There are no missing gaps. I got it from years of talking to you guys and reading your links—then disagreeing. Billionaires equal capitalism and capitalism and those who support any form of it are the problem.
Billionaires do not equal capitalism, though. The nature of a system is what is rising in it, not what is dying away. It’s through these logical leaps that you have to resort to in order to justify your own lack of support for a system where public ownership is the principal aspect, where as production socializes and centralizes it is folded into the public sector, and where the working classes maintain dominance over the state.
How do you get rid of private property? Is all private property the same? Is it all superfluous, or does it present a tradeoff? Since no system is static, what a system is working towards, its trajectory, is critical.
You can insist that there are no gaps, but from what I can tell there are plenty. You place your hatred for billionaires over your desire for a better world for the working classes. You take socialist countries as enemies for not placing retribution over material reality.
Billionaires are bourgeoisie. The existence of the bourgeoisie does not mean a system is capitalist alone, what’s important is what is the principal aspect of the economy. You’re relying on the “one-drop” rule, which would imply that the existence of a public post office in the US means that the US is fully communist. That’s obviously ridiculous, private ownership is the principal aspect of the Statesian economy, but this is the limit of the “one-drop” rule.
Capitalism is a mode of production, not a class. I am not defending the permanent existence of the bourgeoisie, but instead defending a system where the bourgeoisie is waning and socialized production is rising. I am defending the transitional status as valid and moving, not a static, unmoving snapshot.
I never excused billionaires, I only defended socialism. Please, explain how your vehemont opposition to any movement that does not immediately result in communism makes you a “real socialist.” How do you think communism is to come into existence, if not through socialism?
Ban evasion is against the rules in most places, not just Lemmy.ml. Either way, they never made a complete point. They had a claim, but nothing to justify it or counter the Marxist understanding of socialism.
I have no unity with people who oppose the Dictatorship of the Proletariate, and do not consider them part of the left. They are at best, misguided folks with their hearts in the right place, but far more often they are knowing Imperialist tools trying to suppress class consciousness.
Karl and Vlad aren’t exactly known for their concern for the environment or animal welfare beyond recognizing that things like soil fatigue and over-farming would eventually render it unfit for production to feed the humans. Anthropomorphic pragmatism at the expense of the ecosystem is a hard pass for me.
You’re telling me environmental sciences weren’t super advanced in the 1800s and 1910s I’m shocked. You people are so unserious. Socialism/Communism is the best shot we have at tackling these issues by removing the profit drive that necessitates exploitation at the very core of the current system. But sure let’s throw it all away because you don’t actually understand anything beyond vibes and idealist nonsense.
What’a 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. You tanked are out here defending Team China billionaires vs Team America billionaires, but neither of your systems can produce one that earned their billions without exploiting the planet. The both of you greenwash your rape with climate pledges and carbon free goals but at the end of the day it’s because both states know if the states rape the planet hard enough they can’t exist. I’m serious as fuck, you can’t justify the existence of commie billionaires when confronted with their profiteering at the expense of the planet any better than a western capitalist so you disregard the argument. Your systems both value humans over the rest of the lives we share this rock with.
“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.”
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.
“You tankies are out here defending Team China billionaires vs Team America billionaires, but neither of your systems can produce one that earned their billions without exploiting the planet.”
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.
“The both of you greenwash your rape with climate pledges and carbon free goals but at the end of the day it’s because both states know if the states rape the planet hard enough they can’t exist.”
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.
“I’m serious as fuck, you can’t justify the existence of commie billionaires when confronted with their profiteering at the expense of the planet any better than a western capitalist so you disregard the argument.”
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.
“Your systems both value humans over the rest of the lives we share this rock with.”
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.
“They weren’t in it for the sake of the environment itself.”
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.
“Every society that has tried to overhaul itself… has just repeated the industrial revolution’s rape of the land at a speed run.”
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.
“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.”
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.
“Nobody gets to billionaire status clean.”
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.
“Why tolerate them? Unless your fines are bankrupting them, billionaires can pay fines like it’s a subscription service.”
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.
“These actions are not taken for the sake of the environment, but because the human and economic growth demands it.”
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.
“Where are all the materials for this coming from? What’s the impact of building all that?”
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.
“Fines, restructuring, and public re-education happens all the time in the west.”
