The plastics revolution... and consequences

[K. A. Pital]

So, is the Soviet use of asbestos in buildings a flaw in socialism, then?

It is. Harm from asbestos was discovered in pre-WWII years already. In the US, the construction industry lobbied to keep it in production. I think in Europe it was phased out earlier (I may be wrong and will have to re-check). The USSR had little excuse in not phasing it out as soon as the first studies started to come.

These are not realistically foreseeable consequences unless, IN ADDITION to specifying state control of the means of production (socialism), we ALSO specify that the state is extremely economically conservative and reluctant to implement any new program or technology or product without massive, extremely detailed studies of the environmental impact.

That would, perhaps, be a good thing. However, we are witnessing a successful dismantling and sabotage of even rather weak social-democratic regulations in Europe. So neither green socialism nor socialism of any kind can be seen to answer this question in practice any time soon.

No socialist industrial planner would say "let's not ship raw plastic around our country in tiny pellets (because that is the only effective way to make it practical to mold it into the desired shapes), because a giant patch of floating plastic fragment soup might form in the South Pacific if we do that."

Maybe not, but I have already mentioned that socialism often tends to localize production due to limited international trade. Shipping pellets from city to city inside the landmass is one thing, and it is already a potential threat - but shipping them in huge numbers across the oceans is another. Capitalism compresses the spaces by moving goods faster and faster, and also separating production spatially if it makes sense to do so. Nations lose full production chains inside their own territory, and large amounts of precursor goods are shipped around the world to make up for it.

[Simon_Jester]

So, is the Soviet use of asbestos in buildings a flaw in socialism, then?

It is. Harm from asbestos was discovered in pre-WWII years already. In the US, the construction industry lobbied to keep it in production. I think in Europe it was phased out earlier (I may be wrong and will have to re-check). The USSR had little excuse in not phasing it out as soon as the first studies started to come.

There was considerable ambiguity about the level of harm involved at first, among other things because the evidence of harm from asbestos was coming in at the same time as evidence of harm from smoking- which is similar enough that one effect can mask the other. Moreover, asbestos legitimately does have some advantages in terms of making buildings safe, well-insulated, and otherwise sound.

So in everyone's defense, this is not a simple or clear-cut issue, especially in the context of 1950-era material science when alternatives to asbestos were less available.

Furthermore, if everyone made the same mistake, it seems ridiculous to blame everyone for the mistake. Some kinds of mistakes just happen; they're not things we can magically fix by making society 'better.'

These are not realistically foreseeable consequences unless, IN ADDITION to specifying state control of the means of production (socialism), we ALSO specify that the state is extremely economically conservative and reluctant to implement any new program or technology or product without massive, extremely detailed studies of the environmental impact.

That would, perhaps, be a good thing. However, we are witnessing a successful dismantling and sabotage of even rather weak social-democratic regulations in Europe. So neither green socialism nor socialism of any kind can be seen to answer this question in practice any time soon.

My point being, 'greenness' is not a consequence unique to, or even chiefly associated with, socialist countries. Certain types of social democrats favor it, but they are far from the most firm advocates of socialism in general.

No socialist industrial planner would say "let's not ship raw plastic around our country in tiny pellets (because that is the only effective way to make it practical to mold it into the desired shapes), because a giant patch of floating plastic fragment soup might form in the South Pacific if we do that."

Maybe not, but I have already mentioned that socialism often tends to localize production due to limited international trade. Shipping pellets from city to city inside the landmass is one thing, and it is already a potential threat - but shipping them in huge numbers across the oceans is another. Capitalism compresses the spaces by moving goods faster and faster, and also separating production spatially if it makes sense to do so. Nations lose full production chains inside their own territory, and large amounts of precursor goods are shipped around the world to make up for it.

[/quote]The limited international trade under socialism wasn't necessarily a consequence of socialism. If socialism had won, had not broken down and drowned under capitalism, why wouldn't we expect to see things like raw plastic being shipped across oceans? If plastic is useful in one place, but is most readily made in another place, why not ship it across an ocean? Why wouldn't socialist countries do such things?

The only reason I can think of is the difficulty of accurately and realistically determining the economic costs of goods and services in a command economy, which makes it hard to know if it would be more efficient to import things, and easy to decide not to for ideological reasons. This is not a virtue of command economies. It can result in inefficiencies that could even cause greater environmental damage indirectly, and it results in people having fewer resources and opportunities than would otherwise be available.

[Sea Skimmer]

Do remember Asbestos was consider a radical improvement in safety when it was new, it was and is overwhelmingly the best boiler insulation known. No reasonable replacement exists for it either in that role, where it literally stopped thousands of boilers fires and explosions per year in the world, for decades. The use for mere building insulation was secondary, and grew out of the boiler issue.

People didn't adapt that stuff because they were evil penny pinchers, they adapted it because nothing worked even remotely as well. IIRC at the time aspestos appeared the US alone was having 900 static boiler explosions or fires per year.

