IAN ANGUS is the editor of Climate and Capitalism (www.climateandcapitalism.blogspot.com) and a member of the coordinating committee of the Ecosocialist International Network. This article is excerpted from a talk he gave to a meeting sponsored by Green Left and Socialist Resistance on October 10. It will appear in next month’s issue of SR.
“The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the disease is the capitalist development model.”
That was the opening sentence of a remarkable letter sent to the UN in September by Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, the first indigenous head of state in Latin America. It is a dramatic illustration the spread of ecosocialist ideas among socialists and anti-capitalists in the global south.
But just what does “ecosocialism” mean? It’s a relatively new term, for a relatively new political development, and different people use the word in different ways, often putting quite different content into it.
What’s more, like the shorter word ‘socialism,’ ‘ecosocialism’ is used to for three different but related things.
· Ecosocialism is a goal – a global ecosocialist society.
· Ecosocialism is a body of political, economic and social thought that combines socialist and ecological ideas.
· Ecosocialism is a movement – a growing number of activists worldwide who believe – although most would not use these words – that the only way to stop ecological destruction is to impose what the authors of The Communist Manifesto called “despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.”
Ecosocialism as a Goal
Most ecosocialists would agree that our goal is a society in which profit is no longer the driving force of economic activity, and in which the preservation and restoration of ecosystems will be central to all activity.
Our view of the future is necessarily general, since we don’t know what conditions will prevail when the transition begins – in particular, we don’t know how much devastation capitalism will cause before it is brought down. But that does not mean we cannot or should not develop visions of what an ecosocialist world what might be like. Indeed such positive visions will play an important role in winning people to movements that can actually implement the “despotic inroads on the rights of property” that will bring down this system and make a new one possible.
Ecosocialism as a Body of Ideas
One of the most exciting developments in recent years is the new wave of Marxist scholarship dealing with ecology – a dozen or books, hundreds of essays and articles.
Of course there are far more non-Marxist books on the subject – but the Marxists are consistently superior at explaining why capitalism is fouling up our world. At the root, global warming isn’t caused by stupidity, or by short-sighted decision-makers – it is caused by capitalism’s insatiable need to increase profits, by what John Bellamy Foster calls “the ecological tyranny of the bottom line.”
People who don’t understand that don’t understand global warming, and so cannot propose meaningful solutions to capitalist ecocide.
The explosion of Marxist writing on ecology also shows that the Marxist wing of the green movement (or the green wing of the Marxist movement) is far from homogeneous. One of the most important disagreements regards the role of the working class. Joel Kovel, for example, argues that there is no “privileged agent of ecological transformation,” and an ecosocialist party will grow out of social movements and “communities of resistance” not the working class. Others (myself included) disagree strongly – in our view, socialism is not possible without mass working class action.
Obviously it is important for ecosocialists who disagree on this and other issues to collaborate on concrete projects. The new Ecosocialist International Network provides a framework for such collaboration, on a global scale.
But it is important to bear in mind that we are far from the point at which anyone can correctly say “this and this alone is ecosocialist theory.” Indeed, that point may never arrive.
Ecosocialism as a movement
Marx famously wrote that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Ultimately ecosocialists must be judged not by the brilliance of their writing, but by what they actually do to change the world.
In the imperialist countries -the “global north” — the ecosocialism movement involves two parallel developments – the spread of Marxist ideas in the green movement and the spread of ecological ideas in the Marxist left.
The result is not a new movement, but a current within existing socialist and green-left movements. We might say that in the developed ecosocialism today focuses on making the Greens more Red and the Reds more Green.
In the global south, by contrast, a mass anticapitalist ecology movement is emerging. In countries where global warming is already a matter of life and death, people are fighting environmental destruction – and the environmental destroyers – on a daily basis.
The fights take many forms, including land occupations, road blockades, and sabotage as well as more traditional actions such as petitions, rallies, demonstrations. Such protests occur daily in dozens of countries.
Evo Morales’ recent letter to the United Nations illustrates that point and another – that in the fight to save the earth, a vanguard role is being played by indigenous peoples. As Morales said:
“[W]e – the indigenous peoples and humble and honest inhabitants of this planet – believe that the time has come to put a stop to this, in order to rediscover our roots, with respect for Mother Earth; with the Pachamama as we call it in the Andes. Today, the indigenous peoples of Latin America and the world have been called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life.”
And he suggested a global political organization to combat global warming:
“We need to create a World Environment Organisation which is binding, and which can discipline the World Trade Organisation, which is propelling us towards barbarism.”
That’s not just a clever turn of phrase. In that one sentence, Morales says that the environment must be given legal priority over capitalist profits and the neoliberal policies that protect them. In short, he is calling for “despotic inroads on the rights of property.”
Cuba’s Foreign Minister, Felipe Perez Roque, also spoke to the UN on global warming in September. He placed responsibility for global warming on directly on the imperialist powers, and rejected any suggestion that poor countries should have to forego economic growth in order to clean up the mess caused by rich countries.
How should mitigation and adaptation be financed? Cuba’s representative had anti-imperialist answers:
“if only half the money that our countries must pay every year in servicing a constantly growing burdensome debt were set aside for these purposes, we would have over US$200 billion per annum. Another alternative would be to earmark merely the tenth of what the sole military superpower on the planet spends on wars and weapons and we would have another US$50 billion available.”
Evo Morales expressed this idea in a more general way:
“I think that it is important to think about some regions, some sectors and some countries repaying what has often been called the ecological debt. If we do not think about how this ecological debt will be paid, how are we going to solve the problems of life and humanity?”
The idea behind “ecological debt” is that that the imperialist powers owe compensation for the environmental damage they have wreaked in the Third World, and for their grossly disproportionate production of greenhouse gases. It’s a very profound concept that radicals in the global north need to understand and promote as widely as possible.
Major battles against ecological devastation are taking place in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The formation of the ALBA block of anti-imperialist governments in Latin America is a huge step forward for ecosocialists -we must view them as our closest allies in the struggle to build the movement that Morales describes:
“I feel that it is important to organise an international movement to deal with the environment, a movement that will be above institutions, businesses and countries that just talk about commerce, that only think about accumulating capital. We have to organize a movement that will defend life, defend humanity, and save the earth.”
Liam redux 
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