Bruce Lerro

This article is about the differences between the micro psychology of liberals and the macro psychology of communists. Differences include: how society and the individual are configured; the impact of capitalism on personal life; how the mind-body relationship is conceived; how the objective and subjective worlds are integrated; how politics impacts personal life and how research should be conducted. These differences are not self-evident or easy for liberals to understand. In order to attempt a breakthrough, I describe the story of Flatland, Edwin Abbot’s great 1884 science fiction book of why two-dimensional beings on Flatland fail to understand the Spaceland dimension of some of its creatures. I’ve included a link to a video of the story. This will conclude Part I.

In Part II we will discover that even when liberals find out about the Russian activity theory led by Vygotsky, they interpret him in a bourgeois fashion. By this I mean they focus on educational reform and play, rather than work, while ignoring social class, exploitation, alienations as well as what an anti-capitalist individual might look like. To explore both parts of this article will referring to a great book by Carl Ratner: Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind. In my opinion more than any other individual in the United States Carl has remained the most uncompromising in presenting the communist psychology of Vygotsky to the Yankee public.

Hard Facts About Political Economy in Mordor

The US has the highest percentage of children living in poverty in the industrial world – 23% and climbing. We have the second-highest infant mortality rate among wealthy countries. Mordor has the highest incarceration rate in the world (spending is three times the amount that is spent on education). We are something like 125^th in the world of 200 countries in literacy. American Association for the Advancement of Science discovered that one-third of America’s population believes that human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time. In absolute numbers we easily have the highest obesity rate in the world. We have a political party, a party that imagines itself as liberal, complicit in the production of genocide in Palestine while propping up dictators the world over. The highest-paid individual in John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October 2008 was Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist. Her salary was higher than McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser. The so-called program “War on drugs” program does nothing to stem the use of drugs in the US. The 400 wealthiest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest 400 million.

Sixteen years after the near collapse of the global financial system, the US Congress still has adopted no new rules to re-regulate financial institutions. The financiers and politicians who created the financial implosion of the early 21^st century have foisted greater harm on the US than all the country’s enemies. Why aren’t these problems fixed? We have no mass political party that might address these problems in a systematic way. We have political debates that are sponsored by a private organization, Commission on Presidential Debates. No other political parties are allowed to participate unless the two major parties agree.

In a Degenerating Society the Need for Propaganda is Essential

The ruling powers try to rationalize and legitimize their power by inventing ideologies that paint them as more capable and harder working than they really are. One part of their ideology is that there is no ruling class as a social formation. Class is simply the position that separate individuals occupy as a result of their individual competencies and effort. The “free market” is infinitely flexible, open to all comers. In this capitalist ideology there is no relationship between social classes. Capitalists appear to acquire their wealth as a completely separate process from what workers do or don’t do. What is really going on is that upper-class wealth is dependent on their exploitation of the working class in the form of surplus value.

The ruling class does not invent its ideology by itself. The upper middle class (the professional middle-class individuals, the PMCs) perpetuates the ideology not only in economics, but in philosophical, artistic and scientific fields. Presidents of community colleges work for capitalists to dampen the expectations for working-class students. Their commission institutes are specifically charged with developing ideological tools for legitimizing capitalist practices such as the RAND Foundation. Also on the ground floor are the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. All three hire intellectuals to do their bidding by giving talks and writing papers and books. These institutions play hardball. For example, the RAND corporation installed its academic agendas through the leadership of RAND intellectuals who were by then in powerful university administrative positions. Thomas Schilling was one of the key figures in established rational choice theory, probably the most direct enemy of communist psychology.

Being mystified by this propaganda does not mean people are blind to every aspect of society. It only means they do not fundamentally understand how their society works. They are ignorant of the following deep issues of how power is distributed: the infrastructural relationships between the Deep State and particular political regimes; how capitalism operates and why it gets into crises roughly every seven years. The Mordor public, whether liberal or conservative, may know about lobbying, corruption, lying and cheating. They may be aware of inequality, poverty and discrimination. However, propaganda keeps them from not understanding the basis of these, or how these problems are interrelated and macro cultural in both form and content. Propagandists do not have to directly intervene in an institution in order to bend it to its will as Stephen Lukes points out in his third dimension of power. Furthermore, these propagandists can commit evil and be agents of oppression without themselves being perverted, sadistic or psychotic.

