The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
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1AR -- Ext: VaguenessEcological Leninism is incredibly vague, the revolution is either global or nothing.Tugal 20 – [Cihan Tugal PhD is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; “Leninism without the working class? The missing subject in Malm’s ecological revolution”; 10/27/20; https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/leninism-without-the-working-class-the-missing-subject-in-malms-ecological-revolution/; Lowell-JL] Remarkably, Malm discusses factory takeovers without bringing workers in. Oil companies indeed need to be nationalized, as he asserts, and their resources turned into carbon capture facilities, machines, and personnel. When capital does anything to approximate the carbon capture which scientists argue is required at a global level, it circulates the carbon back into the atmosphere. Not selling it would not be profitable, Malm demonstrates: businesses will not produce something they would afterwards have to sink into the ground. Only the state can sink carbon into the ground globally. However, the book does not include one mention of organizing or mobilizing the workers of these companies to carry out the necessary nationalizations. It appears that “we” are burdened with the nationalization. But who is going to run these companies after “we” nationalize them? Ironically, Malm introduces the section where he discusses oil nationalization with an anti-bureaucracy, pro-democracy quote from Lenin, yet comes to rely so much on the state as his prose unfolds. Without any articulation of the social actors who could take on nationalization processes, the talk of democracy will be just talk. It might be objected that workers are so complicit in pollutant capitalism that they can’t be counted on. But negating that option goes nowhere towards nailing down an effective social replacement. Then, there is the problem of the winter palace itself. Grabbing control of a second rate empire granted the Bolsheviks the chance to start a socialist experiment on a huge scale. But they knew everything would go to ruin if their institutions did not spread beyond Russia. Malm is incautiously sanguine that a revolutionary takeover might not produce similar bottlenecks today. But he is unspecific regarding the international form war communism will assume. The eco-revolution is either global or it is nothing, but how do you accomplish global war communism in a world of a few imperial powers, perhaps a dozen effective nation-states, and many state-like yet ineffective entities? How many of these would you have to storm to even initiate a global process? There can be no immediate answer to this question, but it has to be confronted. And confront similar questions Lenin did, even if without any resolution. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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