Ecosocialism III

"Left biocentrism" = "deep ecology"

[url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=4724]Deep Ecology v. Ecosocialism, Part 1[/url]

[url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=4781]Deep Ecology v. Ecosocialism, Part 2[/url]

[url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=4872]Deep Ecology v. Ecosocialism, Part 3[/url]

[url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=4890]Deep Ecology v. Ecosocialism, Part 4[/url]

[url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=4892]Deep Ecology v. Ecosocialism, Part 5[/url]

[url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=4935]Deep Ecology v. Ecosocialism, Part 6[/url]

Ian Angus wrote:

What we now call ecology was fundamental to Marx’s thought, and, as John Bellamy Foster has shown, in the 20th century Marxist scientists made major contributions to ecological thought. But on the whole, the Marxist movements of the 20th century either ignored environmental issues entirely, or blithely deferred all consideration of the subject until after the revolution, when socialism would magically solve them all.

What’s worse, some of the worst ecological nightmares of the 20th century occurred in countries that called themselves socialist. We only have to mention the nuclear horror of Chernobyl, or the poisoning and draining of the Aral Sea, to make clear that just eliminating capitalism won’t save the world.

Now there is an easy answer to that – we could just say that those countries weren’t socialist. They were state capitalist, or something else, so criticism of their environmental crimes is irrelevant. But green critics will rightly call that a cop-out.

People in the Soviet Union and the other soviet bloc countries thought they were building socialism. And for most people worldwide that was what socialism looked like.

So whether we call those societies socialist or give them some other label, we need to answer the underlying question: what makes us think that the next attempts to build socialist societies will do any better than they did?

Our answer has two parts.

The first is that eliminating profit and accumulation as the driving forces of the economy will eliminate capitalism’s innate drive to pollute and destroy.

While mistaken policies and ignorance have caused some very serious ecological problems, the global crisis we face today isn’t the result of mistaken policies and ignorance – it is the inevitable result of the way capitalism works.

With capitalism an ecologically balanced world is impossible.

Socialism doesn’t make it certain, but it will make it possible.

The second part of the answer is that history is not made by impersonal forces. The transition to socialism will be achieved by real people, and people can learn from experience.

This is demonstrated in practice by Cuba, which in the past 25 years has made huge strides towards building an ecologically sound economy, and which has repeatedly been one of the few countries that meet the WWF’s criteria for a globally sustainable society.

The lesson we must learn from that achievement and from the environmental failures of socialism in the 20th century is that ecology must have a central place in socialist theory, in the socialist program and in the activity of the socialist movement.

Ecosocialism works to unite the best of the green and the red while overcoming the weaknesses of each. It tries to combine Marxism’s analysis of human society with ecology’s analysis of our relationship to the rest of nature.

It aims to build a society that will have two fundamental and indivisible characteristics.

• It will be socialist, committed to democracy, to radical egalitarianism, and to social justice. It will be based on collective ownership of the means of production, and it will work actively to eliminate exploitation, profit and accumulation as the driving forces of our economy.

• And it will be based on the best ecological principles, giving top priority to stopping anti-environmental practices, to restoring damaged ecosystems, and to reestablishing agriculture and industry on ecologically sound principles.

- excerpt from the [url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=5449]keynote address[/url] to the recent [url=http://climatechangesocialchange2011.wordpress.com]Climate Change, Social Change conference[/url] in Melbourne.

[url=http://www.socialistaction.blogspot.com/2011/11/climate-change-and-need-... change and the need for eco-socialism[/url]

Quote:

The system is incapable of innovating its way out of ecological crisis. William Stanley Jevons, a 19th century British economist, can be called a "peak coal" theorist. He forecast an end to British capitalism from the depletion of coal, but thought that the industrialists needed to push onward to the end. Yet Jevons, who was no ecologist, made a unique observation: more efficient devices for burning coal—better boilers and engines—did not decrease the actual usage of coal in Britain. Instead, the more efficient the technology, the more coal was burned in absolute terms. This is a reflection of the logic of capitalism: efficiency leads to higher resource usage. There is no way that we can avoid climate catastrophe simply by making capitalism more efficient.

