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[-] Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 6 days ago

What eco fascists are capitalist? Any real attempt at degrowth and ecofascism would be fought tooth and nail by liberals and capitalists. This isn't like old fascism where the goal is war that is very amenable to capital that can profit off the increased consumption by the state. Degrowth requires a reduction in production and consumption which is a direct threat to capitalist profit motive.

It would also be a direct threat to a socialist regime that draws its legitimacy from increased living standards and consumption, which is what most do. If you liquidate all the capitalist and redistribute all the money that's not gonna help climate change if all the workers go and spend that money on f-150s and steak.

Eco-fasch:

Climate change is real, but if we just exterminate enough of the brutes, we won't have to stop building new coal plants to power the entropy machine!

[-] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 0 points 6 days ago

I read eco-fascist as someone that can't change their habits, so will double down on the destructive habits for the environment, not someone that fights to reduce the impact of climate change through actions against capitalism.

[-] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 days ago

The straw I am dunking on has very poor argumentative skills.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Eugenics was a widely discussed topic prior to the world wars. Mostly in pro-colonialist and conservative circles. Also, megaprojects, like a dam on the strait of Gibraltar (which would have had devastating ecological consequences).

Meaning: you have the same kind of educated but conservative and egocentric upperclass now.

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

ecofascism like burning down the amazon? i'm tired and confused.

[-] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 10 points 6 days ago

No, kill people who "they" think don't contribute to get the population level well down to 'save the environment'

To be fair we deliberately kill people in their millions now, 9 million a year from starvation, another 9 million from air pollution.etc

An example of an eco fascist ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola

Linkola blamed humans for the continuous degradation of the environment. He promoted rapid population decline to combat the problems commonly attributed to overpopulation. Linkola also defended an end to immigration, the reversion to pre-industrial life ways, and authoritarian measures to keep human life within strict limits.

On the 101st anniversary of Finland's independence, Linkola was announced as the winner of a poll conducted by the national broadcaster Yle to determine who had done the most to preserve Finland's natural heritage.[19]

I do think his book "Will life Prevail" is worth a read and I do agree with him that the worst human invention ever is the road.

No, no, see we don't have to stop building new coal plants to power the entropy machine if we just exterminate the brutes/ngmi's

[-] fort_burp@feddit.nl 3 points 6 days ago

Prescient, that was almost 7 years ago! I wonder what they're doing now.

[-] TIN@feddit.uk 35 points 1 week ago

Liberals, the ultimate bogeyman of all other political leanings

Neoliberalism has been the dominant political ideology of the western world for decades, would you rather us blame todays problems on people who haven't been in power?

[-] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 37 points 1 week ago

Maybe if liberals stopped doing and apologizing for heinous shit all the time they'd be hated less.

[-] bigfondue@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

What else is the Fediverse but Lib-bashing and red-bashing?

[-] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 1 week ago
[-] GlitchyDigiBun@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago

And furries owo

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[-] figjam@midwest.social 14 points 1 week ago
[-] DahGangalang@infosec.pub 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask. Double checked the rules and it doesn't look like I'm violating any, but please point me in the right direction if there's a better place for my questions. I genuinely am unclear and want to learn.

In this context, what are eco-facsists? And then how does that and Malthusian Population Theory inherently relate to Capitalism?

When I imagine Malthusian Population issues, I normally think of it as a left-wing / anticapitalist talking point. Assuming I'm missing the mark on that, what's the Socialist proposed solution and/or explanation of why that's not an issue? (Racked my brain for a better wording for that last sentence, but couldn't think of one on the fly. Please pardon my ignorance if there's a different phrasing I should have used).

Edit: wanna say thanks for letting a foreigner in a foreigner land come and pick at some of the thinking of the community. I appreciate the civil discussion and sources being pitched towards me.

[-] Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

An eco authoritarian accepts these two premises:

  1. The current consumption patterns of humans, especially in the first world, are unsustainable in regards to meat, travel via cars, home sizes for heating and cooling, etc.

