Written by Michael Löwy and first published at Radical Ecological Democracy
The
contemporary international political economy is marked by a great
contradiction. On a planet characterized by finite resources, the economy is
predicated upon an absurd and irrational logic of infinite expansion and
accumulation. With its fossil fuel based operations continually spewing carbon
into the earth’s atmosphere, the capitalist system’s productivist obsession
with profit has brought humanity to the brink of an abyss. Climate change is
accelerating much faster than predicted – the accumulation of CO2, the rise in
temperature, the melting of the polar ice, the drought, and the floods:
everything is happening too quickly. In fact, the scientific assessments are
now perceived as being too optimistic. The question is: after a certain level
of increase in temperature – say six degrees – would the planet still be
inhabitable for our species?
How should we
respond to this enormously frightening scenario? We have seen that partial
reforms are completely inadequate. The failure of the Kyoto protocol, for instance,
illustrated that it was impossible to meet the dramatic challenge of global
warming with the methods employed by the capitalist free market, such as the
emission rights stock exchange. What is needed is the replacement of the
micro-rationality of profit by a social and ecological macro-rationality, which
demands a veritable change of civilization. It is, however, impossible to work
towards that change without a profound reorientation aimed at replacing
contemporary energy sources by clean and renewable ones, such as wind or solar
energy. The first question, therefore, concerns the issue of control over the
means of production, especially decisions on investment and technological
change, which must be taken away from the banks and capitalist enterprises in
order to serve the society’s common good.
Ecosocialism is an attempt at providing a
radical civilizational alternative, based on the fundamental arguments of the
ecological movement and combining them with the Marxist critique of the
capitalist political economy. It’s an economic policy founded on non-monetary
and clearly articulated extra-economic criteria: ecological equilibrium of the
earth and fulfillment of the social needs of its people. Ecosocialism, thus,
questions the Marxist notion of destructive progress inherent in capitalism.
This new dialectical synthesis has been well articulated in the works of a
broad spectrum of authors, from James O’Connor to Joel Kovel, Ian Angus and
John Bellamy Foster, and from André Gorz to Elmar Altvater. It is as much a
critique of “market ecology”, which does not challenge the capitalist system,
as much as that of “productivist socialism”, which ignores the issue of natural
limits.
The
possibility of an ecosocialist transformation rests on public control over the
means of production and planning. It is characterized by a democratic and
pluralist debate at all those levels where decisions are to be taken, and a
process by which different propositions are submitted to the concerned people,
in the form of parties, platforms, or any other political movements, ultimately
leading to the election of delegates. This rigorous form of representative
democracy, however, must be complemented, and corrected by direct democracy,
where people choose directly between major options at the local, national and,
even global level.
The passage
from “destructive progress”, which accompanies capitalism to the final stage of
socialism, is a historical process, a permanent revolutionary transformation of
society, culture and mentalities. This transition would lead not only to a new
mode of production, and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an
alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization. It would be beyond
the reign of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by
advertising, and beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are
useless and/or harmful to the environment. It is important to emphasize that
such a process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of social
and political structures, and the active support of an ecosocialist program by
the vast majority of the population. The development of socialist consciousness
and ecological awareness is a process, where the decisive factor is people’s
own collective experience of struggle, from local and partial confrontations to
the radical change of society.
The countries
of the South would have priorities somewhat different from the global north.
They would need to build critical infrastructure, which is not currently
uniformly available to its people – railroads, hospitals, sewage systems, roads
etc. But there is no reason why this cannot be accomplished with a productive
system that is environment-friendly and based on renewable energy sources.
These countries would also need to grow great amounts of food to nourish their
population, but this can be much better achieved by an agricultural system
based on family-units, cooperatives or collectivist farms, rather than by the
destructive and anti-social methods of industrialized agro-business, based on
the intensive use of pesticides, chemicals and GMOs.
To dream and
to struggle for green socialism does not mean that we should not fight for
concrete reforms, which are needed urgently within the existing system. These
include a general moratorium on genetically modified organisms, a drastic
reduction in the emission of the greenhouse gases, the development of public
transportation, the taxation of polluting cars, the progressive replacement of
trucks by trains, a severe regulation of the fishing industry, as well as the
phasing out of pesticides and chemicals in the agro-industrial production.
These urgent
eco-social demands can lead to a gradual process of radicalization. We must not
accept limits on our aims according to the requirements of the capitalist
market or of “competitivity”. Each small victory, each partial advance can
immediately lead to a higher demand, to a more radical aim. Such struggles
around concrete issues are important, not only because partial victories are
welcome in themselves, but also because they contribute to raise ecological and
socialist consciousness. These victories will promote activity and
self-organization from below, and ultimately to a radical and revolutionary
transformation of the world.
Michael Löwy,
a Brazilian by birth, has lived in Paris since 1969.
Presently he
is an emerit Research Director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific
Research), and lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
Paris. Michael’s books and articles have been translated into twenty nine
languages. Among his main publications are:
Georg Lukacs
: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, Verso, 1981;
Romanticism
against the current of modernity (with Robert Sayre), Duke, Duke University
Press, 2001;
Fire Alarm.
Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the concept of history ‘, London, Verso, 2005;
Franz
Kafka, Subversive Dreamer, Ann Arbor, Michigan University Press, 2016.
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