^{_{The ISO and BP how Capitalism is destroying
the planet do you agree?}}

In Marx' understanding, persons are
commodified and degraded under the fetishism of market, capital and
money where the market or profit are made central. Reductionism and
alienation occur when life is reduced to the market economy, CEOs
are stylized "job creators" and workers degraded as "cost factors."


In the 50s, we had a guns-and-butter economy without limits.
Pushing the workers and increasing productivity was the panacea. In
the 80s with the neoliberal counter-revolution, Reagan reduced the
top tax rate from 71% to 24% and gave capital all freedom in the
"trickle down" mythology. In the current financial crisis,
pyromaniacs are called fire-fighters and speculators "investors."
Trust will be more distant than a star until the financial sector is
shriveled, working hours are reduced and redistribution occurs from
top to bottom.

As the Sabbath was made for man and not man
for the Sabbath, the economy should be a part of life, not a
steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination.

Here
is a link to an essay on Erich Fromm. The future will be brighter
when we overcome our estrangement and send the architects of crisis
back to the golf course!

 http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2010/07/400819.shtml

I don't currently have the time to type the
book that it takes to properly get into the subjects raised here,
but let me point you to an excellent talk that addresses why
socialism is necessary to save humanity and the planet.

 http://www.revolutionbooksnyc.org/Lotta060810.mp3


Video at -  http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GNFJC51X

Socialist Worker has excerpts from the new
Haymarket book "Ecology and Socialism" that fit well into this
thread. I encourage people to check out the article and let us know
what you think.

 http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/22/truly-sustainable-society

How to solve the growth problem. Some of you
said that I was wrong and then went on to say that Socialism would
be like sipping oil from a glass rather than gorging at an all you
can eat buffet. Then still others tried to make yourselves sound
very intelligent and used a lot of big words.

The bottom
line is this oil and fossil fuels ot finite and will run out this is
an undisputed fact which we have known for a long time. Today most
of out energy is made using fossil fuels. So with demand rising
"growth" and this would happen in a socialist country as much as a
capitalist country which is why the Soviet Union fell. The Soviet
Union could not provide for the basic demands of it's population
furthermore the educated class demanded more materials and a higher
standard of living. Not to mention what happened to tha Arial Sea
which is one of the worst enviromental disasters in history.


I don't believe science will save us so I refuse to believe
in any political idialiogy thst believes in growth as the answer to
societies proplems, and thank you Steve I totally agree.

The socialists seem to be forgetting or
denying that BURNING OIL by itself is a global catastrophe. No
leaking needed. A socialist economy could run a completely
leak-proof, worker safe, even egalitarian etc., oil economy and the
environment would still fall apart around us. Burning any fossil
fuels IS JUST OUT OF THE QUESTION.
Hydroelectric dams will
destroy all of the global salmon runs if global warming doesn't.
Dammed up rivers also produce huge amounts of greenhouse gasses by
creating big anaerobic decaying pits of organic matter. Sometimes
more greenhouse gasses than coal burning power plants. Look it up.


But let's be clear here, producing and maintaining solar
panels, or windmills, or thermal generators, or whatever is also
needlessly polutive, wasteful and harmful.
Metal mining requires
the destruction of huge tracts of land and poisons streams and
rivers. It increasingly requires the use of large quantities of
cyanide and other toxic chemicals. The production of plastic
releases Dioxins (some of the most deadly compounds known), and then
the plastics that we use continue to leak dioxins and other harmful
chemicals into the general environment (wherever it is that they
happen to be, in your home, outside, wherever).
Recycling is
also a chemical and energy intensive industrial process that harms
the environment and is wasteful to the degree that eventually, as a
system, it will run out of raw materials to circulate.
Any way
you cut it, fossil fuel and electric infrastructures are not
sustainable. And by "not sustainable" I do not mean just mean "dirty
and regrettable but still an option, if only a not so good one"
that's not what "not sustainable" means! It doesn't mean "yucky, but
workable." It means that IT PHYSICALLY CANNOT CONTINUE. A
non-sustainable practice will stop itself from continuing either by
completely depleting the resources it needs to continue OR by
destroying the environment to the degree that human life cannot be
sustained- whichever comes first.
Heck, even a steam industry is
not sustainable... most of the U.S. was deforested during or even
before the early industrial revolution alone. Early Middle Eastern,
African and European civilizations that practiced intensive grain
agriculture were not sustainable (while it would appear on the other
hand that indigenous milpa -maize, squash, beans, etc.- farming is
rather sustainable). Most of the lifestyles that we have come to
think of as "civilized" are just not sustainable.

