Why We Need (Eco)Socialism

This podcast is best in video form! You can watch this one and 200+ more on the Our Changing Climate YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@OurChangingClimate

Help me make more podcasts like this by supporting Our Changing Climate on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Check out Half Earth Socialism here: https://www.half.earth/

In this Our Changing Climate climate change essay, I look at how and why socialism, specifically ecosocialism, is crucial to mitigating climate change and building a just and equitable world. Specifically, I look at how capitalism can not exist in harmony with the natural world by investigating the concept of "metabolic rift." I then unpack what exactly ecosocialism is through the examples of various authors and activists. Ultimately, a planned, rational, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and deeply democratic mode of production is the only path forward for true harmony with the natural world. That economic formulation is ecosocialism.

Email List: https://ourchangingclimateocc.substack.com/
Bluesky: http://ourchangingclimate.bsky.social/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/occvideos/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/occ.climate/
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/OurChangingClimate/

_______________________

Further Reading and Resources: https://ourchangingclimate.notion.site/Ecosocialism-Resources-d669969b342242c6aa7d0f93f4e26f04?pvs=4
_______________________

For music, I use Artlist. You can get 2 months free with this link: https://artlist.io/artlist-70446/?artlist_aid=occ_2345&utm_source=affiliate_p&utm_medium=occ_2345&utm_campaign=occ_2345

I also use Epidemic Sound for some of my music: http://epidemicsound.com/creator

Support Our Changing Climate on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/c/OurChangingClimate

Transcript

Eight Hawaiian honeycreeper species wiped from the face of the earth. Record heat waves, drive thousands of deaths. Hurricane Otis killing hundreds. Soil degradation is at an all time high. A crisis at a scale this world has never seen is no longer at our doorstep, it’s now crashing through the threshold and threatening to pull us down into climate chaos. And our current political and economic choices just aren’t working. We need to chart a new path forward. One that heals the vast gulf that has opened up between humanity and nature. We need ecosocialism. But what exactly does that mean? Why is ecosocialism the answer? Today we dive into the inner workings of ecosocialism, in order to uncover exactly why socialism is necessary to avoid planetary disaster. What linear programming has to do with rewilding. Why Cuba could unlock answers to cutting emissions, and why this diagram is crucial to healing our connection with the planet. 

The Metabolic Rift

Soil is the foundation of life. A vibrant ecosystem teeming with organisms upon which humanity has built their success. Agronomists know this. Farmers know this, and yet this knowledge seems to forgotten on here on the barren fields of Minnesota's corn farms. Monocultures of corn and soybean rip the soil clean of organic matter and nutrients, demanding increasing amounts of fertilizer and pesticides to maintain yields. But farms like this aren’t outliers, their commonplace worldwide. Declining soil health is just one of many alarm bells signaling that our planet is on the brink of ecological collapse. And behind it all lies capitalism. Under capitalism, human labor transforms nature extensively in the pursuit of profit and capital accumulation. This relentless pursuit of transforming nature into marketable goods disrupts the cycle of production and reproduction in nature, or in other words, nature’s metabolism. As Marx writes in the first volume of capital “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” The degradation of soil health across the world then, isn’t a symptom of human nature, it’s instead driven by the rampant hunger of capitalism.

Throughout history, there has always been a metabolic interaction between humans and their natural environments. Whether through gathering or cultivation, we have worked the land to sustain ourselves. Up until capitalism, however, that which we extracted has been replenished, whether through manure, food scraps, or clothing made from natural materials. Consequently, ecosystems, while certainly disturbed, weren’t shattered. However, capitalist production smashed this metabolic cycle. It privatized common land, forcing peasants from farms into the city. Survival was no longer based on how well you tended to the land and grew food, but instead how big your wages were. Food was grown in the countryside and sold via markets to sustain growing urban populations now working under a capitalist wage-labor system. In this process, capitalist production “prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.” In essence, the fundamental workings of capitalism directly contradict the regenerative processes of nature. This is what ecosocialist scholar John Bellamy Foster called the metabolic rift. Capitalist production continuously extracts minerals, nutrients, and organic matter from the earth, transforming them into commodities for profit, without completing the cycle by returning them to the soil. This perpetual extraction without replenishment represents one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. We urgently need a new economic system, one that prioritizes the well-being of humanity and nature over the accumulation of profits and capital. One that That system is ecosocialism.

