The U.S. Olympic team is one of a handful that will supply air conditioners for their athletes at the Paris Games in a move that undercuts organizers’ plans to cut carbon emissions.
U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland said Friday that while the U.S. team appreciates efforts aimed at sustainability, the federation would be supplying AC units for what is typically the largest contingent of athletes at the Summer Games.
“As you can imagine, this is a period of time in which consistency and predictability is critical for Team USA’s performance,” Hirshland said. “In our conversations with athletes, this was a very high priority and something that the athletes felt was a critical component in their performance capability.”
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that Germany, Australia, Italy, Canada and Britain were among the other countries with plans to bring air conditioners to France.
I’m not trying to hide anything here. My username is a reference to Lenin, whom I referenced in the comment, doesn’t get much more explicit than that :)
Firstly, I’m not the one who brought up the dispossessed masses, that was another commenter. Secondly, it’s not without a directed objective. The argument is clear: “the fault of climate change is not of the individuals who use AC, but of the system as a whole, and since the system is controlled by the ruling class, the ruling class is to blame”. It explicits this victim-blaming mindset where the general populace is blamed for climate change and pollution, when they’re not the ones choosing in which system they live. And I say this as someone who doens’t own a car out of principle, so criticism to the system is compatible with individual action and compatible with understanding that the blame is not of the individual workers.
I don’t accept this criticism. First of all he was a lawyer, so he definitely had education in economics. Secondly, I don’t believe that formal education in an institution is the only possible way to attain knowledge in a field. I say this as someone doing a PhD in a STEM field, knowing many people around me who have formally attained the same education level as I have and know jackshit, and others who with the same formal degrees as I do, are insanely more knowledgeable. Hell, Marx himself, who wrote one of the most influential and important works on economics of history, formally studied law and philosophy, not economics. How is this not proof enough?
All of this criticism of philosophy is valid, but again, socialism and Marxism aren’t philosophical ideas. They’re philosophical when it comes to the morality, sure, in the sense that I do believe that they’re morally superior to other systems, and that much is subjective. But the historical, economical, and political study of socialism and Marxism can be scientific. That doesn’t mean that every single book or article or essay on socialism is scientific, but that it can be approached as a science. Economic planning, the analysis of media, the economic analysis of capitalism and imperialism, all of those are very scientific, and the fact that you haven’t encountered scientific literature on them has more to do with your surrounding conditions or ideas than with the nature of the study debate of socialism. Especially nowadays, when there have been socialist attempts such as China, Vietnam, the USSR and the whole soviet block, Cuba… It’s very possible to do material, economical, historical and political analysis of socialism, and it’s routinely done, both from a subjective point of view and a scientific one.
Being critical is good. Criticising them without making an attempt to read them based on preconceived notions isn’t. You talk about the scientific method which is great for me, since I work in that field. To me, the most important part of the scientific method are predictive capabilities. Without proving predictive capabilities, there can be no science. And when you read Lenin’s work “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism”, and it can successfully make predictions about the economy that are valid more than 100 years ago, such as the tendency towards monopoly of capitalism (as we can see with Nestlè, Amazon or Google), or later stages of capitalism shifting from the export of manufactured goods to other countries to the export of capital to other countries (look at how much capital entered China since the 80s from capitalist countries), I’m as amazed as I am when Einstein’s theory of general relativity is yet again confirmed 100 years after its writing when SUPERLIGO is capable of detecting the gravitational waves of a collision of black holes. Especially because he was running against many economists of back in the day who were already claiming that the best way to solve monopoly was through progressive regulations… and look where that’s led us.
Regarding your discussion of how the USSR managed to defeat nazism, yes, lots of people died, but what can be expected? The USSR had 20 years to industrialize against the 150 years of Germany, of course their army wasn’t as capable or developed as the German one. This whole “meat grinder” vision of USSR in WW2 stems from Nazi propaganda, in which the Nazis were justifying losing against the “Slavic Untermenschen” because of the infinite “hordes of Asians” that they were throwing at them, and talking of the brave fight of the Soviets against Nazism as a “meat grinder” is very insulting towards the population of those countries. Belarus lost 25% of its population during WW2, and reducing their contribution to the war to “a meat grinder” is horrendous IMO.
You don’t understand what “feudal” means. Feudal isn’t a synonym of agricultural or poor, feudal refers to a particular system of social relations, where serfs are bound to work the land of their lords without a wage on exchange, but instead receiving military protection on exchange for a compulsory requisition of the goods produced by the land, paid in kind. Again, when you use those terms in this fashion, you’re proving that you haven’t studied the true meaning of what you’re talking about.
Regarding Holodomor, it happened during the collectivization of agriculture, and it happened because of a combination of bad planning in collectivization (doing it too fast), unfair and poorly-planned requisitions of grain in certain regions such as Ukraine or Central Asia in general (which people often forget about because then they can’t make baseless claims of genocide against Ukrainians), sabotage by Kulaks, and bad crops. But this is the first and last famine that the USSR saw, and it happened prior to the industrialization of the country. Almost as if famines are commonplace in preindustrial societies, huh? Almost as if Russia was a region which has suffered historically about 5 famines per century. That’s not to say it wasn’t intensified by poor planning by the government, but again, first and last famine in the USSR. And it’s not like capitalism doesn’t create famines. Just some years later, during WW2, the British provoked a famine in India (Benghal Famine if you’re interested) which killed 3+mn people, and that one was actually done with explicitly racist undertones, with Churchill famously justifying the famine by telling Indians that “they reproduced like rabbits”.
