Step-by-step guide to eco-socialism

As an extension of the current war on the planet, a regime of climate geoengineering designed to keep the present mode of production going is sharply opposed to the view enunciated by Barry Commoner in 1992 in Making Peace with the Planet: “If the environment is polluted and the economy is sick, the virus that causes both will be found in the system of production.” 28 There can be no doubt today that it is the present mode of production, particularly the system of fossil capital, that needs to change on a global scale. In order to stop climate change, the world economy must quickly shift to zero net carbon dioxide emissions. This is well within reach with a concerted effort by human society as a whole utilizing already existing sustainable technological means—particularly when coupled with necessary changes in social organization to reduce the colossal waste of resources and lives that is built into the current alienated system of production. Such changes could not simply be implemented from the top by elites, but rather would require the self-mobilization of the population, inspired by the revolutionary actions of youth aimed at egalitarian, ecological, collective, and socialized solutions—recognizing that it is the world they will inherit that is most at stake.

Today’s necessary ecological revolution would include for starters: (1) an emergency moratorium on economic growth in the rich countries coupled with downward redistribution of income and wealth; (2) radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; (3) rapid phase-out of the entire fossil fuel energy structure; (4) substitution of an alternative energy infrastructure based on sustainable alternatives such as solar and wind power and rooted in local control; (5) massive cuts in military spending with the freed-up economic surplus to be used for ecological conversion; (6) promotion of circular economies and zerowaste systems to decrease the throughput of energy and resources; (7) building effective public transportation, together with measures to decrease dependence on the private automobile; (8) restoration of global ecosystems in line with local, including Indigenous, communities; (9) transformation of destructive, energy-and chemical-intensive agribusiness-monocultural production into agroecology, based on sustainable small farms and peasant cultivation with their greater productivity of food per acre; (10) institution of strong controls on the emission of toxic chemicals; (11) prohibition of the privatization of freshwater resources; (12) imposition of strong, human community– based management of the ocean commons geared to sustainability; (13) institution of dramatic new measures to protect endangered species; (14) strict limits on excessive and destructive consumer marketing by corporations; (15) reorganization of production to break down current commodity chains geared to rapacious accumulation and the philosophy of après moi le déluge; and (16) the development of more rational, equitable, less wasteful, and more collective forms of production. 29

Priority in such an eco-revolution would need to be given to the fastest imaginable elimination of fossil fuel emissions, but this would in turn require fundamental changes in the human relationship to the earth and in the relationship of human beings to one another. A new emphasis would have to be placed on sustainable human development and the creation of an organic system of social metabolic reproduction. Centuries of exploitation and expropriation, including divisions on the basis of class, gender, race, and ethnicity, would have to be transcended. The historical logic posed by current conditions thus points to the necessity of a long ecological revolution, putting into place a new system of sustainable human development aimed at addressing the totality of needs of human beings as both natural and social beings: what is now called ecosocialism.