alanjjohnstone
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Soaring demand for electricity in Spain has pushed power company Endesa to restart a coal plant that has been idle since July and is slated for closure as part of European emissions-cutting goals.
Portugal shut down its last remaining coal plant last weekend.
We now have a vaccine for malaria.
Do we witness any urgency in its manufacture and distribution? Or is it that malaria isn’t such a serious threat to the developed nations of the world?
Are the anti-vaxxers going to campaign or protest? Or is it that they don’t care about the poor, anyway?
The debate however did continue.
I recall when I re-joined and attended Conference it was again discussed. Memory doesn’t help me to say if there was a resolution or discussion item or what, if any, was the voting on it.
There were also exchanges on Spopen when that was a lively forum.
Perhaps, the pandemic post-mortem would be an appropriate occasion to re-visit the issue.
Prince William said increasing pressure on the continent’s “wildlife and wild spaces as a result of human population” was presenting a “huge challenge for conservationists, as it does the world over”.
Seems he hasn’t changed his views for back in 2017, he said much the same, that Africa’s “rapidly growing human population” was putting its wildlife and habitats under “enormous pressure”.
Eco-Royalist Fascism?
Over 30 drowned in the Channel. It was just a matter of time before we had such an avoidable tragedy.
As we expected the British government blame people traffickers and the French, washing their own hands for having an immigration policy that drives people to risk their lives in an attempt to gain entry.
And the British public, many will simply say it is the refugees own fault, they got their just deserts and it will be a lesson to others in the future.
I wouldn’t say the Teenvogue article was completely rubbish other than like 99.99% of people it recommends reforms as a solution and has a romantic attachment to indigenous peoples as custodians and guardians of Nature.
When you scratch the surface of eco-fascism we get to Garret Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_ethics
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_against_helping_poor.html
Not so far away from the euthanasia and eugenics of Nazism, is it? Yet how many understand the political conclusion of where the Tragedy of the Commons is heading towards?
The Wiki entry on eco-fascism refers to Bookchin’s use of the term “Deep Green” as a description of the misanthropy which is prevalent in some ecologists and perhaps if eco-fascism is objectionable, we should begin using it more. Will it be introduced into the Socialist Party lexicon?
As I said, this ideology is set to grow and perhaps even dominate in popularity, particularly when the consequences of global warming heightens with rising numbers of climate refugees as certain countries collapse. So that is why this exchange on words and meanings is vital.
The other aspect of using fascism as a term for any populist totalitarian or authoritarian regime sometimes but not always with a charismatic dictator is the misuse of the word. So far we omitted the word social fascist as used by the Stalinists against their labourist rivals in the 1930s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascismIn conversations, I have used the term “red fascism” to describe Stalinism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fascismI fully understand that a 17th Century argument blaming poverty on the numbers of poor is not fascism.
However, it is a foundational building block being used in the present day to again make the poor culpable for climate change and environmental destruction.
Nazi ideology in Germany was based on lebensraum – living space – an appeal that being a superior race, Germans were justified in expanding – invading – into neighbouring nations so as to accommodate its population. “Blood and Soil”
We have ecological activists who deem the poor in the developing and undeveloped world Untermenschen, not deemed fit to share equally in the benefits of the developed world and fated to pay the price to preserve the privileges of those living in the developed world.
The concept of eco-fascism is already in the public discourse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
Call it out for what it is. Quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, looks like a duck…
And while I am at it, we can start critiquing those eco-localists as being advocates for autarky, the antithesis of the world cooperative commonwealth
As we always said, economic reality dictates government policy.
The US has said it is releasing 50 million barrels of oil from its reserves in an attempt to bring down soaring energy and petrol prices. The move is being taken in parallel with other major oil-consuming nations, including China, India, Japan, South Korea and the UK.
We can all agree like MS suggests that there will be fewer diseases within a socialist society, and like smallpox, many can be eradicated, such as the end of polio being on the verge of accomplishing.
But we cannot promise that there will never be another pandemic.
What we know of viruses is that they constantly evolve to overcome natural resistance and the use of anti-biotics creates immunity to their effect.
The current pandemic has raised the issues that Rodshaw and BD have referred to. It reminds me of an early argument that the late comrades Pieter Lawrence and Frank Simpkins presented about the continuation of law and law enforcement.
Is Broadstairs and Carstairs, the State’s secure hospitals for the criminally insane the best treatment, BD? Even within every “normal” psychiatric hospital they have “locked” wards for those who exist as a threat to themselves and others.
For the “typhoid marys”, it meant incarceration under unpleasant conditions.
Even lockdowns under capitalism need not be too stressful, people did survive and some even thrived through it. It was not always a negative experience and brought some benefits. Likewise, it revealed many problems too, personal and social.
