this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Cultists. Right. Because analyzing material conditions is cult behavior but trusting market signals that literally price extinction as an externality is rational. Marx and Engels wrote about the metabolic rift between society and nature in the 1860s. That is foundational ecological critique. You dismiss a century of development in socialist environmental theory because it does not match your moral aesthetic. China's ecological civilization framework is not statecraft over climate. It is state capacity applied to climate. Binding targets in the 14th Five-Year Plan. Provincial cadre evaluations tied to environmental metrics. The world's largest carbon market covering power generation. That is not disregard. That is planning.
Tankie is a thought-terminating slur. It replaces analysis with a label. Drop it. And commie billionaire is a contradiction in terms that you wield to avoid engaging with actually existing socialism. China's billionaires operate within a system where the state controls land, finance, energy, and strategic industry. They are tolerated, regulated, and increasingly compressed under common prosperity. The number of billionaires in China has been shrinking. Platform economy crackdowns. Anti-monopoly fines. Wealth redistribution mechanisms. This is not capitalism with red flags. This is a transitional mode managing contradictions. Your false equivalence between a socialist state that directs capital and a capitalist state that is directed by it is either ignorance or bad faith.
Greenwash is a material accusation. Show the material. China manufactures over 70 percent of the world's solar modules. Produces the majority of EVs and batteries. Built the largest electrified rail network on earth. Installed more renewable capacity in 2023 than the US has in its entire history. These are not pledges. These are material actions. Meanwhile the West offshores emissions, counts consumption poorly, and calls it progress. If this is greenwashing then the greenwash is building the actual infrastructure to decarbonize the global economy. Your rhetoric sounds radical but it erases the material difference between a system that plans for ecological transition and one that cannot because profit forbids it.
You are serious. And you are wrong. We do not justify billionaires. We analyze them. In China, private wealth is subordinated to social goals through party discipline, state finance, and industrial policy. When a tech billionaire's company harms workers or the environment, the state intervenes. Fines. Restructuring. Public re-education. That does not happen under capitalism. It cannot. The profit motive is the law. Under socialism, the profit motive is a tool. A managed contradiction. We are reducing the number of billionaires. We are expanding public ownership in strategic sectors. We are directing investment toward green tech. If you want to fight billionaires, fight the system that produces them as a structural necessity. Not the one that is actively dismantling their power.
This is idealist nonsense. Valuing human flourishing is not opposed to valuing nature. The rift is created by capitalism, which treats both labor and nature as disposable inputs. Socialism seeks a rational metabolism between society and nature. That means clean air, restored soils, protected biodiversity, and stable climate because human survival depends on it. China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while expanding forest coverage, controlling desertification, and leading global renewable deployment. That is not human-über-alles. That is recognizing that ecological health and human development are dialectically united. You can posture about deep ecology while the planet burns. We are building the material base to actually save it.
If you want to criticize, criticize from the left. Criticize from materialism. But do not equate a system that plans for ecological survival with one that structurally cannot. One of these systems is building the solar panels, the batteries, the rail, the grid. The other is writing net-zero pledges on paper while approving new oil fields. Pick a side based on what is being built, not on vibes.
> "What's shocking isn't that they weren't environmentally conscious in their time, it's shocking that a hundred plus years on and their cultists will disregard environmental science to support statecraft over climate."
>Marx and Engels wrote about the metabolic rift between society and nature in the 1860s. That is foundational ecological critique.
Indeed it is, but they wrote about in terms of how abuse of the environment makes it difficult to maintain human systems. They weren’t in it for the sake of the environment itself. Every society that has tried to overhaul itself and transition out of whatever version of feudal state it was in has just repeated the industrial revolution’s rape of the land at a speed run.
>You dismiss a century of development in socialist environmental theory because it does not match your moral aesthetic.
China's ecological civilization framework is not statecraft over climate. It is state capacity applied to climate. Binding targets in the 14th Five-Year Plan.
Indeed I do. You’ve had a century and are still trying to formulate “plans” that sound great on paper but are often ignored locally because the existence of the state will always override the consequences to the environment. Opposition to this is framed as immoral aesthetics?
