What would socialism mean for the environment

[boiler]

What would socialism mean for the environment

Capitalism is a system of productive relations based on the exploitation of labor, the realization of surplus value as profit, and the expansion of markets. In practical terms, all sort of behaviors and practices which are ‘irrational’ from the perspective of long-term human and ecological well-being are cultivated and sustained for the pressing end of profit.

Socialism is the antithesis of capitalism: the seizure of power by the proletariat and the movement of society toward communism, a mode of production and series of societal relations free from class divisions and a state.

Socialism also marks a break in the relationship between social production and the natural environment. Whereas capitalism involves productive relations of exploitation sustained toward the circular end of profit, socialism involves the democratic control over the means of production as part of the rational and increasingly egalitarian satisfaction of people’s wants and needs. Implied in such rational and democratic production is the inclusion of ecological regeneration and co-dependence as regulative economic principles.

Lastly, socialism represents the complete abolition of the ‘global division of labor’ and an end to the structural relationship of imperialist exploitation of the majority Third World by the minority First World.

Practically speaking, we can gain a glimpse of socialism when we ask how life might be made better from the perspective of humanity’s long-term interest were it not for the fetter of capitalism.

More specifically, we could speak of how life might be altered in Occupied North America (the United States and Canada) for the oppressor and oppressed populations which reside throughout it, under a hypothetical socialism:

For starters, capital-intensive agriculture would no longer be subsidized. Food would be produced in more local economies and in ways no longer dependent on Third World and migrant labor. Mass consumption of industrial meat might diminish. On the other hand, traditional and new ways of growing food might be developed and adopted on a mass scale.
Beyond socialized health care is the institutionalization of preventative care. Physically-balanced lifestyles and healthy diets will be promoted, not physical inactivity and profit-driven pharmaceuticals.
Productive activities will no longer not cause disruptions to ecological metabolic cycles. Instead, productive activity will be undertaken to improve general human health via regenerating and re-integrating positive features of the natural environment into populated and unpopulated spaces. For example, planting trees will no longer serve the business, aesthetic, or philanthropic sensibilities of the ruling classes, but will be carried out as a productive end unto itself for the concrete and intangible benefit it brings to local populations and humynity as a whole.
Disposable products and packaging could be diminished. Small bottles and cans such as those which are widely available at convenience stores could be largely done away with. Other types of plastic packaging could be reused on a mass scale. Under a system based on the ration democratic fulfillment of human wants and needs, waste (whether in the form of dumping, packaging, or uneaten food) is no longer a ‘cost of business’ but becomes a social problem with social solutions. Things like ‘controlled obsolescence’ will no longer exist.
Food production could become socialized. Restaurants could be replaced with larger-scale cafeterias, thus reducing resource cost and increasing efficiency, along with ensuring a healthy diet for every member of society. Such a reform would reduce the importance of the home-kitchen and would reduce the need for the individual ownership large refrigerators and other energy-draining larger appliances.
Residential patterns would also change. The single family home will go the way of the estate house. Cities would become more pedestrian-focused. Car-culture could be done away with. Entire blocks and neighbors could be blocked to motor traffic; sheltered walkways be built. Bike lanes could take over roads. Public transportation infrastructure could be developed for the long-term facilitation of daily travel. Via the social ownership of vehicles, the needs of individuals to transport larger objects could be met.
None of these examples of structural changes are made impossible by an unknown law of physics. They are all quite feasible given the current developmental level of the productive forces and available technologies. However, these relative examples taken as a whole are rendered impossible under capitalism, a system of productive relationships in which profit, commodities, and labor are regulative norms. Only through the development of a new socialist world-economy based on different regulative principles can the seemingly inherent contradiction between people and nature be resolved.

http://revolutionaryecology.wordpres...e-environment/

[tallguy]

Socialism a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for developing a sustainable relationship between humans and the rest of life. Capitalism is a complete non-starter and has to go. Actually, that's understating just how incompatible capitalism is with ecological sustainability. The fact is, capitalism is going to go. The first and second laws of thermodynamics will simply allow for no other outcome. The only pertinent question that remains, then, is what it is replaced with. It seems to me that the future will either hold some form of socialism or a return to unpretentious, overt serfdom for the majority.

It doesn't feel like it for us in the West yet. But we are on the edge of BIG history.

[Venas Abiertas]

We must learn to manage our resources. There is no alternative. Capitalism, a system in which everything and everyone is for sale, cannot manage anything rationally. Even a bird knows enough not to foul its own nest, but capitalism is not even as rational as a bird.