Consumer Psychology

Ratner writes that consumer spending accounts for 70% of Mordor’s GDP. For capitalists, it is vitally important for the population to not only consume a great deal but to do so quickly. He writes that for capitalists, the natural cycles of growth of animals are too slow for the profit motive so cows are fed hormones to speed up that growth. Fish are also farmed in conditions that speed their growth. The same is true for people.  Capitalists do not want people to eat according to when they are hungry. This takes hours to peak. Instead, the act of eating has to be decoupled from hunger and coupled with fun because no other consumer activity can be performed as continuously as eating. We cannot wear new shoes all the time, but one can eat food every hour when watching TV, going to the movies or attending ball games because they require rapid turnover to generate profit. It includes getting to work faster, working faster and spending money faster when these same workers consume.

Wholesome food takes a long time to digest, and afterwards the person is sated and has no desire for more. Added to the headaches of capitalists, some wholesome food can be cheap to buy and generates low profit. On the other hand, junk food is digested quickly and its fat, sugar and salt provide instant gratification without real satiation while stimulating new cravings.  Ratner refers to Jules Henry’s book Culture Against Man which uses the adjective “pecuniary” to describe various aspects of consumer psychology. Pecuniary is synonymous with commodified. Furthermore, enjoyment and desire have to be shifted from use to acquisition. For many consumers, the process of shopping becomes more enjoyable than using the product. Many compulsive consumers never use the products they buy. We can go window shopping and browse catalogues and ads without any particular object in mind. Obsessive shopping can become a pathology. One researcher, H. Dittmar, found that compulsive shoppers have a larger discrepancy between their present self and their ideal self than others.

Sensationalism is rampant in modern culture, in popular music, in entertainment with car crashes, special technical effects and plenty of sexual suggestion. There is minimal, trivial content with little character development or substantive plot. Sensationalism offers no continuity between people and product. Throw-away products are deliberately designed for the short term and wear out quickly. They are unrepairable and replaced by new purchases. Capitalist intervention into the emotional life of the consumer with advertising campaigns is fueled by mass-market psychologists. Capitalists can’t admit what they are doing to anyone else, let alone to themselves so they invent a theory that is the opposite of what they are doing.

A rational choice theory of economics ignores the emotional and sexual appeal of the advertising industry that posits the consumer as having a natural rationality where you know what you need, you gather information and weigh the pros and cons of purchasing. Rational choice theory was developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 60s. Rational choice theory is a mainstay of bourgeois ideology because it construes society as an outcome of interpersonal negotiations. It is the mother of contemporary individualistic social theory, one of whose forms is micro-cultural psychology. (It's also a pillar of "Neoclassical Economics", the theoretical legitimating matrix of Neoliberalism, and the only type of "economics" taught in the US and the rest of the collective West.)

Why Can’t We See Through The Hard Facts of Political Economy, Propaganda and Consumer Psychology?

In order to penetrate below the surface of capitalist society and analyze what is going on, we need a communist psychology which requires more than a liberal or conservative understanding of what is what is happening in the political economy. Understanding communist psychology requires:

• understanding infrastructural and structural dynamics of capitalism that are invisible to the naked eye;
• understanding that these factors may contradict common sense. Because reality is complex and expanding we cannot experience its totality through sense impressions. We must use sense impressions to infer and deduce unobservable properties of reality on which science is based;
• understanding society as a kind of verb in motion, not a noun, an unchanging thing.

Carl Ratner gives three examples from the sciences which show that they have to move beyond their senses and beyond common sense in order to make new discoveries.

Astronomy is concerned with the immense, broad system of factors beyond the earth that bear on earth and bring it into being. Just as the characteristics of Earth are unintelligible if one doesn’t understand the astrophysics of the sun, other planets, distant galaxies and the big bang, so characteristics of psychology are unintelligible without first understanding macro-cultural factors.