>Tankie is a thought-terminating slur. It replaces analysis with a label. Drop it. And commie billionaire is a contradiction in terms that you wield to avoid engaging with actually existing socialism. China's billionaires operate within a system where the state controls land, finance, energy, and strategic industry. They are tolerated, regulated, and increasingly compressed under common prosperity.
Nobody gets to billionaire status clean. The typical argument tankies push is that unlike western oligarchs, they somehow don’t exploit the state or people. Your defense of their existence falls flat when pressed about what they did to the environment to get there. You tolerate them? Why? And unless your fines are bankrupting them, billionaires can pay fines like it’s a subscription service as long as whatever they’re being fined for is more profitable. That’s capitalism 101 and no different than Bezos having an illegal fence he pays a pittance as a penalty for.
>Greenwash is a material accusation. Show the material.
“China manufactures over 70 percent of the world's solar modules. Produces the majority of EVs and batteries. Built the largest electrified rail network on earth. Installed more renewable capacity in 2023 than the US has in its entire history. These are not pledges. These are material actions.”
Your words. These actions are not taken for the sake of the environment, but because the human and economic growth demands it. Where are all the materials for this coming from? What’s the impact of building all that? Greenwashing at its finest- we still did it, we just did it a little cleaner than you.
>You are serious. And you are wrong. We do not justify billionaires. We analyze them. In China, private wealth is subordinated to social goals through party discipline, state finance, and industrial policy. When a tech billionaire's company harms workers or the environment, the state intervenes. Fines. Restructuring. Public re-education.
Fines, restructuring, and public re-education happens all the time in the west because, again, billionaires and corporations can eat the fines as long as their profits prevail. You said you tolerate billionaires that arise in your system. Are there not enough western billionaires to be studied, how they act and exploit, that you couldn’t see their methods and be intolerant of them occurring in your system?
>This is idealist nonsense. Valuing human flourishing is not opposed to valuing nature.
Again, criticism of the system is disregarded as nonsense. Human flourishing has always come at the expense of nature.
>Criticize from materialism. But do not equate a system that plans for ecological survival with one that structurally cannot. One of these systems is building the solar panels, the batteries, the rail, the grid.
Solar panels, batteries, the rail, and the grid are all materials. They require resources to be build and their purpose is to make the human condition more comfortable. That aspect of human nature is never going to change, so we have to figure out how to mitigate what we do to the planet while progress. But if your system is tearing apart the planet for rare earth elements so you can build the infrastructure to raise up your population of the expense of whomever and whatever animals/plants are living atop them, just so you can mass manufacture said “ecofriendly” equipment to nations of consumers to build your GDP, while tolerating and analyzing how your system creates billionaires and wealth inequality, you’re just the opposite side of the consumer coin. The west demands, China supplies, and neither would be where they are without the other.
No shit. They were trying to understand the material relationship between human society and nature, not writing a nature-worship catechism. Humans are part of nature. Human survival, reproduction, and development all depend on managing that relationship rationally. Treating that as some kind of moral failure is not ecological sophistication. It is just anti-human edge lord posturing.
This is just a slogan replacing analysis. The fact that industrialization has ecological costs does not make every system identical. Under capitalism, extraction and destruction are driven by competitive accumulation. Expand, cut costs, externalize damage, grow or die. That is the core logic. Under socialism, destructive development can happen, but it is not the same structural compulsion. A system that can subordinate investment to planning is not the same as one where investment is subordinated to profit by definition. Pretending otherwise is either idiocy or dishonesty.
And under capitalism, ecological destruction is not a failure of implementation. It is usually the implementation. If poisoning a river, flattening a forest, or gutting a mountain is profitable, that is rational behavior inside the system. So spare me the false equivalence. A contradiction between national planning and local execution is not the same thing as a system structurally rewarding destruction as normal business practice.
Correct. So what? That is not an argument, it is a truism. The actual question is whether billionaires rule the state or the state rules them. In the West, billionaires are not some accidental byproduct. They are the ruling class. In China, private wealth exists inside a system where the commanding heights remain under state direction and where capital can be cut down, reorganized, and redirected. Is that contradiction resolved? No. Is it identical to liberal capitalism? Also no. You keep treating the existence of contradiction as proof that all distinctions vanish. That is baby-brain politics.
