Preface

Before the Flood: The Political Challenge of Ecosocialism

Ecosocialism is a political current based on an essential insight: that preserving the ecological equilibrium of the planet and therefore an environment favorable to living species, including ours, is incompatible with the expansive and destructive logic of the capitalist system. The pursuit of “growth” under the aegis of capital will lead us in short range—the next decades—to a catastrophe without precedent in human history: global warming.

James Hansen is NASA’s chief climatologist and one of the world’s greatest specialists on climate change; the George W. Bush administration tried, in vain, to prevent him from publishing his investigations. Hansen wrote this in the first paragraph of his book Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (2009):

Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril. The urgency of the situation crystallized only in the past few years. We have now clear evidence of the crisis. . . . The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.

This understanding is largely shared across lands and continents. In a well-informed essay, “How the Rich Destroy the Planet,” the French ecologist Hervé Kempf gives us a true picture of the disaster being prepared: beyond a certain threshold, which may arrive much sooner than predicted, the climate system may run away irreversibly; we cannot rule out a sudden and brutal change, with temperatures rising by several degrees and attaining unbearable levels. Faced with this knowledge, confirmed by scientists and shared by millions of citizens around the world, what are the powerful doing, the oligarchy of billionaires that rules the world economy? The social system that presently dominates human societies, capitalism, blindly and stubbornly resists changes that are indispensable if we are to preserve the dignity of human existence. A predatory and greedy ruling class refuses any attempt at an effective transformation; almost all spheres of power and influence submit to a pseudorealism that pretends that any alternative is impossible and that the only way forward is “growth.” This oligarchy, obsessed by conspicuous consumption—as Thorstein Veblen described many years ago—is indifferent to the degradation of living conditions for the majority of human beings and blind to the seriousness of the biosphere’s poisoning.

The planet’s “decision makers”—billionaires, managers, bankers, investors, ministers, business executives, and “experts”—shaped by the shortsighted and narrow-minded rationality of the system and obsessed by the imperatives of growth and expansion, the struggle for market positions, competitiveness, and profit margins, seem to follow the precept King Louis XV proclaimed a few years before the French Revolution: “After me, the Flood.” The twenty-first-century Flood, like the biblical one, may take the form of an inexorable rise of the waters, drowning the coastal towns of human civilization under the waves: New York, London, Venice, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong. . . .

The spectacular failure of all international conferences on climate change—Copenhagen, Cancún, Doha, Rio—illustrates this voluntary blindness: the greatest polluters, beginning with the United States, China, Canada, and Australia, have refused any commitment to a concrete reduction, even a minimal one, of carbon dioxide emissions. The weak measures more “enlightened” capitalist governments have taken so far—such as the Kyoto agreements and the European climate-action package, with their “flexibility mechanisms” and emission-trading schemes—are quite unable to confront the dramatic challenge of climate change. The same applies to the “technological” solutions privileged by President Obama and the European Union: “electric cars,” “agro-fuels,” “clean carbon,” and so on. As Marx predicted in The German Ideology, productive forces in capitalism are becoming destructive forces, creating the risk of physical annihilation for millions of human beings—a scenario even worse than the “tropical holocausts” of the nineteenth century studied by Mike Davis.

One word about another marvelous, “clean and secure” technology, favored not only by the powers that be but also, unfortunately, by some ecologists (Monbiot, Hansen, Lovelock), as an alternative to fossil resources: nuclear energy. After the terrifying Chernobyl accident in 1986, the Western atomic lobby found its answer: this was the result of bureaucratic, incompetent, and inefficient management of nuclear plants in the Soviet Union. “Such a thing couldn’t happen among us.” After the 2011 accident in Fukushima, Japan, this kind of argument lost all currency: TEPCO, which owns the Japanese nuclear plant, is one of the largest private capitalist enterprises in the country. The fact is that insecurity is inherent to nuclear energy: accidents are statistically inevitable. Sooner or later, new Chernobyls and new Fukushimas will take place, provoked by human error, internal dysfunction, earthquakes, tsunamis, airplane accidents, or other unpredictable events. Moreover, replacing fossil-fueled plants with nuclear ones on a world scale would mean building hundreds of new such plants, inevitably increasing the probability of more accidents.

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What is the alternative solution? Individual asceticism and penitence, as so many ecologists seem to propose? Drastically reducing consumption? The cultural criticism of consumerism is necessary but insufficient: one has to challenge the mode of production itself. Only a collective and democratic reorganization of the productive system could, at the same time, satisfy real social needs, reduce labor time, suppress useless and/or dangerous production, and replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. All this requires deep incursions into capitalist propriety, a radical extension of the public sector, and, in a word, a democratic, ecosocialist plan.

The central premise of ecosocialism, already suggested by the term itself, is that nonecological socialism is a dead end and a nonsocialist ecology cannot confront the present ecological crisis. The ecosocialist proposition of combining the “red” (the Marxist critique of capital and the project of an alternative society) and the “green” (the ecological critique of productivism) has nothing to do with the so-called “red-green” governmental coalitions between social democrats and certain green parties, on the basis of a social-liberal program of capitalist management. Ecosocialism is a radical proposition—i.e., one that deals with the roots of the ecological crisis—which distinguishes itself from the productivist varieties of socialism in the twentieth century (either social democracy or the Stalinist brand of “communism”) as well as from the ecological currents that accommodate themselves in one way or another to the capitalist system. This radical proposition aims not only to transform the relations of production, the productive apparatus, and the dominant consumption patterns but to create a new way of life, breaking with the foundations of the modern Western capitalist/industrial civilization.

