My Structural Activist Standpoint

My structural activist standpoint is somewhere in between a deep ecologist (in the vein of deep green resistance in relation to food production and relative fossil fuel desistance) with definitive acknowledgement of the limitation in the carrying capacity of the earth informing non-statist populationist politics at the level of the individual citizen’s discretion; and an eco-minded technocratic libertarian industrial socialist – small state socialism with private property. I believe that an enlightened political mass movement is the only way forward to achieve an authentic post-capitalist order and mode of production.

I believe in some level of equitable industrial global inter-connectivity, such as the internet, transportation technologies, and the metals and resources needed to create equitably socially and politically distributed, and environmentally friendly, services and goods. These can be powered by renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind power. Renewables require mining and often displace and kill wildlife (see https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/01/27/green-energy-technologies-and-mitigating-human-inter-species-violence/).

However, a non-expansionist economic (and in some ways more minimally industrial) socialist global political system would greatly reduce harm to the environment supporting sentient life (animals, humans, and some invertebrates who/that qualify as sentient).

I believe we need to drastically reduce human population, which is currently far and above the earth’s carrying capacity, wherein we use agricultural surplus and agricultural overshoot from unsustainable monocropping using fossil fuel fertilizers to feed the population. (There is also the shameful failing, within this system, to feed geopolitically impoverished people in the Third World, even though we currently produce more than enough food, due to the exclusionary politics of capitalism).

I am not a bourgeois environmental ‘populationist’ like Al Gore, Dick Smith and Bill Gates, who all believe we should reduce human population whilst retaining/rescuing the capitalist mode of production, not distribute wealth more equitably and equably, and not question their own enormous, inflated and excessive and (colonial) inequitable carbon footprints.

Instead, I believe we should reduce human population, alongside redistributing wealth in the global economy. This reduction must emanate from political consciousness-raising, and not statist population reduction methods.