This would hit harder if you were comparing like with like. In capitalist states, fines are often just a cost of doing business because the state is structurally dependent on capital and too weak or too compromised to discipline it meaningfully. In China, capital has faced forced restructurings, canceled IPOs, sector-wide crackdowns, anti-monopoly campaigns, and direct political steering. That does not make the contradiction disappear. It does mean this is not the same thing as Bezos paying a token penalty and carrying on as usual.
Again, no shit. That is how politics works in the real world. Decarbonization does not stop counting because people also need breathable air, stable power, mass transit, and livable cities. You are basically arguing that ecological measures are fake unless they are done out of pure spiritual devotion to untouched nature, with no human interest involved. That is not a serious political standard. It is moral theater.
From the material world, obviously. Like every form of production in human history. This is not some devastating revelation. The real question is whether renewable buildout, electrified transit, and grid expansion reduce total ecological damage relative to fossil dependence and capitalist sprawl. The real question is whether extraction can be planned, constrained, cleaned up, and subordinated to long-term social need instead of private accumulation. You dodge that because “everything uses materials” sounds profound to people who stopped thinking halfway through the sentence.
Not in the same way, not at the same scale, and not under the same political logic. Western states regulate capital without challenging its supremacy. That is the difference you keep trying to blur. Liberal states discipline capital at the margins while depending on it fundamentally. A socialist state can confront capital as a subordinate and contradictory element inside a broader political project. You do not have to pretend that project is complete. You do have to stop flattening everything into one big undifferentiated blob because nuance would ruin your performance.
Human flourishing under class society and capitalism has come at catastrophic expense to nature because production is organized irrationally and destructively. That does not mean human flourishing as such is the problem. Unless your argument is literally that billions of people should stay poor, underdeveloped, immobile, underfed, and energy-starved so you can preserve your moral purity. And if that is your argument, then say it clearly instead of hiding behind vague eco-misanthropic sludge.
No, that is you collapsing all distinction into a smug little nihilism because it saves you from having to think politically. Yes, there are contradictions in green industrialization. Yes, extraction has costs. Yes, socialist projects operating inside a capitalist world market inherit ugly pressures and hybrid forms. None of that proves equivalence. It proves the opposite. It shows how difficult it is to build out the material basis for decarbonization inside a global system still shaped by imperial accumulation and commodity production.
Correct. The world market is integrated. Congratulations on discovering interdependence. That still does not prove all systems are the same. It proves that socialist and postcolonial states develop inside a world still dominated by capital, which imposes distortions, compromises, and contradictions. You keep stating features of the existing world economy as if they magically erase the distinction between a system trying to discipline capital and one structurally ruled by it.
What you are actually arguing, stripped of all the green grandstanding, is this: humans use resources, development transforms nature, therefore every large-scale social project is ecologically guilty, therefore nothing is qualitatively better than anything else. That is not deep ecology. It is flattened nihilism with a green paint job. It is politically useless, analytically empty, and mostly serves as an excuse to sneer at anyone trying to solve real problems at scale.
Serious politics starts from the reality that billions of people need food, housing, transit, sanitation, electricity, healthcare, and industry, and that these have to be provided without cooking the planet. Capitalism cannot solve that because production is governed by profit, not need. That is the whole fucking issue. A socialist project can fail, deform, compromise, and contradict itself. But it at least exists on terrain where rational ecological planning is possible. Capitalism exists on terrain where ecocide is profitable.
So stop acting like “materials come from somewhere” is a killer argument. Everybody older than twelve already knows that. The real question is who governs the metabolism between society and nature: capital, or conscious planning. You keep dodging that because once you answer it, your smug both-sides routine falls to pieces.
And beneath all the fake nuance, your argument keeps drifting into ecofascist bullshit. The constant move is to treat human development itself as the problem, flatten billions of people’s material needs into “the species” as an abstract plague, and posture as morally superior to any project that tries to raise living standards at scale. That politics always ends in the same place: contempt for mass humanity, especially poor and developing populations, in the name of some purified relationship with nature. So stop dressing up misanthropy as ecological seriousness. It is not profound. You are just an infantile kaczynski acolyte. If you truly believe all of this stuff why are you using technology go live in the woods.