I cannot develop the history of ecosocialism in this preface. I will, however, mention a few stepping-stones. They concern mainly the eco-Marxist tendency, but one can find—for example, in Murray Bookchin’s Anarchist Social Ecology, in Arne Naess’s leftist version of deep ecology, and among certain “degrowth” authors such as Paul Ariès—radically anticapitalist analysis and alternative solutions that are not too far from ecosocialism.

The idea of an ecological socialism—or a socialist ecology—didn’t start really to develop until the 1970s, when it appeared, under different forms, in the writings of certain pioneers of a “Red-Green” way of thinking: Manuel Sacristán in Spain, Raymond Williams in the United Kingdom, André Gorz and Jean-Paul Deléage in France, Barry Commoner in the United States (preceded by Rachel Carson in the 1960s), and Wolfgang Harich in East Germany, to name a few. The word ecosocialism came into use mainly after the 1980s, when it appeared in the German Green Party, a leftist tendency that designated itself as ecosocialist; its main spokespersons were Rainer Trampert and Thomas Ebermann. At the same time came the book The Alternative, by an East German dissident, Rudolf Bahro: a radical critique of the Soviet and East German model in the name of an ecological socialism. During the 1980s the US economist James O’Connor developed in his writings a new Marxist ecological approach and founded the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. Also during this period Frieder Otto Wolf, member of the European Parliament and one of the main leaders of the left wing of the German Green Party, would contribute—together with Pierre Juquin, a former French Communist leader converted to the red-green perspective—to a book called Europe’s Green Alternative (1992), a sort of first ecosocialist European program.

Meanwhile, in Spain, followers of Manuel Sacristán, such as Francisco Fernández Buey, developed socialist ecological arguments in the Barcelona journal Mientras Tanto (In the Meantime). In 2001 the Fourth International, a Marxist/revolutionary current present in several countries that was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, adopted an ecosocialist resolution titled “Ecology and Socialist Revolution” at its world congress. In the same year, Joel Kovel and the author of this book published an international “Ecosocialist Manifesto” that was widely discussed and inspired, in 2007, the founding in Paris of the International Ecosocialist Network (IEN). A second ecosocialist manifesto discussing global warming, the Belém Declaration, was signed by hundreds of people from dozens of countries and distributed at the World Social Forum in Belém in the state of Pará, Brazil, in 2009. A few months later, during the UN International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, the IEN disseminated an illustrated comic strip, Copenhagen 2049, among a hundred thousand demonstrators gathered under the banner “Change the System, Not the Climate!”

To this must be added, in the United States, the work of John Bellamy Foster, Fred Magdoff, Paul Burkett, and their friends from the well-known North American left journal Monthly Review, who argue for a Marxist ecology; the continued activity of Capitalism Nature Socialism under the editorship of Joel Kovel, author of The Enemy of Nature (2002); and, more recently, of Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and of the young circle of activists called Ecosocialist Horizons and its cofounder Quincy Saul, who recently edited an ecosocialist comic book called Truth and Dare (2014). There have been many important books, among which one of the most inclusive is Chris Williams’s Ecology and Socialism (2010). Equally important, in other countries, have been the ecosocialist and ecofeminist writings of Ariel Salleh and Terisa Turner; the journal Canadian Dimension, edited by ecosocialists Ian Angus and Cy Gonick; the writings of the Belgian Marxist Daniel Tanuro on climate change and the dead end of “green capitalism”; the research of French authors linked to the global justice movement, such as Jean-Marie Harribey; the philosophical writings of Arno Münster, an ecosocialist follower of Ernst Bloch and André Gorz; and the recent Manifeste Ecosocialiste (2014), edited by a committee of activists belonging to the radical wing of the French Front de Gauche (Left Front) and the 2014 European Ecosocialist Conference, which took place in Geneva.

It would be a mistake to conclude that ecosocialism is limited to Europe and North America: there is lively ecosocialist activity and discussion in Latin America. In Brazil, a local ecosocialist network has been established, with scholars and activists from various parties, unions, and peasant movements; in Mexico, there have been several publications discussing ecosocialism. The well-known Peruvian revolutionary leader Hugo Blanco has been active in the IEN, emphasizing the common agenda of the Indigenous movements and ecosocialism. In 2014 there were ecosocialist conferences in Quito and Caracas. Last but not least, there is growing interest in ecosocialism in China; Bellamy Foster’s and Kovel’s books have been translated into Chinese, and Chinese universities have organized several conferences on ecosocialism in the last few years.

It is important to emphasize that ecosocialism is a project for the future, a horizon of the possible, a radical anticapitalist alternative, but also—and inseparably—an agenda of action hic et nunc, here and now, around concrete and immediate proposals. Any victories, however partial or limited, that slow down climate change and ecological degradation are stepping-stones for more victories: they develop our confidence and organization to push for more. There is no guarantee that the ecosocialist alternative will triumph; very little can be expected from the powers that be. The only hope lies in mobilizations from below, like in Seattle in 1999, which saw the coming together of “turtles and teamsters” (ecologists and trade unionists) and the birth of the global justice movement, or Copenhagen in 2009, or Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010, when thirty thousand delegates from Indigenous, peasant, labor, and ecologist movements in Latin America and around the world participated in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

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The present collection of articles is not a systematic presentation of the ecosocialist ideas and practices, but a more modest attempt to explore some of its theoretical aspects and proposals as well as some concrete experiences of struggle. The book represents, of course, the opinions of its author, which don’t necessarily coincide with those of other ecosocialist thinkers or networks. There is no intention here to codify a doctrine or any sort of orthodoxy. One of the virtues of ecosocialism is precisely its diversity—its plurality, the multiplicity of its perspectives and approaches, which are often convergent or complementary but also sometimes divergent and even contradictory.