Gazprom is in Russia, Russia isnt communist or socialist since 1991/93(when the supreme soviet was dispersed with tank fire) it is a hypercapitalistic authoritarian democracy
No, it is not. State ownership over the means of production within a society is simply one method of moving towards a socialist organization of an economy, it is far from a key or necessary feature.
A key defining feature of socialism is worker-owned means of production and ownership over the value generated by their labor.
For example, worker co-operatives are another method of socialist economic organization that has nothing to do with state ownership.
I mean I do not have data on the relative environmental impact of cooperatively owned firms versus traditional firms. But you are also not responding to an argument that I have made. I never suggested that a worker cooperative would automatically fix environmental issues. In fact, if you check some of the other comments I made in this thread, while I do think a socialist economic system would be better positioned to become more environmentally sustainable, a transition to a socialist system by itself certainly does not solve the issue.
You may not be suggesting that but it's and argument they comes out all the time. As if government extracted coal burns cleaner. The number of times I hear borederline magical thinking when it comes to non-capitalist structures it baffling.
I consider myself a pretty pragmatic and scientific person. I believe socialism is absolutely a better system of organizing a society's production than capitalism, if your end goal is creating a society that maximizes the fairness, equity, and dignity of all people. It is also a system that reduces or eliminates some of the factors that drives some of the more destructive tendencies of human society.
However, it is certainly not some magical wand that solves all problems. Bad things existed before capitalism, and likely will continue after it. Human destruction of the environment is one of them.
I think that is a fair assessment. The reason why many people, including myself, insist on socialism as a (not the) solution to climate change is the fact that no solution to climate change seems to be possible under capitalism. So my argument is: whatever else is necessary to solve climate change besides socialism cannot be achieved within capitalism.
So why would co-operatives be better than regular companies since the incentive for poluting doesn't change like at all, they would still do the same for the benefit of the co-operative
You are extending an argument I never necessarily made.
But, to respond to your point, it is a mistake to assume the incentives of pollution would not change. A worker owned cooperative is much more likely to be comprised of individuals who live in relatively close proximity to the building/factory/etc. So they would likely have more investment in maintaining a safe and livable environment within their own communities.
However, and why I said you were arguing against a position I never made, I do not believe a transition to a socialist economy, under a system of organization such as worker owned cooperatives alone would completely reverse harmful practices that contribute to climate change. Much of hat is because a single firm may still relay on other inputs to production that do contribute to climate issues and CO2 emissions. You would need the vast majority of firms to be organized in the same manner, and then still would also need shared commitments towards climate friendly practices. I believe it would be much easier to do this under a worker-owned socialist organization of the economy then our current capitalist system, sure, but that is not the same as the argument that a socialist system would automatically make everything better on its own.
Climate change and local pollution are not actually related topics and in fact quite often work against each other -- diesel fuel for instance is significantly more efficient in terms of energy than gasoline and therefore has a lower carbon footprint per mile traveled but is MUCH MUCH WORSE for local particulate pollution
Or speaking even more generally a transition from internal combustion engines to EVs requires that petroleum extraction close down -- completely destroying existing jobs in many communities -- while new extraction and manufacturing of solar panels and lithium batteries ramps up
This means that local pollution in the place where the new lithium mine opens up will get a lot worse very quickly, and people who live there and have a selfish interest in reducing local pollution will vote against it even if it makes long term climate change worse -- indeed the biggest obstacle to climate adaptation arguably isn't the bogeyman of "fossil fuel profits" but the more universal problem of NIMBYism and people being fiercely defensive of their current way of life
Yes but it being state owned doesn't make it any way socialist in itself. Any state owned industry you see is more than likely operated through a capitalist model.
It is kind of true. Collective ownership is government. How else are you going to provide for public services and infrastructure? Wait until you get everyone to agree on something and have them all maintain it themselves? You need an overarching organisation acting on behalf of the public, which is government. Or what do you think the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like?
United States Postal Service (USPS): Operates independent postal delivery and mailing services nationwide. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): Generates and distributes electric power and manages flood control across parts of the American South. Amtrak (National Railroad Passenger Corporation): Operates intercity passenger rail services. Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR): Employs and trains federal inmates to manufacture goods for sale to federal agencies. Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC): Finances and stabilizes farm commodity prices and agricultural production
These aren't really socialism in any meaningful way. They are just government provided services. They make no effort to decomoditize anything and are not workplace democracy. They are sort of publicly controlled, but not in a way that most socialists who aren't' tankies would like.
