Mr Funk wrote:DutchCanuck wrote:What system do you suggest to replace it? Communism has a fairly bad track record.
shefcurry wrote:And we should cheer for this. Because communist countries have an impeccable track record of caring for the environment....
Ah yes, the ol' red baiting.
Well, capitalism, just life feudalism and slavery before it, will not last forever. And what you're both referring to -
Stalinism - was a complete caricature of socialism, which is international and democratic, or it is nothing. The USSR, due to its isolation and culutural backwardness, degenerated into a bureaucratic, totalitarian dictatorship following the Russian Civil War, when the Russian working class was too exhausted and wiped out following WWI and the civil war to counter the emerging bureaucracy and its figurehead, Stalin.
All of the victories and progress of the revolution (workers' democratic control, women's and gay rights) were rolled back, except the nationalized, planned economy, which of course the workers' lost democratic control, with the tyrannical bureaucracy taking over. This degenerate model was then supplanted in China and eventually eastern Europe. They were deformed worker states with absolutely no workers' democracy nor control over the economy. The bureaucracy ruled supreme.
A "communist" or "socialist" country has never existed before. You can't have a few particular nation states here and there, which have already achieved the highest form of human development, while being surrounded by antiquated capitalist nation states. In fact, nation states won't exist under the more advanced stages of socialism. That is ridiculous. It would be just like having one or two fully developed capitalist nation states surrounded by feudal kingdoms in medieval western Europe.
The international working class is the most powerful and progressive force on the planet. Following a series of great, historical events, their consciousness will rapidly change and they will reject the old institutions, ways of thinking and take action into their own hands. We're already seeing this with the rapid rise of strikes, labour action and social movements around the world, particularly in the United States, China and the Middle East.
Humanity took a massive step forward when feudalism was overthrown and capitalism was fully established, with the old aristorcracies rendered powerless.
But the potential and possibilities for humanity will be insane once the international working class has seized democratic control over the means of production and instead of the anarchy of capitalism with constant and reckless overproduction, boom/bust cycles, the artificial expansion of financial markets and the rest of it, will be supplanted with publicly owned and democratically controlled economies, in which production is planned to meet human need and not satisfy greed.
If you want politicians to take the environment seriously, then you should vote for parties that prioritize the environment in their political agenda. When political will changes all parties have to follow suit, and there's actually been some progress in terms of actually recognizing there is a problem (still a few holdouts, obviously).
