If you think the earth is dying because poor people are having too many babies, that's about three logical steps away from ecofascism.

  • opposide [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    Edit: We need to have a site wide Marxist geography study session with the amount of reactionary and outright fash opinions there are in this thread. If you are one of those opinions, I am absolutely not shitting on you AT ALL. There’s a reason Marxist geography isn’t widely taught unless you seek it out. It is an immensely powerful tool to apply dialectical materialism to issues that can easily turn people reactionary. Any other mods reading this we desperately need to figure out a weekend pinned post project for the topic or something. In the meantime please do not hesitate to ask me any questions and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.

    Hello chapo dot chatters it is time for me to put on my geologist and climatologist hats to tell you that ANY freaking out about population now or in the foreseeable future needs to stop now, and here’s why:

    You are thinking of earth and it’s resources in terms of what we currently produce and consume as a global capitalist society. It is our job as socialists to CHANGE THIS. Your doomposting about population vs consumption is inherently reactionary. There is technically a cap on earth’s carrying capacity for humans, but that cap is in the dozens of billions. A socialist society can not exist without sustainability as one of its main tenets for a plethora of reasons, but most importantly the equity in a universally habitable planet. High qualities of life under capitalism will inherently lead to environmental degradation and scarcity. We already live on a potentially post-scarcity planet in terms of necessities, and likely by a significant amount. When talking about achieving a certain quality of life under socialism, we have no frame of reference for the amount of production and renewable resources it would take because our only understanding of production and consumption in this world is influenced by and for capitalism.

    Capitalism’s allocation of these resources and ability to fetishize commodities is what is destroying our planet, NOT growing population. There are immediate short term issues we face in regards to climate change that capitalism simply can not address, but very few demographics are significantly contributing to the climate crisis and all who do have massively disproportional numbers of people vs contribution to the crisis. This is in NO WAY A POPULATION ISSUE.

    On a positive note, capitalism is becoming too heavy a burden for capitalism to continue supporting, because as quality of life increases, population growth tends to halt. As capitalism relies on infinite need for extraction and exploitation it will run into a wall as these societies no longer have growing numbers of people to exploit (which very much mirrors what produced the collapse of feudalism) and this will cause massive social and economic upheaval.

    This is, in my opinion, the fruition of Marx’s prediction on capitalism outgrowing itself and collapsing. The pieces have been in place for a long time. Bourgeois democracies and corporations are already trying to fight this by desperately filling the holes in their modes of production with cheap labor from the global south or by directly importing literal human beings from the global south to fill the holes in their society and economic system.

    • impartial_fanboy [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Holy fuck thank you for this. Thought I was gonna go bald tearing my hair out from all the absolute dumpster fire takes in this thread. I'm just gonna expand on it a bit from a STEM angle (yes I know, how awful) to show just how ridiculous the overpopulation arguments.

      There is technically a cap on earth’s carrying capacity for humans, but that cap is in the dozens of billions.

      Technically, the only real fundamental limit is waste heat. These caps are in the trillions (if not higher), yes just with the resources of the Earth, no asteroid mining or whatnot. Doesn't even require super magic tech, it can be done with things we know for sure that we will be able to do in the very near future--assuming we don't kill each other of course. Every limit you can think of can be circumvented with enough energy, which if you have fusion (no, the jokes of it being always 20 years away aren't funny--funding was cut when they realized it was actually possible and would decimate the fossil fuel market) is only a problem of scale not some fundamental limit except waste heat of course.

      Capitalism’s allocation of these resources and ability to fetishize commodities is what is destroying our planet

      The tragic thing is that most of the technology/solutions for climate change and environmental degradation already exist or just need to be developed to scale. But because they aren't 'profitable' they aren't utilized. Hell even most fossil fuel emissions could be drastically reduced (on the order of 90%) if we mandated refineries and power plants actually deal with their waste exhaust instead of just dumping it into the atmosphere but again this isn't maximally profitable so its not done to any real meaningful extent in the grand scheme of things.

      • opposide [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        You sound like me as a kid lol

        But here’s a good video in relation to this discussion right now, and I’ll be writing a more in depth post some time this week for a bigger discussion about it. Marxist Geography really is the coolest field of study so many have never heard of

      • opposide [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        Yes but all consumption we currently understand is based on a society which has no major renewable resource use and development.

