An Outline of ‘Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia’

Written by Hans Baer and first published at Climate and Capitalism

Introduction. In a previous article, I described Hans Baer’s essay “Toward Democratic Eco-Socialism as the next World System” as “an important contribution that merits study and discussion among all ecosocialists.”

Now Hans has written a book that both elaborates on the ideas he expressed in that essay, and outlines the views of a range of socialists on the struggle against capitalism and for an ecological civilization.

Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia: Transitioning to an Alternative World System is published by Berghahn Books. The outline below was prepared for Climate & Capitalism by the author. Like his earlier essay, this book is an important contribution to the ongoing process of ecosocialist development and clarification. I hope it will stimulate wide discussion about what the aims of ecosocialism are and how they can be achieved. —Ian Angus

OUTLINE OF ‘DEMOCRATIC ECO-SOCIALISM AS A REAL UTOPIA’

by Hans Baer

This book is guided by the recognition that social systems, whether they exist at the local, regional, or global level, do not last forever. Capitalism as a globalizing political economic system that has produced numerous impressive technological innovations, some beneficial and others destructive, is a system with many contradictions.

More so than in earlier stages of capitalism, transnational corporations and allied organizations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the European Union, make or break governments and politicians around the world.

Capitalism has been around for above five hundred years but manifests so many contradictions that it must be replaced by an alternative world system — one committed to social parity and justice, democratic processes, environmental sustainability, a safe climate, and preservation of biodiversity.

As delineated in this book, democratic eco-socialism, in the terminology of the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright, constitutes a real utopia, a vision that is theoretically achievable but requiring much reconceptualization and social experimentation.

Chapter 1 focuses on what might be its principal contradictions in terms of social justice and environmental sustainability, namely:

profit making, economic growth, and the treadmill of production and consumption;

social inequality within and between nation-states;

population growth as a by-product of poverty;

depletion of natural resources and environmental degradation;

climate change; and

resource wars.

Given that climate change scenarios prompt us to imagine dystopian visions of the future, this chapter explores several mainstream and radical worst-case scenarios that humanity must avoid in order to preserve itself as a species along with other species.

Chapter 2 examines the discrepancies between the ideals and realities of socialism as they played out during the twentieth century, particularly in five contrasting countries, namely, Russia and the Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, North Korea, and Cuba. This chapter examines various interpretations that seek to determine the nature of post-revolutionary societies, asking whether they were instances of

“actually existing socialism” or some form of state socialism;

aborted transitions between capitalism and socialism;

state capitalism; or

new class societies.

This chapter also examines positive and negative features of post-revolutionary societies, particularly in terms of the economy and workplace, social stratification, and environmental problems. Their mixed record along with the fact that even a reformed and supposedly more environmentally friendly capitalism may spell the end of much of humanity strongly suggests that the concept of socialism must be rejuvenated to ensure social parity, democratic processes, and environmental sustainability for humanity.

The growing realization of the gravity of the global ecological crisis and anthropogenic climate change has prompted the development of numerous mainstream and countercultural visions of the future which are explored in Chapter 3. Ultimately a shortcoming of these future scenarios is that most are premised primarily on ecological modernization, which advocates a shift to renewable energy sources and energy efficiency but does not adequately address issues of social parity.

A shortcoming of the Green New Deal and postgrowth models is that they assume that some version of capitalism can function as a steady-state or zero-growth economy, when history tells us that capitalism in inherently committed to continual economic expansion as part and parcel of its pursuit of profits.

Chapter 4 argues that socialism remains a vision, one which requires that various individuals and groups grapple with alternative visions of socialism. As humanity enters an era of catastrophic climate change accompanied by tumultuous environmental and social consequences, it will have to consider alternatives that will circumvent the dystopian scenarios depicted earlier.

After briefly reviewing several Marxian-inspired future scenarios, this chapter seek to reconceptualize socialism by examining the notions of democratic socialism, eco-socialism, and democratic eco-socialism and critically examines efforts to create socialism for the twenty-first century in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Cuba. It also examines the pros and cons of Samir Amin’s notion of delinking as a strategy for escaping the clutches of global capitalism.

Chapter 5 acknowledges that anti-systemic movements are sure to be a permanent features of the world’s political landscape so long as capitalism remains a hegemonic political-economic system. It examines the role of specific anti-systemic movements, namely, the labour, ethnic and indigenous rights, women’s, anti-corporate globalization, peace, and environmental and climate movements, in creating a socio-ecological revolution.

They are a crucial component of moving humanity to an alternative world system, but the process is a tedious and convoluted one with no guarantees, especially given the disparate nature of these movements.

