this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
129 points (99.2% liked)
Communism
2723 readers
52 users here now
Welcome to the communist Lemmy community! This is a community for all Marxist.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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