招瑤 posted:i’d like to share a revelation that ive had during my time here, it came to me when i tried to classify yr species & i realized that you aren’t actually mammals. every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium w its surrounding environment but you humans do not. you move to an area and you multiply, & multiply until every natural resource is consumed. the only way you can survive is to spread to another area
clarity on this point would at least make your statements comprehensible.
Acdtrux posted:From the perspective of the illusory dichotomy between man and nature, ecofascists struggle against the population and communists struggle against nature. Communism is a victory against nature.
isn't trying to define communism in terms of an "illusory dichotomy" explicitly undialectical?
Acdtrux posted:Taking this view, my posts here are intended to demonstrate my inability to distinguish environmentalism, taken separately from the class struggle, and ecofascism. I am trying to identify ecofascism and eliminate it from my thinking.
then you're overcomplicating things terribly. i sympathise with the urge to treat this as a purely philosophical problem to be solved by finding a creative argument in response but that is the hallmark of moribund academic marxism. there are plenty of good reasons to reject the ideology of so-called "overpopulation" without resorting to rhetorical attacks on nature. to understand the problem with your approach in more practical terms, consider the struggles of indigenous peoples around the world (which should never be far from the mind of any communist). the fight against capitalist theft and exploitation of land is inseparable from environmental concerns.
toyot posted:i've talked about the way out of this contradiction, the development of the new autotrophic class that uses CO2 as a carbon source and water as electron acceptor to synthesize food
in the meantime there is an existing, similarly theoretical but more immediately viable alternative to agriculture: eating the rich
toyot posted:Acdtrux posted:
Thesis: Nature is an undisturbed system out of which mankind has emerged.
Antithesis: Mankind is therefore subordinate to nature, and it is inevitable or mandatory that social laws in accordance with nature are instituted under the threat of climate crisis.
Synthesis: Nature emerges out of mankind. Nature is secondary to humans, since the specific configuration of nature is determined by the social mode of production among humans. The human fist and it's ten fingers have affected every aspect of the big rock. Climate crisis and social crisis are coextensive.
From the perspective of the illusory dichotomy between man and nature, ecofascists struggle against the population and communists struggle against nature. Communism is a victory against nature.
Taking this view, my posts here are intended to demonstrate my inability to distinguish environmentalism, taken separately from the class struggle, and ecofascism. I am trying to identify ecofascism and eliminate it from my thinking.
the contradiction is that any 'victory against nature' (to get food) waged by heterotrophs like us becomes a zero-sum advance made against the rest of animalia. which we observe, all of us being born into a live mass extinction event. i talked about this in my theses on agriculture. agriculture is a land-replacement niche. zero-sum might even be paying it a compliment because the intensive way it's practiced today, it's more like a mining operation. but so long as agriculture is our species-niche, technology will serve to attenuate this niche, meaning the class of hand-users will devote their lives to attenuating the niche. this should be clear to any marxist ("first, man must eat"). it means, out of the infinity of invention, the proletarian class will manufacture broad-leaf herbicides, exponentially-more-potent invertebrate poisons, water-robbing dams, technologies incompatible with earthly life. and again, i've talked about the way out of this contradiction, the development of the new autotrophic class that uses CO2 as a carbon source and water as electron acceptor to synthesize food, transitioning the species out of agriculture. leaving agriculture means abandoning the giant over-winter grain surplus as a life strategy, the contradiction of surplus management, and the resulting formation of classes: leaving agriculture means leaving class society.
anyway, do you support a hereditary class of warriors taking state power, permanently reducing the populations of their racial enemies, so fields lie fallow until they're retaken by forest? do you support human sexuality like the movie Salo? if not, then don't worry! you aren't an ecofascist.
e: typos
Edited by toyot (today 07:52:28)
in short, the agricultural revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,
Acdtrux posted:Thesis: Nature is an undisturbed system out of which mankind has emerged.
probably a bit nitpicky, but "undisturbed" is an odd qualification to me. if anything, we're talking about a system of constant endogenous disturbance (& exogenous, too, if we're limiting our scope to the Earth and taking into consideration events like meteoric impacts)
Stalin posted:[D]ialectics holds that nature is not a state of rest and immobility, stagnation and immutability, but a state of continuous movement and change, of continuous renewal and development, where something is always arising and developing, and something always disintegrating and dying away.
Acdtrux posted:From the perspective of the illusory dichotomy between man and nature, ecofascists struggle against the population and communists struggle against nature. Communism is a victory against nature.
communism includes struggle against nature, but also struggle against class domination. right? surely we oughtn't omit that pretty-important bit
the communist solution to ecological crisis isn't just about beating nature into a shape that will accommodate humanity, but also reshaping society in novel ways that are simply not possible with the law of value in control. the thing being preserved is the capacity for human flourishing in the broadest sense, and if humans have come into their own as stewards of life in a grander sense, then human flourishing will imply other sorts of flourishing — preserving biodiversity, first as a means and, with sufficient development, finally as an end unto itself. put simply, it's for everyone.
the approach people have been calling "ecofascist" instead seeks to preserve above all else the aforementioned class domination, and any and all efforts to stave off disaster will take that as their starting point. hence its need always and everywhere to frame it as Humanity that is destroying nature, rather than the wasteful systems that prop up our ruling class
toyot posted:anyway, do you support a hereditary class of warriors taking state power, permanently reducing the populations of their racial enemies, so fields lie fallow until they're retaken by forest? do you support human sexuality like the movie Salo? if not, then don't worry! you aren't an ecofascist.