While not seeking to create a blue print per se for creating an alternative world system that will be manifested in different ways in the many countries around the world, Chapter 6 proposes several system-challenging reforms that potentially could facilitate a transition from the existing capitalist world system to a democratic eco-socialist world system. These include:

the creation of new left parties designed to capture the state;

emissions taxes at the sites of production;

public and social ownership of the means of production;

increasing social equality and achieving a sustainable population size;

workers’ democracy;

meaningful work and shortening the work week;

challenging or rethinking the growth paradigm;

energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, appropriate technology, and green jobs;

sustainable public transportation and travel;

sustainable food production and forestry;

resisting the culture of consumption and adopting sustainable and meaningful consumption patterns;

sustainable trade; and

sustainable settlement patterns and local communities.

Chapter 7, the conclusion, argues that as humanity proceeds into the 21st century, its survival as a species appears to be more and more precarious, particularly given the impact of climate change in a multiplicity of ways looms on the horizon. More so than has ever been the case, it is essential for critical scholars and activists to envision future scenarios and strategies for achieving an alternative world system.

Perhaps more important is developing strategies to shift from the existing system of globalized capitalism to an alternative that transcends its numerous contradictions and limitations.

While presently and for the foreseeable future, the notion that democratic eco-socialism may be eventually implemented in any society, developed or developing, or in several linked societies may appear absurd, history tells us that social changes can occur very quickly once certain social structural and environmental conditions have reached a tipping point, a term that has become popular in climate science.

Climate Change Brings Socialism and Science Together

A review of A Redder Shade of Green by Ian Angus

Written by Eve Ottenberg and first published at Truthout

Thanks to climate change, science and socialism have become entwined in ways previously unimaginable. Science brings the news that, unless we act swiftly to control climate change, we will inhabit a dying planet. Socialism traces the causes of this catastrophe to the destructive and chaotic growth model of capitalism and advocates for a different system. Meanwhile, sensing the source of danger to their profits, corporate and government reactionaries fuel disinformation campaigns to discredit science and confuse the public. This has been going on for years, with disastrous results.

Ian Angus' new book, A Redder Shade of Green, (red for socialist revolution, green for ecological revolution) is about the prospect of ecosocialism in the face of capitalist ecocide. Angus has written previously about the "Anthropocene," a name for our era that emphasizes the centrality of human-influenced climate change. He does not accuse humanity as a whole of environmental destruction, but only a small sliver of humanity -- the capitalist class, which has left a gigantic, planet-sized carbon footprint. Angus repeatedly stresses that billions of people have a negligible impact on climate change and that the overpopulation argument -- which blames humanity as a whole for climate change -- has been used to distract and undermine an effective, ecosocialist movement. The US military has a hugely destructive impact on the environment. So does ExxonMobil. The many citizens of Bangladesh, reeling from climate-change-exacerbated flooding, do not.

So, what about the many environmentalists who believe a primary cause of climate change is that there are too many people on earth? Angus tries to persuade them otherwise. He observes that in the 1960s and 1970s, overpopulation was used to explain environmental degradation as well as poverty in the global south, thus providing a solution to two problems at once in a way that does not question capitalism. It took the likes of Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin and Barry Commoner to initiate an environmentalism rooted in radical social critique, he writes, adding, "Their analysis was rejected by the traditional conservationists, the wealthy organizations and individuals whose primary concern was protecting the wilderness areas for rich tourists and hunters." Indeed, it was the Sierra Club that financed Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, a book heavily promoted by "liberal Democrats who correctly saw it as an alternative to the radical views of Carson, Commoner and Bookchin." Angus adds that Ehrlich's book "became a huge best-seller, and it played a central role in derailing radical environmentalism." The population bombers faded away, but now they are back, shifting the environmental threat focus from corporations to people.

"The populationists' error," Angus writes, "is that they assume there is no alternative" to capitalism. They assume more people means more food means more modern agriculture, which is hugely ecologically destructive. But, Angus argues, there are other agricultural models; moreover, working with the food supply we already have, there are other ways to do things. "Existing food production is in fact more than enough to feed many more people." Without current waste, it could feed billions more.

Angus observes that "too many people" is in fact "code for too many poor people, too many foreigners, and too many people of color." According to Commoner: "pollution begins in corporate boardrooms, not family bedrooms."

Socialism has not always been ecologically conscious, and for much of the 20th century it wasn't, with disastrous results. "The socialism practiced by the countries of the Socialist Camp replicated the development model of capitalism," said Cuban official Oswaldo Martinez in 2009, who, Angus reports, considered this competition, a la USSR, China and East European socialist countries, a mistake. A Redder Shade of Green is a very serious attempt to bury that past once and for all, and to ground socialism in scientific environmentalism. This, fortunately, has been socialism's direction for several decades. Not so for capitalism. "Pouring crap into the environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and it isn't going to stop so long as capitalism survives," Angus writes.

Since the 1990s, socialism has become much greener. Cuba and Bolivia have led the way. Bolivian President Evo Morales is quoted: "Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under capitalism we are not human beings but consumers … It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger … 'Climate change' has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life." Or as Barry Commoner is quoted: "The present course of human civilization is suicidal."