Because, again, you’re not being faithful to reality. The USSR never impoded, and it never collapsed. The USSR did suffer a period of stagnation, but how exactly does stagnation lead to collapse? Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. The USSR was dissolved illegally and antidemocratically against a referendum carried out in 1991, from the top down, by the Gorbachev administration. This is indeed a consequence of one of the biggest problems of the USSR: the immense concentration of power at the top spheres of government. But you can’t accuse the USSR of collapsing. In fact your reasoning is backwards. If the USSR survived to a civil war in which 14 foreign countries invaded it, if it survived to a WW2 where 25+ million inhabitants perished, and if it survived to the Cuban Missiles crisis, how on Earth is it supposed to crumble under stagnation? As I said I’m Spanish, Spain hasn’t grown AT ALL in per-capita terms since 2007, so it’s been stagnant for almost two decades at this point. Would you say it’s a failed state and that it’s collapsed and the government should be dismantled, or is economical stagnation really not that big a thing? The USSR was burdened with problems with economic planning (very hard to do properly before modern computers, if you’re interested in this I suggest that you read “People’s Republic of Walmart”, a book that outlines arguments for economic planning and criticises planning within the USSR as antidemocratic and inefficient), with overspending in military (triggered and forced by the USA despite the constant attempts of the USSR to try and reduce tensions and reach deals about disarmament and deescalation), and several other problems. But the moment it all started going down (and not just stagnating) is after the mid-80s, when Perestroika was applied and huge swaths of the economy were suddenly liberalized and subjected to markets.[1/2]
[2/2] What really made the former USSR actually collapse, was the neoliberal shock therapy applied after its illegal dissolution, supervised and directed by “prestigious experts” from MIT and by the IMF. There, the GDP fell as dramatically as it does in war times, and the situation was so dire that the population loss due to alcoholism, suicide, lowering standards of life and healthcare, missing births, depression, unemployment, etc. are numbered in millions of lives lost, and many millions more ruined. That’s the moment when good’ol capitalism auctioned the entire country to a few corrupt oligarchs because the priority was to privatize everything as quickly as possible, and which led to the modern fascist oligarchic kleptocratic government in Russia. But these millions of lives lost and ruined by capitalism don’t count, do they? These were somehow a necessity, unlike Holodomor, a famine in a preindustrial society.
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life through a combination of imperialism and resource, wealth and labour extraction from underdeveloped countries (look up the concept of unequal exchange if you’re interested), and last century’s worker movements which achieved significant improvements in the quality of life of people, and obviously due to technical and scientific progress. But these worker victories were achieved DESPITE capitalism, not because of it.
And the technical and scientific improvements that happen under capitalism, funnily enough, are funded mostly by public research, in which universities and pulic institutions will do the brunt of the research, and then a few companies will cherrypick whatever they deem profitable, study a bit further, patent it, and then sell it to the rest of the world at exorbitant prices, as we see blatantly and glaringly with medicine and pharma. I’ll remind you which country in the world was the first to double-vaccinate 95%+ of its population against COVID: Cuba. With state-funded research, and state-funded vaccine production, with the goal of vaccinating as many as possible as soon as possible, instead of the objective of maximizing profit. Or just look on how much governmetns spent funding big pharma to develop the vaccines. This progress isn’t BECAUSE of the private sector and capitalism, it’s DESPITE it.
This was already obvious to Lenin in his 1917 work “Imperialism: the highest stage of Capitalism”, where he extensively criticises the idea of “ultraimperialism” or long-term collaboration between different capitalist world powers as impossible (again a successful prediction more than 100 years ago, how lucky is that?).
Obviously corruption happens everywhere, but it’s a very different problem systemically when the means of production are owned collectively. Because, suddenly there are no private companies with the private interest of maximizing profit at all costs. So you don’t have the car factory paying the goverment official to be able to dump waste in the river, or the construction firm paying the local town hall to requalify their lands and allow for a construction plan. Embezzling and favors still exist within socialism, but without a profit motive, many other types of corruptions disappear. If there’s no wealthy ruling class whose existence and profit depends on the exploitation of the working class, suddenly there’s no wealthy powerful people doing everything legally and illegally possible to maximize their profits.
Russia went fascist? Excuse me? The USSR is the ONLY country in Europe which supported the Republicans in Spain in their fight against ACTUAL fascism, while Britain and France looked at the Nazis and the Italian Fascists supplying weapons to the reactionaries and literally bombing republican Spain, and claimed “best we can do is non-intervention and a volunteer corps” (brigadas internacionales, my utmost respect to all who participated in them)
Again, you’re failing to have a proper understanding of the reasons for fascism to exist. Fascism is a reactionary movement which takes place when the wealthy elites of a country see themselves threatened by the mobilization of the working class. It happened like this in Spain, it happened like this in Germany, it happened like this in Italy, and it attempted to happen in Russia as well (look up what the Black Hundreds were, and how Bolsheviks eliminated them). One of the most explicit purposes of fascism is to eliminate socialism and anarchism from society, for the most part through violent means. Fascism isn’t a consequence of “instability”, it’s a response to socialist movements and worker coordination.
Elected representatives aren’t a bad idea in itself, they’re just proven not to be democratic in western capitalist systems, in the sense that they don’t make decisions that represent the majority, but instead make decisions which represent a wealthy minority. Again, how many people in the EU wanted to apply austerity policy after the 2008 crisis, whose consequences we suffer to this very day? If you want an example of what real democracy looks like to me, I recommend you have a look at Pedro Ross’ book “How the workers parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution”, which details how after the dismantling of the USSR, Cuba was immersed in a deep economic crisis after losing its main trade partner, and how democratic participation by millions of people in the island was capable of saving people from the worst of the crisis.
You hold them in high esteem, but then proceed to basically insult their legacy when you say that living conditions in western Europe are due to capitalism, instead of honoring the worker movements of the past century.