Secondly, Darwin could have never discovered how species evolved from changing environmental circumstances if all he had to go on was the plant and animal life in Britain in the 19th century. He had to travel half-way around the world to discover fossils of plant and animal life thousands of years old. He needed the geological work of Lyell in order to familiarize himself with ages much larger than human history to begin to understand the gradualness of bio-evolutionary change. He had to refuse the easy and infantile explanations of theologians who could not imagine that matter was self-organizing and not a passive lump moulded by the will of God.

Lastly, in the atomic structure of steel beams:

Cultural factors in psychology may be analogized to atoms in steel: they are constituents which are invisible to the naked eye, are difficult to accept from the perspective of common sense. Looking at a steel beam it seems inconceivable that it is composed of atomic particles which are in motion…. Macro cultural psychology is analogous to atomic science in revealing constituents that are invisible to the naked eye, …macro cultural psychology changes our way of understanding psychology just as fundamentally as atomic theory changes our way of understanding steel beams.

Macro cultural psychology is also like the unseen distal sun in Plato’s cave. Everyday life in capitalist society with its villains and heroes in the movies, sports, music and politics are like the shadows cast by the sun’s light on the back of the cave. When we get involved in the puppet show of the shadows on the wall we ignore the capitalist sun that is responsible for the whole show. People act on the basis of their needs, interests, aims, passions and thoughts based on the shadows on the wall in the hopes of achieving satisfaction. However, behind these subjective experiences lies a macro cultural, political economic logic of the sun that structurally patterns them unconsciously in particular ways to remain focused on the puppet show rather than the light behind them.

From Flatland to Spaceland

Another way to capture the difference between liberal psychology and communist psychology is to imagine that each inhabits different dimensions of reality. In his mathematical science fiction book Flatland Edwin Abbot tells a story of life in the two-dimensional plane of Flatland. The people on Flatland take their world as self-evident. The higher functioning ones get around quite well just as working or middle-class people get along in capitalist society. What they don’t understand is that there is a third dimension of height. By accident, one of the Flatland inhabitants is visited  by someone from the third dimension which is called Spaceland. The third-dimensional being can get along in the two-dimensional world, just as communists can get along in a capitalist world but their full life is more complex, living in the third dimension.

When the three dimensional being tells the Flatlander (a square) about the existence of Spaceland, the Flatlander is cynical. Finally, the Spacelander challenges the square to ride with him into the dimension of height. The Flatlander is both frightened and delighted to find the real existence of Spaceland. In our time, the Flatlander being drawn into Spaceland would be like a Flatlander living through a socialist revolution. The square returns to Flatland to proselytize about the existence of Spaceland but he finds their resistance to the existence of Spaceland remains entrenched. Below is the link to a 30-minute video about the story.

Flatland

What is Macro Cultural Psychology?

From the political to the economic to the psychological
Infrastructural macro-cultural psychology posits that psychology is rooted in political and economic institutions that are neglected by neoliberal psychology. They include the state, the army, the stock market, the Catholic Church, corporate farms, banks, pharmaceutical companies, the healthcare industries, capitalist media and their impact on psychology. From this flow capitalist relations like commodification, alienation, surplus value, consumerism, class structure and possessive individualism. Lastly, these influence the familiar psychological expression such as emotion, perception, motivation, reasoning, self, sexuality and the senses. Interpersonal relations must be congruent with these macro factors if they are to function effectively. Whenever people express themselves psychologically, they mostly express and promulgate macro-cultural factors embodied within it. Vygotsky writes that mental structures are inseparable from a social structure and that there is a social structure designed just for psychology.

Invisible levels in deep time beyond the senses

For macro cultural psychology nature is both outside and inside us. Culture mediates both outside and inside. Macro culture mediates our external interactions with nature (earthquakes, food sources, trees, animals, air, water, oil) and it mediates our internal relation to our own biology (our hormones, sense organs, motor organs, and cortical processes). This structure is invisible, yet implicit and outlasts the lives of the individuals who shape it. Macro culture imposes constraints as more than a mere sum of individual acts as claimed in liberal micro psychology.