Oh, I’m just here because the copypasta that is online tankie vomit relies on the critique being based on a compare/contrast with western imperialism and capitalism. You both fail when hit with environmental concerns which you both dismiss with the same “ecofascist” hand wave. As if either system doesn’t have like-minded detractors, there’s dozens of us! Humanity is always going to put itself first, that is inevitable. You both enjoy the luxury of your systems while tolerating the excesses because eventually, once we ride it to a certain point, the powers that be will make it right. As long as you think there’s a hierarchy of humans you’ll think there’s a hierarchy of life and tolerate your comfort at the expense of another. The power to change is not in enabling systems but recognizing the responsibility is one each person within the system.
And cabin in the woods? That’s so played out. Humans like to live in urban areas, many of which have been developed for centuries, if not millennia. We’re not erasing them that easily. The key is to reshape those places and reduce your impact while laying the foundation for whoever comes after to have a head start to reduce theirs. Leave the woods to the animals. Feel free to visit but leave no trace.
And what have you built? Where's your great non-hierarchical ecofriendly alternative?
Community networks. Turning vacant lots into garden spaces we all pitch in on and benefit from. Seed exchanges and planting native species that benefit our wild pollinators. Local buy nothing groups that reduce the amount of waste going into landfills. Showing up to town halls to fight for walkable developments and better public transit. None of this stuff is that difficult, it just requires one to connect with the humans that live around them, the ones they’re going to spend most of their lives engaging with. What works in one city might not work exactly the same in another. A community garden in St Paul is not going to be the same as one in San Diego, and it shouldn’t be. Public transit in a tiny town in the Midwest isn’t going to be the same as in NYC. Still all interconnected, the water you shit in or divert upstream affects the people downstream, but again it’s about making those connections and figuring it out personally.
Also, are you arguing for the existence of hierarchies? Because when you start building those you’re setting up a system where people who have “more” whether they deserve it or not are coming in with a greater advantage and now have a framework to exploit.
This is just utopianism. These individual actions are not bad, but you cannot get the necessary systemic change by just advocating everyone to do it. You need organization and coordination, which involves hierarchy, establishing socialism, and directly addressing the root causes.
That's perhaps good for addressing things at the individual level, but the fact of the matter is that those whose destructive footprints are the largest are the elites at the top and the companies they control.
This entire conversation is about the existence of Chinese billionaires and their companies being defended as a necessary evil for the progress of the state, as well as the point MLism isn’t environmentally conscious beyond maintaining the environment as is needed to support the state. No shit it’s the elite and their industries causing the most destruction. The world doesn’t need billionaires or their companies, whether they’re based in the west or China. However, a good deal of communists will defend their team’s billionaire’s right to exist rather than break party policy and ask “why do we abide these few who enrich themselves at the expense of the world we have to share and create vast wealth inequity?”. I know why America tolerates their billionaires, it’s a capitalist country. Why does a socialist country tolerate theirs?
China has billionaires because it has private property, and it has private property because the CPC decided to integrate with the global market for the purposes of more rapid development and technology transfer. Every ML that exists has had to consider why China still has a bourgeoisie, the idea that we simply ignore it is absurd. Secondly, Marxism-Leninism does have a strong environmental component, you need a healthy environment in order to have a lasting environment for humanity. If we do not take care of the planet, then we will be wiped out.
As has been linked in this thread before, China Has Billionaires is an excellent starting place for understanding China's socialist system and its contradictions, contradictions that propel it to move forward and change.
No, it relies on compare and contrast because systems are not interchangeable just because you are too lazy to distinguish them. If your whole argument is that any reference to capitalism or imperialism is a dodge, then you are admitting up front that you cannot defend your own flattening of all political economy into one big moral smear. Comparison is not an evasion. It is how analysis works. Your problem is that the comparison ruins your whole “everyone is equally guilty” routine.
Wrong again. The environmental concern was addressed directly. Extraction, industrialization, and green transition all have material costs. The difference is that you use those costs to erase every structural distinction and retreat into sanctimony. “Ecofascist” is not a hand wave when your argument keeps sliding toward humanity as such being the problem, mass development as inherently suspect, and politics reduced to moral restraint. That is exactly the territory you keep wandering into.
This is just you smuggling in anthropocentrism as an eternal truth after pretending to critique it. If it is inevitable, then your entire argument collapses into useless sermonizing. Either human societies can consciously reorganize their relationship with nature, in which case politics and systems matter, or they cannot, in which case you should take the first step to saving the world by killing yourself and reducing human affects by 1.