The human being has a marvelous capacity to adapt to almost any circumstance, but we are approaching the point where not even our most basic needs of food, water, and air can be met. Eventually we will reach a time when all of our science and technology will not be enough to counteract the damage we have done to our environment. The megarich are already making plans to colonize Mars. They know what's coming.

Socialism or barbarism. It really is that simple. Either we learn to cooperate on solving our problems or convert our planet into the set of Bladerunner.

[Bolshevik Sickle]

TL;DR
But personally I would make sure the environment is most taken care of.

[Ritzy Cat]

Environmentalism's's archenemy is economics - which would become nonexistent in a socialist/communist society.

[tallguy]

Environmentalism's's archenemy is economics - which would become nonexistent in a socialist/communist society.

The environment's arch enemy is civilisation....period. However, it is true to say that some systems of civilisation are far more unsustainable than others. Capitalism being just about the worst. Predicated, as it is, on perpetual economic growth or, in the absence of that, perpetual economic and social conflict.

[Jimmie Higgins]

In my view, the environmental struggle is not a struggle on behalf of an abstract or ideal environment, but a social struggle among people for control and so I think it's fundamentally linked to class struggle. What is our relationship with the natural world, who has access to it, how is it treated and used? As others have said, the environment in capitalism, like most everything in capitalism, is commodified: dissected, chopped up, and sorted according to the best possible exchange value. Business Competition, and division of land and ecosystem by competitive nation states, and the endless need for growth ensures that any long-term planning or sustainable and harmonious relationships to the natural world goes against all the natural currents of the system.

On the other hand a society where there is common ownership, collective planning and decisions by huge masses of people, and where the point of production is to make our lives easier and better, would not be driven to, for example, suck oil out of frozen sand just because it yields a slightly quicker return than less destructive means of producing energy. How we produce today is largely logical only from a profit standpoint. Capital needs to move and grow, if the point of production was to produce a stable and pleasant life for the worker-producers, then it would make much more sense to create ways of producing at a stable sustainable rate. Loggers wouldn't decide that clear-cutting and having to pick up and move every few years was better than farming lumber and being able to maintain a steady life. Maybe that was a bad example, because maybe lumber isn't efficient at all from a no-profit viewpoint.

This brings me to one point I disagree with in the o.p. which is local farming vs. monoculture factory farming. I think actually in some ways a ton of small autonomous farms would actually be worse for the environment... Well bad in a different way, maybe not worse. It would be very inefficient, create a lot more labor, use a lot more water, and not every population center developed in capitalism is in areas which could actually maintain their populations in that way. I think rather than looking towards this kind of thing, a society not run by the profit motive could synthesize older more healthy methods with modern advances. Personally I think major food production could actually be urbanized in a large scale form which would minimize effects of large-scale farming on the natural world. It would also make farm labor more like factory work or warehouse work, and I've read that large scale indoor urban farming would provide oxygen and could filer water for cities. Anyway, that's just a kind of pet-utopian thing of mine, mabe people will figure out different and better methods. but I think it's interesting because it's something that could be done now, but likely won't under capitalism (unless there is a revival of large public works projects) because of the long term investment required: engineers said it would take a decade of operation before it starts to create a return -- so why do that when land is cheep and reqires a very small cost to prepare for harvest.

[tallguy]

.....

....This brings me to one point I disagree with in the o.p. which is local farming vs. monoculture factory farming. I think actually in some ways a ton of small autonomous farms would actually be worse for the environment... Well bad in a different way, maybe not worse. It would be very inefficient, create a lot more labor, use a lot more water, and not every population center developed in capitalism is in areas which could actually maintain their populations in that way. I think rather than looking towards this kind of thing, a society not run by the profit motive could synthesize older more healthy methods with modern advances. Personally I think major food production could actually be urbanized in a large scale form which would minimize effects of large-scale farming on the natural world. It would also make farm labor more like factory work or warehouse work, and I've read that large scale indoor urban farming would provide oxygen and could filer water for cities. Anyway, that's just a kind of pet-utopian thing of mine, mabe people will figure out different and better methods. but I think it's interesting because it's something that could be done now, but likely won't under capitalism (unless there is a revival of large public works projects) because of the long term investment required: engineers said it would take a decade of operation before it starts to create a return -- so why do that when land is cheep and reqires a very small cost to prepare for harvest.

Farming itself, is an unsustainable practice. Modern, intensive farming is unsustainable because it completely denudes a given section of land of its nutrients in very short order due to the methods employed and the only reason this denuding is masked is via the annual application of hydrocarbon-derived fertilizers. Smaller scale, low-intensive farming is equally bad, however, because it requires far more land to be turned over to production for a given population size because of it's lower yields. And, in the end, it will denude the land just the same, it just takes longer, that's all. just about every human civilization in the entire history of man has fallen due to the destruction of it's environment from over-farming.