Macro cultural factors cannot be known or managed by sensory impressions by themselves. One cannot see or hear the full dynamics of the stock market or a transportation system over time and around the world. Culture and communication are the most immediate bases for mental and psychological life. Without the symbolic duplication of objects over deep social space and time there would be little freedom to imagine variations in our choices. The freedom to imagine new things is a cultural product. Far from stifling imagination and freedom, macro culture provides the mechanism for making anything in culture psychologically possible. In Ratner’s conical model, every phenomenon is a complex of three qualities:

• its own distinct quality (family as a distinct institution);
• the qualities that are imparted from structural forces such as the state, laws, educational practices;
• the political economy – the stability of the stock market, as work opportunities and the cost of goods and services.

All layers of macro culture are not equal. The economics of manufacturing are more influential in society than painting or sculpture. For example, automobile production employs hundreds of thousands of workers. In its success or failure, it affects the steel, oil and transportation industries.

Beyond mind-body problems

Ratner argues that the so-called the mind-body problem of how the physical body-brain produces mental life is the wrong way to frame the origin of consciousness. It is culture that produces the mind, not brain circuitry. If nature is world one and culture is world two, consciousness/psychology is world three. Culture does not influence some primordial consciousness and then adds certain extrinsic elements to it. Rather, culture forms consciousness. A major difference between human and animal cognition it’s that animals perceive relations of observable features of immediately present entities (first order relations). With the exception of chimps dolphins, ravens and crows, for humans, the socio-cultural world mediates their relations. For the rest of the animal kingdom, present sensuous relations are all there is.

Interpersonal micro relations vs interpenetrating macro relations

Neoliberal micro psychology finds it roots in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. It assumes that individual relations with society are associative, contractual and voluntary. Furthermore, society is confined to sensual relations between people in Everyday life.  Macro cultural psychology is grounded in the interpenetrating, interdependent relations of Hegel and Marx. It assumes individual relations with society are organic, necessary and involuntary. Society includes not just personal relations in everyday life, but structures and networks beyond sensuous interpersonal relations that impact an individual whether we like it or not.

For neoliberal capitalist psychology, psychological functions evolve on the individual level in order to realize individual agency or expression. For neoliberal psychology agency is usually touted as independent of macro culture – as expressing the individual resisting culture or recasting culture in more fulfilling personal terms. (Hostility and suspicion of the collective.) But this championing of individual agency breaks down. A good example of why this doesn’t make sense is early advertising campaigns to get women to smoke. Women’s “agency” did not create the demand to smoke out of personal choice. It was the macro culture of advertising agencies that began and sustained the process. Micro-cultural society ignores macro-cultural socialization such as various types of propaganda which are necessary to spread common cultural psychological signification throughout the population. Interpersonal socialization would be too fragmented and idiosyncratic to accomplish this massive, common socialization.

Overcoming Conventional Methodology

From idealism and mechanism to political practice
It is important not to restrict macro cultural psychology to conventional methodology. We should not conceptualize macro principles to terms that are amenable to simple, superficial, fragmental statements on a questionnaire or fragmented behavioral observations. But how are the objective and the subjective integrated? Because in liberal micro psychology the objective and the subjective are kept separate, their studies always are either overstressing the objective, resulting in mechanism or reification, such as behaviorism. The other possibility is they overstate the subjective which results in idealism, like humanistic psychology. In macro cultural psychology, the ultimate integration of the objective and the subjective is collective political practice of a party, union, or social movement in which individuals engage in attempting to change the world. This practice enriches and changes the objective world while transforming subjective experience. This collective political practice avoids the twin dangers of mechanism and idealism, reification and subjectivism.

Individualism in liberal micro psychology research methods

Individualism in research methods  are designed to validate subjects by:

• allowing them to speak freely;
• accepting their point of view uncritically;
• renouncing systematic interview and analytical methods that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity;
• ignoring cultural pressures that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity.

A central political issue in capitalist society as in all class societies is exploitation. Micro liberal psychology avoids the reality of exploitation marginalizing by:

• reducing it to personal meanings;
• interpersonal negotiations;
• discourse symbols;
• fragmenting it into variables.

Macro Cultural Psychology Qualitative Research

A phenomenon’s function is revealed when it answers at least these four questions:

• why it exists in the sense of why it is necessary for that particular constellation of elements;
• what role the element plays in the capitalist or socialist system;
• what it reciprocally contributes to the system;
• why the system needs it.

