The alt risks authoritarian takeover in even best-case scenarios.

The scenario sketched above highlights that ecosocialist degrowth transitions would most likely occur in a context of deepening political-economic crisis, intensifying climate shocks, and worsening insecurity for the majority of populations. A key danger, then, is that even in the best-case scenario in which powerful red-green movements decisively shift the balance of power vis-à-vis capital and elect leftist parties following ecosocialist platforms, this could lead to “authoritarian” forms of ecosocialism, understood as ecosocialist regimes that institutionalize “state of emergency” provisions such as unchecked executive power, the suspension of democratic rights and procedures, restrictions on free speech, and military-police repression of dissent (Petras and Fitzgerald Citation1988). This has of course been one of the primary challenges confronting all socialist transitions historically, which have had to fight off external military intervention, resistance from capitalist elites, and reactionary currents from below in order to protect revolutionary gains. Things would be no different for future ecosocialisms-in-transition, particularly given the likely contradiction between the speed at which consumption cuts may need to be made in the global north and the slowness with which post-materialist cultural change would occur, yet such problems have not been systematically explored by ecosocialists and degrowth scholars. The risks are twofold: first, that authoritarian measures would be needed to enforce lifestyle changes upon recalcitrant populations and “deal with the exceptional circumstances of direct and serious threat” to the survival of ecosocialist regimes in their early phases; and second, that such measures, rather than being temporally limited and abolished once the “exceptional circumstances” are dealt with, become the new normal (94).

Quincy Saul and Andreas Malm are among the few ecosocialists who don’t shy away from this problem. Saul, for one, writes that “a period of ‘emergency rule,’ when the expropriators are expropriated, must be revised for the twenty-first century, it cannot be dismissed or glossed over” (Saul Citation2011, 58–59). Similarly, Malm suggests that carrying out the transition in the needed time frame would require.

warlike state management of all industries … centralized decisions on who can consume what goods in what amounts, [and] punishment of transgressors threatening the annual emissions targets … [which] can only be feasible under an exceptional regime dealing with an unheard-of emergency (Malm Citation2015, 187)

The risk, in other words, is that ecosocialist regimes that are democratically elected in a context of unprecedented climate-energy-economic crises may be forced down an authoritarian path in order to enforce carbon rationing, enact rapid and far-reaching transformations in land-use, break through the gridlock of dysfunctional and polarized legislatures, and defend themselves against violence and sabotage from capitalist elites and the far-right. The danger is exacerbated by the fact that worsening climate and political-economic crises, far from neutralizing the threat of rightwing populism, will most likely intensify ethnonationalist reaction and political polarization. As Malm and the Zetkin Collective explain: “the higher the temperatures, the more acute the antagonism between a left that alone stands ready to pick up the instruments for alleviating the crisis and a right that, for that very reason, refuses to contemplate it” (Malm and Collective Citation2021, 286–287). Additionally, given that ecosocialist transitions would entail a “life-threatening situation” for most if not all sectors of the capitalist class, many of them would likely ally with the far-right in order to halt such transitions in their tracks and restore capitalist power “by any means necessary” (241). Thus even in the best-case scenario in which ecosocialists are able to assume power in core states, this would almost certainly occur in a context of rabid far-right resistance in alliance with global capital. The risks are particularly acute in, but not limited to, the US, where the spectacle of armed insurrectionists storming congress to try overthrowing the 2020 presidential election give us a taste of what ecosocialists are up against.