But don't
sweat it. Biologically modern humans have been around for 200,000
years. Large-scale industrial energy infrastructures have been
around for roughly 100 years. That's less than 0.1% of the time that
humans have been around. Meaning that I'm sure we'll be able to
figure out how to live just fine again without that utterly
frivolous, completely unnecessary crap.
The ghosts of
essentially all of your ancestors going back to the earliest humans
would probably laugh in your face if you tried to tell them that "I
can't imagine living without electricity! Certainly it can't be
done!"

Whoa whoa whoa. Slowdown there. The person
asking this question - who I assume to be you - asked for
clarification, from a Socialist standpoint, about industrialization.
Not the use of Fossil Fuels. The consumption of natural resources is
an inevitability but the consumption of Fossil Fuels is not.
Throughout this discussion I have maintain the orthodox Marxist view
(which is not sustained by Leninist organizations) that Socialism is
not possible without Capitalism first reaching a particular level of
development. It is from the Capitalist's mindless industrialization
that the peoples of the world become members of the Proletariat and
in turn the conditions for a Socialist revolution are eventually
made possible.

In Marx's time the issue of environmentalism
wasn't nearly as pronounced and so it wasn't really an element of
his work. But considering the fact that Marx did believe Capitalism
would produce a set of conditions so terrible that it would cause a
global class movement, its rational to say he would have included
environmental degradation in his theory had he been living today.
consumerism, global warming denial, and general complacency towards
our environment are deeply ingrained in the Capitalist system. It is
these characteristics, necessary to sustain the demand for consumer
goods that fuel growth of the Capitalist system, that will
invariably prevent the ruling class from acting in a manner that
prevents some sort of catastrophe down the road. When this
catastrophe occurs, it WILL indisputably demonstrate that Capitalist
development is at the heart of the declining integrity of our
planetary ecosystem. When this catastrophe occurs, Capitalism will
be unable to cope with the massive, destabilizing strain it places
on Global Markets. When this catastrophe occurs, it will compact
with all the other insidious tyrannies that exist to maintain the
system and burden the working class - political, social,
intellectual, economic, etc.

It figures that such a
culmination of events would be the spark that lights the proverbial
fuse - causing that global awakening that precedes the true
Socialist revolution predicted in Marx's work. This environmental
catastrophe will inevitability be a crucial element and focus of the
democratic, non-hierarchial reorganization of our planet; as the
masses will seek to establish a system which will not repeat the
disaster that was so horrific that it helped cause a historically
unequaled paradigm shift the world over.

Because we are
unavoidably moving towards a totally industrialized world today, by
the time such an event occurs its logical to assume that
industrialization will be even more prevalent. On a planet with a
human population of billions - all of whom who are trained to
operate and dependent on industry - it would be impossible to
immediately abandon industry without causing starvation that in
unlike any of our most horrible nightmares. But because these
industries will be operated to SUSTAIN humanity rather than to
simply perpetuate growth for profit, immediate steps - such as the
abolition of Fossil Fuels and the mass adoption of Alternative
Energies - will be immediately possible. As the jump in awareness
that is necessary to operate a democratic, non-hierarchal society
spurs on infinitely greater and more socially-mindful education, as
the prosperity inherent to operating industry for need affords the
masses more time to develop other skills, the process of slowly
reducing the need for industrial dependency will steadily alter our
economies and in turn the size/composition of the human race as
whole. Conversely the depletion of the Earth's resources - slowed
but ever present - will never allow a global society of
collectively-orientated people to simply ignore the state of the
Earth - thus insuring energies will be consistently dedicated to
mitigating humanity's impact on the Earth.

Although all of
the aforementioned is quite complicated (and will be even more so in
practice), the fact that such a future is possible and well within
the operating confines of SOME socialist thought I hope I have
successfully helped you understand how it is simply not realistic to
put Socialism on the same level as Capitalism. And to reiterate my
emphasis on the world "some" large elements of what I've outlined
here are simply structurally impossible under some forms of
Socialist thought - primarily Leninist ones. As you have correctly
stated the Soviet Union unilaterally failed to distinguish itself
much less the "greatness" of Capitalism despite its barbarity.
Leninist thought retains one of the most crucial and powerful
elements of the Capitalist system - the necessity of hierarchal
power structures due to what the perceive as the incompetency of the
masses. When you keep hierarchy, you keep an unequal distribution of
power. When you keep an unequal distribution of power, you establish
the basis of a class system and when you have a class system you
have class interests which compel some to control and exploit the
people. It is this basic principle that has rendered all attempts at
Leninist Socialism miserable failures with unforgivable loses of
life. The ruling class of the Soviet Union - the beloved
"professional revolutionaries" and "People's Party" worshiped by the
Leninists - never care about the people just like their Capitalist
counterparts; only the perpetuation and defense of their power and
wealth. When these inherently selfish elements are steering the
ships of our nations, they cannot be convinced to avoid the icebergs
of ecological devastation that threaten to hurt everyone but them.

Thorn,you sound more like Bill O'Rilley or
some of the others on Fox 'News.'