Ratner identifies primary questions for research which include:

• How can it conceptualize these elements as parts of a system?
• Which system are they part of?
• What are the other elements of this system?
• How do they depend upon and support one another?
• What features do each element acquire through its role in the system?
• How are the elemental features distinctive to or particular to this system?
• How might the features of the elements change if they played different roles

in this system or if they were transposed to a different system?

• What kinds of methods must be used to elicit answers to these questions?
• What kinds of probing questions must we ask to extract these answers?

Please see Table 1 at the end of Part I for a summary of the differences between micro and macro cultural psychology.

Let us close out Part I of this article with a discussion of the emotions.

Macro Origin of Emotions

The starting point of human emotions is not internal private experiences based on the individual’s private history. These emotions are already always housed in macro cultural emotions. Ratner names love of country, anger at capitalists or racial minorities, hatred of socialism, national shame, dejection about political trends, fear of economic depressions, fierce loyalty to professional baseball, football, basketball or hockey teams or devotion to certain kinds of music or dance. Anger that culminates in violence exists on the macro cultural level in the form of a working-class person who fought in wars has PTSD and is homeless. Other working-class people are competing for jobs and whose union is not treating them well. Others face low wages and lack of medical benefits. These macro cultural emotional states are environmental, not outside private emotions. The macro-cultural environment is already inside of psychological private states.

Personal and interpersonal behaviors do not exist on their own. What appears to be individual behavior is only the immediate, apparent appearance that masks a deeper macro culture of emotions as a window into it. The same is true of memory. Personal memories are embedded in collective memories that involve systematically remembering favourable aspects of political life while forgetting other events as a result of political propaganda. These unify people whether they are based on reality or illusions. Whether individuals are conscious or not of having been internalized, these collective memories are the soil for private in which memories to grow or die.

It used to be thought in the 50s and 60s that advertising propaganda influenced people in a very heavy-handed way, implying the public was passive (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders).  Then it was found by Michael Schudson in his book Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion that people were less snowed by advertisers than researchers thought. What I want to bring to your attention is the way advertisers directly impact the public emotions by fragmenting emotional experience during a television program.

Advertisements are strategically placed immediately before or after an intense emotional scene. This emotional fragmentation is built into the formatting of television scenes. One must wait for the ad to pass in order to complete the emotion. It does not permit long, continuous development and resolution of our emotions (168-169)

Ratner says this emotional format is recapitulated by people in their personal relationships. Individuals get used to experiencing fragmented emotions because cell phones, text messages, Twitter and Instagram break up a full emotional expression. Ratner says that individuals get so used to this that grow uncomfortable with extended continuous emotional responses.

Coming Attractions

“But” you might say, “I’ve heard of this Vygotsky you speak of. He worked in the field of cooperative learning and developed something called the zone of proximal development. So Vygotsky’s communist ideas are here in the United States.” The problem is this assumes that the communist ideas of a theorist can be directly translated into a capitalist society with no distortion, exaggeration or even censorship. In part two of this article, I will show 11 differences in how Vygotsky is interpreted by those whom Ratner calls “neoliberal” Vygotskyan psychologists.

Differences Between Micro and Macro Cultural Psychology

W.J. Astore
BRACING VIEWS

Bombs and Bulldozers Are Us

An American crew loading Hellfire missiles onto aircraft. Israel has killed many people, including Palestinian leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, founder of Hamas in 1987, using the Hellfire weapon.

More Weapons to Israel to Power a Genocide

I recently ordered a few items from Amazon. Random stuff like a shower caddy, an iPhone case, and lamp sockets. It won’t surprise you to learn they were all “Made in China.”

I ordered some clothes from a fancy online retailer. The clothes said “Designed in California” but they were, of course, Made in China.

What is America making? What are we sending overseas? Bombs and bulldozers for the devastation and dismantlement of Gaza and other Palestinian Territories. Consider this article from Ken Klippenstein (excerpt follows), which details roughly $10 billion in “foreign aid” to Israel.

Here’s what Klippenstein had to say:

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While the entire news media is focused on Trump’s suspension of arms for Ukraine, the administration is arming Israel to the teeth. The nature of the bombs being sold indicates Israel’s military is preparing to continue its bombing campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen; as well as preparing for possible war with Iran.