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 has always come at the expense of nature.”
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.
“Solar panels, batteries, the rail, and the grid are all materials… if your system is tearing apart the planet for rare earth elements… while tolerating and analyzing how your system creates billionaires and wealth inequality, you’re just the opposite side of the consumer coin.”
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.
“The west demands, China supplies, and neither would be where they are without the other.”
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.
China is at the forefront of combatting desertification, proliferation of solar, and electrification. This is made possible by strong central planning in a socialist market economy, and is entirely different from an economy that could transition to clean energy and strong environmental protections but refuses to for profit alone.
The change is not good enough because is it still thinks humans are exceptional. Better argue over which political system is worse for our species while both exploits the planet so we can feel better about who was right when the status quo prevails. Yeah, your change isn’t good enough.
You’ve had a few hundred years and a few attempts but even your allies in the comments can only offer that it’s being pledged and that there’s plans, eventually, maybe, we’re working on it. You can defend Chinese methods against a lot of western criticism, but seriously, the end of factory farming? They’re making no moves to address how they feed their people.
But since you brought them up: hey’re certainly now the cutting edge on renewable energy and smart grid tech. Agriculture emissions are still second place behind fossil fuel emissions, so for what my opinion is worth (not much) they’re following the right course by focusing on that first. But don’t be surprised if the next big innovation in reducing agriculture emissions comes out of an AES country. They’re certainly far more likely to devote massive resources to the problem than anywhere in the West.
You’re in an entire thread about China, and once again, miss the point I made earlier. China’s concern is the emissions because those negatively affect the human population, which is very inline with ML attitudes about environmentalism. What’s the living conditions of the cows, chickens, swine, and dogs in those farms?
Oh, it’s been hammered back at me that the ML approach to environmentalism is that it’s purpose is to protect the environment for the sake its use to the people, that protecting it at the expense of whatever progress is deemed necessary is to deny humanity and therefore radical and unjust. My argument would be that, whether it’s a capitalist society or a socialist one, there’s a lot of commodities that don’t really warrant environmental harm just because humans would prefer to have it. Chinese reforms created a middle class, and just like in the west, a middle class becomes a consumer class. Both end up generating more one time use waste, both consume built to be obsolete technology, both consume more meat. At some point it ceases to be elevation from poverty to commodity fetishism. So while I can wish and hope all I want that people would consume ethically, mindfully, and with a goal of harm reduction, at some point I would simply say “fuck off, earth first” and deny my fellow humans access to whatever it is they are seeking.
aren’t exactly known for their concern for the environment or animal welfare beyond recognizing that things like soil fatigue and over-farming would eventually render it unfit for production to feed the humans.
lol… so in other words you mean recognizing environmental concern. Is this that materialism I keep hearing about?
Yeah. If you’re only concern is “how much can we exploit the environment until it’s unfit for human use”, you’re treating the environment like it’s a material for human consumption.
Elementary school level of understanding tells you that focusing on the benefit of land because it benefits humans is still a good thing. The more we focus on long term environmental goals the more we will tackle all facets of them, the PSL has written about it in modern language, and that’s only one org.
whining about theory gets you nowhere. I promise you you won’t meet leftists who feel good about factory farming.
You can do this kinda stuff on the internet all you’d like and call us cultists for our politics but if you’re going to engage with people like us you’re gonna get real answers based on material conditions (both future and past). Sorry it’s not the argument you want but eradicating capitalism will rapidly increase education and literacy, workplace independence and most importantly eradicate the drive for profit, as others have said, even in ways like profit driven FOOD and WATER consumption leading to over farming and wasting products that go moldy on the shelf because they’re too expensive, and on and on. Hurl insults all you want, you’d fit right in on Reddit
This thread is full of leftists who don’t “feel good” about factory farming, but still abide it abide it whether it’s under a capitalist system or a socialist system. China’s socialist and hasn’t abolished factory farming. Y’all don’t “feel good” about it but it’s an acceptable practice because fundamentally we disagree on the rights of humans versus non-human life. You could also put a decent dent in the power of capitalism, environmental damage, consumerism, and waste if you prioritized eliminating the capitalists while retooling the system. But that kind of talk is what’s gotten me banned from Reddit repeatedly.