What is Ecosocialism?

In 2020, the world needed to cut emissions by 7.6% every year in order to stay below 1.5C of warming. That same year, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. State actors mobilized massive plans to halt the spread of a disease. The economy ground to a halt, and yet global emissions only fell by 5.4%. Only to then quickly rebound as production kicked into high gear a year later. The pandemic lays bare the destruction and incompetence of our global capitalist economy. It reveals that even harsh austerity and forced consumption cuts under capitalism will never be enough to stave off the worst of climate chaos. Capitalism cannot stop the climate crisis, cannot dismantle the fossil fuel industry, nor can it halt the sixth mass extinction. It can’t, because it is the core driver of all of these crises. 

But as much as we can recognize the growing human/nature rift born out of capitalism, critiquing the present is not enough; we must envision a beautiful and realistic future. One that excites us and helps fuel the fire of transition. As environmental historian and author of Half-Earth Socialism, Troy Vettese, argues, [“having [00:33:00] this utopia, this end goal, is very useful

That actually glues together your coalition. That actually binds you together.”]. Ecosocialism can might just offer that powerful vision that glues us together. It calls for a worker and peasant-led revolution rips ownership of production away from the elite and puts decision-making power into the hands of the masses. Unlike capitalism, which prioritizes decisions based on the endless creation of products to sell for more profit, ecosocialism advocates for an economy that makes decisions based on the well-being of all people and the planet. But what makes ecosocialism ecological then? Most of this is well within the bounds of many socialist goals and vision. Admittedly, as Victor Wallis notes [“it's even redundant to put the 'Eco' prefix out there because socialism implies that you make decisions on the basis of what's in the interests of people and you can't legislate in the interests of people without taking into account the environment.”] While socialist goals often align with ecological concerns, ecosocialism specifically emphasizes a democratically planned economy based on  social and ecological constraints. Planning is crucial not only for  ethical wealth redistribution and knowledge sharing, but also for living harmoniously within our natural environments. History, though, teaches us that there are many pitfalls in the planning process, especially when it comes to the environment. Just because you are striving for socialism, like in the case of the Soviet Union, doesn’t necessarily mean that you will achieve ecological sustainability. If you’re interested in learning more about Soviet planning I’ve uploaded a whole companion video to this one examining the environmental faults and successes of Soviet planning. These past and present examples of the various forms of socialism show us that ecology, whether species extinction, or climate change, or ocean acidification, all need to be foregrounded in a planning process if we are to avoid ecological destruction. So, ecological planning is essential. Because capitalism, with its market-driven anarchy, fails to account for ecological sustainability in any meaningful way. [“capitalism has already failed. Right? Capitalism is not going to get us out of this mess. We've been talking about climate change and other environmental crises for more than, three decades and things have gotten much worse.”] So, we know that capitalism has ripped the natural world apart and it has failed to mend it back together. An ecosocialist planned economy then is a necessary intervention if we are truly to heal the rift between human economies and the natural world. But what exactly do those ecosocialist futures look like?