Angus writes that how we build socialism "will be profoundly shaped by the state of the planet we must build it on." This idea that, in order to create a socialist future, we must recognize how much damage capitalism will do to our planet dates back to Marx's concept of a "metabolic rift" between capitalist society and nature, writes Angus. The damage is already severe. "Without radical economic change, it's more likely that we will have a three degree [temperature] increase by the end of the century and maybe four," Angus observes. "That … would be catastrophic … substantial parts of the earth … would be very difficult, even impossible to survive in."

In his previous book, Facing the Anthropocene, Angus reported on the growing scientific consensus that capitalism's most ferocious and brutal assault on the environment really took off after 1945. This postwar period has been dubbed "The Great Acceleration" and was marked by rising global temperatures, species extinction, ocean acidification and the ubiquity of plastics, which now literally pervade every corner and crevice of the Earth, including almost all tap water. Back in the 1970s, Commoner drew attention "to dramatic increases … in materials not found in nature, synthetics that cannot degrade and so become permanent blights on Earth." The Second World War, Angus writes in his new book, accelerated "fossil fuel production and use, the automobilization of Western society, corporate concentration and the rise of monopolies, the mass introduction of synthetic petrochemical-based products, the industrialization of agriculture."

Fighting this array is daunting. Humanity's success with restoring the ozone, cited by some scientists and environmental activists as a model approach to global warming, is not really comparable to what will be needed to combat climate change. But it is worth noting that that success was achieved not by a chloroflourocarbon (CFC) cap and trade system but "by an outright ban." That's what would work: a ban on fossil fuels. But Angus says, if "CFCs had been as central to capitalism … as fossil fuels are, the ozone layer might have been gone by now."

The International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), launched in the 1980s by a group of scientists and sponsored by the International Council for Science "coordinated the efforts," Angus writes, "of thousands of scientists around the world from 1990 to 2015." It was prompted by environmental concerns. Perhaps this group's most disturbing discovery was that in the past, when the climate changed, whatever the cause, it did so quite rapidly. "What we experience today as extreme but rare heat waves could become … frequent occurrences," Angus writes. "If we cross such a tipping point, ecosystems won't have time to adjust, species won't have time to evolve, and human societies might not have time to adapt." It was the IGBP that agreed on the new terminology, "the Anthropocene" and "the Great Acceleration."

Regarding World War II, Angus observes that mainstream economists "typically treat wars as anomalies, as interruptions in capitalism's normally peaceful development. In fact, capitalist growth in the 20th century depended heavily on military production and spending. The most destructive war in human history triggered a radical acceleration of environmental destruction that continues to this day."

Late capitalist agriculture is a major factor in environmental degradation. The chapter "Third World Farming and Biodiversity" argues against industrial farming and for saving biodiversity by means other than nature preserves. It advocates peasant farming enhanced by technological advancements in sustainability. "Some forms of agriculture destroy life, others preserve and expand it," Angus writes. Third world sustainable farming is much friendlier to biodiversity than large-scale "production of bananas, sugar cane, tea, technified coffee and cacao, soybeans, cottons, pastures."

The struggle of peasant farmers for human rights, the struggle for sustainable agriculture and the efforts to preserve biodiversity are one. The umbrella organization, La Via Campesina, calls for "the conjoining of the rights of people to consume food to the rights of people to produce their own food." According to the book Nature's Matrix, which Angus quotes: "Joining the worldwide struggle of millions of small-scale farmers clamoring for food sovereignty is more likely to yield long-term biodiversity benefits than buying a patch of so-called 'pristine' forest."

In other words, industrial farming is the problem. "Without an agro-ecological revolution," Angus writes, "the Sixth Extinction cannot be stopped."

Angus advocates an inclusive approach. Many environmentalists, liberal politicians and scientists are not socialists, and will not share all this book's conclusions. But if more people can be persuaded of the wisdom of, say, Rachel Carson, instead of Paul Ehrlich, humanity has a better chance of attacking environmental degradation at its root. The neo-Malthusian view -- that too many people is the problem -- needs to be debated and defeated. So does the corporate-sponsored disinformation campaign promoting climate change denial. Individual scientists who speak up about climate change deserve to be defended from well-funded corporate smear assaults. And socialism's move away from its 20th century, environmentally unfriendly models needs to be encouraged.

Of course, even if all these steps are taken, the hour is still very late.

"The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized," Rachel Carson wrote. For socialists, there has always been a focus on what Marxist critic Georg Lukacs called "militant participation in the great human struggle for liberation." And a struggle for real liberation now includes the planet.

Review of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil capitalism and the crisis of the Earth system by Ian Angus

Written by Allan Todd

The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers to the start of a new geological epoch which, according to most leading Earth System scientists, has now replaced the Holocene. It means geological strata deposits will now be, for the first time, massively dominated by those of recent human origin - especially the release of carbon and other greenhouse gases as a consequence of increased burning of fossil fuels - as opposed to those due to natural changes.

