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Look at all that bloat, what a kludge

I have zero arguments worth reposting sorry. It just took a long time to clarify my ‘moderately conservative communist’ label. Despite the downvote tally, I have zero beef with him or any other comrade. It was a comment of humor that has been greatly misinterpreted i think

You are absolutely right that the terms clash and it makes for a confusing label to those on both sides i think. I do prefer to keep using it though because I think that naturally pre-occuring confusion points to something important about the situation. I realize now my earlier framing of communist means and conservative ends was backwards i guess. Since global capital is the true radical force destroying our social fabric, merely conserving the present is not enough. We actually need the conservative discipline of a strong state to impose order and push us forward into a truly emancipatory communist future. I am still unsure if this is the best way to articulate it, but does it make more sense? I feel like I just sound like cowbee now, but I also never felt I disagreed with him in much of anything substantial to begin with

Your mistake is treating capitalism as a static “status quo.” It isn’t. Capitalism is a dynamic process of constant, disruptive revolution. It actively destroys the ecological status quo every single day. So if “conservative” means upholding the prevailing state of things, then defending the physical world against capitalist expansion is conservative. You have to radically change the economy just to conserve the environment.

The train analogy only proves my point. If a train is accelerating toward a cliff, letting it run preserves the engine’s current operation, but it radically destroys the train. Hitting the brakes disrupts the engine’s operation in order to conserve the train. I want to disrupt the capitalist engine to conserve the physical world. Communist means, conservative ends.

The thread already highlights this, but the target of the change dictates the label.

You are assuming capitalism is the steady baseline and communism is the disruption. But in reality, global capital is the true revolutionary force. It constantly tears apart the planet, destroying ecosystems just to keep expanding. It is insanely radical.

So if capital is the radical disruption, then what does it mean to be a conservative? ‘oppose change’ certainly doesn’t cover it or much of anything at all. It means you want to conserve the basic conditions of life against this chaos. I am a communist because it takes a radical break to stop capital, but I am a conservative because the whole point is to defend the physical world from its destructive progress. Communist means, conservative ends.

I feel like your true definition of ‘change’ means ‘movement toward liberation’ if you could only be more specific. If a train is heading towards a cliff, hitting the brakes is conservative in the literal sense, but it is also the only sane and radical thing to do. You need a revolutionary tool (communism) to apply the brakes, but the goal is ultimately conservative (keeping the train from crashing).

Yes and I suspect you too may be a sentient life-force. Stay safe

As stated earlier, my best points were essentially ignored. If that’s what ‘getting dunked on’ means, I’m beyond fine with it lol

I don’t know how this is mud throwing when he describes himself as an optimist and at the same time was the ‘clueless one’ on what a moderately conservative communist stands for.

I love your take though, especially the ‘parse your scattered ideology’ bit, that was hilarious. I believe Cowbee has been clued in on my perspective despite my own cluelessness haha

Thank you for linking the comment thread for me.

Lable your axis-es please

Rather overly optimistic communist at that. Told me to study up on communist theory without ever engaging with my best points. Talks a lot, says very little.

I think on the whole, we actually agree on the mechanics of what needs to happen: slash the destructive waste and build the green infrastructure. Functionally, eliminating massive sectors is degrowth. You call it “advancement” because of the new tech. I call it “degrowth” because the total material footprint has to physically shrink to make room for it.

Going all the way back to your original confusion, I hope I’ve at least cleared up what I meant by “moderately conservative communist” -> essentially someone whose primary focus is conserving the physical commons against the destructive march of both capital and unchecked productivism. Given that we’ve mapped out where our versions of communism diverge, do you think lemmy.ml is still a good home base for a degrowth communist like me, or is there another instance where this flavor of socialism fits better?

It is not as simple as you make it sound, because you are treating advanced technology like it exists in a vacuum instead of recognizing the physical cost of building it.

You call degrowth a trap, but ignoring physical limits is the real trap. Degrowth doesn’t mean abandoning rail for inefficient small-scale production. It means intentionally shrinking the total material throughput of the economy. We can advance rail while drastically degrowing destructive sectors like aviation, the military, and industrial meat.

The problem is that building your advanced green infrastructure still requires massive mining for copper, concrete, and rare earth metals. Those mines destroy real ecosystems whether a socialist planner orders them or a capitalist does. Efficiency per person does not change the absolute physical footprint of extracting resources for 8 billion people. If your environmentalist socialism refuses to shrink our total material consumption, it will just plan its way into the same ecological collapse.

I think if it must be put simply, your communism is just vastly more optimistic than mine.

