Yeah and all the communist states are super ecologically friendly, oh no you don’t belive they are communist do you? Handy.
But let’s imagine a perfectly communist society, are workers all able to heat their house? Able to travel freely? Enjoy hobbies? If you answered yes to these then your either going to need magic or energy.
You can’t just pretend capitalism is responsible for everything bad, unchecked consumption can happen in any system as can over production, ecological destruction, and all sorts of potential problems. I would love to transition to a decent type of communism but I’m not going to pretend it’ll fix the climate on its own.
Yeah and all the communist states are super ecologically friendly
Historically, planned economies have had a better track record preserving ecologies and building sustainable infrastructure. That’s largely because the economic planners deal with long-term timelines (five year plans being the standard) rather than quarterly business cycles.
When you’re running a logging company and you have to ask where you’re going to get your next batch of trees in five years or fifty years, you engage in more sustainable harvesting practices than a for-profit fly-by-night that only cares about growing the number of trees chopped down after every round of investment is depleted.
You can’t just pretend capitalism is responsible for everything bad
Capitalists do a much better job of scaling up industrial infrastructure rapidly, because they do fixate on the short term much more narrowly. Profit-driven practices have rapidly converted our coal-based electricity economy to a natural gas economy. And private speculation has created a booming industry for new technologies - from batteries to cryptocurrencies to LLMs.
But when you run up against the limits of your natural resource supplies, that rapid growth isn’t an economic advantage anymore. You generate far more waste than your communist peers. You spark lots of international conflicts attempting to increase your rate of extraction. And you end up with a very top-heavy unprofessional administrative state, as power consolidates into the hands of financialized aristocrats with little real expertise in the businesses they administer.
In the modern moment, that produces a lot of problems directly attributable to capitalist business practices.
I would love to transition to a decent type of communism but I’m not going to pretend it’ll fix the climate on its own.
If the US were to adopt more Communist-championed energy, housing, and transportation policies, it would immediately benefit the global climate.