If we really want to be sustainable with the land, we need to reduce our global population down to about 1 billion at the very most. That way, it would not matter if our farming was intensive or non intensive. The rate at which we robbed the land of nutrients would be equally offset by its capacity to heal itself. In the absence of the above, everything else requires massive energy inputs from outside the agricultural/living system to keep it going. Everything else is unsustainable and, in the absence of a reduction in our global population's size and concomitant demands, communism is no more sustainable than capitalism is. It's merely a bit less unsustainable.

Communism, capitalism and a global human population of 7 billion are all children of the industrial age and the industrial age is drawing to a close. Don't misunderstand me, to the extent that this fall from our current industrial perch can be managed at all, communism, or some variant of it, is our only hope of managing that transition. But, make no mistake, the old socialist verities need to adapt to what is to come no less than anything other form of hitherto perpetual-growth based human system of organization.

[Full Metal Bolshevik]

If we really want to be sustainable with the land, we need to reduce our global population down to about 1 billion at the very most.

Source?

[tallguy]

Source?

You have nothing else to say in response to the points made in my post?

Really?

Nothing?

That's a bit pathetic.

[Niccolo]

What's wrong with asking for a source for what seems like a drastic claim?

[Comrade Chernov]

Farming itself, is an unsustainable practice. Modern, intensive farming is unsustainable because it completely denudes a given section of land of its nutrients in very short order due to the methods employed and the only reason this denuding is masked is via the annual application of hydrocarbon-derived fertilizers. Smaller scale, low-intensive farming is equally bad, however, because it requires far more land to be turned over to production for a given population size because of it's lower yields. And, in the end, it will denude the land just the same, it just takes longer, that's all. just about every human civilization in the entire history of man has fallen due to the destruction of it's environment from over-farming.

If we really want to be sustainable with the land, we need to reduce our global population down to about 1 billion at the very most. That way, it would not matter if our farming was intensive or non intensive. The rate at which we robbed the land of nutrients would be equally offset by its capacity to heal itself. In the absence of the above, everything else requires massive energy inputs from outside the agricultural/living system to keep it going. Everything else is unsustainable and, in the absence of a reduction in our global population's size and concomitant demands, communism is no more sustainable than capitalism is. It's merely a bit less unsustainable.

Communism, capitalism and a global human population of 7 billion are all children of the industrial age and the industrial age is drawing to a close. Don't misunderstand me, to the extent that this fall from our current industrial perch can be managed at all, communism, or some variant of it, is our only hope of managing that transition. But, make no mistake, the old socialist verities need to adapt to what is to come no less than anything other form of hitherto perpetual-growth based human system of organization.

Or, you know, we could come up with new methods of farming. Here's a thought, dig away the layer of malnourished soil, and plant the crops on the new, lower patch, which still has nutrients in it. Meanwhile, transport the bad soil to, say, a greenhouse, stir it and mix it up a little, so any nutrients still in it is exposed. And then use that to grow crops.

Boom. You've just doubled your crop output, especially since if it was a greenhouse, you'd be able to insulate it and grow crops in places you normally wouldn't be able to grow them.

I'll take my Nobel Prize now.

[tallguy]

Or, you know, we could come up with new methods of farming. Here's a thought, dig away the layer of malnourished soil, and plant the crops on the new, lower patch, which still has nutrients in it. Meanwhile, transport the bad soil to, say, a greenhouse, stir it and mix it up a little, so any nutrients still in it is exposed. And then use that to grow crops.

Boom. You've just doubled your crop output, especially since if it was a greenhouse, you'd be able to insulate it and grow crops in places you normally wouldn't be able to grow them.

I'll take my Nobel Prize now.

Sub-soils contain minerals. They contain little humus (carbon from dead organic material) and little nitrogen (both of which are ultimately extracted from the atmosphere and that process of extraction is driven by the energy in sunlight) and it would take several centuries to get them to the point where they did. This process could be partially sped up considerably, of course, by the liberal application of nitrogenous based fertilizers, which are derived from cracked natural gas.....oh wait....That's a finite, and therefore unsustainable, resource isn't it. The Nobel prize will have to go on hold I'm afraid.

Notwithstanding the terribly iniquitous allocation of existing resources, the elephant in the room is too many people and not enough stuff. Or, more generally, not enough planet Earth. Until we face that demon head-on, everything else is fiddling while Rome burns. Socialism, in the absence of recognizing the above, will be little better equipped than Capitalism to face the Crisis that is rushing headlong towards us. However, at least in socialism there exists the capacity for such recognition. Capitalism is systemically incapable of it.