You say the need motive does not have an endless feedback loop, but I think you are really ignoring how need scales with technological advancement. When socialism develops new medical treatments and/or better housing those immediately become new basic rights. The standard of living constantly rises which requires constant material input. Advancing society expands the definition of what people need to live a dignified life.

Even if we accept that the need motive lacks the artificial acceleration of the profit motive, you still have to face the baseline. Providing a modern, dignified standard of living for 8 billion people with housing, healthcare, and green energy already requires an ecological footprint that exceeds the Earth’s capacity.

We do not need an endless feedback loop to hit ecological collapse. The starting line is already unsustainable. Stopping the profit loop just means we crash into the wall at a steady speed instead of accelerating. To actually live within planetary boundaries, we have to intentionally shrink the material baseline of our consumption. That is degrowth. You cannot simply assume that meeting human needs will automatically align with the Earth’s carrying capacity, because right now, they do not.

You argue that removing the profit motive removes overproduction, but you are treating “human needs” as a fixed, objective metric that planners can just calculate. Advancing industry inherently creates new needs. A hundred years ago, indoor plumbing was a luxury; now it is a basic need. As technology advances, the material baseline of what humans require to participate in society advances with it. A socialist state aiming to provide for an advancing society will have to extract the resources to meet those constantly expanding needs.

If your scientific planners realize that meeting those advancing needs will destroy the lithium salt flats or the deep sea, and they choose to restrict production to save the environment, they are intentionally limiting consumption. That is degrowth.

You say I am confusing capitalism with culture, but you are treating “scientific planning” like magic that can bypass thermodynamics. Planning how much to extract does not change the physical impact of the extraction itself. Whether a capitalist or a socialist planner orders the mining of cobalt, the local ecosystem is destroyed. Removing the profit motive changes who gets the wealth, but it does not change the physical reality that large scale industry consumes the natural world.

You are correct that the profit motive drives overproduction under capitalism. But once profit is gone, you still have a system that demands the continuous development of productive forces. Without a hard commitment to ecological limits, your planned economy will still consume the planet, just more equitably.

You say advancement doesn’t mean endless production, but you haven’t explained what physically stops it. You are treating advanced recycling and renewable technology like a magic wand that bypasses the laws of physics. Thermodynamics dictates that recycling is never one hundred percent efficient, and building the infrastructure for a global green energy grid requires a staggering amount of initial extraction. You cannot build solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries out of thin air.

You also keep using the word freeze, but I am not arguing for freezing society. Degrowth is not about returning to the Stone Age. It is about intentionally shrinking the parts of the economy that are actively destroying the planet, like fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and the military industrial complex.

You claim large industry does not mean overproduction, but what exactly limits it under socialism? If the state is trying to meet human needs, and industrial advancement constantly creates new needs as fast as it solves old ones, how do you prevent the system from just producing more? You assume removing the profit motive removes the drive for endless consumption, but the culture of advancement itself creates that desire. Without a hard commitment to physical limits, your planned large industry will still overconsume, just more efficiently.

No one is arguing to freeze history and return to being hunter-gatherers. That seems like a real strawman. I am talking about a steady-state economy where we actually live within our physical means, rather than assuming we can just innovate our way out of finite planetary boundaries.

You keep saying we can extract “intelligently” and “minimize” it, but you have to look at the actual material math of the green transition you keep praising. Building solar panels, wind turbines, and global electric vehicle fleets for billions of people requires an unprecedented scale of mining for lithium, cobalt, copper, and rare earth metals. There is no “intelligent” way to strip mine the deep sea or destroy lithium salt flats that makes it ecologically harmonious. Planning just makes the destruction more organized. The physical limits of the planet do not care how smart our five-year plans are.

You say large industry is the basis of socialism, but large industry is exactly what caused the massive metabolic rift with nature in the first place. Capitalism absolutely accelerated it, but the industrial metabolism itself requires a massive throughput of the natural world. Communist ecology has a lot of great theory, but if it ignores the hard limits to growth and assumes we can infinitely develop our productive forces on a finite planet, it is repeating the exact same productivist mistakes as capitalism. It is just substituting red flags for green ones while the mines keep digging.

I’ll gladly revisit communist ecology as soon as it stops ignoring the real material limits of our planet. This explains your fears of me being on a ‘eco-fascist pipeline’ though i guess. I want to conserve the commons specifically to guarantee abundance and avoid the scarcity that breeds fascism. You, on the other hand, want a centralized state to continue forcing industrial extraction and advancement on a finite planet. When your planned development inevitably hits the hard ecological walls you refuse to acknowledge, it won’t be the profit motive deciding who gets the last of the resources. It will be your socialist state. And a state forcing through industrial limits for the ‘greater good of historical progress’ is a lot closer to the architecture of fascism than a community trying to protect its water from a lithium mine.