That is not my argument at all. My argument is the exact opposite: nothing gets made right without struggle, power, planning, and transformation of the underlying system. You are the one substituting ethical performance for politics. Telling individuals to “reduce impact” while leaving production, ownership, and state power untouched is not a solution. It is liberal consumer morality in green face paint.
This is pure assertion with no content. Recognizing that societies have to allocate labor, resources, infrastructure, and development is not the same thing as endorsing some metaphysical hierarchy of life. You keep jumping from “humans must organize production” to “therefore all human development is domination,” because that leap is the only way your argument survives. It is a childish leap.
And this is where your whole critique shrinks into useless individualist mush. Systems are not magical abstractions floating over people. They are organized structures of power, property, coercion, and production. Individual responsibility matters, but without structural change it is politically pathetic. No amount of composting, biking, or consumer self-denial abolishes fossil capital, reorganizes energy grids, transforms land use, or socializes production. You are offering personal virtue as a substitute for politics because you have no serious theory of power.
Good. Then you admit large-scale human settlement, infrastructure, and material reproduction are permanent facts of social life. Which means your vague anti-development moralism was empty from the start. Dense urban living, electrified transit, modern sanitation, large-scale housing, and planned infrastructure are exactly the kinds of things serious socialist development can rationally organize. You do not get to concede the necessity of mass society and then keep moralizing as if all large-scale development is just civilizational sin.
That is so abstract it is almost parody. Reshape them how? Through what property relations? What energy system? What industrial base? What state capacity? What class power? Who expropriates whom? Who plans what? Who decides what gets built, where, and for whom? You never answer any of that because once specifics appear, your politics evaporate into vague sermons about impact reduction. You are not offering a program. You are offering a recycling bin with a superiority complex.
Nice slogan. Still not politics. Human society does not run on hiking etiquette. The problem is not whether individuals are spiritually respectful enough on their weekend walks. The problem is how to organize agriculture, housing, transport, energy, and industry for billions of people without handing the whole planet over to profit-driven destruction. You keep dodging that because “leave no trace” sounds wise right up until it meets civilization.
You have spent this entire exchange replacing analysis with pejoratives, structure with lifestyle ethics, and politics with sanctimony. You do not understand systems, you do not understand power, and you do not understand that sneering at “humanity” is not a substitute for ecological theory. Strip away the smugness and all that is left is anti-materialist, ecofascist-adjacent moral sludge from someone too shallow to grapple with how the world actually works.
Ecofascist is a handwave dismissal because my argument is consistently that the power to change things is not in statecraft but personal responsibility. You invoke the idea of fascism because you can’t get your head around the idea that individuals are responsible for their own actions, not the governments they empower, whatever form that may be, so if it opposes you it must be fascist. But I don’t advocate relying on hierarchies and the state to adopt my morality and then enforce it. Living amidst a few billion with free will is going to result in conflicting moralities and a struggle to survive, let alone thrive. How that’s managed…
Well, you suggested I kill myself. Politely at least, framed as if it were philosophical. But I’m reading between the lines and guessing that’s a passive-aggressive hint about your feelings towards me. Is that your solution for dissent, opposition, differing morality, the exercise of free will and individual autonomy? Death? I know you suggested I do it myself, but as I’m not, who then? You? The state? We’re two anonymous users arguing political philosophy on the internet and your morality considers telling the person you’re arguing with to kill themselves an acceptable win condition? Humanity isn’t the problem, individual humans are the problem, and you’re an example of that.
No, it is not a handwave. It is a description of where your politics keep drifting. Not because “personal responsibility” is inherently fascist, but because you use it to dissolve politics into private morality while dodging power, class, property, production, and planning. Individuals are responsible for their actions. Nobody disputed that. What I disputed, repeatedly, is your inability to explain how individual responsibility by itself reorganizes energy systems, transforms land use, disciplines capital, or plans development at scale. You keep retreating into moral language because you cannot answer the structural argument.
This is just evasive nonsense. Governments are not alien beings hovering above society. They are organized forms of power rooted in institutions, class relations, coercion, and material interests. “Individuals are responsible” does not answer any of that. It just lets you posture as ethically serious while refusing to engage with how social life is actually organized. You are not rebutting my argument. You are dodging it by shrinking politics down to personal conduct.
