From: <james at communistbanker.com>
I'd suggest that it should be challenging the idea that we should start from the 'self-evident' need to deal with emissions, and start instead from a focus on defending working class living standards. Hence my challenge to explain how you can ensure that people's needs - as defined by the people, not by you - can be met in the context of addressing global warming. If your answer is that we cannot do this, that we have to tighten our belts, then frankly I don't see much role for the left at all. This would at least explain the voting intentions of some on the list, but it's not an inspiring platform and it doesn't give me a reason for engaging in left wing politics instead of watching TV.
^^^^^ CB: Since you are a communist, why don't you try something like explaining that though capitalism has brought some improvements in the standard of living, its impact on meeting humanity's needs, which include environmental arrangements, has not been an unalloyed success. You might point out that the profit motive of private corporations as _the_ main guiding principle of technological and use-value development is polluting in a way that a significant portion of scientific opinion warns is leading to catastrophe , i.e. serious damage to people's future need fulfillment. I mean if you wanted to bring some other communist stuff in besides only defending people's historically constructed concept of "need".
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I have been accused of misrepresentation because nobody has adopted to slogan, 'reverse the industrial revolution'. But the past few centuries have unleashed human creativity, and have seen an enormous and sustained improvement in living standards. If you try to force this genie back into the bottle, preventing the expansion of use values because it is not sustainable, then you are going to reverse the industrial revolution, whether you choose these words or not.
^^^^^ CB: Again , as a communist, I would think you would be more partial to a revolution in our attitude toward the industrial revolution which would aim specifically and emphatically to take control of the "genie coming out of a bottle", drop faith in the Invisible Hand, radically change capitalist anarchy of production. Communism is supposed to harness capitalism and its technology, not just let her rip. Within this approach there is room for appeal to the masses of workers that their decisions about what they "need" over the last 100 years may have been skewed a bit by influence of the ruling ideas of the era, which are the ideas of its wild-ass ruling class, the bourgeoisie.