“Lots of modern writing is still just words”. Words without action are just “thoughts and prayers” of liberals acknowledging a problem to signal virtue publicly while quietly ignoring the problem or agreeing to pass it on to a later generation. Tell me, do you “feel bad” because you empathize with the suffering, or do you “feel bad” because you’re ashamed you are aware of the suffering yet put little effort into correcting it? Or is “feeling bad” one of the points you don’t actually believe?
There are no missing gaps. I got it from years of talking to you guys and reading your links—then disagreeing. Billionaires equal capitalism and capitalism and those who support any form of it are the problem.
Billionaires do not equal capitalism, though. The nature of a system is what is rising in it, not what is dying away. It’s through these logical leaps that you have to resort to in order to justify your own lack of support for a system where public ownership is the principal aspect, where as production socializes and centralizes it is folded into the public sector, and where the working classes maintain dominance over the state.
How do you get rid of private property? Is all private property the same? Is it all superfluous, or does it present a tradeoff? Since no system is static, what a system is working towards, its trajectory, is critical.
You can insist that there are no gaps, but from what I can tell there are plenty. You place your hatred for billionaires over your desire for a better world for the working classes. You take socialist countries as enemies for not placing retribution over material reality.
Agree to disagree. Billionaires are the definition of capitalism. Defending their existence is just SINO
Billionaires are bourgeoisie. The existence of the bourgeoisie does not mean a system is capitalist alone, what’s important is what is the principal aspect of the economy. You’re relying on the “one-drop” rule, which would imply that the existence of a public post office in the US means that the US is fully communist. That’s obviously ridiculous, private ownership is the principal aspect of the Statesian economy, but this is the limit of the “one-drop” rule.
Capitalism is a mode of production, not a class. I am not defending the permanent existence of the bourgeoisie, but instead defending a system where the bourgeoisie is waning and socialized production is rising. I am defending the transitional status as valid and moving, not a static, unmoving snapshot.
Removed by mod
I never excused billionaires, I only defended socialism. Please, explain how your vehemont opposition to any movement that does not immediately result in communism makes you a “real socialist.” How do you think communism is to come into existence, if not through socialism?
How can they when your mods delete their posts?
There’s no point debating in an echo chamber.
Ask stuff in good faith and be respectful, the mods don’t remove everything they disagree with
Just 99% of it.
Ban evasion is against the rules in most places, not just Lemmy.ml. Either way, they never made a complete point. They had a claim, but nothing to justify it or counter the Marxist understanding of socialism.
Typical Anarkiddie’s understanding of Communism.
Typical left unity.
I have no unity with people who oppose the Dictatorship of the Proletariate, and do not consider them part of the left. They are at best, misguided folks with their hearts in the right place, but far more often they are knowing Imperialist tools trying to suppress class consciousness.
Karl and Vlad aren’t exactly known for their concern for the environment or animal welfare beyond recognizing that things like soil fatigue and over-farming would eventually render it unfit for production to feed the humans. Anthropomorphic pragmatism at the expense of the ecosystem is a hard pass for me.
You’re telling me environmental sciences weren’t super advanced in the 1800s and 1910s I’m shocked. You people are so unserious. Socialism/Communism is the best shot we have at tackling these issues by removing the profit drive that necessitates exploitation at the very core of the current system. But sure let’s throw it all away because you don’t actually understand anything beyond vibes and idealist nonsense.
What’a 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. You tanked are out here defending Team China billionaires vs Team America billionaires, but neither of your systems can produce one that earned their billions without exploiting the planet. The both of you greenwash your rape with climate pledges and carbon free goals but at the end of the day it’s because both states know if the states rape the planet hard enough they can’t exist. I’m serious as fuck, you can’t justify the existence of commie billionaires when confronted with their profiteering at the expense of the planet any better than a western capitalist so you disregard the argument. Your systems both value humans over the rest of the lives we share this rock with.
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.
China is at the forefront of combatting desertification, proliferation of solar, and electrification. This is made possible by strong central planning in a socialist market economy, and is entirely different from an economy that could transition to clean energy and strong environmental protections but refuses to for profit alone.
“The change is not good enough, better change nothing so the even worse status quo prevails”
The change is not good enough because is it still thinks humans are exceptional. Better argue over which political system is worse for our species while both exploits the planet so we can feel better about who was right when the status quo prevails. Yeah, your change isn’t good enough.