But with socialism, being a society already built more solidly on social and communal relationships, the problems of lockdown can be even more minimised. In fact, hasn’t social distancing highlighted just how much of a social species we really are?
What I think the real question is and it is one ALB raised.
How do we respond to the current protests against the implementation of bureaucratic State regulations, with the introduction of vaccine passports and restrictions on movement and access to public facilities?
It is a genuine issue of libertarianism for many protestors.
It is also a question of economic survival for many too, as they experience their livelihoods being threatened. That would not exist in a socialist lock-down.
But recall the experience of raves. Passing laws to make raves illegal didn’t stop those from happening. It proved an attraction.
In my lifetime I saw smoking forbidden in pubs. Something I once thought was impossible but it took place relatively smoothly. People and pubs adapted to the new rules.
But ALB’s question is still pertinent. What do we say to those who demonstrate against strict lockdown?
It isn’t all anti-vaxxers.
BD and rodshaw speculation is an interesting one, perhaps a lot wider than we think.
Still, we have not yet come any closer to defining word for the adoption of a Malthusian political approach within the environmentalist milieu by the far-right, many of whom can be described as proponents of a totalitarian authoritarian society based upon race and religion who are making use of the climate crisis to promote those views.
“Liberal” and “progressives” using similar and related arguments may well be shocked into realising that they are unwittingly advocating an “eco-fascist” ideology when confronted with the accusation.
The problem we are facing is only going to worsen in the future, and if words are our weapon, then we better arm ourselves appropriately.
Other words totally lost to us is social democracy and social democrat.
How do we retrieve and rehabilitate those?
While I am at it another couple of pet peeves
Why is it we nearly always automatically define the working class as those who work for a wage or for a salary? We don’t call for the abolition of the salary system. We don’t call ourselves salary-slaves, (even though they are much more alliterative) so why continue with a distinction that appears we accept the middle-class status of salaried workers.
Then there is our reluctance to use the words social ownership or social control and collective ownership or collective control as synonyms for common ownership and democratic control. We use the latter very repetitively.
The best definition of common ownership is no ownership.
Have we really defended the original political usage of those terms social and collective or permitted them to be usurped?
As I asked earlier, MS, what is the alternative for the term to use for the Malthusian proponents of ethno-nationalism as the answer to the so-called ecological and over-population crisis.
Is eco-nativism as ALB suggests more explanatory than eco-fascism? It certainly narrows it down to being anti-immigrant but not the wider blame of over-population.
I often use in articles the word corporations to mean companies, particularly large multinational (transnational as some prefer) enterprises. Am I letting family-owned businesses such as Walmart or local firms off from criticism? Is corporations another word to discard? When we talk of employers do we also reject calling them CEOs? In my youth, it was sufficient to equate bosses with the term management to be understood, despite the managerial bureaucratic theories of Burnham, Rizzi and Cardan.
We have to find a language that fellow workers can easily follow and that is not always going to be the vocabulary we use in the WSM.
As I said words are normally understood by the context they are used in.
Our main video, Kids Stuff, does not even use the word socialism to explain our socialist case.
Boris quotes Lenin to the CBI
“Lenin once said that the Communist Revolution was Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” he told the crowd.
“Well, I hesitate to quote Lenin before the Confederation of British Industry, but the coming industrial revolution is green power plus the electrification of the whole country.”We can agree with today’s Socialist Courier blog-post that “We should be more demanding on labels we ascribe to people.”
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-socialist-partys-practice.html
But we use words in a context, not necessarily as the dictionary would define them.
As an aside, do I protest that the Socialist Standard too often applies Americanised spelling with the Z instead of the S in its articles 😉
Abstention is a persistent feature of Chilean elections – where rarely more than half of the electorate turns out. Despite the seemingly high stakes of yesterday’s election, participation hit just 47%.
Any thoughts on that, MS?
I’m restricting the argument to the term “eco-fascism”, not a blanket epithet for very conservative.
(we have a similar issue with “imperialism”, not all capitalist countries have a imperialist foreign policy but for capitalism itself the tendency is inherent for the most powerful economies to be imperialist)
Is Malthusian a sufficient condemnatory description for what we witness in the politics of many ecology activists?
Does it adequately express the effect of their ideology?
How do we equate the abuse of environmentalist concern with rabid nationalism and racism unless we use words that already are associated with these?
Can we talk of eco-white supremacism? Eco-far-rightism? Eco-nationalism? Do these make the tendency within ecologists any clearer?
When the concept is of “blood and soil” reflected is eco-nazism appropriate?
Anyways here is Wiki on its meaning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascismTake your pick