Most scientists see the real start of the Anthropocene as beginning after the ‘Great 

Acceleration’ in fossil fuel use from 1950 onwards.

During the 1990s, research projects on the Earth System, and on the nature of past climate changes, revealed that some past climate changes often came rapidly, after certain key ‘tipping points’ had been passed. This evidence of past ‘ecological volatility’ has allowed scientists to establish that, in the geological past, relatively small changes/stimuli have driven great - and sometimes abrupt - qualitative changes in the very delicately-balanced Earth System.

In 2007, a study began to identify which of Earth’s processes are most important to maintaining climate stability. The first results, published in 2009, dealt with the relatively-stable climate history of the Holocene epoch, during which humans developed agriculture. 

Nine ecological processes - or ‘Planetary Boundaries’ - were identified as having maintained the safe operating space for humanity over the past 12,000 years.

The conclusion was that for 3 of these planetary boundaries - climate change, biochemical flows (especially nitrogen pollution), and biodiversity loss - Earth was already in the danger zone, and for 3 others was nearly there. In 2015, further research showed that the danger zone for land-system change had also been passed.

Some Earth System scientists argue that the emergence of the Anthropocene epoch is down to the activities of the entire human species. Others - like Ian Angus - place the blame on the particular economic system which has come to dominate global economic and political developments since 1945.  

Those who take the latter view argue that the vast majority of these negative changes result from capitalism itself - and especially post-1950 capitalism which has been driven by what they term ‘Fossil Capitalism’’. Certainly, the changes in Earth System trends since 1950 produce remarkably similar-shaped graphs to the main socio-economic trends during the period 1950-2010:

Ecosocialists in particular see the Anthropocene not just as a biophysical phenomenon, but also as a socio-ecological phenomenon. In particular, it is associated with capitalism’s drive for profit and accumulation - even if that profit comes from unsustainable growth. However, whilst global capitalism tries to expand infinitely, the Earth is not infinite.

From the beginnings of industrial capitalism 200 years ago, it was clear to contemporary observers such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and William Morris that capitalism had anti-ecological characteristics. However, the rift in the Earth’s carbon cycle was considerably widened by the invention of the internal combustion engine and then the aeroplane at the turn of the 19th Century. and 20th. Century - because this led in turn to a rapidly-growing market for petroleum.

Both US oil and chemical corporations were given a huge boost after 1945 via the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction. The Standard Oil Company, the biggest US oil company, benefitted most of all. This, and the discovery and exploitation of massive sources of cheap crude oil in the Middle East triggered off what became known as ‘The Golden Age’ from 1950 to 1973.

It was this which made the Great Acceleration possible: between 1976 and 1973, the world consumed more commercial energy than had been used in the entire period from 1800 to 1945.  History since 1950, as far as the Earth System perspective is concerned, has largely been an account of the expansion of fossil capitalism into every aspect of life and every part of the globe.

The gross inequalities arising from global neoliberal capitalism are not just economic - they also relate to unequal exposure to the dangers of climate change and its resulting extreme weather events. Globally, 99% of weather disaster casualties are in developing countries, and 75% of them are women. The Global South suffers far more than the Global North, and within the South, the very poorest countries are hit hardest.

Even within the North, the same climate-change inequalities hold true - as was shown by the impacts and aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or Hurricane Sandy in 2012. No billionaires numbered among the casualties in the North, no corporate owners or executives in the South have to witness their children dying from malnutrition.

The first signs of serious climate-change impacts can be seen in the increasing numbers of people displaced by droughts, water-shortages, desertification and starvation. Incredibly, these mass displacements - and the much worse effects of climate change still to come - have led the US in particular to identify global warming as a ‘threat to Western security’!

In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a study relating to abrupt climate change - the conclusion was that wealthy nations such as the US would need to build ‘virtual fortresses’ to avoid consequences such as skirmishes, battles and even wars over increasingly scare resources such as energy supplies, water and food. In particular, borders would need to be militarily defended against ‘unwanted starving immigrants’ from poorer countries seeking places of greater safety.  That is the stark scenario of the environmental apartheid which is already emerging.

This book, by Ian Angus, was published last year, and is an essential read for all concerned about climate change - and especially so for all ecosocialists.

Allan Todd is member of Allerdale & Copeland Green Party and a Supporter of Green Left & the Ecosocialist Network 

Can Marxism strengthen our understanding of ecological crises?

John Bellamy Foster wrote in the foreward to Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, by Ian Angus:

‘It’s capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it.’

Foster the author of Marx’s Ecology replies to a critic, ecosocialist writer Saral Sarkar, on metabolic rift, sustainable human development,  degrowth, population growth, and industrialism.