Then you are not describing a politics. You are describing an ethic of personal restraint. Fine. But stop pretending that an ethic of personal restraint is a sufficient response to planetary crisis. You already conceded that billions of people live in dense urban societies and that those societies need to be reshaped. Good. Through what property relations? What industrial base? What energy system? What infrastructure? What mechanisms of coordination? What institutions? What class power? You ignored all of those questions because your position falls apart the second it has to get concrete.
Exactly. How that is managed. That is the political question. That is the whole point. The moment you admit management at scale is necessary, you are back in the terrain of systems, institutions, and power, which is exactly what you have been trying to escape this entire exchange.
You are clinging to that line because it gives you a way to avoid everything else I said. The point, stripped of your melodrama, is this: if your position is that development is inherently domination, that humanity will inevitably put itself first, that systems are all morally equivalent, and that nothing structural can really improve the situation beyond individuals trying to lessen their footprint, then what exactly is the horizon of your politics other than managed decline and moral scolding? If development is ontologically evil and improvement is impossible except at the level of private restraint, then your position collapses into fatalism.
No. The solution is to stop pretending that structural crises can be solved by sermonizing at individuals while leaving ownership, production, and power untouched. Again, you are dodging. You have spent this entire exchange ignoring the core argument about systems and replacing it with offense-taking, pejoratives, and moral theatrics. You are not engaging. You are looking for escape hatches.
And now you have reduced ecological politics to bad-individual theory. That is even thinner than the abstract “humanity” line. Large-scale ecological destruction is not explained by individual wickedness. It is reproduced through systems of accumulation, incentive, property, and power. You keep bouncing between blaming humanity in the abstract and blaming individuals in the singular because both moves let you avoid talking about structure. That is why you ignored basically every substantive point I made. You cannot answer them, so you keep retreating into moral accusation.
You have dodged almost every structural point I raised, ignored every question about how your supposed alternative would actually function, and replaced political analysis with a mix of personal offense, moral vanity, and vague sermons about responsibility. That is your biggest failure here. Not just that your argument is shallow, but that the moment it is pressed, you stop defending it and start performing indignation instead. Strip away the pejoratives and what is left is an incoherent, anti-materialist politics with no theory of power, no theory of change, and no answer to the world beyond scolding people inside systems you cannot explain.
I think the implication that someone you disagree with should kill themselves is a point worth clinging to. If your solution is “kill yourself”, I question what kind of state you and likeminded people would enable if given the opportunity. That comment is a pretty hard turn in what’s otherwise a typical internet back and forth.
I absolutely do not think you should kill yourself, and that was clearly not my position. What I am saying is that your worldview is profoundly fatalist and anti-human. You treat development as inherently suspect, human flourishing as fundamentally evil, and systemic change as either impossible or irrelevant next to private moral restraint. The logical horizon of that politics is not liberation or transformation. It is managed decline, despair, and eventually mass death.
That is exactly why I spent this entire exchange arguing against your position so forcefully. I think you are wrong in almost every respect. I think better is possible. I think human beings are not a plague species. I think ecological survival requires transforming how we organize production, not retreating into sanctimonious moralism about individual behavior. I think suicide is bad. I think extinction is bad. I think your politics point in that direction precisely because they deny the possibility of collective human development without treating humanity itself as the problem.
And more importantly, notice what you are doing again here. You are still avoiding the substance of everything I said. You have latched onto one line that you are misinterpreting so that you can dodge the actual argument about systems, power, class, production, and planning.
First off, I enjoyed your superb explanations and critique. Secondly, I am baffled by your immeasureable patience and non-hostile replies. Lastly, I will let this be a reminder of how deep the capitalist propaganda reaches into the minds of even (seemingly?) literate people.
Thank you for your effort o7
Thank you always a pleasure to hear.
Around a decade of academic writing bestowed on me the gift of translating the incredibly harsh curse filled unkind impatient thoughts of my mind when dealing with frustrating people/situations to more measured words on the page.
It comes in many forms in this case I stand by my first read of this case being eco fascist/anprim kaczynski acolyte nonsense. One of the many compatible choices for those who wish to feel revolutionary without the burden of anything pesky like the material world or the systems that govern it.