Heck not long ago India had to consent to using new Aspestos in the carrier Baku, because it was physically impossible to run her Soviet era pressure fired boilers without it, they tried replacement by fire brick and all boilers failed on trial. The alternative insulations on the market all have much lower melting points and inferior thermal protection. That's why certain items like protective suits for volcano research are still aspestos. Nothing else will work. Many boilers had to go out of service when they needed repairs and aspestos was banned, but all over the world it's still in use because you'd be crazy to stop before you were forced.

Until the cancer risk was understood it was never a question of choosing to use aspestos, industry standards worldwide called for it in high temperature applications. While not always having the force of law said standards might as well be laws when it comes to say, a lawsuit over a massive boiler explosion.

IIRC the USSR kept making kids toys and furnature out of the stuff until 1991 though, the west generally stopped that by the 1960s, but in all reality such toys are safe unless broken and the debris inhaled. Not sure if they made wall panels out of or not, that was a thing for a little while in the west before drywall was well established.

[K. A. Pital]

Asbestos is not fully banned in the US until now, although wide partial bans came with legislation in IIRC 1970 and 1977.

Even reading this article on Wikipedia demonstrates that the awareness of adverse effects came way before any action
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#1950s

And that companies consciously sabotaged any action in the period from 1930s to the 1970s and 1980s.

There is thus very little excuse for companies or governments in this. Dying from pulmonology is an excruciating, torturous death. Companies and governments who wilfully ignored the need for greater regulation and health investigation are basically cold-blooded murderers:

In 1942, an internal Owens-Corning corporate memo referred to "medical literature on asbestosis ... scores of publications in which the lung and skin hazards of asbestos are discussed."[134] Testimony given in a federal court in 1984 by Charles H. Roemer, formerly an employee of Unarco, described a meeting in the early 1940s between Unarco officials, J-M President Lewis H. Brown and J-M attorney Vandiver Brown. Roemer stated, "I'll never forget, I turned to Mr. Brown, one of the Browns made this crack (that Unarco managers were a bunch of fools for notifying employees who had asbestosis), and I said, 'Mr. Brown, do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they dropped dead?' He said, 'Yes. We save a lot of money that way.'"[136]

[Elheru Aran]

That, however, again, is not a fault exclusive to capitalist societies. It is rather a flaw in human nature and in how corporations dehumanize people.

[K. A. Pital]

Did I not admit as much at the start of this page? Socialism's fault is that in competition with capitalism, it blindly accepts the same production techniques and technologies, no matter the consequences. No matter how inhumane it could be.

It might be alleviated by common ownership (a larger set of people stands to profit from industrialization), but the problem is not fully gone at any rate.

[Simon_Jester]

Asbestos is not fully banned in the US until now, although wide partial bans came with legislation in IIRC 1970 and 1977.

From what I've heard, asbestos is basically no longer used except for applications where people are massively unlikely to breathe it, and/or where it's the only material that can possibly do the job. It may not be banned, but that is in large part because there's no point in banning something no one wants to use.

There are a lot of situations where toxic substances have to be used, and the sensible approach is simply to try and minimize the harm caused as far as possible. Modern technology saves a great many lives, and some aspects of it simply couldn't exist without toxic materials used in manufacturing and so forth. We have or should have laws to make this be done as safely as possible, but it's not a reasonable response to try and ban every potentially dangerous thing in the world. The net cost of doing so can easily exceed the social costs of tolerating the toxins.

Even reading this article on Wikipedia demonstrates that the awareness of adverse effects came way before any action... And that companies consciously sabotaged any action in the period from 1930s to the 1970s and 1980s.

There is thus very little excuse for companies or governments in this. Dying from pulmonology is an excruciating, torturous death. Companies and governments who wilfully ignored the need for greater regulation and health investigation are basically cold-blooded murderers...

Why yes, that is entirely true!

The point is, literally any organized body which seeks to build things and do things is prone to this sort of thing. People rationalize the harm caused as "not very serious," or they decide that the sacrifices of other people are "for the greater good." It's a seemingly universal flaw of all economic systems, socialist and capitalist alike, that decision-makers will make choices that are unsafe for some of the people, some of the time.

There's no point blaming capitalism for such problems, just as there's no point blaming socialism for, say, marital infidelity. A problem that has always existed so long as humans exist, won't necessarily vanish because of a governmental reform.

So when we talk about the consequences of the plastic economy (the original topic), it is very much right to talk about the problem and the appropriate responses, but we won't get anywhere by claiming the problem is capitalism.

[K. A. Pital]

I think that while socialism has at least the potential to be more humane, capitalism, due to is anarchic and uncontrollable nature where thousands of private entities exist and act simultaneously, is fundamentally irredeemable.

[Zixinus]

There are actually very few purely capitalist/free market countries in the world, or so I remember. Even the US does socialist practices while very carefully not calling them that. And very few purely socialist ones too. Most countries waver between the two extremes to various degrees.

In the end, it is up to the leadership of a country to recognize a problem and take it seriously. For plastic in the ocean to be taken seriously, it needs leadership with environmentalist values. Without that, the problem is not solved.