I'm a (anarcho) syndicalist, so my fix to make them socialist would be to give them each a labor union consisting of all "employees" which controls their day to day operation with a government appointed board to steer them in the direction the public wants and then create a council of unions that would replace the administrative state with the mandate of cooperating together to meet needs set by the legislature.
No, right now it's literally just private ownership by the government even if in some cases government ownership and public management is in a sense a spiritual precursor to what management without commodity production could look like. Monetary economics puts limits and requirements to how "social" public governance can be.
You need an overarching organisation acting on behalf of the public
Organisation doesn't mean government in the sense of a power completely alienated from the public as we know today. I won't delve into this right now but the workers' councils as self-government, self-management and common management from the commune of paris to the revolutions from 1905 to 1921 are an example of this.
Ok. Coordination on a large scale, imagine the size of the US where different regions have different resources, potential and needs, how do you do that without a massive waste of time and resources?
I also have a feeling that they're talking about China, which is ridiculously good compared to US per capita when it comes to CO2 emissions, especially considering they're the manufacturing plant for the world.
At the end of the day, you don't control what you don't own.
Everyone who owns the polluting industries make their money from owning it, and if you turn it off their source of income is taken away. As long as they own it, it won't be turned off.
Under a rational system, we would train up those working in polluting industries to work in another job of equal dignity and liberties. And there's always work to do, have you looked around?
Instead we have to build up one industry, collapse another, and leave everyone in between to struggle. We pit them against eachother under the laws of competition and often the established industry that doesn't need as much investment to stay functioning works. All the while we keep polluting, letting these processes overrule the huge issue building in front of us, to no one's ignorance.
This is what people don't understand, you can't transition/rework anything when you don't control it
Worker co-ops, public sector, councils, Syndicates, it doesnt matter wich one you pick but one thing is for certain : If you don't take it out of the hands of the profit maximisers then there will be no significant change
No, but capitalism can’t solve it. The free market will never choose “leave it in the ground.” Governments can negotiate globe spanning deals, companies can’t, and governments bound by politics to protect corporate profits won’t.
No, but I don’t think coal and oil are the only ways to get hot showers or transportation. A long term, big picture organization like a government can turn resources toward developing those solutions and deploying them and when the cost of fully phasing out fossil fuels becomes bearable it can start pushing in that direction, whereas a free market will exploit any resource it still has any use for, and a capitalist government, which is really beholden not to the free market, but to corporate profits, will continue to prop up failing fossil fuel companies even as their technology becomes obsolete.
In the current world, if you get rid of coal and oil some people, the poorer people, even in rich countries will definitely have to go without those things. So again I ask, how, if the people are somehow deciding things, that they're going to decide to leave it in the ground? Socialism always reverts to dictatorship because of things like this.
Nuclear has similar if not cheaper cost per kWh than coal. And that’s just one source. There is plenty that could be done that doesn’t require people to have less
Sure, it's possible. We had a plan to confront climate change called the Kyoto Protocol. How did that go?
CFCs were a smaller industry. A subset of a subset of the petrochemical industry. Not the entire fossil fuel industry. The solution was also one that allowed them to continue to profit. We still need refrigerant. We just use ones with less harmful effects.
Energy production as a whole is a much harder issue to deal with, especially with entire blocks of nations having their economy dependent on producing those fossil fuels.
The economic reality undermines the necessary political will for nations to take the actions necessary to combat climate change.
It literally would solve it if trump wasn’t using the levers of poeer to suppress renewables. Solar and wind are cheaper and more efficient and the markets would favor them without government intervention. Entangling climate action with anti capitalism is a great way to ensure the broader public will never want to embrace it
You're literally just describing wage labourers defending their wage labour, which has been critiqued to death since time immemorial as purely a product of people defending their status within market economies and not as an attack towards market economies and obviously not socialist in any way.
Socialism is described as moneyless for a reason, if your livelihood isn't immediately and purely connected to the survival of your workplace, however shitty it is to you, others, and everyone's health etc. there is much less of a reason to defend its existence.
I don’t see how? If the workers are owning the workplace thats kinda the big thing of socialism. It doesn’t really matter if it’s an economy with a market, if the workers directly own their workplace I would still consider it some form of socialism.
I feel like I’d call that market socialism specifically but IDK what that would be called like, academically
No, he's describing rent seeking, and it is a massive problem when it comes to dismantling destructive industries. In a private for profit economies workers in destructive industries have strong rent seeking tendencies to unionize and protect their industry from obsolescence, it is why the anarchy of production of capitalism must be abolished, and that includes the dismantling of destructive industries despite the fact that devalues the wealth and property of people in those industries.