Included in the sales are tens of thousands of controversial 2,000 lb. bombs so heavily criticized during the Gaza war for their destructive capacity, and thousands of “Hellfire” missiles that are used for targeted killings.

When I visited the Defense Security Cooperation Agency website’s section for major arms sales to see a breakdown of the weapons, I was immediately struck by the fact that five of the last six sales were to Israel.

Screenshot of DSCA’’s “Major Arms Sales” landing page

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The U.S. bombs and missiles being sent to Israel, almost all made by Boeing, are included in:

• February 28 sale worth $2.04 billion, including:
  • 35,529 MK 84 (general purpose) or BLU-117 (hardened) 2,000-pound bomb bodies (or combination of both).
  • 4,000 I-2000 (hardened) 2,000 lb. advanced penetrator warheads for 2,000-pound bomb bodies.
• February 28 sale worth $675.7 million, including:
  • 201 MK 83 MOD 4/MOD 5 general purpose 1,000-pound bomb bodies.
  • 4,799 newer BLU-110A/B General Purpose 1,000-pound bomb bodies.
  • 1,500 KMU-559C/B Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) anti-jam enhanced GPS guidance kits to attach to MK 83 bomb bodies.
  • 3,500 KMU-559J/B JDAM guidance kits to attach to MK 83 bomb bodies.
• February 7 sale worth $660 million, including:
  • 3,000 AGM-114 Hellfire Air-to-Ground Missiles, aircraft, helicopter and drone carried, used to attack vehicles and individuals.
• February 7 sale worth $6.75 billion, including:
  • 2,166 GBU-39/B 250-pound Small Diameter Bombs (SDB) Increment 1.
  • 2,800 MK 82 General Purpose, 500-pound bomb bomb bodies.
  • 13,000 KMU-556 JDAM Guidance Kits to attach to MK-84 (2,000-pound) bomb bodies.
  • 3,475 KMU-557 JDAM Guidance Kits to attach to BLU-109 (2,000-pound) bomb bodies.
  • 1,004 KMU JDAM Guidance Kits to attach to 500-pound GBU-38v1 bomb bodies.
  • 17,475 FMU-152A/B multi-function fuzes for bombs.

*****

Holy shit! Nearly thirty-six thousand 2000-pound bombs! That is 36 kilotons, roughly the equivalent of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And that’s not including the assorted 1000- and 500-pound bombs tossed into the mix.

A Hellfire shot from one of its suggested platforms, an attack helicopter. Fighter-bombers can also handle the weapon.

This is an astonishing amount of ordnance for Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank.

President Trump, of course, has the full support of most Democrats in sending this stockpile of destruction to Israel. Call it bipartisan genocidal enablement.

America sure is an “exceptional” nation. No nation is better at bombing others—or supplying the bombs for others like Israel to do so—then flattening what remains with “Made in USA” bulldozers.

Honestly, I wish my country made shower caddies, iPhone cases, and lamp sockets instead of bombs and bulldozers. Don’t you?

Eric Zuesse

The Biggest Lie?

Many left commentators, like Lee Camp, have long concluded that the US is not a democracy, but a sociopathic plutocracy. Unimpeachable political scientists agree. Meanwhile, we cynically meddle around the globe in the name of "democracy".

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

A meeting between US President Donald Trump (C) and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (L) veered sharply off track in front of TV cameras and ended abruptly, White House, Washington, DC, Feb. 28, 2025

Indrajit Samarajiva

Photo by Nazly Ahmed, “A city lost in the haze. With air quality dropping to unhealthy levels across Sri Lanka, Colombo's skyline looked straight out of a dystopian film. When I captured this shot, the AQI was at 153, a stark reminder of the air we breathe.”

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I used to joke that Sri Lanka is like Diet India, except during pollution season, when it's like India. India's air quality during its crop-burning season (November to January) is death incarnate. I hate hearing about Delhi's suffering downwind because we are downwind also. The pollution hits Sri Lanka around February, meaning my kids are effectively smoking three cigarettes a day and not allowed to play outside. My family all have bad noses and everyone is sniffling and snuffling. India is family, but for fuck's sake, get your shit together.

