Clash link turns alt solvency. Refusing to compare the alt to the plan dooms the transition.

This leads to the second conjoined tendency, which is to neglect difficult strategic questions, trade-offs, and dangers that would likely emerge during the transition process and beyond. The majority of ecosocialists ignore these sorts of questions altogether, while others address them more tepidly. Michael Löwy, for example, who has done some of the finest work on elaborating the ecosocialist alternative, does not consider whether there might be a trade-off between calls for “democratic planning” and the simultaneous emphasis on biospheric limits within which we must constrain consumption. Indeed, he affirms that “nobody has the right to tell people what their needs are” (Löwy Citation2015, 34), but then the question of whether this may require allowing energy-intensive modes of consumption that transgress planetary boundaries to persist is left unaddressed. Instead, Löwy expresses faith that “the rationality of democratic decisions will prevail once the power of commodity fetishism is broken” (28). This is perhaps plausible, but as Löwy himself recognizes, there will be a long period of transition in which the “old habits of consumption would persist” (34), and he doesn’t grapple with the question of how they would be transformed within the requisite timeframe to avoid runaway climate change (i.e. by 2050 or shortly thereafter). Joel Kovel and Michael Lebowitz also recognize that ecosocialism(s)-in-transition would remain marked by the defects of capitalism for some time; thus they emphasize the importance of democratic praxis in forging the new subjectivities and social relations that would be needed to sustain a long-term revolutionary transformation, which otherwise risks lapsing into the same authoritarian statism that has plagued socialism throughout its history (Kovel Citation2007, 272; Lebowitz Citation2006, 66). This is an important insight, though it still begs the question of how a society-wide transformation towards ecosocialist/degrowth principles might occur in the needed time-frame. Given the possible intransigence of energy and emissions-intensive consumption practices, particularly in a context of rising rightwing populism and “fossil fascism” (Malm and Collective Citation2021), we should grapple squarely with the risk that state coercion would be needed enforce ecosocialist degrowth in rich countries. On the other hand, if we choose to follow the democratic will wherever it leads us, even if this entails the perpetuation or even expansion of material-energy intensive modes of living, then we must deal with the biospheric consequences. Might there be a trade-off, then, between degrowth and non-degrowth paths to ecosocialism, each with its own set of challenges and dangers? Ecosocialists have not systematically investigated these sorts of questions.

In sum, we can see that the ecosocialist and degrowth movements have so far devoted limited attention to important strategic questions and trade-offs regarding ecosocialist transitions. Thus they are vulnerable to critiques like those of Matt Huber, who claims that degrowth variants of ecosocialism fail to articulate how their utopian aspirations could be “realistically built out of the present” (Huber Citation2019). Instead, Huber advocates what he calls a “scientific ecosocialism” that eschews the emphasis on degrowth and instead endorses a “traditional socialist politics not of limits and less, but of more” (Huber Citation2019). Unfortunately, Huber’s proposal is itself “utopian” in that it disregards the biospheric devastation that would be entailed by more consumption in the already over-developed global north (which I will expand on below). However, he indicates a crucial problem that must be addressed by the degrowth ecosocialist left: how might an ecosocialist vision based on degrowth (in rich countries) win popular majorities? As Hubert Buch-Hansen bluntly states: “the degrowth project is nowhere near enjoying the degree and type of support it needs if its policies are to be implemented through democratic processes” (Buch-Hansen Citation2018, 160). This is undoubtedly true, at present, and thus more strategic thinking about the how of transition is needed. Following Sam Gindin, we need “an honest presentation of the risks, costs, and dilemmas the [eco]socialist project will face, alongside credible examples and promising indications of how the problems might be creatively addressed” (Gindin Citation2018, 14). Furthermore, as Erik Olin Wright says, we need to understand “not simply the obstacles and openings for strategies in the present, but how those obstacles and opportunities are likely to develop over time” (Wright Citation2010, 18).

In this sense, following Gindin and Olin Wright, we can develop a “realist” or “realist utopian” approach to ecosocialism that combines rigorous social and ecological analysis with speculative imagination, working through the likely constraints on utopian potentials, how they might be surmounted, and the likely challenges, tensions, trade-offs, and dilemmas we would face even in the best-case scenarios. No one could ever pretend to have fully worked out answers to these problems, and the claims of “realism” (i.e. “being realistic”) can always be contested, given that we are dealing with an inherently open and uncertain future (Wright Citation2010). But the difficulties of developing more realistic models of possible futures and theories of systemic change should not lead us to dismiss the importance of facing them as rigorously (and humbly) as possible. To this end, I will first develop a plausible (r)evolutionary scenario of how something like ecosocialist degrowth might emerge in the coming decades, and then think through some of the likely trade-offs and dangers that would accompany the transition process.