Interesting read. I tend to agree particularly with the notion that the idea of being radical is contextual, it’s not a fixed set of strictures or specific ideological prescription. Radical thinking is to expand the imagination beyond ideas we’ve already tried before.

For that reason I would say that at this point in time, Marx is not really radical thought. Much of what he prescribed, as its been attempted, has become more obviously a limited product of his time, in which he himself and his perspective were trapped. It has irreconcilable flaws that always curve it towards authoritarianism.

Rejecting the inclination to be precious about Marx and communism or any historical philosophy is probably the radical direction for our time, that’s what leaves you in new territory looking for new solutions based on what actually works. Marx’s ideas, like the guillotine, have failed broadly when implemented because while they’re radical for their time they’re still part of a less evolved social structure.

Now that the Soviet Union has been defunct for almost 30 years—and owing to the difficulty of receiving firsthand perspectives from the exploited Chinese working class—many people in North America experience authoritarian socialism as an entirely abstract concept, as distant from their lived experience as mass executions by guillotine. Desiring not only revenge but also a deus ex machina to rescue them from both the nightmare of capitalism and the responsibility to create an alternative to it themselves, they imagine the authoritarian state as a champion that could fight on their behalf. Recall what George Orwell said of the comfortable British Stalinist writers of the 1930s in his essay “Inside the Whale”

This is something that really makes discussions on the left difficult, people’s unwillingness to admit that the Soviet Union and CCP weren’t just “unlucky” attempts, but rather speak to a deeper link to authoritarianism and the right-wing that’s built into Marxist ideas (intentionally or otherwise).

It’s a similar feeling to when people talk about the founders in the US revolution as if they were strongly democratic. In reality the revolutionary elites would be considered anti-democratic by our modern understanding. Their thinking was still constricted and heavily classist and is actually responsible for a lot of the problems our democracy still struggles with to this day.

I only care about what the founders thought about democracy in terms of it being a contrast or waypoint. I believe modern ideas about what democracy should be are far superior, and I would never want to go back and apply the Founders’ prescriptions. We need to move past them, and likewise I think the left needs to move beyond Marxism towards newer, more expansive ideas around human liberty and social relationships. Preferably ones that don’t necessitate purges.

Marxism to me, for all practical intents, is a right-wing/conservative framework. Being to the “left” is about being able to philosophically adapt to new information. It’s about not just incorporating that new info but also being able to drop ideas that don’t fit reality. It’s not a commitment to any specific recipe, rather, like the author says, it’s about finding the most effective way of moving the needle towards the social relationship that we all want, where people are free and valued and don’t need to compete against eachother just to live and thrive.

…if we cut emissions it stops climate change from getting even worse, killing even more people, destroying even more property and causing more mass migration, causing even further ecological collapse.

You’re literally just asking “Why mitigate climate change?”

What is it going to solve if the companies responsible for more than 70% of the world’s emissions are stopped from producing those emissions via regulation? That’s your question?

I just laid them out; regulating the most destructive industries and forcing them to stop releasing greenhouse gasses, same way we force them to stop dumping mercury in estuaries or how we stop them from destroying national parks etc.

Climate change is not going to get solved by people buying local and making their clothes out of hemp. The responsibility for sweeping change lies with the government ultimately to get industries in line.

It’s like blaming someone who uses AC during a record heat wave when our grid itself isn’t using green sources. You fix the power source that the AC draws from and you fix the AC. It’s the same across many industries, dumping the decision-making onto average people at the end of the line is super inefficient.

There are solutions, they just threaten the profits of the 100 or so top polluter companies and the majority of politicians are bought out by those companies. The author kind of continues the old trope that this is somehow the responsibility of every day people to solve through their individual actions. While individual action and less consumption does help, it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the effect of the industries themselves. If we want to mitigate the effects of climate change that has always been the most efficient way to go about it; forcing industries to change, even if it costs them.

The biggest issue though is, if the world solved that political issue, China is still dumping a third of the world’s greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and are still building more coal plants at a record pace. They are fixated on their geopolitical and imperial goals, scaling back to focus on domestic necessity just isn’t a possibility for Xi.

If there’s one thing humans can do, it’s eat something into ecological collapse 💪