What is
ecosocialism?
Ecosocialism
is a political current based on an essential insight: that the preservation of
the ecological equilibrium of the planet and therefore of an environment
favourable to living species – including our own – is incompatible with the
expansive and destructive logic of the capitalist system. The pursuit of
‘growth’ under the aegis of capital will in the short term – in the next
decades – lead to a catastrophe without precedent in human history: global
warming.
The planet’s
‘decision makers’ – billionaires, managers, bankers, investors, ministers,
politicians, business executives, and ‘experts’ – shaped by the short-sighted
and narrow-minded rationality of the system, obsessed by the imperatives of
growth and expansion, the struggle for market positions, competitiveness, and
profit margins, appear to be following the precept proclaimed by Louis XV a few
years before the French Revolution: ‘après moi le déluge’. The Flood of the
twenty-first century may take the form, like that of Biblical mythology, of an
inexorable rise of the waters – the result of climate change and the melting of
the world’s ice caps – drowning under its waves the coastal towns of human
civilisation: New York, London, Venice, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong.
Confronted
with the impending catastrophe, what does ecosocialism propose? Its central
premise already suggested by the term itself is that a non-ecological socialism
is a dead-end and a non-socialist ecology is unable to confront the present
ecological crisis. The ecosocialist proposition of combining ‘red’ – the
Marxist critique of capital and the project of an alternative society – and
‘green’ – the ecological critique of productivism – has nothing to do with the
so-called ‘red-green’ government coalitions of social-democrats and certain
Green parties on the basis of a social-liberal programme of capitalist
management.
Ecosocialism is a radical proposal – that is, one that deals with
the roots of the ecological crisis – which distinguishes itself both from the
productivist varieties of socialism in the twentieth century – either
social-democracy or the Stalinist brand of ‘communism’ – and from the
ecological currents that in one way or another accommodate themselves to the
capitalist system. A radical proposition that aims not only at the
transformation of the relations of production, of the productive apparatus, and
of the dominant consumption patterns, but at creating a new way of life,
breaking with the foundations of modern Western capitalist/ industrial
civilisation.
In this short
essay we cannot elaborate the history of ecosocialism. Instead, we will briefly
discuss the ideas of two important forerunners, William Morris and Walter
Benjamin, and follow with a short survey of the rise of ecosocialism since the
1970s, with special attention to the Peruvian indigenous leader Hugo Blanco.
William
Morris
William
Morris (1834-1896) was a revolutionary socialist allergic to the productivist
and consumerist ideology of modern capitalist civilisation. A brilliant and
gifted intellectual, poet, novelist, painter, architect, and decorator, he
occupies a singular place in the history of socialism in England. An associate
of the very select Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose members included Edward
Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and founder of the Society for the
Protection of Ancient Buildings, he was to become a socialist and the author,
after 1880, of truly revolutionary political and literary works located
somewhere between Marxism and anarchism.
In his famous
1894 article, ‘How I Became a Socialist’, he makes the following forceful
statement, associating in one single combat art and revolution: ‘Apart from the
desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and
is hatred of modern civilization.’1
His
best-known book, the utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890), proposes an imaginary
vision of a socialist England in the year 2102. Unlike the utopian socialists
of the nineteenth century, Morris retained a lesson common to Marx and the
anarchists: utopia cannot be accomplished by abandoning the corrupt society to
experiment with a harmonious life at its margins; the challenge is to transform
society itself by means of the collective action of the oppressed classes. In
other words, Morris was a revolutionary utopian and a libertarian Marxist. An
entire chapter of the book – ‘How the Change Came’ – tells the story of the
dramatic passage from ‘commercial slavery’ to freedom, through a civil war
between communism and counter-revolution, ending with the final victory of the
rebels.
Ecological
economist Serge Latouche sees Morris as a forerunner of ‘de- growth’, but it
seems more accurate to relate him to an ecosocialist position; in any case,
unlike most socialists of his time, he already perceived the disastrous effects
of the capitalist domination of nature. His passionate critique of capitalist
civilisation seems more relevant today than the productivism which prevailed in
the left for so long.
In an article
from 1884, ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’, he describes the commodities
produced by capitalist commercialism as ‘miserable makeshifts’ and adds the
following comment, whose strong ecological dimension was quite unusual at the
time:
These things
[...] I will for ever refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth but waste.
Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the
gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the
unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent;
the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it ,
[...] works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man [...] –
all things which serve the pleasures of people, free, manly and uncorrupted.
This is wealth.2
Morris
categorically rejects the Protestant work ethic: ‘the semi- theological dogma
that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer, is
hypocritical and false’ – a ‘convenient belief to those who live on the labour
of others’, that is, the ruling parasitical classes. Labour is only good when
‘due hope of rest and pleasure accompanies it’, which is not the case in
capitalist civilisation: ‘how rare a holiday it is for any of us to feel
ourselves as part of Nature, and unhurriedly, thoughtfully and happily to note
the course of our lives [...]’. To render labour attractive it has to be
liberated from the tyranny of capitalist profit, thanks to the appropriation of
the means of production by the community; labour will then respond to the real
needs of the body – food, clothing, lodging – and of the spirit – poetry, art,
science – and not the requirements of the market. After the revolution, labour
time will be substantially shortened, because ‘there will be no compulsion on
us to go on producing things we do not want, no compulsion on us to labour for
nothing’.3
In his 1884 lecture,
‘Art and Socialism’, Morris argued that only by a socialist transformation,
putting an end to the inexorable rules of Capitalist Commerce, can we overcome
the present sad condition, when ‘our green fields and clear waters, nay the
very air we breathe, are turned [...] to dirt. [...] Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die – choked by filth.’4 Ahead of his time, by his criticism of
the false needs created by commercialism, of the social and environmental
disasters generated by industrial capitalism, of the ‘repulsive’ labour at the
service of profit, and of the poisoning of nature by capitalist dirt, William
Morris can indeed be considered an early prophet of ecosocialism.
Walter
Benjamin
Like William
Morris, Walter Benjamin was one of the few Marxists in the years before 1945 to
propose a radical critique of the concept of ‘exploitation of nature’ and of
civilisation’s ‘murderous’ relationship with nature.
As early as
1928, in his book One-Way Street, Benjamin denounced as ‘imperialist’ the idea
of the domination of nature and proposed a new conception of work as ‘the
mastery of relations between nature and humanity’.5
Archaic
societies also lived in greater harmony with nature. In ‘The Paris of the
Second Empire in Baudelaire’ (1938) Benjamin calls into question the ‘mastery’
(Beherrschung) of nature and its ‘exploitation’ (Ausbeutung) by humans. As the
nineteenth-century anthropologist Bachofen had already shown, Benjamin insists
that ‘the murderous (mörderisch) idea of the exploitation of nature’ – a
dominant capitalist/modern concept from the nineteenth century on – did not
exist in matriarchal societies because nature was perceived as a generous
mother (schenkende Mutter).6
For Benjamin
– as for Friedrich Engels and the libertarian socialist Élisée Reclus, both
interested in Bachofen’s writings – it was a question not of a return to the
prehistoric past but of putting forward the prospect of a new harmony between
society and the natural environment. Only in a socialist society in which production
will no longer be based on the exploitation of human labour, ‘work [...] would
no longer be characterised as the exploitation of nature by man’.7
In the Theses
‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), his philosophical testament, Benjamin hails
Charles Fourier as the utopian visionary of ‘a labour that, far from exploiting
nature, is capable of extracting from it the virtual creations that lie dormant
in her womb’ (Thesis XI). This is not to say that Benjamin wanted to replace
Marxism with utopian socialism; he regarded Fourier as a supplement to Marx and
he insisted on the importance of Marx’s critical notes on the Gotha Programme’s
conformist stance on the nature of work.
For
social-democratic positivism – typified by Joseph Dietzgen – ‘the new conception
of labour amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency
is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat’. This is ‘a conception
of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before
the 1848 revolution’, observes Benjamin, and one which ‘already displays the
technocratic features later encountered in Fascism’.8
In Thesis IX
‘On the concept of History’, Walter Benjamin characterised the destructive
progress that accumulates catastrophes as a ‘storm’. The same word ‘storm’
appears in the title (which almost seems to be inspired by Benjamin) of the
latest book by James Hansen, a NASA climatologist and one of the world’s
foremost specialists on climate change. Published in 2009, the title of the
book is Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate
Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. Hansen is no revolutionary,
but his analysis of the coming ‘storm’ – which is for him, as for Benjamin, an
allegory for something much more menacing – is impressive in its lucidity:
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.9
Ecosocialism
since 1970
The truth of
the matter is that during most of the twentieth century the dominant streams of
the labour movement – trade-unionism, social- democracy, Soviet-style communism
– with few exceptions, ignored ecological issues. On the other hand, ecological
movements and Green Parties – except for some smaller leftist currents – had no
sympathy for socialism.
