The twenty-first century opens on a catastrophic
note
The twenty-first century opens on a catastrophic note, with
an unprecedented degree of ecological breakdown and a chaotic
world order beset with terror and clusters of low-grade, disintegrative
warfare that spread like gangrene across great swathes of the
planet--viz., central Africa, the Middle East, Northwestern
South America--and reverberate throughout the nations.
In our view, the crises of ecology and those of societal breakdown
are profoundly interrelated and should be seen as different
manifestations of the same structural forces. The former broadly
stems from rampant industrialization that overwhelms the earth's
capacity to buffer and contain ecological destabilization. The
latter stems from the form of imperialism known as globalization,
with its disintegrative effects on societies that stand in its
path. Moreover, these underlying forces are essentially different
aspects of the same drive, which must be identified as the central
dynamic that moves the whole: the expansion of the world capitalist
system.
We reject all euphemisms or propagandistic softening of the
brutality of this regime: all greenwashing of its ecological
costs, all mystification of the human costs under the names
of democracy and human rights. We insist instead upon looking
at capital from the standpoint of what it has really done.
Acting on nature and its ecological balance, the regime, with
its imperative to constantly expand profitability, exposes ecosystems
to destabilizing pollutants, fragments habitats that have evolved
over aeons to allow the flourishing of organisms, squanders
resources, and reduces the sensuous vitality of nature to the
cold exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital.
From the side of humanity, with its requirements for self-determination,
community, and a meaningful existence, capital reduces the majority
of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power while
discarding much of the remainder as useless nuisances. It has
invaded and undermined the integrity of communities through
its global mass culture of consumerism and depoliticization.
It has expanded disparities in wealth and power to levels unprecedented
in human history. It has worked hand in glove with a network
of corrupt and subservient client states whose local elites
carry out the work of repression while sparing the center of
its opprobrium. And it has set going a network of transtatal
organizations under the overall supervision of the Western powers
and the superpower United States, to undermine the autonomy
of the periphery and bind it into indebtedness while maintaining
a huge military apparatus to enforce compliance to the capitalist
center.
We believe that the present capitalist system cannot regulate,
much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot solve
the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits
upon accumulation-an unacceptable option for a system predicated
upon the rule: Grow or Die! And it cannot solve the crisis posed
by terror and other forms of violent rebellion because to do
so would mean abandoning the logic of empire, which would impose
unacceptable limits on growth and the whole "way of life"
sustained by empire. Its only remaining option is to resort
to brutal force, thereby increasing alienation and sowing the
seed of further terrorism . . . and further counter-terrorism,
evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism.
In sum, the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt.
It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism
exposes its underlying weakness. It is, in the language of ecology,
profoundly unsustainable, and must be changed fundamentally,
nay, replaced, if there is to be a future worth living.
Thus the stark choice once posed by Rosa Luxemburg returns:
Socialism or Barbarism!, where the face of the latter now reflects
the imprint of the intervening century and assumes the countenance
of ecocatastrophe, terror counterterror, and their fascist degeneration.
But why socialism, why revive this word seemingly consigned
to the rubbish-heap of history by the failings of its twentieth
century interpretations? For this reason only: that however
beaten down and unrealized, the notion of socialism still stands
for the supersession of capital. If capital is to be overcome,
a task now given the urgency of the survival of civilization
itself, the outcome will perforce be "socialist,"
for that is the term which signifies the breakthrough into a
post-capitalist society. If we say that capital is radically
unsustainable and breaks down into the barbarism outlined above,
then we are also saying that we need to build a "socialism"
capable of overcoming the crises capital has set going. And
if "socialisms" past have failed to do so, then it
is our obligation, if we choose against submitting to a barbarous
end, to struggle for one that succeeds. And just as barbarism
has changed in a manner reflective of the century since Luxemburg
enunciated her fateful alternative, so too, must the name, and
the reality, of a "socialism" become adequate for
this time.
It is for these reasons that we choose to name our interpretation
of "socialism" as an ecosocialism, and dedicate ourselves
to its realization.
Why Ecosocialism?
We see ecosocialism not as the denial but as the realization
of the "first-epoch" socialisms of the twentieth century,
in the context of the ecological crisis. Like them, it builds
on the insight that capital is objectified past labor, and grounds
itself in the free development of all producers, or to use another
way of saying this, an undoing of the separation of the producers
from the means of production. We understand that this goal was
not able to be implemented by first-epoch socialism, for reasons
too complex to take up here, except to summarize as various
effects of underdevelopment in the context of hostility by existing
capitalist powers. This conjuncture had numerous deleterious
effects on existing socialisms, chiefly, the denial of internal
democracy along with an emulation of capitalist productivism,
and led eventually to the collapse of these societies and the
ruin of their natural environments.
Ecosocialism retains the emancipatory goals of first-epoch
socialism, and rejects both the attenuated, reformist aims of
social democracy and the the productivist structures of the
bureaucratic variations of socialism. It insists, rather, upon
redefining both the path and the goal of socialist production
in an ecological framework. It does so specifically in respect
to the "limits on growth" essential for the sustainability
of society. These are embraced, not however, in the sense of
imposing scarcity, hardship and repression. The goal, rather,
is a transformation of needs, and a profound shift toward the
qualitative dimension and away from the quantitative. From the
standpoint of commodity production, this translates into a valorization
of use-values over exchange-values-a project of far-reaching
significance grounded in immediate economic activity.
The generalization of ecological production under socialist
conditions can provide the ground for the overcoming of the
present crises. A society of freely associated producers does
not stop at its own democratization. It must, rather, insist
on the freeing of all beings as its ground and goal. It overcomes
thereby the imperialist impulse both subjectively and objectively.
In realizing such a goal, it struggles to overcome all forms
of domination, including, especially, those of gender and race.
And it surpasses the conditions leading to fundamentalist distortions
and their terrorist manifestions. In sum, a world society is
posited in a degree of ecological harmony with nature unthinkable
under present conditions. A practical outcome of these tendencies
would be expressed, for example, in a withering away of the
dependency upon fossil fuels integral to industrial capitalism.
And this in turn can provide the material point of release of
the lands subjugated by oil imperialism, while enabling the
containment of global warming, along with other afflictions
of the ecological crisis.
No one can read these prescriptions without thinking, first,
of how many practical and theoretical questions they raise,
and second and more dishearteningly, of how remote they are
from the present configuration of the world, both as this is
anchored in institutions and as it is registered in consciousness.
We need not elaborate these points, which should be instantly
recognizable to all. But we would insist that they be taken
in their proper perspective. Our project is neither to lay out
every step of this way nor to yield to the adversary because
of the preponderance of power he holds. It is, rather, to develop
the logic of a sufficient and necessary transformation of the
current order, and to begin developing the intermediate steps
towards this goal. We do so in order to think more deeply into
these possibilities, and at the same moment, begin the work
of drawing together with all those of like mind. If there is
any merit in these arguments, then it must be the case that
similar thoughts, and practices to realize these thoughts, will
be coordinatively germinating at innumerable points around the
world. Ecosocialism will be international, and universal, or
it will be nothing. The crises of our time can-and must-be seen
as revolutionary opportunities, which it is our obligation to
affirm and bring into existence.
Ecosocialist International