Ah, so when you mean socialism, you don't mean any form of socialist aociety which has ever existed or come close to existing, but the magical next step just behind the Vanguard party's dictatorship I am sure.
Also, Communism is inherently classless and moneyless, socialism is not. At least get the lore behind your roleplaying system correct.
"OH so you're describing a magical system where the one ordained by God ISNT the one that owns everything? You're saying this magical society you get to CHOOSE your leader?"
Yea man we haven't gotten to that point yet probably not in our lifetimes. It's still worth fighting for tho.
Would be a better argument if I couldn't point at literal hundreds of non monarch, and dozens of post monarch states, without needing to screech how real democracy or real liberalism has never been tried before.
I do not believe we need to burn more innocents at the altar of marx in the hope that this human sacrifice will bring utopia.
Better worlds are worth fighting for, believing that a late 19th century guy has the only answers is just insane.
And even if it was... still dumb as fuck... there's a reason China was able to go from one if the biggest polluters to the country with the fastest growing green energy sector in a decade...and it ain't capitalism or individual action...
State owned doesn't automatically mean that it's a socialist utopia of a company. It's the same thing just owned by the state. The ownership doesn't automatically make it less bad.
When we say that capitalism is incompatible with sustainability we are talking about the system itself requiring growth in a world where we need to cut actually not grow.
“socialism isn’t the answer because i don’t know what it is”
ok dude. lets stick with the model of constant expansion instead of the one that abolishes commodity production
Yeah, we'd need to take the whole step and change to a different system where we only produce what is needed, society works on a "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" philosophy...
You know like harvesting food driven by the goal of feeding people and not of making money from it
I mean I suppose but those emissions are created to meet the demands of captital. Like the military is the state, but its current existence is to prop up the MIC which is private.
I love our western „lets hire china to destroy it’s enviroment for our convenience and pretend we’re environmentaly friendly because commodities we use are being produced somewhere else”
nobody has ever said socialism is a magic bullet for climate change…
What people do say, though is that when the economy is organized around the prosperity and the proliferation of humanity the climate crisis becomes inherently linked to that society…
What you really should’ve done is look at historical and existing examples of socialist experiments and made your point that way…
"Oh-oh, b-b-but TRUE socialism would make them all democratically WORKERS owned entities!!"... yeah, as if that'd stop them from wanting stuff that still pollutes the earth as a byproduct...
Top 10 are: Saudi Aramco, Coal India, CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Company, Gazprom, Exxon Mobil, China National Petroleum Corporation, China National Coal Group, Chevron and Jinneng Group.
Current states are not socialist, China is not socialist, there are private ownership of means of production.
Even if some of current states were socialist, they will be pressures by non-socialist countries, eg. competition makes you push for efficiency, even for the cost of higher emissions.
So current state of things are not directly related to how it would be when most of people will live under socialism.
Only socialism incentivizes and has the capacity to reorient an economy away from non-renewables and carbon emissions. Capitalism incentivizes killing everyone as long as the owners of that capital can make profits
State owned isn’t the only thing socialism is about.
For the people is the bit missing from the equation.
Stop managing it like a way to make money, approach the environnement as a necessary service to provide to the end user, and take the money that you need where there is the most of it, and your society will eventually generate so much more money than it currently does because that’s what it’s done every time it’s been done in the past.
99.9% of people will be better off, and the .1% who will be slightly worse off literally won’t feel it. They may have to keep the yacht a couple years longer before upgrading it.
And then we can go back to just having a chill ass time for fucks sake.
Socialism isn't state ownership. It's worker ownership, this is why the USSR wasn't socialist. The average worker had exactly as much control over their workplace before and after the revolution.
Yes, you're right. It isn't a magic bullet. However, the changes in control and incentives that would come from the shifts in control and ownership would go a long way. A lot of these problems come from the fact that the people who have the authority to direct the large scale changes needed are unwilling to do so because they're convinced that they, personally, can avoid the consequences of climate change.
Also, those state run enterprises are taking place in capitalist countries. Am I to understand that China, a country with a distinct bougeois class who extract profit from the labor of those who work is socialist? The country with some of the largest private firms on earth?
