Not our alternative. Past empirics aren’t true socialism – requires negation of private ownership, not elite central planning.

As Williams also points out, in its early years under the leadership of Lenin, the Soviet Union took ecological sustainability very seriously both in terms of state policies and education (2010, 181–182). Williams writes, “Committed to the unity of theory and practice, the Bolsheviks did not limit themselves to theoretical reconceptions of a dynamic and interactive organic and inorganic world but actively supported little-known but nevertheless groundbreaking ecological practice” (2010, 182).

Writing of the ecological crisis, Minqi Li argues that “as capitalism ceases to be a viable historical system, socialism may prove to be the only viable solution to the fundamental crisis confronting humanity” (2013, 10). Li’s argument is especially compelling because he makes the case that “even if one follows the logic of mainstream economic theory” (2013, 12), socialism is more viable than capitalism. Li concludes, “Only with public ownership and society-wide planning could society achieve ecological sustainability without sacrificing the basic needs of the great majority of the population” (2013, 41). Socialism would be incomparably more viable than any form of capitalism. Insofar as it is the negation of capitalism, Marxian international socialism is the way out of the fatal deadlock that capitalist eco-imperialism is driving us towards. To Marx and Engels, socialist modes of production are defined in opposition to the capitalist modes of production and private property, and that is precisely why they emphasize the significance of the historical development of capitalism as a necessary condition for the transition into socialism. While the capitalist modes of production are centred around private property and the private ownership of the means of production, essential to socialism is the negation of private property and the private ownership of the means of production. However, under all forms of state socialism that have been attempted thus far, the private ownership of the means of production was not negated. Put differently, in all cases of state socialism to date, it was the state and party elites, not the public or workers, who controlled the means of production. Of course, these elites claimed to represent the interests of the proletariat, but that makes no difference in terms of the actual ownership of the means of production, and, thus, relations of production, which remained economically exploitative, socially alienating, politically oppressive, and ecologically devastating. In such state-dictated economies, the proletariat were not less disempowered than the proletariat in market-dictated economies. Workers in either case have been free only insofar as they freely choose the only option the system would give them, namely to sell their labour. This, in turn, greatly empowered the ruling class both nationally and within an international regime of antagonistic nation states, thereby further dividing the proletariat across the world.

In all cases, and regardless of whether socialism is the solution or not, viable or not, realizable or not, we do not know of any system that is as disastrous, and, thus, as dysfunctional, especially ecologically, as capitalism, except for the interests of the ruling capitalist class itself. Emphasizing the desperate need for a revolutionary replacement of the capitalist modes of production is simply a restatement of what most scientists call for in terms of the need for immediate and drastic changes to avoid ecological catastrophe; however, the very language of most scientists is deliberately apolitical, even when they try to alarm us about the imminent danger that the ship of humanity is sinking (for reasons that are nothing but political insofar as dominant politics are the politics of the dominant class, the politics that prioritize and normalize whatever is necessary to sustain the bourgeois hegemony, especially the endless accumulation of capital, which, in turn, is ensured first and foremost through the perpetuation of the existing relations of exploitation of both labour and nature). More to the point, scientific discourse itself essentially operates at the heart of the ideological hegemony of capitalism. In other words, there is a contradiction in waiting for the scientific community to declare that capitalism is the problem. For only when capitalism is no longer the dominant system will there be a scientific community (with a recognized scientific authority) in which the majority could make such a declaration; on the other hand, when capitalism is no longer the dominant system, such a declaration will be neither necessary nor accurate.