  2. Any reduction in that consumption will be extremely unpopular and thus politically impossible under any democratic regime, whether that regime be under capitalism or communism.

Therefore to achieve sustainability and save the planet and countless human lives we will need a top down authoritarian government to force the populace into sustainability similar to how fascists would force there populace to war despite its inherent unpopularity.

[-] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 days ago

A made-up boogie man that basically no one believes in.

[-] Cruxifux@feddit.nl 33 points 1 week ago

The liberal take on the ecosystem is that the carbon footprint of individuals is too high, and therefore we must as INDIVIDUALS all choose to use less carbon of our own free will. And as liberals see that the individual will not choose to do that, instead of changing our entire system to something better that would improve the environmental impact en mass, they’d prefer that we keep capitalism, even if that means large parts of the global population must suffer and die. Thats what hes talking about here.

[-] Nalivai@lemmy.world -2 points 6 days ago

So we're just using the word fascism to mean whatever the fuck we want this day, huh?

[-] Cruxifux@feddit.nl 5 points 6 days ago

Allowing private corporate interests to guide the health of the planet to ruin for individual profit, and controlling world governments to do so at the behest of the people would be a very fascist thing to do, regardless of what the definition of fascism you personally think is.

[-] Wrrzag@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago

Capitalists being in power is just regular ol' capitalism though

[-] lukecooperatus@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I feel like there's also a similar kind of perspective that is widely normalized in these kinds of discussions that boils down to simultaneously blaming everyone on an individual level and being defeatist about ever solving it. Specifically, I'm talking about when people say things like:

Oh, we destroyed the rain forests / polluted the environment / strip mined 3rd world countries / ruined space with our junk / killed the coral reefs / etc

No, we the working class didn't do that. Humanity as a whole didn't do that. The owner class did all of that to feed their addictions to wealth and power under capitalism. We the working class by and large criticized all of those things whenever we happened to have enough agency to consider it.

[-] Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

we the working class by and large criticized all of those things whenever they happened

I don't recall working class at large protesting car centric infrastructure and factory farming. Some niche groups did but by and large a functioning highway system with free parking everywhere and cheap meat have been very popular with the working class.

I agree we need to liquidate the capitalist class but not everything can be blamed on them. If we had socialism tomorrow we'd still need to deal with the fundamental issue of the unsustainability of the consumption based lifestyles that most people in the first world of become accustomed to and will not give up easily.

[-] BigBenis@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

The very fact that you're getting downvoted here proves your point. Most working people love their cars and cheap meat and it offends them to suggest it's a net negative on society.

[-] Cruxifux@feddit.nl 10 points 1 week ago

Yes, exactly.

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[-] Fecundpossum@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

I was around someone with this same hot take, who called Sir David Attenborough an Eco-fascist for acknowledging that the endless destruction of wild habitat at the hands of humans expanding their own habitats and resource extraction, was responsible for the beginnings of a mass extinction event for wildlife.

I’ll say it loud and proud. Industrialism is not natural. Industrialism is the only way we can support a population of 8 billion humans, the only thing that allowed them to exist in the first place. Industrialism is inherently destructive and exploitative.

Tankie dweebs seem to think that if we just give everyone an equal cut, that we would suddenly have a utopia, that we would somehow bring back the massive swaths of insect populations we’ve decimated, that we could magically make degraded land arable again. Nah.

Industrial civilization isn’t infinite. It has a start and an end. When it ends, so will most of us. Recognizing this doesn’t make one an “eco fascist”

What makes someone an eco fascist is if they want to genocide populations they deem undesirable for ecological purposes. Pretty simple.

[-] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 15 points 1 week ago

Industrialism is inherently destructive and exploitative.