The many tendrils of ecosocialism

Imagine a world where you don’t feel forced to go to your job just to put food on the table, where climate collapse isn’t driving every global disaster. A world where decisions about what products get made, what public goods are free and accessible, are made by everyday people, not by CEOs and board members. A world where community and chosen family are just a bike ride, a high-speed train, or a quick walk away. Living under capitalism it’s easy to feel like these visions are unrealistic or even utopian. We know that capitalism isn’t working for us and for the planet, but it’s hard to imagine an alternative. We’re caught between understanding the destructive logic of capitalism and struggling to engage with viable alternatives. Perhaps that’s part of capitalism’s plan. As author and educator Ashley C. Ford writes, “The goal of oppressors is to limit your imagination about what is possible without them, so you might never imagine more for yourself & the world you live in.” This is why we need vibrant visions and debates not just about the destruction of capitalism, not just about how we get to an ecological zero carbon world, but also about what that world looks like when we get there. Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese’s book, Half-Earth Socialism, is an excellent example of envisioning a socialist ecological future. Addressing the sixth mass extinction, the threat of global pandemics, and the climate crisis, Half-Earth Socialism calls for a socialist planned economy that hinges on the key parameters of land preservation, minimizing emissions, and a good life for all, rather than what markets normally plans around: monetary costs and profits. More concretely, Vettese and Pendergrass call for a Half-Earth Socialism that uses linear programming planning methods to set broad scale goals like global veganism, energy quotas, and forest rewilding and stewardship under indigenous control. As Pendergrass notes, [“We could imagine feasible ways to use simple algorithms to plan plausible ways of organizing society and then debate about what those plans look like and on various levels. We imagined a little federalism where we set broad course goals at a large level, and then figure out in detail what that looks like as you go towards the more local level.”] In the context of climate change, socialist planning is crucial because it let’s us understand exactly what we we need to do at all levels. As Vettese argues, [“So it's like, okay, someone's vegan or someone has a Tesla, you know, someone doesn't fly, they're great, you know, but what, what is actually necessary? I think. When you're in a market, this is super opaque, one really has no idea.] He goes on to add, that with a planning model, [“You begin to see these things in their totality, which is difficult to do, or impossible to do with a capitalist.”] The reality is that any ecological socialist society will have trade-offs. To dramatically downscale the economy, preserve half of the world’s ecosystems in a decolonial way, while also redistributing wealth and energy to everyone in the world, countries and the rich in the imperial core will certainly have to cut down on production and consumption. In the last chapter of their book Vettese and Pendergrass reveal what that might look like through the idea of the Gosplant. An algorithmic planning tool that reveals the trade offs that must be made in order to reach an ecologically sound society. Drawing on the work of prior planning theorists and the power and capacity of new planning and modeling systems like climate models, the authors envision a central planning tool called Gosplant. Using linear programming algorithms, which are already used throughout Gosplant would  spit out broad plans depending on which parameters are necessary. For example, if we very simplisticly input that we want to cut emissions by 7.6% every year, rewild 25% more land, while maintaing a global good life, all by 2030, Gosplant might spit out a variety of plans ranging from more lenient energy quotas but faster uptake of vegetarian or vegan production and consumption. Or perhaps more aggressive rewilding and afforestation instead, or a more rapid increase in renewable production. Essentially, thousands of planners and scientists would plug a massive amount of data into Gosplant, and model coarse blueprints 5, 10, or even 25 years into the future projecting what it would look like to cut emissions, rewild half the planet, and redistribute wealth at different speeds. Those broad plans would be disseminated, debated, and transformed as they pass through to global, national, and local levels. In the last chapter of the book we get a brief glimpse at that future as fictional local Massachusetts planner, Edith, explains [“The folks down in Havana made a few different plans for next year assuming different energy quotas, ensuring in each plan that nature is always respected and no one is left behind… Plan 5-F is the most austere, keeping consumption at about 750 Watts per person, which includes all of the industrial production and social services required to keep society running… Plan 5-F means we can let a lot more of pasture return to wilderness, rather than planting more of those terrible biofuel plantations.”] Throughout the chapter, the characters debate the various plans constantly. Because for ecosocialist planning to succeed it must be in constant motion. It must be intensely transparent, accessible, and subject to debate. Plans must come from everyone, be formulated and run through modeling tools like the fictional Gosplant, and then sent back to the masses in an endless cycle of construction and exploration. 