Again always a pleasure knowing it's interesting/enjoyable/informative for others seeing my posts.
At this point you’re grandstanding and practicing your speechwriting against a foe whose beliefs have been decided by you. You’re arguing with the assumption of me, not with me.
If your worldview values the concept of humanity and society more than it values the right to self-determination of the individuals residing in it. Development is routinely suspect because people lie about their intentions, cut corners, and enrich themselves while providing the support and services others need. Human flourishing is fundamentally evil if a person or state flourishes at the expense of another. Systemic change without private moral restraint is meaningless. America’s racism is a perfect example of this. The system changed, slavery was abolished, but the morality of white supremacy didn’t die when the institution did. It festered, used the system to create a new form of justified racism. Your politics are allotted prosperity, false austerity, and state for state’s sake.
When I do argue back it’s because I think you are wrong in almost every respect. Your acceptance of destruction and misery in the name of progress is revolting. Tolerating wealth hoarding for the purpose of studying it is a flimsy excuse for abiding billionaires instead of redistributing their excess back into the society that made them, but it tracks with the idea that the growth of the state as agreed upon by the powerful few is a measure of it’s success. If growth is boosted by the fortunes and companies of a few billionaires, you’ll let them remain, even if it is contrary to the philosophy. Since you hold individual responsibility in low regard and your morality is ambiguous you can convince yourself
of anything, without self-reflection or moral conundrums, so long as implementing it builds a better state, at least better enough for most. You treat individual humans like they’re a plague on humanity for the audacity of questioning systems and demanding better for non-human life.
Humans are in no danger of driving themselves to extinction. Ruining our current ways of life, annihilating mass swaths of the population; yeah, we could do that. But we’re intelligent, capable, and cooperative by nature. We will make the planet inhospitable and drive a lot of other species to extinction if we don’t balance progress with morality beyond humanity. But I guess I’m being sanctimonious when I demand that from my society.
You push the myth that China was build on cooperation and collectivism like the US pushes the myth it was build on the labor of rugged individualism. Both narratives have kernels of truth scattered among a much larger pile of bullshit. If your goal is humanity first, to hell with the consequences to everything else, including individuality, you don’t value life and humans, you value the idea of them.
No, I am arguing with what you keep actually saying, and the problem is that what you say keeps collapsing into the same incoherent moral haze every time it is pressed. I asked you repeatedly how your politics handles production, infrastructure, energy, housing, agriculture, and mass society, and every time you dodged into abstractions about morality, self-determination, and personal responsibility. That is not me inventing your position. That is me taking your words seriously enough to notice that they do not amount to a politics.
This is a fake opposition. There is no individual self-determination in the abstract, floating above material life. Individuals determine themselves through social conditions, through housing, food, healthcare, education, mobility, energy, and freedom from domination by capital. You keep invoking “self-determination” as if it means anything outside the structures that make life livable. It does not. A person without material security is not more free because you used nicer moral language while leaving them at the mercy of markets, landlords, bosses, and scarcity.
Then your problem is not “development” as such. Your problem is development under class rule, private accumulation, and weak or captured institutions. Which is exactly the structural point you have been refusing the whole time. If development is suspect because of who controls it, who profits from it, and how its costs are distributed, then congratulations, you are back in the terrain of systems, ownership, planning, and power. The second your argument gets specific, it stops being a defense of pure personal morality and becomes a structural critique you have spent this entire exchange pretending not to need.
That is such a vague moral formula it explains almost nothing. Every serious politics agrees flourishing at others’ expense is bad. The question is how you prevent it materially. Through what institutions, what property relations, what forms of power, what mechanisms of coordination. You never answer that because you do not have an answer. You just restate the moral sentiment and hope it substitutes for political thought.
This is a stupid comparison because it actually proves my point, not yours. Slavery’s abolition did not magically destroy white supremacy, true. But without structural change, slavery would still exist openly as law. The fact that ideology persists after institutional change does not mean institutional change is meaningless. It means politics has to transform both structures and social consciousness. You keep treating “private morality matters too” as if anyone denied it. Nobody did. The argument is that private morality without structural transformation is impotent, and your own example demonstrates exactly that.