Sure, but we've destroyed and exploited enough to sustain eight billion people (and, given the insane amounts of food waste in the first world, even more than that). We've already cut down enough forests, taken over enough natural habitats, emitted enough greenhouse gases and generally been enough of a cancer already, so we don't need to do more of that to survive. The reason forests are still being cut down and CO2 is still being emitted isn't because industrial civilization requires it, but because capitalism requires it. Brazil isn't cutting down the Amazon rainforest because their life depends on it, but because rich people's yacht money depends on it. Removing that incentive to destroy the environment even more would do a lot to protect the ecosystem. That, not the strawman you painted, is the intersection with socialism.

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[-] spacesatan@leminal.space 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I love the doublethink some people have of "capitalism can't grow infinitely" and "population can grow infinitely". It's one or the other. The earth has a carrying capacity for whatever standard of living you want to choose and we're probably well over it for what anyone posting here would consider acceptable. Either population has to decline or standards of living have to decline for people in the imperial core for us to achieve a sustainable and equitably distributed standard of living globally.

I do not understand why some people would prefer having 10 billion subsistence farmers instead of 500 million people living comfortably.

I recognize I'm talking past the tweet somewhat because in my experience it is largely just a strawman. There is a flavor of leftists that cannot see the phrase 'global overpopulation' without immediately strawmanning eugenicist genocide as the envisioned solution. As if 'the earth cannot sustain infinite people' is an inherently racist idea. The actual ethno-fascists are almost all natalist now, get with the program.

[-] thedarkfly@feddit.nl 17 points 6 days ago

The population won't grow infinitely. People have in average two surviving children when mortality rate is high. If mortality decreases thanks to higher living standards, there is a population boom because more than two children survive. Birth rate then decrease to about two children per woman and population stabilizes. You can argue on why this happens, but this is just observation from Europe to Africa, from the Americas to Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition?wprov=sfla1

[-] spacesatan@leminal.space 10 points 6 days ago

Yeah it should be a self solving problem eventually and that would be fine if we had a few hundred years to let it play out. But rising living standards and rising population are both contributing to the climate crisis. The earth cannot sustain uplifting 8 billion people to a European standard of living. We have to put a thumb on the scale somewhere and I would prefer that thumb be 'have as few children as possible' instead of standard of living backsliding or slowing the industrialization of the developing world.

This only really requires being proactive about making contraception available to make demographic transition happen faster.

[-] stray@pawb.social 5 points 6 days ago

If you had a magic wand that could get rid of 7 billion people without any practical or ethical concerns, it still wouldn't be a good solution to the climate crisis because the remaining people would still be doing industrialism and capitalism. It would just keep happening.

But perhaps more importantly, I don't see any way to quickly lower the population without resorting to mass murder. Population degrowth can only be a long-term strategy based in a societal value of coexisting without excessive consumption, or else it's just an elite class deciding who's allowed to live and breed.

[-] bstix@feddit.dk 4 points 6 days ago

I think there's a mathematical issue here: There's no limit on living standards.

If we decrease the population, they'll simply want more.

Billionaires buy the second yacht because it's easier than transporting the first yacht to the other coast. On a smaller scales, I also buy 3 t-shirts so I can still have a choice of what to wear when the first one is in the washer. The choice is an unnecessary increase in my living standards.

If we go with your suggested figure of 500 million people, and these people should all have EU standards of living, we'd still be consuming more resources than the Earth can provide. It's not the 8 billion poor people who are taking the toll on the resources. Removing them wouldn't fix the issue.

I'd like to think that we can maintain a high living standard by technological advancement, but we do have to be realistic about it. Our living standards in the west are simply unsustainable, even if it was just us on entire globe.

[-] cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

A lot of climate adaptations would increase health and quality of life. Living near major carways is really fucking bad for you. Red meat is bad for you. Suburbs are bad for you. Going into the office every single fucking day in your car and eating trash because you're strapped for time then going home to your shitty suburban house is bad for you. It wouldn't all be steps down.

[-] astropenguin5@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago

I think the problem is more that yes, the earth can only sustain so many people, but we have not nearly hit that limit yet. And in my opinion a better worldview is 'lets take care of the planet better and have more efficient organization of labor and food and such, so that the earth can take care of us in return and support more people.'

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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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