Sri Lanka, of course, cannot just blame India, as much as we like to. Indian crop sati accounts for the variation in Sri Lankan pollution, but the baseline is us. As O.A. Ileperuma said, quoting a 2012 report, “In Sri Lanka, during 2011, emissions from motor vehicles accounted for 55-60% of air pollution, while 20-25% was due to industries and 20% was from domestic sources (Ministry of Environment, 2012).” Again, note that this is Sri Lanka's baseline pollution, which Indian ‘transboundary air pollution’ tips over seasonally, like now.

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At a deep level, we have both not got our shit together, whereas China—which used to be notoriously polluted—has. What's going on?

Capitalist vs. Communist Air

Remember that the core difference between communism and capitalism is who/what is in charge. Basically if it's a who or if it's a what. Either the human community is in charge under communism, or capital incorporate under capitalism. The words basically contain their own definition.

The key insight of China's reforms in the 80s was that you can have markets within socialism as long as you keep power over them. Capitalism, on the other hand, puts society inside a market where even politicians are bought and sold. A communist (or socialist) government can put the community (or society) at the center of decision-making, but letting capital decide on its own is a recipe for disaster.

Take air pollution, for example. In a deeply unequal society like India, the rich get expensive air-filtration systems, expensive schools, and expensive cars. They privatize air. This is all good business for the private sector—more stuff to sell—though the public suffers—life is hell. The overall economy gets much worse because people can't breathe and are sick, but as long as one sector makes enough money to bribe politicians, it all clicks. This is not a market failure, it's markets working as intended if you let the markets run themselves.

This failure is because pollution is a social problem that cannot be solved at the market/firm level. A firm will algorithmically optimize its profits and not measure anything outside themselves, including, in this case, the air. As these firms grow they co-opt elites with their products (private cars, education, etc) and corrupt politicians with that plus filthy lucre. Remember that liberal democracy was a Trojan Horse, left by capitalist colonizers, a last bit of divide and conquer into two parties.

Note that within capitalism, none of this is especially intentional, the whole point of capitalism is to remove human intent and let markets magically move resources around. But they just move the resources into a few pockets while everyone else drowns, average it out, and then drinks all around it. The collapse in air quality in countries that failed at socialism (like India and Sri Lanka) is just the unnatural result of letting a market make decisions for people. On top of actual cancer, you get capitalist cancer, firms that profit from problems and widen inequality.

Communism—or any system of human control—will not magically solve these problems, but it is at least not algorithmically bound to exacerbate them. A strong public sector (could be communist party or king) can say, hey, everyone piling into $50,000 cars is stupid, let's move more people much cheaper with trains. The private sector on its own won't do this because cars are quite profitable, which is why you need a strong public sector to beat some common sense into them. Central planning can take a higher look at the economy and balance it, which markets and firms just won't do on their own. In the same way, you need central planning to see when certain sectors (like private education or private air) are becoming cancerous and reduce them.

The broad principle, which should be self-evident, is that human goals are only achievable if humans have control over planning. You cannot just cede control to an invisible hand (which isn't real) or the whims of rich people (who are really assholes). Human values (breathing, not getting sick, not dying) are simply not understood by corporations, which only understand monetary value. It does not compute unless you ram the numbers down their throat. When there's actually more money to be made by selling air, selling healthcare, and selling coffins than in solving these problems, why would you solve them? Why would you reduce profit for people, planet, or anything so extraneous? Broadly, this is to say that such central problems are only solvable if you have central planning. And China is a case in point.

China

When I was in Beijing for a month (2012) I never saw the sun. At most I saw the fuzzy end of God's lit cigar, ashing in my eye with scorn. Men hung around smoking cigarettes in their Beijing bikinis and I guess I was smoking also. Unlike failed socialist states like India and Sri Lanka, however, socialism with Chinese characteristics actually worked. They made a plan to reduce pollution, and three five-year plans later, they did it. Now you can see the Beijing sky, something I've never seen before. This became possible over successive Olympic Games, and now it's common.

