Everyone is OBESSED with getting more, when we overproduce so much already. We don’t need more, everyone sites Marx and Lenin without ever talking about their contexts. Marx died in 18th century England and Lenin died in early 20th century Soviet Union, Lenin literally talked about problems of Taylorism in Enslavement of Man to Machine yet he chose it as a strategy and he chose to have stricter punishments for slight mistakes in factories not because Lenin was someone who believed in sacrificing those who live now to build a better future but because he saw that their hope for revolutions in Europe didn’t come true and now needed to rapidly industrialize, in the end Taylorism wasn’t the thing that led to it but Stalin’s methods. Today we don’t need that, we have already exhausted from 1970s, now how much more we, as humans, will extract from it?
On Marx and Lenin, I meant that in their time capitalism was mostly of an industrial nature where Lenin even believed that capitalism can’t increase agricultural output which we now know to be false, Marx and Lenin both saw a world which didn’t have an agriculture as robust as ours so they saw increasing production at anytime as a good thing because it was really stagnant even under industrial revolution. In our time agriculture has been fostered to a point where we now have to worry about soil exhaustion which wasn’t the case even during late Soviet Union. On topic of nature and communism, I recently read a book called Communism: The Highest Stage of Ecology, so I have been thinking about how Ecology doesn’t really have an ideological element in nearly any major movement advocating for communism, in major parts it is because many movements are in places which can’t afford to, which need to develop their infrastructure but even those who can focus on Ecology, ignore it for a fetishization of aimless growth at faster and faster rate.
It’s very hard to integrate “avoid ecological collapse through actual acknowledgement and engagement with the wider earth system” and “have the productive forces to not get killed by Capital”. Capital doesn’t care about killing its host afterall, and that’s a tremendous combat advantage.
So I think they just don’t wanna think about it. I’ve seen some books like Climate Leviathan, but have yet to get into them.
Hadn’t it already done so long before his time or am I misunderstanding?
Agriculture production was quite stagnant for a while until the development of artificial fertilizer and its mass adoption. Factory farming is also a practice which was only developed later, Marx and Lenin both saw a stage capitalism which rapidly increased industrial productive capacity but hadn’t changed much in agriculture.
can you give an example of this?
Most of the main groups and figures in America for example, organisations like PSL, RCP USA, media figures which are socdems for everyone but by American standards they are sadly communists, they all support policies like preventing polluting data centers from popping up at home but their delegates abroad just talk about how they need Chinese level production at home like my guy China produces so much because it needs to keep up with America because otherwise it’ll be swallowed up by America. Chinese military budget is what it is because America will overthrow the CPC the moment it gets a single weak chance at this point, China produces so much because the whole imperial core turned it into their factory, America doesn’t need what China has because everything is to make sure America and its cronies can’t undermine the project. America as a country is already bloated enough, it doesn’t need anymore generally speaking, certain sectors like schools need funding which are deliberately withheld, there’s no scarcity of it.
okay maybe its the US context that i’m missing then. the parties and media here often have an eco-socialist perspective. Melanchon (LFI, french broad left party) being the most famous example. He has been criticising the Macron gov for not adressing the wildfires and has been promoting turning administrative divisions into bioregions etc etc. Jason Hickle is also extremely popular. You see a lot of red-green party coalitions (although they are usually not very radical). so from my EU point of view communists/marxists have been very keen on adressing ecology.
EDIT: for PSL, they do talk a lot about the climate crisis and how socialism is the only way to adress it, so im not sure where you are getting that they want infinite growth?
Yea French left is more eco-socialist, one of the only points I’ll ever give to the damned French, don’t mind it, French are just the worst. On PSL, I meant their home platform has many environmentalist policies but everything about America and American organizations just seems so insincere when none of the platforms follow any principled practice and everything is just extremely geared towards productivity, consumerism, production, and emitting as much green house gases as possible. Like America is one of the places that will genuinely lose by having socialism because it has too much from the world and no one country can have all that.