QUESTIONS FOR JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

by Saral Sarkar

Ecologise, March 17, 2017

Prof. Bellamy Foster is a renowned scholar. If his scholarship is also meant to serve the cause he espouses, he may be requested to please reply to the following questions/comments of a reader of this article:

Of what use is it to replace the commonly used and well understood term “great ecological crisis” through the hardly known and not well understood long Marxian term “metabolic rift in the human relation to the earth?”

There are some more statements/phrases in the article that throw up critical comments: e.g.”Creating a world of sustainable human development …” This caused me to raise my eyebrows. “Sustainable development” has since the 1980s been the buzzword of capitalist development economics. But the term meant nothing new. It was like dehydrated pure drinking water. Of course, Bellamy Foster is using the additional attribute “human”. But “human development” has also been around for long. Doesn’t it mean in plain English sustainable economic growth?

A straightforward question: Doesn’t Bellamy Foster think that Eco-Socialism’s immediate goal should be to initiate a policy of de-growth, a contracting economy, and a contracting population? And the long-term goal a socialist steady-state economy at a low level?

We know how much ecological havoc the socialist Soviet Union and other “socialist” countries of Eastern Europe wreaked. It is therefore not right to say, I think, “It is capitalism … that constitutes our “burning house.” Isn’t it better, because truer, that it is industrialism that constitutes for the last two hundred years our burning house, capitalism and “socialism” being merely two political variants of the same industrial way of living?

AGAINST THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE EARTH:

A RESPONSE TO SARAL SARKAR

by John Bellamy Foster

Ecologise, March 26, 2017

I appreciate Saral Sarkar’s questions regarding my Foreword to Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene. I will attempt to answer his queries as briefly as I can and in the order in which they were asked. I have numbered my responses for the convenience of the reader.

(1) There is no sense in which Marx’s concept of an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” (or metabolic rift), as this concept is employed by ecosocialists today, can be seen as a substitute for the notion of global ecological crisis. Marx’s development of a socioecological systems approach (rooted in the notion of metabolism) grew out of the natural-scientific discussions of his time and prefigured the rise of the ecosystem concept and later Earth System analysis. It is closely connected to our current scientific understanding.

Thus, an article in Scientific Reports in March 2017 refers to the “metabolic rift,” citing Marx’s Capital, in an attempt to address some of our contemporary human-ecological problems. Similarly, scientists in the Anthropocene Working Group define the Anthropocene as an “anthropogenic rift” in the Earth System (or Earth metabolism). Indeed, rather than displacing the notion of global ecological crisis, Marx’s metabolic rift can be seen as adding clarity to our understanding of that very real crisis, and particularly the dialectical interconnections between its social and ecological aspects.

(2) The concept of “sustainable human development” was highlighted in Paul Burkett’s now classic essay, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” published in the October 2005 issue of Monthly Review. Marx in volume 3 of Capital presented what is undoubtedly the most radical conception of sustainability ever introduced, arguing that individuals don’t own the earth; that even all the people in all the countries of the world don’t own the earth, but that they simply hold it in trust for future generations and must maintain it and even improve it as good heads of the household. He defined socialism as a social formation in which the associated producers rationally regulate their metabolism with the earth in such a way as to promote genuine human needs, while at the same time economizing on the expenditure of energy.

It is certainly possible, therefore, on the basis of classical historical materialism, to develop a revolutionary conception of “sustainable human development”—one which is radically opposed to “sustainable development” as defined by neoclassical economics. Sustainable human development, cannot be taken as meaning sustainable economic growth—a term which from an Earth system perspective is a contradictio in adjecto.

Surely it would be a fatal error for the left to disarm itself intellectually by abandoning contested concepts like sustainability and ecology—or, for that matter, equality, democracy, and freedom—simply because they have been appropriated and distorted in various ways by the dominant ideology. We need to fight for our own perspectives.

(3) Degrowth, in the form in which it is usually presented today, cannot be the principal organizing objective of the ecosocialist movement, since it neither addresses the immediate ecological threat nor engages with the need for structural change in the capital system. Given the planetary emergency, the ecological movement’s primary goal at present has to be one of mitigating climate change, which however cannot be separated from a host of other social and ecological problems.

In the Anthropocene, we are faced with the eventual prospect, if society continues to follow the path of business as usual, of the end of civilization (in the sense of organized human society) and even potentially of the human species itself. But well before that hundreds of millions of people will be affected by increasing droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events of all kinds.

This requires a radical change in the “political and economic hegemony,” as Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research puts it. Anderson also insists on an immediate moratorium on economic growth and on all attempts to spur growth at the expense of the environment. Conservation is needed as well as shifts in resource use, technology, and use values. Fossil fuels have to be kept in the ground.

All of this is in line with what is argued by degrowth theorists. But the whole concept of degrowth has been distorted by the fact that it is generally used to put the dominant concept of economic growth on its head, arguing simply for downsizing the system, or putting it in reverse, without engaging in a full critique of capitalism or the promotion of the revolutionary structural changes that would be needed in confronting the capital system. There is certainly no question that we need to move toward a steady-state economy in Herman Daly’s sense of no net capital formation. The weight of the economy in the rich countries of the advanced capitalist world needs to be reduced.

But we should not make the error of seeing this as just an issue of scale as degrowth theorists commonly do. The entire structure of the capital system itself needs to be overcome and replaced by a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability. Failure to address revolutionary structural change is the main weakness of the degrowth perspective, which has not yet escaped the ideology of capital. Thus, leading degrowth thinkers like Serge Latouche insist that degrowth in their terms is somehow compatible with capitalism.

(4) It is true that all other things being equal increased population places more burdens on the carrying capacity of the earth. But crude Malthusian perspectives are not at all useful in addressing the ecological problem. It is capital accumulation, not population increase, that is the major factor in climate change. Although carbon emissions have to cease everywhere on earth within the next few decades—i.e., the world has to reach zero net emissions by 2050—the biggest reductions in emissions will necessarily have to occur in the rich countries, where per capita carbon emissions are highest.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that the wealthy countries, which have the highest per capita carbon emissions, are not those countries with the highest rates of population growth. Indeed, the poorest countries with the highest population growth rates tend to be those countries with the least per capita impact on the climate.
Population growth in capitalism is a dependent variable. It is dependent on conditions of capitalism and imperialism in a given state or region, and on such factors as employment, health, education, women’s rights, etc. An excellent book on this topic is Ian Angus and Simon Butler, Too Many People?

(5) The question of whether it is industrialism rather than capitalism that is the source of our “burning house” is an odd one for someone with a connection to ecosocialism to ask. The argument that Sarkal presents here is that because the Soviet Union too did damage to its environment, and it was industrialized but non-capitalist, that we should therefore move away from analysis of historically specific social formations, like capitalism (or formerly “actually existing socialism”), and instead we should just attribute the whole problem to the more general, abstract notion of industrialization.

The same logic if carried farther would lead one to argue that, since pre-industrial societies also destroyed their environments, industrialization is not a sufficient explanation. We should therefore attribute the environmental problem to human society in general. And, then, since humans are social animals, society itself can be considered an insufficient explanation, so we should attribute the ecological problem to the very existence of human beings. Ergo there are simply too many people.

Such an approach is not very helpful in that it removes all the crucial historical elements of the problem, and also our ability to act in rational ways. What is beyond question is that capitalism is a system dedicated to capital accumulation above all.

As Marx put it, the capitalist only knows “Go on, Go on” (Grow, Grow), i.e., M-C-M´… M-C-M´´… M-C-M´´´, ad infinitum. In its increasingly irrational attempts to expand, capital (the capitalist corporations) commodifies everything in existence, endangering humanity and the entire planet. In less than a generation under business as usual this process will take us over the climate cliff.

There is only one possible conclusion: System Change, Not Climate Change!

Survival Is the Question - Review of Ian Angus and Richard Smith's Ecosocialist Books

Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System By Ian Angus Monthly Review Press, 280 pages, $19 paper.

Green Capitalism: The god that failed By Richard Smith World Economics Association, http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/, 115 pages, $21.50 paper.

Michael Lowy reviews two books on ecosocialism, first published at Solidarity US

CRITICAL ECOLOGY PUBLI­CA­TIONS are finding a growing audience in the United States, as is evident in the success of Naomi Klein’s  book This Changes Everything. Within this field there is also an increasing interest in ecosocialist thought, of Marxist inspiration, of which the two authors reviewed here are a part.

One of the active promoters of this trend is Monthly Review and its publishing house. It is this group that has published the compelling book, Facing the Anthropocene by Ian Angus, the Canadian ecosocialist and editor of the online review Climate and Capitalism.

His book has been lauded by the general public as well as by many within the scientific community, such as Jan Zalasiewicz and Will Steffen. Among the principal proponents of this outstanding work on the Anthropocene are Marxist researchers like Mike Davis and John Bellamy Foster, and ecologists on the left like Derek Wall of the Green Party of England.

From the work of such thinkers as chemist Paul Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on the destruction of the ozone layer, geophysicist Will Steffen and many others, the conclusion that we have entered into a new geological era that is distinct from the Holocene (the era of the past 12,000 years) is beginning to be accepted.

The term “Anthropocene” is most often used to identify this new epoch, which is characterized by the profound impact of human activity on the earth-system. Most experts agree that the Anthropocene began in the mid-20th century, when a “Great Acceleration” of destructive changes were triggered. In fact, three-quarters of all CO2 emissions have been produced since the 1950s.

The term “Anthropos” does not mean that all humans are equally responsible for these drastic and disturbing changes — researchers have clearly shown the overwhelming responsibility of the world’s richest countries, the OECD countries, in shaping these events.

We also know the consequences of these transformations, notably climate change: most temperature rise, increasing extreme climate events, elevating ocean levels, the drowning of large coastal cities, etc. These changes are not gradual or linear and can be both abrupt and disastrous.

It seems to me, however, that this part of Facing the Anthropocene is less developed. Although Angus mentions these dangers, he does not discuss in a more detailed and concrete way the threats that weigh on the survival of life on the planet.

What are the established powers doing — especially the governments of the rich countries principally responsible for the crisis? Angus cites the fierce response of James Hansen, the North American NASA climatologist, to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, saying, “a fraud really, a fake…. It’s just bullshit.”

Indeed, even if all the countries present at the conference keep their promises, which is very unlikely considering that not a single sanction is expected to be fully met by the Paris agreements, we still will not be able to avoid an increase in the planet’s temperature past two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

Time Running Short

Although 2 degrees Celsius is the officially accepted limit to avoid an irreversible process and unbridled global warming, the true safe limit will be 1.5 Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) as even the participants of the conference have admitted. Naomi Klein’s conclusion: there is already barely time to avoid a catastrophic warming, but not in the framework of capitalism’s existing rules.

Ian Angus shares this diagnosis, and dedicates the second part of his book to the root of the problem: fossil capitalism. If governments and large corporations continue to throw coal into the boilers of this run-away train of development, it is not the fault of “human nature.” Rather, it is an essential demand of the capitalist system itself.

This system cannot exist without growth, expansion, accumulation of profits, and consequently environmental destruction. Yet this growth, which has been founded for almost two centuries on fossil energy, concentrates more of its investments today on further expanding fossil fuel production than any other sector. This doesn’t even touch on the generous subsidies provided by many governments — oil reserves alone receives more than fifty trillion dollars.

We can’t count on the good will of Exxon and company to renounce this mantra. This is not to mention other branches of production — automobiles, planes, plastics, chemicals, highways, etc. — all closely associated with fossil capitalism.

The one percent who control as much wealth as the remaining 99% of humanity carry great economic and political power. This is the reason for the resounding failures of the “international conferences” on climate change, which always end, in James Hansen’s words, in “bullshit.”

What, then, is the alternative? Angus notes that we can no longer return to the Holocene: the Anthropocene has already begun and cannot be reversed. The climate change already underway will last thousands of years. There is an urgency to slow down the suicide race created by this system, through a mass movement that encompasses all those who are ready to join in combat against fossil capitalism and climate change.

We hope for the capacity, in the future, to replace capitalism with a unified society: ecosocialism. The April 2010 Peoples’ Conference against Climate Change and in Defense of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which brought together tens of thousands of indigenous groups, farmers, unionists and workers, is a concrete example of this movement.

What happens to supporters of socialism? Ian Angus notes that the USSR was an ecological nightmare, particularly after Stalin eliminated the Soviet ecologists. (This section also deserves further development.)

Some socialists criticize what they call the “catastrophism” of ecologists, while others think that ecology is a diversion from the “true” struggle of the classes. While it’s true that ecosocialists are not a uniform mass, they do share the conviction that an effective socialist revolution can only be ecological and vice-versa.

They also agree that we need to buy ourselves time. The fight to decelerate disaster, by obtaining partial victories, both against capitalist destruction and for an ecosocialist future, is a part of the same integrated process.

What are the chances of such a struggle? Angus soberly observes that there is no guarantee. Marxism is not a sort of determinism. Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the fight of the classes can either lead to a revolutionary transformation of society or to “the common ruin of the contending classes.”

In the Anthropocene, this “common ruin,” the end of human civilization, is a real possibility. The ecosocialist revolution is by no means inevitable. We will need to be capable of bridging the gap between the spontaneous rage of millions of people and the beginning of an ecosocialist transformation. The author of this admirable and stimulating book concludes (with Bertolt Brecht): “If we fight, we may lose; if we don’t fight, we have already lost.”

Green God’s Failure

Richard Smith doesn’t discuss the Anthropocene, except for one telling moment: “Nature doesn’t run Earth any more. We do…It’s time we make conscious and collective decisions.”

Smith’s book is much more than a critique of “green capitalism,” as the title suggests. It comprises a collection of essays in an order that is a little improvised and somewhat repetitive, but on the whole the text is admirable in its coherence and rigor.

One could begin with this diagnosis: in May 2013 the observatory Mauna Loa in Hawaii found that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere exceeded 400 ppm. The last time that  levels were this high, the average global temperature was 3-4C warmer than today, the Arctic was iceless, and sea levels were 40 meters higher. The places that we now call New York City, London, Shanghai were all under the sea.

Climatologists constantly issue warnings: if we do not stop greenhouse gas emissions soon, we will inevitably reach uncontrollable and irreversible global warming, which will result in the collapse of our civilization and the possible extinction of our species.

Yet, what’s happening? Business as usual. Not only have we failed to reduce emissions in recent years, but they are continuing to increase and each year break the previous records. We continue to extract fossil energy, and are willing to go far to find more, from the depths of the ocean to the oil sands. In short, the dominant spirit can be best summarized with King Louis XV of France’s remark:
“After me, comes the flood.”

Who is to blame? Like Ian Angus, Richard Smith clearly names a culprit: the capitalist system with its insatiable and irrepressible need to “develop.” This growth is not simply a mania, a fad, or an ideology. Instead, it is the rational expression of the demands of capitalist reproduction.

“Grow or die” is the law of survival in the jungle of the cutthroat capitalist market. Without overconsumption, there is no growth, and without growth there is massive unemployment, crisis and ultimately ruin.

Even an economist as “dissident” as Paul Krugman ultimately resigns himself to consumerism. He writes, “There is a strong element of rat race in America’s consumer-led boom, but those rats racing in their cages are what keep the wheels of commerce turning.”

This is all simply the logic of the system — from the failure of the international conferences, to “green capitalism,” to the exchange of CO2 emission rights, to ecological taxes, etc, etc. As the orthodox, neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman approvingly expressed, “Corporations are in business to make money, not to save the world.”

Richard Smith’s conclusion: if we want to save the world, we must dismantle corporate power over the economy. “Either we save capitalism or we save ourselves. We can’t save both.” Capitalism is a runaway train, which strips the continents entirely of their forests, devours the ocean’s flora and fauna, disturbs the climate, and is advancing rapidly towards ecological catastrophe, and, consequently, ruin.

Hence Smith’s criticism of the delusions of economists and environmentalists who support “green capitalism.” There are many in the United States but also in France  — worshippers of this “god that failed.” Hence the need to reject the rules of the market and of private property.

What to do? The solution does not exist within the structure of the market or in technological advancement. We must drastically reduce, in a rather short period of time, the use of fossil energy, not only for the production of electricity, but also in transportation, heating, industry, production-oriented agriculture, etc.

And as Exxon, British Petroleum, General Motors, etc. have no desire to commit economic suicide — and none of the capitalist governments intends to force them — society has to take control of the means of production and distribution, and reorganize the productive system entirely. This can be done by guaranteeing decent employment to all workers whose businesses are destined to either disappear or reduce drastically.

It is not enough to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. Production and consumption must be substantially reduced (or “de-growth”). According to Richard Smith, three-quarters of the goods produced today are unnecessary, harmful, or suffer from programmed obsolescence.

If, instead of manufacturing products for profit, manufacturing worked to satisfy human needs, then we could produce useful, durable, repairable, adaptable products that could be used for decades — like my own 1962 VW, which is still running.

Smith adds: “Priority could be given to the social and ecological needs that today are neglected or sabotaged, such as health, education, habitat (set to ecological norms), and healthy and organic food. We could work fewer hours and have longer vacations.”

But this implies a radical break with the capitalist system, which would involve depriving private owners of economic control and opting instead to plan democratically. In other words, ecosocialism. Planning committees could be elected at the local, regional, national, continental, and sooner or later, international levels.

Additionally, major decisions could be made by the population itself: Car or public transportation? Ban nuclear energy or use it? And so forth. It is a question of replacing the “invisible hand” of the market — which can only perpetuate business as usual — with the visible hand of society’s democratic decisions.

Such democratic planning is the very antithesis of the sad bureaucratic caricature that was “central planning” under the now-extinct USSR. It was perfectly authoritarian, if not totalitarian. But this is the project of another civilization, an ecosocialist civilization.

Getting There

Richard Smith’s point is perfectly coherent. The only remark I would make is the absence of mediation. How can we move from the suicidal train of capitalist civilization to an ecosocialist society? This question merits further examination.

The starting point here can only be current mobilizations against this system, which Naomi Klein refers to as Blockadia.

These struggles include the commitment of Canadian Native People and environmentalists against the mining of tar sands, the fight in the USA (blocking the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, for instance), those in France who combat shale gas (provisionally victorious), those in the indigenous communities of Latin America who fight against oil and mining multinational companies, etc.

All of these struggles — local, regional or national — are essential in several aspects: a) they slow the race towards ruin; b) they reveal the value of collective struggle; c) they foster anti-systemic (anti-capitalist) consciousness.

Fortunately, in the last paragraph of his book, Richard Smith takes interest in the concrete dimension of the struggle for ecosocialism by welcoming the rise, throughout the world, of struggles against the destruction of nature, against dams, pollution, overdevelopment, chemical and thermal power plants, predatory extraction of resources, the imposition of GMOs, the privatization of communal land, water and public services, capitalist unemployment and precariousness.

Today, we have a growing wave of global “awakening” — almost a massive global upheaval. This insurrection is still in its infancy, and its future is unsure, but its radical democratic instincts are, Smith believes, the last and best hope for humanity.