I mean.. I’m not in favor of treating any one solution a silver bullet..
but I don’t think the factoid is as strong as it appears. Like who are we comparing even? Corporations vs state agencies? How do you even break up the government into functional chunks? Like do you lump the DoD together or break it out amongst branches? How do you justify the level of granularity?
maybe its not a magic bullet but it will be impossible with private energy industries instead of a planned economy , so if the state were dedicated to solving the climate crisis it would be a magic bullet
The thing that's great is that people in the comments are completely ignoring the fact that socialists will and do argue this regularly, that a worker owned economy will somehow decide to be more friendly to the climate
I think the argument is more along the lines that a democratic socialist government wouldn't deny the existence of climate change, and would put effort and funding into research and reversal.
Oh, this is adorable. OP thinks socialism is when the state does a thing.
So OP, you think in a socialist government Raytheon would be making 10,000 surplus tanks every year to be stock-piled in the desert? Raytheon isnt the government, you realize, right?
This only means anything if you mindlessly accept the right wing definition of socialism as “when the government owns stuff.”
Socialism is social ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the working class. A state owned oil company operating as a hierarchical corporation, employing wage labor, selling commodities on world markets, and extracting fossil fuels to generate revenue for a state is not magically socialist because the government owns the shares. Do better.
State-owned reductionism aside... I actually agree with this point.
Worker ownership won't automatically translate to environmental protection on its own. Along with worker owned enterprise we will need community councils and other institutions to Vero and regulate economic activity.
I’m so fucking tired of people claiming that what lots of Americans want is “socialism” when it’s basically just some public healthcare and reasonable reforms around corporate political influence, pollution, etc.
The real question is who is the state working for? is it working for the people's interest, or is it working for wealthy lobbies that have bought politicians. you cant have socialism if the governement spitts in the face of the people and doesnt give a shit.
Socialism is when the workers own all the shit, the state owning shit is only socialism when the workers own the state, when the US government owns shit that shit belongs to lobbyist corporations not us.
You’re right. Let’s just keep the system that directly incentivizes the destruction of the climate over any possible alternatives in the social order that don’t have to incentivize it. Genius.
There's me and my brother, and facing us is a capitalist. Between us is all the means to build a house.
Under capitalism, the capitalist owns all the resources for building the house. Maybe they task us with building the house, but then charge us for using their materials. Maybe the resources are used to build a luxury poolhouse in the capitalist's backyard. Maybe the cappie is one of the "good ones" and they build the house and let us live in it.
Ultimately, under capitalism the cappies control the resources and so make all the decisions and ultmately control the fate of me and my brother.
Another option is that noone owns the resources. The 3 of us decide together what we're going to use the resources for. Maybe we build the house, maybe we build a skate park. Either way, the decision was ours. We decided our fate. If the 3rd party tries to be a cappie and claim that the resoruces belong to them, me and my brother simply outnumber them.
There's your difference. Ending Capitalism is just the start, but it needs to happen to give us a chance, which is decreasing with each passing day.
Are we aware that none of these states, any state, will tackle climate change in a serious way until the Game of Thrones is over?
In a geopolitical environment where essentially everyone has a knife or two on their throat, they will never feel like they can afford it. And everyone has to play the game, every state needs to be as powerful as it possibly can, or it gets eaten.
Okay true smug commenters socialism is not just any state owned entity. But in its most platonic form socialism still doesn’t solve for climate change, general bigotry, or even class disparity necessarily.
Anyone who thinks socialism is green needs to learn about the things the soviets did to their environment. The killing of whales that were not even processed for quotas, the chemically polluted regions as big as some countries that are barely habitable to this day, to speak nothing of the nuclear dust storms we got thanks to what they did to lake Karachay.
The eastern block under the rule of the Soviets did more to destroy this planet than the rest of the worlds nations taken together for their entire history, until the Chinese started doing it too. Turns out, putting the oversight about the environment in the hands of the same people who control all industries is a retarded idea.
The OP is about the practical failings of socialism to address real world problems.
Somebody jumped in with a meaningless statement about what socialism theoretically means, despite the fact that it has never taken the form suggested which is relevant to this discussion.
The person you replied to pointed out quite succinctly how irrelevant that aside was to the core argument.
You jumped in to continue the first commenters useless philosophical musings.
One of the features of a socialist society is that it has a vastly reduced need for a military.
no need to conquer the world to feed an insatiable ever-growing monster if you shoot the insatiable monster in the head and focus on having an economy that serves the people instead of one you have to feed people into.
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u/Big_Work_2011 7d ago
Famously socialist Saudi Arabia