Chinese communism industrialized rapidly, with concomitant pollution and environmental destruction. Unlike capitalism which must keep growing at all costs, however, communism has a boss in the Communist party which can change direction or even stop certain activities. And so they made air quality a priority and did it. As Sustainable Mobility said,

Backed by municipal and national support, including the ambitious Five-Year Plan 2001-2006 as well as 2011-2016, which coupled economic growth with environmental stewardship, Beijing embarked on a journey to reshape its transportation fabric (Yao, 2018). This transformation encompassed investment reprioritization, reduced freeway growth, and curbed parking provisions, underpinned by an overarching focus on transit and the revival of traditional Chinese urban design – walking centers and transit linear corridors with dense, mixed-use patterns. The result? A decoupling of private vehicle use from wealth, as Beijing embraced public transport, cycling, and e-vehicles powered by renewable energy sources, reshaping the city’s transportation landscape.

Air quality was prioritized in the national five-year plans and in city level plans like Beijing's. Around the time I left, Beijing announced huge societal, industrial, changes to make itself suck less. Specifically,

The capital's 2013-2017 plan aims to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million tonnes and keep it within 10 million tonnes by 2017, compared with 23 million tonnes in 2012. The city will also slash its cement production capacity to 4 million tonnes in 2017, from 10 million tonnes in the early period of the 12th five year development plan from 2011 to 2015. Beijing's action plan for clean air echoed a national air pollutionprevention and treatment plan, which was also released on Thursday on the central government's website...

Iron and steel, cement, chemical and petrochemical industries will reduce waste emissions by more than 30 percent in 2017 compared with the levels of 2012, said Beijing's action plan. Meanwhile, Beijing will promote the use of clean energy in public vehicles, such as buses, taxis and postal trucks. By the end of 2017, Beijing will have 200,000 vehicles on the roads that are powered by new and clean energy, with about 65 percent of public buses using clean energy. The city will shut down 1,200 small polluting mills in the building materials, chemical, founding and furniture sectors by 2016.

Since China doesn't change between bribed governments every X years, they're actually capable of policy continuity (remember that liberal democracy is a Trojan Horse, meant to entrench global capital and cripple local governance). China is able to actually execute policy, and actually execute billionaires (unlike capitalist countries which only execute the poor).

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Anyways, getting down to brass tacks, Beijing's coal consumption dropped by more than 50% (measured differently, but percentage drop is as planned). Beijing also closed six of eight cement factories by 2018, lowering production capacity to 3.1 million tons, ahead of plan. Beijing's public transport is largely electrified now, and China's fuel use seems to have peaked. They also did it while preserving GDP growth (a noxious measure, but whatever). The point is that graphs like this don't happen, there are a lot of party functionaries pulling a lot of levers. You can certainly have a stupid plan under central planning, but you at least don't leave it to capitalist chance.

China is doing these big policy shifts and balances across its economy. Electrifying transport, for example, so much that fuel demand there may have already peaked. As the International Energy Agency said this year (2025), “For China’s fuel growth trajectory to be leveling off at this early stage of development is without historical precedent. This slide is likely to accelerate over the medium-term, which would be sufficient to generate a plateau in total China oil demand this decade.”

Of course, this ain't all blooming roses. A lot of the Beijing polluters merely moved further away. Crop burning, while banned for a while, has been allowed again. China still deploys mega coal projects and grows economically, which always requires energy, all forms of which require fossil fuels, not to mention other nonrenewable resources. I am not saying that communism produces environmentally magical results more than capitalism, it is still a human system. All I'm saying is that communism—by virtue of having central planning—can actually have a plan and stick to it. This can lead—for the narrow purposes of our conversation—to localized results.

Hence China, specifically Beijing, sees its air quality get better because they're trying to make it better while India and Sri Lanka see ours get worse because we're praying to the predators. We're caught in a capitalist doom cycle, with our elites dragging us down like Greeks out a Trojan. Divide and conquer, commodify and corrupt; capitalism née colonialism still works a charm for fucking shit up. We're releasing reports and having meetings, but as long as the economy is out of government control, both economy and environment careen out of control; predictably so. There's a saying that failing to plan is planning to fail. Ain't it the truth.

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For a piece on the global climate communism we should've done 50 years ago, click here.

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