The idea of
an ecological socialism – or a socialist ecology – only began really to develop
in the 1970s, when it appeared, under different forms, in the writings of
certain pioneers of a ‘Red-Green’ way of thinking: Manuel Sacristán (Spain),
Raymond Williams (UK), André Gorz and Jean-Paul Déléage (France), Rachel Carson
and Barry Commoner (US), Wolfgang Harich (German Democratic Republic), and
others.
A few words
on André Gorz, perhaps the most influential of these pioneers of ecosocialism:
an existentialist philosopher – a friend and follower of Jean-Paul Sartre –
with a strong Marxist background, André Gorz attempted, from the 1970s, to
bring socialism and ecology together, building on their common opposition to
capitalist productivism and consumerism.
In a 1980 essay he wrote: ‘Only
socialism can break with the logic of maximal profit, of maximal waste, of
maximal production and consumption, and replace it by economic common sense:
maximum satisfaction with minimum expense.’ The idea of extra-economic and
non-market values is foreign to capitalism. ‘It is, however, essential to
communism, but cannot take form as positive negation of the dominant system
unless the ideas of self-limitation, stability, equity, and gratuity receive a
practical illustration [...].’10
Although the
following will mainly address the eco-Marxist tendency, one can also find
radically anti-capitalist analyses and alternative solutions that are not too
far from ecosocialism in Murray Bookchin’s anarchist social ecology, in Arne
Naess’s left version of deep ecology, and among certain ‘de-growth’ authors
(Paul Ariès).
The word
‘ecosocialism’ apparently began to be used mainly after the 1980s with the
appearance, in the German Green Party, of a leftist tendency which called
itself ‘ecosocialist’; its main spokespersons were Rainer Trampert and Thomas
Ebermann. At the same time the book The Alternative, by the East German
dissident Rudolf Bahro appeared, which develops a radical critique of the
Soviet and GDR model, in the name of an ecological socialism. During the 1980s
the US economist James O’Connor developed a new Marxist ecological approach in
his writings and created the journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. During
the same years Frieder Otto Wolf, Member of the European Parliament and one of
the main leaders of the German Green Party’s left wing, co-authored with Pierre
Juquin, a former French Communist leader converted to the Red-Green
perspective, a book called Europe’s Green Alternative,11 which one might call
the first ecosocialist European programme.
Meanwhile, in Spain, followers of
Manuel Sacristán such as Francisco Fernández Buey, developed socialist
ecological arguments in the Barcelona journal Mientras Tanto. In 2001, the
Fourth International adopted an ecosocialist resolution, Ecology and Socialist
Revolution, at its world congress. In the same year Joel Kovel and the present
author published an International Ecosocialist Manifesto, which was widely
discussed and inspired the foundation in Paris in 2007 of the Ecosocialist
International Network (EIN). A Second ecosocialist manifesto, addressing global
warming, the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration, signed by hundreds of persons from
dozens of countries, was distributed at the World Social Forum in Belem, State
of Para, Brazil, in 2009. A few months later, during the UN International
Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, the EIN distributed an illustrated
comic strip, Copenhagen 2049 to the hundreds of thousands demonstrating under
the banner ‘Change the System, not the Climate!’.
To this one
has to add, in the US, 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 and Socialism, under the editorship of Joel Kovel, the
author of The Enemy of Nature,12 and, more recently, of Salvatore Engel-Di
Mauro; the young circle of activists called Ecosocialist Horizons (Quincy
Saul), who recently edited an ecosocialist comic-strip Truth and Dare (2014);
not to mention many important books, among which one of the most inclusive is
Chris Williams’s Ecology and Socialism (2010).
Equally important, in other
countries: the ecosocialist/eco-feminist 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 ; the recent Manifeste Ecosocialiste (2013) published by the French Parti
de Gauche (Left Party); and the European Ecosocialist Conferences which took
place in Geneva (2014) and Bilbao (2016).
While the
attitude of the communist and the green parties towards ecosocialism have been
cool – for diametrically opposed reasons! – discussion of the ecosocialist
thesis has recently begun to appear in their newspapers and journals. The same
applies to the Party of the European Left, which approved, in 2014, a
resolution sympathetic to the ideas of ecosocialism.
