Climate Justice: What is Eco-Socialism?

By John Molyneux and Jess Spear

John Molyneux and Jess Spear wrote a short pamphlet, What is Eco-Socialism? Here, we publish an excerpt of it to present the concept and key ideas of a socialist contribution to the environmental justice movement. You can order it here.
The pamphlet, published in October 2020, is co-authored by Jess Spear and John Molyneux, who are members of People Before Profit and editors of the Irish magazines, Rupture and the Irish Marxist Review, respectively. Rupture is an eco-socialist quarterly published in Ireland by RISE (Revolutionary, Internationalist, Socialist, Environmentalist), and the Irish Marxist Review is a theoretical journal associated with the Socialist Workers Network. This pamphlet represents a collaborative effort by the two journals.

What Do We Mean by Eco-socialism?

We think eco-socialism is an idea whose time has come.

What has brought this about is quite simply the current condition of the world we live in. We are living in a world characterized by three massive global crises: the COVID pandemic, the economic crisis, and the climate crisis. These are far from being the only issues. On the contrary it would be easy to fill many pages just listing vitally important issues — global inequality, imperialism and war, racism, misogyny, and gender oppression are the most glaring — but the three mentioned are interlocked and threaten the future of humanity. Eco-socialism represents a coherent but also an open response to all these connected crises.

Principles of Eco-Socialism

Eco-socialism is based on three key principles:

1) the crises and main issues are all the product not of human nature, of the human race as a whole, or of individual ignorance and bad attitudes, but of the economic and social system of capitalism which completely dominates the world;

2) that the issue of climate change and the broader environmental crisis cannot be solved in isolation from the issues of class exploitation and oppression, and colonial, racial and gender oppression. Stopping climate change demands a just transition and a just transition requires a fight for equality and social justice across the board; and

3) that the solutions to these crises are interconnected and socialist — they involve moving towards a society based on public ownership and democratic planning i.e., production for human need and ecological sustainability, not profit — and will therefore require mass mobilization.

Eco-socialism also involves a view of socialism that is fundamentally different from the anti-democratic police states of official Communism.

Eco-socialism Is Intersectional

Eco-socialism has compelling reasons for being emphatically intersectional. The system change required on a global scale to address the climate crisis and the wider environmental crisis means that we are committed to building a united mass movement for change on a national and international scale. The ecological crisis cannot be solved by piecemeal reforms on this issue or that issue, in this country or that country. But long experience has shown that such unity is only possible on the basis of fighting all the different forms of oppression we suffer and which subjugate us to the environmentally destructive rule of capitalism.

It is not just a matter of morality and abstract principle, namely that racism, sexism etc. are wrong in themselves (though they certainly are) but rather that you can’t fight capitalism and climate disaster without fighting racism, sexism and every other kind of oppression. Oppression is functional to capitalism. It intersects with exploitation systemically to support the continuing rule of capitalism and the perpetuation of the class system and all the environmental destruction that comes with it. For example, women’s oppression provides a new generation of labor power in large part through free domestic labor and helps ideologically justify low pay for care work in general. This saves capitalists a load of money. So does racial discrimination in pay and working conditions.

As socialist and trade union organizer Jim Larkin said over 100 years ago, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” It’s not just a question of working class unity; racism, sexism, and LGBTQ+ oppression mean there is less possibility for huge parts of the working class to struggle if they have more insecure work, no free time due to caring responsibilities, and are generally downtrodden by being discriminated against.

All of this applies with particular force to the movement against climate change. We know for certain that while climate change ultimately threatens us all, its immediate victims will be disproportionately the poor and the peoples of the Global South, that is those who have done, and do, the least to generate it. This is firstly because the areas projected to get extremely hot for most of the year are concentrated in the Global South and in less developed countries; and secondly, because these countries are less developed and therefore have fewer social supports and infrastructure to mitigate the harm. Their ability to withstand hotter temperatures, dramatic shifts in weather patterns, and deadly extreme weather events is much weaker than the wealthier countries in the Global North. In short, more people in the Global South and in developing countries will suffer and die if we don’t act quickly and take the steps necessary to assist their transition. There can be no effective solution to climate change that does not address the question of a just transition for the Global South.