Anti-communist environmentalism is just imperialism and commodity fetishization with green wrapping paper.
The ending of fossil fuel energy and factory farming cannot come about under capitalism. It is baked into Communism.
You’ve had a few hundred years and a few attempts but even your allies in the comments can only offer that it’s being pledged and that there’s plans, eventually, maybe, we’re working on it. You can defend Chinese methods against a lot of western criticism, but seriously, the end of factory farming? They’re making no moves to address how they feed their people.
I didn’t say anything about China.
But since you brought them up: hey’re certainly now the cutting edge on renewable energy and smart grid tech. Agriculture emissions are still second place behind fossil fuel emissions, so for what my opinion is worth (not much) they’re following the right course by focusing on that first. But don’t be surprised if the next big innovation in reducing agriculture emissions comes out of an AES country. They’re certainly far more likely to devote massive resources to the problem than anywhere in the West.
You’re in an entire thread about China, and once again, miss the point I made earlier. China’s concern is the emissions because those negatively affect the human population, which is very inline with ML attitudes about environmentalism. What’s the living conditions of the cows, chickens, swine, and dogs in those farms?
Neither the OP nor any of the comments in the chain I replied to mentioned China.
I didn’t see a point, just more evidence that you can’t tell the difference between capitalist commodity fetishism and environmentalism.
Oh, it’s been hammered back at me that the ML approach to environmentalism is that it’s purpose is to protect the environment for the sake its use to the people, that protecting it at the expense of whatever progress is deemed necessary is to deny humanity and therefore radical and unjust. My argument would be that, whether it’s a capitalist society or a socialist one, there’s a lot of commodities that don’t really warrant environmental harm just because humans would prefer to have it. Chinese reforms created a middle class, and just like in the west, a middle class becomes a consumer class. Both end up generating more one time use waste, both consume built to be obsolete technology, both consume more meat. At some point it ceases to be elevation from poverty to commodity fetishism. So while I can wish and hope all I want that people would consume ethically, mindfully, and with a goal of harm reduction, at some point I would simply say “fuck off, earth first” and deny my fellow humans access to whatever it is they are seeking.
lol… so in other words you mean recognizing environmental concern. Is this that materialism I keep hearing about?
Yeah. If you’re only concern is “how much can we exploit the environment until it’s unfit for human use”, you’re treating the environment like it’s a material for human consumption.
Elementary school level of understanding tells you that focusing on the benefit of land because it benefits humans is still a good thing. The more we focus on long term environmental goals the more we will tackle all facets of them, the PSL has written about it in modern language, and that’s only one org.
whining about theory gets you nowhere. I promise you you won’t meet leftists who feel good about factory farming.
You can do this kinda stuff on the internet all you’d like and call us cultists for our politics but if you’re going to engage with people like us you’re gonna get real answers based on material conditions (both future and past). Sorry it’s not the argument you want but eradicating capitalism will rapidly increase education and literacy, workplace independence and most importantly eradicate the drive for profit, as others have said, even in ways like profit driven FOOD and WATER consumption leading to over farming and wasting products that go moldy on the shelf because they’re too expensive, and on and on. Hurl insults all you want, you’d fit right in on Reddit
This thread is full of leftists who don’t “feel good” about factory farming, but still abide it abide it whether it’s under a capitalist system or a socialist system. China’s socialist and hasn’t abolished factory farming. Y’all don’t “feel good” about it but it’s an acceptable practice because fundamentally we disagree on the rights of humans versus non-human life. You could also put a decent dent in the power of capitalism, environmental damage, consumerism, and waste if you prioritized eliminating the capitalists while retooling the system. But that kind of talk is what’s gotten me banned from Reddit repeatedly.
Like I said, lots of modern writing on it. But apparently arguing against points I don’t actually believe is easier.
“Lots of modern writing is still just words”. Words without action are just “thoughts and prayers” of liberals acknowledging a problem to signal virtue publicly while quietly ignoring the problem or agreeing to pass it on to a later generation. Tell me, do you “feel bad” because you empathize with the suffering, or do you “feel bad” because you’re ashamed you are aware of the suffering yet put little effort into correcting it? Or is “feeling bad” one of the points you don’t actually believe?
LMAO you talked big game about knowing our arguments and your understanding of Marxism is surface level at best