Hugo Blanco
It would be a
mistake to conclude that ecosocialism is limited to Europe and North
America; there is, in fact, 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. And recently (2014) there have been ecosocialist conferences in
Quito and Caracas. Last but not least there is a growing interest in
ecosocialism in China where the books of John Bellamy Foster and Joel Kovel
have been translated, and several conferences on ecosocialism have occurred in
the last few years organised by Chinese universities.
But
ecosocialism is not only a matter for scholars and intellectuals; in many
countries social activists and popular leaders are taking an interest in it.
Indigenous communities in Latin America are presently in the forefront of the
socio-ecological struggle against the destruction of forests and the poisoning
of rivers and the land by oil and mining multinationals. One of the main
leaders of these movements of anti-systemic resistance is the Peruvian
indigenist revolutionary fighter and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco.
Initially
affiliated to the Fourth International, in the early 1960s Hugo Blanco
organised a large peasant movement in the Convención Valley in Peru, which had
its own armed self-defence brigades. Arrested by the police and condemned to
death, he was saved by an international campaign of solidarity which included
Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertrand Russell. Several times
elected to parliament, he was forced into exile by Fujimori’s dictatorship in
1992. After his return to Peru he joined efforts with the Confederación
Campesina de Perú (CCP), the major Peruvian Peasant Union. Today Hugo Blanco’s
main reference is the Mexican Zapatista movement; he is the editor of the
periodical Lucha Indígena and despite being over 80 years old still in the
front lines of indigenous struggles in Peru.
During the
last decade Blanco became increasingly interested in ecosocialism, which he saw
as the continuation of the collectivist traditions of the indigenous
communities and their respect for Pachamama, Mother Earth.13 He signed the
Belem Ecosocialist Declaration and, heading an indigenous Peruvian delegation,
took part in the International Ecosocialist Conference which took place in
Belem after the World Socialist Forum of 2009. He has often argued that the
indigenous communities, in Latin America and elsewhere, have practiced
ecosocialism for hundreds of years.
Conclusion
It is
important to emphasise that ecosocialism is a project for the future, a horizon
of the possible, a radical anti-capitalist alternative, but also, and
inseparably, an agenda for the here and now around concrete and immediate
proposals. Any victories, however partial and 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’.14 There is no
guarantee of the triumph of the ecosocialist alternative; there is very little
to be expected from the powers that be.
The only hope lies in the mobilisations
from below, as in Seattle in 1999, which saw the coming together of ‘turtles’
(ecologists) and ‘teamsters’ (trade-unionists) and the birth of the Global
Justice Movement; or as in Copenhagen in 2009, when hundreds of thousands of
demonstrators gathered around the slogan ‘Change the System, not the Climate’;
or in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010, when 30,000 delegates from indigenous,
peasant, trade-union, and ecologist movements from Latin America and the world
participated at the People’s Conference on Climate Change, whose document
denouncing the imperialist destruction of Mother Earth echoes Walter Benjamin’s
writings from the 1930s.
Notes
1. William
Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist’ (1894), Political Writings, ed. A.L. Morton,
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979, p. 243.
2. Morris,
‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’, Political Writings, p. 91.
3. Morris,
Political Writings, pp. 96, 97, 107.
4. Morris,
‘Art and Socialism’, Political Writings, p. 116.
5. Walter
Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (trans. J. A. Underwood), London:
Penguin, 2008, p. 87.
6. Walter
Benjamin, ‘Das Passagen-Werk’, Gesammelte Schriften (GS), Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, VI, 1, p. 456.
7. ‘Das
Passagen-Werk’, I, p. 47.
8. Benjamin,
‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, GS, I, 2, pp. 698-699.
9. James
Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate
Catastrophe and our Last Chance to Save Humanity, New York: Bloomsbury, 2009,
p. IX.
10. André
Gorz, Ecologica, New York : Seagull Books, 2010 (Paris: Galilée, 2008, pp.
98-99).
11. Montreal:
Black Rose, 1992.
12. Joel Kovel,
The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?, London and
New York: Zed Books, 2002.
13. See his
book Nosotros los indios (We the Indigenous), Buenos Aires: Herramienta, 2010.
14. Chris
Williams, Ecology and Socialism, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010, p. 237.