        In an equitable socialist society not only will this be all renewable, but consumption in general will be completely overhauled since capitalism currently has vested interest in shaping our (over)consumption.

          • opposide [none/use name]
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            4 years ago

            Which is why eco-fascism is so dangerous. It does address the problems but without the Marxist analysis of the problem and synthesis of the solution it will simply never be capable of fixing the actual underlying issue. Talking in terms of “if everybody lived with an American quality of life...” is a useful thought experiment to gauge our current overconsumption, but irrelevant when gauging quality of life under a socialist system in which modes of production, labor, distribution, etc are completely different despite maybe having a similar quality of life

    • Phillipkdink [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      You are thinking of earth and it’s resources in terms of what we currently produce and consume as a global capitalist society. It is our job as socialists to CHANGE THIS. Your doomposting about population vs consumption is inherently reactionary.

      I'm sorry, this is a very condescending way to speak to leftists. Why do you think that people who post here of all places are unable to imagine a world, or think about a problem, outside of capitalism? It's just a disrespectful way to treat people you disagree with instead of just accepting they disagree with you about the severity of the problem and debating the details.

      Under any system including luxury space communism there is going to be a level of carbon emission related to providing people with a particular standard of living. We all agree here that no person anywhere on Earth is more entitled to that standard of living than anyone else. So in our drive to reach that global standard, there must be discussion about how that standard produces waste and feeds on extraction.

      Obviously there is waste under a capitalist framework where my pants are made from cotton grown in Madagascar, shipped to the Philippines for processing then to Vietnam for assembly then shipped to me, but you cannot just hand-wave away the idea that a) there are going to be significant emissions unrelated to waste and b) socialism itself doesn't guarantee the elimination of waste.

      So accepting that none of these values will be fixed (as new technologies increase efficiencies, deserts can be reclaimed, rates of consumption may increase or decrease) there still needs to be a frank discussion about the population rate that can be sustained at a certain level of standard of living, and those two values will need to be in negotiation with each other.

      • opposide [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        I’m not trying to be condescending which is why I even added the part about asking any questions, etc.

        You’re absolutely correct that socialism does not guarantee the elimination of waste and I 100% agree, but what socialism DOES that capitalism does not is incentivize the collective care of our environment as degradation of the environment is inherently the degradation of our collective. Under capitalism, addressing the climate crisis is not profitable and therefore not even a facet of where labor is directed. Under socialism this would be vastly different as the maintenance of our planet is intrinsically tied to the maintenance of an equitable society and thus socialism itself.

        • Phillipkdink [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          but what socialism DOES that capitalism does not is incentivize the collective care of our environment as degradation of the environment is inherently the degradation of our collective. Under capitalism, addressing the climate crisis is not profitable and therefore not even a facet of where labor is directed. Under socialism this would be vastly different as the maintenance of our planet is intrinsically tied to the maintenance of an equitable society and thus socialism itself.

          My point is this is obvious to everybody who posts here, it's not some amazing revelation of privileged knowledge only you have. Nobody here supports capitalism, everybody here is aware that its fundamental construction leads to waste and eventual catastrophe.

          So gee maybe if people here think overpopulation is a problem they're already factored in the waste inherent in capitalism. Maybe calling us reactionaries instead of listening and discussing where we disagree isn't the most productive approach.

          • opposide [none/use name]
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            4 years ago

            I openly said I’m not shitting on people for having these opinions and it’s not their fault, meaning they aren’t reactionaries. It is, however, a reactionary opinion to have sadly which is why I addressed it and wrote a big long post about it

            • Phillipkdink [he/him]
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              4 years ago

              Sorry, you don't get to decide if my thoughts are reactionary or not I'm afraid no matter what community you mod lol.

              Honestly you sound like a lib who accuses leftists of being right wing because they criticize Biden. Like they literally can't conceive of the possibility that there could be a legitimate reason to criticize him because there are bad people who do that for dumb reasons, so whoever does it is bad.

              • opposide [none/use name]
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                4 years ago

                I’m not saying it because I mod a community, I’m saying it because Marx and Engels both said Malthusian theory was wrong and based in reaction

      • opposide [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Anything by David Harvey is solid and not too dense of material that you need to sit down with a highlighter and whiskey to understand. Anywhere is a great jumping off point, but here is my personal favorite.

        He also looks a bit like Marx in this video