i think a person can reproduce harmful reactionary ideas about ecology and humanity's relationship to it without ever thinking about hereditary classes of warriors or such
we live in this midden, we can see how these sorts of ideas are the ones that are placed in the mouths of villains to add "complexity" and so people can write stupid little pieces about how actually Super Genocide Man has a point or the like
Edited by Constantignoble ()
toyot posted:it's hard to think of an agricultural society without a superstructure of ecologically harmful ideas, because agriculture replaces intricate life systems with cereal grains acre by acre. so the base of all class societies is ecologically harmful.
it seems pretty easy to imagine agriculture that doesn't do that actually. modern permaculture is one example but the forest gardens that native americans maintained seem to be another. in both these case there's cultivation of food plants going on in a way that isn't a cereal monoculture.
marx very specifically in his works on liebig & against malthus saw the robbery agriculture which depletes natural fertility & productivity as something specifically instantiated by the capitalist mode of production
but there are actually many significant examples of historical agricultural practices acting as multipliers of local diversity and fertility with a minimum of inputs: pre-columbian settlements in the amazon basin, oasis agricultural systems throughout north africa, classical chinese rice-fish-duck polycultures, etc...
the food & agriculture organisation of the un's agricultural heritage systems collection is a cool resource existing but maligned & under threat examples of persisting traditional & indigenous agricultural practices
toyot posted:you believe modern permaculture farms support a greater variety and density of life than what was on the land before?
you said that "agriculture replaces intricate life systems with cereal grains acre by acre". i pointed out that permaculture doesn't do that because it's attempting to create an varied ecosystem(or "intricate life system" if you want to call it that) of different species rather than monocultures of cereals. lots of premodern agricultural systems also worked on the basis of maintaining an ecosystem that wasn't a grain monoculture. what you're asking here is different to the statement that i was responding to. i'm also not sure if thinking purely in terms of comparative numbers of species is necessarily very helpful, because some mostly undisturbed(as far as we can tell at least) ecosystems don't have a very large number of species as such. coniferous forests or grasslands often aren't very species rich for example. but i think you can actually make the argument that some systems of agriculture do or can lead to a straightforward increase in species diversity in the way you're asking about. for example, here's a neat little paper on land that was occupied and cultivated by the romans in france. the paper's authors found that there were increased levels of nutrients in the soil in areas that had been intensely cultivated(and hence managed) as compared to areas with little or no cultivation, and that this lead to a corresponding increase in species diversity in those areas of the site:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3071833 posted:The spatial variation of soil and leaf properties reflects these ancient agricultural practices. Stones from enclosures and nearby terraces were removed and heaped into surrounding walls before plowing, thereby increasing soil water-holding capacity. Fragmentation and dispersion of limestone gravels by cultivation raised soil pH, which may have favored organic matter accumulation. Near the houses, ash dispersion increased fine-size charcoal content. Manuring decreased soil C:N ratio, which in turn favored N mineralization, and increased δ15N (Koerner et al. 1999, Jussy et al. 2002) and soil phosphorus in enclosures and nearby terraces. The similarity of soil properties between remote terraces and undisturbed areas suggest a lower intensity of agricultural use of these zones, possibly devoted to herd grazing in the former and forest in the latter.
Present understory vegetation differs widely among the categories of ancient land uses. The factorial correspondence analysis of plant communities reveals a gradient of plant species composition closely related to the intensity of ancient land use (Fig. 3), with a marked difference between undisturbed areas and remote terraces on the one hand and nearby terraces, enclosures, and houses on the other hand. This gradient is significantly correlated with the Ellenberg's indicator values for nitrogen (r = 0.77, P < 0.001, n = 43) and humidity (r = 0.62, P < 0.001, n = 43). This increasing water and nitrogen availability indicated by vegetation is not related to light differences, since light indicator values vary in an opposite direction (Table 2). An increasing number of species not found in the undisturbed areas appears along the gradient of previous land use intensity (Table 2). Of a total of 116 species, 29 are only present in the houses, enclosures, and nearby terraces, whereas 15 species are only present in remote terraces and undisturbed areas, despite a higher cumulative sampling area in the latter sites. Thus, ancient cultivation adds a significant amount of diversity to the present forest.
toyot posted:you're welcome to point out any historical period where agriculture did not un- and re-plant the land, replacing the existing ecology. in which mode of production did agriculture increase the number of plant and animal species on the land?
literally chapter 1 of the Bible. User probated for the current aeon.
i was specifically referring to the classical chinese polycultures of the dong communities & similar ethnic minorities
the theft of soil fertility by intensified cereal monocultures could have been practiced just as easily with the means of premodern agricultural technology. in fact your initial claim was that it was, altho you've now shifted into saying that maybe it wasn't but that it's an inevitable telos nevertheless
Acdtrux posted:some comments I made on reddit before bhpn banned me. The thread idea is, how to respond to environmental doomerism? the graph I am referencing is this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Population_curve.svg
Do you think the accusation that I am a fascist is correct? I developed these arguments in response to my observations about ecofascism so I desperately hope that I have not merely stumbled my way from one right-wing tendency to another.
Don't listen to the trolls pretending they don't know what Reddit it. I had a similar problem on that subreddit, here's some of the comments I posted:
