Plan Angus "The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the disease is the capitalist development model." That was the opening sentence of a remarkable letter sent to the UN in September by Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, the first indigenous head of state in Latin America. It is a dramatic illustration the spread of ecosocialist ideas among socialists and anticapitalists in the global south. But just what does "ecosocialism" mean? It's a relatively new term, tor a relatively new political development, and different people use the word in different ways, often putting quite different content into What's more, like the shorter word 'socialism, 'ecosocialism' is used to for three different but related things. Ecosocialism is a goal - a global ecosocialist society. Ecosocialism is a body of political, economic and social thought that combines socialist and ecological ideas. Ecosocialism is a movement — a growing number of activists worldwide who believe — although most would not use these words - that the only way to stop ecological destruction is to impose what the authors of The Communist Manifesto called "despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production" Clirate change
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Plan Angus Ecosocialism as a goal
Most ecosocialists would agree that our goal is a society in which profit is no longer the driving force of economic activity, and in which the preservation and restoration of ecosystems will be central to all activ1tv.
Our view of the future is necessarily general, since we don't know what conditions will prevail when the transition begins - in particular, we don't know how much devastation capitalism will cause before it is brought down.
But that does not mean we cannot or should not develop visions of what an ecosocialist world what might be like. Indeed such positive visions will play an important role in winning people to movements that can actually implement the
Climate Change Kills "despotic inroads on the rights of property" that will bring down this system and make a new one possible. Ecosocialism as a body of Ideas One of the most exciting developments in recent years is the new wave of Marxist scholarship dealing with ecology — a dozen or books, hundreds of essays and articles. Of course there are far more non-Marxist books on the subject - but the Marxists are consistently superior at explaining why capitalism is fouling up our world. At the root, global warming isn't caused by stupidity, or by shortsighted decision-makers -it is caused by capitalism's insatiable need to increase profits, by what John Bellamy Foster calls "the ecological tyranny of the bottom line." People who don't understand that don't understand global warming, and so cannot propose meaningful solutions to capitalist ecocide. The explosion of Marxist writing on ecology also shows that the Marxist wing of the green movement (or the green wing of the Marxist movement) is far from homogeneous. One of the most important disagreements regards the role of the working class. Joel Kovel, for example, argues that there is no "privileged agent of ecological transformation," and an ecosocialist party will grow out of social movements and "communities of resistance" not the working class. Others (myself included) disagree strongly - in our view, socialism is not possible without mass working class action.
Obviously it is important for ecosocialists who disagree on this and other issues to collaborate on concrete projects. The new Ecosocialist International Network provides a framework for such collaboration, on a global scale. But it is important to bear in mind that we are far from the point at which anyone can correctly say "this and this alone is ecosocialist theory." Indeed, that point may never arrive. Ecosocialism as a movement Marx famously wrote that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Ultimately ecosocialists must be judged not by the brilliance of their writing, but by what they actually do to change the world. In the imperialist countries -the "global north" the ecosocialism movement involves two parallel developments - the spread of Marxist ideas in the green movement and the spread of ecological ideas in the Marxist left.
The result is not a new movement, but a current within existing socialist and green-left movements. We might say that in the developed ecosocialism today focuses on making the Greens more Red and the Reds more Green.
In the global south, by contrast, a mass anticapitalist ecology movement is emerging. In countries where global warming is already a matter of life and death, people are fighting environmental destruction - and the environmental destroyers - on a daily basis.
The fights take many forms, including land occupations, road blockades, and sabotage as well as more traditional actions such as petitions, rallies, demonstrations. Such protests occur daily in dozens of countries.
Evo Morales' recent letter to the United Nations illustrates that point and another — that in the fight to save the earth, a vanguard role is being played by indigenous peoples. As Morales said:
"[Wle - the indigenous peoples and humble and honest inhabitants of this planet - believe that the time has come to put a stop to this, in order to rediscover our Tools, will respect for Mother Earth; with the Pachamama as we call it in the Andes. Today, the indigenous peoples of Latin America and the world have been called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life"
And he suggested a global political organization to combat global warming:
"We need to create a World Environment Organisation which is binding, and which can discipline the World Trade Organisation, which is propelling us towards barbarism."
That's not just a clever