan where everything can be grown when you want it, then probably food and other basic commodities you need to survive were created through a ton of labor and ecological exploitation.

Personally I call this "bootstraps-environomentalism" because it's the same logic of "why don't poor people just get off their asses and go to college and get a better job?". In this case it's "why don't lazy people live more morally like I do". It turns the capitalist economy and environmental destruction into matters of "personal responcibility" and yet 99.9% of us have no influence in boardrooms and banks which orchestrate these things. It's sad that people on the left are so demoralized that they don't even think that a broad reform on production methods is even possible. I guess we could think of it in a positive way like people recognize how toothless these reforms tend to be; but it's like rejecting toothlessness and instead choosing to only eat soup and mashed apples anyway.

The problems we face are wide-spread and systemic; to alter this course it would take huge changes - re-forming cities so that cars are not necissary, re-forming all of agriculture so that crops are grown for ease and the best use of resources rather than the monocultures based on cheap land and wasted water and exploited migrant labor of today. It would take cooperation between firms and between countries (especially where lakes and oceans that share borders are concerned) and capitalism ensures that companies and countried will have more at stake in competition than can be gained from cooperation.

Rather than organize hundreds of millions to shop a certain way, organizing tens of thousands to demand that reforms are made now, and to take militant labor action to win some influence over production would make a much bigger and better impact within capitalism. It could also help mobilize people for being able to take it all over so that our society could be shaped around making our lives better and more livable.

[goalkeeper]

Nature is our enemy.

'Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzle of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railways. Let the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled.’ V. Zazurbin

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

What's wrong with a little bit of misanthropy every now and again? :rolleyes: Harsh self criticism could do us some good.

Having been around people of privilege for much of my life, I can tell you that the bourgeois can be quite cancerous. Its interesting to see how one person can manage to take a beautiful, untouched plot of land and put some monstrosity of a mansion on it ... for themselves and their tiny family. Humans, like other animals in nature, want survivability, sustainability and a comfortable living. Sometimes that desire does become cancerous, when one person absorbs resources from their environment and labor from others to expand their own estates. In that sense, the estate of the Capitalist is at once a cancer on society and on the environment of our planet.

Humanity might not be a cancer, but wealthy Capitalists may be. Granted, any species which has no predators and suddenly expands across the globe and causing mass extinction of the other species could be viewed that way too, but in that case we're in good company - the Argentine Ants are at least as good at being "cancerous" as the human species - and lets not forget the common cat, which loves to find new islands and eat all of the endangered rodents and flightless birds on it.


Nature is our enemy.

'Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzle of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railways. Let the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled.’ V. Zazurbin

How can nature be an "enemy"? It sounds like something Zizek would say to troll liberals but aside from that it seems like a metaphysically dubious statement ... everything in our universe is "nature", how could it be our enemy? Nature gave us corn, wood, metal and stone, we draw our resources from it like any animal, and we are within it anyhow. As for the quote I doubt many people want to live in a land of endless, dreary, cement Soviet housing estates and smokestacks broken up by the occasional cornfield anyhow.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

As for the quote I doubt many people want to live in a land of endless, dreary, cement Soviet housing estates and smokestacks broken up by the occasional cornfield anyhow.

I dunno, it sounds like a massive improvement over any of the suburban shitholes I've come across (I'm looking at you, Surrey!), which seem to embody all the most loathsome aspects of petit-bourgeouis pseudo-individualism. There is something about such landscapes which seems to encourage and/or attract the most prissy and small-minded kind of Little Englander. Barf.

I'd gladly forgo paving over the Earth if it meant bulldozing all those insipid cookie-cutter houses and leaving the ruins to nature. Those fucking things really are cancerous, in my opinion.

[Ele'ill]

Is humanity a 'cancer' on the planet? Why or why not? And according to what definition? And if they are, can anything be done about it, short of trying to eradicate the human race / human civilization or whatever?


No, we're capable of researching how to have minimal impact and I think we have the means to put that into action. Minimal impact is roughly equal to lost profits so I'd blame it on a systemic level not just generally 'humans'. Then again it might be too late.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I dunno, it sounds like a massive improvement over any of the suburban shitholes I've come across (I'm looking at you, Surrey!), which seem to embody all the most loathsome aspects of petit-bourgeouis pseudo-individualism. There is something about such landscapes which seems to encourage and/or attract the most prissy and small-minded kind of Little Englander. Barf.