No, my politics are about consciously organizing social life rather than leaving it to capital and then sermonizing at individuals about their consumption habits. “State for state’s sake” is just another slogan you throw out because you do not know how to talk about institutions except as sinister abstractions. The state is not holy. It is an instrument of class rule and social coordination. The whole question is which class rules, for what purposes, and under what material constraints. You flatten all of that into “big system bad” because that is easier than thinking.
This is a complete straw man. I did not say destruction and misery are acceptable. I said that all large-scale development involves material transformation and contradiction, and that the political question is who controls that process, for whose benefit, and whether its harms are reduced, planned, and overcome rather than driven blindly by profit. You keep translating “development has contradictions” into “you celebrate destruction” because you cannot answer the actual argument. It is a child’s tactic. Replace complexity with accusation and hope nobody notices.
Again, you are arguing with a fantasy because it is easier than reading. I did not say billionaires should be preserved for anthropological curiosity. I said the existence of private wealth inside a contradictory transitional system is not analytically identical to private wealth as the sovereign principle of the system itself. If you cannot distinguish between a contradiction inside a political project and the essence of a political project, then you are not doing analysis. You are doing moral absolutism for people who think every contradiction is proof of total collapse.
Wrong. I hold individual responsibility in its proper place. Individuals matter, but individuals do not abolish structural compulsion by wishing harder. And my morality is not ambiguous at all. I am saying very clearly that politics has to be judged by whether it materially expands human flourishing, reduces domination, socializes the conditions of life, and rationally repairs the relationship between society and nature. You are the one hiding behind ambiguity, because “people should be better” sounds noble right up until anyone asks what that means at the level of billions of people and complex social reproduction.
No, that is you projecting your own nonsense back onto me. I have defended collective human development this entire time. You are the one who keeps treating human development as presumptively guilty, mass society as morally contaminated, and political transformation as suspect unless filtered through private virtue. I am not attacking people for questioning systems. I am attacking your inability to question systems in any way that rises above sanctimonious lifestyle ethics.
This is not the reassuring correction you think it is. You have just admitted the plausibility of civilizational breakdown and mass death while still refusing to ground your politics in large-scale structural transformation. That is exactly what makes your whole position so useless. You recognize catastrophe and then prescribe moral restraint at the level of individuals as if that is commensurate with the scale of the problem. It is laughably inadequate.
Then once again you have conceded the central point. If humans are intelligent, capable, and cooperative, then large-scale conscious reorganization of society is possible. Which means politics, systems, institutions, and planning matter. “Morality beyond humanity” is not an answer by itself. It is a phrase. The real question is how that morality is embodied in production, law, infrastructure, and power. You never get there. You stop at the sermon.
Nobody said China is a mythically pure collective project without contradiction, coercion, compromise, unevenness, or class struggle. This is another cheap caricature because you cannot engage with the actual claim, which is that different systems have different logics, different capacities, different constraints, and different ways of disciplining capital. You keep trying to turn every argument into “oh so you think this place is morally pure,” because moral purity is the only frame you seem capable of understanding.
And there is the straw man again. I did not say “to hell with the consequences.” I said humanity is part of nature, not external to it, and that any serious ecological politics has to preserve the material conditions of human life while rationally transforming our relation to the rest of nature. That is not contempt for life. That is the only basis on which ecological politics can be more than aristocratic moral disgust with mass society. You keep trying to turn any defense of human development into permission for domination because you cannot imagine politics except as a contest between private virtue and monstrous systems.
You have spent this entire exchange dodging specifics, replacing analysis with moral haze, and answering structural questions with slogans about restraint, self-determination, and being a better person. Then when pressed, you invent a version of my position that celebrates destruction, worships the state, and despises individuality, because engaging with what I actually said would require you to do more than preach. Your biggest failure is not just that your politics are shallow. It is that they collapse on contact with scale. You have no serious account of power, no theory of production, no mechanism of change, and no answer to ecological crisis beyond scolding individuals while the world is organized by forces you refuse to analyze. That is why your whole argument reads like smug moral theater. You clearly want the posture of radicalism without the burden of actual thought.
PLEASE ACTUALLY READ WHAT I'VE SAID TO THIS POINT BEFORE CONTINUING TO TYPE LIES, STRAWMEN AND NONSENSE