But Pendergrass and Vettese are just two thinkers in a vast world of ecosocialist ideas. There are other visions like those of Max Ajl’s vision of a a more decentralized ecosocialist world, wherein “Greenbelts surround all cities, as popular planning converts sprawling suburbs into farmed swards. High-speed trains link bigger cities to smaller ones, smaller ones to capillary lines leading to outlying hamlets.” A world that prioritizes anti-imperialism and state sovereignty in the periphery. Ultimately as Max Ajl writes, “Eco-socialism aspires to egalitarian redistribution, public ownership of the means of production, respectful, modest, and humane management of the human interaction with non-human nature, and decommodification of social life globally, not merely locally. And it aspires to eliminate capitalism not merely locally, but globally. And it is explicitly anti-imperialist, and pro-Third World state sovereignty.” Ajl’s vision seeks to mend the metabolic rift of capitalism by shrinking the distance between urban production and the rura land. Ending a system of extraction and embracing one of replenishment. Ideas that even Karl Marx was writing about a century and a half before. He writes that it’s not enough just to liberate the worker. For a truly just and liberated society, we must also heal our broken relationship with the land. Arguing that communal land ownership, communism, is the only way to heal the metabolic rift. As ecosocialist scholars John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write, “For Marx, the only lasting path to sustainability is the ‘conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property’–i.e. the abolition of private landed property. Ecological sustainability is only a possibility in ‘a future society of associated producers,’ a socialist society, which could bring about a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry.”  Meanwhile authors at the The Red Nation, argue for an indigenous-led global ecosocialism. One that foregrounds stewardship, an end to colonial occupation everywhere, and an emphasis on mass action and non-reformist reforms from below right now. They call for radical acts that weaken capitalist structures today, while also building power to topple settler-colonial capitalism in the future. This looks like immediate defunding of police, immigration, military forces. Free sustainable housing, education, healthcare, mental health services. Enforcement of treaty rights. Reinvesting in care work, alongside land, air and water restoration. The Red Deal is a crucial intervention into ecosocialist visions. It shows that while it’s important to have future visions to hold onto, the climate crisis, capitalism and colonialism are destroying life and land right now. We need serious harm prevention immediately. In the words of the Red Nation, “We cannot simply build isolated utopias while the rest of the world burns, nor can we wait for the slow process of reformist reform to kick in. We cannot simply heal our individual trauma, nor can we consume better to save the environment. We cannot vote harder and place all our hope in a few individuals in Congress. Climate change will kill us before any of these strategies liberate the planet from capitalism.” 

Despite their differences, communal stewardship, rational and ecological production, and anti-imperialism are all throughlines throughout these ecosocialist manifestos. However, these visions of ecosocialism are just that, visions, imagined realities to hold onto as we chart the path towards ecological and political transition. But there are real world instances, however flawed, of ecosocialism in action. And the shining star among them lies in the heart of the Caribbean, battered on all sides by imperial pressure.

Lessons from Cuba:

Nestled within the Havana’s concrete skyline lie green rows of lucious vegetables. An organic farm. Here, in organoponico La Sazón, co-operative workers tend to the many rows of raised beds that feed their neighbors and the surrounding city. La Sazón, a full scale organic farm, with minimal chemical and fossil fuel inputs, is not an outlier in Havana, it’s the norm. But Cuban agriculture wasn’t always like this. Cuba’s unique history forged this organic system through hardship and struggle. For most of the first half of the 20th century, Cuban agriculture was heavily industrialized. Monocrops of sugarcane coated the countryside as Cuba was forced to produce sugarcane for its imperial colonizer, the United States. After thrusting off the weight of the imperialist forces in 1956 with a triumphant socialist revolution, Cuba was ready for change. However, much of Cuban agriculture was still tooled toward high fossil fuel import and high monoculture output. Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba still mainly grew sugar and traded exclusively with the Soviets for staples such as rice, wheat, tractors, and gas. But this system was dramatically upended in 1991. When the Soviet Union unraveled, and the imperial core maintained its trade embargo on Cuba. The country was left isolated from oil, staple foods, and mechanized farming systems like tractors that had long been the cornerstone of their farms. As a result, Cuba entered what was deemed the Special Period. Journalist and author Bill Mckibben writes that in 1989 the average Cuban was eating about 3,000 calories per day. By 1992, that plummeted to 1,900 calories per day. In short, Cuba was starving because their semi-industrialized agricultural system was ripped out from under them and a imperialist sanctions left them no other option but to look inward for a solution. Now on the other end of such a brutal crisis born out of imperialist aggression, Cuba has transformed. In Havana alone, its residents converted 35,000 hectares or 135 square miles of land into agriculturally productive space. Which is the same as converting the area of six Manhattans into farming space. But Havana is just a small part of Cuba’s socialist agricultural revolution. Isolated from almost all trading partners, Cubans either had to adapt or starve. And through plans like Campesino a campesino, or farmer to farmer knowledge sharing and urban farming initiatives, Cuba pulled itself out of the depths of industrial, fossil fuel intensive agriculture and built one that dramatically decreased emissions output while prioritizing food access. In the 1980s, Cuba had more tractors per hectare than California, but by the 2000s tractors were quickly replaced by over 400,000 oxen teams. Monocultures were replanted with polycultures. Crop diversity was valued for its ability to decrease pest pressure and encourage healthy soil. Fossil-fuel reliant techniques were replaced with sustainable and permaculture oriented systems. Organoponicos, or the Cuban term for urban garden, proliferated widely, using raised beds to grow health plants of poisoned urban soil. Crucial to this was the campesino a campesino or farmer to farmer movement. The goal of this movement “...was for small farmers to share knowledge with each other, and integrate new, sustainable systems of agriculture. Through social participation, mobilizing local resources, and reverting to traditional peasant know-how.” This grassroots knowledge building meant that, as Aidan Ratchford writes, “many small farmers producing 80-100% of food necessary for family consumption by 2011. A cooperative in Jagüey Grande, for example, produces 80% of food needs for the 60,000 residents of its municipality” By purposefully placing the needs of the people, like good healthy soil, accessible food, and control over what to grow, instead of emphasizing growing for commodity sale, like selling sugarcane to multinational corporations, Cuba has successfully built an ecosocialist agriculture. Ratchford goes on to write, “A country previously reliant on imports for 90% of its food was able to feed itself through urban, organic agriculture. This movement represents the largest conversion from conventional to alternative, organic agriculture in the world’s history.” Cuba reveals the possibilities of an ecosocialist degrowth future right now, especially when it comes to agriculture. It not only is deepening the connection between its people and land through agroecological and urban farming cooperatives, but it's done so while increasing literacy, food access, and minimizing fossil fuel use. While by no means the end goal, Cuba’s form of socialist organization represents an ecosocialist degrowth in action. They’re shortening the distance between factory and field, between humans and the natural world. But Cuba is constantly battered on all sides by the forces of capitalism, in order for ecosocialism to take root, it must spread out in all directions and across the globe. And to achieve that we need a plan.