I'd gladly forgo paving over the Earth if it meant bulldozing all those insipid cookie-cutter houses and leaving the ruins to nature. Those fucking things really are cancerous, in my opinion.

I agree, although this is a false dichotomy. Why live in a dreary world of cement or a dreary world of oversized middle class mansions? Who decided that the working class can't have their cake and eat it too? The bourgeoisie?

[Jimmie Higgins]

I agree, although this is a false dichotomy. Why live in a dreary world of cement or a dreary world of oversized middle class mansions? Who decided that the working class can't have their cake and eat it too? The bourgeoisie?

Iriquoi long-houses with really awsome internet acess for all.

In my utopia there'd be clean nap areas everwhere so you could go out or travel and if you got tired you'd just sleep for a while no matter where you were. I don't even like napping currently, but I think people were meant to nap a lot and not sleep in a big block and then rush around all day. That, and all utopias are just a rejection of things we don't like about current society and one of my biggest pet peeves is that there's never any place in public to chill and hang out anymore in urban areas.

With people doing more recreational drugs in my imagined post-revolution utopia, we'll need lots of infrastructure to support the sudden urge to nap or the need for readily available chill-out rooms. :D

[cyu]

Why does cancer have a bad reputation? Don't cancer cells have rights too? Why don't we try to defend cancer cells? The answer is that cancer in humans is opposed to humanity. When we define cancer as bad, it is because it is bad to humans.

I see no problem with an ever growing biomass of humanity.

When we talk about environmental devastation, why is destroying the environment bad, while destroying cancer cells good? The reason destroying the environment bad is that it is bad for humanity. After you poison all the water, choke off all the air, and get rid of all the top soil, humanity has nothing left to live on.

It's not simply that any change to the environment is defined as bad. Otherwise, we'd judge all agriculture as bad, since it completely changes the original landscape of where you started to grow the food. However, agriculture is still opposed to poisoned water and retreating topsoil - because those 2 things make agriculture more difficult - and thus the survival of humanity more difficult.

[Ele'ill]

Iriquoi long-houses with really awsome internet acess for all.

In my utopia there'd be clean nap areas everwhere so you could go out or travel and if you got tired you'd just sleep for a while no matter where you were. I don't even like napping currently, but I think people were meant to nap a lot and not sleep in a big block and then rush around all day. That, and all utopias are just a rejection of things we don't like about current society and one of my biggest pet peeves is that there's never any place in public to chill and hang out anymore in urban areas.

With people doing more recreational drugs in my imagined post-revolution utopia, we'll need lots of infrastructure to support the sudden urge to nap or the need for readily available chill-out rooms. :D

wait, do you remember me posting about this? 'nap centers' where people could go to read and doze off. Like really ambient rooms and stuff. I thought I was the only person

[MarxSchmarx]

I'd suggest you inject some historical materialism into your analysis. This isnt 'humanity' we're talking about it's an economic system which was initially forced on us and now maintained via all manner of propaganda, distraction and outright Machivellian mind fuckery with the might of the modern state holding the gun. Industrial production could be handled in completely different ways outside of the profit motive. You know this. Yes?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying industrialization is the problem. Humanity can still save itself if it can abandon capitalism. As the American socialist Eugene Debs said - "I am for socialism because I am for humanity.".

But I don't think it is appropriate to cherry pick all humanity has to offer. Humanity has done great things - vaccines, compassion for the less fortunate, rum, poetry - but it has also done some incredibly awful things. The modern state and industrial production under capitalism threaten us all. This is not new to historical materialist analysis. The brutal wars of the last century attest to the enormous destructive power capitalism can bring. We have just added a new dimension in the form of environmental catastrophes.

[Jimmie Higgins]

wait, do you remember me posting about this? 'nap centers' where people could go to read and doze off. Like really ambient rooms and stuff. I thought I was the only personHa, maybe I did pick that up from you, I don't remember. Anyway it's a good idea and I fully support our nap-faction, come the revolution. :)