Of one thing we can be certain: climate change will mean, indeed already means, a huge increase in the number of climate refugees, of people displaced by virtue of their homelands becoming uninhabitable. How our societies respond to these refugees will be a crucial issue in determining whether climate change becomes a point of departure for the construction of a decent world or for a descent into barbarity.

At the same time, the immense inequality between the capitalist North and the Global South cannot be understood without considering the history of slavery, colonialism, empire, and racism. Historically speaking, racism developed as an ideological justification for slavery and colonial conquest. The normalization of racism continues to enable the super-exploitation of black and brown workers who generally receive lower wages and suffer worse working conditions, while also being more likely to be expropriated by landlords who charge extortionate rents for substandard accommodation, and banks who charge them higher interest rates. Additionally, capitalists use immigration as a way of increasing the labor supply at lower wages and then work to blame that desired effect on the workers themselves in order to sow division and resentment among the working class.

The effects of climate change are also deeply gendered. Large amounts of research have shown that the impact of so-called ‘natural’ disasters is substantially greater on women. Thus:

Natural disasters lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men. In other words, natural disasters (and their subsequent impact) on average kill more women than men or kill women at an earlier age than men. Since female life expectancy is generally higher than that of males, for most countries natural disasters narrow the gender gap in life expectancy. Second, the stronger the disaster (as approximated by the number of people killed relative to population size), the stronger this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy. That is, major calamities lead to more severe impacts on female life expectancy (relative to that of males) than do smaller disasters… Taken together our results show that it is the socially constructed gender-specific vulnerability of females built into everyday socioeconomic patterns that lead to the relatively higher female disaster mortality rates compared to men. (Eric Neumayer and Thomas Plumper in ‘The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: The Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy, 1981–2002’)

Following the catastrophic Asian Tsunami in 2004, estimates made based on the sex of survivors (for instance, by Oxfam International) suggest that around three times as many women as men perished. This is a pattern of inequality that is bound to be repeated in the numerous disasters that will accompany climate change. As we’ve already indicated above, the impacts of these disasters will be far more severe in the Global South than it will be in the relatively affluent North and constitutes yet another reason why eco-socialism, and indeed the whole climate movement, must be intersectional in its approach.

Eco-socialism is an ideological position rather than an organization, so it is not easy to provide evidence of institutional practice as opposed to aspiration. However, the Global eco-socialist Network (www.globaleco-socialistnetwork.net), to which both RISE and People Before Profit members are affiliated, can serve as an example. Its founding principles state simply: ‘We need a global mobilization of people power. Such mobilization requires a commitment to just transition… The united mobilization we need also requires opposition to all racist, sexist, national, homophobic, and transphobic oppression’.

Our Vision of Eco-socialism

Eco-socialism stands for a society that combines collective ownership and democracy, equality and freedom because only through such a combination can we overcome the metabolic rift with nature created by capitalism and establish a society that is environmentally sustainable.

Capitalism is by its nature nationalistic and organized into competing nation states in a way that continually frustrates even a coordinated international response to the COVID emergency. There is no way it can achieve the international solidarity required to meet the environmental crisis.

An eco-socialist internationalist perspective is also essential for dealing with what is already (and will be in the future) a major consequence of climate change, namely a huge increase in climate refugees. At the moment, the category of climate refugee is not even legally recognized but the fact is that as temperatures rise, ever greater swathes of the planet will become unlivable and people will have no choice but to migrate.

In short, nothing less than international eco-socialism will meet the challenge of our times. This doesn’t mean that we should expect the whole world to go eco-socialist at once. That is very unlikely to occur but it does mean that if a bridgehead for eco-socialism were to be established in one country, whether it was in Ireland or Brazil or wherever, it would be necessary to spread it to other countries as quickly as possible. And recent history, with for example the rapid international spread of Greta Thunberg’s calls for climate strikes and of the Black Lives Matter movement, shows that in today’s globalized world this would be an achievable goal.

What distinguishes the approach and vision of eco-socialism from what might be considered the more ‘mainstream’ and dominant strands of the environmental and climate change movement — the likes of Friends of the Earth, War on Want and the Green Party — is that while the latter believe that catastrophic climate change avoidance and a sustainable future can be realized by bringing about a collective ‘change of heart’ within the existing economic system and state framework, eco-socialists believe that what is needed is a fundamentally different society based on a sustainable relation to nature and production for human need not profit.