In order to contain climate change and prevent disaster, we need a total overhaul of the energy and transportation infrastructure. Shipping and personal transit need to become radically different, and all energy for human activity needs to come from renewable sources. This would require a massive, worldwide mobilization of resources and people on a scale that is truly unprecedented. Keeping energy use at sustainable levels will be a monumental task, but one that is necessary for our survival.

The changes that need to happen are of the kind that requires a planned economy, democratically run by the working class. The task facing us cannot be left to chance and the chaos of the market, but it also cannot be imposed from above by a bureaucracy. Planning is the only realistic way to restructure the whole infrastructure of society, from top to bottom, in the radical way that is necessary.

"I don’t think climate change necessitates a social revolution." - Naomi Klein

[url=http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1053]No ecosocialist she[/url]

Robert Biel wrote:

Some environmentalists argue that the environmental issue is so serious that it has to be given priority over class politics. This is wrong simply because it is capitalism that is the problem. But it would be equally wrong to say that the environment is a long-term issue which can be dealt with later, once the political conditions have been created, for grassroots movements are making it an immediate issue, and they are precisely the really existing forces which can challenge the system.

- from his book [url=http://zedbooks.co.uk/paperback/the-new-imperialism]The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradiction in North/South Relations[/url]

Quote:

A socialist society has to critique and transform 

The whole way energy is produced and used in the U.S. is rooted in profound waste (and disregard for humanity’s future needs). The U.S. has long used (roughly) twice the BTU per capita compared to imperialist Europe (with a comparable lifestyle).

Coal in the U.S. used to serve the railroads (as fuel) and steel (as coking components) — now it is powdered and fed into power plants (in the main). It is not just the conditions of production that are marked by capitalist decisions and priorities, but the purpose of production, and the modes of consumption for various commodities, etc.

Communists have often written that we can’t just “lay our hands” on the existing state, and then use it to our purposes.

Something similar is true about production — we can’t simply “lay our hands” on this society’s productive apparatus and use it (unchanged) for our purposes. [b]The production process itself needs to be radically critiqued, reconceived, overthrown and transformed — by the working people themselves, while still maintaining and developing a working economy.[/b]

In the theory produced during the [Chinese] cultural revolution, it was said (by the revolutionaries among the communists) that the class nature of a production process was determined on three levels:

1) At the level of ownership (not just juridical ownership on paper, but actual ownership: meaning if it is state owned, who really owns the state?)

2) At the level of relations IN production (meaning how is the work itself organized, and how much are the workers developing the consciousness and political power to affect it?)

3) At the level of relations of distribution (meaning how are both wages and goods circulated, and who does that distribution serve?)

This is very different from the older, previous, orthodoxies among communists — who thought (one-sidedly, even naively) that state ownership settles the socialist character of production. In contrast, the communists during the GPCR said both that we had to see if the “ownership by the whole people” (through state ownership) is real or fake — i.e. who owns the state in a sweeping sense? Is the state (at its heights) still a revolutionary stronghold of ongoing communist transformation?

But beyond that, they argued that [b]ownership alone (even by a genuinedly socialist state) did not guarantee socialist relations of production[/b] — and that it was important to see how local production itself functioned (what line is in command), and what larger purposes the distribution of commodities served....

We need to look at more than just how the production process is owned, (i.e. not merely where its surplus goes), but also [b]what it produces, how it is produced, what it serves in the largest senses[/b].

It seems inevitable to me that [b]a non-imperialist North America will have radically different consumption patterns.[/b] Vastly different spectra of produced goods and services. Radically different environmental impacts. Radically different values and expectations among the people.

Excerpted from [url=http://kasamaproject.org/2012/04/24/revolutionizing-production-itself-fo... production itself: For humanity and for the world[/url]