I know we’ve strayed a bit far from the initial talking points(via most of my best points being ignored and retreated from, mind you), but I have to ask, surely you have enough context to no longer be puzzled/confused by the meaning of one characterized as a ‘moderately conservative communist’? Did I clarify enough, or only muddy the waters further? If I did clarify enough, what label would you assign yourself in contrast to me and my position? Would it be better (or more productive lol) for me to take on the label of ‘degrowth communist’? I feel I understand my position more confidently, but I’m still pretty lost on where your initial confusion stemmed from.

I agree that removing the profit motive changes how the economy is steered, but you are assuming the new drivers will automatically choose harmony. You say socialism will advance production while ending consumerism, but those two things contradict each other. If you are advancing production, you have to consume the output or use it to expand further. Otherwise you are just creating massive waste.

The bigger issue is that you keep treating harmony as a decision we can just make once capital is out of the way. Advancing production requires physical extraction. Planning does not magically make lithium mining or cobalt refining clean. A planned economy still has to dig the same holes in the ground and process the same materials to build the green infrastructure you want. You are just doing the destruction on a schedule instead of for a profit margin.

Historically, planned economies did not decide to be harmonious either. They decided to industrialize rapidly to compete with capitalist countries, and the environment suffered greatly for it. If the primary goal remains advancing the productive forces, the physical impact on the planet remains destructive. Changing who holds the steering wheel does not change the fact that the vehicle is still an industrial machine tearing up the ground beneath it. At some point, you actually have to ease off the gas pedal, not just plan a more efficient route.

You say that shifting from profit to human need stops the cycle of endless expansion, but I think you are underestimating how elastic “human needs” actually are. Under an industrial socialist system, if the state decides that everyone needs an electric car, a modern apartment, and global supply chains for fresh produce year-round, the expansion continues. The motive changes, but the physical extraction stays the same.

To build all that green infrastructure to meet those needs, you still have to mine lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals on a massive scale. Those mines still destroy ecosystems and pollute water, whether the workers or capitalists own them. Profit does not physically dig the holes in the earth. Machines and labor do that. Changing the reason we dig the hole does not stop the hole from destroying the local environment.

The core issue is that you are replacing the profit motive with a productivist motive. You are assuming that as long as we are producing for need instead of profit, we can keep expanding production indefinitely. But the planet has hard physical limits. A truly socialist system has to recognize those limits and intentionally restrict what we consume, not just change who is doing the consuming. If your version of socialism just promises more stuff for everyone, you are still running an infinite growth engine on a finite planet.

You are treating advancement like it is a neutral force of nature, but it is really just driven by the need to keep growing. You say we can be efficient without excess, but that ignores how efficiency actually works in the real world. When we figure out how to use a resource more efficiently, we do not use less of it overall. We just consume more because it becomes cheaper. Making green tech more efficient does not hit the brakes on the machine. It just gives the system a cheaper, greener excuse to expand mining and infrastructure.

You assume a socialist state will just choose to stop producing once it is efficient enough, but the whole logic of advancement requires endless expansion. If the socialist state keeps up the project of endless industrial growth just with a red flag over the factories, the planet still burns. The relentless drive for more production caused the ecological crisis in the first place. Doing it faster and greener is not the cure. You cannot run an infinite growth engine on a finite planet and expect it to voluntarily stop. The climate does not care if the bulldozer destroying the forest is owned by a billionaire or a workers’ collective. Believing that efficiency will magically solve overconsumption without us fundamentally changing our relationship to consumption is just wishful thinking.

But when you make production more efficient, people don’t consume less. They consume more. ‘Green advancement’ is often just a license to expand the exploitation of nature under a new label. We cannot ‘advance’ our way out of a systemic crisis, but if we fundamentally change our relationship to consumption, maybe we can start to really rip the e-brake on how efficiently we have been and currently are exploiting nature.

I think you may have the causality backwards. Eco-fascism thrives on scarcity, no? In my mind, it is what happens when the state fails to manage resources and people are forced to fight for scraps. My point is that we must use the state to strictly conserve the commons to ensure there is enough for everyone. That is the opposite of fascism. It is the only guarantee against it. As for China, simply electrifying the economy with solar panels doesn’t change the underlying logic of endless accumulation. We can’t just assume the ‘wheel of history’ will save us if we don’t grab the wheel ourselves.