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So, back to basics. It seems to me that there are a couple of core statements at the core of the form of Socialism (Marxist Socialism, apparently) jmw is advancing here:
1) This form of socialism demands that workers live a free life and are productive.
2) For jmw, this means having at the very least the current standard of living of a Western European.
3) It is imperialism to prevent people in Africa or Asia, who have currently not got that standard of living, from pursuing and getting it.
4) The only way to have that minimum-acceptable standard of living is to live as people in Western Europe do.
5) It is not possible to have the minimum acceptable standard of living without behaving in ways that upset environmentalists.
6) Therefore, upsetting environmentalists is the least negative consequence, and therefore the one to be adopted rather than seeking to find a standard of living that would allow those living in the various parts of the Earth to live sustainably, or at least as our current science can pin down what might be meant by "sustainably", in terms of water usage, carbon production &c.
Of course, another consequence might be the destruction of the conditions under which the Earth is inhabitable. Which is a bit of a problem, because.
7) At present, the industrialised nations of the north and west pump out a lot more pollution per person than the less industrialised nations of the south and east (roughly and clumsily grouped)
8) Therefore, inasmuch as climate change is affected by human activity, much of that activity is from people maintaining the minimum-acceptable standard of living defined by jmw.
9) Further, climate change is disproportionately killing and damaging the people and the economies of nations in the south and east.
10) So... by rejecting the idea that _anyone_ should not live not only at the level of Western Europeans but also in the way that Western Europeans do, and therefore that there is no need to chhange one's own behaviour, as one has the minimum acceptable standard of living, one is actually agreeing to kill people and damage economies in the south and east.
Now, things get a bit complex there, because:
11) Not entirely surprisingly, a nation's chances of getting to that minimum acceptable standard of living are reduced significantly if its people are being killed and its economy damaged by climate change.
12) One therefore gets into a slightly odd situation where by advancing and behaving according to the principle that everyone should be entitled to live in a resource-intensive way, one is actally potentially reducing the chances of those whose prevention from doing so would be imperialism from doing so, in the name of anti-imperialism.
This sounds confusing, but possibly isn't - the message may be that ideology is actually more important than practicality at this point - it's important to behave as if this standard of living were the right of all workers, even if by doing so in fact you are taking it further away from other workers. There's a Kantian vibe to this approach which might dovetail quite nicely with a Marxist critique - that as an individual, since your personal impact on the environment is miniscule, you should instead behave in a principled way - in this case by being free and productive, which is represented by the current lifestyle, and the current methods employed to get it, of a Western European worker. |
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