How We Get to Ecosocialism:

Whether it was the U.S. in 1776, Haiti in 1791, Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959, revolutions have always been the engines of change. The destruction of capitalism will continue ever onward, until we actively disrupt it. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet solution to achieving an ecosocialist economy. It will only come about from the long collective struggle of the working class and peasants taking control of production. This may happen peacefully or involve violence, especially if the capitalist elite are heavily entrenched in the cycle of accumulation, like those in the United States. But most likely, this revolution will begin in the periphery, in countries like India and Philippines where there are already thriving communist revolutions attempting to build power. For most of the rest of the world, unfortunately, the conditions of capitalist state backlash against the left, make global ecosocialism seem too far away to address the urgent environmental needs. We need rapid ecological change within the next 10 years, and unfortunately, a global ecosocialist revolution doesn’t seem likely within that timefram. So, we cannot rely solely on the prospect of global ecosocialism to address climate action. Instead, we will need to work within our current system right now while simultaneously striving for a more rationally planned ecological economy. As brazilian ecosociliast activist, Sabrina Fernandes, writes, “To escape the looming ecological disaster before we have the chance to establish a socialist society, we will have to implement ideas, policies, microsystems, reforms, and other socio-political arrangements that will slow the pace of the crisis while establishing the foundations for popular power that can overcome it and support a new system.” These interventions can range from building union power and pushing for more power in the workplace, or seeking more support for urban and agroecological farming methods.  It could involve organizing communities to advocate for safe, accessible, and electrified public transit, as well as developing extensive bike infrastructure. It could mean blocking or sabotaging pipelines across indigenous land. It could mean defunding the military and police. Pendergrass points towards the recent United Auto Workers strike as another example of immediate social and environmental harm-reduction: [“one of the things they're demanding is a four day work week because they recognize that the transition to electric vehicles is, requires less labor, and they, they have this vision of, you Uh, all the workers prospering and sharing in the benefits of there being less labor by having a four day work week. Rather than firing people.”] But in the process of fighting for these stopgap interventions, it is crucial not to lose sight of the larger goal. These are harm-reduction strategies and will forever be beholden to the whims of capitalist production if we don’t continue to escalate towards ecosocialist democratic planning. The goal is to build an “ecological transition that will make the socialist transition possible.” Only through the complete dismantling of capitalist forces, a feat historically achieved through revolution, can we embark on the journey of constructing and planning an ecological and ethical world for all.