Here, crossposted, is my last post until I succeed with the archive. This is not a departure, but an attempt to shift to other activities for a while. I like that I wrote this and do not consider it a waste of time. Hope you enjoy reading it. If you do, it goes well with my second-to-last post.
JackRiddler » Mon Feb 18, 2019 7:13 am wrote:Sounder wrote:Many folk go to 'Capitalism' as the cause of so much bad stuff, yet the Soviets or Chinese never thought about ecological upheaval either.
Others, like you, prefer to deny that the Soviet regime pursued the same mode of production as their Western capitalist competitors. They were clunky and stupid and did so to an even greater ecological extreme, beginning in an era when ecology was barely a concern in either ideological camp, under conditions of permanent attack from the outside and with a very weak capital base. The social creeds and the societies differed, but the productionist organization of the Soviet societies' economic powers did not. Ostensibly they believed they were managing the "capitalist stage" with an eventual (fictional) horizon of communism in some far future after the Cold War. In their industrialization phase, party planners looked at the real-existing capitalism of the West and decided, correctly, that the industrial takeoff had been preceded by a phase of "primitive accumulation" requiring vast amounts of colonial forced labor and destruction of traditional sustenance economies. They decided to use the Slavic peasantry and the indigenes of Siberia and Central Asia as the internal colonies for the purpose of building the infrastructure and accumulating the capital for the industrial take off. They also felt surrounded and compelled to follow the same models of industrialism and macro-accounting that prevailed in the Western capitalist countries, including the pursuit of enterprise profit as an end in itself. They adopted the fateful GDP, a god that only knows always how to add and never to subtract. The regime was party dictatorship by open violence and the big-lie creed was "Communism," but the economic practice is properly characterized as state capitalism, a.k.a. "real-existing socialism." In their final decades, they did their damndest to reproduce the consumerist prosperity model of the West, and failed, miserably. By comparison, anyway: the "standard of living" was better than in the capitalist-controlled Third World. At least they helped Cuba escape the fates of the rest of the Caribbean and Central American regions, which are blessed with capitalist regimes. Rest in hell, motherfuckers.
China today is the most important industrial producer and on its way to becoming the new financial center of the global capitalist system. Outside its borders it is valorized by the Western "markets" for playing capitalism by the neoliberal rules, for understanding how business is supposed to work, for its productive and disciplined labor regime, and for its breakneck pursuit of technological dominance. Never mind the bodies, it is considered the biggest capitalist success story of recent decades. When the great lovers of private property like Bill Gates and Steven Pinker talk about the "decline of extreme poverty," they know at least 50% of that trend is Made in China. And yet they credit this to capitalism, not communism, and to China's commitment to meritocratic management of maximizing production integrated into the global capitalist markets. The oligarchic practices and corruption are no more extreme than elsewhere and China is on its way to producing the majority of the world's billionaires, if it has not already. They go to Davos too, when they're not being arrested in Canada. China demonstrates, to the barely hidden satisfaction of Western neoliberal ideologists, that democracy and capitalism need not go together, and are historically separable phenomena. The message from large segments of the Western capitalist ruling class has been that "we" need to be more like China -- or else! Trump does not differ in his commitment to the same neoliberal creed of how labor should behave. Choking in its smog, today China is showing about as much or slightly more concern for ecological sustainability as the Western regimes. It is engaged simultaneously in the biggest projects to convert to solar energy, and also opening enough new coal mines to provide its outsize share in overdetermining the planetary catastrophe. Both of these industries are run by the capitalist rules.
In writing the above, I do not expect to influence your false and confusionist use of terms and determination to stick to your ideological construct of "CC." Your benightenment is your own. I cannot keep you from bizarroland riffs about the Boston Marathon bombing as part of an operation designed to deliver a socialist climate-change brainwash. (Wow!) I write this in the hope anyone reading this exchange between us gets the damn point, and for use in future writing. (I think the above two paragraphs will serve that end as outlines.) I feel no need to differ with your critique of the way the corporate media present the ecological issues, and laugh at your attempt to associate my thinking with that babble.
Your attempt to wedge in a difference between "CC" (your own way of constructing it so as to deny it) and the ecological catastrophe of which carbon emissions are a major driving element is just another form of denial and compartmentalization. The eco catastrophe killing the insects and global warming are the same thing. Or, rather, the global warming brought about by uncontrolled carbon emissions, ocean poisoning and the destruction of primary forest land is a big but hardly the only element constituting the ecological catastrophe. The eco catastrophe is driven by the capitalist organization of political economy. It proceeds from a mode of production that requires prodigious quantities of energy derived from hydrocarbon burning and generates enormous wastes in every stage of the production, consumption and disposal processes. This capitalist organization of economy, which resists planning and public spending if they are unprofitable but loves planning and public spending if they foster GDP growth, requires hydrocarbon burning and generates enormous wastes because these practices generate revenues and profits on the ledgers of enterprises competing for buyers on markets, and thus creates outlets in which the financial sector can invest at an ROI. That is true in China, the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan, the oil-producing countries, India, Latin America, Africa and Oceania. That is real-existing capitalism.
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That is a scary thought.